Geek As Citizen: History, Posterity, and Our Terrible Past Creations

Previously I had focused on the value of publishing and republishing our past works (mostly focusing on the written word), and on helping others publish their works. I consider this an excellent example of geek citizenship as we organize information that others may find of use, review past work, and assist and empower others. If you’ve done any kind of writing over the years you know it’s power to reach people – to organize it’s access and help others do the same just lets more people benefit from someone’s creations.

However in my past work I was referring to things that would actually benefit people directly. Things we would be proud of and share gladly. Things that in short, we consider good works, even if they may be a bit rough around the edges.

The problem comes when dealing with things we’ve created that aren’t that good – or downright terrible.

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Every Hollywood Film Seems Alike? We May Have Found Writer Zero

save-the-cat-imageThe book Save The Cat seems to have had . . . undue influence on the writing process in Hollywood.  As in, most of it.

It’s hard to argue with the thesis of this article (especially with the checklist right there) and with the fact Hollywood films have gone awful checklist – as we’ve talked about here endlessly.  So this might be “Writer Zero” in any attempt to track the epidemiology of sameness.

I might be skeptical that one book could have an influence, but then again there’s the disturbingly believable claim that it looks like one dumb idea helped lead to our cultural-econmic-financial-business culture problems.

Serdar of course will be writing more of this on his blog, which I look forward to.  I wish I could do more than nod and go “probably” and may in the days to come.

– Steven

An Interview With Noah Bradley On Why You Don’t Want To Go To Art School

Noah Bradley is a professional artist who works in gaming and other mediums – and he’s got a bone to pick with “traditional” art school educations that he wrote up at https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/138c5efd45e9.  He points out that a lot of art school careers put you in debt, with less earning potential than many other careers, and you can do it a lot easier.  We’ve seen people call out issues with law school, and medical school – Noah is calling it out about art schools.

So you know the drill – when someone rocks the boat in the creative world, I’m going to interview him.

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