Posts Tagged ‘why so serious?’

education: encyclopedia dramatica

[education is a weekly (or once in awhile) post about one or two worthwhile links. sites you should visit, see, hear, just generally experience and appreciate and learn from. I'll write a brief "WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?" along with each one. think about it. analyze it. do you like it? do you not? I want to educate you; as in the latin verb educo, to lead forth, as in I'm leading you away from my site. Hahaha.]

ED is important. It’s a living, breathing Traité de bave et d’éternité. Forget MTV, forget the New Yorker, forget CBGB, forget California, ED is the real culture purveyor of our time. It is an irrational order to the chaos of the internet, without giving in to cheap gimmicks like sites that just post memes or try to capture the moment. ED utilizes the chaos: absorbs it, interprets it, uses it to define itself. ED perpetuates itself without shame.

Put simply, Encyclopedia Dramatica is Wikipedia for trolls. It also focuses primarily on internet culture. It is written in the language of that culture: hateful, rude, awful, distasteful, and unforgiving humor. ED embraces the notion that the internet is not a good place and that’s okay. We prefer it to be a bad place. A celebration in decadence and irresponsibility. A rabbit hole unfit for Disney movies. A malevolent, unapologetic place mired with endless catacombs of self-referential nonsense. A dark foreboding forest to which there is no escape. I could go on with these metaphors, but I’ll try to hold back.

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Education/Network Generation

If you’re in college seeking a life contained within a “creative” field, you’re not supposed to be learning how to do things: you’re supposed to be learning how things were done. Eventually you should learn how things are currently being done. Not how to do them. Yes, your professor should tell you what words mean, what these forms are, what film is, what composition is, they tell you the way things are done. How Kubrick held a camera. How Picasso held a paintbrush. These are the things you should learn. And then your teacher should tell you to go and do them, follow them as rules and guidelines. Eventually they should tell you to break those rules. Here’s how this was done, this famous painting or short film or something, now go do it yourself how you want to do it. There is no right or wrong, no marketing or consumers or audience, just expression. That’s the way it should be, but it’s not the way it is. Kids these days want to Google it and find an answer if the answer isn’t fed to them beforehand. They think the way Kubrick or Picasso did it is the way it should be done. It’s not.

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