personal account. no fun allowed

 

professional: @videodante

star wars fanblog: @ct-0451

 

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dante.cool/

I understand and respect the rhetorical goals of saying "don't call [various assorted acts of human creation] 'content'" but to me it just sounds like saying "don't call [various assorted foods] 'dinner'". It's just a convenient term for a lot of items in a category, idk man. Be specific when/if you can but I don't really feel much of a moral compulsion on the wording


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in reply to @dante's post:

i make the #1 thing people use this word for and it makes me sick to my stomach every time someone applies it to my work. i didn't go to a seminar and get taught this so make whatever conclusions you like. no, it isn't deep, it's incredibly shallow. there's no mystery as to its meaning and origin and intent. if the word was "slop" we wouldn't be having this conversation, even though it's the exact same intent. the fact that it wasn't commonly used in everyday parlance until recently doesn't change the fact that everyone adopted a term used by marketers to reduce all art to "bait to sell ads" and I'm giving my official notice that I'm going to die mad about it

I'll preface the following by saying that I'm not nearly as angry as I sound, just because this is one of those things where I do fully understand that I lost and that there's no way to ever fix that and there are much bigger and more important fights to worry about, so I'm not actually upset at anyone, but:

The thing that bugs me is that it's not even a neutral shift. Usually when definitions change it's something innocuous, and if you're irritated about it it's just because you're being pedantic, but in this case it's a word coined by the people who have been trying to destroy culture for decades which explicitly means "meaningless, interchangeable sludge to fill space in between our advertisements." To me, it feels pretty hard to wash that stink off, but what's worse is that I don't think anyone has tried.

To wit, when we say "well everyone knows what it means so it must be serving an important purpose linguistically," what does it mean? Because nobody would ever use it to describe a TV show or a book or a magazine or something hosted on a personal website or a blog post or a news article or anything else not delivered to them by an algorithm driven website. I don't think people even realize that when they say this word, they are subconsciously thinking "stuff that came down the sludge pipe from the website that's designed to keep me constantly slurping at the nozzle." But that's what it means, and i don't think it can be rinsed off, and I don't think it makes sense to not be offended by it.