I rather like how this turned out. And not just because I had to fight my technology just to get the damned thing done.
And I lost.
What you see there is the raw, unedited version of my little thought piece. I edited the heck out of that version like I usually do, and then Corel VideoStudio refused to output it properly so I was back to square one.
Oh well. The raw version is hardly unwatchable. I have been internally debating whether all the effort I put into editing out um and ahs and stutters and pauses is really worth it in terms of the final product.
I’m hardly inarticulate. I speak clearly and my little verbal imperfections generally flow with my speech patterns well enough.
Another thing to ponder as I explore the art of video.
I’ve done some more looking for a program to add the video clip and pictures for me so all I have to do is talk. That would be ever so handy.
No luck yet, though. I tried an app/site called Descript which has many amazingly powerful features, like editing a video by editing its script (!!), but it did not do what I am looking for, dammit.
I think I am going to have to break down and just go get the visual content myself. Maybe subscribe to one of those stock footage sites to make it a little easier.
If I start doing that, then I will be doing way less editing to my vids.
I’ve only got a finite amount of creative energy in me and if I have to come up with enough images and clips to cover a whole video, I won’t have much left.
In theory I could record the raw video then spend more than a day editing it and refining it and so on. I could try the whole “make it the best it can be until you literally can’t thing of any way it could be better” thing.
But uh, I don’t really operate that way. As with a lot of things, I travel perpendicular to that more logical and orderly approach.
I do everything wrong and yet somehow it works out. Just like Lister.
Maybe some of us just have to make things up as we go.
About the subject of the vid : I’ve been pondering it further and I think it has something to do with our modern idea of “earning” pleasure.
Looking at a sunset is free. In the capitalist brain, that means it has no economic value. It has a price of zero. So it can’t possibly be important or good.
But more than that, I think we fear things that violate what Nietzsche called our fundamental table of values. The idea of a world in which unlimited joy is available on demand is just too upsetting to us. We need some sort of structure to make sense of how you come to “deserve” things and a world in which you can get your happiness from looking at a picture of kittens at play violates the very concept of “earning”.
I think this is behind a lot of rules about sex, too. Sex can provide enormous pleasure, joy, and release for comparatively extremely little labour, and we fear that.
I mean, did we really deserve that orgasm?
On a spiritual level, I would really love to learn what we can achieve if such arbitrary limitations are removed. If we all suddenly remember that we made the rules up just to have rules and therefore we are free to change or abolish rules that no longer work.
Certainly, the immediate effect would no doubt be a period of unprecedented decadence as everyone indulged themselves to their heart’s content.
But we’d get over that, and then… well…
..we would get to see what we become when all our needs are met.
More after the break.
Past the decadent
There is a reason why decadence leads directly to temperance.
Decadence is the pursuit of spiritual objectives by tangible means. For example, a feeling of emptiness or incompleteness is a spiritual matter.
Trying to fill that void with sex and drugs is decadence.
And that’s why addiction in all its forms is the plague of our era. Whether it’s substance use disorder (drug and/or alcohol addiction), being an adrenaline junkie, hoarding (aka acquisition addiction), serial relationships, video games, risky sex, or pretty much any other way to activate your pleasure center, damn near everyone has their addiction.
Certainly everybody with depression. We all self-medicate.
The true horror of decadence comes when the pleasure that has been fixated upon reaches the point of diminishing returns and yet the individual does not want to let go of it so they keep ramming their head against the wall trying to get enough of the thrill out of the pleasure as they need at least to feel normal.
This hurts. And yet, because of the nature of addiction, the addict has deep tunnel vision and can no longer see any source of joy other than the fixation.
So they are compelled to keep doing something that hurts like hell and that makes them angry at the world and that’s why decadence so often leads to sadism or masochism.
They have gone so deep down the decadence rabbit hole that only the extreme sensations of pain, giving or receiving, can penetrate the numbness.
Because that’s where decadence leads – numbness. The impossible cruel mechanism of addiction is that every time you use something to plug that hole, the hole gets bigger, so it takes even more next time.
Hence people going from being a free spirit hippie to being a Jehovah’s Witness or the like. Once they finally hit rock bottom and that releases them from the addiction enough that they can look for a way out, they find spirituality through extreme religion and that becomes the new addiction.
Oh well. At least Jesus doesn’t wreck your liver.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.