#FASTEST VIDEO EDITING OF MY LIFE

[royalarchivist]

Full video of Quackity and Wilbur singing “Perfume” from tonight’s LA Lovejoy concert!

(Videos shared by @sootsit, edited together by me)

[petday]

Do you think that it is okay to be "slow" at art? I have problems with ADHD and I can never get things out very quickly... while I still improve, learn, and end up finishing things, it often takes me way longer than it should. It ends up being a little stressful because my friends can output drawings a lot quicker, even in doodle format, whereas even for just doodles it can take me at least an hour at times. This makes things like drawpiles a bit hard to do as well.

Yes, it is okay to be "slow" in art.

"Speed" is relative. You are quite fast in movement speed in comparison to a different person.

Going further, there are infinite points to compare your speed against. "Was I the fastest I could possibly be when depicting this character with these series of lines?" Well, there are infinite different series of lines you could have drawn, infinite influences that any one person can have, infinite life experiences, thus no two people will ever draw exactly the same. A person can draw faster than you, but their drawings are different than yours. Even when people emulate each other, there is something about each person that makes their differences clear eventually – attitude, subject matter, tendencies, choice of material... "Would my friend draw this picture faster than I could?" You can ask yourself such questions but it would be impossible to answer, because you are the person who made the drawing, thus whatever 'speed' was required for the drawing was exactly the 'speed' at which you made the drawing, otherwise the drawing would not exist at all.

If you wish to draw 'faster', you can avoid some actions. You can paint without use of the undo button, you do not have to flip the canvas, you do not have to spend time reading color theory, you can just draw. You can qualify even the messiest drawing as a 'finished' drawing. That's what I enjoy.

However, if you avoid actions that you enjoy for the purpose of 'saving time', you may end up desiring such actions, and you may regret your faster pace. Contrary to the belief that 'fast is best', being 'slow' can be preferable over being 'fast', because you are enjoying the actions that cause you to work at a slower pace.

In this world, I particularly dislike the focus on "high speed" as if it is an innately positive quality. It is a neutral quality. Of course, you should be fast in some emergency scenarios. But there is no 'perfect' future, so I do not see why humans rush towards this imaginary 'perfect' future. There are no 'perfect' pictures, so there is no rush to reach such a 'perfect' state. I was happy to refresh an artist's blog in 2006 and see a new picture once every few months. Also, there were some websites in which you could view the time-lapse video of a person's drawing, and some people spent hours and hours. There was no ability to edit the video, so you could watch people redraw things over and over, scrap various ideas, focus on different parts of a drawing, and so on. Even if the 'completed' drawing looked 'perfect' to me at first glance, the person might have taken a lot of time. I had fun watching their videos. Others would draw quickly, so their videos were short. That was cool too. I didn't feel either was superior over the other.

I like a slow pace. My speed varies because life and thoughts vary. I have spent weeks on some of my favorite works. I have spent months thinking about something before finally drawing about it. In artwork, you can spend an eternity. Ideas can mutate into different ideas if you leave them alone for a long time. There is no pressure to act immediately. That is great.

Perhaps you can make things with friends who do not usually draw. You may find that they have a fun insight in comparison to the friends who are experienced at drawing. 'High experience in drawing' can also result in 'doing things only in the way that we are taught is the correct way' which can result in 'repeating the same ideas and techniques.' That is fine, but 'low experience in creating art' can result in great art because they do not follow the common 'rules' that are popularized in various art communities, so they can make awesome, surprising artwork without consciously thinking about making something 'good'.

I am 'slow' in comparison to my friends. Drawing with friends was difficult to enjoy. "Well, I will just doodle fun things at the bottom of the page. Oh, others have already painted complex things." It's alright. It became fun when I stopped thinking much while drawing. You can doodle at your own pace, true friends will not judge you. Also, if you do not enjoy drawing with others, even if you make great effort to enjoy it, it is OK. There are other activities to enjoy with friends too. I can enjoy drawing with others sometimes, but other times, I prefer to draw alone.

[natalieleif]

UPDATE: I finally got stuck and went on Youtube beat Undertale Yellow! All in all, I really liked it! It's infested that part of my brain where things go that are fun enough to invest time in, but also have enough scattered potential for some really good fanfic/art.

I do agree with a lot of the critiques, and I'm glad to see a lot of stuff added in Version 1.1 to make life easier (bug fixes, Easy Mode, recovery items, etc). I'm hoping there's a 1.2 version later that adds even more quality-of-life. That said, a lot of the critiques aren't... really... things that seem feasible for a patch update. ("Make the character art more monstrous!" You mean, redraw every sprite in the game!?!)

So with that in mind, here are some things I'd love to see in 1.2 that are maybe (hopefully!) easier for a freelance dev team. Spoilers below!

Adjusted mechanics/dialogue for bosses that have no reason to kill you. This is most obvious with Starlo and Martlet's Pacifist fights--both are friendly and reluctant towards murder, so their Pacifist fights ending in death or defeat feels... odd? Compare to Toriel or Papyrus: one will adjust her attacks to never hit if you take too much damage, and another will cut his battle entirely if you hit 1 hp. A similar form of 1-hp cutoff or "Oops, that was an accident!" Game Over dialogue would match their motivations a lot better.

Related to the above, offer a Skip option for any battle the player's lost 3+ times. This is a common video game handicap, and one I always support in story-heavy games like this. A lot of feedback I've seen is from people who want to love the story but struggled with Sir Slither's ACT pattern or Axis's breakout puzzle, so this is an easy way to get most people to finish the game.

Have Dalv gift you any items you missed in the Ruins as a "thank you" for Clover's support. This patch would solve two immediate concerns: that Dalv doesn't have a larger role, and that many players will miss items like the Golden Pear. Sure, Dalv sends a letter to Clover, but the incentive to go back to Snowdin at that point is low. Having some sort of item reward makes it an active part of an average game run and lets more players see Dalv post-Ruins.

Call the Sunnyside Farm a Ranch like it's called in the files. Okay, this one's just for me, but it being a Ranch makes way more thematic sense for the cowboy area.

Let Ace run the card game at least once in the Wild East. Seriously, it's kinda weird that he doesn't. I understand why he can't while he's napping, but the other times??

Edit Ceroba's post-Starlo Pacifist fight dialogue to make it more clear that she's taking you on the fastest shortcut to Asgore. The main critique with the third act to Pacifist route is that it very quickly becomes Ceroba's plot about finding Kanako. And because it's framed as a hunt for Kanako, the dialogue becomes a rush of info about who Kanako is and why this side-plot should matter to you, the player. But at this point we've already done a side-plot, and most players are antsy to get to the end game. Yet the Steamworks really is the only route to Hotland in that area! Having Ceroba guide the player through what they think is a spooky shortcut to the End Boss fits the story, braces the player for the finale, and lets the TALK dialogue with Ceroba build up naturally through the lab, so her betrayal about Kanako has more time to build up and hurts more as a final boss fight.

That's all I got! Thanks for reading, and feel free to reblog with your own wants for a 1.2 patch!

[crxssjae]

Hii mate

Just wanted to say that I'm so excited to hear that you're on the last scene of chapter one of Something About You 🙌🏾🙌🏾 can't wait

Alsoo Writers Truth & Dare Ask Game

🍓🎲🍄🧸🦷❄️🏜️🦋🪲answer as many as you like

(as always no pressure to respond) 😊

Ta

🐨

Thank you for your support. I am sorry for responding this question so damn late, I'm giving you three koalas as an apology. Again. Here you go: 🐨🐨🐨

🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction? 

I got into writing fanfiction when I saw Wattpad for the first time. I don't know how to use it and I just read fanfiction until I wanted to write on my own. So, yeah, it all started around 2018 and I've grown and learned a lot about fanfiction.

🎲 ⇢ what stops you from writing more in your free time?

Watching videos of Honkai Star Rail walkthroughs, some speedpaint videos, and writing vlog videos. There are times, however, I get frustrated when I couldn't come up with a sentence.

🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings

There's some I have but I'll pick one that will currently for now on living for my recent fic:

Samijey/Jeysami

Jey watches Sami randomly doodle in the sketchbook, it keeps Sami's mind flowing for creativity. In some time around, Jey would take Sami's sketchbook, inking before coloring the doodles. Once he's done, he writes on a sticky note and places on the cover of the sketchbook. Sami sobs after opening the sketch, seeing the colors of his doodles, then thanking Jey while being a whole wreck.

🧸 ⇢ what's the fastest way to become your mutual?

Being nice, respecting people's opinions without a shouting match, reblogging and commenting on their fics and/or art. Plus, don't be an asshole.

🦷 ⇢ share some personal wisdom or a life hack you swear on

Oof. Tough one. I think this personal wisdom is don't be down just because someone has better work than you. Be yourself, do whatever you want in your own style, like writing for example.

❄️ ⇢ what's your dream theme/plot for a fic, and who would write it best?

I'm on my wrestling spree side, so this:

It's a Zowens (Sami and Kevin) one and the summary I haven't figured out as of right now. This one is inspired by two comfort games I played whenever I get bored called "Pocket Love" and "Adorable House".

Hopefully I don't mind tagging you, ma'am. @wrestlezaynia would pull it off the best.

🏜️ ⇢ what's your favourite type of comment to receive on your work?

My favorite type of comment I received is the characters' chemistry and how I did a great job on it. Because to me, I thought I didn't do a good job while doing my best researching lol.

🦋 ⇢ share something that has been on your heart and mind lately 

I feel happy because I was given love and earned respect from yesterday and today. I guess it's luck, probably. 😅

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

I've may gone over 50 words from one of them because I tried not to look at the word count while writing and not editing, so I can't. Sorry.

🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

Whenever I see a warning (read warnings before reading) that made me feel uncomfortable. Commenting negatively how a fic made me uncomfortable would be a waste of time. 0/10 do not do this, readers and writers.

Writers Truth & Dare Ask Game

[kyokosasagawa]

art resourcese (especially curated for beginners who might not know terminology, fundamentals, etc)

General Resources https://eyedropper.org/ - open source app that picks colors from web pages https://krita-artists.org/ and https://krita.org/en/ - forum and website for free open source painting program "Krita"

Vocabulary

https://artmuseum.arizona.edu/vocabulary-art-terms - simple

https://www.modernsculpture.com/art-terminology-a-glossary - intermediate

Study Schedules Examples

note: you do not need to follow an art schedule to get better at art. this is mainly for reference purposes.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J9pBJTeVF7oCdUxBt5LrYJBR34YLmOsoK0DHtzMIC6Q/edit#gid=0 - 7 month art improvement curriculum, no times just someone's weekly schedule that they went by for 7 months https://www.brendanmeachen.com/soloartist - 2 year, 3 month long art curriculum that utilizes mainly free resources. lots of good resources. https://cubebrush.co/mb?product_id=ts8nza - an art study schedule by marc brunet. good structure to take inspiration from (for example, seperating it into "AM and PM" instead of by hours https://www.deviantart.com/suzanne-helmigh/art/Make-your-personalized-work-schedule-447913008 - ideas on how to make an art study schedule. make your own art schedule! https://www.amazon.ca/Natural-Way-Draw-Working-Study/dp/0395530075 - traditional focused, but essentially a book that is one big giant art lesson. has a lot of schedules to look at that start off with beginner and steadily increases, though they might be complicated to read.

Study Tips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD0G9uEWgRc - "How to develop an effective study routine" by UnJaded Jade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhG7DENh-uk - "The Scientific Way to Improve your Art FAST! - How to Practice and Remember Efficiently" by YanSculpts

Inspirational / Philosophy / Creativity / Art Block

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Nhi1AfGNI - "The only tool you need to create" by Kesh https://www.amazon.ca/Unleashing-Artist-Within-Breaking-Restoring/dp/0486831868 - a book on creativity, anxieties, and perfectionisms when it comes to art. caution, some advice may be unwise for people with OCD (example: recommending to get "obsessed" with art), but its otherwise a pretty good book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWfav3dGA_I - "3 Ways You're Creating Artist Block Without Knowing It" - Adam Duff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m559PUX3bJI - "LEVEL-UP YOUR ART IN 2022 (most important tips)" by Marc Brunet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9Aj6UK0B8U - "Your art sucks, and that's OK" by Astri Lohne https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSKLJRTN-kE - "🧠 Art habits you NEED to have (to get good)" - by Marc Brunet https://kickinthecreatives.com/kick-creatives-podcast/ - podcast on art, inspiration, so forth

Fundamentals https://drawabox.com/ - Dedicated to learning construction, shape, and form, along with how to handle your tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuEkb6FNptE "My Top 10 Composition Tips for Artists" by Tyler Edlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTslVOUJ0jI - 6 Habits for Good Line Quality by Proko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJkIaMECW6c&t=348s - "Improve Your Art with Better Shadows"- by Sinix Design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH6E_n51-BQ "Figure drawing will make sense after this video" By Love Life Drawing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNP5V8nGxRc - "Life Drawing | Line of Action" - Josh Papaleo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1FK8n7WgY - "Understanding Color" by Blender Guru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTYGWfiZnMA - "Essential Values for Painting, Lighting and Design" by Marco Bucci https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8HFcC5wreY -"Secrets of Shapes in Professional Art" by Tyler Edlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uigc8ofhDuo - "# 7 Ways Simple Shapes Can Improve Your Drawings" by Proko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ufz75UvHs - "Iterative Drawing - The Fastest Way to Improve" by Proko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KHLmBAWFvY - "KNKL 368: Using reference to create new original poses! (45min LIVE drawing + posing demo!)" - Kienan Lafferty

Clothing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07NanfYT8U - "Understanding Every Type Of Clothing Fold" by Marco Bucci https://archive.vogue.com/ - "The entire history of Vogue at your fingertips."

Digital Art https://www.ctrlpaint.com/ - teaches you from the very beginning how to draw digitally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mosDbZSqVGU - "My 6 Steps to Digital Painting" by Aaron Blaise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LroqHa24o-Y "Let's Improve Our Brushwork! (Digital Painting Tips)' - by Aaron Blaise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_E1ARR_AAg - "Anatomy Quick Tips: Skin" by Sinix Designs

Traditional Art https://www.learntopaintpodcast.com/ - how to paint podcasts https://www.creativebug.com/ - recommend if your library has access to it, but you can get a free trial for 2 months as of writing (may change in future))

**References https://www.pureref.com/ - software to organize your references as an imageboard https://www.adorkastock.com/ - Pose references https://line-of-action.com/ - References of figures, animal drawings, hands/feet, facial expression, scenes/environment https://pixabay.com/ free-to-use photographic references https://www.si.edu/openaccess - open access images by the smithsonian (has a lot of interesting old art pictures) https://naturalhistory.si.edu/visit/virtual-tour - national museum of natural history virtual tour https://grafitschool.gumroad.com/ - Paid pose references https://www.deviantart.com/theposearchives - Pose references https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/search - University of Washing digital collection

Podcasts https://open.spotify.com/show/46YccBlYhfOKq4zD4NHoxn - Draftsmen. Created by Stan Prokopenko and Marshall Vandruff. Two professional artists talk to eachother, and others, on art. https://www.svslearn.com/3pointperspective - 3 Point Perspectiive. Created by Will Terry, Lee White, and Jake Parker. Three professional illustrators that deal with children's illustrations.

Professional side of things https://artprof.org/pro-development/business-selling/art-commissions/ - guide on art commissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHoFS-PyS5M - How to make a Character Design Portfolio by Jackie Droujko https://artprof.org/ - website of art resources, including art school research, portfolio information, etc. majority of content on here is free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnhxny0STrk "How I Built My Art Business From Nothing - My Business Strategy and Journey To Being An Illustrator" by Mimimoo Illustration

[twoset-updates]

[041222 straits times article]

read online (subscribers only, video interview in the article is viewable without subscription)

[EDIT 051222] video interview now also available on youtube:

text of the article below the cut:

(typed by hand, there may be errors)

Practice makes perfect

Australian violinists Brett Yang and Eddy Chen tell Executive Editor Sumiko Tan that they set up TwoSet Violin to show how classical music can be fun, and to attract the young to it

Violinists Brett Yang and Eddy Chen are joking that if they must name their least favourite composer, Johann Pachelbel would be up there.

“Sometimes, some pieces are really overplayed, they’re put out of context. That gets a bit annoying,” says Yang, referring to the German composer’s pervasive Canon In D.

So you won’t play Pachelbel at your wedding then, I ask.

“Nah,” Chen dismisses.

“No way,” protests Yang. “Maybe at my funeral, you can play that.”

“But it’ll make you so angry, you’ll come out of your grave,” comes Chen’s rejoinder.

They laugh their heads off at this.

I decide not to mention that Canon In D was in fact what I had chosen to play at my wedding, and one of the few pieces of classical music I enjoy.

The two guys behind TwoSet Violin aren’t music snobs, really. They are just very passionate about classical music and see it as their mission to educate people about that world.

In 2013, the Taiwan-born Australians decided to form TwoSet Violin to make funny videos about life as classical musicians, which they posted on social media.

Their YouTube channel now has nearly four million subscribers, and the 1,300 videos there have garnered more than 1.2 billion views. There are also videos on other platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

Their live shows mixing comedy and violin recital have been seen in more than 20 cities, and they are planning another world tour.

There’s also TwoSet Apparel, a line of music-inspired T-shirts, hoodies and cardigans.

Their videos are both hilarious and educational. Often looking as if they had just tumbled out of bed, they discuss everything from violin hickeys (neck bruises due to prolonged violin playing; I see one on Yang but not on Chen) to misconceptions about musicians (”musical geniuses are born, not created” really riles them up.)

A video of them critiquing a Guinness World Record holder for world’s “fastest violinist” has drawn 9.5 million views. Their Pachelbel’s Chicken video, played with a squeaky rubber chicken, has 3.7 million views.

I’m interviewing the influencers ahead of their Nov 16 concert with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO).

This was a rather more serious performance. Yang played Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and then Bach’s Concerto For Two Violins with Chen. The latter performed the closing movement of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2, better known as La Campanella, for an encore.

The SSO event was sold out within minutes and its livestream on YouTube amassed more than 986,000 views in two weeks.

Yang had asked over e-mail for restaurant suggestions. I give him four and he picks One-Ninety at the Four Seasons. The hotel says filming there would be difficult and suggests we eat at its quieter Jiang-Nan Chun Cantonese restaurant.

They are fine with Chinese food, and also agree to bring along their violins — in this case, two precious Stradivarius instruments on loan to them for the SSO concert.

In person, they come across as smart, decent and sincere. They also look as if they could do with more sleep.

Yang, 30, is the friendlier, chattier one. When he sees the camera crew milling around, he asks me: “Is everyone eating or is it just us?”

Just us, I say.

“Sorry, guys,” he waves to them.

With his floppy fringe and dark-framed glasses, his style is collegiate preppy.

Chen’s is more hip hop. He’s wearing trendy oversized wire-frame glasses, a big white T-shirt and a sprinkling of jewellery. He appears a little more distant at first, possibly due to a lack of caffeine.

You’re quieter than in your videos, I remark.

“Yeah, people say that a lot,” Chen, 29, says. “I am, actually. But I also think I just haven’t had my coffee today.”

Yang vouches for this. “There is Eddy pre-coffee and after,” he says, mimicking how a tortoise retracts its head in and out of its shell. It sets them off laughing again.

Over our two-hour set-menu lunch, they finish each other’s sentences and reaffirm the other’s opinion or observation, Chen warms up after his caffeine fix from the Chinese tea. They share the same humour and their affection for each other seems genuine.

Sharing similar backgrounds, they have been friends for more than half their lives.

Both were born in Taiwan. When they were four, their families moved to New Zealand before settling down in Brisbane, Australia.

Yang, whose Chinese name is Po-yao, adopted the name Brett in Taiwan when his parents asked his English teacher for Western names. She went down the alphabet in giving them suggestions. His older brother is Alan, he got Brett and his mother is Cathy. “We skipped D as we couldn’t find a good name. My dad’s Eric.”

Chen’s mother picked Michael for him when he started kindergarten in New Zealand, but there were three other Michaels in his class.

He asked her for a new name, and she told him to pick one himself. Chen, whose Chinese name is Wei-chen, decided on Eddy after a fighter character in Tekken, a PlayStation game.

They met when Yang was 14 and Chen 13, at a maths tutoring class in Brisbane attended by Asian students.

The next day, they ran into each other again at a youth orchestra rehearsal they had signed up for. They didn’t attend the same school, but the classical music world was so small that they stayed friends.

Chen’s father was a dentist and his mother a housewife. He and his sister, who’s five years older, learnt the violin and piano. When she was 18, she decided to focus on the piano. “My mum was like, ‘well, we have only one piano, so I’m not giving you piano lessons anymore.’” He did the violin.

As for Yang, his older brother played the cello for a while and is now a dentist — “he’s fulfilling that for my parents”. His father is a semi-retired architect and mother an artist and teacher.

Their childhood revolved around practice, performance and competitions. Both went to Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, one of Australia’s leading music and performing arts schools, and knew they would make a career in music.

Chen remembers what his father, who died in 2015, once told him.

“He said, ‘Look, I’ve done that whole make your Asian parents happy part, and it’s cool, but I’m staring at teeth every day from the moment I wake up till I go to sleep. So unless you’re really passionate about teeth, maybe think a bit about doing what you’re passionate about.’

“That stuck with me, which is why I chose to do music even though my mum was like ‘be a doctor, be a doctor’.”

Yang tells his friend: “Your dad’s the chillest dad.”

Did your father get to see your YouTube success before he died, I ask chen.

“We had just started. He saw a little bit, but he didn’t see our first world tour, unfortunately, which would have been cool,” he says, sounding wistful.

Yang adds comfortingly: “He left you with his blessing — and passion.”

Around the time they were in university, South Korean rapper Psy’s Gangnam Style video became a global hit. Inspired, they started to make videos.

There was then a popular duo called 2Cellos. Calling themselves TwoViolins would be lame, “like a copy-paste”, says Yang. “So our two set of violins? Okay, TwoSet Violin.”

They got jobs in orchestras after graduation — Yang with the Sydney Symphony and Chen with the Queensland Symphony.

The fanbase of their videos continued to grow. At the end of 2015, they left their jobs to do videos full time. Audiences lapped up content like 8 Most Epic Piano Performances Everyone Should Watch.

In 2017, they decided to raise funds for a world tour and, as they said at the time, “turn our viral classical comedy videos into one crazy recital”.

They busked and slept on the streets of Sydney, and hit their goal of A$50,000 (S$46,000) in five days. From 2017 to 2019, they performed in more than 20 cities, including Singapore.

INFINITE IDEAS

As classical musicians, they saw how audiences were ageing. A key motivation behind TwoSet Violin has been to win over young fans.

“At concerts, it’s a sea of white hair,” says Yang. “You see a few young people in the front, which is usually us, the students, going to watch their favourite artists on student tickets.”

Adds Chen: “In 20 years, what’s going to happen?”

Yang replies: “We’re not going to have a job... It starts from the younger generation appreciating these things.”

I wonder if making videos has felt like they were dumbing down.

Yang points out that they do play the violin. “It’ll be a different story if we were faking it... But we still offer the integrity of classical music.”

Chen reminds me that his partner would be playing the full Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the SSO. “No YouTube violinist I can think of could do that, right?”

They love it when people tell them how the videos have inspired them to pick up or relearn instruments.

They are brimming with “infinite” ideas on how to make classical music entertaining.

Anything, it seems, can be turned into content.

An idea like whether one can play the violin on the moon could lead to a discourse on how sound and frequency travel in space.

Some videos critique the treatment of classical music in popular culture. 

Their recent parody of the Korean group Blackpink’s use of Paganini’s La Campanella drew flak from K-pop fans for being disrespectful, which they have shrugged off.

Blackpink’s treatment of La Campanella was “pretty artistically uninspiring”, says Chen dryly.

“They turned such a great piece into one of the most monotonous-sounding loops. Like they tuned it down, they processed it to sound almost like a machine violin, and then it was just looping like half the sentence.”

Their critiques aren’t mean-spirited, they add.

“I don’t think we’ve ever insulted someone for the sake of insulting. When we’re making videos, we’re coming from a perspective of sharing the world of classical music,” Chen says.

“So it’s like we’re educating about classical music but in a fun and entertaining way. We add some comedy to it, and sometimes with comedy there’s a bit more spice to it, and we add a bit of roast occasionally.”

As performers, they have had their struggles with stress and exhaustion.

When Chen was about 20, he couldn’t play the violin for about eight months and was in a wheelchair for two. He was preparing for a performance when first his arms, then legs, became mysteriously wracked with pain.

Eventually, a doctor diagnosed it to be psychological, and he had to learn to push through the pain. He has since recovered.

In 2020, Yang took about three months off, suffering from exhaustion.

They have since tried to take more breaks. They manage themselves, with a team of about 12, half of whom work part-time. Big agencies have asked to represent them, but they prefer to be independent.

Covid-19 put a halt to touring, but they held a virtual tour in December 2021. The duo, who are single and semi-based in Singapore, have announced another world tour for 2023/2023.

They don’t have any significant sponsors or government funding, and get income from YouTube advertising, concerts and apparel. “We try to make it work from the resources we have,” says Yang. “It forces us to be super creative.”

They are certainly changing the way classical music is perceived. At their SSO concert at the Victoria Concert Hall, they tied up with Tiger Sugar to serve bubble tea. (They are big bubble tea fans.)

A lot of their success — as well as their future — hinges on them staying in sync with the other.

Chen says they are on the same wavelength in most things and have hardly ever fought. “We are very much on the same page in our bigger outlook on life. Obviously, there will be smaller decisions that we might disagree on, but we just discuss it.”

Yang echoes this. They approach situations not from a “me perspective” but seek to understand each other.

As we wrap up the meal, I ask what they like about each other.

Yang says: “Eddy’s a very open-minded person, and he also thinks really deep. So it’s not just one-dimensional. You think broadly, you also think depth.”

Chen says he appreciates his friend’s ability to be in touch with people’s feelings and be considerate in social situations.

“He knows how to bring uncomfortable conversations up in a non-confrontational way. You know how sometimes people just bottle things up and then over time it explodes, right? But with Brett, it never feels like it has to get to that.”

Yang says softly: “Thanks, bro.”

The lunch crowd has gone, and we take over the restaurant to film the video. They play for us a segment of Augustin Hadelich’s arrangement of Por Una Cabeza by Carlos Gardel.

Yang e-mails me later to ask if I’d like a ticket to their SSO concert. I ask for one to their open rehearsal.

There’s nary a head of white hair among the audience. The seats are occupied by happy young people — mostly women — clapping wildly when they walk on stage and soaking in the Mendelssohn and Bach that follow.

I’m not a classical music lover, but, I, too, enjoyed myself.

[jiminsass-istant]

https://www.tumblr.com/jiminsass-istant/741783172809900032/httpswwwtumblrcomjiminsass-istant74093410630?source=share

I want to talk some points abt new jeans

They really just came out of nowhere like literally no teasers, no nothing. Directly released 2 songs with tons of videos on 70M subscribed hybe channel and those 2 songs are super catchy. 1 song is a ballad. Kpop world loved them like really really loved them and they released another title song along with releasing all the songs digitally and while that song was catchy, the lyrics are controversial (that the company gave am absurd explanation it's really laughable) The songs were hit on the korean side but I don't know much abt charts and how they impact their variety shows so I won't talk abt k- side but internationally their songs were on all popular playlists (both AM and spotify) and ofcourse all kpop playlists. So even if you are not a hybe Stan or doesn't engage much in kpop spaces online you will someway or other listen to their song and get hooked. They have 14 or some songs and had 6 songs reach 33M ppl so yeah. Without TTH, their latest comeback single made 1.4M or less than 2M (almost an year after debut) and had the peak of nearly 5M after adding to tth and tiktok heating and that song has like 5% korean so there's that.

Newjeans and 5050's cupid reminds me of "you think you got taste, oh baby how do you know" because you can't escape their songs even if you don't engage with kpop because it was that crazy

and when it comes to jk

he had more or less same things happen BUT he also happens to be a part of world's biggest band's popular member who was teasing solo music for years so he reached craaazy heights like fastest to achieve 1b on spotify

Thanks for giving insights on New Jeans! I really appreciate it.

I have a small task for those who are reading this in the end of this answer, so please read-

The points you made are totally valid. New Jeans songs are definitely very catchy like i said in that post. And their label definitely invested in playlisting too. + Tiktok heating because those songs are indeed tiktok friendly.

As for Cupid song, it was exposed that their CEO paid some million won to Tiktok to push that song. (The song definitely had viral potential and they recognised that). This news actually changed my entire perspective on tiktok heating. Sure, some songs are just organically viral, but I realised tiktok had reached that level of power and influence that labels are now paying tiktok (like they pay for streaming platforms and radio) to push their songs. So I won't be surprised if Hybe did something similar for Super Shy or other songs. (Again, i repeat, these are songs with viral potential and that's why the push was successful, even without remixing the original song)

It's true, Jungkook's high numbers came not only from the playlist, radio and tiktok push, but also as a result of the already present massive army fanbase. But it's also true, that the songs got some local acceptance BECAUSE they are in English.

That's why in that post I said that BTS's fanbase comes mainly from the story and concept they sell. One needs to invest their mind and time. There are not a lot of BTS songs that a local will listen to and think - oh let me put it in my playlist quickly because their songs are simply soo different from what the west grew up listening to. And I still believe that b-sides have a bigger potential than some main tracks.

Okay, fuck it. Let's try to name some BTS songs or parts of BTS songs that have viral potential on tiktok-

1. Blood sweat and tears melody, sped up (thank you jimin) - sexy dance challenge

2. Disease bridge (thank you Jimin) - anime edits, nightscape edits, racing cars/bikes

3. If i ruled the world chorus - shopping haul, daily life, hustle

4. Coffee chorus - couple themes

5. Just one day chorus- already viral in the kpop side

6. Outro: love is not over

7. House of cards (instrumental in the beginning)

8. Pied piper (ooh I'm taking over you part) - thirsty edits

9. 134340 (intro instrumentals)

10. So what bridge + drop ( for transitions)

11. Serendipity vocal run (sped up)

12. Black swan orchestral instrumentals

Do you have more ideas..?

Audio editors that make mashups can bring so many more ideas. So much potential. It will be difficult to make bts songs viral without some editing- mashup, speed up, drops, adding beats etc

[bl00dst41ned]

little recap of my fics (bye 2023 edition) - inspired by @hopefulromantic1

first fic posted :

safe place

i impulsively posted my first Jobe fic on july 28,2023, without knowing it marked the beginning of a beautiful journey here. i remember writing it because i couldn't find any jobe content.

the one i enjoyed the most writing :

snooze

i remember watching sza's "snooze" music video for the first time and being so giddy at the sight of sza and justin together, i had to write about it. the writing process was one of my fav because i just went with the flow, letting my fingers roam on the keyboard.

just another love song

this has to be my favourite smau (along with one i have unfinished in my drafts). i just loved the process, like getting the pictures, finding captions etc. (except the comments, i can't stand these)

my favourite scenario(s) :

the other man

i LOVE LOVE LOVE this fic for the plot. i wish i wrote it better (might rewrite it) and it got more views. i think i could write an entire book of it.

another lifetime

even though it is a sad one, it holds such a special place in my heart. i genuinely took my time with it (hence why it's my longest fic), trying to focus on the expression of emotions as there was a lot. i tried to write it as best as i could and i love it dearly

my biggest successes :

catching flights

crazy, this was my fastest growing fic yet i wrote it under an hour i think. remember waking up to see it have gained 200 notes overnight. what a way to wake up (thank you so much for it by the way, you may not know but you make me so happy)

unexpected

another jude work, love writing dad fics so loved this one too. i remember it took me so much time i was DONE. to this day it might the one that gets liked the most every day.

that one special fic

hold me in the cold

it is my most recent vvd fic and it's the first fic I wrote (I was just posting headcanons and smaus) I'm partially happy about it but love it too because I finally succeeded writing a full fic even though it's short

thank you for your support this year, you guys brought so much joy in my life, I don't think you can imagine. happy new year, much love and blessing to you for 2024

[illfoandillfie]

Hi sweetheart, i hope you are doing great! i think you are a beautiful person and an amazing writer, i’ve written lots of things already but i would like to hear some advice from you about writing so i can improve my skills, i really love writing 🫶🏻😩🥹🥰💌✨

lots of love from Argentina

oh gosh im 🤧🤧 thank you, thats so lovely of you to say!

First of all I keep a writing advice tag for any posts I come across with useful writing tips. Some of them are really general, some of them are about writing specific things (like kissing or children), so probably not everything in there will be useful but hopefully some of it is.

As for my own advice.... none of it is going to be groundbreaking stuff. I've never studied writing, I don't think too hard about how I write, and at the end of the day I just write silly fics about silly boys to keep myself entertained. But I'll put a few things under the cut. These are all more general sort of tips so if there are any specific parts of writing you want me to talk about let me know and I'll see what I can give you!

Number 1 is to just have fun with it. Don't get hung up worrying about if a concept is cringe or if its something no one else will like or if it sounds too much like something else you wrote. If it's an idea that interests you, then you're going to find it easier and probably more fun to write. And if you already love writing then you don't want writing to turn into a chore or something you don't enjoy.

Number 2 is to read real books. Reading fanfic is great and fun but it's very useful to read some books that have been professionally edited and published too. There is a craft to writing things that sound good and one of the fastest ways to learn what sounds good is to read books. You don't have to study them or analyse them, your brain will just pick up on patterns, on how sentences fit together, on what sounds good and what doesn't.

One of my fave examples of this is the way we describe things, at least in the English language. There is an unwritten formula for making a description sound good. opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. It's why saying "the silly little pink French book" sounds good but "the pink silly French little book" sounds very strange. No one is taught this formula, no one does it consciously. It's just that one sounds better than the other. And it's the sort of thing you subconsciously pick up from reading.

Number 3 is don't be afraid to do some research. No one knows everything. Sometimes you'll want to write about something that isn't super familiar to you. Whether that be because you're writing is set in a different country to where you are, or you're writing a smut scene with a kink/position you've never done in real life, or you're writing a character with a kid when you don't have kids. Research it! Go on google maps and find the place you want to write about so you can see how the streets look. Find a cosmo article or a youtube video that talks about the kink. Find a site that includes those little drawings of sexual positions (or heck, find some porn if thats more helpful) so you can see how it looks. Find a blog post from a parent and see how they talk about their kid. Listen or watch interviews if you're writing RPF to see how your person talks and what their mannerisms are. Not everything has so be 100% accurate and you're absolutely allowed to make some stuff up but if there's anything you feel unsure about, see if some research helps you.

Number 4 is to read everything you write out loud, but especially dialogue. Sometimes things can sound good while you're writing it but then when you read it back you realise it sounds clunky or it doesn't flow properly. Plus it helps you pick up on mistakes you might otherwise miss (like incorrect spelling or if you meant to delete a sentance but didn't). And I say especially for dialogue because when people talk they'll abbreviate words, they include slang, they use contractions. By reading things out loud to yourself you can hear where inflections are, you can hear if something sounds too formal, or wrong for the emotion you're trying to convey. When I write I make sure that I read it out loud to myself when I'm editing. You don't have to read it to someone else and you can whisper it under your breath so no one else will hear, but it is one of the best things you can do while editing or even if you get stuck while writing a conversation. Sometimes just hearing it out loud will help you identify why its not working.

Those are all the things I can think of off the top of my head but like i said if theres any areas of writing that I haven't mentioned that you'd like my take on let me know!

[oral-history]

WHY AUDIO NEVER GOES VIRAL Is This Thing On? (One of the Best Pieces Ever)

Stan Alcorn

· Jan 15, 2014

With a community of creators uncomfortable with the value of virality, an audience content to watch grainy dashcam videos, and platforms that discourage sharing, is a hit-machine for audio possible? And is it something anyone even wants?

Skip Dolphin Hursh

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Last October, several dozen audiophiles gathered in a basement auditorium for an all-day conference about “the future of radio in a digital age.” Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian finished a talk he’s been giving to college campuses about the Internet and the transformative power it can unleash when it mobilizes a mass of people around an idea, a video, a website, a tweet. When he took questions, I asked: Why does the Internet so rarely mobilize around audio? What would it take to put audio on the Reddit front page?

Ohanian leaned back, contemplating the question, apparently for the first time. “That’s interesting,” he said. “I’m thinking of a lot of the viral content.” You could practically see the memes and GIFs pass across his brain. He started to point out that most viral videos are under three minutes, while the best audio storytelling was usually longer, but interrupted himself with a story about Upworthy.

When the founders pitched him on their plan — to make “socially good content” “go viral” — Ohanian invested “out of passion,” not because he thought it would work. Now Upworthy is one of the fastest growing media properties on the Internet. Sure, sound may not go viral today, but Ohanian is optimistic. “Probably someone here in the audience is going to show us all wrong,” he said, “and a year from now we’re going to look at the Upworthy for audio."

“So go make it.”

Easier said than done.

Cat Video Vs. The Cat’s Meow

Bianca Giaever has always been obsessed with radio. As a child, while she biked her newspaper delivery route, she listened to an iPod loaded exclusively with episodes of WBEZ’s “This American Life.” At Middlebury College, she stalked her classmates, dragging them to her dorm room to record interviews she edited into stories for the college station and smaller audiences online. “I was fully planning on working in radio,” she says. “My whole life.” That is until, the day after graduation, she became a viral video star.

When she painstakingly crafted moving audio narratives, her parents and brother listened. When she added video to her final college project, “The Scared is Scared” — a 6-year-old’s dream movie brought to life — “It just. Blew. Up.”

“At first I was like, ‘Wow. A lot of people are sharing this on Facebook,’” she recalls thinking, “‘I have such nice friends!’” Then it was friends of friends. Then strangers. By the time websites like Mashable and CBS News picked it up, she could only picture the audience as a number. Waiting on the tarmac for her post-grad vacation to begin, she watched on her phone as that number spiked into the thousands, then hundreds of thousands, seemingly crashing the site that hosted it. “These French people were yelling — because I had my phone on as we were taking off — that I was going to kill them,” she recalls. “They were like, ‘Is whatever you’re doing worth our possible death?’ And I was like, ‘Maybe? This is the biggest thing that’s happened in my life!’”

Of the 100 most-shared news articles on Facebook, three were from NPR, but none included audio. Two of these were reblogs of YouTube videos.

I’m a public radio reporter and this doesn’t happen in my milieu. There is no Google Sound, no BuzzFeed for audio, no obvious equivalent of Gangnam Style, Grumpy Cat or Doge. If you define “viral” as popularity achieved through social sharing, and audio as sound other than music, even radio stations’ most viral content isn’t audio — it’s video. A 17-minute video interview with Miley Cyrus at Hot 97 has nearly 2 million views. An off-the-rails BBC Radio 1 video interview with Mila Kunis: more than 12 million. In June 2013, the list of the 100 most-shared news articles on Facebook included three from NPR, but none included audio. Two of these stories were reblogs of YouTube videos (this one and this one), found on Gawker and Reddit.

“Audio never goes viral,” writes radio and podcast producer Nate DiMeo. “If you posted the most incredible story — literally, the most incredible story that has ever been told since people have had the ability to tell stories, it will never, ever get as many hits as a video of a cat with a moustache.”

It’s hardly a fair fight, audio vs. cat video, but it’s the one that’s fought on Facebook every day. DiMeo’s glum conclusion is an exaggeration of what Giaever reads as the moral of her own story: “People will watch a bad video more than [they will listen to] good audio,” she says.

Those in the Internet audio business tend to give two explanations for this disparity. “The greatest reason is structural,” says Jesse Thorn, who hosts a public radio show called “Bullseye” and runs a podcast network called Maximum Fun. “Audio usage takes place while you’re doing something else.” You can listen while you drive or do the dishes, an insuperable competitive advantage over text or video, which transforms into a disadvantage when it comes to sharing the listening experience with anyone out of earshot. “When you’re driving a car, you’re not going to share anything,” says Thorn.

The second explanation is that you can’t skim sound. An instant of video is a still, a window into the action that you can drag through time at will. An instant of audio, on the other hand, is nothing. “If I send someone an article, if they see the headline and read a few things, they know what I want them to know,” a sound artist and radio producer told me. “If I send someone audio, they have to, like… listen to it.” It’s a lot to ask of an Internet audience.

For some radio makers, social media incompatibility is a sign of countercultural vitality. Thorn has called his own work “anti-viral,” and believes that entertaining his niche audience is “still so much better than making things that convince aunts to forward them to each other.”

“That’s A-U-N-T-S,” he clarifies.

But when I suggest the situation doesn’t seem to concern him, he interrupts, “To say that it doesn’t concern me — it concerns me profoundly. I think about it all the time.” In his view, social media warps our consumption patterns, and not for the better. “It’s a serious problem in my life. And not just in my media-making life, in my day-to-day life.”

After Giaever’s video went viral, she turned down an internship at “This American Life” — “my dream since I was nine” — to become a “filmmaker in residence” for Adobe. She gets paid to make her own movies, which she still approaches as radio stories with added visuals. It’s the proven way to get people on the Internet to listen. “The entire concept of what I’m doing seems problematic to me,” she says. “What’s so beautiful about radio is you can’t compete with what people are imagining in their heads, right? And yet I still continue to do it.”

Because audio doesn’t go viral.

Except that sometimes, it does.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

Most viral audio wasn’t intended for the Internet. Recordings made for some other purpose are excerpted and uploaded: voicemails, speeches, and calls to 911 and customer service hotlines.

One category of viral audio is the document, bits of audio that serve as evidence in a news story. It’s easy to imagine text transcripts being distributed in audio’s absence: Bradley Manning’s testimony, the 911 calls of the Trayvon Martin case, Obama’s oft-quoted “clinging to guns and religion.” The primary advantage of audio over text is that it lets the listener confirm a quote with her own ears and determine if meaning is altered by nuances of emphasis or emotion.

Another category of viral audio is the rant or comic diatribe, where emphasis and emotion are the entire point. For instance, an irate San Francisco Chronicle reader chewing out the editor for referring to a “pilotless drone,” or a voicemail becomes an increasingly laugh-filled narration of the aftermath of a car crash. A transcript of these would be like lyrics without a melody.

Somewhere in between these two is a subcategory that could be called “celebrities gone wild”: Alec Baldwin cursing out his 11-year-old daughter, Christian Bale cursing out his director of photography, Mel Gibson cursing out his ex-girlfriend, etc.

These brief, emotional, sometimes-newsworthy clips of people speaking have cousins in viral video. In fact, the two are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47% comment” was captured and distributed as a video featuring blurry donors’ backs. A recent viral “video” titled, “Potty Talk! [Original] 3 year old contemplates the effects of his diet on the toilet” is merely a shaky shot of a bathroom door. When documenting a primarily auditory event from the vantage point of a single recording device, adding a video camera to the microphone gives slightly more information, and the advantage of keeping the eyes occupied.

But these amateur, one-shot videos are a small and shrinking section of the viral video pool. “We’re seeing a lot more professional work in [the viral video] space, and I don’t just mean advertisers,” says YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca. The “top trending videos” of 2013 were all intentionally shot and edited for an Internet audience: music videos (“What Does The Fox Say?”) and ads (Volvo’s “epic split” with Jean-Claude Van Damme) but also low-budget productions like the Norwegian army’s “Harlem Shake.” They all have had over 90 million views.

Analogous audio — deliberately constructed and virally distributed — is a rarer and more recent phenomenon.

Ask a public radio journalist for an example of viral audio, and one piece comes up again and again: “Two Little Girls Explain The Worst Haircut Ever.” It’s two minutes and fifty seven seconds of cute, as five-year-old Sadie and three-year-old Eva tell the story of an ill-advised haircut to their patient interviewer and father, WNPR reporter Jeff Cohen. For public radio, Cohen has covered gangs, unemployment, and the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school. He won a magazine writing award for a story in the Hartford Courant about Connecticut’s first Iraq war widow.

“I’ve done a lot of work as a reporter that I’m pretty proud of,” he says. “I will never be recognized for anything for the rest of my life, except for this.”

It, too, resembles a viral video: it’s short, self-contained and driven by cute children. But not only does it lack any images of said children, it isn’t a straightforward record of what unfolded in front of the microphone. Cohen recorded two interviews, one with each daughter, and then carefully edited them into a fast-paced, seamless whole. Unlike Alec Baldwin’s voicemail, “Two Little Girls” is a showcase of audio’s power to create what appears to be an unedited version of reality, but is in fact a tightly constructed story, with a beginning, middle and end.

To explain why millions of people have listened to “Two Little Girls” — and why this is still so exceptional — you have to look at its convoluted path to fame.

What We Mean When We Talk About ‘Viral’

Taken literally, “viral” brings to mind an infectious agent bumping around inside its host, spreading accidentally by breath or touch. When “viral marketing” emerged in the 1990s, the medical referent was apt. The disease vector typically took the form of email and “virals” — as such ads were then called — that lived in the inbox. Invisible to the wider world, they spread from individual to individual, as when Hotmail stuck a sign-up ad beneath its users’ signatures. Or when the movie “American Psycho” sent compulsively forwardable emails from its psychotic main character, Patrick Bateman.

Today, those seeking to “go viral” have the same essential goal — to increase their audience by reaching the audience’s audience (and their audience, ad infinitum) — but the web has changed beyond the dynamics of disease transmission. Instead of invisible, one-to-one emails, today’s Internet infections spread by a cascade of publicly visible, one-to-many “likes,” “shares,” “tweets,” and “reblogs,” accelerated and amplified by an expanding web publishing industry. “Sharing” implies a deliberate effort, but social media sharing skews toward a mix of self-representation and what Tumblr creative technologist Max Sebela refers to as “speaking in content”: You might share Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” not because you want people to watch the video, but to make a joke about the fact that today is Friday.

“How does it happen,” YouTube’s Kevin Allocca asked in a 2011 speech called “Why Videos Go Viral.” “Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation, and unexpectedness.”

Tastemakers are like virus broadcasters, picking up outstanding, or “unexpected,” Internet phenomena that might otherwise never spread beyond their initial communities, and spraying their spores onto larger followings.

For Cohen’s “Two Little Girls,” the key tastemaker, without whom it may well have languished in Internet obscurity, was Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman. (Note: I spoke with Zimmerman before he announced his plans to leave Gawker to become editor-in-chief of a social network startup called Whisper.)

Zimmerman is the closest thing to a one-man embodiment of what he calls “the viral industry.” When Gawker hired him in early 2012, his boss A.J. Daulerio approvingly called him, “a total freak” for his ability to methodically scour the corners of the Internet for the video, memes, and Internet ephemera that would grow to popularity after being seeded with Gawker’s audience. “Before I used to do basically 20 hours a day,” Zimmerman says. “Now there’s a night shift, so I don’t have to worry as much.” In the last three months of 2013, his posts were responsible for more than half of Gawker’s pageviews and two thirds of the site’s unique visitors — nearly 40 million in total — according to Gawker’s public stats. For comparison, that’s more than 1/3 of the traffic of the entire the New York Times website.

Zimmerman’s work is a more extreme version of the new, upside-down dynamic of web publishing. Instead of the publisher’s megaphone guaranteeing its articles an audience, the publisher only has an audience insofar as the articles “go viral.” Tens of thousands of readers see most of the dozen items Zimmerman posts each day, but millions see his blockbusters.

For those hits, the content and the clickbait headline are as important as the timing. He describes “going viral” like surfing: boarding a wave at the earliest possible point. “You don’t want to wait too long because you’ll miss that initial cresting,” he says. “It’s a race against everyone else.”

Zimmerman chooses what to cover by scanning for signs of that wave rather than looking deeply at the constituent molecules of content. “The way the system works is I keep a mental note of instances of occurrence on a certain tier of sites,” he says. This lets him identify “viral momentum,” even when his personal judgment might suggest otherwise. “The purpose of the system is to override my biases and to override whatever personal feelings I have.”

Sometimes this lets Zimmerman not only beat the competition, but also popularize something that might otherwise never bubble into the mainstream from a less-trafficked corner of the Internet. But the system — Zimmerman’s and that of the “viral industry” more generally — has an obvious bias of its own toward content that is already being shared on the Internet.

For Bianca Giaever’s “Scared” video, first college and radio friends shared it on Facebook, then Vimeo made it a “staff pick,” then major media websites like CBS News, BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Mashable blogged about it. Within three days, hundreds of thousands were watching.

For Cohen, it took four months, and a lot of luck.

‘Invisible As the Radio Waves Themselves’

Jeff Cohen had interviewed his daughters many times, in the same way other fathers shoot home videos. “I’m sappy that way,” he says. But he thought enough of the haircut piece to play it for colleagues at the radio station. “It was about five minutes long, and my boss and friends said, ‘Cut it down to three minutes and put it on PRX.’”

PRX is the Public Radio Exchange, and as the name suggests, its website is a marketplace where station managers shop for stories. After Cohen uploaded his new, tighter version of “Two Little Girls” in February of 2012, it was discovered and licensed by a handful of local stations: KOSU in central Oklahoma, KUT in west Texas, KSJD in southwest Colorado.

But to the Internet, all this was invisible as the radio waves themselves. “PRX is designed as a business-to-business marketplace,” says PRX CEO Jake Shapiro. “We’re not designed for listeners… yet.”

The circuitous route that “Two Little Girls” took to Gawker didn’t start with PRX, but at a monthly event called “Ear Cave” hosted by one of Cohen’s colleagues at a coffee shop in Hartford, Connecticut. “I call it BYOB, BYOE,” says the event’s creator Catie Talarski. “Bring Your Own Beer, Bring Your Own Ear.” She dims the lights, sets up chairs, and projects a photograph of an old radio, so the audience has something to look at while a chosen curator presses play on a laptop. That April, “Two Little Girls” was the grand finale.

“It was just a huge hit,” recalls Adam Prizio, an insurance auditor who was in the audience that night. Two months later, Prizio, with the voices of Eva and Sadie bouncing around his head, decided to google it. Finding the audio on PRX, he posted a link to community blog MetaFilter, with no description other than a mysterious quote (“It happens three times in every life. Or twice. Or once.”) and the categorization “SLAudio,” a riff on “SLYT” (Single Link YouTube).

Overnight, the comments swelled. “Amazing.” “Adorable.” “Better than the Car Guys.” “OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING BALLER.” There were fewer comments than a link published ten minutes later — “Fundamentalist Christian schools in Louisiana will soon be citing the existence of the Loch Ness monster as proof that evolution is a myth” — but they were comments of single-minded delight. The next morning, Zimmerman saw the thread in his morning Internet regimen, and within an hour had put up his own post that would go on to gather some 1.3 million views entitled, “Public Radio Reporter Interviews His Two Little Girls After One Gives the Other the ‘Worst Haircut Ever.’”

“It didn’t really matter that it was audio,” says Zimmerman. “It was more about how it was being received online.”

In one sense, it followed the same trajectory as all viral content, or what YouTube’s Kevin Allocca has defined as a combination of “community participation” and “tastemakers.” Something becomes popular in a niche community, whose public enthusiasm attracts the notice of a tastemaker, who then repackages it to suit a larger audience, where the entire process repeats on a larger scale.

But really “Two Little Girls” succeeded in spite of its immediate community. Cohen first had to be convinced to put it online at all, and even then it was on a website searched only by public radio station managers. While Cohen says it made the rounds of his Facebook friends, it only took off after audio enthusiasts heard it at a coffee shop.

Compared to other media, even young, tech-savvy audiophiles are less likely to share audio on a weekly basis, and when they do, they’re more likely to use email instead of social media.

The barriers that nearly blocked “Two Little Girls” from finding a larger audience are a mix of culture and technology. While home videos make the leap to YouTube all the time, audio makers tend to keep their scraps to themselves. When I took an unscientific poll (n=60), it backed up what I heard anecdotally: Compared to other media, even young, tech-savvy audiophiles are less likely to share audio on a weekly basis, and when they do, they’re more likely to use email instead of social media.

Several echoed the sentiment of occasional radio producer Laura Griffin, who said, “I tend to assume that most people don’t have the same patience and appreciation for audio that I do, so I am selective about what audio I share and with whom.”

Others pointed to technological limitations. The files themselves are large and often forbid downloading. Audio-hosting websites employ an inconsistent potpourri of players, many of which disallow the embedding that has helped make online video ubiquitous. (Some PRX audio can be embedded, but Gawker had enough trouble with its player that they uploaded the audio into their own.) “I often don’t share NPR audio because their player isn’t embeddable and requires going to another website to listen,” notes multimedia producer Will Coley.

There is one standard format for distributing digital audio, but rather than resolving these barriers to sharing, it may be their most perfect expression: the podcast.

The Podcast Problem

If you don’t know what a podcast is, you’re in the majority.

Technically, it’s an RSS feed containing links to files (“podcast” typically implies an audio file). Using podcast-listening (formerly “podcatching”) software, you can “subscribe,” setting your computer or smartphone to automatically download the new and get rid of the old.

It’s hard to appreciate in 2013 the enthusiasm with which this simple idea was met by the mid-2000s media.

“I haven’t seen this much buzz around a single word since the Internet,” computer programmer Carl Franklin told the New York Times in 2004.

By letting everyone become broadcasters (or really “podcasters”), it was supposed to disrupt radio in a way that was predicted to parallel that other online media format with a horrible portmanteau name: blogging. In fact, the name “podcast” was tossed off by the Guardian's Ben Hammersley between the alternatives “audioblogging” and “GuerillaMedia.”

It wasn’t all hype. Anyone can start a podcast, just as anyone can blog. The podcast did close the loop, in its clunky way, between where people download and where they typically listen. And aficionados can point to a long list of programs, especially covering technology and — more recently — comedy, which never would have existed otherwise.

12% of Americans listened to a podcast in the last month, the same percentage as three years ago.

But while much of online publishing now takes the form of the blog, interest in podcasting seems to have flatlined. According to Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron), 12% of Americans listened to a podcast in the last month, the same percentage as three years ago. It is a substantial niche, but smaller than the percentage of people who create online videos, and less than a sixth the number who watch them.

“There was a huge wave of initial excitement around podcasting changing and disrupting and turning upside-down radio seven years ago, or longer,” says PRX’s Jake Shapiro. “And then it kind of just petered out.”

While the number of podcasts has proliferated, the vast majority of episodes have audiences in the double or triple digits, judging from the experience of podcast hosting giant Libsyn. “If you want to do the average, our mean podcast? Now you’re looking at like 200, 250 downloads per episode,” Libsyn’s Rob Walch told NextMarket Insights's Michael Wolf. The majority of top podcasts, far from being grassroots disruptors, are major public radio shows: “This American Life,” “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” and “Radiolab.” It’s the dominant way of finding an on-demand audio audience on the Internet, but it’s more Hulu than YouTube.

The absence of disruption is, in part, baked into the technology. “It’s clearly the number one barrier to wider listenership,” says Jesse Thorn. Apple gave the format a big boost when it brought it into the iTunes store in 2005, but that walled garden of a market has come to delimit the podcast’s reach. To watch a YouTube video, you click play, wherever it exists on the web. With another click you can immediately share it by putting a player in the feed of your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or even LinkedIn accounts.

To listen to a podcast, however, you have to search for it on an app or in the iTunes store, sign up for it, wait for it to download. (Of course there are other ways to download podcasts, but the majority of podcast downloads occur through Apple.) Click “share” on Apple’s podcasting app, and you’ll be prompted to post an RSS feed, which is a bit like trying to share a new Tom Junod article and instead passing on a password that readers can use to subscribe to Esquire.

These hurdles don’t hamper podcasts that are already well known. Thorn’s podcast audience has been growing steadily by approximately 50% each year. “Radiolab” and “This American Life” — public radio shows that are among the most popular podcasts and the aesthetic guiding lights for young public radio producers — are both approaching a million digital listens for each new episode. For these shows, the occasional episode will get shared more than others, but that “viral” bump is on the order of 10 to 20 percent, and even that seems driven less by social media than old-fashioned word of mouth. “Google is a much bigger referrer to any given episode [than Facebook],” says WNYC’s Jennifer Houlihan Roussel. In other words, podcasts don’t go viral. Nor are they designed to.

As the Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, points out in the Independent back in 2005, “Podcasts take content and put it into a form that can’t be indexed by search engines or be speed-read, and which you can’t hyperlink to (or from). A podcast sits proud of the flat expanse of the Internet like a poppy in a field. Until we get really good automatic speech-to-text converters, such content will remain outside the useful, indexable web.”

A Cloud Atlas?

If there is any company attempting to create a modern web alternative to the podcast, it’s SoundCloud.

“Podcasting: It’s a fairly old school method of distribution,” says its co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. “We are certainly of the opinion that SoundCloud is the superior way of broadcasting your show across the web.”

If you’ve played audio from Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, you’ve likely seen it: the slow crawl of orange across a gray waveform. This omnipresent, embeddable player is what has most clearly attracted the moniker “YouTube for audio.” Hoping to make sound as sharable as video, SoundCloud delivers this content via a streaming player instead of a dressed-up file download.

In a Facebook message, data scientist Lada Adamic told me: “Soundcloud does seem to have a lot of sharing activity (everything is dwarfed by YouTube but soundcloud is holding its own) [sic].” SoundCloud was the 11th most commonly submitted domain on Reddit as of March 27, 2013, according to Reddit data scientist Chad Birch, above the Huffington Post, the Guardian and Vimeo. The number of YouTube domains submitted was almost 22 times as high.

But the SoundCloud content accumulating most on social media isn’t what the company calls “audio.” “In our world, in terms of viral content, the real viral content is actually music,” Wahlforss says.

For non-music “audio,” SoundCloud lets broadcasters and podcasters have it both ways, encouraging them to make their shows available on SoundCloud’s platform, while also creating a podcast-ready RSS feed. “We are trying to blur that distinction a little bit,” says Wahlforss.

“We’re on SoundCloud because they have a nice player for sharing on Facebook and Twitter,” says Seth Lind of “This American Life.” But the total plays of their hour-long episodes on SoundCloud peak at roughly 3% of its digital listenership, and are usually under 1%, hovering around 5,000. A look at SoundCloud’s “trending audio” page presents a similar picture: podcast episodes and radio shows, with listenership in the hundreds or low thousands.

Clearly, technology alone doesn’t ensure the virality of an hour-long show with a headline designed for consistency rather than clickability (e.g.: “#513: 129 Cars” from “This American Life”). “It’s probably not going to be as popular as a Gangnam Style,” Lind notes, dryly. The audio that has gone viral takes a different tact: short, tailored specifically for SoundCloud, and providing a near-immediate pay-off that fulfills the headline’s promise.

Much of it is some mix of rant and newsworthy document, like AOL’s Tim Armstrong firing Patch’s creative director, or Charles Ramsey’s 911 call after he helped rescue three kidnapped women in Cleveland.

But the most heard, and most truly social example of SoundCloud’s viral audio is a New Zealand radio host’s dramatic reading of a series of text messages from a one-night stand gone unhinged: “This Is What Crazy Looks Like Via Text Messaging.” “Fletch & Vaughan” host Vaughan Smith found the texts on BuzzFeed and performed them as part of a four hour-long drive-time show. He then uploaded it to SoundCloud and shared it on Facebook to appease callers who wanted to hear the skit — but only that one skit — again.

“At the end of the weekend it hit a million plays,” says Smith. “It was mental.” With more than six million plays to date, more people have heard the version from “Fletch & Vaughan” than have read the BuzzFeed article it was adapted from — a triumph of sound over text.

It couldn’t have gone viral without a player as sharable as SoundCloud, but perhaps more importantly, it couldn’t have gone viral without the active unearthing of comedic gold buried within a longer broadcast. “In public radio, only within the last few years has there been a big value seen in disaggregating content from shows,” says PRX managing director John Barth. “And there’s still a pretty big debate about that.” These concerns echo the now-largely-obsolete resistance of other media to the Internet. They want listeners to experience the whole enchilada, not take the ingredients and re-contextualize them.

As for creating a whole new audio cuisine — work cooked up specifically for a SoundCloud audience — the successful examples are elusive. “We mostly use it as a promotional tool really,” says Smith. “We use it to promote the podcast.”

The Message Is The Medium

Last October, Reddit's Alexis Ohanian told a basement full of audiophiles to go make "the Upworthy for audio," but in a sense, we already have the Upworthy for audio: Upworthy. With its scientifically-selected, clickbait headlines, it  is the reason nearly two million people have heard the future president of Ireland Michael Higgins dress down rightwing talk show host Michael Graham (“A Tea Partier Decided To Pick A Fight With A Foreign President. It Didn’t Go So Well.”) It’s the reason hundreds of thousands have heard Geoffrey Gevalt tell a small poignant story, set to music, about his daughter (“A Toddler Gets Totally Profound In a Way Most Adults Don’t”) and Summer Puente about her father (“Every Night This Dad Falls Asleep in Front of the TV. There’s a Beautiful Reason Why.”)

The Upworthy sector of the Internet economy isn’t just healthy, it’s insatiable and omnivorous in its appetite for content it can coax people into clicking and sharing. “Whether it’s audio, whether it’s video, whether it’s still images, whether it’s text: my system remains pretty much the same,” says Neetzan Zimmerman. “For me it doesn’t really matter.”

The viral industry can help solve audio’s skimming problem, but only if it can find the content in the first place. “Radio doesn’t do a very good job of marketing itself to the viral industry, for whatever reason,” says Zimmerman. “Maybe it thinks too highly of itself, or thinks of ‘viral’ as a cheapening of its content. I really disagree with that. I think there’s a lot there to be mined, and a lot that gets ignored.”

“Marketing” makes it sound like radio makers simply need to do a better job of drawing attention to their work. And it’s true: active, public sharing directed at non-audiophiles is how Zimmerman found “Two Little Girls.” If there were a website that showed what audio was “trending” in some smaller community, Zimmerman says it would become part of his system. “One hundred percent. No doubt about it.”

There are also plenty of short podcasts and single-serving radio stories that are poorly labeled on obscure web pages or presented in unembeddable players. “Nobody that I’ve seen, even the best of them, spends time thinking about how to create the metadata or the descriptions: the things that might actually catch your attention,” says PRX’s Jake Shapiro.

More fundamental than marketing is the question of where audio makers see a market. “So far nobody is producing audio, really, for an audience that might be scanning for things to enjoy,” says Shapiro.

“It’s somewhat of a chicken and egg thing,” he says, “Until producers have any kind of confidence that there’s an audience or some money to be made — or preferably both — they’re not really targeting it.”

“If it can’t be used for pornography it’s never going to be the most popular thing.”

Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithms to favor audio. Perhaps SoundCloud or PRX or Apple will make a social alternative to podcasting. “It’s possible that someone will make this app that’s all about sharing audio that will be the next Snapchat,” suggests Seth Lind. “That’s obviously not going to happen,” he quickly adds, to make sure I know he’s joking. “If it can’t be used for pornography it’s never going to be the most popular thing.”

But Jeff Cohen and “Fletch & Vaughan” demonstrate that audio makers don’t have to wait for a deep shift in technology to court a viral audience. They would, however, have to create audio not for already-dedicated radio and podcast listeners, but for the distracted, impatient crowd that is the web. Audio enthusiasts would have to evangelize on that work’s behalf, not just in coffee shops or emails to each other, but online, loudly, with the same manipulative, click-chasing techniques wielded by the rest of the web.

The day “Two Little Girls” went viral, Jeff Cohen tweeted: “I fear I may disappoint new Twitter followers once they realize that I mostly write on Hartford, government, and healthcare. Not my kids…” That is still more or less his beat, though he does also have a children’s book (“Eva and Sadie and the Worst Haircut EVER!”) due out this summer.

“I don’t know anything about the Internet, really,” Jeff Cohen says. But the way he sees it, although he got lucky, he also made his own luck.

“I didn’t cut anybody’s hair. But when you see an opportunity, you take advantage of it.”

Stan Alcorn is a print, radio and video journalist based in New York City. He regularly reports for WNYC, Marketplace and NPR and is a staff writer for Fast Company's Co.Exist.

© 2016 News.me Inc · Terms · Privacy

[blazehedgehog]

Re: Throne gifts - of all the things on the list, which things do you think would help you the most / you want the most in regards to video production? For example, I see some monitors on the list. Would they provide more screen real state / better color accuracy that would make editing easier for you? Or the RAM, it should speed up rendering times. Is that more useful to you? Would like to know where donations might be most helpful.

(This is in reply to this post)

When thinking of things to buy for myself, the top two "things" I am saving up for are rebuilding my PC and the Xbox. Which one of those things is the front runner is complicated.

I can capture and edit video just "fine" with my current setup, but things can always get faster. So getting the Xbox first isn't necessarily going to diminish anything about my current life. But, again, things can always get faster. A new CPU would smooth out a couple of video capture woes I've been struggling with.

But for the PC upgrade, I can't just buy a new CPU and be done with it. I am currently on one of the fastest CPUs that my Socket 1150 motherboard supports. I think part of the reason this motherboard was as cheap as it was back in 2016 is because Socket 1150 was completely discontinued by the end of that year (I actually had to replace the motherboard in 2017, and had to buy the replacement on Ebay).

Which is why there's a CPU and a motherboard on Throne. I'd need both.

The RAM is also sort of attached to the new motherboard as my current one tops out at DDR3. That RAM is DDR4.

Actually, to back up a little bit, a lot of the computer stuff was on another wishlist I was building for myself back when I was flush with cash after the Sonic 3 video. I was waiting on a few other things to clear before I spent it, but then my Mom got sick and things played out like they did, meaning it basically became impossible to justify blowing my savings on a new PC. Which is why a lot of it "goes together."

Anyway, RAM is cheap right now, so the CPU+Mobo would be the focus, I guess. I have 16GB of RAM right now, which was kind of a lot back in 2016, but is considered average by today's standards. I am not quite starving for RAM just yet. 32GB is just a "nice to have because RAM is cheap."

(And for the record, the DDR3 would work in the new motherboard, just not the other way around)

Alternatively, this monitor I'm currently using is not only very dark after 12 years of all-day use, but might also be dying? Last month the entire display went completely wacky and basically turned to snow like an old CRT. It lasted about 5 seconds and then started displaying normally again. I very nearly almost took the hit and knee-jerk ordered a new monitor right then and there.

Of the two monitors I have on Throne, the Asus was the one that was on my old "rebuilding my PC" Amazon wishlist. My current 12 year old monitor is an Asus, so I'm inclined to stick with the brand unless someone tells me otherwise. It also has g-sync and some high refresh rate stuff I've been told looks good.

The Samsung monitor was just something I think I found while browsing Throne itself. It's cheaper than the Asus, but it also has slightly less features (and slightly less hook up ports) than the Asus, too. For instance, my current Asus monitor is connected via DVI, which that other Asus monitor also supports, but that Samsung only does HDMI or DSUB. So you get what you pay for.

I wouldn't look down on either monitor, but my preference is the Asus. I think the Asus is lower latency, too.

Honestly, it's a bummer Throne only lets you set one item as "featured." Amazon at least let you rate things by priority. Throne needs that, or the ability to put things in to multiple categories at once.

[amtrak12]

I crossposted the Elemental Writer Asks to my Lucifer Twitter so this question is from over there.

Summer: How do you know when you need a break from writing?

THIS IS SUCH A GOOD QUESTION! Because it can be hard to tell the difference between needing a break and just needing to push through with a bunch of crappy writing to get through a block.

So, I guess to start, here are some reasons I, personally, might need a break from writing.

I'm sleepy

I'm distracted by a different fixation

My day job has been too demanding/busy/etc

Other real life stuff is going on

I've been writing too much

Now with outside stress, it is what it is. I either write what I can or I just let myself relax with video games or a TV marathon or whatever. And being sleepy only really has one solution too: go to bed lol

For being distracted: Unless I have an external deadline (like I signed up for a fic exchange), I just give into the distraction now. Sure, go play Sims for a couple of days because I can't stop thinking about raising horses. Yeah burn through the entire Shadow and Bone series in a week. It's fine. Even if I don't need a break from writing at that moment, the break is still a good mental refresh.

And now for the difficult-to-define problem of 'writing too much'. What is too much and how can you tell if you're at that limit?

For me, too much is anything at NanoWrimo pace (1667 words/day or 50,000 words in 30 days) or greater. That's total writing, not just how many words I publish. Now, I can handle 20-40k words per month for months on end with the occasional 50k spike. But that's only after writing the same WIP for a year and a half which has given me a lot of practice at writing consistently.

Factors that will decrease how much I writing I can do:

Editing

Brainstorming new story ideas

Free-writing and basic rough drafts are the easiest and fastest things for me to write because quality doesn't matter. But generating new ideas or editing existing writing both take a lot more brain power. At any point in time, I'm doing a mix of brainstorming, drafting, and editing. But I'm (slowly) learning I need to pay attention to which I'm doing more of in any given week, because that will influence how soon I'll need a break.

This week, for example, I posted a new Can We Keep Her chapter last Friday and a one shot on Monday. I've also written and submitted 3 drabbles for a fic exchange that won't get revealed until this coming weekend. Now, I've gotten better this year about forcing myself to take a day off of writing when I publish a new WIP chapter. Partly to celebrate and partly because I've learned I WILL burnout if I immediately jump into the next chapter. This WIP is monstrously long, and no amount of 'pushing it' is going to get it done faster.

But I definitely haven't been taking breaks after my shorter one-shots. 😬 And here I am on Thursday when I've scheduled myself to resume Chapter 20's draft and I just… don't want to. I'm feeling super unmotivated today even though I know exactly what I need to write. I thought I was disappointed by getting no comments on my one-shot -- and I am, sure -- but uh… after typing all of this out, I'm going to guess that I've expended more brain power writing and editing those drabbles than I thought. And that uh, maybe just maybe, I might need to spend tonight reading or playing video games instead of writing.

LOL I have no idea why that wasn't clear to me before. I just published FIVE different fics in a week. Seems pretty obvious that I should take a break 😜

So, I guess my advice for how to tell if you also need a break or are simply stuck on a writing problem that you need to push through:

Take note of how much you've written lately (this week/this month)

Compare that to how much you typically write in the same time period

Remember what else is going on in your life that's been demanding your energy.

If your response to any of those categories equals A Lot, you probably need a break from writing. Find the method that refreshes you, and go do that instead for a day or two (or longer, even) 💜 My favorites are fiber crafts, scripted television, and reading.

[howdykittyleroy-blog]

I'm being open with this post because I think it's essential that people are made aware of mental health issues, and if one can share experiences, it can help others in a similar situation feel less alone. I've been prone to depression most of my adult life and it's a pain in the - not posterior - the head.

I'm okay now, but my mind crashed the other day. I was working through the edits on Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 2 that my editor had suggested and I agreed with (good suggestions). My editor also told me that the majority of my writing was 24 carat gold! Wonderful! Sadly, that makes no difference to how I feel even when everything goes so well. I wish it did.

As I worked on the edits I was also working on a blog post, thinking that that was a relaxing break. Then, because the weather was decent, did some gardening. That's when my brain exploded and the ensuing depression was horrible. Hubby took me out for a drive, because that invariably helps. It did, and as I got better I began to video the route, which I later posted on YouTube.

Hubby and son both told me that I was overdoing it - again. Pushing myself - pushing pushing... The last few months had been centered on my epic western trilogy and nothing much else. I was heading for burnout and breakdown.

We went out for coffee the following day because I'd recovered, and discussed tactics for treating my mindset. I'll back off the work, approach the writing carefully, and work on my artwork as well. We're also working on our social life, which dropped dramatically after covid, and, now that spring is here, get out and about more. I've got to keep PA hubby up to date with what I'm doing as far as the trilogy is concerned. So gently, gently...

Can't have my brain exploding again. 😱💥

(For anyone who is interested, Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl! is the gripping story of a devastating and charismatic pants-wearing cowgirl who's the fastest gun in the west. This is her journey to find her true self on the American frontier. It's available on Amazon).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/West-Girl-Alias-Jeannie-Delaney-ebook/dp/B0C9YT6DVR/

[droptoeholdyourhorses]

My Nine Platinum Trophies

On PlayStation. Not literal platinum trophies.

It's rare that I actively go after a platinum trophy in a video game but last night, in the early hours of the morning, I got my ninth so I figured it would be nice to go back and look at the ones I do have.

1. WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 (PS3)

First Trophy: 22/08/2011

Platinum: 20/11/2011

Time: 2 months, 29 days

Rarity: 1.9%

Given WWE SvR 2010 came out in October 2009, you might be wondering why I was late to the party on this one. Until 2011, pretty much the only games I played at all were the WWE ones and I stayed loyal to my PlayStation 2 until the bitter end. When WWE '12 was announced to be exclusive for the seventh generation, I caved and got myself a PS3. For whatever reason, I actually skipped SvR 2010 when it came out on PS2 so I picked up a cheap copy for the PS3 instead and managed to get my first platinum a few days before WWE '12's release.

2. Family Game Night 3 (PS3)

First Trophy: 17/07/2012

Platinum: 26/09/2012

Time: 2 months, 9 days

Rarity: 2.7%

Ah yes, arguably the most prestigious platinum of all. Accomplished by achieving such feats as winning The Game of Life 10 times, having a perfect game of Twister, locking another player in any room in Clue, building all five trap variants in Mouse Trap, and gaining six combo cards in Yahtzee.

3. Rocket League (PS4)

First Trophy: 16/08/2015

Platinum: 05/01/2017

Time: 1 year, 4 months, 20 days

Rarity: 2.7%

Another case of being behind the times. Rocket League was free on PlayStation Plus upon its initial release in July 2015 but I don't remember actually having a copy until Christmas 2016. However, when looking through the trophies, I have two dating back to August 2015. I can only assume I did download Rocket League briefly, lost interest the first time around, uninstalled it and eventually got back round to wanting to play it again. Mysterious circumstances whatever happened meaning the platinum took close to 17 months as opposed to just 11 days. In between FGN3 and Rocket League, I also 100% completed Monopoly Plus, Firewatch, and Hitman but none of those offer a platinum.

4. Killing Floor 2 (PS4)

First Trophy: 08/06/2017

Platinum: 29/06/2017

Time: 21 days

Rarity: 1.7%

This one I did get when it was free on PlayStation Plus. However, I picked it up at the insistence of my friend Chris. He currently has 92 platinum trophies for comparison sake. A fun little game that helped pass the time during a period of unemployment for myself until I found a job that September. A couple of months prior to the KF2 platinum, I also 100% completed Disc Jam, meaning my overall platinum count should really have been 8 at this stage.

5. L.A. Noire (PS4)

First Trophy: 25/12/2017

Platinum: 23/03/2018

Time: 2 months, 26 days

Rarity: 1.8%

I never played L.A. Noire on the PS3, instead getting the enhanced edition for Christmas 2017. I soon realised what I had been missing. A lovely game with a fantastic story that never outstayed its welcome. Probably the first time I actively wanted to achieve a platinum as opposed to having a majority of trophies and then just picking up the ones I didn't have. On the topic of Rockstar games, I got Red Dead Redemption 2 as a gift for Christmas the following year. I have 81% of the trophies for that game, missing out one single player trophy and a few of the online ones. I do however have 100% in-game completion which is good enough for me.

6. Golf With Your Friends (PS4)

First Trophy: 23/05/2020

Platinum: 11/06/2020

Time: 19 days

Rarity: 0.5%

The fastest platinum I've achieved to date. Golf With Your Friends was a quite handy game for a group of us to play during a time where none of us could see each other in person for reasons I forget. I've not played any of the GWYF expansions though.

7. Grand Theft Auto V (PS4)

First Trophy: 11/12/2014

Platinum: 24/01/2021

Time: 6 years, 1 month, 13 days

Rarity: 0.1%

Now, to be fair, while I did play GTA V throughout those six years, I didn't spend all that time trying to get the GTA V platinum. Between May 2016 and December 2020, I didn't earn a single trophy for it. So why did I suddenly make it a goal when for so long it hadn't concerned me? There was some reason I couldn't go into work for a few weeks around the end of 2020/early 2021 - who knows what it could have been? - and I needed something to pass the time. I decided to replay the story of GTA V and then realised the platinum actually seemed doable after all. One month later, I got my rarest platinum of all. Much better than the 55% I completed on the PS3 version of the game. I don't have any desire to do it again once I own a PS5.

8. Zombie Army Trilogy (PS4)

First Trophy: 25/01/2023

Platinum: 30/05/2023

Time: 4 months, 5 days

Rarity: 1.4%

The second zombie related game on the list, also at the instance of my friend Chris oddly enough. Did end up preferring it to Killing Floor 2 after some initial reluctance on my part to play it. Chris is now trying to convince me to buy Zombie Army 4 and get the platinum on that as well. He does play other genres of games, I promise.

9. WWE 2K23 (PS4)

First Trophy: 29/04/2023

Platinum: 28/06/2023

Time: 1 month, 30 days

Rarity: 0.1%

A historic platinum for me, for a couple of reasons. It marks the first time in my gaming history I've got two platinum trophies in a row. It's also the first WWE game since SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 that I've achieved the platinum for. It's going to feel odd playing it now and not having to worry about trophy hunting.

[codersguidebd]

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[atlanticcanada]

CTV Atlantic reporter to run 2023 Boston Marathon

Each spring, some of the Maritimes’ fastest and most dedicated runners take part in the Boston Marathon, and on April 17 the start line will include a face familiar to CTV Atlantic viewers.

CTV Atlantic’s Ryan MacDonald is best-known as a reporter and video-journalist based in Cape Breton.

He’s also an avid runner, and is among the nearly 30,000 competitors from around the world who are officially entered into the 2023 Boston Marathon.

The 127th edition of the race will be MacDonald’s first time participating.

"I qualified for the Boston Marathon, and that's been a dream of mine for at least 10 years,” MacDonald told his CTV Atlantic colleague Laura Brown after finishing the 2022 Fredericton Marathon in a Boston-qualifying time.

The Boston Marathon is considered by some to be the Super Bowl -- or the Stanley Cup -- of long-distance running.

However, unlike championships for professional athletes, the majority of those who run the Boston Marathon are amateurs – everyday working-class people.

Each person comes to the start line with a story, and MacDonald is no exception.

"I'm not naturally athletic. I was that proverbial last kid picked in gym class,” MacDonald said in a recent podcast hosted by friend and Cape Breton Road Runners president Herbie Sakalauskas.

MacDonald explained that growing up, he liked sports, but wasn’t particularly good at them.

He said he had moderate success as a hockey goalie, but a brief stint as the backup on his high school team was as far as the dream went.

Trying out for hockey teams often meant running a few kilometers during dryland training, which is when something happened that surprised the then-teenager.

"All these guys who (bested) me at other sports, I'm like, 'Why am I lapping them on the track? Did I finally find a sport I'm good at?'" MacDonald recalled.

By age 22 though, MacDonald said he became overweight and slipped into an unhealthy lifestyle.

"Christmas 2004, we took a family picture,” MacDonald said. “After I saw that family picture, I was horrified. And, after almost crying a little bit, I said, 'I'm doing something about this.'"

To start getting back into shape, MacDonald started simple by walking on a treadmill.

A few years later, he started going on jogs a few times a week just to stay in shape.

Eventually, he rediscovered the natural love for running he had stumbled upon in high school.

MacDonald says the next family picture looked a lot better.

He went on to run his first half marathon and then his first marathon in 2010. But the stringent qualifying times – particularly for younger men – to gain entry to the Boston Marathon seemed out of reach.

"It was unthinkable. Like, I wasn't sure if this body was physically capable of doing that,” MacDonald recalled.

Fast forward to the 2022 Fredericton Marathon, MacDonald had just turned 40-years-old, but says he was in the best shape of his life.

He felt it was time to try to qualify for Boston.

The day was a success, with a finish time of 3 hours, 1 minute -- more than enough to meet the Boston standard.

"My wife told me this morning, it was the final text I saw before I went out, she said, 'Ryan, if push comes to shove -- run based on love and gratitude.' And whenever push came to shove out on the course, that's what I did -- and that's what saw me through today,” MacDonald told CTV Atlantic after the race.

This winter, the soon-to-be 41-year-old has been training as hard as ever.

He will be among nearly a dozen Cape Bretoners, and dozens more Nova Scotians, who will toe the start line in Hopkinton, Ma., on April 17.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/LUJA7oa