#I'm no kevin perjurer

[vimbry]

gary I need to hear the looney tunes stage show where mel blanc had a song that went "my friends all call me twerp, but antwerp is my name" that no one probably filmed bc it was 1978

[defender-of-jouvente]

alright, you asked for it...here comes as many cat facts as I can fit in this one ask!

1, kittens are born blind and deaf, around one week of age, the eyes and ears will slowly open up. 2. the mother cat has colostrum in her milk, to aid in the development of her kits 3. female cats can gt pregnant at as young as six months. 4. spaying and neutering cats is important, support TNR; trap neuter return! 5. at two weeks of age, kittens can practice walking! 6. at 3 weeks of age, teeth will come in. but they aren't for eating meat yet, they're for grooming. 7. at four weeks, kittens can try solid food. 8. cats are crepuscular, more active during the dawn and dusk hours. 9. kittens sleep a lot because their growth hormones are released during rest. 10. kittens twitch in their sleep because it's the brain firing off neurons. these twitches are signs that the body is learning about itself.

Heheheheheheheheheeeee....... Kittens..........

[alphaori]

kevin perjurer of defunctland is so archivist coded it's insane, the only reason he didn't get scouted by elias is because he's american

[citssys]

ID: Screenshot from a YouTube video - "Part six. I paid an industrial engineer to create a complex computer simulation of a theme park populated with agents, all with unique preferences, riding attractiona of varying capacities in order to compare and contrast wait times, number of rides ridden, and other factors with and without a virtual queue system." [End desc]

The channel is Defunctland, for anyone wondering, and it's one of our favourite channels on YouTube.

No YouTuber will ever top the phrase "A powerful rat named Charles Entertainment Cheese."

[bumpscosity]

you guys there's a new defunctland video and it goes hard

[queseraphita]

Sports fans are the worst type of customer

[emlemony]

Watched the new Defunctland doc in one go and now I'm regretting not splitting it up and savouring it. Twas truly a work of art, and sure I can watch it again but it's just not going to hit the same.

[michiruze]

Still thinking about the new Defunctland video and I am happy that this time, Defunctland managed to UNITE Latin Americans, Southeast Asians, AND older Americans through ONE video.

The Kid City video felt like Defunctland saw that some of his non-US audiences noticed that his content, while amazing, are very US-centric (though not his fault), and decided to cover a theme park trend that came from outside of the US (and is big outside of the US) this time.

I know that it's probably coincidental. He probably intended the new video to be ABOUT the American theme park chain Wannado but during his research, discovered that the concept of Wannado originated in Mexico and through that, found out about La Ciudad De Los Niños (part of the origin story of Wannado -- which came from Mexico, and is big in Latin America) and Kidzania (which took off in Asia), then....well, the video now is about something that non-US audiences can reminisce for once!

That's MAGIC and now i feel glad that now I can follow Tumblr's Defunctland reaction posts without feeling left out for not being American, for once.

It's also interesting how some Southeast Asians latched onto discussions about La Ciudad De Los Niños with Latin Americans in the wake of this video too. Truly, Kevin Perjurer has ignited a small Latin American-Southeast Asian solidarity moment.

On a more humorous note I see a number of Americans going "wait we do not have this in the US" (since Wannado closed in 2011) and I'm here like "THE TABLES HAVE TURNED, AMERICANS. WE SOUTHEAST ASIANS CAN HAVE OUR DEFUNCTLAND MOMENT NOW"

[ghost-orion]

imagine any defunctland doc with a navy blue anime guy in the corner, clearly drawn by a fan like 5 years ago. with white hair

kevin perjurer should have a rantsona

[seasonofprophecy]

With how personal the video got and how inherently personal the relationship is between the art and the artist And how capitalism (competition over unity, commodification, basing your worth as a person on your work, etc) has molded young artists, I'm not going to condemn the people who come away from the newest video with sentiments along the lines of "I can't believe corporations would exercise improper crediting and that I and my work are going to be forgotten also no that wasn't a YouTube video that was high art documentation" because that's a valid response but to me (to me) [to me] that's not The Point of the video.

Alex Lasarenko said "No. No regrets." No. No regrets. No!!! No regrets!!!

Did Kevin Perjurer end the video by saying "You know what? This is a documentary actually"? Did any of the people that Kevin interview started off their clip with saying "Yes I did this and this and this 😏"? Did Lisa Lasarenko refuse to interview a man who would nail her late brother's legacy as "that guy who did the Disney Channel four note jingle"? NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BASHING YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH A MALLET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your art has value no matter what you make no matter what you're remembered for (if at all) and any work that you have passion for that you are willing to dedicate time out of your fleeting life on is work that you should value as it is and as it will be and as You are!!! Do not regret doing something you love.

[rabbiteclair]

i'm glad that Kevin Perjurer appreciates the inherently funny nature of the phrase 'toot toot chugga chugga big red car'

[radwolf76]

I know I'm a few days late for Halloween, but here's a video with some important implications for the Skeleton War

So, we've all seen this gif. It turns out, there's much misinformation about the origins of it. In the same vein as Kevin Perjurer's deep dive into the Disney Channel Jingle, or hbomberguy's exposé on the Roblox OOF, another intrepid YouTube researcher has done the legwork and found the real story.

[embyrinitalics]

What a Surprisingly Thoughtful Defunctland Documentary Taught Me about Writing Fanfic

In case you weren't aware, Defunctland (Kevin Perjurer) is an artist and documentarian whose delightful films cover the strange histories of theme parks and themed entertainment (my favorite is the FastPass+ retrospective). I just finished watching one of his videos, and I found the conclusion so inspiring that I wanted to jot down some impressions.

I didn't think a documentary about trying to track down the composer of the Disney Channel theme song would lead me on a deep dive into artistic identity and legacy, but here we are.

So without spoiling the ending, the film concludes in part with various artists (and even the filmmaker himself) introspectively discussing the complicated relationship between an artist, what he creates, and the legacy he want to leave behind.

Usually an artist hopes to be remembered for something meaningful and lasting, something "serious," probably the culmination of years of labor that they would consider to be their best work. For a composer, they might imagine a grand piece played in a concert hall, or something similarly complex. Almost certainly not a four note jingle played between commercial breaks.

Kevin himself admitted to having difficulties reconciling his love for his work and the films he creates with his disappointment with his outward facing identity: a YouTuber and Content Creator, who gets called pretentious for trying to identify himself as an artist, filmmaker, and documentarian.

Part of what's put forward in the film is that maybe we need to stop obsessing over how grandiose or serious the work we're remembered for is, which is really a thing of ego and largely outside our control. Maybe what we need is some humility, and to learn that what's important isn't how fantastical the work was, but the amount of joy it brought to people.

It got me thinking about being a fanfic writer. I've never had anyone call me pretentious for claiming I'm an artist, but I've felt like I am. And I have had people tell me that I'm "wasting my talent" writing fanfic and that I should eventually outgrow this hobby and do real writing. It's made me timid to tell my friends that I write, and made the pride I feel when I finish a piece a tad tarnished.

But if I step back from the notion that the value of a piece of art is determined by predefined measurable parameters, instead of by the passion, talent, and love and dedication of the craft poured into it by its maker and the joy it sparked in others, maybe I'd stop pooh-poohing the stuff I make—THE FANFIC I WRITE (louder for the people in the back!)—and treat it like the lovingly-crafted, handmade, one of a kind, fresh-squeezed out of my brain SPARKLY WORK OF ART THAT IT IS.

And the same goes for you! So, uh, yep! That's it. That's the post.

Mmkay bye!

[weaselandfriends]

Web Original, Recently Witnessed

In a previous post, I mentioned some web fiction I'd recently read. This time, I'll highlight some web original content outside of the literary sphere. While I have some experience with literature, I'm completely untalented in other mediums, so my assessment of this content is no better than a layman's. However, I still thought it worth highlighting.

1. Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History by Kevin Perjurer (Defunctland)

Perjurer has been putting out excellent documentary-style content on theme parks and their rides for years now, but while his production quality is consistently high, his videos often live or die based on the core level of interest his subject engenders. For instance, his video on notoriously awful ride Superstar Limo (with a general focus on notoriously awful theme park California Adventure) is an incredible watch, while his video on a random assortment of small, local Santa Claus theme parks across America isn't quite so compelling. He's no Jon Bois (of 17776 fame), a documentarian capable of rendering extraordinary seemingly the most banal of subjects.

Journey to EPCOT Center, however, is unlike anything Perjurer has ever put out before. It completely eschews Perjurer's typical voiceover narration style of documentary, instead stitching together music, audio of news reports and press releases, and dramatizations of Disney boardroom meetings to create a seamless narrative. Beyond the unique style and presentation of the piece, however, is the incredible artistry on display in several of the segments. Some of the biggest highlights:

12:00 to 16:14: A neon light animation detailing the vision and plan of EPCOT, which gradually transforms into a 3D map that the camera travels through

16:52 to 21:03: An impressively animated series of newspaper articles detailing Disney's struggles finding signatories for its world showcase; the video comments indicate some shots of the moving newspapers were created practically, with Lego conveyer belts

38:46 to 44:27: A puppet show dramatizing Disney's efforts to seek international sponsors

There are numerous other impressive, inventive, and creative segments as well, with unique animation and visual styles. The video rarely repeats the same trick twice.

The funniest part is that all of this is in service to a topic I would personally consider quite boring. EPCOT is such a Disney-buffs-only type of subject, neither Disney's greatest success nor its greatest failure. The incredible skill on display is all aimed toward depicting a fairly corporate, backroom-style story about men in suits trying to secure handshakes. There's an almost propagandistic feel to it, an extolling of capitalist bigwigs that feels completely at odds with Perjurer's visionary style.

In a way, it's reminiscent of United Passions, a FIFA propaganda film meant to make its executives look good in the wake of real-life controversy. On the other hand, though, Perjurer's exceedingly loving depiction is appropriate for Walt Disney's final passion project, Disney himself being a man who, for better or for worse, was as much of a dreamer and visionary as he was a cutthroat businessman. EPCOT, as the video tells you, was designed as an optimistic reaffirmation of the American free enterprise project, and as a complement to that vision Perjurer's video could not be more accurate. Unlike United Passions, this video was also made independently, not financed by Disney to make itself look good in the eyes of the public. Metatextually, it poses a fascinating question: Is there value to corporate art? Can a corporation create something of true beauty? Perjurer's video suggests it can.

2. The Mind Electric Animation - Lonely-Man's Lazarus by Daisy

Perjurer is probably familiar to many of my readers, so this next entry is more obscure, something I stumbled on almost by chance.

A friend of mine is big into animatics, which as far as YouTube is concerned is about setting music (usually Broadway or Disney musical numbers) to sketchy, storyboard-style art. I'm not a major Broadway fan in general, so these have never appealed to me much, although I've been shown several.

This one, though, rather generically titled "The Mind Electric Animation" (after the song it features), caught me entirely off guard. The first notable element is that the animation is monstrously more fluid than a typical animatic, though it retains the sketchy/storyboard art style and traditional animatic sensibilities toward character design (very "Tumblr," if I had to put a word on it). Secondly, the music, rather than being from Hamilton or Heathers or some other popular musical, is from the itself rather arcane album Hawaii: Part II by Joe Hawley (under the name ミラクルミュージカル). Hawaii: Part II is, as far as I can tell, a concept album detailing the story of a man who goes insane after his girlfriend is murdered (possibly by himself), with a strange secondary subtext of possibly being metaphorical for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The lyrics are certainly open to interpretation.

The animatic combines these elements with heavy inspiration from a different concept album, potentially the most famous one ever made: Pink Floyd's The Wall, with specific nods to the film adaptation's animations for The Trial and Empty Spaces. There is no skimping on detail, with some sequences absolutely bursting with bizarre visuals. The ultimate result is absolutely trippy, abstract, and surreal, which are some of my favorite things for something to be.

Regardless, it's an impressive work of animation for a single person to make; the video description states it took 15 months, which is more time than I've spent on any one of even my longest works. The creator themselves is somewhat enigmatic from what I could tell, despite having a whole host of social media platforms. They seem to be working on a web comic, but trying to find any concrete information on what it is actually about was difficult. Nonetheless, whoever made this certainly has an abundance of creative vision and talent. Though I've seen skilled artists sit down to create something narrative before and flub it utterly (an example that comes to mind is Ava's Demon), so who knows if what is on display in this animation will make it into that web comic. Even if it doesn't, the animation by itself is incredible, so check it out.

3. The Skibidi Toilet podcast guys are for real by Mikhail Klimentov / Built By Gamers in general

Built By Gamers has been on my radar for some time (ever since seeing this video) as an absolute masterclass of performance art. The voice, the emphasis, the little oddities here and there, the way the two hosts so often ignore direct questions posed by one another, it creates something inimitably uncanny. This interview by Mikhail Klimentov, who I am familiar with primarily through his esports journalism, only adds new layers to what was already a convoluted question of irony and sincerity.

There are a few concrete insights, most shockingly to me that the creators of Built By Gamers (Todd Searle and Peter Armendariz) got their start in esports. But despite the title that seems to clearly suggest their videos are sincere, the actual interview is far less conclusive. For instance, this exchange:

It's evident to me that you guys take this very seriously. You feel as though there's a lot of craft behind these videos. Tell me about the stuff that a viewer won't see: the behind-the-scenes stuff that you're thinking about as you're working on these videos. Armendariz: A lot of people think it's ChatGPT. That's a big thing that people think that we do. But a lot of it is actually well crafted, through hours — like we'll spend hours on one script and really thinking about how we can get someone to react. It doesn't matter if it's them laughing, if it's them feeling sad, or them hating on one of us, our main goal in our videos is to get someone to feel something. The hard truth is that people don't realize how many hours we spend on one video to get that one line. I think that's what people don't really understand. We’ll spend like two hours on one line. Searle: Our tone, like how we talk — it’s on purpose. I have to get into character for it. Armendariz: Todd has a voice, bro! He didn't think he'd be good at telling stories, and I have him tell every single story because he has this campfire story voice. And sometimes he'll hit a line and I'm like, “No, no, you’ve got to hit it harder.” And we'll spend like 30 minutes trying to hit the line, or hitting the hook just the right way.

Followed immediately by:

People really don't know what to make of you guys. They don't have a sense of whether you're serious, whether you're in on the joke, whether there's a joke at all. I'm curious if you can clear that up. Searle: We want it to be everything you just said. We want people to think we're serious. We want camps of people who don't think we're serious. People who think that we're A.I. We kind of want to keep it, I guess, vague in that regard. Like we want you to believe… what we are — and that's OK. Armendariz: I think sometimes we'll play into different communities. So, like, some people will say, ‘You guys sound like you got brain surgery.’ So then we’ll make the most cringey video that's like super brain-rot, you know? We just kind of mess around and have fun.

So are they just messing around and having fun, or are they spending hours trying to nail specific lines just right? Are they sincerely trying to tell a story that gets an emotional reaction or are they just trolling, which also gets an emotional reaction? The biggest troll of the interview, targeted specifically at me, was this response:

Can you tell me what those writing principles are? Armendariz: I think a big writing principle that everyone should follow is, it's really important to show, don't tell.

People who have talked to me elsewhere know I am a massive enthusiast of the ubiquitous Mr. Beast, not necessarily because I like his content (though I do think he puts together some strong game show/Wipeout-style videos), but because of the story behind him: That he is an extreme, almost insufferable perfectionist, who analyzes video success and failure to a scientific degree, doing experiments with thumbnails, video lengths, et cetera, all to take detailed assessments of the results and perfectly calibrate his videos in mathematical fashion. It's a type of rigor that flies in the face of the casual, wastefully generous persona he cultivates in his videos proper.

I think many people have this innate idea that a work of art's quality is somehow tied to the effort expended to produce it. (Even I have it. Notice how for both of the first two entries in this post I mention the effort or time or craftsmanship of the work in question.) This is the kind of sensibility that causes a layman, who knows nothing about painting, to prefer a Caravaggio to a Rothko. But this sensibility is both conceptually and often practically wrong; Rothko, for instance, engineered his own paints, creating custom blends of materials (including non-paint material, like egg) to form paints of a perfectly specific color or gloss or sheen, a process often completely unseen by a casual glance at the finished work.

Subsequently, there's a reason they're called writer's workshops, that writing is so often described as a craft: It's an attempt to imbue writing with a sense of effort that makes it more palatable. The stereotype extends to the artist who sneers at quote-unquote "low" art, thinking "If I was willing to lower myself, I could create that slop and make millions too." In my experience, though, the people creating this "low" art are often expending absurd amounts of effort and exhibiting incredible skill to create something perfectly engineered for success. I, certainly, have found zero success in attempting to broaden my own audience, even when I make attempts at it; it's not something that's easier to do if you're just willing to try.

I also increasingly fail to believe in the stereotype of the miserable cynic artist who creates something they think is garbage because they know that'll be most popular. Those people don't last long; those who succeed in the popular sphere are people who are genuinely passionate about what they create, even if it looks like dreck to everyone else (including the millions who consume it).

I've been kicking around an idea for a story about Mr. Beast for some time now, exploring these concepts in even greater depth. That won't happen in the immediate future, but it's something to look out for.

[olliedollie1204]

i'm going to cry. kevin perjurer has earnestly made me cry at the end of this documentary

[ilajue]

FUCK YOU Kevin perjur for making me cry over the Disney theme song you deserve jail time for this idk how I'm going to recover