There's the old saw that "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Yesterday I was assessing what I'm going to do with the InSum series in future editions. The thing about e-books is that you can continue with them indefinitely, but should we? Should there be limits on content? Now that we can generate content with AI ad nauseam the sky's the limit. But we can't consume that much information without some kind of framework. That's one of the ideas behind serializing the diaries into months and days. It's easy to create within that structure.
When I create new content it's usually through YouTube video transcripts that I use as raw material for the diaries. (This piece of writing is from a video transcript). You can generate a lot of text from voice and I think a lot of people are doing that these days. [Eventually, content gets "sequeled" and "prequeled" out. Serial thinking makes the sky the limit, and that's a good limit, instead of the universe being the limit.
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Many of the books are now in their second and third editions. The third editions will not have any images in them as I decided that I would create a separate blog for them. This is the better option rather than the very small images in the books. Amazon charges a download fee to the author, so I had to optimize them accordingly, resulting in tiny images with no zoom.
The other change I might be making in the future is that I will stop making e-books and just publish a print version of all the books. The downside of that is that they get too large. The original first edition of all the books was about 215 pages. The initial plan was to keep them at 215 pages but that was back in 2021 and there's been a considerable amount of new content. New essays and riffs that I've done are probably going to double the size. Do I want 12 400-page books? One of the advantages of e-books is that they eliminate bulk in long open-ended serial texts. On Dynaxiom 2777: "Visual art is like music with different durations depending on how long you look at it." Most art is looked at for under 30 seconds but can be as long as a lifetime if you look at it daily." For example, if you're at a museum and standing in front of a painting, you look at it for a couple of seconds, look at the caption card, look back at the painting--all in about 15-20 seconds. It's interesting to correlate that with music: when you stood in front of a painting sound would play using hypersonic speakers placed directly above the painting. Hypersonic speakers are very directional such that when you stand under them you hear sound and then when you step out of the zone you no longer hear sound. When we look at a painting we're "looking" at music. It's a synesthetic experience even if you're not a synesthete. If you correlate those two things, both paintings and visual art can have a duration. But art only has a duration for as long as you're looking at it. Music has fixed durations when you’re listening to it--three minutes or five minutes– but it also has a lingering duration in your head because you can hear music not in its entirety, but parts of it. Take for example Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond which is about 6-8 minutes. Everyone can hear that in their head: they might hear the intro guitar motif, they might hear some of the verses and choruses, or just the chorus but not the piece in its entirety. Perhaps some people can in their heads from start to finish, but it won't be accurate and they won't be able to prove that they listened to it. When we listen to music together we understand time consensually. The other thing that's interesting about art is the duration it takes to create it. Some art can take perhaps a day some take months some takes take years. When you look at the painting you can sort of say, "Well that took a long time". But you're only standing in front of it for 15 seconds and you're only "hearing" that painting for 15 seconds. But like an earworm, you can remember what the painting looked like, but like Shine On You Crazy Diamond, you can’t play it in your head from start to finish. Perhaps you can remember the painting if you read about it in an article and you remember being at the Museum looking it, or standing next to it. Similarly, in music, people can talk about it which makes the music play in your head. So there's an interesting correlation between the duration of music and the duration of art. 11/30/2022 Excerpt from the November diary, Some November |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
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