I picked Randy Pausch’s talk for one reason and it’s that he’s not Steve Jobs. I owe nothing more.
I also knew I wasn’t going to watch all 76 minutes of his lecture. Come on. So, in the spirit of spontaneously and impulsively jumping into stuff, I clicked around and just went with random timecodes. Here’s what he said during those random timecodes, and what I think of them. (Edit: let the record show the timecodes shown are the relevant passages, not necessarily where I clicked. honesty babyyyy)
No, I am not going to write too many normal blog posts if I can help it. Having a unique voice is an integral step to making it in anything involving art, or so it should be.
5:07 – Randy talks about “being in zero gravity” being one of his childhood goals, but not “being an astronaut”. It’s important to narrow down more lofty goals to the parts of it that actually interest you. For example, I like the idea of Hello Whirled being signed to a label like Joyful Noise or something, but when I think about it further, it’s not the actual “being on a label” that I’m interested in. I’m more interested in the label’s services, like booking and promotion that I’m utterly useless at on my own. With this in mind, I can set my sights on what truly matters to me, and with less room to be disappointed if things don’t work out.
23:20 – Randy talks about meeting Jon Snoddy. I don’t know or particularly care who Jon is, but I was thinking about Randy quoting Jon, saying “When you’re pissed at somebody and you’re angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time.” Gonna be honest, I don’t know that I agree with this. Maybe it’s my argumentative nature, but I believe there’s such a thing as being wrong. I wish I had something more interesting to say about this passage, but I have to stick to the guidelines I set at the beginning or this will never get done.
37:37 – I was greeted to a talking rabbit saying “Make me a world”, then a person with a VR headset moving their hands up as the rabbit giggles and says “Yay!” and “Make me some trees” and other serial killer stuff. When the world was fully made, it became the creepiest animation I’ve ever seen. My heart goes out to whoever wore that headset. Ignoring the terrifying nature of the content, it’s always just really neat to see things well before their completion. In this case, that thing is VR. Right now, it’s just entering a point where it could be mainstream some day, but it still has a long way to go before that point. Here, it’s far removed from anything remotely commercial. That said, the fact that it worked at all shows that there was reason to stay interested in the project, because something was clearly there. Take these two recordings, for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gASoSPSFyeU Wire – “Ignorance No Plea” (late 1978, early 1979 demo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TZbOz1Pz5o Wire – “I Should Have Known Better” (1979 studio recording)
Now, I shouldn’t have to tell you which song is functionally better, but in case you’re wrong, I’ll tell you it’s the second one. The rhythm suits the song better, and brings out a menacing side to it that just isn’t apparent in the first version. But…the song is still all there in the first version. The arrangement’s different, but every piece is in place.
58:50 – Randy talks about a professor of his, Andy Van Dam, indirectly telling him he was too arrogant for a lot of people to handle, and it was going to screw him over in the long run. That’s a good way to view things. If you can observe how other people perceive you over your own perception of yourself, you can either rest easy a little bit because people like you even if you don’t, or you know why people don’t like you and you can work towards improving on those so that one day people will like you. I hope that makes sense. I’d love it if it did.
I think there’s enough here to work with. Let’s call it done.
