Some musing of note from a boat blog, golf as an exercise in hypocrisy, and some interesting telescope stuff...
The other day I read somewhere how awful the whole doing videos about your cruising experiences and expecting people to support you by begging is the new thing and how it will destroy cruising as we know it.
Sigh...
Yesterday, I read somewhere else a fawning article about how awesome the ten best (spelled highest income producing) vlogs were.
Double sigh... I so hate film, video, and book reviews that think how much something earns has anything to do with its quality...
Personally my opinion of the whole idea of filming or writing about your cruising and getting paid for the resulting product is no bad thing. The list of cruisers who have written for magazines, written books, and even made films of their adventures is a very long list and I don't recall anyone taking issue with any of those folks. Face it, it's an already established means of supporting cruising and all the newbies are doing is taking advantage on new forms of financing and distribution.
That said, I'll defer to the great Theodore Sturgeon for a needful fact/rule...
"I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms."
Which boils down to Sturgeon's Law of 90% of everything is crap. Just between us I've always thought that Theodore was just a bit too optimistic.
Anyway... Regarding the new flood of viewer sponsored video production of the cruising variety, it is safe to say that Sturgeon's Law is in no danger of being found untrue and I don't find that problematic at all. There is a lot of good valid stuff in that non-crap (no-selfie-stick-in-sight) 10% that is well worth viewing. A few years from now, providing we have not succumbed to thermo-nuclear annihilation because tRump was pissed off at someone or other, we'll accept the current video cruising model as the norm.
Of course, 90% of it will be crap, but the 10% will continue to get better and better so what's the problem?
Listening to Rotana
So it goes...
