RetCon Artists: Improving the Future by Improving the Past
March 17, 2011 1:46 PM Subscribe
RetCon Artists: Improving the Future by Improving the Past
Website for the tactical revisionism consulting firm I made up for a recent comedy presentation thing at SXSW. Be sure to take a look at the PDF presentation for more detail, or watch a recorded slideshow + audio presentation on youtube.
The story is that Waxy really generously invited me to come be one of the presenters at the Worst Website Ever II panel he put together for SXSW this year, a sequel to the original which he organized three or so years ago. The idea was to come up with a bad idea—whether it was "so bad its good" or "so bad it's actually bad" or "so bad it's a metacommentary on the idea of badness" was pretty much up to the individual presenter to decide, and we had a fun variety of approaches.
I went with "so bad it's sort of disturbingly plausible" for mine and presented it pretty straight-faced: the presentation text was sort of wryly, dryly evil and technical, with a lot of the comedy in the incidental details of the slide graphics and text. Lots of delayed laughs during the actual presentation as people caught up with what was on the slides. The PDF contains my presentation notes pretty much verbatim if you want a sense of what I did on stage, and walks through a couple of specific bad but in theory practicable ideas; the video is a recording I made at home this afternoon.
The website was an excuse to take more of a long view of the bad idea, and to use some of the jokes I had to ditch from my initial presentation notes in order to get my pitch down to five minutes. I liked the idea of having this be out there in case anybody noticed the url during my talk and decided to plug it in.
Website for the tactical revisionism consulting firm I made up for a recent comedy presentation thing at SXSW. Be sure to take a look at the PDF presentation for more detail, or watch a recorded slideshow + audio presentation on youtube.
The story is that Waxy really generously invited me to come be one of the presenters at the Worst Website Ever II panel he put together for SXSW this year, a sequel to the original which he organized three or so years ago. The idea was to come up with a bad idea—whether it was "so bad its good" or "so bad it's actually bad" or "so bad it's a metacommentary on the idea of badness" was pretty much up to the individual presenter to decide, and we had a fun variety of approaches.
I went with "so bad it's sort of disturbingly plausible" for mine and presented it pretty straight-faced: the presentation text was sort of wryly, dryly evil and technical, with a lot of the comedy in the incidental details of the slide graphics and text. Lots of delayed laughs during the actual presentation as people caught up with what was on the slides. The PDF contains my presentation notes pretty much verbatim if you want a sense of what I did on stage, and walks through a couple of specific bad but in theory practicable ideas; the video is a recording I made at home this afternoon.
The website was an excuse to take more of a long view of the bad idea, and to use some of the jokes I had to ditch from my initial presentation notes in order to get my pitch down to five minutes. I liked the idea of having this be out there in case anybody noticed the url during my talk and decided to plug it in.
This project was posted to MetaFilter by oneswellfoop on March 17, 2011: RCA, that's the company that used to make phonographs... uh, yeah, sure
Love that you actually built this.
posted by waxpancake at 11:27 PM on March 17, 2011
posted by waxpancake at 11:27 PM on March 17, 2011
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posted by kenko at 3:43 PM on March 17, 2011