The Escapist : Zero Punctuation: Army of Two

I have so, so much bromance for Yahtzee. I took a trip to his site today to see the latest Zero Punctuation, and I found his second most recent post defending his stance as to why he hates the webcomic Control-Alt-Delete.

I’m kind of torn, I don’t want to copy/paste the entire essay but he currently offers no way to directly link to ‘just the post’ in question.

I think I would hate it if someone did this to something I wrote, without giving me lots of credit, because people are stupid, so I won’t. I’ll just point you vaguely to it right now:

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/ - specifically the post titled ‘23/3/08: You Cad‘

But read this fucking poetry:

You see, I have this theory that the internet is causing a general mediocritisation of human culture, because you can put pretty much any piece of work on the internet and no matter how hugely it sucks dolphin jizz you’ll find some dick who’s prepared to tell you it’s brilliant. This is the principle on which Deviantart appears to be founded.

OH MY GOD, IT’s SO TRUE. I’ve felt this exact thing for a very long time. My god. My take on it has always been more that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE will like what you make, if you put it online. This was the case eight years ago at least, I’d argue that it’s probably harder to find stuff online now, now that there is such a glut of content out there. Your stuff either needs to stand out or just simply be promoted effectively, but again, SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE will like your stuff. No matter how obscure, secular, or just simply bad it is, someone will like or at the very least appreciate your work. If I were to redraw the entirety of the Star Wars movies using stick figures, the site would get thousands of hits.

But the cruellest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn’t. It gives them no incentive to improve or try new things, which a creative person must always strive to do. And it tends to foster the kind of monstrous egos the webcomic sphere grows like mushrooms in the shit-spattered dark. Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del is notorious for having a zero tolerance for any criticism, constructive or otherwise, often deleting it unregarded from his forums, or declaring them invalid for half-baked reasons. It seems blanket praise has already done its damage to this fevered ego.

Again, just to be clear, I did not write this amazing poetry, I’m simply citing it and passing it along for you to understand how amazing Yahtzee is. The bolded part is the like first cardinal rule of ‘art school.’ When you go get formal art training, THE FIRST THING YOU DO IS SPEND A YEAR BEING CRITICIZED, but also learning how to critique other people. This skill is just as important as learning how to draw, because as Yahtzee so eloquently pointed out, YOU WILL NOT GROW AS AN ARTIST IF YOU ARE UNAWARE OR UNABLE TO RECOGNIZE THAT GROWTH IS NEEDED.

He goes on to speak about how exactly to form comedy, explaining simple punchline examples, and showing exactly how CAD fails in regards to these seemingly simple elements. I can quote every passage and comment but I’ll let you go and read it yourself.

haha, I am just getting frustrated because I’m starting to see things materialize in front of me; mostly things that I feel very strongly about, and seeing other people elaborate and very eloquently ’say.’ I want to share this stuff with the world but I don’t know how.