Robin Sloan has a new app, Fish: a tap essay, discussing the difference between liking something on the Internet and loving something on the Internet. It's thoughtful and well done. And it's something you ought to check out if you spend a lot of time on sites like this one. One way or another, you'll have an opinion, the essay demands it, and Internet that makes you think is the best kind.
In the essay, Robin mentions the difference for him between what he likes and what he loves is if he keeps going back to it. Writing up this post, the last sentence of the first paragraph specifically, I think I might have realized for the first time that for me, the difference between a Tweet or post that I like or fave or star, or whatever, and one I love is if it makes me think. I might not ever visit that URL again, but I'll think about it later. Again and again, maybe. I love that. Since I'm simple, I sometimes also love, vs like, remarkable animal videos.
queuenoodle is a Twitter account that will tell you when movies expire from Netflix Watch Instantly so you can, uh, watch them. Brought you by Twitter's media pastamaker, Robin Sloan.
Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of "production as performance" video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term "VideoSong":
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules: 1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice). 2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Nail on the head. Although I think you can also consider something like "trust" to be stock as well, in which case you can use quality flow to build up stock.
What I love about the approach is that it's showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It's entertaining, but it's also an exercise in demystification -- which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.
