As a creator, you might feel like it’s your job to give the audience what they want. In practice, this turns out to be a complicated and fraught affair, and one you ought to think carefully about.

“If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but not really be successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.” – Steve Jobs

Where are we on this? Title is decent but maybe there’s something better… don’t be a tribute act? don’t parody yourself? minimize self-parody? beware self-parody?

what is the core advice? it’s good to know your talking points, i repeat my talking points but i don’t think i’ve become a parody of myself entirely. i’ve repeated my talking points enough that other people repeat them now. cool, that means that I’m done, I can move on to the next thing.

how is an artist to remain interesting? how do you make an album that’s good after you’ve made another, evolving your sound, so you don’t end up being a tribute act to yourself? AC/DC is cool but it’s sort of tragic that they make the same album over and over?

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Was having dinner earlier. KFC. There’s a pasar malam near my place where you can get Ramly burgers, so I got one. Nature is healing. Pasar malam literally means “night market”. It was satisfying. Ramly burgers remind me of watching The Lord Of The Rings with my friends years and years ago. (cute details but irrelevant)

I watched a couple of vids in the evening over dinner. A John Oliver video about inflation… there’s a formula to it. You know what to expect. There are these predictable setups and punchlines where you’re expected to laugh. And I’m thinking now as well about how comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle each develop a predictable voice. It becomes a kind of comfort food. You don’t expect any of these fellas to make dramatic changes in their style.

In Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson talks about the existence of genres and subgenres in movies. And we have this everywhere else too…

I’m also thinking about for example twitter accounts or youtube channels or even tiktoks that focus very hard on specializing at getting very good at delivering a very specific thing

A common pattern I’ve noticed on tiktok is that a creator does some trial and error over time experimenting with different styles of comedy, and then eventually they stumble onto something that really takes off. Like there’s this brown guy Mahmood who does a guru act. There’s also this white lady who did something like, pop songs presented as TED talks, with the clicker and intonation and everything. It’s delightful, I love them both.

“We know it’s not right, we know it’s not funny, but we’ll stop beating this dead horse when it stops spitting out money.” – Bo Burnham, Repeat Stuff (2013)

A lot of tv shows go on longer than they should. It’s probably because of the money. My understanding is that top sitcom celebrities get practically a million dollars per episode – yup, true for Friends, true for The Big Bang Theory. I’m fascinated by how contexts create superstars, which is maybe the topic for another essay.

When I scroll through Twitter or Instagram I see there are a bunch of these novelty accounts that amass tremendous followings by catering to a very hyper-specific niche, for example “memes I wish I could tag my cat in”, which is a wonderful repository of cat memes. I wonder about the people running such accounts. More sinister is “libsoftiktok”, where an account goes out of its way to seek out…

the thing that i’m always trying to do is to encourage people to raise their aspirations and care about things more lasting than a bunch of money. for the glory of valhalla, that’s what we were voyagers was about

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I don’t want to be too predictable. I want to be interesting. I want to cross genres. I realize this is tedious because it makes it difficult for people to know what they’re paying attention to. I’ve been reading a bit of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. I like how it has a bunch of different genres in it.. very cool