You know, I feel like people focus a lot on concision to the point where it becomes self-defeating. Maybe that's just because I'm a blowhard, but the way some people stress brevity above all other qualities makes me think they want a world where you ask the computer for a readout and it prints a summary like something out of Neuromancer (or, you know, Google Chatbot or whatever it's called). Sometimes you need the longform to make or refine your point. Sometimes a book is better than a pamphlet. For instance I wouldn't change a word of Shaun's videos on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On the other hand, I have watched a lot of youtube videos that clearly need an editor. That could have been just a couple minutes long instead of a half an hour. Or that might have been better as a ~500 word blog post somewhere. I haven't watched this video, and I probably won't because I feel like I'm up on the ongoing controversy that is JK Rowling, so I'm not judging its quality. And I've seen Contrapoints' stuff before, liberalism aside she does good work, if perhaps a little bit self indulgent(but she is a professional YouTuber, so I suppose that comes with the territory). So maybe every second of its one hour and fifty-five minutes is justified. Or maybe it doesn't need to justify itself because it is transformative or artistic in someway, beautiful on its own merits so what does it matter if it's not perfectly 'useful'.

I started off wanting to complain about the length of the vid (that I've no intention of watching, so good on me) and argued my way around to "actually it's great that it's two hours." But when I said that I've seen videos that needed an editor, I guess I wasn't necessarily thinking of creators like Contra, or Philosophy Tube, or Folding Ideas. Well, maybe sometimes, but they're far from the worst offenders. I guess what I was really thinking of are those videos that are like "3 hour retrospective on Mass Effect Andromeda 5 years later", or an hour long video that's basically just the phrase "The Witcher 3 is really good" over and over, or a lot of the amateur film video essays (and sometimes even the not so amateur ones), which just don't seem to have a lot to offer, critically. Then again, they seem to find an audience. Hell, maybe I'm just cranky.