

There is a certain inevitability to life. - winter_blue
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2007/02/020507.html

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unalone
Ze Frank is one of those few and fascinating people online who's able to
combine a plethora of interests and create work that's both memorable and
touching. He's got the same melancholy whimsy that _why the lucky stiff did.

Dunno why Ze Frank became vogue today on Hacker News, but I do not at all
disapprove.

~~~
mattmaroon
Really? I just find it cheesy and over-produced but in a low budget sort of
way. The constant camera cuts for no reason are nearly seizure-inducing. The
attempt to be sardonic fails lamely.

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_pius
As far as I can tell, _the show_ rarely if ever attempted to be sardonic, but
_did_ in fact attempt to be nearly seizure-inducing.

Like or dislike, that trippy feeling you get while watching isn't by accident,
it's by design.

~~~
mattmaroon
sportsracers?

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unalone
That's a term he uses right from the beginning, no explanation given. The
mystery of what a sports racer was is one of the things he used to build
together a community. The speed at which his site grew in that week is
remarkable, and the code words he used was a big part of it. If anything, it's
the opposite of sardonic. It's childish (but in a good way).

~~~
mattmaroon
I guess I found it sardonic because the intended audience is most definitely
not sportsracers. It's sort of like the high school star linebacker calling
the 100lb nerd "big guy".

~~~
unalone
It's more whimsical than sardonic. It's too absurd to be taken seriously.

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timr
Ze Frank is great, but I hope we're not going to see the submission of each
individual day of the Show as a story.

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warwick
Though I don't think every show is relevant to HN, I don't see any problem
with submitting individual videos. Compared to some of the blog posts we see,
Ze Frank videos are full of content.

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10ren
Thinking you created the wave is similar to confusing your own efforts with...
luck. I've been reviewing the early days of my business, and tremendous luck
was involved. Sure, I was _there_ , and did the work, but a big part of it was
the wave. I'm not sure that I could do it again, without finding another such
wave... so I guess I have to become a surfer, and study the waves... problem
is, I'm not much interested in that...

And then he pokes fun at web 2.0 (e.g. copying names like flickr, del.icio.us
and 37signals). I'm sure you already got all that - I mainly wrote this for
the people complaining about it.

I think ze frank would be great at startup school.

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nfnaaron
"I've been reviewing the early days of my business, and tremendous luck was
involved. Sure, I was there, and did the work, but a big part of it was the
wave."

Without the luck, the hard work would have had less effect, but without the
hard work the luck would have had no effect. So, it was the hard work. Some of
that work was recognizing the world that luck presented to you: studying the
waves.

~~~
10ren
That's true, and it implies an interesting algebra of causation. Thanks for
both!

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nfnaaron
I've never seen Ze Frank before today. When I first followed the link, I saw a
site with almost nothing, and a video with no obvious reason to watch. So I
didn't watch.

Then I noticed that this post was attracting a fair number of comments. After
reading most of the comments I decided there was probably something in the
video worth seeing, so I watched it.

It turned out to be well worth it, for entertainment and insight.

The comments also made me look up the word 'sardonic.' Even at this late date,
there are mysterious gaps in my vocabulary.

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thras
I sat next to a girl on the airplane the other day who works with autistic
children. She told me that the strange thing is that many of these children
are good with computers and frighteningly addicted to YouTube. Apparently
there is an entire community of autistic people making videos for other
autistic people. The autistic viewers will watch the same minutes of autistic-
produced video again and again thousands of times. They do things like read
the contents of movie jackets on film, zooming in on each photo one by one.
And out there in YouTube-land is an audience for it, obsessed.

I thought of this while I struggled to figure out why the Zefrank video was at
the top on Hacker News this evening.

~~~
brown9-2
What are the autistic-community videos of?

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Tichy
He described it - an example is reading captions on the jackets of movie DVDs.

