"Boom" - Irony Capitol (updated repost)

A while back I posted this critique of a presentation, and even commented my concerns on the related YouTube thread, which in turn inspired a couple tiresome fallacies by way of side-stepping my point. I had a knee-jerk reaction, yanking my comments (leaving some mysterious one-sided rebuttals on that thread), and temporarily pulled this particular post, which afterward bugged me to no end. 

Classic xkcd

Chalk it up to an object lesson about petty bitching from the sidelines, but that's one of the hallmarks of being an editorial cartoonist. I really should stop and just stick with dam beavers. 

Unfortunately this blog is way too small to show up in the Wayback Machine, but the cached version was still around to cut & paste in an updated, edited version. So not only do I still stand by my original observation, after some reflection on the speaker's spell of creative woo, I think someone paying six-thousand dollars to attend this conference should be critical about the material, which in this particular case is basically a recounting of other people's efforts. Nothing wrong with that - aside from the climax of the gig. 

Via Boing Boing comes another inspirational presentation given at TEDxMaastricht: motivational speaker Ted Hurson's "The Shock of the Possible" is a good kick in the ass which reinforces a key tenet of creative thinking. I've posted here before some examples in in/congruity and other methods of gag-writing: add this to the toolbox.

Unfortunately his message is somewhat undermined by failing to credit the unattributed cartoon he uses as arguably the presentation's capstone image. Which is curious after going to such great lengths to document and acknowledge the many other examples he cites.

If one's entire business model is predicated upon raising "intellectual capitol" it might pay to invest instead in some prudent and basic research: hell, a 2-second Google search of the key caption phrase "Now Here's My Plan" would yield some "unexpected connections." Namely that of the cartoonist Shel Silverstein. 

It's a pet peeve of mine to see the work of creators slighted like that - especially if the skill and unique talent of an artist is used to conceptually sum up and highlight an entire message. But this unfortunately happens a lot, especially with cartoons, which are comparatively devalued against such obviously Important Business People who are paid lots of money to sell "their" Big Ideas. Hopefully it'll be remedied in the future.