I have not updated recently on the grounds that there has been nothing to update about. I have not finished any novels, published any novels, or really done anything that would merit a mention on this blog.
This is not to say I have not been busy. I have been very busy. Mired in things to do, I have been wading through them like some poor fisherman in a swamp. But they are all serial projects: I work and work on them, day after day, and for now I can show nothing.
This monotony of creative work (now there’s a paradox in language!) is a tiring experience, I find. And sometimes I will have what I like to call a catastrophic motivation failure. These do not happen frequently, but when they do it is usually a sign that I have so buried myself in work that I have forgotten to come up for air, and I have to do the metaphorical equivalent of lying on shore, panting, for a day or so.
Sometimes I play videogames. Sometimes I read novels. TV shows are also a good way to let myself unwind. Unfailingly my choice in procrastination will take the form of imbibing someone else’s creative work. I want to see images I did not paint; read words I did not write.
I bring this all up because this is what happened last week. At about this time last Monday, in fact, I was descending into a stupor of entertainment consumption that would culminate in my buying, on a whim, the entire first season of Dexter.
Dexter is a ShowTime series about a serial killer who kills other serial killers. Kind of like Sweeney Todd without the singing and the poetic ending. That is not important. What I wanted to write about here is how I came to buy the entire first season on iTunes.
I don’t usually buy TV shows on iTunes. I prefer getting the DVDs from Netflix. The only other complete series I have on iTunes is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (a show, incidentally, I think the character of Dexter could learn a thing or two from). But I went out and purchased the entire first season of Dexter, and the first episode of season 2, before I remembered about my Netflix account, and decided to utilize their 3 at a time rental limit to stagger my entertainment consumption rate.
Now why did I do that?
Well, I did it because I like the show. I could tell I liked the show after watching the first episode. But I could not tell I would like the show before I watched that first episode. I certainly did not care enough to buy it. No, I scoured YouTube until I found the one video that actually contained the first episode of Dexter. One I am sure has since been discovered and taken down. Too late: I watched it, I liked what I saw… so then I went and, as I have been saying all along: I bought the entire first season on iTunes.
Funny how these things happen, huh?
Renowned magicians Penn & Teller (who have their own series on ShowTime), have often said that their show has benefited greatly from pirated videos uploaded to YouTube. ShowTime doesn’t like it, and tries to take the videos down, but as far as they can tell it just helps them sell tickets and raise viewership of their series.
I don’t think that people should be given a free reign to repost works to which they do not own the copyright or did not get permission, but the kind of puritanical purging that is perpetrated by some companies can, I feel, only do more harm than good.
Anyway, I’m sure as hell glad that one user ripped an episode of Dexter and put it up, otherwise I probably would never have watched the series at all. And it’s a damn fine show. Not perfect, but very fine.
Perhaps next week I’ll blog about it.
—Goldeen
