I have seen the interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. She is shockingly poor on the uptick. She does not seem to have the faintest grasp of any of the issues; often, what you hear her say seems to be the verbalization of her confused inner thoughts, created extemporaneously. Both Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson would make better Vice-Presidents than she.

Tina Fey, when she impersonates Sarah Palin, has to make a real effort to come across as as lost and clueless as Sarah Palin, and yet she fails, because she cannot exude the same panicked sense of a person utterly out of her depth that Sarah emotes.

Sarah Palin is not intelligent enough to be the Vice-President, and I sincerely hope she does not get the chance to prove me right.

Now I've come across another video essay on sex in videogames that uses the same format, and acknowledges it does so at the end of itself.

One example is an innovator.

Two is a genre.

So, I'm gonna' be the first to go on record and call this the New New Essay for the internet age. This new essay features several telling characteristics:

1. The video is used to support the text. As opposed to a podcast or a video recording of a speech being presented, there is a clear interplay between the text of the essay and the images, whether they serve to reinforce or act as a counterpoint to the text.
2. The pace is very quick. Instead of the normal, belabored delivery of a typical essay, these essays are delivered as quickly as the person can speak in stand-up comedy style.
3. The information density is incredibly high. When compared to a short blog entry such as this, which takes maybe twice as long to create as it does to consume, a video essay take's it's author several hours at a minimum to put together (though Yahtzee apparently takes days), which translates to a heck of a lot of information in a short 5 or 10 minute clip.
4. The video essay is fundamentally is making an argument. This is that characteristic of all essays, but just to be clear, what I am talking about is distinct from story telling or YouTube video blogs or some other narrative or animated story via video. What I am talking about is people writing real essays, whether it is reviews or otherwise, that are arguing for or against a point of view.

I hope we see more of these video essays in the future. They are entertaining, and smart.

If I was all meta, I'd make this paper blog entry itself into one.

Upgraded Wordpress and a bunch of plugins, including installing CommentPress and other such things.

Feel free to let me know what you think; give me feedback via comments.

That would be cool.

-Randy Pausch, September 18, 2007

The same and more available at this flash site.