Stories, Stories Everywhere
Red Shirt Pony Tail Guy and the Pelican
Just like a pelican. First they ask for help, then when they’re done with you, off they fly.
The best content leaves you making more content, extending the story, and the lives of the characters, in your head. At the end of a movie, or a great novel, you want it to go on. You make it go on in your head for days after you finish it.
This simple act of pelican kindness, and quickness, is no novel, but in the same ways it suggested a couple of longer, more complete stories to me about red shirt pony tail guy and the pelican. Here goes.
Five years later a huge wave blows red shirt pony tail guy off his boat. The only way he survives is through the efforts of his old friend… the pelican! And his hilarious family!
Wait, this is actually better… ready? The pelican’s just flown free and he’s flying around now. But he doesn’t understand red shirt pony tail guy saved him, all he knows is the guy grabbed his leg, and held him down, so he starts dive bombing the guy, who takes blow after blow, he doesn’t want to defend himself, because he might hurt the bird, but he finally has to. He pulls out his gun, and at the very last second he’s forced to slay the creature he saved… to save himself. Music sting. Irony. Sadness. The end.
Now, in all seriousness, what’s really going on here? I’m embellishing micro-content. That little video is no movie, no novel, no. It’s simply a trigger. I’m the one making the entertainment. I am making the product. In the case of this post, and everything I do with interactive media, I do all this for free.
Of course, I’m saying nothing new. The dirty secret of early AOL, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and, ta da, Medium, is that their product is user created content, generated for free by their members and consumed by other members.
What is Medium’s game? When do they start to monetize their writers? What’s the story here? And in the name of endless egotism, why am I helping them? For helping me?
