I watched the first issue (both parts) of Season 12 of the Red Panda Adventures yesterday! I did say something about maybe doing more reaction-blogging, so:
God, I’d forgotten just how bad I am at stories with pictures, especially stories with pictures and words, and especially especially moving pictures. (It could be worse: they could be moving photographs rather than drawings.)
Pictures are so complicated; even if I can take my time, I usually miss a bunch of stuff*, and it only gets worse if it’s time-limited. It probably doesn’t help that I’m used to Red Panda episodes being purely audio: I suspect it strengthens my tendency to treat videos as basically audioplays, just with minor visual enhancement (getting the broad strokes of the imagery and missing all of the details).
(This is one of the reasons I have a lot of trouble with any webcomic** more complicated than XKCD, the other reason being that even steady webcomics update so slowly that by the time they reach the end of a plot thread, you’ve forgotten what the beginning was. When you combine these two effects, you tend to end up with climactic moments relying on minor details that I haven’t seen in ten months and also didn’t even notice at the time. I’m sure there must be people webcomics work for, but they really do not mesh well with my brain.)
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did have fun. I just had to strike a compromise between “overwhelmed by quantity of sensory input” and “not getting the full effect of the story”, and I’m a bit out of practice at that.
Maybe I should try watching these episodes multiple times, shifting my focus on rewatches. They’re short enough that it wouldn’t take ages: I could probably even do two watches of an issue consecutively without burnout. (Even without soaking in Everything, watching videos gets mentally taxing after a while. One standard-length TV episode (~45 min) is somewhere around my limit.)
—
*Fun fact: image descriptions have a curb-cut effect. I’m (effectively) not blind, but I often find I understand an image (especially a comic) a lot better after I’ve read an image description, because the description pointed out important bits that I didn’t notice. (I wonder if I should try described video sometime.)
**I haven’t really tried non-web comics.
Tags:
#Red Panda Adventures #(okay so this was more about my relationship with video-based media in general than about RPA specifically but still) #oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I was researching video conferencing recently for a school assignment #and the supporters praise it for conveying zillions of microexpressions and whatnot #which to me seems like a *downside* #video chats immerse you in so much input that your brain *has* to dump most of it #but you have limited control over which parts get dumped #and your conversational partner doesn’t know what made the cut and what didn’t #ideally you want to prevent people from sending messages you’re not going to receive #so that they *know* you don’t know it #(and if your partner is better at processing large quantities of real-time information than you are) #(they have an advantage over you) #(which they might exploit) #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging
Brinens and Things 
5 thoughts on “”