Note: You may have noticed that this post is late, breaking the grand 8-days-between-posts tradition upheld until now. Sorry about that! A combination of hardware and wetware failures are to blame.

However, keeping up with posts has been difficult regardless, so we're going to switch to a 15-day cadence for the foreseeable future. Maybe that will let us make more awesome and less lame posts, too. Or not!

Documentary

Documentaries are meant to feel "authentic," but are necessarily fake in some ways. They are edited together to serve a purpose; choices are made about what to show or not show.

A little blue one, with a little brown dot.

No matter how realistic they try to be, there is still an act of creation and curatorship undertaken by the author.

An orange double-nut, fused into a sort of zigzag shape.
An orange double-nut, fused into a sort of zigzag shape. The backside. Pretty smooth, all around.

The work may make you feel like you are being shown reality in an unobscured form, but it is necessarily a selective, biased form of reality.

So too with this site.

A big green one, with a chipped bit towards us and a long crack running its length.

Documentaries tend to be motivated by less commercial goals than other enterprises. Often some kind of moral outrage is the driving force. Towards this end, they may present a particularly biased view of reality indeed, in order to provoke the desired reaction from viewers.

A plain blue, with a cleanly chopped off chord, revealing blackness.

The documentary simply competes with any number of other stimuli for mindshare in its audience. The documentary tries to get an advantage by making claims of authenticity — presumably something that people ascribe greater weight.

A yellow nut, with half the shell off, open-faced. Some brown papery peanut skin is smattered across the top.

But I wonder how much people simply take what they see at face value. Certainly, much of advertising is built upon the premise that we do, even if not not intentionally.

A big, smooth, lumpy red one, with an 'X' pair of cracks.

On one hand, the documentary tries to take advantage of this — even especially so — by encouraging viewers to see it as belief-worthy. On the other hand, it discourages taking what's given to you at face value in general, by making a claim to be "more real" than other inputs that might make such claims.

A wide orange lozenge with a dimple on each end, each cracked and muddied. The cracks mingle in the middle.

Here at defectivecandy.com, we make no claims to authenticity. Nor do we encourage you to take what is given at face value. These are advantages of the surreal.

We would just like you to think.