Untitled Symphony No 140 in Blue.
Being a not-so brief explanation of this Alt-title nonsense.
For some time now, I’ve been adding Alt-titles (Alternate titles) to my posts at the end of the post.
This originated with a post by John at Notes to the Milkman “What Title Should I Give This Post” speculating about titles (in blogs and art). In it he mentions something I personally found quite amusing, > quoting the artist Damien Hirst: ” In a TV interview Hirst said “[A work] is either titled or it’s not and Untitled – what’s that? It’s like calling your kid Untitled. ‘Untitled Number 1, dinner’s ready!’ It doesn’t really work.” ”
I started putting little Untitled Jokes at the end of my posts calling them Alt-titles (with the hope that those who know how to code html would get the extra joke). Jokes, limericks, musicially inspired Untitled Titles abounded, until now, (for the moment) I have settled into the Alt-title Untitled Object No. X For …. format.
I credit John for the inspiring this idea, as well as Richard of The Future is Papier Mache , who pointed me to this post. Richard also experiments with many devices for post titles – including my current favourite, where he names posts after book titles and then tells you where the book sits in his house. Ben always includes a joke at the bottom of his posts and I credit him with the idea of putting the “joke” at the end of my posts.
And there you have it. Alt-titles.
Kill-ratio
My kill-ratio status refers to how many photographs I take versus how many I present. Typically if they are captioned, I don’t count them because it’s my blog, my rules. And often the captioned images are more explanatory, or not mine. Day 94 – Unknown Cable started off my kill-ratio status updates:
“p.s. Been thinking a lot of the concept of a kill-ratio, where you kill most of the ideas/concepts/whatever that come to the table first and then you’re left with the “one”, or the few. With project Obso, I end up shooting (the luxury of digital photography) dozens or gadzillions of images, and then the task at hand is to get a good kill-ratio. The out of focus ones are the easiest to murder of course, as are the not so well lit, and the ones with little bits of stuff in the background I didn’t notice are also fairly easy to discard. Then the task becomes more harder. Obso is helping me get better at this, but it’s still a challenge..
What is your kill-ratio like?”
Of course, it could be argued that better than a good kill-ratio would be to begin with shooting less and that happens sometimes too.
I’m the html-guy that could relate to your alt-codes, but I’ve wondered about the kill-ratio so thanks for the explanation.
Glad to know someone out there gets the little joke:)
These days most of my title conflict is blog post related. Should I go for the interest-catching ‘How to…’ type of thing or just keep it as short as possible? I tend to waver somewhere between.
As for my idea-to-fruition ratio? My kill ratio is higher than I’d like and not as high. What I mean is even though I accept not every little idea I have will make it to fruition, and as frustrating as I find that, I also accept it as part of my process. More ideas than I can use—for stories, songs, books, screenplays, plays, projects—is better than none. So I’ll continue to come up with more than I can ‘use’.
But I still hate to see a good spark snuffed before given a chance to explode!
I like the in-between space.
“…a good spark snuffed before given a chance to explode” ha ha! Yes, you never know when a smoldering ember decides to take off in a new direction. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.