Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer. Adapted because I have to shave off about half an hour from my very long Tate talk, and upgraded because I’ve had 13 months of additional thoughts. The required changes led to this exchange:

Matt: The trick — and what I’m dithering over — is what combination of slides will make a talk that will not just be passable, but sing, as its own separate and coherent thing.

Mike: Exactly. It’s always about sequencing, and the narrative that that sequence induces.

Matt: It’s such an interesting problem. Some slides don’t disrupt the narrative much, others are like big rocks in a stream — you can’t put them just anywhere, because they threaten to direct the flow in some new direction, or create awkwardness if you force the flow back onto its original path around them. So in much the same way that paint or graphite interact with the canvas or paper to produce unexpected results that were more than just your artistic intent flowing from your brain through your fingers — they push back, in a way — I find that slides have their own narrative geometry, that makes some transitions natural and others almost impossible. And personally I find it very hard to redo a slide to change that geometry; I’m much more likely to change things upstream and downstream to make that slide seem natural rather than like a dam or impediment. If it’s a sufficiently good slide, which for me is driven by its internal logic. In ecological terms, each slide has an autecology that dictates how it works on its own, and a synecology that describes how it works with other slides.

Mike: Once again, you have accidentally written an SV-POW! post. Seriously. Just post it.