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togglesbloggle · 1 month

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In Defense of Bad Things

'Bad' here meaning mostly 'amateur'; stuff made enthusiastically by people at an unprofessional level. Art with visible gaps between what the artist imagined and what they achieved, products of flawed craftsmanship. I suppose everybody can appreciate them to some extent, it's a rare parent that doesn't put up their kid's drawings on the fridge in one way or another. But it turns out to be a fully general skill you can cultivate, and the more I do, the more I'm glad I did.

Partly, it's the teacher thing; finding delight in amateur work is one of the ways to find delight in the process of learning. Cultivating a love of striving-qua-striving can help make you a force for good in the world, as people start to feel safe trying to do things when you're around, even when their efforts are wobbly. You get to participate a little more in the process of atoms spinning themselves into ideas, even when there aren't any illusions about whether you're helping cultivate some revolutionary genius in the field.

And partly it's a fabulous way to build community. By necessity, our professional-level skills tend to be at the service of other people, performed for economic benefit; that's kind of how you get professionally good at something in the first place. When we're acting for our own sake, and among friends, most of what we do with one another is amateurish. I only cook middling-okay, I can't hold a tune that well, I'll never be a speed runner for anything. If you can only enjoy singing from the hundred best singers in the whole world, manufactured and polished by major studios, then you and your friends will sit shoulder-to-shoulder and passively listen to music. But it's so much richer an experience to sit face-to-face, actually singing together, even badly; you expose yourself to so many new ways to appreciate and respect one another, building relationships on what you've accomplished and not just by witty criticism or liking the same things.

And partly it's because some of the most powerful and innovative artistic experiences are in high-churn environments with low expectations and low barriers to entry, if only because those catch the passionate and driven young people that have been otherwise overlooked by our systems. The golden age of webcomics meant that a ton of the actual art involved was pretty lousy, but it also produced work that people still talk about today. D&D began as a profoundly unpolished collection of handmade rulebooks sold at cons in a plastic baggie. By the time these products of enthusiastic amateurs filter themselves through various levels of popularity and absorb mainstream cash influx, they're often risk-averse and missing a lot of the bold spark that inspired their fans in the first place; others will simply never drift towards the mainstream at all. I'm not saying you should be the person who goes out to dig through the slush piles of the internet looking for overlooked art, unless you want to be-- but sometimes a work of actual staggering genius also happens to be a Supernatural fanfic by a first-time author who's a little hazy on commas, and if that's a dealbreaker, you're going to miss out on some profoundly valuable experiences.

And hiding behind all of these things is, like...

Our appreciation of beauty has an odd structure, right? When things are done very skillfully, by brilliant artists with years of training, we can usually appreciate those accomplishments. And when we're looking at nature without human influence, and especially when we think very deeply about natural processes and understand them in context, we often rediscover that sense of beauty. There's just this bizarre hole in the middle where we declare things 'ugly'; as if a little skill is worse than none at all.

I really don't trust that gap. It feels like a trick my brain is playing on me, you know? It has me suspicious that a lot of what I consider 'ugly' or 'bad' is not a very direct experience of the world at all, or an informed judgment. That it is, rather, a declaration of (self-, social-) identity; a desire to be seen as a person of good taste, or as somebody who does things well, or just more primitively as one of the monkeys who is in the good-stuff-tribe and not one of the monkeys who is in the bad-stuff-tribe.

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salora-rainriver · 4 months

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We're talking about Ads Again

Context for those followers of mine who weren't there: I made a post about tumblr ads being weird back in 2016 and it's literally still getting notes to this day. People responded GREAT to it. honestly, despite being like. ass old at this point and written by a literal high schooler, it's still pretty good! I thank my dad being in advertising helped significantly. I had an expert witness.

Tonight, I'm writing the sequel to that post. the sequel is this post.

let's just fucking dive into it or whatever.

why am I doing this?

okay for starters I made that post in goddamn 2016 and I refuse to believe my insights into the marketing world have not improved since then.

Also, the marketing world has CHANGED. Huge swaths of my old post are no longer relevant. What we saw with tumblr ads in 2016 was in some parts a passing fad, and in other parts the harbinger of a new wave of influencer marketing and corporate parasociality (I coined that term just now).

Honestly I've been thinking for a while that I should make an update post, but what with, yanno, adulthood, that's been kinda hard!

Well, I've missed a train, and it's Christmas, so I've finally found the time to do that.

What has Changed?

in my personal life... dad got fired! yeah it fucking sucks. the good news is he and his wife are working towards their retirement now, shifting away from the industry overall. Good news as far as life is concerned, but it does mean I no longer have as clean a connection to the Industry as I used to.

but more importantly, why he got fired. The fact is, dad's old! I know, shocker. More than just being old, though, his field (and my stepmom's field - they both did the same work) represents an older paradigm of advertisement. he did TV spots and posters, not ad reads for Raid Shadow Legends. He was great at his work, but we're in an era of data-driven, maximalist, google adsense, low-barrier-to-entry, super-fast and super-cheap digital advertisement.

Well, more specifically,

We're on the cusp of an extinction event poised to bring said era crashing to the ground.

Pictured: the current vibes in the ad world

Siberia is on Fire and Everything is Dying

So given that my typical source on stuff like this is currently unemployed, I decided to hit good ol google (well, google and duckduckgo. fitting given what we're talking about) to see if I could get any insights into what the current state of advertising is.

and the short of it is that everyone says the end is nigh. check this out:

Digital is dead, and so is TV. God fucking damn. BY THE WAY, I loved these two articles. Chris Gadek, a man I only learned about today, is clearly an excellent writer and his professional insights are probably gonna be way better than my amateur synthesis of the half-dozen different articles I read today, including his.

blatant shilling for random article writers aside, let's get on to my half-baked synthesis, starting with:

What Set Siberia on Fire

In small part, it's the same issues facing most major companies and industries in our late capitalist world: Hubris.

As this New York Times article points out, we've got a low barrier of entry into a gargantuan industry that's increasingly pumping out slop to follow a strategy of 'more is more'. And we've all seen the bizarre mobile game ads and shady scams that have resulted from THAT.

On top of that, we've also got the fucking digital privacy issue shaking up the entire world as consumers increasingly don't like being spied on (imagine that), and the EU starts rolling out heavy restrictions on the data harvesting that was fueling a bunch of this advertisement bubble.

There's also the ad fraud. Oh, you didn't hear about that? Well, it's nothing much, just that lots of bots are clicking ads to falsify click metrics, artificially inflating the effectiveness of said ads. look, it even has a wikipedia article

oh and Facebook did it. Facebook did ad fraud. :)

and I'm not even getting into everything that works to shake up or demolish basically every advertisement channel out there - the decline of cable tv and print newspapers, the increasing use of ad blockers, the crisis of consumer trust, etc etc.

In short we are looking at a multitude of micro-crises all working together to make the environment unlivable for most current forms of advertisement.

in other words: an extinction event!

Who's Gonna Survive

And just like in a real extinction event, whether or not you survive depends on how good you can adapt to the brave new world you've found yourself in. Old school advertising needs to drastically rethink their everything if they're gonna stay afloat, and every field of the industry needs to recreate itself. As my new favorite writer Chris Gadek says,

"These crises show that there are no safe havens. You can’t substitute one advertising medium for another. Rather than pivot, the advertising industry must adapt and learn to effectively use the channels at their disposal (TV included), factoring in the seismic societal and technological changes that have occurred over the past decade and beyond."

and what is that going to look like? what's going to be the new face of advertising?

The field seems torn, at first... but also aligned, at least when it comes to the core principles:

privacy is a big issue. Seems like a lot of advertisers are seeing an end to wanton consumer surveillance, and looking into less invasive ways to gather important and meaningful data

companies that rely on selling ad space and propping up their engagement metrics are going to be relied on less, probably, because the metrics themselves are being seen as less reliable (for good freaking reason)

regaining consumer trust is going to be a massive priority in the future.

overall, we're probably going to look at a massive downturn in ads, as people turn to a quality-over-quantity strategy in an attempt to stop flooding the attention marketplace.

that's the gist I'm getting from reading oh so many different articles of varying quality from so many different sources.

So, yanno, there may be some hope out there. If smart people start leading this industry (lol), we may get to actually enjoy ads.

Yeah. Enjoy ads.

Unironically.

I know, it's crazy.

PS: if you start seeing affiliate links on mainstream TV ads, thank our lord of excellent business analysis Chris Gadek for calling it early. God, that's such a crazy left-field idea and I really want it to actually happen.

#advertising #advertisement #I'm not apologizing for the chris gadek worship. it's a good running gag fuck you.#this is probably not my best work but in my defense I missed a train and also me writing this got interrupted like 3 times today #i saw a post about ads today and it made me go 'i think the internet needs to know how much this industry is on fucking fire right now'#I am correct of course. y'all need to know.

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autumn-oceanopromises · 7 months

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Writing Like A Woman

I bought a book and I'm waiting for it to be delivered: "To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction", by Joanna Russ. I've never read her work before, seminal and powerful as it seems to be in relation to queer, intersectional, and feminist perspectives, and her work seems to be mostly out of print, as she was active (and alive) in the 60s to 90s.

I'll be quite honest - up until probably my mid-twenties, the title of that book alone would have put me off it completely. (There's a whole story and essay to be had there, the growing-up ways that a POC immigrant boy - man - seeks the media perception of white (=good, =great) masculinity and pretends to be the most masculine and milquetoast, which includes rejecting femininity in everything, in order to reject perceptions of weakness, which are mostly to do with how other boys see boys, within the masculine subculture. How virtue signaling is constant, even in the most private of spaces and to absolutely nobody but myself.)

But that's not the topic of this entry. This one's about writing like a woman: the female-expectation-derived plot points and structures that are rarely examined and re-combined by amateur male writers, why writing and exploring those structures are especially important in the low-agency world we are entering into or are already living in now, and how I want to but don't quite know where to start.

*Trigger warnings and disclaimers: I come at this from the perspective of someone whose publicly posted body of amateur writing is 50% poetry, 40% erotica/pornography, including some extremely dark content (though none of it is, of course, hosted on this blog), so appropriate trigger warnings apply when I discuss this, and 10% other things, including NANO novels, short stories, slash and romance fanfic, game design, worldbuilding lore, marketing copy, etc. I read predominantly amateur fantasy and science fiction, often fanfiction, and not professionally published literary fiction, horror, or romance, and am unaware of the trends within them. I am a cishet POC man living in a predominantly white country, and as such, may mention and perpetuate problematic perspectives. This is my personal opinion, written in 2023.* I've approached the work of Joanna Russ circuitously. I would like her guidance in the literary analysis of feminist fiction. I discovered her first by finding out about her essays and novels from r/menwritingwomen, a subreddit about pinpointing the ways that men write women - as a lampoon, as a satire, as a horror. I've looked at critical, if fond, examinations of her work, which is often the only things available for free on the Internet any longer - respected authors, mostly women, who point to her work as something that inspired and provoked them. I very, very much look forward to finding out what her work reads like. I very much look forward, if dread, examining and being deeply, viscerally horrified, at my thinking, my plot structures, and my internalized bigotry. I look forward to deliberately playing some really horrible shit straight, but with an undercurrent of horror. I look forward to writing things which are less horrifying. I very much look forward to writing like a woman, especially in science fiction and fantasy.

Writing like a woman without acerbic wit and superb guidance (at least according to all the critics), it turns out, in 2023 amateur writing spaces, even and especially under the current flood of "strong female characters", is incredibly fucking hard. Writing, plot and structure, is still mostly treated with the implication and context of masculine-derived plot and structures. The Hero's Journey is about men, after all, and it inseminates most things in modern media. In amateur genre fiction, which holds a lot of eyeballs, including isekai and litRPGs, there's very few non-male viewpoints; fantasy and science fiction as a setting abounds just about everywhere, but the rise and fall of the plot remains action, adventure, base-building, and shounen: everything stems from what society expects and pressures boys and men to do and desire: to conquer, to save, to explore, to investigate, to fight, to build and create, to happen to - to take, to seize, to plunder.

Some of the most popular tropes in this field are: overpowered protagonists, crushing and laying waste to things before them; time travel, cheat items and powers, systems to manipulate and game. The number of these stories are increasing, rapidly, and are a thriving ecosystem - the number of popular complete fucking jackasses maybe one or two morality pets is through the fucking roof.

I consume an absolute shit-ton of these. It was originally a guilty pleasure, but it's rapidly become less guilty, and more of blatant escapism and a solid portion of my day. I'm one of the target audience: I hate my job, but am reasonably good at it in some bits. I hate going to work, I hate being at work, and I hate the feeling of general helplessness and corporate bullshit, in myself, my team, and my customers, even while being very aware that I have probably some of the least corporate bullshit and helplessness that a person working in retail and in general is trading time for money, has. I have very much a lot of agency and I know I'm using it very poorly.

There is very little stopping me, in terms of amount of bureaucratic rules, except for the fact that the company is seriously overcharging people for a health-related product, mainly because the company is part of the fashion-industrial complex and a monolithic monopoly in the heart of unchecked capitalism. As a symptom of the general shittiness though, and unrelated to the corporate bullshit side of things, I especially hate entitled customers, who treat my team and me like shit for less and less amounts of money. Sure, you paid a "lot" of money for "the worst customer service in your whole life". We went out of our way to give you special treatment, including at least three free products and processes worth nearly 1.5 grand, something like four hours in consultation, and you in total spent $200 in a store where $800 is the average price, where you knew the average price walking in. I wish you genuinely shitty customer service for the rest of your miserable fucking life. That said, it's true that people in general just are making less money than the prices of living goods, and belts are squeezing tighter everywhere. If you can afford belts.

As people get less and less able to afford important shit, become less and less able to enact their own personal individualism and individual thoughts, and more and more ruled by whatever the higher-level narrative is - the news, the fashion companies, the social media trends, all of that shit - the more escapism rises, but also the more I believe that writing like a woman, like the challenges women faced in in the '60s to '90s is important. I would like to write "like a woman": I want to explore plot structures where the action happens in carving out agency under an unbearable and generally unbeatable social pressure - focusing more on the bureaucratic rather than the supernatural as in horror genre fiction, rather than the protagonist happening to the world. Figuring out the mystery where everyone and everything wants to kill or suppress you, girl (or boy, or other) meets house, and more structures that I just don't know yet, with and about things happening to the protagonist, the manic pixie dream boy archetypes, all that shebang and shemoves. I realize as I say this that it sounds incredibly stupid. The whole first half of the hero's journey is shit happening to the protagonist, the protagonist breaking out and developing agency, and arguably, a protagonist - especially in film - is almost always entirely reactionary.

But that focus on it? Where the pressure is right there, if unacknowledged or right out of the eyeline? Where specifically, the focus is the variation on and about carving out what little agency you can have in a world that specifically is trying to keep you down and quiet and in your little box and if you go too far they'll slap you down into place with horrific impersonal consequences, so walking the line and making peace with walking the line, is really, really important? Joanna Russ wrote a lot of this in science fiction, and many, many feminist writers have explored this in fantasy (in historical and epic), in mystery, in romance, in horror, in literary fiction, in erotica made by and for women. It exists in trans narratives, in queer narratives, in POC narratives, in narratives about poverty.

I don't know anyone who's cross-applied the same structures to the boxes for cishet middle-class men, even though we're rapidly entering a world where those boxes are getting more and more obvious and more and more crushing, because the middle-class is shrinking rapidly and high-level narratives, spin, trends, all that shit, are turning people on people. Radicalising via arousing extreme states of anger and fear, lust and gluttony and envy and greed. And, okay, there's a lot of fiction out there for cishet men already. It's just, that fiction for cishet men always runs with the same narratives that, frankly, causes this shit to happen IRL for everyone else.

I'll be honest: this whole entry is probably nothing new to people already reading and agreeing with the points of feminist literature. And cishet man discovers one of the good points of feminist literature, news at 11. But it matters to me.

And I don't know any mainstream literature or media, where specifically, the direction to make this situation and setup is about empowerment. Bioshock, maybe. But even that has caveats. Because a lot of works in these structures are tragic, specifically are about arousing extreme fear and anxiety and tension. Sometimes sexually arousing, sometimes sublimating it into an orgy of "justified" violence. Can I make this setup empowering and joyful and ecstatic and awe-inspiring and wonderful, with happy endings that don't result in breaking out of the physical box entirely or withdrawing into personal self-isolation, through whatever means? Because the pressure is overwhelming and there's a lot of it. And you can't change the world around you, you can't control it, but you can control yourself and your reaction to it - that's one of the most common therapy adages. And this is, very much, the same thing. I think it's really important, because the direction, very much, in high-level narratives and spin, especially in Western countries, is "give up when you're faced with this pressure". It's give in and join the complex. It's "escape into a fantasy world where shit is easy". It's escape into apathy. Apathy is the highest it's ever been, political or otherwise. Lack of social connection, lack of intimacy, lack of knowing and understanding and empathizing. It's rabble-rousing with undirected anger and fear directed against other people who are also angry and fearful.

And I think it's really worth disguising as a different take, so that some of the audience that's consuming media and fiction that would cause it IRL, instead starts looking at and exploring and varying takes on dealing with it instead. I don't know if there is much like this, in published fiction. though maybe there's a heap of it and I just have never found it. Therapy-heavy fiction and takes exist, but they come off really proselytizing.

Specifically though, on a personal level, I'm wondering, yet again, about the courtesan universe that I'm writing. All the fixed points in the timeline, everything I've written so far about it, I now realize is variations on this theme. But, having come at it from a male perspective, having written and consumed only ever male perspectives or male-reflected expectations and perspectives, it's always come off incredibly flat, somehow, with caricatures of characters. I've put in conflicts and things which are irrelevant and sometimes contradictory to the underlying message and exploration of theme for that universe, and it reads badly. My whole life, as well, has been about "breaking out of the box", while being incredibly aware that I keep putting myself back inside, or breaking out of the box and realizing I'm just in a bigger box; carving out agency while staying in the same box still feels like a failure to me.

I really want to explore this, though. I want to carve out my own agency, and be okay with it, living in the box that society dictates. I would like to explore, in writing, and hopefully share with other people, and inspire them to explore the same thing, their own takes on it. This is still, quintessentially, a very male perspective on a female-based structure, and I'm aware of that, so I would appreciate guidance. I really want to tell these stories, and explore these themes, writing like a woman.

#essay #feminism #writing like a woman #opinion

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lowtaxsa · 1 year

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Review: Hitman 3 (2021)

Hitman 3: The Catastrophe Chronicles

Welcome, brave souls, to my review of the catastrophe that is "Hitman 3." As the title suggests, it's the third installment in a series that has had its ups and downs, and this time we've reached a new low. Get ready to cringe, laugh, and wonder why anyone thought it was a good idea to release this monstrosity into the world.

You once again assume the role of Agent 47, a bald, barcoded, genetically-engineered assassin with the emotional range of a wet mop. Somehow, this bland protagonist has managed to score a third outing, and you're stuck with him for the duration of this misadventure.

The plot is a convoluted mess that tries to tie up the loose ends from the previous games, while also introducing enough new threads to make you want to pull your hair out. Spoiler alert: you won't care about any of it. The dialogue is laughable, the cutscenes are amateur hour, and the voice acting sounds like it was done by a bored high school drama club.

Hitman 3's AI is just as impressive, if by "impressive" you mean "more incompetent than a Roomba with a broken wheel." Enemies will conveniently ignore you if you're wearing a slightly different outfit, and their pathfinding skills would make even the most incompetent GPS system look like a genius. It's not uncommon for your targets to get stuck on furniture or endlessly loop around the same spot, making your job easier and far less interesting.

The game's level design is as uninspired as they come. It's as if the developers took the most generic action game tropes and mashed them together in a giant, unappetizing stew. Expect to trudge through countless warehouses, abandoned factories, and other locales that are just as drab and unmemorable as Agent 47 himself. The icing on the cake is the level where you infiltrate a costume party, only to realize every partygoer is wearing the same three outfits. Talk about creativity!

And let's not forget the weapons. The arsenal in Hitman 3 is as generic as it gets. Pistols, rifles, and shotguns – all of which you've used a thousand times before in other games. Oh, and they all sound like someone banging pots and pans together in their kitchen. The only "unique" weapon is the fiber wire, which, let's be honest, isn't exactly new to the series. Can you feel the excitement?

Graphically, Hitman 3 is about as cutting-edge as a butter knife. Textures are bland, character models are blocky, and animations are stiff and robotic. The game's "physics" are a joke, with bodies often ragdolling into absurd positions or clipping through walls. It's a visual trainwreck that makes you long for the days of 8-bit graphics.

So, is there any redeeming quality to Hitman 3? Not really. It's a soulless, tedious, and downright terrible entry in a series that should have been left for dead a long time ago. Save yourself the agony, and avoid this game like the plague. As for me, I'm going to try and erase this experience from my memory and move on to something – anything – better.

#hitman 3 #lowtax speaks #big blog #reviews #gaming garbage

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literaticat · 2 years

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What is the reality of ever getting out of the slush pile these days? Thousands of writers. Tons of editors hawking their services. Professional organizations offering courses and workshops. Everyone chasing the dream and being sold a bill of goods to think it can happen for them… but what are the odds of getting a picture book agent REALLy?

Yep, writing IS a highly competitive field. Just like it's highly competitive to be a professional actor, or olympic-level figure skater, or a fashion designer, or violinist, or baseball player, or whatever. LOTS of people dream about those things, or are amateurs at those things - very few people, by comparison, make it to the point where they are actually doing this thing as their full-time job.

However, no rational adult would seriously think, "hey, I know the rules of baseball and I am decent at tossing a ball to my dog, so even though I’m 40, outta shape, and I’ve never even tried out to be on a team, I'm gonna be a pitcher for the Yankees." It's a KNOWN FACT that being a professional baseball player is a demanding and competitive job, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who are extremely fit, well-trained, exceptionally talented and driven vying for those opportunities.

By contrast, writing seems a lot more attainable. There’s a very low barrier for entry, for one – you don’t have to take a class, or pay a dime, to write something, or to query agents, or to send your work to publishers. You don’t have to know what you are doing or be good at it.

(And trust me, most people think they could be a published author, whether they have actually written a word or not – that’s why I don’t tell people what I do for a living, because I don’t need my dentist trying to pitch a kids book to me AGAIN.)

In a way, you might think, well uh-oh – that means it is even MORE competitive. You know that agents say they take on very few new clients a year – so if they are going to take on, say, TWO new picture book clients, and they get potentially TWO THOUSAND queries… Well, you can crunch the numbers. Not great odds, almost zero in fact. :(

However. HOWEVER! If you are sitting around writing to the the Q&A of a literary agent for fun on a Friday night – I am gonna go ahead and hazard a guess that you’ve also done other kinds of research, and might be more well-informed about publishing than Rando McDentist. You have read and appreciate children’s books. You have probably tried to send your query to agents who rep the general category in which you write, you’ve written a decent query letter, you’ve made sure your work is pretty solid, no major typos, etc.

Well, if all that is true, then you aren’t competing with all those thousands of random queries AT ALL. You are only competing with the other folks that are at the same level as you – which means you are competing with, maybe, 200 people for those 2 potential slots with that agent. Still long odds, obviously, but a heck of a lot less daunting, I’d say.

Now let’s go a step further. You have a critique group, you have studied children’s books and writing, you have learned and edited and actively tried to make your writing not just good but GREAT, you have learned about the current market for the category you write in, you’ve written a stand out query and really targeted the agents you are sending to brilliantly – well guess what, now you are only competing with, like, 40 people. Still a competitition, but one that is MUCH more likely to pan out in your favor if you combine all that with persistence. (Because, after all, there are a fair number of agents, and though all of them will have also gotten 40 or so really GREAT queries – all of them have different taste, so what ends up on top might be different for each!)

(And yes, as you mentioned, there is an entire ecosystem of people and organizations built to help writers “level up” on this journey, providing anything from education to editorial services to networking opportunities, and more. Some of them cost a lot of money, some are inexpensive or free; Some are well worth it, and some are scammy. While there definitely ARE con artists who take advantage of dreamy-eyed newbs, I’d say the majority of folks in this ecosystem actually DO want to be helpful, not hurtful, to authors. And either way, I don’t think their presence matters much to the crux of your ACTUAL question, which was, “what are the odds of getting out of the slush pile”!)

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