#not nano 2020
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ok camp nano goal is 30hrs so approx ~1hr/day. stretch goal is 30k words but I'm not so much worried about that
#last time i did nano was apparently july 2020 according to the site#and i apparently wrote 30k for take evangeline which is so funny bc i do not remember SHIT
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hate that the nano website sucks so much ass but also the only event near me is 30 minutes away at 6-7 pm when i'm too tired to do shit and also know that i am almost certain to be the only one masking. like. it's so impossible to make any kind of friends around here and it's exhausting.
#disgruntled octopus#it's not like i was active in the irl community in md but at least there were more options#and then during nano 2020 they did zoom stuff which i didn't do bc i wasn't doing nano but i appreciated#now it's solely write ins irl at bangor library#also write ins are not practical for me bc my laptop is so old and shitty and tempermental#so it's like. i do wanna go. but also i don't wanna get sick i don't wanna drive an hour round trip and i don't wanna go out in the evening#but gd the isolation really kicks in when there's something i want to do but can't/don't want to deal with the cons
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I'm editing a draft as one of my NaNos (the other NaNo is a new novel- yes I'm insane).
The "new" novel is actually a short story that I've reworked multiple times. An early draft is somewhere on *gasp* FictionPress. It was inspired by a prompt on here about everyone having a soulmate, and a timer that counts down to when they meet. People in this world are considered children until they meet their soulmate, at which point they are considered adults (there's a twelve-year-old who's expected to move out just because he met his soulmate). The MC figures out how to manipulate the timer. The original short story ended with his surrender to the timer's insidious secret- there's a fungus that activates when it runs out and sprouts in the brain, forcing soulmates to love each other. While this is still canon, the MC will go down a happier path.
(Fun fact- I shared the original short story with people, and they thought it was a happy ending???? Like, what part of "brain fungus" did you ignore???)
The draft I'm editing is a deconstruction of the chosen one trope. Being the chosen one actually sucks, because you belong to the being that "chose" you after you die. The MC also has to deal with a fairy companion who treats him like shit if he doesn't follow the prophecy, and a mentor who is downright abusive, driving him to near-suicide. This was my 2020 NaNo, though I've had the idea since 2017. I have all the notes for it in place, so it should be easier than farting out a new work from scratch.
And now I can give myself the "tell people about your NaNo" badge on their website! :)
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so, this is nice to see. like. sometimes it just feels like i’m not accomplishing anything, right
my ao3 wordcount for 2022, as of today:
that doesn’t include at least 120k of original stuff, if somewhat sleep-deprived memory serves. that doesn’t count the 20k oneshot rotting while i put off finishing the last scene, or the 60k fic that’s just getting started. it doesn’t include ideas i started and pushed aside halfway through.
i hate to risk sounding like i’m bragging but damn. it’s not a lot. it’s not anything, to most people, especially being that it’s free labor.
but that’s half a million words there, easy, and i know all of them are good. i have faith in my competence.
whatever else comes out of this year, i did that much. and i know wren from last november wouldn’t have dreamed of a 500k year, let alone a 500k year i wasn’t even trying to pull. the only person i ever have to impress is my former self, right?
#bird noises#im emo tonight about it#fanfiction#objectively my writing journey is kind of bonkers insane from 2019-now#tried nano for the first time in 2019. super intimidated and stressed. hit 48k#skipped april camp#did 30k for july camp (swiftpaw’s chance baby!)#fuckin. stumbled into the overachievers forum in october#told myself i would set three tiered goals of 50k/75k/100k#but i knew day 1 i was lying to myself#hit 100k nano 2020#accidentally prepped so hard for april camp i wrote 60k in march and collapsed#i donttttt remember july i think i skipped it#came back nano 2021. 125k. started a week early too#130k novel in five weeks and some other work i did in the last couple days of nov#i felt fucking feral for that one#i never properly counted last april but it was somewhere high. 80k?#again#dont remember july’s final number but i do think it came out similar to april#i stopped tracking my words this year sooo#and i donttttt think i got to 100k this month but i just started college i gotta cut myself slack#DEFINITELY over 50k but ill do a final count in the morning#we’ll see
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the forgotten mothers || PROLOGUE
Fandom: Norse Mythology/Religion
Wordcount: 1,487
Character(s)/Relationship(s): Loki/Sigyn/Angrboda, Original Characters
CONTENT WARNING(S): Mentions of torture and the physical after-effects of it.
Summary: Sigyn, free of the cave, has been trying to live in relative peace in Midgard. When a woman confronts her, demanding to know where her missing daughter is, that uneasy peace is broken, and Sigyn finds herself the target of an unknown force that's hunting down the children of Loki and killing them. She must stop them before Ragnarok comes to claim them all.
“Is that—the sun?”
Sigyn nodded once, then stopped when her vision swam, and then felt a fool because Loki could not see her.
“It is, husband. We are free.”
With a note of reverence in his tone, Loki said, “You wondrous creature. What did you do?”
The impossible. Somehow, she had done what was supposed to be impossible.
“I will tell you later.”
AO3
#sigyn#logyn#written by me#story: the forgotten mothers#does loki/sigyn/boda have a couple name?#anyway. yes. i'm writing sigyn again.#originally written in 2020 for NaNo and i only just now got back around to messing with it
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I haven't posted directly on tumblr in years but for a small update, I just finished my third year of NaNoWriMo in a row working on the same book (I did just over 60,000 words this year on the second draft of it, after doing the first draft entirely in 2020) ^^
It's finally getting rly close to a point I'll be happy to share it for the first time, which I'm very nervous and very excited about
#it's a gay science fantasy heist story with a shapeshifting con artist a long-lost princess and a bunch of fun characters#given that I've wanted to be a writer since I was like 10#its been the most wonderful thing finishing my first book in 2020 and continuing to make it better#(also I realised halfway thru this year it is actually 2 books)#so I guess I wrote my first two books in 2020 which is an amazing accomplishment to me c:#I hope all my writer friends and neighbours have/are having a great nano this year <3
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okay so, it's already August and I realized I have to book my fall vacation if I want to have one. original plan was to triangulate the exact time in which I can cause maximum pain to my coworkers, but no one will tell me when that is and my psychic powers are failing :/
Sooooo I've triangulated the best time to take off as the 10th - 18th of October. There's Canadian Thanksgiving on the 9th (planning your vacation around stats so you get bonus days off is Primo Adulting), and I'd also have my mom's birthday off so we could do something fun. And I think that'll be the sweet spot where we usually have our very short fall, so it'll be chilly enough to do lots of cooking and baking but not so chilly/such bad weather that I can't go for a hike/drive. (If it's one of the years where we have an extremely late summer or early winter I will just. Die. Especially if it insists on being 20+ C). I could also take the 3rd/half of the last week of October off, which might be more ideal weather-wise and spooky-enjoyment-wise, but I'd get one less day bc there's no stat to align my time off with.
Anyway sorry this post has no purpose other than I'm scared to book my vacation bc I don't want to use up my vacation days 😭 but also I really want to book it so I have something to look forward to...
#i also kinda wanted Halloween off but i realized it falls on a work from home day anyway#so i can still make slow cooker chilli or whatever and watch horror movies and be chill#also i won't have a week off during nanowrimo but. i haven't won nano since 2020 anyway and I don't think 'not enough writing time' is the#problem anymore. more like 'not enough motivation' or 'not enough ideas' lmao#anyway aaaaggghhhh decisions decisions#why can't i be like my aunt and get like 2 full months of vacation time. i need to be an independent contractor for the govt#(part of the reason she gets so much time is just A Good Job but also she's non-union but there IS a union in her workplace so...#... they got really good raises for their employees. but rhe govt funding didn't stretch to raises for non-union employees...#so the compromise was non-union employees get a ridiculous amount of vacation/personal days#anyway in conclusion a) bookin vacation time hard and b) unions are good for everyone actually
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I finally broke 70k on my original novel! Now probably 30k to 40k to go! Lol
Trying to be happy with the progress and push aside that it is my 2020 Nano and has barely been touched since then.
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Took a break from writing my absolute Magnum Opus of a fanfic for about 10 months, then decided to read/notate for revisions the other week out of nowhere. Just finished reading my beloved unfinished 600k+ behemoth and boy. Sure do hope I can get back into the flow of it quickly cause there is still. So much to add.
#max mumbles#I started it during NaNo 2020 for reference#still gotta finish up the last of it then go back and add or complete scenes I skipped#probably gonna let it breathe for a little while after that then do another annotation read through for revisions#I think after that I'll kinda have to just throw it out there since I've already spent a wild amount of time on it#genuinely don't expect to be done with this thing for at least another year due to The Way I Am#Cherry on top is it's for The Hobbit so I doubt many people are gonna see let alone read it since popularity is way past its hayday#so this is PRETTY MUCH JUST FOR ME#would love if people would read and like it but im bein realistic yknow#constantly plagued by the feral biting urge to talk about it but got no one to ramble about it to
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Dr. Zayn Asghar is the inventor of the nano-ant swarm!
#ant-man#zayn asghar#nano-ant swarm#the future#time travel#al ewing#tom reilly#marvel comics#comics#2020s comics
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90% sure it’s another Hbtw Nano year b/c i’m not interested in or thinking abt anything else right now, fully in 24/7 hbtw brain mode, But i’m also at what i would charitably call the Beginning of a complete overhaul of any’s personal lore and motivations / the entire rhea situation, which means huge changes to the entire first arc (again) which i severely doubt will be anywhere near settled by nov @_@;; also recently started thinking about why the hell godseams as a power system work the way they do in literally any capacity + may have to fix that before I move on anywhere (++ I think it’s the cornerstone of the problem I’ve been kind of circling since last year wrt wanting the deities to be more present on earth than they currently can be, but also if that’s true then iloilo’s plan&the entire ‘correct century’ changes nothing/io has nowhere to go back to, so the simple solution doesn’t work) … never satisfied ever lol I think it’ll just be Hbtw Sea So Deep Arc (But Slightly Different This Time) for nano every year for the rest of my life at the point (-﹏-。)
#2014 and 2018 were my two Miracle Novel years but i’m not even asking for a time THAT good again#just would like to write 50k words that include plot points I actually care abt#seems like it should be an easy task. and yet#bbbbbbbb i’ve been thinking abt dg a lot recently since it’s I Can Fix Her season and like. definitely can not go back there again BUT#it’s still so infuriating that that book is structured the way it is for no reason when it’s very very obvious from rereading everything#*Surrounding it in notes &c. that the main appeal of the plot is that we know dale’s secret but not saya’s…?#daydreaming of a draft that leans into the devil king memories plot from the beginning bc that was the whole point of his character…#anyways though we’re not doing that so it’s beside the point. putting it down asap#what we Are doing is returning to the stupid fake godspeaker plot that I thought I’d put to bed permanently circa 2020#but I guess that’s what rhea is abt all along. In A Way. a [usurped position] …#txt#nano tag#anyways anyways. feeling very put-upon abt this entirely self-inflicted situation bye
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i’m going to do the most fucked up evil attempt at nanowrimo ever
#actually that’s false bc in 2020 my nano novel eventually just turned into my 50k word vent diary#and it does Not get more evil that that#txt
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#I'm going to be mega annoying and self boost#I'm currently (very slowly) uploading two of my old novels in audiobook form to youtube#they aren't teen lit despite my art style#the teenage characters in one of the books are all adults by the end of the book#and they're in a series where I actually finished more than one book#the other book which I have a feeling will be more popular was my vampire hunter/demon slayer Romantics/Victoria fan fic#it's basically Romantics/Victoria the tv show fan fiction#but it was my 2020 nano project#also that is me doing all the voices#and I made all the art (or edited it in photoshop)#b. h. avondale#I rethought about it and I'm pretty sure that even though my stuff is fucked up a bit that it's less fucked up than some teen lit I read#so it's not 18+ any more#I thought it would be bad but I've read worse in teen lit and classic lit so I'm guessing it's probably fine?#b. h. avondale is my penname it's not my real name!#youtube#lgbt lit#historic fiction#current releases#audiobook#this is one of several side projects#and you bet your ass that I'm going to eventually do Matilda's story too once I untangle it#she's still a mess but not in a dress- a mess in a fine vest and trousers I think#both those stories on the channel have bipolar leads in the stories#actually bipolar#my chatter#my art#my voice#the veery family saga#to be the hunter or the hunted
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I realized I haven't posted about my WIPs in ages so I should uh, probably do that at some point again. So.
Main WIP: Finding Magic
It's a High Fantasy story, and I'm currently working on its 4th draft! Once that's done I'll ask a friend to read it, incorporate the feedback, ask other friends twice more and maybe then I can start trying to get it published?? Feels unreal but here we are. Story follows Runa and Laith who, after getting a strange letter from Laith's grandpa, leave their home village and go looking for him, accompanied by a Duskian (regarded as Evil, I used to have just named them demons and still need a new German name for them lmao), a unicorn, and a dog.
Seldnacs
Seldnacs are an open species by FelonDog over on dA, but they're original enough I'm putting them here - They're getting mostly short stories, but will pop up every now and then.
Started but currently on kinda sorta hiatus
Changes: This one, along FM, was one of my first stories and I definitely want to finish it eventually... Bear with me because you'll be able to tell it started when I was a teen lmao. It's kinda sci fi-esque, the story starts with a strange laboratory experimenting on mostly teens and children by adding animal DNA to theirs, basically creating beastfolk, just that it often isn't as pretty as most fantasy beastfolk. The characters eventually decide to try and fight/escape, leading to them having to figure out how to survive now that they look Like That.
Rainbow VN: An Urban Fantasy Visual Novel/Dating Game; it'll have six different characters, and the plan is that every character gets a Get To Know route followed by a route split into Romance, Friendship, and Supernatural routes. Quite a bit has been written for a NaNo once, but I gotta re-plan a lot of it.
Unnamed Horror WIP: Another former NaNo WIP, its first draft is pretty much finished but it'll need a lot of editing. It follows two kids whose trip to the local woods turns south when they end up somewhere very, very far away from home...
Solarpunk WLW WIP: Started for last year's NaNo, though I actually had to give up that year 😔 It has, as the WIP title suggests, a Solarpunk setting (futuristic but very hopeful, lots of Green Tech, etc), the protags are two older ladies (70s-80s) who meet and fall in love.
Fallen or Loyal: After humankind got sapience, the Heavenly Host split into the Loyalists, who want to follow God's Plan and lead humans back into Safety, and the Fallen, who believe that humans' free will is more important than safety. I've already written quite a bit, but I'll probably have to re-plan a lot of it and figure out where I wanna go.
I've been rotating these in my brain
Unwanted Transformation: It definitely needs a better title lmao, set in the same world as Finding Magic; a young woman got cursed by a Duskian to be in a dog's body for reasons she doesn't know, and she's trying to get a young Orc guy to help her a) track down the Duskian and make him explain, and b) get back to her friends and girlfriend.
Dracula Sequel: I may have Dracula Daily Brainrot, and a Vampire OC lying around with no story to be. I'll hold off on actually starting until DD is finished (vampire was originally a Van Helsing OC, but I want the story to follow the OG book more closely), but it'll be about revenge; a while after the happenings of Dracula, one of Drac's "children" (biological from before he was a vampire? Someone he turned? Idk yet) decides she's finally ready to get revenge on the people who killed her father.
Hyenas: I just really like Xenofiction and love hyenas; the story will probably follow a young spotted hyena who's just left their pack and has to join a new one, working their way up from the bottom, but naturally, there's now things threatening her new pack. I'm considering adding some fantasy elements (like, say, the yeens having magic), and/or including more hyena species aside from Spotted Hyena.
Rebels with a Cause: In a cyberpunk dystopia setting, a ragtag group of misfits tries to take the unjust government apart. Still gotta figure out a lot about what said government is actually like... Doing... Tho.
#long post#my wips#writeblr#writerblr#I have some more on Indefinite Hiatus but the post is long enough as is#finding magic#changes#Seldnacs#rebels with a cause#rainbow#rainbow vn#NaNo 2020#nano 2020 project#nano 2021#Nano 2021 project#dunno how to do read more on mobile sorry mates
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“Brand safety” killed Jezebel
I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.
Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter
But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/
Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/
Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:
https://text.npr.org/734303135
The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars
Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers
But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/
I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas
Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/
(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):
https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/
Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html
The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.
Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.
Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:
https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad
Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.
Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:
https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/
Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:
https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards
This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.
But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":
https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/
More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":
https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look
Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."
This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/
But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:
https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/
A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/
This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:
https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201
G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944
Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,
It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.
When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.
This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.
As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."
The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety
#pluralistic#jezebel#publishing#brand safety#adjacency#adtech#media theory#censorship#surveillance advertising#dynamic ad placement#quackspeak#Global Alliance for Responsible Media#garm#debated sensitive social issue#Third Party Safety and suitability#schizmogenesis#woke capitalism#duckspeak
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When Is a Small Press a Good Fit?
When it comes to publishing, many writers will think about big publishers first. However, there are a lot of different publishing options out there to explore. NaNo participant and author, Clara Ward, talks about their experience publishing with a small press and gives you questions to consider while you think through your publishing options!
NaNoWriMo inspired me to write. Signing with a small press gave me the support I needed to publish a book I love.
I’d published books before—starting with NaNoWriMo sponsor deals in the early days of online publishing—but I never had the right skill set to promote those books. As a result, they never truly found their audience.
In November of 2020, I poured my heart into a genre-blurring near-future tale of sailing across the Pacific and building a neurodiverse, queer, and possibly magical chosen family. In 2021, I titled it Be the Sea and asked myself: What am I going to do with that?
1. Are you looking for fame or family?
Small presses are as varied as the people who form them. If you read widely, you may already have a treasured book on your shelf from your publisher-to-be. Try asking NaNoWriMo friends who share your interests if they’ve discovered any surprising or emerging sources for great reads. (At the very least, you may find books you’ll love in unexpected places!)
Admittedly, a small press doesn’t have a fortune to spend on paving your path to fame. But I have never felt as seen as when my soon-to-be publisher, E.D.E. Bell at Atthis Arts, wrote back, “I’m really in love with what you are doing and would like to talk about it.”
2. Do you have the bandwidth for working with others?
Even with the most supportive small press, you may have to push outside your comfort zone. I know authors who love the absolute control and freedom of self-publishing. For a time, I felt very comfortable just posting my NaNoWriMo fanfiction novels on Archive of Our Own. At most, I had one or two beta readers to offer feedback on those works. Whereas E.D.E. told me in one of our earliest conversations that in addition to our three rounds of editing we’d need “a good number of betas” to cover the range of topics we were working on together.
I was delighted! I knew what I’d written was ambitious, and I welcomed all the feedback I could get. But it turns out, each extra person in a process adds new challenges and delays. I had to stretch my empathy as well as my publishing timeline because, to quote E.D.E. again: “It’s a lot of emotion (as well as brain cycles) to go through...” Outside perspectives will only improve your writing if you are willing to work with them, to truly listen and learn.
3. Can you handle the two-way commitment?
No form of publishing is easy. The myth that authors write while others handle business and promotion is not true at the top, and certainly not with small presses. In my experience, working with Atthis Arts was like joining a team or chosen family. Beyond certain paid tasks, such as editing and sensitivity reading, I discovered a community of authors who freely offered coaching before my first public reading, social media boosting, tips for author webpages, and an extra pair of eyes on letters requesting bookshop readings or other events. While not all small presses work the same way, this supportive culture proved to be an excellent fit for me. Naturally, I wanted to give back whenever possible.
Small presses can only succeed with community. This month, as I promote the launch of Be the Sea at bookshops in Mountain View, Davis, and Sacramento, I will be introducing many Californians to my Michigan-based small publisher, Atthis Arts. When I stand up as a panelist at Norwescon in Washington state or at various science, library, or Pride events later in the year, I’ll be promoting more than Be the Sea by Clara Ward. I’ll give back by sharing my appreciation for small presses, the supportive and inclusive practices they can normalize, and the opportunities they open up for future writers and readers.
Clara Ward lives in Silicon Valley on the border between reality and speculative fiction. Their latest novel, Be the Sea, features a near-future ocean voyage, chosen family, and sea creature perspectives, while delving into our oceans, our selves, and how all futures intertwine. Their short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Decoded Pride, Small Wonders, and as a postcard from Thinking Ink Press. When not using words to teach or tell stories, Clara uses wood, fiber, and glass to make practical or completely impractical objects. More of their words along with crafted creations can be found at: https://clarawardauthor.wordpress.com
Photo by Hümâ H. Yardım on Unsplash
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