#EscapingtheVoid

[adornesibley]

What's an August: A Newsletter

Reading: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, Rare Birds by L.B. Hazelthorn, and A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

Finished Reading: The Reddening by Adam L.G. Nevill, Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, The End and Everything Before it by Finegan Kruckemeyer, A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher 

Podcast: N/A

Playing: Lunacid (PC), and Salt and Sanctuary (PS4/PS5)

Making: A .°˖✧website✧˖°.

Writing: Project E

Word Count: 164030

TLDR: RAGE, memes, capitalism sucking the fun out of fun, breaking away from socials, the magic of the INDIE WEB, I’ve got a website :3

Stop wasting beautiful stories on memes. I get so mad whenever I see a meme with a pitch for a story… and it’s brilliant… I have many memes (which now have permanent residence in my brain) which I am thinking of while writing this. I wanted to share some… Which meant searching for them and now I have more that exist and it hurts. It hurts for two main reasons. One is a me problem I should maybe look at deeper and one is a societal problem which can only be fixed by the death of the patriarchy… I’ll try to bring both down.

Number one is that I do not feel that a meme is a fully-fledged art form and that something is less valuable in meme form. How dare I, right? Bring out the guillotine. I guess, my personal art form is long-form storytelling and so I think about how these story ideas could fit into my own art form and that would be so cool, and I want to write them. And I can’t… which brings us to Number B.

Anyone who might want to write a novel or other fully published work based on these ideas, or inspired by it will likely not be able to. But first, let's take a look at the post which started me thinking about this right now.

The post in question:

So, Number B reason… Coming from me, this is going to be a real shocker, Capitalism. If you’re a storyteller and want to not… y’know, starve to death, you need to be concerned with the origin and claims to the core concept of a story. If you want to make a story based on a prompt like this, or a meme you saw, you can absolutely do so! However, if you do, and sell that story, and then the person who originally made this idea finds out… you could A. lose your publishing deal as you did not have the right to license this story and/ or B. get sued by the person whose idea it was.

This is bullshit.

We should be and feel free to share stories, ideas, and story ideas and art as freely as we care to. We should have a society where storytelling is being done by the vast majority, not the lucky few. We should be able to burn these brilliant story ideas on the pyre of memes/ communal storytelling. We should be able to make art without having to resort to squeezing every last Schrute Buck from your IPs cold corpse. Of course we all can make art for the masses and give it freely… but food is nice, so is paying rent, or a mortgage. And it is hard to be an art faerie, flitting about creating art like you were Magi Lune or Christa from Ferngully, art springing from your very presence on this fertile Earth… But you’ll have to squeeze it in, somewhere between your night shift at the Omega Mart and your 6am spin class and picking/dropping off children and of course there is the dishes to do. We must not forget the dishes! I have big feelings. 

Alright, I’m good now. Needed to get that off my chest.

Have I mentioned that I have a Patreon?

On a lighter note, and without a paywall: I’ve been making a website! I watched the following video on the “Indie Web” and got inspired to create my own Neocities website. I’ve become a supporter so I can include extra file types on my website and not be as concerned about the upper limit of how much space my website can take up.

I’ll be uploading the newsletters there under Tidings, as well as uploading art that I’ve made, and TTRPG stuffs, including the Umbrulexicon as I keep making them. I’m also going to be uploading writing projects there which will not be uploaded elsewhere. So there’s plenty to love over there~

Probably, WARNING FOR EPILEPSY!!!!!!!!:

Support weird. Support your local artist and help them bring down Capitalism.