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krysmcscience · 2 years ago

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So, I have to say first off that, as a general rule, asking for money is my Number One biggest fear, particularly if it's coming from strangers. However, my mental health is also plummeting towards rock bottom with every passing day, stuck as I've been in this small southern USA town for almost nine years now. So, I figure, why not come to a compromise before I lose my marbles entirely? :D

For every donation, I will spend a minute for every dollar drawing whatever it is that you, the generous donor, wants me to draw.

"But wait!" you might exclaim, before I'm sure you would go on to wonder, "What if I only donate a dollar? How great could a one minute drawing possibly be?!" Well, certainly not perfect or even very detailed, but I can tell you this much: Every sketch in the fundraiser image took me between a minute to three apiece, and that’s only because I got finicky with some of them. ;) Here’s some better examples of what I can do with that time:

"Not bad, but do you actually have the time for this?" you might also be wondering. Probably not if the extremely unlikely occurs and this goes viral, but the moment I hit my goal, I'll be able to quit my job. Which tends to have the effect of freeing up time!

"Why do you want to leave the South so badly?" you ask? Ohhhhoho, a whole host of reasons, my friend! Let's get into those real quick:

I am from the Nevadan desert, and the South's swampy humidity makes me feel like I am constantly drowning in the devil's buttcheeks. :)

I need peace and quiet to be able to work on my (many) novels, and to not lose my mind in general, and yet my various neighbors seem to think that noise is the Best Thing Ever! If there's not a muscle car or motorcycle idling somewhere very close by - and vibrating through the foundation straight into my eardrums - there's a screaming competition, an involved house renovation, totally random fireworks for several hours somehow despite it being nowhere near a holiday, or literally an entire day or more of the most repetitive two-note bass music you could possibly imagine! And that last thing happens on an almost weekly basis!!! D8

Having been raised in Las Vegas, I am used to city folk, who tend to mind their own business and ignore everything else, and small town folk apparently Do Not Like That! All of my coworkers seem to be under the impression that I am obligated to share my every last life detail with them, and to acknowledge them every single time I pass within five feet of them, and to talk with them whenever they want me to regardless of how I'm feeling at the time, or else I must be "rude" and "probably the worst"? And I am So Tired of it. :D

It is beyond uncomfortable having to walk on eggshells around a bunch of people whose worldviews barely even count me as being a person, especially when that bunch of people happens to be dwarfed by the number of guns they own. I would love to be able to just be myself without having to worry that a bigot will shoot me, thanks. :]

I don't like being stuck in one place for too long, and yet I have been stuck here for Nine Literal Years, so I'm halfway convinced that this town is a metaphysical trap or something, or else I'd have been able to leave it on my own by now. I have never had this kind of trouble leaving a place before! All kinds of inconveniences and catastrophes have kept on popping up over the years to force me to stay longer, though, and uhhhh I kinda don't like that. It's spooky. :(

Speaking of spooky, maybe I'm imagining it, but I'm pretty sure that none of my neighbors have aged in the entire time I've been here??? Cuz like, one of the kids next door was a toddler when I first moved in, and is still a toddler now? Soooo, that's kinda spooky, too. Do Not Like. D:

Literally no one in the food service industry here knows how to get my orders right for some reason! I can order the simplest thing and they will still mess up my food, and only my food, guaranteed, almost every single time. HOW??? D:<

That last one probably seems out of place after Possible Paranormal Shenanigans, but that's fine. Is that also a reason to leave? Sure, why not. Anything can be a reason to leave, because I say so. :3c

It's the SOUTH, what else needs to be said here??? >:\

Moving on! "How do I get a drawing from you after I donate?" you ask? Easy-peasy. If you donate via my ko-fi page, you can simply leave me a message with your donation telling me what you want me to draw for you, or – if you want something a little more complicated or specific, like, say, an original character of yours – contact me at [email protected] and attach any relevant image references or descriptions of what you’d like to have drawn. The same goes for if you donate via my Paypal. Once you do that, I'll get to work on your drawing as soon as I can! The more donations there are, the longer it may take for you to receive it, but I can assure you that I will get it done for you within a more or less respectable timeframe.

"I'd like to know what that timeframe is first," you might be saying, quite reasonably, because I'd like to know, too! Unfortunately, I can't really predict how this exercise will go, given that I still have to work a full-time job right now, but I will be drawing on a 'first come first serve' basis, so if donations are slow, you can probably expect to have your drawing either within the day, or up to three days after. If donations come in quickly, though, all bets are off, because I could finish your drawing the same day, or up to two weeks later! But regardless of how long it takes overall, should I reach my goal, I fully intend to have everything drawn within a month after donations are closed. Even if it does take longer, no matter what, you absolutely will get a drawing from me if you donate.

"You aren't just going to do sketches for a big donation, are you?" some potentially very generous people might ask, to which I say, certainly not! The larger the donation, the more time I can spend on making your drawing look beautiful for you. That could involve anything from a cleaner sketch, to linework, all the way up to coloring, shading, and possibly even a background! It all depends on what you want me to draw, and what I'm able to do with the time you give me. ^-^

"Is there anything you won't draw?" you might like to know. Obviously, NSFW stuff is off the table - think PG-13 at worst. I also won't draw anything that's hateful of others, or anything that supports hate, because that's just not how I roll. "But then," you might add, "how do you roll, artistically speaking?" Perhaps obviously, my wheelhouse is cartoons and - to a lesser degree - anime, specializing in organic and (mostly) human characters, but if you want me to step outside my creative box, I will gladly give it a shot and do my very best! Just please don't ask me to draw realism, please, please, for both our sakes, just Don't. Neither of us will like the result. I will do it, but it will be All Kinds Of Awful. O_O

"Can I just donate without getting a drawing?" asks No One, because there is No One who doesn't like getting stuff drawn for them. And in response to No One, I fling out the link to my GoFundMe and then promptly go to hide in a corner, completely terrified of getting something for nothing - for reasons I can only guess at, but which a psychiatrist would probably pay me over just to have the sheer challenge of trying to figure them out. In fact, I am so terrified of this concept that I am going to go hide in that corner For Real now, and end this post.

Byeeeee

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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 3 years ago

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Canary, Part 6

First

Tim had been watching her out of the corner of his eyes for a long time. It wasn’t that he was trying to be creepy or anything, he just… didn’t know why she was there. It didn’t make sense. She was relatively low on funds according to what he and Oracle had dredged up, and even Tim in all his billionaire-ness recognized that this place was more expensive than average…

So, why had she come? It wasn’t even close to the motel she was staying at.

The vaguely paranoid -- cautious, he was cautious -- part of him worried that she had somehow known he was there, but there was no way she should have been able to know that. Hell, he hadn’t known he was going to this particular cafe until he’d gotten to work and realized that there were now cameras in the breakroom and his office to make sure he didn’t drink too much.

But, really, it seemed like she was just using the free wifi that the cafe provided to write up a resume.

He relaxed and sunk back in his chair with his laptop while he did his work.

… he didn’t get to work for long.

He picked up on the slight gravel of someone putting on a voice with ease. It was high and sweet, a voice he commonly heard from customer service workers. He chanced a look back at the barista and frowned when he saw her on her phone. Not her, then.

He looked around the tiny coffee shop and cringed a little when he realized what was going on. Shady guy approaches a woman who’s drinking coffee alone? Yeah, that’s never a good thing.

He pushed his laptop into his bag quickly, slung it over his shoulders, put the cap back on his coffee cup so the guy wouldn’t be able to tell that Tim had been there for a while, and rushed over.

He rested his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Hey, bud, she said no.”

Tim watched both of them tense and their gazes were pulled to him in an instant.

Marinette glanced him up and down once. He watched her eyes lock onto his coffee cup for a second and he carefully turned his hand a little so she could see the name.

She smiled. “You’re late, Timmy. Don’t tell me you got caught up in another meeting?”

He shrugged innocently. “You know how it is.” Then, he split into a grin. “Maybe I should be the one that’s upset, though. Can’t believe you didn’t save me a spot.”

“I tried!” She whined. “He insisted!”

The man chuckled awkwardly. “I see. I’m sorry, I thought you were alone.”

She rolled her eyes. “I told you I wasn’t. Can you move, though?”

“Actually,” Tim said, because he didn’t want to sit in the window where Duke might happen to see him while on patrols. “There’s a free table back this way.”

Marinette tipped her head to the side a little before nodding. “Sure.”

She closed her laptop with a snap, gathered her things into her bag, and followed him back to his table.

That should have been the end of it. Unfortunately, the guy was still watching them. It looked like they weren’t going to be able to do work for a while if they wanted to keep up the pretense that they were friends.

She seemed to know it, too, because she sighed and rested her head on her hand with a small frown. “Guess we have to talk.”

He huffed. “Don’t have to sound so upset about it.”

“Alright. Fine.”

“Not sounding much more excited.”

She rolled her eyes and then brought a bright smile to her face. “Sure, Timmy, sounds great! Can’t wait to have a super fun conversation with you!”

“... nevermind. That’s weird. Why did that almost convince me? I knew it was fake.”

She let herself lean back in her chair, her face falling back to a slightly smug grin. “I’m Parisian,” she said simply.

Yeah. That made sense. Every Parisian Tim had had the (dis?)pleasure of meeting had had an almost unnerving amount of control over the way they presented their emotions.

He snickered. “Why the hell would you move here, then?”

She rolled her eyes. “Our psychopath was so boring. Like, dude, we get it, your wife died or whatever, that sounds like a you problem. Now, a guy deciding to become a jewel thief purely for the gimmick? Way more interesting.”

“Moral grayness is so twenty years ago,” Tim joked.

“Exactly! Give me dumbasses who are evil purely to be evil and good to be good!”

He grinned. “I can see why you like Harry Potter.”

She blinked.

He motioned to her cup. Scrawled across it in the barista’s messy handwriting was ‘He Who Must Not Be Named’.

She relaxed a little, grinning. “I just finished the books so I’m a bit obsessed. Also, every time I tell them that my name is Marinette they misspell it.”

“Don’t feel too bad, baristas are just like that. Heck, they’ve misspelled my name before.”

“... your name is Tim.”

“They spelled it with a y.”

“... why?”

“Yes. Exactly. A y.”

She giggled a little. “No, I mean why would they do that?”

“Oh. No clue. I hope they were just messing with me.”

The barista was wiping down the tables. It was nearing closing time and Marinette was feeling more and more sorry for the poor workers the longer they stayed. She knew that, when she had used to work at the bakery, she had always especially hated customers that were there around closing time.

Only two tables remained occupied.

She sighed when she glanced over and saw the guy was still there.

Oh well.

She looked over at Tim. “Care to walk me a few blocks in a random direction to see if we can get rid of him?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“‘Certainly’? I may not be super great with American customs yet but even I know that’s weird,” she teased.

He huffed a little. “Listen.”

“I’m listening.”

His nose scrunched. “No, wait, you weren’t supposed to call me out on the fact that I didn’t have an excuse.”

“Oh. Okay, we can try again.”

“Alright.” He cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said again, this time in a tone that mocked the one he’d said it in the first time.

Convenient. She was intent on mocking him, too: “I’m listening.”

“You’re the worst,” he complained.

She laughed. “I am so not. Joker exists.”

“You’re worse than him,” he said in his most serious voice.

She laughed harder. “No one is worse than him.”

He grinned. “I thought you liked people that were evil purely for being evil.”

“But he’s not,” she argued. “The man just decided one day that he liked the weird guy who dressed like a bat and figured that the best way to get that guy’s attention was to murder people.”

“Gotta admit, it works,” said Tim.

She shrugged, grinning. “Yeah, it does. Makes me wonder what would happen if the Big Bad Bat didn’t come, though.”

He tipped his head to the side slightly and then shrugged. “I don’t know, actually. He usually stops it in time.”

“I think he’d freak out.”

“Absolutely.”

She grinned and stretched lazily, head tipping back.

“He’s still following us, isn’t he?” Asked Tim.

“Yep,” she said, popping the ‘p’.

He groaned a little. “Great. Looks like we’re heading to the library.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You go to libraries? You could probably buy every ebook in existence and have a few billion left over.”

“One of my sisters works there, I can ask her to get rid of the guy,” he explained. “But I like libraries. There’s something quaint about them.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, it’s nice to see how the common folk live sometimes.”

He returned her eye roll. “Not like that. I spend a lot of time staring at screens, I have a special appreciation for regular old books.”

“That’s nice. I wish I had time to sit down with a physical copy like that.”

“You see, I have this genius strategy for making time: not taking care of myself.”

“Go on, this is intriguing.”

“Well, eating and sleeping, right? Everyone thinks they’re totally necessary things otherwise you’d die or whatever. But, listen, that’s just a hoax made up by the government to perpetuate capitalism.”

She nodded eagerly. “Totally totally totally. What’s your solution?”

“Coffee communism.”

“Yes, you should use your rich boy money to lobby Congress.”

He grinned. “I totally should. But I can’t run it by my family.”

“No way! You never know who's capitalist anymore, they could be plants placed by the sleep industry to ensure that you don’t go through with it.”

He gasped. “No! You think? My own family?!”

She nodded grimly. “It’s always the ones closest to you that betray you.”

And then he broke character, snickering behind his hand. She beamed.

They reached the library and he smiled as he held the door open for her. He asked her to wait while he talked to his sister and she waved him off casually, telling him to take his time.

She pulled out her phone and pressed her lips together thinly as she made a note to head over later that night to give the man -- Henry -- his money. She’d give him a little tip because, for a moment there, she’d almost forgotten that they were just acting. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to purposely trigger herself for the sake of believability but, hey, if she was going to try and dupe one of the smartest businessmen alive into talking to her, she needed to go all out.

Speaking of Tim, she updated the file of Tim’s favorite cafes plus the probabilities of him visiting each one. It was for his oldest brother, Richie Wayne. She didn’t know why Richie was the one to ask for it seeing as he spent most of his time in Bludhaven and therefore likely wouldn’t find much use in it, but no one ever really knew why Richie Wayne did anything. The man famously had almost as much cotton between his ears as his father.

But, Richie Wayne was also just as rich as his father, so… she’d give him his file later that night after checking her math with her favorite graphing calculator.

A redhead in a wheelchair rolled past Marinette and she absently held the door open for her, only to be surprised when she cursed out Henry.

She watched as Henry held his hands up and started backing away from the woman in the wheelchair, and then he ran down the nearest alley.

(… she’d give Henry a bigger tip. The man had just wanted a tiny side job to help pay for his wife and kids that wasn’t being a henchman, he didn’t deserve this.)

She opened the door for the woman on her way back inside and mumbled her thanks. The woman nodded once and continued on her way.

Marinette leaned back against the wall again and scrolled through Twitter as she waited for Tim to reappear. Apparently, Poison Ivy was already back in Arkham. Something about an intern at the botanical gardens watering plants wrong. Wild.

Marinette felt someone sidle up beside her and, after a quick glance confirmed that it was Tim, pocketed her phone.

He smiled at her, a tote bag over his shoulder.

“Did you go grocery shopping while I wasn’t looking, somehow?”

He hesitated before holding it out to her. “It’s the French dubs of the Harry Potter movies.”

She blinked as the bag was thrust into her hands and looked down at it. Yep, that was Harry Potter in French. She also, vaguely, noted the tiny slip of paper his phone number scrawled across it.

She slung the bag over her shoulder.

“I’m never going to return these. You’re going to rack up so much debt.”

~~~

NightwingsAss9384: does anyone know why nightwing and canary hate each other?

ScareCrane: She stabbed Batman once on accident and somehow got away with blaming it on him

Daylightwing: She refuses to let B adopt her.

RiddleMeThis: They think it’s funny when their stans fight.

SignalOfficial: They said ‘I’m the only flippy bitch allowed in New Jersey’ and have been fighting ever since

Yummmmmm: He has to or else Robin will get jealous because he’s the only stabby sibling allowed

Oracle: They’re fighting over who gets to change their name to ‘The Dodo’ first.

DeadHood: Nightwing is jealous that Canary was the first one of us to think to have a full-on bird mask.

TheBetterCanary: every time i go into the batfam tag to try and avoid them all i see is his fancams

SpoilerAlert: they’re both convinced that they’re the hottest bachelor/bachelorette in gotham

NightwingsAss9384: im beginning to think no ones going to tell me.

BlackBat: :)

~~~~~

Perma taglist: @nathleigh @peachmuses

Canary taglist: @jayjayspixiepop @unoriginalmess @miraculousfanfic127 @probably-a-hologram @iloontjeboontje

#if i did a kofi would anyone donate #probably not #canary #maribat #timmari #timari #timinette #shutterbug #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug #tim drake #red robin

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iinuyashas · 4 years ago

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After today’s episode I just wanted to share some interesting google searches in regards to this idea that anime industry only cares about the Japanese fandom (not true) and why potentially we need be looking closer at what RT doesn’t say.

Anime industry only cares about Japanese revenue:

I would hope folks wouldn’t actually believe this because it just sounds SO silly but lets get into it, shall we?

“Japanese anime industry earning more money than ever, almost half of it from outside Japan”

I’m sure most people who have been an avid anime fan will notice how mainstream anime has become in the last couple of years. When I was a kid anime was no where near as popular as it is today and I think we have streaming services to thank for that.

For anime adaptations we know the animators themselves barely make any money and depending on the manga artist contract they could very easily not see much of the revenue from anime adaptations.

To tell the naked truth, regardless of how many people watch the film or how much the gross earnings are, not a single yen goes to the author. We are only paid an upfront license fee. — Hideaki Sorachi (Gintama Volume 51)

I think it’s interesting to see the author of Gintama talk so openly about money especially when Sunrise is the studio who produces Gintama. It seems most authors make their money from royalties.

This article goes into more detail about how anime is produced and who fronts the money and how the money gets distributed when it comes to anime production

At the end of the day the anime industry makes A LOT of money. It would be silly for any industry to “ignore” half of it’s revenue source. Anime companies only care about one thing and one thing only - Money.

Why I think we should pay attention to what RT doesn’t say about S*ssrin

I just want to preface this with - I’m not Japanese and I’m definitely not claiming to be an expert on Japanese culture BUT one thing I’ve always found interesting when it comes to communication differences between Americans and Japanese is indirect communication vs direct communication.

Americans (to no ones surprise) are very direct. We ask a question and expect a direct answer. However, from what I’ve read and seen on YouTube is that being polite and “saving face” is very important in Japanese communication

Refusals: The cultural preoccupation with saving face and being polite means that the Japanese may wish to avoid giving a flat “no” or negative response—even when they don’t agree with you. Therefore, focus on hints of hesitation. Listen closely to what they say, but also pay careful attention to what they don’t say and implicitly mean. It’s a good idea to clarify and double check your understanding.

I think back to that non answer RT gave in that Chinese interview about S*ssrin, and while she didn’t say anything against it - she certainly didn’t say a strong yes for it, either.

Similarly, Japanese may be surprised to hear Americans say "No" often because Japanese tend not to say "No." We usually express our reluctance to accept an offer by subtle facial and verbal expressions because we want to avoid making people feel bad by refusing directly.

On the other hand, Japanese tend to be more comfortable with indirect communication. They prefer to use more roundabout ways of expressing opinions, especially negative ones, in order to avoid embarrassment or conflict. Japanese are well aware that use of the word “difficult” about an idea means “it will not work.”

Here is a YouTube video titled Difficulties of Communicating with Japanese People

At the end of the day S*ssrin always had the chance of becoming canon. I also understand people’s frustrations. I don’t want this pairing to become canon and I will be severely disappointed if it turns out to be endgame. However, the shippers have been screaming canon from the very beginning. We knew Rin would show up at some point - until we have official confirmation that she is the mother lets all just try and take a deep breath. I’ve been watching HNY with the idea that Rin isn’t even an option - even if she is an “appropriate” age within the timeline I don’t think it would be received well AT ALL and the fact that we’ve seen so much merch of child Rin, she started the series off as a child and “girl who adores Sesshomaru” is a very weird way to introduce someone's “wife”, but that's just me. I’m still prepared for worst case scenario but I feel pretty confident she isn’t the mother.

#japanese culture #japanese communication #anime industry #just some casual google research #antisessrin #anti sessrin

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livingdeadinsideyourhead · 4 years ago

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Free Music in a Capitalist Society - Iggy Pop's Keynote Speech Transcript

Hi, I'm Iggy Pop. I've held a steady job at BBC 6 Music now for almost a year, which is a long time in my game. I always hated radio and the jerks who pushed that shit music into my tender mind, with rare exceptions. When I was a boy, I used to sit for hours suffering through the entire US radio top 40 waiting for that one song by The Beatles and the other one by The Kinks. Had there been anything like John Peel available in my Midwestern town I would have been thrilled. So it's an honor to be here. I understand that. I appreciate it.

Some months ago when the idea of this talk came up I thought it might be okay to talk about free music in a Capitalist society. So that's what I'm gonna try to talk about. A society in which the Capitalist system dominates all the others, and seeks their destruction when they get in its way. Since then, the shit has really hit the fan on the subject, thanks to U2 and Apple. I worked half of my life for free. I didn't really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn't making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it's not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.

As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there's gonna be a correction.

When I started The Stooges we were organized as a group of Utopian communists. All the money was held communally and we lived together while we shared the pursuit of a radical ideal. We shared all song writing, publishing and royalty credits equally – didn’t matter who wrote it - because we'd seen it on the back of a Doors album and thought it was cool, at least I did. Yeah. I thought songwriting was about the glory, I didn't know you'd get paid for it. We practiced a total immersion to try to forge a new approach which would be something of our own. Something of lasting value. Something that was going to be revealed and created and was not yet known.

We are now in the age of the schemer and the plan is always big, big, big, but it's the nature of the technology created in the service of the various schemes that the pond, while wide, is very shallow. Nobody cares about anything too deeply expect money. Running out of it, getting it. I never sincerely wanted to be rich. There is a, in the US, we have this guy “Do you sincerely wanna be rich? You can do it!” I didn’t sincerely want to be rich. I never sincerely felt like making anyone else that way. That made me a kind of a wild card in the 60's and 70's. I got into the game because it felt good to play and it felt like being free. I'm still hearing today about how my early works with The Stooges were flops. But they're still in print and they sell 45 years later, they sell. Okay, it took 20 or 25 years for the first royalties to roll in. So sue me.

Some of us who couldn't get anywhere for years kept beating our heads against the same wall to no avail. No one did that better than my friends The Ramones. They kept putting out album after album, frustrated that they weren't getting the hit. They even tried Phil Spector and his handgun. After the first couple of records, which made a big impact, they couldn't sustain the quality, but I noticed that every album had at least one great song and I thought, wow if these guys would just stop and give it a rest, society would for sure catch up to them. And that's what's happening now, but they're not around to enjoy it. I used to run into Johnny at a little rehearsal joint in New York and he'd be in a big room all alone with a Marshall stack just going "dum, dum, dum, dum, dum" all my himself. I asked him why and he said if he didn't practice doing that exactly the way he did it live he'd lose it. He was devoted and obsessive, so were Joey and Deedee. I like that. Johnny asked me one day - Iggy don't you hate Offspring and the way they're so popular with that crap they play. That should be us, they stole it from us. I told him look, some guys are born and raised to be the captain of the football team and some guys are just gonna be James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and that's the way it is. Not everybody is meant to be big. Not everybody big is any good.

I only ever wanted the money because it was symbolic of love and the best thing I ever did was to make a lifetime commitment to continue playing music no matter what, which is what I resolved to do at the age of 18. If who you are is who you are that is really hard to steal, and it can lead you in all sorts of useful directions when the road ahead of you is blocked and it will get blocked. Now I'm older and I need all the dough I can get. So I too am concerned about losing those lovely royalties, now that they've finally arrived, in the maze of the Internet. But I'm also diversifying my income, because a stream will dry up. I'm not here to complain about that, I'm here to survive it.

When I was starting out as a full time musician I was walking down the street one bright afternoon in the seedier part of my Midwestern college town. I passed a dive bar and from it emerged a portly balding pallid middle aged musician in a white tux with a drink in one hand and a guitar in the other. He was blinking in the daylight. I had a strong intuition that this was a fate to be avoided. He seemed cut off from society and resigned to an oblivious obscurity. A bar fly. An accessory to booze. So how do you engage society as an artist and get them to pay you? Well, that's a matter of art. And endurance.

To start with, I cannot stress enough the importance of study. I was lucky to work in a discount record store in Ann Arbor Michigan as a stock boy where I was exposed to a little bit of every form of music imaginable on record at the time. I listened to it all whether I liked it or not. Be curious. And I played in my high school orchestra and I learned the joy of the warm organic instruments working together in the service of a classical piece. That sticks with you forever. If anyone out there can get a chance to put an instrument and some knowledge in some kids hand, you've done a great, great thing.

Comparative information is a key to freedom. I found other people who were smarter than me. To teach me. My first pro band was a blues band called The Prime Movers and the leader Michael Erlewine was a very bright hippy beatnik with a beautifully organized record collection in library form of The Blues. I'd never really heard the Blues. That part of our American heritage was kept off the major media. It was system up, people down. No Big Bill Broonzy on BBC for us. Boy I wish! No money in it. But everything I learned from Michael's beautiful library became the building blocks for anything good I've done since. Guys like this are priceless. If you find one, follow him, or her. Get the knowledge.

Once in secondary school in the 60's some class clowns dressed up the tallest guy in school in a trench coat, shades and a fedora and rushed him in to a school dance with great hubbub proclaiming "Del Shannon is here, Del Shannon is here." And until they got to the stage we all believed them, because nobody knew what Del Shannon looked like. He was just a voice on some great records. He had no social ID. By the early 60's that had really changed with the invasion of The Beatles and The Stones. This time TV was added to the mix and print media too. So you knew who they were, or so you thought anyway. I'm mentioning this because the best way to survive the death or change of an industry is to transcend its form. You're better off with an identity of your own or maybe a few of them. Something special.

It is my own personal view having lived through it that in America The Beatles replaced our assassinated president Kennedy, who represented our hopes for a certain kind of society. Didn’t get there. And The Stones replaced our assassinated folk music which our own leaders suppressed for cultural, racial, and financial reasons. It wasn't okay with everybody to be Kennedy or Muddy Waters, but those messages could be accepted if they came through white entertainers from the parent culture. That's why they’re still around.

Years later I had the impression that Apple, the corporation, had successfully co-opted the good feelings that the average American felt about the culture of the Beatles, by kind of stealing the name of their company so I bought a little stock. Good move. 1992. Woo! But look, everybody is subject to the rip off and has to change affiliations from time to time. Even Superman and Barbie were German before America tempted them to come over. Tough luck, Nietzche.

So who owns what anyway. Or as Bob Dylan said "The relationships of ownership." That’s gates of Eden. Nobody knows for long, especially these days. Apparently when BBC radio was founded, the record companies in England wouldn't allow the BBC to play their master recordings because they thought no one would buy them for their personal use if they could hear them free on the radio. So they were really confused about what they had. They didn’t get it. And how people feel about music. ‘Cause it’s a feel thing, and it resists logic. It’s not binary code. Later when CD's came in, the retail merchants in American all panicked because they were just too damn tiny and they thought that Americans want something that looks big, like a vinyl record. Well they had a point but their solution was a kind of Frankenstein called "The Long Box." It didn't fool anybody because half of it was empty. It had a little CD in the bottom. You’d open it up and it was empty. Now we have people in the Sahara using GPS to bury huge wads of Euros under sand dunes for safe keeping. But GPS was created for military spying from the high ground, not radical banking so any sophisticated system, along with the bounty it brings, is subject to primitive hijacking.

I wanna talk about a type of entrepreneur who functions as a kind of popular music patron of the arts. It’s good to know a patron. I call him El Padron because his relationship to the artist is essentially feudal, though benign. He or she (La Padrona) if you will, is someone, usually the product of successful, enlightened parents, who owns a record company, but has had benefit of a very good education, and can see a bigger picture than a petty business person. If they like an artists’ style and it suits them, they'll support you even if you’re not a big money spinner. I can tell you, some of these powerful guys get so bored that if you are fun in the office, you’ll go places. Their ancestors, the old time record crooks just made it their business to make great, great records, but also to rip off the artist 100%, copyright, publishing, royalty splits, agency fees, you name it. If anyone complained the line was "Pay you? We worship you!" God bless Bo Diddley.

By the time I came along, there was a new brand of Padron. People like this are still around and some can help you. One was named Jack Holzman. Jack had a beautiful label called Elektra Records, they put out Judy Collins, Tim Buckley, the Doors and Love. He'd started working in his family record store, like Brian Epstein. He dressed mod and he treated us very gently. He was a civilized man. He obviously loved the arts, but what he really wanted to do was build his business - and he did. He had his own concerns, and style, and you had to serve them, and of course when he sold out, as all indies do, you were stranded culturally in the hands of a cold clumsy conglomerate. But he put us in the right studios with the right producers and he tried to get us seen in the right venues and it really helped. This is a good example of the industry.

Another good guy I met is Sir Richard Branson. I ended up serving my full term at Virgin Records having been removed from every other label. And he created a superior culture there. People were happier and nicer than the weasels at some other places. The first time he tried to sign me it didn't work out, because I had my sights set on A&M, a company I thought would help make me respectable. After all they had Sting! Richard was secretly starting his own company at the time in the US and he phoned me in my tiny flat with no furniture. He said he'd give me a longer term deal with more dough than the other guys and he was very, very polite and soft spoken. But I had just smoked a joint that day and I couldn't make a decision. So I went with the other guys who soon got sick of me. Virgin picked me up again later on the rebound. And on the cheap. Damn. My own fault.

Another kind of indie legend who is slightly more contemporary is Long Gone John of the label Sympathy for the Record Industry. Good name. John is famous with some artists for his disinterest in paying royalties. He has a very interesting music themed folk art collection – its visible online - which includes my leather jacket. I wish he'd give it back. There are lots of indie people with a gift for organization who just kind of collect freaks and throw them up at the wall to see who sticks. You gotta watch 'em.

When you go a step down creatively from the Padrons who are actually entrepreneurs you get to the executives. You don't wanna know these guys. They usually came over from legal or accounting. They have protégés usually called A&R men to do their dirty work. You can become a favorite with them if your fame or image might reflect limelight on their career. They tend to have no personalities to speak of, which is their strength. Strangely they're never really thinking about the good of their parent company as much as old number one. Avoid them. If you’re an artist, they’ll make you sick or suicidal. The only good thing the conglomerate can do for you – and they’ve done it recently for me - is make you really, really ubiquitous. They do that well. But, when the company is your banker, then you are basically gonna be the Beverly Hill Billies. So it's best not to take their money. Especially when you’re young. These are very tough people, and they can hurt you.

So who are the good guys?! They asked me when they read this thing at BBC 6 Music. Well there are lots of them. If fact, today there are more than ever and they are just about all indies, but first I want to mention Peter Gabriel and WOMAD for everything they've done for what seems like forever to help the greatest musicians in the world, the so called world musicians to gain a foothold and make a living in the modern screwed up cash and carry world. Traditional music was never a for profit enterprise, all the best forms were developed as a kind of you’re job in the community. It was pretty good, it was “Yeah, I’m a musician, I’m gonna skip like doing the dishes or taking the trash out.” It's not surprising that all the greatest singers and players come from parts of the world where everybody is broke and the old ways are getting paved over. So it's crucial for everyone that these treasures not be lost. There are other people of means and intelligence who help others in this way like Philip Glass through Tibet House, David Burn with Luaka Bop, Damon Albarn through Honest John Records. Shout out to Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Almost all the best music is coming out on indies today like XL Matador, Burger, Anti, Epitaph, Mute, Rough Trade, 4 A D, Sub Pop, etc. etc.

But now YouTube is trying to put the squeeze on these people because it's just easier for a power nerd to negotiate with a couple big labels who own the kind of music that people listen to when they're really not that into music, which of course is most people. So they've got the numbers. But the indies kind of have the guns. I've noticed that indies are showing strength at some of the established streaming services like Spotify and Rhapsody – people are choosing that music. And it's also great that some people are starting their own outlets, like Pledge Music, Band Camp or Drip. As the commercial trade swings more into general show biz the indies will be the only place to go for new talent, outside the Mickey Mouse Club, so I think they were right to band together and sign the Fair Digital Deals Declaration.

There are just so many ways to screw an artist that it's unbelievable. In the old vinyl days they would deduct 10% "breakage fees" for records supposedly broken in shipping, whether that happened or not, and now they have unattributed digital revenue, whatever the **** that means. It means money for some guy’s triple bypass. I actually think that what Thom Yorke has done with Bit Torrent is very good. I was gonna say here: “Sure the guy is a pirate at Bit Torrent” but I was warned legally, so I’ll say: “Sure the guy a Bit Torrent is a pirate’s friend” But all pirates want to go legit, just like I wanted to be respectable. It’s normal. After a while people feel like you’re a crook, it’s too hard to do business. So it’s good in this case that Thom Yorke is encouraging a positive change. The music is good. It’s being offered at a low price direct to people who care.

I want to try to define what I am talking about when I say free. For me in the arts or in the media, there are two kinds of free. One kind of free is when the process is something that people just feel for you. You feel a sense of possibility. You feel a lack of constraint. This leads to powerful, energetic, sometimes kind of loony situations.

Vice Media is an interesting case of this because they started as a free handout, using public funds, and they had open, free-wheeling minds. Originally a free handout was called Voice and these kids were like “Just get rid of the old! I don’t wanna be Vice, yeah!” Okay. By taking an immersive approach with no particular preconceptions to their reporting, they've become a huge success, also through corporate advertising, at attracting big, big money investment hundreds of millions of dollars now pumped into Fox Media and a couple of others bigger than that in the US. And they get it because they attract lots of little boy eyeballs. So they brought us Dennis Rodman in North Korea. And it’s kind of a travesty, but it’s kind of spunky. It's interesting that capital investment, for all its posturing, never really leads, it always follows. They follow the action. So if it's money you're after, be the yourself in a consistent way and you might get it. You’ll at least end up getting what you are worth and feel better. Just follow your nose.

The second kind of freedom to me that is important in the media is the idea of giving freely. When you feel or sense that someone that someone is giving you something not out of profit, but out of self-respect, Christian charity, whatever it is. That has a very powerful energy. The Guardian, in my understanding, was founded by an endowment by a successful man with a social conscience who wanted to help create a voice for what I would call the little guy. So they have a kind of moral mission or imperative. This has given them the latitude to try to be interesting, thoughtful, helpful. And they bring Edward Snowden to the world stage. Something that is not pleasant for a lot of people to hear about, but we need to know.

These two approaches couldn't be more different. To justify their new mega bucks Vice will have to expand and expand in capital terms. Presumably they'll have to titillate a dumb, but energetic audience. Of course all capitalist expansions are subject to the big bang – balloon, bust, poof, and you’re gone. As for the Guardian I would imagine that the task involves gaining the trust and support of a more discerning, less definable reader, without spending the principal. There is usually an antipathy between cultural poles, but these two actually have a lot in common in terms of the energy and nuisance to power that they are willing to generate. I wish red and blue could come together somehow.

Sometimes I'd rather read than listen to music. One of my favourite odd books is Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry by Clinton Heylin. I bought the book in the 90's because a couple of my bootlegs were mentioned. I loved my bootlegs. They did a lot for me. I never really thought about the dough much. I liked the titles, like Suck on This, Stow Away DOA or Metalic KO. The packaging was always way more creative and edgy than most of my official stuff. So I just liked being seen and heard, like anybody else. These bootleggers were creative. Here are two quotes from the dust jacket by veteran industry stalwarts on the subject of bootlegs in 1994.

"Bootleg is the thoroughly researched and highly entertaining tale of those colorful brigands, hapless amateurs, and true believers who have done wonders for my record collection. Rock and roll doesn't get more underground than this." – that was David Fricke, the music editor of Rolling Stone "I think that bootlegs keep the flame of the music alive by keeping it out of not only the industry's conception of the artist, but also the artist's conception of the artist." – that was Lenny Kaye from the Patti Smith group, musician, critic and my friend.

Wow!! Sounds heroic and vital!

I wonder what these guys feel about all of this now, because things have changed, haven't they? We are now talking about Megaupload, Kim Dot Com, big money, political power, and varying definitions of theft that are legally way over my head. But I know a con man when I see one. I want to include a rant from an early bootlegger in this discussion because it's so passionate and I just think it's funny.

This is Lou Cohan "If anybody thinks that if I have purchased every single Rolling Stones album in existence, and I have bought all the Rolling Stones albums that have been released in England, France, Japan, Italy, and Brazil that if I have an extra $100 in my pocket instead of buying a Rolling Stones bootleg I am going to buy a John Denver album or a Sinead O'Conner album, they are retarded."

So the guy is trying to say don't try to force me. And don't steal my choice. And the people who don't want the free U2 download are trying to say, don't try to force me. And they've got a point. Part of the process when you buy something from an artist. It’s a kind of anointing, you are giving people love. It’s your choice to give or withhold. You are giving a lot of yourself, besides the money. But in this particular case, without the convention, maybe some people felt like they were robbed of that chance and they have a point. It’s not the only point. These are not bad guys. But now, everybody's a bootlegger, but not as cute, and there are people out there just stealing the stuff and saying don't try to force me to pay. And that act of thieving will become a habit and that’s bad for everything. So we are exchanging the corporate rip off for the public one. Aided by power nerds. Kind of computer Putins. They just wanna get rich and powerful. And now the biggest bands are charging insane ticket prices or giving away music before it can flop, in an effort to stay huge. And there's something in this huge thing that kind of sucks.

Which brings us to Punk. The most punk thing I ever saw in my life was Malcolm McLaren's cardboard box full of dirty old winkle pinkers. It was the first thing I saw walking in the door of Let It Rock in 1972 which was his shop at Worlds End on the Kings Road. It was a huge ugly cardboard bin full of mismatched unpolished dried out winkle pickers without laces at some crazy price like maybe five pounds each. Another 200 yards up the street was Granny Takes a Trip, where they sold proper Rockstar clothes like scarves, velvet jackets, and snake skin platform boy boots. Malcolm's obviously worthless box of shit was like a fire bomb against the status quo because it was saying that these violent shoes have the right idea and they are worth more than your fashion, which serves a false value. This is right out of the French enlightenment.

So is the thieving that big a deal? Ethically, yes, and it destroys people because it's a bad road you take. But I don't think that's the biggest problem for the music biz. I think people are just a little bit bored, and more than a little bit broke. No money. Especially simple working people who have been totally left out, screwed and abandoned. If I had to depend on what I actually get from sales I’d be tending bars between sets. I mean honestly it’s become a patronage system. There’s a lot of corps involved and I don’t fault any of them but it’s not as much fun as playing at the Music Machine in Camden Town in 1977. There is a general atmosphere of resentment, pressure, kind of strange perpetual war, dripping on all the time. And I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship's rabbit. That's how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they’ve been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

If I wanna make music, at this point in my life I'd rather do what I want, and do it for free, which I do, or cheap, if I can afford to. I can. And fund through alternative means, like a film budget, or a fashion website, both of which I've done. Those seem to be turning out better for me than the official rock n roll company albums I struggle through. Sorry. If I wanna make money, well how about selling car insurance? At least I'm honest. It's an ad and that's all it is. Every free media platform I've ever known has been a front for advertising or propaganda or both. And it always colors the content. In other words, you hear crap on the commercial radio. The licensing of music by films, corps, and TV has become a flood, because these people know they're not a hell of a lot of fun so they throw in some music that is. I'm all for that, because that's the way the door opened for me. I got heard on tv before radio would take a chance. But then I was ok. Good. And others too. I notice there are a lot of people, younger and younger, getting their exposure that way. But it's a personal choice. I think it’s an aesthetic one, not an ethical one.

Now with the Internet people can choose to hear stuff and investigate it in their own way. If they want to see me jump around the Manchester Apollo with a horse tail instead of trying to be a proper Rockstar, they can look. Good. Personally I don't worry too much about how much I get paid for any given thing, because I never expected much in the first place and the whole industry has become bloated in its expectations. Look, Howling Wolf would work for a sandwich. This whole thing started in Honky Tonk bars. It's more important to do something important or just make people feel something and then just trust in God. If you're an entertainer your God is the public. They'll take care of you somehow. I want them to hear my music any old which way. Period. There is an unseen hand that turns the pages of existence in ways no one can predict. But while you’re waiting for God to show up and try to find a good entertainment lawyer.

It's good to remember that this is a dream job, whether you're performing or working in broadcasting, or writing or the biz. So dream. Dream. Be generous, don’t be stingy. Please. I can't help but note that it always seems to be the pursuit of the money that coincides with the great art, but not its arrival. It's just kind of a death agent. It kills everything that fails to reflect its own image, so your home turns into money, your friends turn into money, and your music turns into money. No fun, binary code – zero one, zero one - no risk, no nothing. What you gotta do you gotta do, life's a hurly-burly, so I would say try hard to diversify your skills and interests. Stay away from drugs and talent judges. Get organized. Big or little, that helps a lot.

I'd like you to do better than I did. Keep your dreams out of the stinky business, or you'll go crazy, and the money won't help you. Be careful to maintain a spiritual EXIT. Don't live by this game because it's not worth dying for. Hang onto your hopes. You know what they are. They’re private. Because that's who you really are and if you can hang around long enough you should get paid. I hope it makes you happy. It's the ending that counts, and the best things in life really are free.

#iggy pop #idk if anyone posted it here already #I'm just too lazy to look up so #here it is!

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qqueenofhades · 5 years ago

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Question for you. When you have time. And if you want. I know things are busy for you. What do you mean by end stage capitalism? Thanks.

Aha. I am sorry that this has been sitting in my inbox for a while, since I’ve been busy and doing stressful things and not sure how to answer this in a way that wouldn’t immediately turn into a pages-long rant. Nothing to do with you, of course, but just because I have 800 things to say on this topic, none of them complimentary, which I’ll try to condense down briefly. Ish.

In sum, end-stage capitalism is at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world today, more or less. It’s the state of being that exists when the economic system of capitalism, i.e. the exchange of money for goods and services, has become so runaway, so unregulated, so elevated to the level of unchallengeable dogma in the Western world (especially after the Cold War and decades of hysteria about the “scourge of communism”) and so embedded on every level of the social and political fabric that it is no longer sustainable but also can’t be destroyed without taking everything else down. Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level, but also… we can’t go on like this. So that’s a fun paradox. The current world order is so drastically, unimaginably, ridiculously and wildly unequal, privileging the tiny elite of the ultra-rich over the rest of the planet, because of hypercapitalism. This really got going in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan, still generally worshiped as a political hero on both the left and right sides of the American political establishment (even liberals tiptoe around criticizing Saint Ronnie), set into motion a program of slashing business and environment regulations, reducing or eliminating taxes on the super wealthy, and introducing the concept of “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics. In short, the principle holds that if you make it as easy as possible for rich people to become EVEN MORE RICH, and remove all irksome regulations or restrictions on the Church of the Free Market, they will benevolently redistribute this largess to the little people. To say the very least, this….does not happen. Ever.

Since the 1980s, in short, we have had thirty years of unrestricted, runaway capitalism that eventually propelled us into the financial crisis of 2008, after multiple smaller crises, where the full extent of this philosophy became apparent…. and nobody really did anything about it. You can google statistics about how the price of everything has skyrocketed since about the 1970s, when you could put yourself through college on one part-time job, graduate with no student debt, and be assured of a job for the next 30 years, and how baby boomers (who are responsible for wrecking the economy) insist that millennials are “just lazy” or “killing [insert x industry]”. This is because we have NO GODDAMN MONEY, graduate thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (if we can even afford college in the first place), are lucky if we find a job that pays us more than $10 an hour, and often have to string together several part-time and frangible jobs that offer absolutely nothing in the way of security, benefits, or long-term saving potential. This is why millennials at large don’t have kids, buy houses, or have any savings (or any of the traditional “adult” milestones). We just don’t have the money for it.

Even more, capitalism has taken over our mindsets to the point where it is, as I said, at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world. Climate change? Won’t be fixed because the ruling classes are making money from the current system, and if you really want to give yourself an aneurysm, google the profiteers who can’t wait for the environment/society to collapse because they’ll make MORE money off it. This is known as “disaster capitalism” and is what the US has done to other countries for decades. (I also recommend The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.) This obviously directly contributes to the War on Terror, the current global instability, the reason Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, and other private-security contractors made a mint from blowing up Iraq and paying themselves to rebuild it, and then the resultant rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist reactionary groups. The bombing produces (often brown and Muslim) refugees and immigrants, Western countries won’t take them in, right-wing politicians make hay out of Threats To Our Way of Life ™, and the circle goes on. Gun control? Can’t happen because a) American white supremacy is too deeply tied to its paranoid right to have as many guns as it wants and to destroy the Other at any time, and b) the NRA pays senators by the gigabucks to make sure it doesn’t. (And we all know what an absolute goddamn CLUSTERFUCK the topic of big money and American politics is in the first place. It’s just… a nightmare in every direction.)

Meanwhile, end-stage capitalism has also systematically assigned value to society and to individuals depending entirely on their prospects for monetization. Someone who can’t work, or who doesn’t work the “right” job, is thus assigned less value as a human (see all the right-wing screaming about people who “don’t deserve” to have any kind of social and financial assistance or subsidized food and medicine if they won’t “help themselves”). This is how we get to situations where we have the ads that I kept seeing in London the other month: apps where you could share your leftover food, or rent out your own car, or collectively rent an apartment, or whatever else. Because apparently if you live in London in 2019, there is no expectation that you will be able to have your own food, car, or apartment. You have to crowdsource it. (See also: people having to beg strangers on the internet for money for food or medical bills, and strangers on the internet doing more to help that person than the whole system and/or the person’s employment or living situation.) There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as an economic theory. Exchanging money for goods and services is understandable and it works. But when it has run out of control to this degree, when the people who suffer the most under it fiercely defend it (see the working-class white people absolutely convinced that the reason for their problems is Those Damn Job Stealing Immigrants), when it only works for the interests of a few uber-privileged few and is actively killing everyone else… yeah.

Let’s put it this way. You will likely have heard of the two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes in recent months: the Lion Air crash in October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019. Together, they killed 346 people. After these crashes, it turned out that the same malfunctioning system was responsible for both, and that Boeing had known of the problem before the Max went on the market. But because they needed to make (even more) money and compete with their rivals, Airbus, they had sent the planes ahead anyway, with unclear and confusing instruction to pilots about how to deal with it, and generally not acknowledging the problem and insisting (as they still do) that the plane was safe, even though it’s been grounded worldwide since March. There are also concerns that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is too deep in Boeing’s pocket to provide an impartial ruling (and America was the last country to ground the plane), and other countries’ aviation safety bodies have announced that they aren’t just going to take the FAA’s word for it whenever they decide that the Max is safe. This almost never happens, since usually international regulatory bodies, especially in aviation, will accept each other’s standards. But because of Boeing’s need for Even More Money, they put a plane on the market and into commercial passenger service that they knew had problems, and the FAA essentially let them do that and isn’t entirely trusted to ensure that they won’t do it again. Because…. value for the shareholders. Or something. This is the extreme example of what I mean when I say that end-stage capitalism is actively killing people.

It is also doing so on longer-term and more pernicious everyday levels. See above where people can’t afford their basic expenses even on several jobs, see the insulin price-gouging in the US (and the big pharma efforts in general to make drugs and healthcare as expensive as possible), see the way any kind of welfare or social assistance is framed as “lazy” or “bad” or “socialist,” see the way that people are basically only allowed to survive if they can pay for it, and the way that circle is becoming smaller and smaller. The American public is also fed enduring folk “wisdom” about “money doesn’t buy happiness,” the belief that poverty serves to build character or as an example of virtue, or so on, to make them feel proud of being poor/deprived/that they’re doing a good thing by actively supporting this system that is responsible for their own suffering. And yet for example, the Nordic countries (while obviously having other problems of their own) maintain the Scandinavian welfare model, which pays for college and healthcare, provides for individual stipends/basic income, allows generous leave for parenthood, emphasises a unionised workplace, and otherwise prescribes a mix of capitalism, social democracy, and social mobility. All the Nordic countries rank highly for human development, overall happiness, and other measurements of social success. But especially in America, any suggestion of “socialism” is treated like heresy, and unions are a dirty word. That is changing, but…slowly.

In short: the economic overlords have never done anything to give power, money, or anything at all to the working class without being repeatedly and explicitly forced, they have no good will or desire to treat the poor like humans (see: Amazon) or anything at all that doesn’t increase their already incomprehensible profit margins. The pursuit of more money that cannot possibly be spent in one human lifetime, that is accumulated, used to make laws for itself, and never paid in taxes to fund improvements or services for everyone else, lies at the root of pretty much every problem you can name in the world right now, is deeply, deeply evil, and I do not use that word lightly.

#politics for ts #rant #long post #that...wasn't super brief #but i could have gone on for a while longer #/drinks heavily and passes out #anonymous #ask

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marziesreads · 4 years ago

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Review: The Theft of Sunlight (Dauntless Path #2)

The Theft of Sunlight by Intisar Khanani My rating: 5 of 5 stars For longtime followers of Intisar Khanani's writing and social media, we've often heard about a novel with the protagonist of The Bone Thief, Rae. Here, at last, is her tale! Rae, or Amraeya, is a very smart young woman who is living life with a painful disability. She was born with a clubfoot and, though gently treated by family and loving friends, has long been bullied and scoffed about as a future spinster and has heard that shocking word to see on a page "cripple" used to describe her for far too long. Rae expects that her life will be settling down in a spinsterly life with her sister Niya, who has her own disability- the gift of illicit magic. Neither Rae or Niya expect they will ever marry, what with their challenges and secrets. In fact, Rae never expected she would leave her father's horse farm in Sheltershorn. When her cousin Melly, whose husband Filadon works for Prince Kestrin, soon to be husband to Princess Alyrra of Adania, asks for Rae to come to court, Rae is reluctant to do so. But, when her best friend Ani's sister Seri becomes one of the latest children to be snatched by persons unknown, Rae rethinks this. Perhaps traveling to Menaiya's capital city of Tarinon will allow her to see what is known about these child snatchers. Her sisters are also eager for her to do so they will hear stories of the royal family and court. Yet Rae finds that life in the palace is infinitely more complicated than she planned when Prince Kestrin asks for Rae to serve as an attendant to Princess Alyrra, advising her about Menaiyan customs and keeping an eye out for her in an as yet not very friendly court. After all, Alyrra was living as a goose girl thanks to Valka's treachery in the events described in the first Dauntless Path novel, Thorn. Rae is surprised to find that she really likes Alyrra, and that Alyrra also takes an interest in the child snatchers, having lived closer to the common folk during her time as a goose girl. What the aristocrats pass off boogey-man tales to scare children is very real to the working class of Menaiya who have few resources to track down and rescue their children. Rae's role in Alyrra's service is thus partly secret, as only a few people know of Kestrin and Alyrra's opposition to the trafficking of child laborers, and her work in this regard is quite dangerous. Because ending trafficking and this "free" labor force is bound to have staunch opposition. But the sources of opposition are obscured and come from surprising corners of the kingdom. While Thorn was originally a retelling of the Grimm Bros. goose girl fairy tale, Theft of Sunlight, first in a duology, is an original work set in the world of Thorn. It is a far darker tale, dealing with the complicated process of ending trafficking and breaking criminal enterprises involved or on the borders of it. The novel is so beautifully written in terms of its rich detailing of life in Menaiya, from social customs (which feel rather South Asian and Arabic) to the realities of political life in King Melkior's court that it's easy to get lost in the story only to be brought up short by very harrowing events that befall Rae. Readers should be prepared for a far darker story, and should also be prepared for an unresolved ending. Because yes, there's a cliffhanger ending, dear Reader, which is part of why I chose to review the novel after the release date. For those of you out there who hate cliffhangers and refuse to read until the next book is out, I encourage you to realize that in the pandemic-affected book industry, you may be waiting for a book that will never be published if authors don't sell well now. They are working in an industry that has really suffered during the pandemic, when book tours have only been virtual, and book sales have been adversely impacted by high unemployment, poor library access, and closed bookstores, among the many challenges. The future of author contracts for forthcoming books depends on book sales now and many authors are fearful of not being able to continue. Take a chance on a good book, Reader. You will have the enjoyment of rereading just before the sequel is released. But please, let's have sequels. I also listened to the audiobook of Theft of Sunlight which is beautifully narrated by Shiromi Arserio. She does a great job, especially in the last chapters of the novel which are just heartbreaking. CW: physical violence, bloodshed, dismemberment I received a digital and paper review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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kirliancamera1 · 4 years ago

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Rede Vamp Brazil (https://redevampirica.com) interviews Elena Alice Fossi of Kirlian Camera (English text attached hereunder) 🔥🔥🔥

Question 1: Be very welcome to AcessoRedeVamp, it's a true honor to realize this interview with you Elena Alice! You are a great singer and more every time we see you on stage your performance transmits great emotion and this electrifies all of us! You tell a real story with your performance and this is amazing and rare these days! At the same time, we perceive an expressive revolt against an old world and its stagnant postures. How have you handled 2020?

*** EAF – First of all, I wanna thank you for your words. Being able to communicate with the people who follow us is the most important thing to me. Singing becomes ephemeral if doesn't convey a message. Also for this reason I consider that the stage is the base of a musician, so you can imagine how I miss it. In this sense, it can be said that the category we belong to is very unlucky, not only because it's forced not to work, but rather 'cause concerts are pure lifeblood for a musician's soul. In any case, both Angelo and I can't stand self-pity people, so we immediately jumped into new musical projects, putting top concentration on composition. At any rate, we couldn't be simple observers of an event on this scale, so right from the beginning we tried to dig deep, looking for, and comparing news, data, statistics, whether they came from mainstream channels or from alternative sources. In Italy, for example, the economy has been torn to pieces and furthermore, the same politicians who mourn the dead on TV... cut so many funds for health facilities for a long time, so they may be considered taking part in such a mess. This situation has created a real drama, especially for families who have lost their loved ones without even having a chance to say goodbye one last time. But, it's also true that the worldwide exploitation of this pandemic has given us, we citizens, an opportunity to wake up. No need to use words such as anarchy or rebellion to understand that the old world is showing all kinds of holes. "Divide et impera" is the motto of several governments, so we citizens must not fall into the trap of making war on each other, each nonsense comes up! This is the time to show ourselves united. And, most of all, it’s time not to turn ourselves into servile dogs of a “Power” becoming more and more antidemocratic.

Question 2: Do you feel that the marks left by the year 2020 will bring some effective changes to this "abstraction" called humanity? Will there be a "new normal" or will we just return to an average 2019 when this whole pandemic passes?

*** EAF - If I’d been told about what we have experienced for almost one year, I’d have thought it was a joke, bullshit. But unluckily this is not the case. Such an event has brought much grief and is ruining the economic system of many nations, as already said. But in addition to the injury, here it comes the insult from the absurd and chaotic dictates imposed on us. I'll give you some examples of what's happening here in Italy. “Don't go out after 10 pm”. While people keep on getting sick or even dying, here comes the policeman with a ticket 'cause you left home for a goddam moment. I have this picture on my mind, of a person in pajamas, carrying the garbage bag full of stinking mussel shells at less than one hundred meters from home in a totally deserted night. At that point a flash on him. It’s the police who writes a ticket to that dangerous criminal. And then, for everyone's sake, the Christmas mass was moved from the usual midnight to 8 pm. How the hell can you think it's not a mockery? And... the last “gag”! Before Christmas, our Minister of technological innovation made an appeal to telephone companies so that video calls were free on Christmas days... But what year does she live in? But... is she not able to understand that in Italy almost everyone has either unlimited gigas or wifi? Nothing changes if the telephone companies for a couple of days give us video calls because we already use free services such as Whatsapp, Skype, Zoom, Telegram, and so on and so forth... Ok, in a vain attempt to avoid death, they are putting us in an induced coma! Seriously, all this offends our intelligence! And, when you realize you are inside a joke, you don't like to discover you're the main character, do you?! So, to answer your question, I couldn't foresee how a post-covid society will be reshaped, but the severe weakening that now is burdening us will have some major impact, no doubt. Currently, most folks are obsessed with fear, so are unable to reflect on the consequences of unconstitutional actions such as those foolishly propagated by many States. Furthermore, the pharma companies, the giants of the online shopping industry and many other powerful satanic puppet masters who are used to appear as philanthropists are ready to get their hands on everything, well pleased with the next “big reset”. So, after the pandemic, things will change a lot! For sure, from a human point of view, the feelings will be devitalized.

Question 3: Hologram Moon is a great name! Evokes conspirations like what really is the moon and this strangeness opens a vast creative field to find answers or even new questions... please tell us a bit more about this album, his name, songs...

*** EAF - "Fake is your face" is one of the phrases that most resonate in me when I sing "Holograms", or when in “Lost Islands” the old world said “Goodbye”! It's as if you had to face a new reset, as if you discovered everything you've always believed is swept away in an instant. There's the awareness that in the face of a new and suffocating truth, when the sky collapses, only true love can resist and guide you. In this sense, the final track of the album, “Travellers’ Testament” is a real stone on my heart, as it describes a fantastic journey to a planet. The astronaut is now impatient to fulfill his dream, but he will never arrive on that planet. The landing will take place on a space station. The moon landing's been questioned over and over again and certain evidence of the fact's inconsistency eventually seems credible. But we cannot say what reality is in any scientific way, especially when we're already prepared to believe a reassuring source. This is a simple starting point to embark on our history. More than finding answers, our sacred duty is to open the door to new questions, ask doubts, not take anything for granted. “Hologram Moon” is a purely poetic vision, but also a way to question everything. The mind can atrophy very easily. Habit, for example, can be complicit in this and the so-called comfort zone can be just complicit as well. The hypnosis that we suffer every day without realizing it, also grinding so many and bad TV shows, and so on... So, let's remain thinking and dreaming! This is a message from us.

Question 4: How was the experience of working with Covenant's Eskil Simonsson on the beautiful "Sky Collapse"?

*** EAF - We had come across Covenant several times before doing this collaboration; on festival occasions, in the dressing rooms... But it was a chaotic situation, so... we gave each other a fleeting smile, a kind greeting, but nothing more. Then, when Angelo and I wrote “Sky Collapse”, we immediately thought that a deep and sincere voice like Eskil's would add something precious to the song. Even before recording the two-voice song, we met at a charity festival. We had called him as a guest just to sing this song together, which was yet unreleased. He made himself available immediately. It was a nice gift for us and when the moment came, I think that on stage you could feel my strong emotion all the way down the hall!

Question 5: Well, I think now we will have our fan moment! Let's talk about some Kirlian Camera songs that our DJs and the audience of the REDE VAMP love it? Do I speak the name and may you tell a little about the meanings, influences, or a curious story?

*** EAF ***

>>> NIGHTGLORY. It refers to the triumph of the night, perhaps as a momentary spiritual retreat. I'm talking about that precious moment that regenerates your very existence into yourself. The music of this song was born in a symphonic form, very different from how Nightglory was then arranged. This is a song and an album that has been appreciated by many people only after some time, partly because of a promotion that described the album as the most commercial in our history, which is absolutely harmful and misleading. Invisible Front and Eclipse were even more listenable, for example... Sometimes words spoil your work. It would be better to listen to music only, ignoring its promotional presentation. Fortunately, Nightglory has recovered over time till becoming one of the most requested live songs of ours.

>>> BLACK AUGUST. In this song there are various hints coming out from a dark moment in my life, I mean a period that risked devouring me. Wounds that take time to heal. Sky Collapse can be considered the final act of that period, even if the music of the two songs sounds very different, as you know. Black August blends various stylistic dimensions in a single “body of music”, so many didn't know how to label it at the time, as it effectively goes running free, out of the box. A very atypical song that has gained some actual success despite its distinction, which has also brought us closer to fans of dark metal and so-called electronica.

>>> HELLFIRE. I chose this piece to add an echo to the dark period I was talking about above, in order to exorcise all that negativity, so we went to deal with a theme showing gospel traits but containing some demonic references in the lyrics. Then I didn't know THE 8th PRESIDENT was waiting for us at the SCARLET GATE OF TOXIC DAYBREAK, with his COLD PILLS! A wordplay whoever is following us will understand!

>>> K-PAX. I wrote this piece in a night when everything seemed dreamy and I almost didn't realize where I was anymore. No, I wasn't under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but all my memories were mixing in tremendous chaos that needed to reinvent itself and turn into an immaterial fog, in a light but lost dream. Angelo literally translated the music and melodies I had written on the staff, giving both them and my voice the perfect terms to guide the journey. In fact, it's not a complete and static text, but a sequence of dreamy and painful phrases at the same time. I felt that Angelo listened to me attentively since he knew how to translate my notes so perfectly into written sentences as if he were sending me back into my music. It was magical and at K-Pax Angelo and I discovered the other life of ourselves, bringing to light so many breathtaking emotions and it was just the departure, after the suffocating mists of Still Air, an album we love, and the crepuscular decadence of Stalingrad Valkyrie.

Question 6: There is a cover of Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd from Kirlian Camera that is a true work of art. The Mad World cover performed by Spectra Paris is fascinating. Are there more covers from other bands that you would like to record?

*** EAF - Well yes, there are ideas, but we prefer to evaluate which are the best. Meanwhile, I tried to produce a version of a Johnny Cash song and I made Angelo interpret it: I really like the result. It may be used by Stalingrad Valkyrie.

Question 7: I love your lyrics! What can't Elena be missing when creating new lyrics or musical arrangements? Are there any poetry, films, books, comic books, or other influences?

*** EAF - Mostly everything happens unconsciously. You don't know how many times I realize why I wrote a certain phrase only after a song was released! But I can say that my imagination works mostly by processing images. So, the movies are very helpful in this. Similarly, Angelo and I tap into imagery that could be part of the quantum physics new era, where multiverse and multidimensionality are both playing an important role. This world appears like a really tiny thing when compared to everything else.

Question 8: Elena, I read in an older interview about a "Young Ladies Homicide Club" I found an undeniable reference to the films Noir and the figure of the characters called "Vamp" and all the charm and spectral magnetism ... but I was a little curious. .. what is this "Young Ladies Homicide Club"?

*** EAF - Let's say I imagined an unreal club created by apparently dead or so to say "disappeared" models in order to get rid of fashion people who were acting a bit too naughty! The work to clean up that world wouldn't be lacking, as, after all, it happens in all professional areas. As for myself goes, I gladly opted in a flash and without second thoughts for singing and making music, leaving everything behind, buying a couple of synths and a decent microphone, which I then enriched with various electronic devilry, kicking away possible easy money, foolish nights, cocaine, heroin, stereotyped relationships, and absurdly worshipped wines! Every so often I like to play with the ridiculous and grotesque ghosts of some fashion designers, photographers, and evil spirits, then going to recreate noir stories in which everything happens. I also drew some digital comics with a noir-glam flavor, a few years ago... It was a fun pastime, while with Kirlian Camera I'd been exploring deeper and more fundamental universes.

Question 9: Is there more news on the way for the incredible Spectra Paris and also for Stalingrad Valkyrie? May you talk a bit more about them?

*** EAF - Stalingrad Valkyrie is a project I am very fond of, in a special way. So I insisted on getting it back to life after a period of hibernation which lasted too much in my opinion. "Martyrium Europae", the most recent album, proved me right, even if it’s not a commercial project. Well, it seems our listeners have appreciated the attempt to combine different musical sources in a unique style, certainly linked to the more symphonic and dramatic Kirlian Camera pages, but also quite free to express itself on his own, trying to avoid the most standard patterns of neofolk, progressive and industrial, without on the other hand completely ignoring their now distant origins. So, in its small way, the new album turned out to be a success and I'd really like this project to keep on living with further fresh ideas. We're currently working on a new chapter that will be released on vinyl and some digitals, which contains previously unreleased songs and versions.

Question 10: Elena, our Rede Vamp is a platform about Cultural Vamp and Vampires production ... and there is a question that our interviewees never escape. Is there a character or perhaps a vampire story that you never forgot?

*** EAF - Needless to say the vampire who most impressed me over time can't be anyone other than... Angelo Bergamini!!! Not many know that Angelo was the leading actor in a short film entitled "Himre Bakai", shot in the late nineties or so, directed by Antonio Bocchi, the later owner of the dark-electronic project Lux Anodyca and author of detective books. I don't think the film is regularly available or downloadable at the moment, but I know it was also screened at the time in various festivals and reviews, also getting some good feedback! Angelo (Himre) and Antonio told me that one day the film "will see the light ”, but at the moment... he lies in the dark, by the book, of course!!!

Question 11: Elena, thank you so much for your time and generosity! You and Kirlian Camera have many fans on our events and radio shows, please leave a special message for our audience! Are there plans for a new gig in Brazil after all this pandemic?

*** EAF - While it's true that we've never been able to play in Brazil so far, I'm sure your Land is actually right for us, 'cause I can feel that's full of feeling and passion, so we'd love to perform for you very much, 'cause in spite of the fact it's so far away, I feel a deep affinity and a certain familiarity with your world. And while we wait, confident that sooner or later we'll succeed in our aim, I wanna greet all those who had the kindness to listen to me, with a quote from the American scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

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coppicefics · 4 years ago

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Masked Omens: Week Five

[Image Description: Image 1 - A simple rendition of the Masked Singer UK logo, a golden mask with colourful fragments flying off of it. The mask has a golden halo and a golden devil tail protruding from either side. Below, gold text reads ‘Masked Omens’.

Image 2 - A page from the Entertainment section of the Capital Herald, dated Saturday, 23rd January 2021. Full image description and transcript below cut. End ID.]

Read the fic here!

The Capital Herald - Saturday, 23rd January 2021 Entertainment, page 15

Top section: Stream of Consciousness: Shows To Make You Think A whole host of great documentaries, old and new, have just been added to streaming services Who doesn't love a good documentary? You can learn all sorts of things, and you don't have to do any of the research for yourself. Over the last couple of weeks, loads of people seem to have been tuning into the wealth of documentaries available on various streaming services; here are a few I particularly enjoyed. Green Planet (2020) is not your standard nature documentary; while there are some extremely cute shots of animals (including gorillas, whales, and giant squid) the main focus is on sustainable practices people are experimenting with in all sorts of industries and contexts, and the way they allow local wildlife to flourish. It's thought-provoking stuff. We're As Folk (2019) takes a look at the contemporary folk movement, interviewing figures from the second British revival right through to the present day; contributors include Seth Lakeman, Frank Turner, Anathema and Bellowhead. With folk-festival anecdotes aplenty, the documentary explores the intricacies of the genre and culminates in all the contributors performing a once-in-a-lifetime rendition of 'She Moved Through The Fair'. Gadget If You Can (2015) might be a little outdated now, but that's what makes it such a compelling watch. From watches that tell the time in 21 capital cities concurrently to hoverboards that actually, well, hover, this is a fascinating look at the new devices that seemed to be just on the horizon when it was released more than five years ago. Some have since appeared; some remain pipedreams. All are interesting! Making Fast Friends (2012) is the oldest documentary on this list, and the narrowest in scope. It was released alongside the SEGA charity single 'Fast Friends' and gives us a behind the scenes look at what happened when Sonic the Hedgehog teamed up with a whole bunch of children's TV presenters to make the record. Although largely factual in nature, it does also feature animated 'interviews' with Sonic and Knuckles, so it's entirely suitable for watching with your family. And P-White fans, in particular, will not want to miss this a second time around. A War Without War (2021), by contrast, is both up-to-the-minute and extremely disturbing to watch. It is composed of a mixture of expert analysis of the situation developing on the ground in Celestan and grim footage allegedly smuggled out of the country by fleeing residents. Moreover, with more episodes promised, it forces the viewer to acknowledge what is happening as the country breaks apart, and asks us the difficult question: can you have a war without war? Dinosaurs: The Punchline (2013) is frequently mistaken for a mockumentary thanks to its tongue-in-cheek title. It is, in fact, a thoughtful exploration of how religious groups respond to apparent conflicts between scientific facts and the tenets of their faith. Without shying away from the realities of science as we know it, this film takes a surprisingly sensitive approach to investigating how science and religion intersect in the modern world. By The Numbers (2018) looks back at the history of the televised National Lottery, along with its competitors on other channels and the entertainment chosen to appear directly after it. Featuring clips and interviews with stars from Marjorie Potts aka Telepathic Tracy, whose show aired after the draw for over a decade, to Marvin O. Bagman, whose sports-based quiz show had, at the time of the documentary’s release, the corresponding Channel 4 slot. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is very entertaining. CITRON DEUX-CHEVAL Have I missed any amazing documentaries you think I should be talking about? Drop me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment on our website and I might feature your recommendations in a future issue.

Centre left: Memory Lane: Kilcridhe Now there’s a vicar I’d have loved to meet at the altar Ask any male-attracted person of a certain age – well, my age and up, really – if they remember Kilcridhe, and you'll be met with flushed cheeks and a glassy expression. We remember Kilcridhe, all right – or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we remember Father Jacob MacCleod. It's hard to believe that heartthrob Jacob was Anthony Crowley's first major role on television, and harder still to believe that he was also one of his last. The show ran for only two six-episode series, between 2005 and 2006, but in those twelve hours I think it's fair to say a fair few of us fell irrevocably in love. Kilcridhe was named for the fictitious Scottish village where it was set, and largely revolved around the goings-on of the local church and its new minister. Much of the series' drama centred around Father MacCleod's ongoing attempts to fill the pews, which saw him trying everything from hosting a bake sale – for which he ended up baking everything himself – to arranging a community talent show, with predictably bizarre results. But during the course of these adventures, each episode also introduced us to one or more of Kilcridhe's residents. We got a glimpse into the little struggles and joys of their lives – most of which quickly became Jacob's struggles and joys, too. My main memory of this show is that it was pretty. Not just Jacob, but everything about it, from the location they chose for the exterior shots, to the tone added in post-production; everything was just slightly more saturated and colourful than real life, not enough to be jarring but enough to give the whole thing a strangely dreamlike feel. In fact, as Jacob remarked as he prepared to leave for Edinburgh at the end of series one (not knowing if he would return or if the show would be cancelled), “leaving [Kilcridhe] feels like waking from a dream, like going back to reality somehow”. It was, perhaps, for the best that Kilcridhe was cancelled after only two series. Shows originally envisioned as limited series rarely keep their charm past a second extension, and the central actor was to encounter personal problems not long after the end of the show. That's not to say that a revival couldn't work, perhaps with a completely new protagonist. But Father Jacob MacCleod lives on in the hearts of his many fans, smiling that enigmatic smile of his, and when that's not enough, there's always online fanfiction. So much fanfiction. SARAH JEUNE Memory Lane is our regular feature, looking back at the books, shows and films of yesteryear through a nostalgic lens. Do you miss something you’d like to see featured? Just send the show name (plus channel and airdates if you know them) in an email to: [email protected] - your prayers might just be answered!

Centre right: Correspondent’s Corner Stop talking about it Anathema is making waves again as she does the talk-show circuit to promote her new album, Narrative Devices. It's a very pretty album from a very lovely girl, but she does keep getting hung up on one point. Every time somebody describes her music as country, she interrupts to tell them it's folk. Well, I'm no music expert, but even I know that folk is a very European genre, and the United States' equivalent is country, or country and western music, to give it its full name, and to continue to argue to the contrary is simply courting controversy for controversy's sake. It is unbecoming of a young lady – even, or perhaps especially, a young lady with Anathema's obvious talent – to continue to argue with her elders on the subject, and even to correct the likes of Graham Norton and Giles Brandreth. These sage bastions of broadcasting deserve more respect, and they couldn't be more gracious in accepting their 'mistake'. But surely a young musician in the first flush of success should take the time to learn about what she's actually doing? It doesn't seem very much to ask. It’s not entirely her fault, of course; the youth of today are given far too much freedom by their parents and, on top of that, are often propelled to disproportionate success with no chance to prepare for it. Is it any wonder that it all goes to their heads? But there is no excuse for not making an effort to keep their egos in check and defer to their betters on matters of terminology and best practice. Naturally, we all hope that Anathema will enjoy a long and successful career making the music she enjoys the most and , more importantly, music we can all enjoy too. And I also hope that she will, eventually, acquire the humility so rarely found in young people these days and accept that she does not always know best. If she listens to the counsel of older and wiser heads than hers, she might even learn something. ANDY SANDALPHON What can’t they do? If there's one thing that's becoming apparent with every passing week of The Masked Singer UK, it's that celebrities are no longer to content to stay in their lane. No, these multi-talented marvels seem determined to push themselves to the limit in every possible field. So far, we’ve seen sergeants become singers, rugby players become rockers, doctors become divas and authors become, er, audible. And with weeks still to go in this competition, we still have eight masked celebrities to guess. Eight people whose day jobs probably don’t include getting on stage and belting out pop standards are still waiting to impress us with talents that aren’t even their thing. I mean, if I could sing and dance like the contestants on the show, you can bet your life I’d be making a living from it. It would be my number one talent, and I’d be rubbish at anything else, because most of us only get one main skill. Not these jammy gits, though. For them, this is a sideline. It's not just The Masked Singer, of course – from proving their talent for trivia on Pointless Celebrities and their wordplay wisdom on Celebrity Catchphrase to demonstrating their culinary qualities on Celebrity Masterchef and The Great Celebrity Bake Off, it seems that wherever you look someone is adding a new string to their bow. Being a phenomenally talented actor, singer, or footballer is all well and good, but more and more stars are now keen to show us that they really can do anything and everything. And why shouldn't they? It's phenomenally entertaining television to watch. And for those of us who sometimes feel inadequate compared to our famous idols, it can be very reassuring to watch, for example, a comedian weeping into his cupcake mix on Bake Off or an Oscar nominee fall on her face on Dancing On Ice. When they do well, it's amazing; when they do badly, it's life-affirming. That said, I've been blown away by the talent of the contestants on The Masked Singer this series. It's so inspirational, in fact, that I might take up watercolours. EDWARD BIGGS Bottom right (in blue box): Citron’s Quick Picks Fast favourites from Citron Deux-Cheval Look: Sea Change by Hastur LaVista There's never been a journey to to the top quite like P-White's. This authorised biography charts a course from children's presenter to global superstar through interviews, pictures and anecdotes. While the research sometimes seems a little slapdash, the story at the heart of the book is more than interesting enough to hold it together. And since it's authorised, Maputi themself has contributed plenty of private insights and observations. [Image description: A book, its cover featuring a blue-green gradient with black, dripping lines spilling across it. The title reads ‘Sea Change’. End ID.] Listen: Narrative Devices by Anathema Anathema's first album was well-received both within the folk community and beyond it. Now her second album, backed up by an obvious increase in resources, looks set to enjoy similar mainstream success, and deservedly so. The theme this time seems to be the act of telling stories, but it's also a story in itself. You'll have heard the singles, but it takes on new meaning when you play it in order! [Image description: An album cover featuring hands holding a book. The words “Anathema” and “Narrative Devices” are printed on it. End ID.] Laugh: Newtral Stance by AutoTuna on YouTube It's not the first time beleaguered commentator Newton Pulsifer has had his words edited into a supercut. It's not even the first time his frequent disagreements with the VAR have been autotuned – including by YouTube user AutoTuna. But this new edition adds an extra dimension in the form of a flat, robotic voice duetting – and duelling – with the frustrated human, taking the hilarity to a whole new level! [Image description: A screenshot of a young woman wearing a call centre headset (specifically, the woman who cold-calls Crowley in Good Omens and gets Hastur instead). She looks extremely bored. End ID.]

Advertisement, bottom right: IS THIS YOUR CARD? [Image Description: Two business cards with a white-to-yellow gradient, overlapping so that they are slightly fanned out. Printed on the left-hand side of each is ‘This is to certify The Amazing [blank] as a [blank] training under Mr A.Z. Fell.‘ The one behind is filled in with ‘Your Name-’ and ‘Sorcer-’. The front card is filled in in a more child-friendly font, with ‘Your Name Here’ and ‘Junior Magician’. Below this is space for a start and expiry date, filled in with ‘08/20′ and ‘08/21′ respectively. On the right-hand side of the card, a logo shows a rabbit emerging from an upturned top hat, and below it are the words ‘Harry’s Junior Magic Academy’. The word ‘Junior’ is in the same child-friendly font as before. End ID.] IT COULD BE. Membership is open to under 12s and 13-18 year-olds at www.harrys-magic.com

End of transcript.

#masked omens #mo week five #very much fake news #good omens fic

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dweemeister · 4 years ago

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Fanchon, the Cricket (1915)

Fanchon the Cricket* was a family affair for silent film actress Mary Pickford. When she passed away in 1979, she died thinking that the film – the only one to star herself and her two other siblings, Lottie and Jack – as lost to history. The survivability statistics on silent films is grim reading. In a 2013 study, the Library of Congress estimated that around seventy-five percent of all silent films are lost films. One wonders how overjoyed the folks at the Mary Pickford Foundation, which assists with film preservation efforts and has archived various Pickford-related materials for research purposes, must have felt when they learned in 2012 that the Cinémathèque Française unearthed a print of Fanchon the Cricket. In a six-year, cross-Atlantic collaboration, the Pickford Foundation, Cinémathèque Française, the British Film Institute (BFI; which possessed an incomplete and quickly degrading nitrate print), and L'Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna) restored the print and scanned it in 4K. The restoration is stunning, even if Fanchon the Cricket, as a film, is rough in its craft.

Directed by James Kirkwood (primarily an actor) and co-written by Kirkwood and Frances Marion (1930’s The Big House, 1931’s The Champ) and distributed by Famous Players Film Company (in 1916, this studio would merge with the Lasky Company to become the studio now known as Paramount), Fanchon the Cricket is based on George Sand’s novel La Petite Fadette. Mary Pickford is Fanchon, an uninhibited waif (yet another one of Pickford’s numerous young waif characters) that cares not for the judgments and trappings of society. She lives in the woods with her grandmother (Gertrude Norman), whom the townspeople rumor to be a witch (her appearance, attire, and behavior are only inflaming the rumors). During a May Day picnic, Fanchon saves a young man named Landry Barbeau (Jack Standing), the son of a prosperous local businessman (Russell Bassett), from drowning. In the aftermath, the two find themselves smitten over each other. Landry offers marriage, despite his parents’ preference for the straitlaced Madelon (Lottie Pickford), but Fanchon declines. Realizing the familial strife that might occur in such an arrangement, Fanchon will not marry Landry unless his father approves and asks her to.

Without much soft lighting to brighten up one of the most luminous faces of silent film (there are mostly shots outdoors in this movie), Mary Pickford’s physical acting draws in the viewer in every frame she occupies. Pickford’s movements through the forests and thick grass resemble a being at home in nature – why be concerned over mud and pesky insects? Compared to the weighty, measured movements of her town-dwelling co-stars, she flits and skips without much regard for anyone else she encounters. Her mannerisms, as Fanchon, also reflect a complete lack of socialization. When witnessing the silliness of other people, she never hides how she feels, whether that is amusement or annoyance. Only after Fanchon’s brief courtship with Landry do we see that remarkable nuanced dramatic acting Pickford was capable of. In those moments where Fanchon steps out of her childhood for the first time, we see the inklings of her self-realization of the responsibility and affection for others. Fanchon never stops being the wild girl of the woods but, for precious moments in this film, she becomes a young woman who allows herself to love. The transformation, partial though it may be, is convincing, and that is all thanks to Mary Pickford’s brilliant performance.

Shot on location in Delaware Gap, Pennsylvania in an era before the relocation of all major American movie studios to Hollywood (and when a significant amount of major studio filmmaking was still taking place on the Atlantic coast of the U.S.), the environs surrounding the characters features dense foliage and placid creeks and rivers. Fanchon the Cricket, set in either late 18th or early 19th century America, inhabits a space where the young nation was still mostly undeveloped nature. Cinematographer Edward Wynard (the personal cinematographer of actress Norma Talmadge) photographs the action lushly, and the natural outdoors lighting almost makes the sprawling meadows and rippling waterways a dreamscape. Even if the production design might seem too artificial, the natural surroundings make Fanchon’s deep forest shack and small town-yet-posh backwoods America a believable, specific place in time.

At a period of film history when filmmakers were still experimenting in narrative form and how to interweave themes throughout a film, Fanchon the Cricket has too many subplots that never satisfactorily resolve or are too tangentially related to the central plot. Kirkwood and Marion’s scenario, despite showering attention on some of the supporting characters, never lend enough depth to anyone outside of Fanchon and Landry to make them anything but caricatures. The unnecessary bloat makes the films one-and-a-quarter-hour runtime (this is based on the speed of the Pickford Foundation/ Cinémathèque Française/BFI/ L'Immagine Ritrovata restoration; Fanchon the Cricket is a 5-reeler) seem longer than it should be.

The recent restoration of Fanchon the Cricket comes with a modern soundtrack by Julian Ducatenzeiler and Andy Gladbach that is based in twenty-first century folk rock. This mixture – of early American setting and modern music – is disruptive and jarring. As much as Ducanteziler and Gladbach attempt to mirror the film’s sylvan scenery through their orchestration and modern melodic progressions, the disconnect between the film and their score also extends to the emotional journey that Fanchon takes on-screen. Personally, I prefer a simple piano, organ, or small ensemble score for silent film re-releases (most silent films, when they were first released, were accompanied by these instruments). I am no opponent of using anachronistic musical instruments and melodic and harmonic phrasing for re-released silent films (sci-fi and fantasy silent films might benefit from these most). But composers for such projects should heed what the filmmakers were trying to create – including the setting and the emotional textures of their film. Ducanteziler and Gladbach, in this restoration of Fanchon the Cricket, have not done their due musical diligence.

Lottie and Jack Pickford led markedly different lives than their sister – who would go on to co-found United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith and a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). As the least known of the trio, Lottie’s acting career was already on the downswing (by choice) upon Fanchon the Cricket’s theatrical release. Lottie was a socialite, whose passion was to party, experiencing joie de vivre to a maximalist extent. Slightly more established as an actor than Lottie but not as much as Mary, Jack Pickford was a primary figure in a scandal where rich young men drafted by the military would dole out bribes to avoid military service in World War I. Like Lottie, he too was consumed by a socialite’s lifestyle, leading to a life of alcoholism and drug addiction for both.

Moviegoers in the mid-1910s adored Pickford in her most common roles as children and waifs. The year after Fanchon the Cricket, Pickford signed a lucrative deal with Famous Players’ Adolph Zukor that gave her the foremost authority on the films she worked for. In early Hollywood, so strongly associated with movie moguls like Zukor, Mack Sennett (Keystone Studios), Carl Laemmle (Universal), and others, Pickford’s deal was an outlier. The authority she assumed on her productions was a refreshing development for Pickford in an industry filled with stories of interference from the top studio executives. These experiences making films on this new contract helped inspire the formation of United Artists three years later. UA’s creation was a clear statement of Pickford’s desire to foster the talents of herself and others as filmmakers – something that she would continue to champion for decades to come.

The Pickford Foundation/Cinémathèque Française/BFI/L'Immagine Ritrovata restoration is wonderful to behold. The tinting in the restoration was based off the notes found with the BFI nitrate print – making this cross-Atlantic restoration the closest lucky modern viewers might ever get to watching Fanchon the Cricket the way James Kirkwood originally intended. For silent film fans and especially those who want to see the works of one of the most important actresses of all time, this restoration of a complete Fanchon the Cricket is a fortuitous gift.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

* Promotional materials for the film include and exclude a comma between “Fanchon” and “the”. I use the comma in the title of the review but, to save extra typing, I’ve omitted the comma in the body of the review.

#Fanchon the Cricket #James Kirkwood #Mary Pickford #Jack Standing #Lottie Pickford #Gertrude Norman #Russell Bassett #Richard Lee #Jack Pickford #Edward Wynard #Frances Marion #silent film #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

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Pluralistic: 01 Mar 2020 (Make Mordor great again, N95 Mask of the Red Death, Medicare for All with Covid, Necessity Defense)

Today's links

Trump's rhetoric fits eerily well into the Tolkien canon: AR Moxon makes Mordor great again.

The wealthy are chartering jets to avoid coronavirus: The Masque of the Red Death takes to the skies.

The US already has Medicare for All: The day that Trump declares a national health emergency.

America's uninsured will turn a covid crisis into a covid disaster: Our shared microbial destiny cannot be denied.

Jury refuses to convict Extinction Rebellion activists: Long live the "necessity defense" and the human race it protects.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Trump's rhetoric fits eerily well into the Tolkien canon (permalink)

AR Moxon's satirical riff on how Trump would play as a Tolkien villain is not only hilarious, it's also exactly the kind of thing the Tolkien estate used to threaten to sue people over.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1233207274992263168?s=19

(which is why Pat Murphy's astoundingly great genderswapped retelling of The Hobbit, "There and Back Again," is no longer in print.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_and_Back_Again_(novel)

Especially good is how Moxon digs into the way that Tolkien's concept of "races" was uncomfortably close to "racism" (especially orcs, who, honestly, have no conceivable basis for subsisting as a species, let alone a society).

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1233682097463873536

"While I was here, this orc came up —a big guy, very tough, like out of central casting, handsome, could've been a fighting Uruk-hai—and he's crying, weeping, he says 'sir, thank you for the meat.' Incredible. He hadn't had nothing but maggoty bread for three stinking days."

Other Trumpland rhetoric fits in eerily well. Just like Murphy, Moxon claims Hobbits: "We have Hobbits coming in folks, and they're smoking the pipe-weed, and eating second breakfasts, third breakfasts, your breakfasts, your children's breakfasts."

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1233221682309083137

And just as with Murphy, Moxon's satire is full of deep, Silmarillion cuts that demonstrate that his work is coming from a place of deep, if conflicted, affection.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1233328631734206475

"Fëanor, son of Finwë, King of the Noldor, is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more. We all appreciate his contributions, and we're looking into him, and we're looking very strongly. Nobody was talking about him before me."

(Image: Cornel Zueger, CC BY-SA)

The wealthy are chartering jets to avoid coronavirus (permalink)

Plutes are chartering private jets in the hopes of avoiding #coronavirus, assuming that if they only fly in fart-tubes that other wealthy people have farted in, they won't get sick.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-29/wealthy-jump-to-private-jets-to-duck-airlines-and-cut-virus-risk

To make this pay, you really need to fill that Gulfstream. NYC-London is $140k for a 12-seater — flying those 12 buttery soft asses from JFK to Heathrow in BA First will run you $120K.

So you're basically assuming that if you use the plute-only terminal at LAX (whose management company once threatened to sue me for criticizing it in print!), and LHR (originally royals-only, now open to any oligarch), you'll avoid covid. Presumably because the Better People have Better Masks and the Luxury Decontam Wipes and that will keep the bad stuff at bay. Nevermind that we're finding covid in people who've been in psych ward lockdown for TEN YEARS.

https://twitter.com/AskAKorean/status/1233046896719126533

Elite Panic is definitely a killer. I mean, people have been pointing this out since Poe wrote "Masque of the Red Death" in 1842. You can't shoot germs.

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

Humanity has a shared microbial destiny. Crises get resolved by people running TOWARD the problem, not cowering in luxury bunkers while better people do the work. This is the point of my own take on "Masque."

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250242334

Public health crises show that reality has a well-known collectivist bias, and this challenges right wing orthodoxy, which is why the right has only two responses to epidemiology: "It's a hoax" and (later) "Exterminate the dirty poors!"

"The Reactionary Mind," Corey Robin's magnificent 2011 book (updated 2017), traces the history of right-wing thought to find the factor that unites Dominionists, imperialists, white nationalists, libertarians and other strains of right-wing thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

Robin's conclusion: the thing that unites these different strains is a belief that humanity is naturally arrayed in hierarchies, with some people simply born better than the rest of us, and the world is best when the best people are in charge. It's an idea as old as Plato's Republic. Dominionists want Christian men in charge of women and children. Racists want white people in charge of racialized people. Libertarians want bosses in charge of workers. Imperialists want America in charge of the world.

It explains why right-wing movements hang together (because they all agree that the "wrong people" are running things) and why they splinter (once they take power, they can't agree who the "right people" are).

This "divine right of kings/bosses/America/whites/men/Christians" philosophy is coterminal with the idea of the natural leaders having special stuff that makes them better: just as the touch of a king will heal leprosy, so too can you expect that a plute won't have covid. It's wrong, of course — lethally so.

The US already has Medicare for All (permalink)

Did you know the US already has "Medicare for All"? But only under very specific circumstances: under the National Disaster Medical System, if the President declares a public health emergency, the federal government steps in to pay all out-of-pockets.

https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/responders/ndms/definitive-care/Pages/coverage-guidelines.aspx

Any medically necessary service which is authorized for reimbursement as long as the patient sustained:

Injuries or illnesses resulting directly from a specified public health emergency;"

("If you have covid symptoms, you're covered")

Injuries, illnesses and conditions requiring medical services necessary to maintain a reasonable level of health temporarily not available as a result of the health emergency

("if you have any other problem and can't get treatment due to covid chaos, you're covered")

As Carlos Mucha points out, Trump declaring a national health emergency would create "Medicare for All with Covid-19," which could easily become just plain Medicare for All, "as surely as the UK's Emergency Hospital Service morphed into the NHS."

America's uninsured will turn a covid crisis into a covid disaster (permalink)

The last time Carl Gibson saw a doctor was 2013, when an arm-sling and an Rx for painkillers ran him $4000, creating a permanent blot on his credit report. He hasn't been since.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/28/coronavirus-millions-of-americans-uninsured

He's not alone. 44% of Americans do not see doctors despite medical necessity, because of cost. About a third of Americans do not fill their prescriptions because they can't afford them.

27.5m Americans don't have health insurance, thanks to a mix of Republican state-houses blocking Medicare expansion and Obamacare's intrinsic shortcomings, which invite price-gouging and under-coverage from America's sociopathic health-insurance industry.

This is terrible under the best of circumstances, but it's the thing that turns a coronavirus emergency into a coronavirus catastrophe. Because Carl Gibson is sneezing into the same air you're breathing.

("All the common people breathing filthy air" -The Pointer Sisters)

Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, is a former pharma lobbyist who has ruled out price controls for a Covid-19 vaccine.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/27/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-27-feb-2020/#pandemiccapitalism

And Nancy Pelosi has said that treatment must be "affordable" – not free. What's "affordable" when 61% of Americans don't even have $1,000 saved to cover a medical emergency?

It's hardly a novel observation to say that we have a shared microbial destiny: "The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/few-americans-have-enough-savings-to-cover-a-1000-emergency.html

Jury refuses to convict Extinction Rebellion activists (permalink)

An Oregon jury has refused to convict a group of climate activists who blocked a rail line that Zenith Energy used to transport tar sands crude. The Extinction Rebellion activists presented a "necessity defense" for their actions.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/28/landmark-win-fight-habitable-future-jury-refuses-convict-climate-activists-who

The activists were charged with trespassing for planting a "victory garden" that blocked the track. There was video. 5 of 6 jurors decided that maintaining the habitability of the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life justified the action.

"We need to take note of the lessons learned by the labor movement—mass civil disobedience works. The climate crisis is a workers' issue, we need to unite to shut down business as usual. Right now." -Margaret Butler

The result was a mistrial, and now the local prosecutors have to decide whether to haul the activists back into court again.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Deluded Sony music exec can't read his own study https://constitutionalcode.blogspot.com/2005/02/us-market-not-antagonistic-towards-drm.html

#15yrsago Euro software patents reanimated through corrupt officials 0wned by Microsoft https://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/02/28/2223232/eu-commission-declines-patent-debate-restart

#15yrsago Comp sci profs smackdown the movie studios https://web.archive.org/web/20050303023425/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000776.html

#10yrsago Architectural fan-drawings of classic sitcom houses http://origin.www.markmoorefineart.com/artists/mark-bennett

#10yrsago Petition to make "Hella" the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 https://www.facebook.com/The-Official-Petition-to-Establish-Hella-as-the-SI-Prefix-for-1027-277479937276/

#10yrsago Cyberwar hype was cooked up to sell Internet-breaking garbage to the military https://www.wired.com/2010/03/cyber-war-hype/

#5yrsago North Korean defectors undermine totalitarianism with smuggled pirate sitcoms https://www.wired.com/2015/03/north-korea/

#1yrago Oakland teachers' union declares total victory after seven-day strike https://oaklandea.org/updates/oea-reaches-tentative-agreement-with-ousd/

#1yrago German Data Privacy Commissioner warns at new Copyright Directive will increase the tech oligopoly, make EU companies dependent on US filter vendors, and subject Europeans to surveillance by US companies https://torrentfreak.com/german-data-privacy-commissioner-sounds-alarm-over-upload-filter-oligopoly-190301/

#1yrago University of California system libraries break off negotiations with Elsevier, will no longer order their journals https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

#1yrago Satanic Panic 2.0: The Momo Challenge hoax https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/momo-challenge-hoax/583825/

#1yrago Striking West Virginia teachers won swift and decisive victory; Oakland next? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/28/rapid-victory-west-virginia-teacher-strike-shows-what-happens-when-progressives

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/)

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

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dropintomanga · 5 years ago

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10 Years of Manga Therapy

Today is a very special day as it’s the 10th year of this blog. Yeah, it’s been that long.

I think back to what the manga world was like 10 years ago. I remember how huge Naruto, BLEACH, and One Piece were to fans in 2010 and now we have a new generation of Jump series to follow (My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, etc.) today. I remember how the manga industry decided to take steps to deal with scanlations in the start of the decade albeit they were very weak attempts. Now there’s better digital manga services with more to come. I remember how the closing of Borders bookstores hurt manga in the U.S. and in 2013, the 1st season the Attack on Titan anime’s success gave the U.S. manga industry new life. Today, I see so much manga series I heard about online in bookstores.

What hasn’t changed over the past 10 years is the perception of watching anime compared to reading manga. Reading still feels frowned upon as a leisure activity. Many fans prefer watching anime since visuals and voices are they’re often easier to follow. There are attempts to get anime fans to read manga as anime adaptations still drive manga sales overseas. What I would like to try and do is come up with some ideas on how to get interested fans started on reading manga and go on to become lifelong readers of it.

It’s easy to think about all the changes I’ve seen in manga, but I want to talk about my own changes over the past 10 years.

I still remember when I first started the blog, I made 2 serious posts along with a few quotes. Then I made a post stating my commitment to take the blog seriously. I wanted to have some kind of fame. I hoped that I would get a great job/career with help from my blog. And here we are today. I had social media pages and decent enough followings at the start, but over time, my attitude towards the blog began to change.

I realized how I was beginning to obsess with metrics like SEO, analytics, retweets, likes, etc. I remember a friend pressuring me to do online ads. Thank god I didn’t since ad-blockers are now a thing. To be honest, I was really surprised that my blog did well. I still can’t believe my top article ever is the one I wrote about why incest is popular in Japanese otaku culture back in my first year.

At the same time, my life was starting to change around 2015. I wasn’t really watching as much anime as I used to. I also got back into gaming thanks to watching speedruns of Japanese RPGs. I felt that video games were always my first love. Thankfully, my second love was reading, especially of the comics and manga kind.

The first half of the decade was fun for me, but the 2nd half was where I managed to grow into my own as a person. I started to see life outside of the blog and social media in general as I was tired of seeing so much online discourse over topics that are so nuanced and devoid of proper context. I began to take more walks, check out sights and sounds offline, observed people in the streets and spend more time with my family.

When I started Manga Therapy, I had so much self-hatred. It was a big problem that held me back. As much as I had support at the time, I felt so dependent on other people helping me to feel better. I wanted to help others so bad because I wanted to ignore my own problems.

Some of you may have read my Anime NYC yearly recap posts and those were the years that I felt like I’ve made a huge stride in getting past my persistent depression. I finally stopped hating myself. I started to put my own care first. I stepped away from unnecessarily comparing myself to other people. I walked away from any rhetoric (especially online) that sounds super-ideological and/or full of “-isms.” I feel like I have a sense of self-worth and peace of mind that I wish I felt 10 years ago. Hell, even 20 years ago, I wish I had that feeling. I still suck at a few things and I’ll continue to work on them.

The more I’ve changed, the more I feel both compassion and sympathy for people who’ve been through so much and have been ignored by most of society. I realize that even people considered “good” aren’t exactly good. The people you need to worry about aren’t necessarily your enemies; it’s sometimes the people closest to you. That was perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my life so far. I also learned that chasing happiness is a trap that leads to less happiness.

I think about how different I am from most people. I don’t fit into systems labeled in black-or-white fashion. I despise both extremism and groupthink. I see that notable folks in the manga industry are outspoken about things I don’t necessarily agree with. I see notable folks outside of it are outspoken about things I don’t necessarily agree with. While I do enjoy talking to the people who work in or cover the manga industry, I feel that I occupy this in-between area that not many people want to reside in.

I’m starting to believe that not being too involved in fandom has helped me process life better. Fandom is fun to get involved in, but you have to be able to deal with and/or accept BOTH the good and bad sides of it. I don’t know where manga fandom is going because both the fans and industry are going to struggle finding a middle ground with regards to digital manga. Yet I do know that manga fandom has to continue fighting for acknowledgement because it’s not just anime fans who may not care about manga; it’s also the Western comics industry and fans who still ignore the continued success of manga for whatever reason.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a prediction list of what’s gonna happen in the next 10 years. I do hope to see a bunch of manga titles that discuss mental health and illness licensed here. Other than that, the one thing that’s certain is uncertainty. Life is always full of randomness. I didn’t think I was going to start a blog 10 years ago about my own experiences. I didn’t think I was going to last as long as I have. I didn’t think this blog would leave me feeling heartbreak and later renewed joy from a healthy distance. I don’t know where Manga Therapy is going to take me. All I know is that I’ll enjoy this ride for the time being. It’s what I’ll do for myself and my readers.

So, thanks to all my readers for reading and huge props to anyone who’s read for the whole 10 years I’ve been around. Reading manga still provides value to my life. To everyone who has mental health problems or mental illness, I hope that manga with all its complexities can help you cope and build resilience in ways that last not just 5, 10, or 20 years, but a lifetime.

#manga industry #manga #fandom #mental health #psychology #decade retrospective #blogging

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