Currently, I’m trying to launch a brand. I dislike that phrase but there it is. I’ve set up the following things:
A Patreon
A Podcast
A YouTube Channel
A Twitter
A Gumroad (soon)
Additionally, I’m producing content for the next issue of UJ (out next month), and I’m trying to grease the creative wheels on a novel I’ve started. This is a lot for one man to do, when he has a household to manage.
On top of this, I’m doing it with minimal support. We have our fans, and even Patrons, but we don’t have a publishing house or an agency or even a website. We are a fart in a hurricane attempting, at this point, to be a louder fart.
This cannot but cause frustration. That feeling of shouting into a void. So the other thing I must manage is the black dog, which comes sniffing around the barn at odd hours and making a pest of himself. The struggle to be heard in the internet age is a real struggle.
There’s a book I’m reading related to this, called Deep Work, which I’ve started but put down so I could finish The Shining (more on that in another blog). It’s only tangentially about the internet and more about the way one needs to manage one’s time and inputs in order to do truly ground-breaking work. It has given me insight. While I’ve enjoyed reading the stuff that’s been created for the UJ Singles Collection (coming soon!), I can’t help but feel the wish to get to the next level. As my post about critics argued, art must come from artists, so the art can only reflect the artist. If the artist is distracted, what happens?
My reasons are common, but they are no less true for that:
Twitter is Unfair. Twitter squelches the speech of the Right, but not the Left. The examples are too many to count, and they’ve been going on for a while. It’s going to continue that way. That’s what the people who run Twitter think is fair and just. They are Lib-Progs, so they’re going to run things according to a Lib-Prog perspective. It doesn’t matter that Jesse Kelly got reinstated. The sword of Damocles remains hovering over him and anyone else who dissents from the Narrative. I am not getting anything out of Twitter to merit participation in something that will profit those who despise me.
Twitter is Angry. Even if the suppression of speech were balanced, a great deal of what passes on Twitter would be an unworthy addition to the national conversation. As I’ve said before, Twitter often has the function of Burroughs’ Tape Recorder, displaying the worst arguments of either side to the other, provoking greater and greater condemnations from both. It’s all Burns and Owns and Destroys. It’s The Screaming of the Children of the Night.
Twitter is Fake. One cannot communicate clearly in a riot. One cannot think clearly. One can only react and shout. The act of reducing a thought to 140 280 characters destroys nuance, consideration and depth. The reward of likes and retweets makes the exercise little more than a performance, an attempt to be applauded. If I am ReTweeted, I reach more people. Therefore I must make what I say basic and accessible, and at the same time extreme, so that it stands out in the storm. Debates are not good-faith attempts to persuade an interlocutor, but a display of rhetorical wizardry before an audience. It is dishonest at every level.
Since leaving, I have had moments of reconsideration. But then I remind myself that I no longer have the Angry Box, as I used to call it, sitting their on my phone to make me angry. I will no longer have pointless debates with strangers over questions neither of us have the honesty to admit our ignorance on.
Instead, I am here. Thinking, reflecting, considering, offering. Doing the Work.
Bill Corbett of MST3K fame has a tweet that illustrates something I have come to find baffling (Incidentally, the tweet that follows this thread is pretty funny).
What’s a movie you’ve never seen that seems to make people ANGRY when they hear you haven’t seen it? If any?
I suppose, given that certain works are considered era-defining, classics if you will, that people will express surprise and dismay to anyone who slips through the gill-nets of pop culture. But the level of emotion people express, it almost evokes blasphemy or heresy. You have failed to become one of the tribe. I have made a very strict effort to not do it, when someone says they haven’t seen something I regard as worth watching. I just say “I really like that, myself. It’s pretty good, but whatever,” or words to that effect.
Even if someone hasn’t seen Star Wars? Especially then. Because being a Grand Inquisitor about Star Wars hurts my heart.
The movie I haven’t seen that bugs people is Neverending Story, and for a while, my adamant refusal to read a Harry Potter book (I still haven’t read one, but Potterheads have learned to behave themselves, and I’m way less obnoxious about it).
AKA, Reflections Appropriate to Any Time Spend on Twitter
I hate your stupid opinions.
I hate reading them. I hate hearing you express them. I hate the way you just repeat things you’ve heard. I hate the way you never pause to examine if anything you’re repeating is true.
I hate the way Social Media has made us dumber. I used to read the newspaper when I was a kid. Mostly the Washington Post, mostly the editorial section, because even in my youth I had intuited that the “news” was a bowdlerized version meant to be shoehorned into a narrative by the crusading Journalists who pretended to speak Truth to Power while actually speaking MiniTruth to everyone else. That meant I read some people who I agreed with, and some I disagreed with.
But I read it, in silence, with no expectation of doing anything with it other than integrate it into my thinking. I didn’t run around the house or neighborhood letting everyone else no my opinion of it. I didn’t assume anyone cared for my particular take of Colbert King’s column.
Today, that would be done by Re-Tweeting it to everyone who “followed” me, with some manner of “sick own” or cretinous applause, such as “This!” or “READ THE WHOLE THING.” I wouldn’t be reading it to read it, but to decide whether it was Of My Sort or not, and make a big deal about it accordingly.
Social media has turned us all into bad journalists. And there were already plenty of those.
So, no, your reaction to the President’s last tweet, or the Olympics, or whether Black Panther is the GREATEST THING SINCE THE LUMIERE BROTHERS INVENTED CINEMA, or whatever one media clown said to another media clown, is not important. It won’t add anything. It does not create, it will not enlighten. It doesn’t exist on its own. It’s just a shout in a noisy room.
And it’s making you angry, and it’s feeding the devil you most want to crack down on. Because you get more of what you pay attention to.
And just in case you decide I’m not practicing what I’m preaching, understand that I could write a nice rant about the Olympics if I wanted to, because there’s very few things I detest as much as the Olympics. Watching the Olympics is about as much fun as watching… other people ski and ice skate.
Let that sink in.
And of course, you have to hear about their inspiration Life Stories first. As if I’m supposed to be interested that some derp had to get up early to practice flinging himself down a mountainside. I assume you have to practice to be good enough for the Olympics.
To say nothing of the fact that the costs of hosting these tedious games can bankrupt cities:
But honestly, I already don’t feel like saying anything else about it. I don’t want to argue with people who want to wonder how in the name of Cheese and Rice the Chinese judge couldn’t give the South Korean girl full points for landing that triple salchow. I don’t want to listen to you tell me “Figure Skating is too a sport, rather than a subjectively-scored performance art!”
I. Do. Not. Care.
And if I spend time arguing about it, I will have to care. I will have to come up with a tendentious definition of “sport” specifically rendered to exclude people who have trained their lives away to do something incredibly difficult that I’ve never even considered attempting.
Is that an addition to anyone’s lives?
No.
So let’s all consider not sharing. Not re-tweeting. Not owning, or applauding, or cross-posting, meme-ing or swiping right.
Let’s try reading, and thinking. Let’s try doing. Let’s try keeping the noise down.
Now Nick Searcy, hilarious actor from Justified and general-purpose insult machine, has apparently felt the ban hammer.
Or maybe not. Twitter’s going Full Kafka on this, explaining its actions in broad bureaucratic generalities when it explains it at all, so who the hell knows.
Basically, it’s a bad time to be an outspoken conservative on Twitter, because the #GloriousTrustandSafetySoviet regards being an outspoken conservative at best as some form of cognitive dissonance, at worst an active sociopathy.
Either because they’re so convinced of their own righteousness that they regard petty tyranny as the Bridge to the Grand Future, or because they lack the spiritual patience to tolerate other points of view.
Which prompted the Internet (and especially Reddit) to lose its damn mind. Because, 12 days from yesterday is December 21st, the first day of Winter. The next book in the series is titled The Winds of Winter. Therefore, on that, day, he will announce that book’s release.
And while I would love for this to be true, I just can’t get my hopes up. Writing epic fantasy takes a long time. Doing a good job with it takes even longer. This isn’t some Dragonlance novel you can poop out in a few months; this is A Song of $(*&ing Ice and Fire. He’s got a million threads to weave together: Stannnis’s deathmarch, Jon Snow touching the void, Cersei’s trial by combat, Sam in Oldtown, Arya in Braavos, Sansa in the Vale, whatever the hell is going on with Brienne and Jaime and Lady Stoneheart, etc.
Oh, and Dany riding a dragon with a khalasar at her back.
So I mentioned that I was re-vamping my Tumblr from having a no real purpose to having a purpose. In the past 2 days I’ve gained nearly 500 followers.
Granted, it’s Tumblr, so following is easy and doesn’t necessarily lead to connection or interaction with contact. It’s like Twitter that way. Of all those followers, there are only a handful of likes, and I think one reblog. But I only have 654 Twitter followers, and I’ve been tweeting for years.
To what do I owe this success, such as it is? I think the following:
People get what my Tumblr’s about, and are interested. People like talking about music, and my posts are short and to the point.
Bro, Do You Even Tag? In doing music reviews, it always helps to tag the band name, the song name, the album name. Then people who check the tags see the content, and decide to follow if they like what they see.
YouTube is the New MTV. After (which is to say, above) every review, I do a separate video post which has either a favored deep track or a live version or something else that I think noteworthy. YouTube is great at giving you options, and people like to hear music when they’re done reading about music.
So, Focus, Reach Out, and Consistent Content. Hopefully this continues.
Does one argue with an enraged, irrational crowd of cultists? Of course not, because argument has no effect on them; one may as well argue with the tides. What you do is use their fury against them. Bend with the winds, and they pass through you.
Intellectually, I approve of the “Good Monday” meme trending on the Twitverse. Fie on all the mopery and misery that starts the week. We should bound from our beds ready to do battle with sloth, folly, and incompetence!
Emotionally, however, F$*& That. I have a cold, and am thus once more pondering the literal translation of “sinus”. It’s May, and the school year is winding down. So I can think of nothing more useful than crawling under my desk until it’s time to pick the kid up from day care.
