The Bifurcated Landscape

My apologies ... I'm going to be elitist for a little while.

Some centuries ago, the number of persons able to read language was well below one tenth of the population.  In a culture where bookkeeping and communication by letters was becoming all important to both the government and the mercantile class, it was perceived that a literate workforce was sincerely needed ... and so, privately at first, the growing middle class undertook an effort to see that their children, at least, would be sufficiently educated to enjoy the benefits of economic opportunities and growth that were blooming everywhere.

Families with the means to do so hired tutors or sent their children to private schools to ensure they acquired the skills necessary to capitalise on new opportunities.  This shift marked the beginning of a broader movement towards increased literacy ... but it was only ever intended for the purpose of making money.  Those who waxed about the beauty of literature, or who perceived that somehow reading would be a gateway for every person's intellectual development, were much mistaken.  Oh, of course, miller's sons, impoverished monks, immigrant's daughters and the like would learn to read and did accomplish startling, amazing things ... but each one of these were complimented by hundreds of thousands who did no better with their literacy than to read tote boards and yellow journals, for such is the nature of human beings.  We can lead them to enlightenment, we can teach them how to achieve it, but we can't make them see a light no matter how boldly we shine it in their eyes.

For most of the population, better than nine tenths, the value of reading, or of any media, is its focus on sensationalism, scandal and exaggerated reporting.  This easily digestible content mollifies the mind following a stressful, difficult day at work; it eases the loneliness of many, it stifles the sense of unimportance, it encourages a feeling of superiority over those who are clearly better off, and it feeds a kind of hope that says, if such persons of such poor judgment manage to find themselves made important enough to write such things about, perhaps one day, I too shall also be important.

Rather than disparage these qualities, as most would, I rather praise them.  This is the most benefit that the majority of us can ever gain from the media, given the sort of work we do, or our effort to pay attention in the classrooms of our youth, or our willingness to buckle down and achieve skills that were difficult to achieve.  We have all these people in the world; they are entitled to some kind of entertainment ... and it might just as well be one that feeds their emotional natures.  For those who argue that media of this sort incites violence, I'll rush to point out that 100 years ago, when the people of 1st world countries had trouble with their governments, they flowed out into the streets with guns and clubs and committed personal violence directly, face to face.  They did not write a nasty screed on their phone.

Examine the violence on the streets in the 1920s and 1930s.  Look up the Sacco and Vanzetti Executions, Tulsa, the Bonus Army March, the Coal Wars, the Los Angeles Fruit Tramp riots, the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, the Detroit Hunger march, the Harlem Riot ... eight examples of violence worse than Jan. 6 between the years 1921 and 1935.  We live in relatively peaceful times.  The largest segment of our population does not seek the same kind of intellectual or cultural experience what we're supposed to want ... and if they cannot obtain the pressure valve that the present day media provides, they will find another way to express their frustrations and emotions, most likely in a way that we won't enjoy.

I say all this to stress that where it comes to catering to our population, with regards to where the money is, the focus is always going to be on the nine tenths and some, and not the less than one tenth.  The less than one tenth is always going to be the loudest single entity ... the one that proclaims a universality of "intellectual culture," because the smaller group is the one that knows how to write and how to speak.  They possess the skill needed to make film, mix music, produce content and run the extremely technical media network, which requires the sort of skill that required buckling down.  But the smaller group is not the "richer" group.  The richest group, the less than 1%, consumes no media at all, cares nothing whatsoever for media except in how it makes money, and makes much, much more money from the nine tenths and some.  It's important to understand how, functionally, the media actually works, and where it's bread is buttered.

As an aside, it's rather freakish to watch extremely rich men in a room talk about how to harness artists to metaphorical carts to make content that the nine tenths and some will watch.  And do so without the least self-awareness.

Keeping these things in mind ... do not concern yourself much with the manufacturing of A.I. generated music or content.  A.I., as it develops is the artist chained to a cart.  And yes, however we may carp, however we may rail and spit, we are going to be thrust into a world where computer generated content is everywhere and unavoidable.  Moreover, you may rely on the one tenth and less of the population taking a stance that sincerely hates this development, that calls it the end of the world and a hundred other disparative epithets, which all amount to getting one's whip and taking after the sea.

But ... if you feel your ire rising even now, reading this, and or if you feel despair in your soul, recall what work the artist chained to the cart is meant to accomplish.  Harnessed artists produce for the nine-tenths and some ... and this work, beneficial as it is for that part of the human congregation, is of no importance whatsoever where it comes to our cultural development.  It never has been.  It is, in fact, an entirely different industry, for an entirely different purpose, than the industry I undertake at this moment in the creation of this post.  Here, I seek to enlighten, to explain that we, who produce original work, are in no way threatened by this change ... except, perhaps, that we may not be able to also produce shit for the masses in the years going forward, as A.I. will be doing that.  Our days of selling crap to the hoi polloi are, yes, coming to an end.  Unfortunately for some, but not so much for others.

From the time I became conscious of artistry and people's perspective of it, there has long been a discord between those who claimed something was "good" because of an intrinsic uniqueness, as opposed to it's mass popularity.  It has been argued to me upteenth times that some obscure bit of filmmaking that no one's ever heard of is actually quite brilliant because it highlights an extremely precise element of our culture, while it's been argued an equal number of times this other extremely popular thing must be important because it has deeply touched so many human hearts.  I think we're moving towards obliterating this argument at last.  Anything obscure, going forward, will never be "discovered," because it won't find that audience able to personally relate to it's content ... and absolutely everything that is "popular" will be A.I. generated.  By definition.

The idea that "deeply personal storytelling" has a future is on the block.  With direct access to every kind of story that every human has explained to a computer at its fingertips, A.I. is going to obliterate sentimentality to a degree that the "creation of human sentiment" by humans cannot compete.  And hooray for that.  None of the significant works that human beings have produced over the last 3 millennium are expressions of "deeply personal storytelling."  They are examples of problem solving, of holding up human trials and examining right from wrong, morality from immorality, usefulness from uselessness, wisdom from ignorance and so on.  It is only in this century, the century of film, that "deeply personal" has achieved any gratuity.  There is no future in the deeply personal, as we shall find that in mining human thought for garbage suitable for the masses, computers will be better at this schmaltz than we are.

There is an argument that floats around that, although yes, although storytelling has historically been a vehicle for exploring complex themes and universal truths, we're all done with that now because they've all been successfully dissected.  This is why we turned to deeply personal in the first place; to seek something "deeper," something more intrinsic to the human experience ... but personally, I find all this human interest-driven "high art" to be facile and shallow.  Weeping over the misery of other people is what the scandal sheets trade in.  Finding solace in the misfortune of others is what yellow journalism portrays.  We've learned in these last hundred years to create images of such uncompromising beauty through visuals that adds a gloss of human sensation to artwork that's been able to turn sensationalism into a sort of perceived reverence.  But it's empty.  There's no more there than what I can have going out on any summer's day and enjoying real nature.

Of course computers can do this every bit as well as we can.  It doesn't require ANY intellectualism or comprehension, beyond the technical skill of making images appear luscious and heart-aching on film.  And technical prowess, in case the reader fails to remember, is what computers are always better at than us.

The future of the individual artist's value is not to be found in emotional manipulation and visual appeal. This is already dying; we're watching the Oscars crash and burn year by year because they cannot let go of the lead dirigible.  There is only one path left open, where computers cannot go; and that is a return to substantive themes and questions that challenge the less than one tenth of the population intellectually and ethically.  That is, the part of the population that wants to be challenged that way.

Because in an uncomfortably brief period of time, this is going to be the only audience left to us.  Those who whine and chafe against the inevitable, marching with their whips to the sea, don't matter.  The voices on the screens decrying what's coming don't matter.  The endless personal videos mass produced that declaim the value of A.I., because today it's a joke, are speaking to an audience that will rush to A.I. produced content, because they don't have to wait months for more episodes of their favourite shows.  The future is thousands of episodes produced in a few hours, which may be binge-watched from this morning until the grave takes us.

But those will be fetid, repetitive, awful shows that only those who can't wait for the next season of Emily in Paris are anxious to see.  Not us.  We won't enjoy them.  But imagine a world where the watcher can "ship" Emily with any other character in the series — or any other series! — and the new episodes will be churned out in the time it takes to toast a bagel and pour a glass of wine.  The convenience of instant gratification will, for the nine tenths and more, vastly overshadow anything that resonates on a deeper level.

We shall have a bifurcated landscape.  On one side, the mass-produced content that provides easy entertainment for those who seek it.  On the other, creators who focus on delivering content that challenges, provokes or inspires.  The arguments will be substance over style, with style losing ... rather that the present dynamic.  And those who get sick of the style — for heaven knows, they'll get all they want, of whatever kind they want, in grand abundance — will drift into the minority, and scorn those who watch the other side ... much more than today, because the camps will be firmly drawn.  One thing is certain: those who praise style will find no market for their work, of any kind.  It makes sense that they weep so much at the insertion of A.I. into their universe, given how small their universe is.

Art exists for no other purpose than to engage and reflect upon the human condition.  All the A.I. in the world cannot stop that from happening.  It may change the rules, it may alter who gets to play, or how they get paid for it, but it can never end the process of taking the world apart and setting out the pieces for others to examine.  This goes on.  Not in the same way, but ... did you think art was immune from progress?

Escapism

The logo above denotes a film production company of the 1940s and 50s, which was really a partnership between two filmmakers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  This particular version of their logo comes from one of my Top 10 films, the Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.  It may very well be in the top 5.  Another version of the logo can be found on this wikipedia page, which also includes a manifesto of the Archers, which I only chanced to read for the first time yesterday evening.  Allow me to reproduce the manifesto, which describes Powell and Pressburger's sense of responsibility to a studio or other producers ... that is, none at all.  Quote,

"We owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss."

"Every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement."

"When we start work on a new idea, we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more."

"No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness."

"At any time, and particularly at the present, the self-respect of all collaborators, from star to propman, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on."

Let me start by saying, I agree.  That is, with respect to my own work, and how I view it.

I am beholden to no one, except those with whom I agree to be responsible towards.   If the work I do is inadequate or of high quality, I am to blame.  When I have an idea, I want to strike at it immediately.  And I believe that what I do, and what I stand for, embraces the idea that theme, or the reason for doing something, is more important than any other part of what I create.

But let's talk about escapism.

What does it mean, the "no artist believes in escapism"?  Is it true?  Does it define the word "artist"?  What is escapism, and why take the stand, among these other things, to say that as artists, Powell and Pressburger are saying that they're interested in truth, instead.

Which, of course, begs that question as well.

Last week, unable to get access to the show in any other way, I signed onto Apple's streaming service so I could watch the show, Ted Lasso.  I had seen several scenes on youtube and was impressed by the writing and the characters, and so I threw some money at the worst technology company in the known universe and watched the show, three seasons in three days.  If you've never heard of the show, I recommend this scene and this one, neither of which will meaningfully spoil the show's storyline, but will introduce most of the characters in their best light.

The show is obstensibly about an American coaching English football, but that is not what the show is about.  The show is about, as one of the clips says, "Grow up, and get over it" ... and every decent person on the series does, which separates the overall work from all the whining, whinging, never-get-over-anything that has polluted television and film these last 15 years.  There are other themes as well, that gets me back in short order to that subject.  A work is not about what the work appears to be about:

This image is not a pipe, and it is not about a pipe.  But until the viewer can grasp this structural relativity, one cannot grasp what theme is apart from moral or message, which is what grade school clumsily fails to correct in the minds of most students.

Escapism is an attempt to emotionally or mentally flee any deeper understanding of the thing we're watching, apart from its most superficial appearance.  It is the argument that this is a pipe, or the representation of one, regardless of the artist's words.  Escapism is the insistence that things be what they appear to be, lest we become mired in a discomforting moment of reflecting on why we've chosen to do something, or see something, which might place us face-to-face with some profound or troubling aspect of life.

No artist wants this.  While the observer of the painting, or the series, or the film being made, has merely to invest a few hours in it, three days say, this is not at all the artist's experience.  There is no escapism in the creation of art, which is the principle reason that most persons do not do it.  Art requires the creator to lock his or her self in a crypt with the work being made and sink into the worst, most repulsive muck imaginable, and to stay there, day after day, month after month, sometimes year after year, and simply endure the horrid, repulsive, uncomfortable truth of it — that the work is very badly done, or insurmountable, or insipid, or any number of other soul-wrenching suppositions that an artist cannot help feeling, while wallowing around trying to make the point have merit or relevance.  This is what the archers are saying: that the naked truth, apart from her lost clothes, is worth doing it for — and is, in fact, the only reason why an artist strives to make anything.

Creating art requires the artist to immerse themselves in the depths of their work, confronting its flaws, difficulties and the relentless self-doubt that accompanies the creative process. This process is not merely about producing something aesthetically pleasing but about grappling with the uncomfortable truths and raw emotions that the work embodies.

But here, we must make a clarification between an artist and a writer, a musician, a painter or any other craftsperson able to use the instruments that an artist also happens to use.  The writers of Emily in Paris manage to cough out various shitty collections of words and characters that appears, to the unfamiliar, to be works of art, though they are nothing but frames in which to place advertising, which in turn justifies the next season of this abomination of a television series.  And should those writers win some award that's paid for by a studio, they will preen themselves and call themselves artists, and those demented souls who like the show for it's escapist qualities will likewise call them artists, which muddies all of this water somewhat for the non-creator.  It's so very, very easy in this culture to confuse "art" with "programming," and to declare that there is no difference, because it's oh so easy.  And thus is my thesis likewise easily exploded, by all those who will point at Emily in Paris or the Sabrina the Teenage Witch or any other show that provides such a comfortable, lovely experience in its lovely, lovely escapist qualities.

Nonetheless, that thesis is sustained if it's understood.  The Archers do not say that artists are not interested in producing escapism, but rather, that escapism cannot be produced by an artist.  The distinction is fine, but clear.

An artist may understand or even work within the realm of popular media, but the core of their creative process is rooted in confronting and expressing deeper truths.  Escapism, in contrast, is an evasion of these truths, providing a comfortable retreat rather than a challenging engagement.

And thus, we arrive at everything that has gone wrong with dungeons and dragons.

In its early iterations, D&D required players to immerse themselves deeply in the game's world, navigating intricate plots, moral dilemmas, and richly detailed settings. The game's creators intended for it to provoke thought, challenge players, and offer a meaningful experience beyond simple entertainment.

However, as D&D evolved and sought a broader audience, there has been a shift towards more escapist content. This trend is marked by an emphasis on spectacle, straightforward quests, and simplified mechanics that prioritize immediate gratification over deep engagement. The result is a version of D&D that offers an enjoyable, but ultimately superficial, experience, catering to those seeking a quick escape rather than a profound adventure.

And just like shitty television, the apparent popularity of present-day D&D has been conflated into a belief in its "artistry," as though the demonstration of a larger audience, and the awareness of more media outlets, and the occasional DM who now speaks of being a "professional" because he or she is paid, receives daily accolades.  Because someone has made a movie of it, which in no way reflects the actual game as it's actually played, or any of the characters therein, or any of the game's structure or nuance, the simple logo is enough to offer a cred it doesn't deserve.

If, upon occasion, I lose the sense of why the pursuit of a specific kind of game that I'm creating isn't me slipping off my cracker, it's only because the misery of creation is so very, very miserable.  But now and then a wake-up call, a manifesto by some filmmakers written 85 something years ago, I'm able to snap back to myself and remember, oh right, I'm not making shitty D&D.  I have no interest in escapism.  Trapped in all this muck, I forgot that a moment.  I got some muck in my eye.  I'm all right now.

The path that I'm on diverges so starkly from the mainstream that its easy to be overwhelmed.  My goal is not to churn out another formulaic product, though I've been encouraged to do that for the money.  But that's not what I'm interested in doing.  If the producers of Emily in Paris showed up with a truck full of money, I'd say no.

I recognise that most people wouldn't or couldn't believe me when I say that ... but most people, as I said, are not artists.

P.S.,

As the truck drove away, my partner would be really, really angry with me.

Skill-set

 

Sorry to lean into this map a second time, but I want to make the point that nearly all of it was drawn IN GAME, mostly while the players were deliberating about what to do next.  I had a clear concept of how things would be arranged as I began the combat, and used the publisher design program to sketch out the walls as we went.  The stairs came from other maps drawn in the past, as did the doors.  The stone motif is a texture that I installed in the program, like adding a font.  All the characters were pre-made.  The imperfection of passage dimensions, narrow or wide, are a feature.

During the combat, many of the partial hexes are large enough to fight from; I tend to call these according to the size of the character.  Goblins weigh 50 lbs. and therefore can fit into much less than a full hex.  A large 240 lb. human, not so much.  All the character symbols are much bigger than their actual size, because it's more important for the players to easily see their characters than it is for these to be correctly scaled.  I've been meaning to provide a picture of the screen set-up I'm using for combats, but I keep forgetting.  Next running, I'll try to remember.

I want to stress that skill-sets like being able to draw quickly, adapt a program to the game, manage a complex set of rules, or keep players in line so that each person has their moment in the sun, take time to build up.  But they're worth it.  Decades ago I should have put more effort into being an artist.  I should have used opportunities to take art classes, or learned to sketch, as those skills would serve me excellently in the present.  As it is, I'm glad for all the time I've taken to use graphic programs, lay out pages for publication, use excel, gain the ability to write that I have and dozens of other lesser skills that I've acquired over my life.  Each has let me do strange and marvelous things, which of course look impossible to those who haven't spent the time.

But what has to be understood is that it isn't so much time as you might think.  Don't let "not being able to do something" get in your way.  Learn to do it.  Sure, it'll be a bitch at first, but in the long run, you'll find so many ways to apply that annoyingly obtained skill as to astound you.  And you'll appreciate that something you can do very easily seems to impress people a lot.  Remember that many of these skills have real-life applications in real jobs, not just for role-playing and fun.

Don't wait.  Pick something today that you don't know how to do, that you'd like to know, and get started.  You're just like any character in the game.  It's starting at 1st level.

Monetizing a Craft

On the subject of "creativity," and living a life of being creative, I feel there's a discussion I'd like to have in this year of late 2021.  And since it's Thanksgiving in America, there's no one reading my blog anyway ... especially with it being Friday.  This is one reason I was throwing up a caption on Fridays instead of writing a post: (a) it shows people I'm still alive; and (b) I felt an odd need to stretch myself in a different direction creatively.  I recognize that it annoyed some people and amused others ... but that can be said about anything I create, all the time.  Some will like it, some won't.  For that reason, if for no other, there's little percentage in creating things exclusively for other people.

On the subject of "being creative," I'm in the camp that believes the everyone has the potential to be creative.  I don't say they are, because they're not.  But if they sought education, if they trained their minds to think creatively, if they put in the time it takes to do this, I believe that a non-creative person can become creative.

Occasionally I hear some voice on the internet who says, "That's wrong.  You have to be pretty damn smart to be creative.  Otherwise, you're not going to invent anything new."  This is nonsense.  Creativity appears to be full of remarkable leaps and "divergent thinking capabilities," as a psychologist might put it, but from a lifetime of being creative and spending thousands of hours talking about creativity with other creative people, the truth is that these things come from being grossly familiar with something.  And when I say "grossly familiar," I don't mean a kid who works as a restaurant cook and pumps out thousands of club sandwiches while waiting for the next opportunity to go home and smoke weed.  I mean someone who pays attention to the sandwiches as they're made, to the quality of cheese, to the texture of the bread, to the thickness in which the turkey was sliced, to the smell and the colour and the day it was shipped in and cut and packaged.  Paying attention to these things is not "being smart."  These are matters of pure sensory observation coupled with mindfulness, which we can define as caring about your job, paying attention to what you're doing and mentally comparing something from day to day.

People care about their job when they're given reason.  If they speak out loud about an observation they make, and they're attacked or shamed for making it; or if they're surrounded by people who themselves don't care enough to explain the nuance of making food, or any other creative thing we might happen to be doing from day to day, then it sends a message that you shouldn't care either.  Constant abusive apathy and constant abuse for being interested in things will cause people to conclude that it's wrong to be mindful of what you're doing; that it's better to think constantly of escape, instead.  And this makes the person who does care, who cares in spite of others not caring, appear to be strangely weird and remarkable.  Such a person is granted special imagined superpowers, like being fabulously smart and really fantastically divergent ... which really just means different from a general population of drones who have been taught to hate being drones, who believe the only escape from being a drone is the seven hours a day one spends away from drone-land.

I've said it many times, however.  Caring and becoming good at something cannot be done just because one wants to be.  Many of the creative people I've known seemed to possess a "natural" creative ability ... such as being able to pick up a guitar and play it competently within a few hours.  Some of these people have chosen to be creative, but I've met just as many who did nothing of consequence with their guitar-playing ability.  A guitar is just a tool.  The tool's not intrinsically important to creativity.  It is a vessel through which we express something creative, but it's not creative of itself.  Playing guitar instantly doesn't confer mindfulness; it doesn't provide the practice that's needed to observe, investigate, deconstruct, become aware of what the tool can do and then take it to creative places.

We have so many wrong suppositions we make about creativity.  The guitar-thing is just one of them.  I've heard it said hundreds of time that some people just "are" creative and some are not.  And this appears to be so, when some psychologist takes a sampling of the population and asks a hundred questions about what we feel and what we might create and how we might go about creating that thing.  But such samplings are restricted to very brief moments of time.  Becoming creative takes many, many years; and ceasing to be creative can happen after a horrific trauma within a few hours.  Someone who is uncreative today, for whatever reasons, may be that because of the life they've lived up to this time — but this says nothing of the life they could have lived, or might live in the future.  Any creative person we interview can, at any time, decide they've had enough; they can't make it pay, they're tired of the shame and the attacks of their friends, they're tired of the scene and the hatred of outsiders.  And any non-creative person might find themselves attending a class, discovering they like a thing, that they care about it, that they want to go on caring about it and, what do you know, five years from now that non-creative person is "creative."  The whole dog-and-pony show we're sold on who's creative and who isn't is an enormous pile of horse-pucky, limited by terms that were never designed to explain change, but instead to describe what is at the moment when the questioning is done.

Furthermore, we must concede and recognize that most people who set forth to define who can and cannot be creative, or who is and is not, are themselves people who decided to care about something else.  Creative people do not sit about and debate who's creative and who isn't.  They talk about who's going to "make it" and who isn't ... in the sense of, who's going to make something important and valuable, and who's blowing smoke up their own ass.  Because a lot of creative people are.  Pretense is an effective and self-destructive strategy for managing the attacks and shame perpetrated by people who feel we shouldn't care too much about things, that caring "too much" is an unhealthy habit, and that specifically we shouldn't care too much about things that don't include a steady paycheque.

It's generally accepted by those who do earn steady paycheques, who chose to care about non-creative things, like psychologists and doctors and political scientists, that it's not such a great thing to be creative.  It's not something that you, O non-creative person, should wish for.  Life really sucks for creative people.  You work a lot for something that doesn't pan out; you spend a lot of time that you could be spending earning money NOT earning money, pursuing a "risky" vocation that may never, ever pay out in any degree that will satisfy you or anyone else.  As my father said back in 1980, when I told him I wanted to be a writer, "You're never going to make a living at it."  There's the shame, right there.  Out of the gate, at 16, a young creative person is warned, "You've made the wrong choice about the life you haven't lived yet.  Smarten up and make the right choice."

It continues to interest me that half the population argues that being creative is something smart people do, while the other half argues that being creative is something only stupid people try.

It's here that we get to the meat of this post; all that's come forward to now is just setting the tone.  In a lot of ways, when talking about being creative, or "an artist" as it were, we are still wrapped up in sentiments that were — extreme emphasis on "were" — realities about being creative.  For example, and thinking of many situations where the argument was made to me by other artists, and where I made the argument myself until I knew better, creative people used to argue that "If I make an amazing thing, the world will be a path to my door."  There are still many people who believe this.  There are many who believe this is the ONLY way to succeed as an artist ... in part, because most of the visible artists we see are those who became famous for making some amazing thing.

The whole idea, however, isn't based on a "creative" model, but upon a business model.  In business, we're producing a "product."  This product then needs to be manufactured, and distributed, and this requires paying a lot of people to create numerous copies of the thing and then store the thing, and in turn physically sell the thing face-to-face to customers, all of which requires enormous amounts of capital and expenditure ... and if you're an ordinary person, who has no access to these manufacturers, distributors, retailers or money-lenders, then creating an "amazing thing" won't do you much good.

And this might be true, if this was 1995.

But it is not 1995.

Let's take these things in turn.  Once upon a time, when speaking about an artistic venture, we spoke about making something.  I tried to write a book, my friends struggled with making an album, or painting artworks, or arranging space to put on a performance or filming a film.  And these were products that were difficult to achieve or create without money and expensive equipment.  This is because if a book were written, an album or film made, a performance given and so on, these things had to be done in the real world, with real physical objects that had to be physically made.  The number of people we could expect to view these physical objects was minimal ... especially without the money to distribute or the money to knock on the doors of Guardians who were there to make sure that only approved films, albums, books, performances and what not would be allowed mass distribution to the masses.

There are a great many people whose businesses and industries depend upon the general population continuing to believe that it's still 1995.  The entire television industry, for example, in which the best rated-TV show today gets ratings so low that it would be cancelled if this were the early 1980s.  Television sells to a smaller market each year; a market that resists getting a computer; a market that gets older and therefore which is actuarially shrinking; a market that is less and less consciously aware of the real world, and can therefore invent whatever bullshit it wishes to sell as reality because most people in the world are not watching.  Other businesses include the publishing industry, the food industry, the film industry and the trucking industry ... and so on.  There are still billions of dollars associated with these shrinking, crippled behemoths, and so long as there is, there's going to be much effort to convince everyone that they're still strong, they're still making the rules, they still deserve our attention and respect, everything is in fact bigger and better than it ever was before and no, they would never, ever lie to you.  After all, they didn't lie in 1995, right?  So I'm sure they're just as honest about their expectations and future today as they were then.

Thus you will still find many pundits who will tell you, "Marketing is HARD."  It was.  It isn't now.  Marketing is still unpleasant, it's still unforgiving, it's still tedious and unfulfilling, but one thing it isn't is "hard."  Marketing is easy.  Create a space — channel, blog, webpage, whatever — and then create content for that space every day.  Or as many days as possible.  Be genuine.  You must be genuine.  Give a lot of time.  A lot of time.  Talk about anything and everything.  Be generous.  Be thankful.  Care.  That's it.  That's the formula.

This has always been the formula.  But while in 1995, the "formula" had to be pushed through grubbing executives and justified with market research and submitted with humility in front of sacred poobahs before it's being discussed by non-creative persons whose interest was money and not creativity, all that shit is gone now.  The channel is free.  The blog is free.  Webpages are not, but they're really soooo 2001.  Choose a free page on social media.  Discuss your creative agenda with no one.  Explain your creative agenda to no one except your audience.

In today's market, if you're manufacturing something, you're creating the wrong product.  I say this as someone who's just manufactured something; who has manufactured a few books.  There's a means to making things, and some cachet in having tactile products, but these are not the 2021 product you need to make.

I can do these things because I'm the design department; I'm the sales department; the internet is the customer support department.  I'm not making a gadget that can break.  Or cause serious harm to people.  I make books.  People have rarely been accidentally killed by a book.  If I were making knives, that would be a whole other thing — but if I were making knives, macrame flower-holders, metal armour or car parts, selling these things through the internet would be a bad, 1995-based marketing plan.  And as I said, it's not 1995 any more.

If I write a book and rely on how things were in 1995, then I'd have to get the book approved by an agent, who would have to get the book approved by a publisher, who would insist on my rewriting the book so it would conceivably be approved by the publisher journalism, who are necessary for selling the book to people who have never heard of the book and can't know for sure they'd ever want to read it without being first told by "experts" that they want to read it.  Of course, there might be someone who pays no attention to experts, but we have to print thousands of these things physically and then move them out to stores and draw attention to them and that's an outlay of money and blah blah blah, that's how things went.  I'd be put in a car and driven around to talk about the book everywhere, because there's no internet and television only talks to bookwriters who write specific kinds of books, so face-to-face meetings were important.  On these face-to-face junkets, I have to prove I'm really enthusiastic about going to them as long as it's expected, however much I might miss my family or children or former life, because now I'm a slave in a car pretending to care about my 55th junket three days before Christmas I won't be allowed to go home for, because the book's not selling as well as the publisher expected and that's my fault or at least my responsibility to fix.

But it's 2021, and almost 2022, and there is no publisher but me.  There is no outlay and immense stock of books because on-demand marketing blew the hell out of the publishing industry like Uber destroyed the taxi business.  I can print a bunch and get a table at a game con, which is enormous fun because I'm working for myself and I get to talk directly to my people — and not the people the publisher thinks should be my people.   My people are the only ones I'm answerable to ... and they're my people because I care, I write a lot, about anything and everything, I'm thankful, I'm genuine — even if that means being a genuine bastard — and I've built this space over a lot of time.  I've followed the formula.  And though I have a few products, what matters more is what I write here, not what products I make.

Once you have a space, and work at it, and earn the respect that people in fact want to give to those who work hard, you can make terrific imaginative creative things out of whole cloth.  You don't have to go through a tremendous guantlet to explain what this new thing is.  A traditional marketer will ask, "If people don't know what a thing is, how can they search for it on Google?  How are they going to find something they don't know exists?"

Traditional marketing presupposes that "finding" is the key to selling.  And that used to be true.  But when all the rest of the marketing, distributing, manufacturing and so on departments are dispensed with, there is much less overhead.  It takes much, much less for the creative person to, how did my father put it?  "Make a living of it."  The internet doesn't need to find me, or my product.  I don't need the whole internet.  I only need to be sure that those who have already found me have reason to keep doing so.  I need only be honest and authentic and to care enough to convince them to help me continue to keep whatever I'm doing going.

It's become spectacularly easy to create a product and then monetise it ... so long as you're making the right kind of product.  Most who get started, thinking they're going to do well, choose the wrong product.  They think they have to make a "thing" ... but let's hope that's dispensed with.  Next, they think they need a lot of equipment and glitz, and of course money to pay for it all.  I won't argue that money and glitz are nice.  People argued that my Kickstarter should be flashier, that it needed to get more attention, that the product wasn't highlighted strongly enough; and of course all those people are convinced that my kickstarter would have done better if I'd done those things, even though it succeeded at raising the money asked for.

Equipment and glitz are not, however, "content."  They're tools.  They won't make something creative more creative.  They won't give substance to something that hasn't any substance.  Something really expensive and really flashy might get attention for a while ... but it won't last and the creator won't learn anything about creating.  And to be clear on the subject, doing something successful for six years, that afterwards crashes and burns, won't sustain the creator's creative impetus for the rest of his or her life.  No matter how great one is when one's riding the crest, the shame of not being on the crest any more feels like being crucified over and over.  Creative success is about being creative, not being famous.

Feel free to disagree.  Eventually, you'll see where I'm coming from.

So what do we sell?

Not an idea.  Ideas are fleeting.  J.D. Salinger had a great idea for a book that he wrote in his 20s and had published when he was 31.  Catcher in the Rye has been considered one of the greatest works of literature ever produced since its first publication in 1951.  Salinger spent the rest of his life wrestling with his inability to repeat his success, escaping public exposure, struggling with his spiritual beliefs and, on the whole, remained an apparently unhappy person for most of his life.  Who knows what the truth is about that, but we know he was hounded relentlessly by a publishing industry that held him to a standard to which he didn't want to be held.

A more common story follows virtually any artist who created a series of works for a decade or so, did well, became famous ... and then simply ran out of ideas.  After a string of successful albums, books or films, one fails, then another, then another.  And as the specific industry turns its back on the artist, the artist grows increasingly obscure, until several generations of children are asking the question, "Who's Paul McCartney?"

Not saying it isn't great having a good idea, or that we can't seriously enjoy that idea when it comes or even build on it for the future.  But we shouldn't count on one great idea to sustain us and it's not necessary in any case.

Where once the goal was to become creative and effective with a given tool that channels that creativity, there's something more important that we can sell today.  As a product it's highly in demand and it's inexhaustible.

Teach.

You can do it; now, teach someone else to do it.  You can renovate a bathroom?  Great!  Film yourself doing it, explain what you're doing, be detailed, take your time, admit your mistakes, have fun ... and then do it again.  Each time you renovate a bathroom, there will be different problems, different things to explain, different gadgets and pieces to buy and install, different jokes to make, different things that YOU will learn and then TEACH, in the same breath.

Where once you created a piece of music and then sold it to someone so they could buy your music and listen to it ... today you can film yourself creating music, explain the process of creating music, teach others how to do it, help them along, communicate with them directly through numerous channels and help them create their own music and enjoy making it.

I write about D&D.  Yes, it's interesting that I have this huge, phenomenal world, but that's not because I'm smarter or more creative or because I possess divergent whateverisms.  It's because I cared, I loved it, I did it constantly, I was mindful of what I was doing, I listened to my players and I trusted my motives to just keep going, to create the next thing, to try something different, to explore possibilities and to ignore people who told me to stop creating and start buying someone else's product.

We're moving into some interesting times.  For two decades we've been told that the internet offers an information revolution.  What manufacturers and marketers don't want us to realize is that the revolution is learning to do things ourselves, teaching others and recognizing that a truly individual thing is not something we buy, but something we learn to make while enjoying the process of making.  Part of that process is teaching others ... and building a new economy through teaching and small-scale personal, authentic-based exchanges.  The 1995ers are worried; they don't know what they're going to do with a worker/owner based economy of five billion self-driven labourers who don't need a job.  They don't need a minimum wage.  They don't need marketing.  And they don't need venture capitalists, marketing agents, retailers, angel investors, brick-and-mortar stores or, well, anybody.

These people are scared.  And they will do their best to obfuscate our choices, to shame our desire to be creative and individual, to push us to believe that we need them, that there's no future without them, and that if we don't kowtow to them, our future, our hopes and dreams, our freedoms and everything that matters will be put at a tremendous personal risk.

Without a doubt, count on them to lie.  As much as they have to.

News and Patronage

So far, I've accumulated eight guests for my podcast, expressing various concerns about what they can meaningfully say that will be useful for listeners.  I take this as a good sign.  We're replete with "experts."  We can use some people expressing doubt.

I'm thinking now that my best course will be to put together 10-13 podcasts (13 would be ideal), then call that a season and take three months off, then do it again.  Two seasons a year, for 13 episodes a season, would be my target.

But of course I have yet to do an interview.  I'm gathering together my resources, fermenting my mind on the general concept and waiting for inspiration.  That is what I do a great deal: wait for inspiration.

Yesterday, I restarted the Juvenis campaign.  It will probably be a slow start; I work inconsistent days and half days Monday to Thursday, limiting my involvement to the afternoon and evening, while Fridays, the day I'm sure to get off, always were pretty slow for the gang.  So, the campaign will likely crawl along, until my situation changes.  Still, it is good to be running online again.  I get a kick out of it.

I've updated a load of maps on the wiki, those with A, B or C in the file names, work that I've been grinding at for months and months now.  I found there were some shortcomings, too, on the map files for those who have donated sufficiently to my Patreon, which I've corrected.  If you're a contributor, have a look at the private map files also. The most recent two that I've updated are Brittania and Germania.  There are some considerable aesthetic additions to these maps, along these lines.

Let's see, what else?  I recently got into an argument on Twitter about artists being paid for their work.  The position I argued against is a common maxim posed by university and post-secondary trained artists, who are propagandized to "Never, ever, ever, work for free for anyone ever, period."  The agenda behind this is plain and obvious to every creative soul in every field:  established artists, particularly established artists dependent on grants for survival, don't want the competition.  The maxim is always presented as something that is in YOUR personal interest, if you are an artist, but it is really just speaking from fear.

It is, of course, ridiculous.  I'm creating right now, for free.  So are millions of other people, because they enjoy creating and because they don't expect to be paid for it anyway.  Of course, I'd like to be paid, and in a greater sense my readers do pay me, regularly, because they appreciate what I do.  But this has nothing to do with how much content I choose to produce, because I love producing and sometimes have to restrain myself from doing so.  This is a blog with too many words and I'm always ready to add more.

Those artists who most pitch the "Don't Work For Free" belief are almost always static visual artists ~ either painters or graphic artists ~ coming from a very specific institutional framework, usually an art school.  And such people look down on writers, they always have.  We are the scum of the art field, usually because to get into the field of writing, writing for free is the only method.  Long, long before we can expect a publisher to print us, it is necessary to enter non-paying writing competitions as early as elementary schools, followed by hundreds of hours writing plays and scripts for high school drama departments (because there is no writer-arts department), followed by writing anything and everything in an attempt to get noticed.  So being told, "Don't write for free," sounds like the spastic grunts of a pig caught between the stiles of its pen.

Of course, by the time we are paid (and I've enjoyed steady work at 30 cents a word, which would make this free blog worth $750,000), writing is easy.  The computer forms the letters for me, requiring no physical skills whatsoever, while thinking and writing become pretty much the same process.  Which is why painters don't think of us as "real artists."

Anyway, I got some peeps angry with me about this, but no never mind.  The thing that has to be remembered about making any sort of creative thing is that making it is more important than being paid for it.  If no one is paying you, make it anyway, because what you'll learn through making and problem solving is more valuable to you than steadfastly refusing to work because there's no paycheque.

Moreover, working for free enables mutual collaboration with other artists at your own level, where neither of you expect to be paid right now.  It makes for contacts in the future, opportunities, gained skill in dealing with others and getting to feel your own voice without training yourself to be a slave to someone with a wallet.  That's the worst thing about being creative and in someone else's pocket; you can't speak your mind, because there's always the chance that causing offense will make the money go away.

Work.  That's the only thing that matters.  In this fabulous age, with the internet, with direct contact with the customer, with hundreds of conventions that will let you sell in real time, with Patreon and other like sights, the world has never been friendlier for the Do-It-Yourself Artist.  Believe me, I grew up in a time where the doors were all closed, all the time.

The only thing standing between you right now and getting your art and your message to a friendly, supportive audience is how many skills you have, against how many you'll have to pay for.  Learn to lay out your product, learn how to sell, learn how to write a blurb, learn how to page design, learn how to draw or copyread or edit.  Learn.  You may be awful at it to begin with; look at me, I still have many shortcomings.  But if you pitch and try and rework, things get better and better, you get smarter and smarter, your work develops, you gain confidence and in the end, you don't need anyone.

You are your own Patron.

Mindfulness

Let me ask something: does the reader feel overwhelmed?  I've talked about a wide range of subjects regarding gamer experience: the importance of difficulty, the responsibility inherent in taking up the mantle of DM, rule-making, game structure and function, narratology, modelling, despair at venturing into new game design, reverse engineering as we play games, operational logic and the concept of game flow.

Are you lost?  This is all interesting stuff but how in hell does it set an agenda for what you're going with your world or your game?  Have you already forgotten most of it?  Has it fallen right out of your head?

Don't be surprised.  I'm finding it hard to keep it straight.  My only saving grace is that most of it has been floating around in my head for decades, without my knowing that the academic work I've been posting and deconstructing existed.  Clearly, it's hard to find; and I think that most of this content falls on deaf ears, given that it sets out to correct misunderstandings about concepts such as "fun," "reward," "rules" and "worldbuilding."  These are not concepts that common game makers or users want corrected: they have already fixed in their minds what these words mean and any effort to create a measurement thereto will be bound to encounter resistance.

Yesterday, prior to writing my post about setting, I spent a couple of hours looking for a definitive university-level book on developing a dramatic setting or a game setting, to compare with the examples that I had found online and among juvenile how-to articles.  There wasn't one, at least not that I could find.  I found plenty of books with a high complexity describing setting in Greek tragedy or in Shakespeare, or related to the Bible or other general categories of literature and drama.  Yet I could not find an authoritative, meaningful book on "choosing a setting" as more crude sources would approach the subject.  From my own academic experience with creative writing, I have to admit the matter was never approached in that manner.  I don't approach setting myself in that way.  I would never think before starting a book, "I want to create a story that takes place in such and such a setting; I will make the setting first and then decide what sort of story I want to tell there."

[I know, this seems like I'm going to go back into setting again, but I'm just going around the barn; I'll come back, I promise]

Any story I've wanted to tell has always been about something I believe or something I want to believe; substantially, the most certain sorts of thoughts that it is possible for me to have.  For example, Pete's Garage is about how a fellow approaches not being able to work and live as a musician, but only knows a life lived among musicians.  Pete still knows what he knows about music; he's wise in his manner and he's forgiving of the musician's lifestyle and the musician's quest.

I didn't want to write a story about a music agent or a music promoter, and I had minimal experience with those things.  But I knew a place, Connections, when I was 19 and 20 that rented rooms by the hour to musicians who wanted to practice, where they didn't have to worry about how loud they were.  It was a shit little building downtown that has since been ripped down and made into a parking lot (coincidentally, connected to a place where I worked on the 5th floor for five years in video-on-demand, but that's not important).  To reduce the noise between rooms, the management hung nets on the walls full of ripped up foam rubber, like one of those nets you probably fell into when doing the high jump in high school.  The carpet was old and rotten, with the wooden floors showing through, the place stank, the floors weren't level, the management were assholes and the vibe was equivalent to a meth lab.  Yet I spent hundreds of hours there, moving from room to room, talking to musicians, writing stories in the corner while they played, blasting my ears since I was about four feet from the bass and drums, and loving it.

In writing Pete's Garage, I wanted to recreate that: so in a way, it could be argued that I "invented" the setting first and then came up with a story.  But no.  In fact, I invented the story and then remembered a setting that would work with that story.  If I'd never known a place called Connections, I'd have used something else from my memory.  That's how writing works.  We begin with the idea, then we cast around for concepts that will fit that idea and make it believable and interesting.

If the idea is bad to start with, nothing we do in the way of story, characters or setting will save it.  That's important.  Most ideas are bad.  In fact, statistically speaking, all ideas are bad.  Good ideas are a non-statistical anomaly.  That is why most of the time, creators just steal good ideas.  The chances that you, as a creator, will have an honest to gawd original good idea is a statistical impossibility.

Thankfully, I'm wise enough to know that only means it's highly improbable.  People get confused about that, however.

All this comes back around to the problem of how do to set an agenda.  See, no one taught me to do this thing of reaching back into my memory for things that would fit with a recently acquired idea. It came with time.  And with the understanding that the method will serve bad ideas as well as good ones.  That's important too.  There's no real way of knowing if you have a good idea or not; this is largely what has me paralyzed with regards to The Fifth Man right now.  I go through periods where my complete lack of confidence makes me question the logic of spending any time on the book, like Marty McFly asking, "What they say, Get out of here kid. You've got no future. I mean, I just don't think I can take that kind of rejection."

When my struggle is difficult, I'm weak that way.

But you're fine, right, gentle reader?  You don't experience misgivings like that.  You don't have doubts about your campaign or your players, or about what you're doing with your game or your life.  Everything about your world's design is going exactly as you want it to and you're one hundred percent certain that when you bring in a new idea or a new adventure for your players, they will love it.  One hundred percent.

We want good ideas . . . but at best, we're working with what we have.  No one can teach you how to do that; you've got to experiment and play.  On top of that, you've got to be open to the possibility that the idea you have is bad, even if that possibility is uncomfortable and keeps you awake at night.  Even if that possibility paralyzes you for a time.  It is better that you be aware of your potential failures, of your moving down the wrong path, than blindly stumbling along, happy go lucky, until you've destroyed any and every opportunity you may have had to find your way back.

All this game stuff ~ if you're not self-aware and mindful of your game in this manner, none of this will do you any good at all.  If you're not mindful, chances are you'll never be.  Chances are you're not mindful because you're terrified of what you'll find if you look at yourself, your choices and your game too closely.  Looking at it too closely could result in your discovering that it is all shit.

Chances are, you're not ready for that.  And that you'll never be ready for it.

I envy you, a little.  But then I remember, if I were making my world or writing my book with the sort of cheerful confidence that disallowed me any misgivings that either might be shit, they would almost certainly be shit.  With statistical certainty.

Like an Artist

There are two key structures that I want to design into the bard character, and both were discussed in the comments section of the last post.  In this, I want to be clear: these rules are based upon what I see as the necessary elaboration of the bard character.  I've been pulled once (it is so hard to resist being an emotional being) into what is a bard and who is a bard, and I don't want to discuss that again.  I want to talk about the mechanics of making a bard work.  Esoteric discussions that do not involve metrics are actually of very little help.

I know that is bound to choke discussion, as I have found whenever I get into the metrics of something.  I am hoping, however, to obtain some understanding for my end goal with the bard.  Very well, down to the meat of it.

Art vs. Product

I'm taking the point of view that a bard, once reaching the status of being a 1st level, is a competent craftsperson.  They can play songs, write with efficiency and clarity, cook well, throw a pot, fashion leather, sculpt and so on.  It isn't a question of whether or not they can do these things well.  They can.  This is a fixed ability, not something that needs a roll to check.

Use this as a guideline: if a 1st level bard draws a lute out at a tavern and begins singing, people all around will enjoy the singing.  Again, it isn't a roll the bard needs to make to find out if people tell him to put the lute away.  They don't.  At first level, the bard is as competent as an average modern day artist who people read and go, "Hey, that fellow can write," or, "Wow, that picture looks just like me."

However, most of what the bard produces is "Product."  The songs sung at the tavern are familiar songs, the meter used to make the poem is a familiar meter, the story told by the puppeteer is well-known, the food is commonplace and recognizable.  And 99% of the time, this is what a bard does.  Bards take the stock forms of their individual skills and abilities and make proficient, workaday, conventional products therefrom.

As well, the bard never really moves away from this.  Bards have a small repertoire of things they know at 1st level and as they grow in level, that repertoire grows as well.  But it never stops being about producing product.  Shakespeare rewrote Marlow and used earlier works as his fundamental guidelines for churning out play after play, the Impressionistic crowd copied from each other, filmmakers borrow techniques, potters watch other potters, jewellers steal, everyone does it.  Over time, it only looks unique and artistic because most of the hoi polloi aren't sophisticated or engaged enough in the field to recognize the difference between something new and different and something regurgitated.

This can be a tremendous frustration for an artist, when something is celebrated as Brilliant and Unique, when in fact is it derivative of some style or particular work that has simply dropped sufficiently out of fashion that the 25-year-old reviewer has failed to acquaint themselves with it.  Those inside the profession, however, know; and so, too, do the creators themselves, who are perfectly aware of the stealing they've done and are also perfectly willing to keep quiet about it.  If the masses want to be duped, and want to give me money for duping them, then all the power to me.

All this, then, is product.  Art is what product steals from.

Art is what a bard does 1% of the time.  That up front needs to be understood clearly.  This is not a case of a bard deciding between A and B.  This is a case of a bard having to do A because B just isn't there.  The bard will absolutely rush to do B, the moment B presents itself, but so long as B is a fickle bitch, then A will have to do.

So when does "art" present itself?  Here we are looking for a specific word, that being "inspiration."  Art happens when the bard encounters inspiration, which isn't a case of just wanting it.  Inspiration has to be gotten ~ and regarding inspiration and the game of D&D, it needs to be gotten out there.

We can make a few guesses at what in D&D would be inspiration.  A legitimate near-death experience.  A magnificent undertaking that ends well.  Something horrific on the Lovecraftian level.  The death of a friend.  A love affair of note.  Something truly memorable.

But, no, the obtaining of an inspiration is not experience, it is not another level, it is in fact absolutely nothing but air.  Having an inspiration means almost nothing in terms of creating an art work.  Remember, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.  All we are saying is that once the inspiration has been sought for and obtained, thereafter the bard has to figure out ~ in their capacity as the representative of a particular art form ~ how to make the inspiration real.

Success vs. Failure

Before we can talk about this, we have to define the difference between these two terms.  This, fundamentally, is what the last post was about, though I think that was missed by some.

It is almost habitual to think that "failure" means bad.  But remember, we are defining the bard as an able, competent artist, not a wannabe who someday is going to be able to make art.  That is nonsense.  J.D. Salinger was only in his late 20s when he wrote Catcher in the Rye ~ which, for all its faults, is without a doubt a distinct, different voice in literature.  We only fail to see that because is in not 1951, when the book was published.  But Salinger was certainly not a 9th level writer.  However much we want to believe the equation that Level = Art, we need to get away from that concept.  The real equation is that Work = Art. Characters with level only have more resources, and therefore the capacity to create larger pieces of art, more expensive pieces of art, pieces of art that require dozens or hundreds, even thousands of participants.

Moreover, resources mean distribution and notoriety.  Quality is not, in itself, a guarantee of notice.  Very often, "art" as I've defined it is often so different, so obscure, so uncomfortable, that it is only understood by other artists . . . who in turn make product out of it that is less different, less obscure, less uncomfortable, and therefore more easily consumed.  This formula is so completely misunderstood by non-artists, despite the endless works that try to describe it, that it is strangely "natural" to think that good artists will automatically be recognized as such.

To use an example from a different field, it has been said that Newton's Principia Mathematica was incomprehensible to nearly everyone who read it, even other mathematicians.  But because it is math, even ignorant people are by and large willing to accept that the book is highly valuable.  Yet at the same time, we encounter no hesitation whatsoever to call great artworks "worthless" and "shit" when they prove too hard to read.  "Yeah, War and Peace. Why would anyone ever read that?"

From this, I postulate that "failure" does not mean bad.  We could rather argue that failure implies a disconnect between the artist and the audience, even with other artists.  An artwork that inspires no one to produce product certainly falls short of affecting anyone.

There is another "failure" that is worth noting, that I did touch upon with the last post.  That is, the failure to get the result wanted.  Let us say that I produce a song about the solitude of individuals facing a terrible oppressive nation, to offer solace to the few intelligent men who, like me, feel helpless in the face of a mighty exploitive entity.  And much to my unhappiness, I discover that this book is embraced, nay, publicly celebrated by the united forces of the KKK, who claim it as the modern bible of their cause.

What am I to do?  My name is now certainly being exploited by an entity over which I have no control, while at the same time every stranger I meet presumes immediately that I must be part of the KKK because I wrote the book for them.  Talk of the solitude in the face of an oppressor.  My career is over, my name is over . . . the most I can do is change my name and hope I can disappear into obscurity.  That is, if I haven't put my picture on the cover of my book.

"Success," then, is the opposite of all this.  Success is communicating, success is inspiring others to make product, success is not having one's name spoiled or being misunderstood, not being vilified and not being burned in effigy.  And, potentially, getting a little money out of it too.  Perhaps a little fame, but this is the 17th century and without the benefit of mass media, fame is in small packets.  We all know the name of Cyrano de Bergerac, technically alive at the time my world takes place, but it is probable that most of the people living in Paris had never heard of him, certainly most of the people in the countryside of France hadn't and only a tiny percentage of people outside of France would have ever read him.  About the same number of people who have read him today.  Yes, we know who he was, but have you read his Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon? ~ had you even heard of it?  Can you confirm without a doubt that I'm not inventing that title without looking him up?

Creating Art

We want a metric that will let the bard character, once having obtained the inspiration, to create an artwork without having to actually create the artwork.  But we also want that character to have some influence over what the artwork will be, how big it is, what it's general tone and subject will be and what general direction of effect it will have.

I propose that we use the universal condition of all D&D characters, the character stats.  A bard looks over the options presented and decides what to take a chance on ~ because, yes, while the quality of the art is not in dispute, the reputation and comprehension of the art is.  But before we get to that, let's define the stats in terms of artwork.

Charisma is obviously beauty, the awe-inspiring pleasure of form and appeal that causes the viewer to drop jaw and stare.  Of course, the opposite is there as well, the desire to horrify, to force others to turn away, like Hieronymus Bosch, to use a relatively contemporary example.  Opposites apply to all the art forms that can be made - and success does not depict necessarily beauty or ugliness, but which the bard desires.

Constitution is health, the patriotic, the celebratory depiction of the present culture, religion or state.  It is also the demise of the state, anarchy, subversion, treason and rebellion.

Dexterity is difficulty, intricacy, the making of something that seems so absurd in its construction that it cannot possible stand, or something that the human body cannot possibly do; or making a tool do something that no one could have imagined was possible.  It is also the pure naturalness of form, of movement, of perfect ease and embrace.

Wisdom is educational, it is making the viewer, listener or subject aware of what has happened, how things work, how the universe functions, what is truth.  And it is also what is not truth, it is fantasy, it is strangeness, it is using the preconceptions of the mind to subvert the mind.

Intelligence is the call to think, to see, to obtain realization, to seek paths of greater understanding, to investigate, to ask questions, to insist that there is more than what we understand.  And it is tradition, ignorance, hate, resistance against reason, the insistence that investigation is evil and that things should be taken on faith.

Strength is strength; it is military might, it is a call to arms, it is compelling, bombastic, it is marching music, it is beating feet and booming drums, it is sinew and force of will and personal success.  It is also weakness, pandering, the denial of personal responsibility . . . and it is porn, it is debauchery, it is hedonism and lust, it is all the crutches that people lean upon because they are too weak to endure.


Some can take that list as moralistic.  I'm not too worried about that, I'm only interested in a metric for defining.  That is because, once we hammer out rules for what makes an inspiration into an artwork, we need rules for what effects an artwork has.

And we can begin those rules by saying that AFTER the artwork is made, after it is released, the character makes a check on the ability they have chosen.

Most characters will play it safe.  Bards have a high wisdom and a high charisma, it will be safest to make artworks that play to those abilities.  But whatever they case, they'll have to do the work before they can know if the work was in vain or not, or what the outcome will be.

THAT is the player understanding what it means to be a bard.  That we are inspired, we pick our chosen message, we pick our form, we start the work, we keep at the work, we finish the work . . . and all the while, we're not sure.  Will it work?  Will it?

It is easy for a player to say, "I write a song," then throw a die and know.

What if we make the player wait to roll.  What if the player has to sacrifice time for session after session, until at some point in the future, the time comes for the die to be cast.  What will that feel like?

It will feel like an artist.

Jaded

I continue to stumble across posts about what a bard is or what a bard stands for ~ and sometimes I really feel that as a community we really ought to be past this now.

However, I think it is simply hard for people to wrap their heads around art being applicable to things.  We live in this strange, modern culture where art ~ at least, as we tend to see art ~ is a sort of distant happenstance that we use to fill up time when we are bored.

We're all so jaded ~ and for those who don't know what that word means, as I'm continually finding people now who don't, as the word has gone out of fashion, I'll explain.

To be "jaded" is to bored by the continual indulgence of something.  The word comes, not from the stone as some might imagine, but from a kind of horse ~ a cart horse, a horse that is worn out and good for nothing else.

So we do not, as a culture, go and see a movie any longer and walk away from it with our viewpoints changed or with our preconceptions shattered, as people felt once upon a time walking out of films like The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai or The Graduate.  We get excited and hopped up about films that repeat precisely the same information as the film we was forty years ago, because we don't want those nostalgic, warm comforting things to ever, ever change.

Because we have moving pictures, we're barely aware of static art ~ unless it is porn.  We find ourselves in a museum every five to seven years, where we stare blandly at pictures for long, fruitless seconds before moving onto the next picture that fails to move us.  We're not caught up in such things; we need the picture to be lurid before it can conceivably shock or entice us, whereupon we either turn away or we fervently seek tens of thousands of like pictures, because a few is never enough to sustain our lust.  If the latter, then a single picture is lost in a sea, easily forgotten, easily deleted.

We cannot conceive of persons walking a thousand miles to stand in front of an image for hours, even every day for weeks, as they absorb and grow impassioned with every nuance of color, line or theme.  We cannot conceive of such persons changing their whole lives after such a viewing, becoming fervent believers, perhaps zealots, for a cause that now exists like a fire for them.  We never feel like that.  We mock those who, in this century, claim 'born again' status, knowing in our deepest, weary, contemptuous, cynical souls that such people must be deluded, deranged or merely stupid.

No rational person responds that way to words.  No rational person embraces ideas like that.  Rational people view coolly, then discard.

How can rational people find a place for a bard in a world that is mechanically designed with numbers, measurements, calculations and the very edge of living or dying on the knife's blade.  Bards?  Bards are for sissies.

It is nearly impossible for most people not to reshape the bard ~ or the 'artist' character ~ into something that would be relevant in our century, our technological framework.  The struggle is always to define how the bard measures up to the mage or the fighter, in clear, industrial terms.  A bard is a craft-making machine.  A bard is a communicator.  A bard is a pop star celebrity.

This last June and July, Dani Osterman worked on a month of posts relating to the bard in a hundred different ways, ending with this summation.  I'm still absorbing it.  Dani's take on the subject jumped me forward at least ten years of thinking on the subject; but I still haven't decided what to do with it ~ fit it into a sage table, somehow.  I've been deliberating on that for a week now.

I'm sure that the central key is not how the bard relates to the world, but how the world relates to the bard.  The onus is on the DM to presume the bard has talent . . . not for the player to be pushed into a place where they are supposed to invent talent that seems suitable to the game.  The art that a bard produces can be no more subject to the personal opinion of the DM or the other players (games where bards are expected to come up with poetry and actually sing it, because we're "role-playing") any more than a fighter has to justify the die roll associated with their sword.  It is the world that has to bend to bards having value, not the player to the world.

Measuring that, however, that gives room for passion and not just numbers and limitations, that's tremendously difficult.  I felt that Osterman was soooo close.  She may have it and I'm still damaged by so many arguments about the bard that I can't see clearly.  I know that building proper skills for my sage abilities won't be easy, nothing like as easy as they have been for other classes.  There's no metric in the real world for art having an effect on people . . . I think largely because by the time we began to develop behavioural metrics as a science, art had already begun its death spiral.

Yes, I said that.  We're all jaded, remember?  Whatever we say, I firmly believe that we're sliding into the same artistic dark age the Romans did; we're making the same mistakes, copying everything that is old, making it simpler, making it easier for the common people to understand, steadily rounding off all the edges and designing things so that they can be thrown together more quickly, more easily, more comfortably, even to the point of creating social mores that keep us from looking at anything that might "damage" our sensibilities, as if an ego can fall out of a tree and be crippled for life.

I don't worry, because it took three or four centuries for art to die completely ~ and it was helped along by a lot of really bad times brought about by a lot of really awful circumstances, far more awful than we can really imagine.  So this is a very, very, very slow spiral.  I won't see much change in it before I die.  Which is just fine.

A Horse

As long as I'm still talking about horses, a top-down version for use in my combat visuals (self-made):

Adding a Rider:

Connecting Ideas

I have been conscientiously avoiding any discussion of my book, The Fifth Man.  Not to worry.  I am working on it.  It is a grind, I'm not enjoying myself - and the only reason I don't talk about it is because I can't talk about it.  Spoilers, you know.  I don't want to talk about a specific problem in the book because of spoilers.

Yet I had a run-in with serendipity yesterday that will at least allow me to talk about why the book is a grind and why I make it a grind.  It has to do with Cezanne, Hallelujah and Malcolm Gladwell.

Now for those who have been reading my blog for awhile, it is already clear that I very much like Gladwell. I like him because he's interesting - and he's interesting because one of his things is to discuss why something we think as a culture or something we supposedly know is wrong.  He steadfastly chooses things for discussion that fit that priority for him.  He hunts for misconceptions and then he explodes them.  He doesn't, as many other pundits do, find documentation or evidence to support things for what we already believe.

This makes Gladwell a challenge.  First, the listener is made to think about something that is normally taken for granted: that a football team should kick on the fourth down, that having great food at a university cafeteria is a good thing or that having more information about something promises greater accuracy.  Then the listener has to accept, as Gladwell demonstrates with facts, that this isn't just untrue - that continuing to think this way is potentially self-destructive, whereas accepting the facts could lead to ground-breaking, potentially system-shattering improvements.  It is usually such a brain twist for people that they either a) don't accept it and hate Gladwell; or b) find themselves overwhelmed and so infatuated with Gladwell's intellect that they apparently lose the point of what he's just said.

Here's an interesting point.  Gladwell refuses, in interview after interview, to accept the label that he's some sort of genius.  This isn't modesty.  Gladwell is a journalist.  All the stories he tells, all the circumstances he discusses, all the associations he makes, are the words and research and brain sweat of other people.  Gladwell just describes it.  This is so constantly misunderstood by the media, by the public, by virtually everyone discussing him on the internet, that it must be a source of tremendous frustration for Gladwell.

Take the most famous association: the 10,000 hour rule.  Googling it, I find this headline front and center: "New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule."  It isn't Gladwell's rule.  It never was.  The rule was Swedish psychiatrist Anders Ericsson's proposal that was part of a study that happened in 1993.  Gladwell made it famous.  Gladwell has never claimed that it's a 'rule' - he presents it in his book Outliers as a curiosity, an apparently consistent pattern that seems to hold for the time it takes to become an expert.  In his book, Gladwell cites examples - examples that still hold water, regardless of what another study shows.  Because it was never presented as a "rule."  It was the media, and particularly the internet, that gave it that title.

The reason I like Gladwell is because he is a window to hundreds of people that Gladwell takes the time to write about.  Not because Gladwell is a celebrity or a genius.  Now I can put that on a shelf and move on.

I have always preferred Paul Cezanne to other Post-Impressionist painters - Van Gogh, Manet, Pissarro and so on.  I can't explain it.  There's something about his work that pulls at me and that's all the justification that I've needed.  With that, however, I had learned a long time ago about Cezanne's frustration with his own work and his tendency to paint the same subjects over and over again, struggling to get them just so (search Google for "Cezanne's Wife") - even painting the same landscape every day, less to represent the landscape than to hammer his own mind or his skill into a shape that came closer to satisfying him.

I've done this, I've done exactly this - and I've always felt a kinship for Cezanne in this particular regard, feeling that I could understand the fierce arguments between him and Pissarro's infatuation with pointillism . . . how I would love to sit in and sop up that kind of passion.

In the media, Cezanne is so rarely mentioned - I am always pleased to hear anything about him, that expands my knowledge.  Let's put that on a shelf, too, and move on.

I'm Canadian, so I know who Leonard Cohen is.  In Canada, there has always been an agenda to force "famous people" that no one as ever heard of - so if you listen to the CBC, the Canadian version of the BBC, as I did in my teens, its impossible not to pick up knowledge of obscure people who happen to be from Canada.  This means that I first heard the song "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen when it was first released in 1984.  For those who don't know, one of the versions that Cohen did was used in the movie Watchmen during the much-despised sex scene.

I have always liked this song - and of the song I can make the joke, "How many musicians does it take to sing Hallulujah?"

"Apparently, all of them."

Unfortunately, I've never found a version of the song that I like.  Cohen himself has the right tone for the song (after about six tries at recording it), but his actual voice is shit and as much as I try to like it, I don't.  John Cale's version is passable but it suffers from way too much expressionism in the song, while the extremely popular Jeff Buckley version sounds like a cat being stretched out as a guitar string.  I've never understood how it got to be popular, nor why every other gawddamn singer feels that they have to sing the song the way Buckley sang it and NOT the way Cohen sang it.  Its a beautiful song!  Just sing the fucking words with the number of syllables the words have, without having to warble, infuse with cheap emotion or stretch the vocals out in some tortured, horrible way.

For a long time I have wondered what the hell it is with this song that compels musicians to ruin it.  Yesterday, however, I found my answer.  Straight out of Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell has started a series of podcasts called "Revisionist History" - and in episode number 7, released yesterday, he talks about the song Hallelujah and about Paul Cezanne (along with what happened with Elvis Costello).  In all cases, he answers questions that have been plaguing me for decades.  And he explains why I am banging my head on the desk, trying to get the book written properly.

I have said it again and again on this blog.  I like to be proven wrong.  I like it so much, I spend hundreds of hours trying to find people online who are writing, speaking or arguing in forums about things I think I know, so that I can feel myself torn down and demonstratively proved inaccurate, so I can adopt the new model and move forward.

I am surprised to find that I am often the only person in the room that feels this way about knowledge.  How is that possible?