State of Create

Patreon today released an annoyingly laid out message called the "State of Create"  Link at the bottom of the text.  Following "months of research," they've decided to discuss what most creators are feeling right now: that platforms that keep changing their rules, abusive algorithms and monitisation policies have been building since before Covid to transform the individualistic artist into a machine cog... and we're not liking it.

One day, our reach is just fine... the next, it's tanked because of some opaque change.  Those in power, who have money, have shut down the passageways in an effort to restore the status quo that existed in the 1990s, when a small number of people held control over everything cultural.  A time I plainly remember, and which I enjoyed the death of.  Well, it's back.

I don't blame the concept of an algorithm for this.  Like any tool, it can be used for good or ill; in this case, however, those with the power to create one also have the power to use it selfishly, there being no option for the internet's user.  This is what the gatekeepers want: control of what's seen, what gets promoted, what thrives.  Those who naively believed the internet would shatter that model, giving creators direct access to audiences without needing permission from a record label, a publisher, a network executive, are discovering that monster doesn't just go away.  It has the money and the will to fuck with the system, and it's back.

The shift has been led by Instagram, Twitter and YouTube... but of course TikTok perfected it. But before anyone rushes to suppose that without these villains, everything would have been just fine, I want to stress that there are thousands and thousands of villains in the game, across the board. These are just the villains who did it the most ruthlessly... but the present state was inevitable. We shouldn't doubt this.

The shift has been systemic: but there have been two things that helped perpetrate this state of mind. There are those who say, "the internet was never going to stay free forever"... but this is merely the voice of those who are bent on killing what it brought. The deeper truth is that what we're experienced is a lull, imposed not by the villains, but by the passive forces that let them be and those who can't get the financial support to wreck the status quo.

I haven't much faith in governments or the law... anyone whose worked in a government-run office isn't surprised to find themselves working on computers with black screens and green-lit text, because the system they used in 1992 still hasn't been updated. It is hardly news for any of us that the governments of the world simply failed to act... and when they did, fearful of the strangling of their supportive election capital, they went after the individual on behalf of the corporation, because that is their way. It is easier to make one fat cat happy than to assuage the fears of a million mice.

Inaction, the lack of meaningful resistance, the inherent blindness of those for whom the bread was not buttered, simply did nothing.  The glacial pace at which authority moves, being inherently conservative, was not going to get in the way here... and they have happily stood aside as rights we gained through technological means are now being arbitrarily taken away.  Emerson said, "For evil to succeed, it is only necessary that good men do nothing."  Since the world bureaucrats aren't "good" in any sense of the word, we can argue without difficulty that this is doubly so when tired, selfish, insipid persons do nothing.

It's no wonder we're feeling a general apathy to this.  As people read this here, and on Patreon's site, the general feeling is going to be, "Oh well, what can we do about it?"  The answer to that is nothing.  I'm not going to quibble on that point.  Anyone who now thinks that there's room for a counter-movement, or that the governments might act (and I hear this nonsense from professional pundits daily), are fooling themselves.  It won't be a grassroots movement that changes this, because it wasn't a grassroots movement that created the present situation.

The internet was not "made" by a socially conscious group, and it wasn't made by villainous corporations. It was not asked for on a widespread basis.  Even in its first ten or fifteen years, it was utterly overlooked by everyone as a joke, a thing for nerds, a sidequest into wasting time.  It was something that just happened — a messy, organic, almost accidental force that emerged out of military research, academic curiosity and hobbyist experimentation.

There is a tendency to relate the internet to the printing press... and that relationship applies.  But the same applies to the advent of newspapers, book publishing, radio and television.  With things going as they are now, we're not going to have another 50 year gap before the internet is suddenly obliterated and replaced by the next thing... and it has been 35 years already.

What is that upheaval going to be?  If you, like me, were around in 1992, what would you have said it was?  Most likely, "e-mail."  Or the "online imaging."  For the average person 30 years ago, what was coming was utterly obscured by the first tiny revelations  —  which seemed utterly amazing given their tiny scope.  10 years before that, freaking dial-up seemed amazing.

And people thought, well, this is it — this is the big change.  But it wasn’t. It was just the first crack in the dam. It was a tiny, clunky version of something that would eventually become so fundamental we don't even think about it anymore. That’s the pattern. The thing that looks revolutionary today isn’t the real revolution — it's just the first primitive version of what’s actually coming.

Here's what's funny.  A couple of minutes thought can point to half-a-dozen things that might be that crack.  AI is being dismissed so easily, because a couple of companies have rushed into gatekeeping it, but those "gates" are failing all over.  Anyone who wants can get around them and break the rules they're setting up.  Distributed computing, self-hosted identities, take your pick.  It might be some experimental, obscure technology that barely works right now.

But you, Dear Reader, aren't thinking about that.  Patreon certainly isn't, because it's business model depends on making its creators into cows in a field, that exist to give the company milk and nothing more, in exchange for the grass we eat: that being you, Reader.  None of the aforementioned villains are... they've built their platforms.  And having once worked for a platform that was crumbling under the weight of technological development, those platforms are rigid, inflexible monsters.  When they go down, they do it all at once.  Hell, I don't even use Google any more.  I haven't in months.

Everyone right now with money in the game — including, on a miniscule scale, creators — depend on this game not changing.  But it is changing, and at a pace that makes Patreon's little survey look like it was made by grade-3 elementary school students.

I have an ex-military friend who plays guitar.  He's moving out of town because the particulates here are getting the better of his asthma as he ages, but he's not worried.  In addition to being ex-military, he's an electrician and a retired bus driver.  And as a musician, he can thrive anywhere.  All he needs is a stool in front of a crowd of people and, artistically, he's fine.

If Canada were occupied by a foreign force, I'd cook.  I make amazing soup and I can make it by the barrelful, quite literally.  I have a 63 gallon recipe in my head right now.  Actual creators, not those chasing clicks and algorithms, are flexible.  We move easily to what's next.

Corporate types do not.  They get eaten by other corporate types, because they're all wolves. No one likes them? Hell, they don't like each other.

The internet came along and I dove in.  And did fine.  The next thing comes along, I'll be fine.  Whatever it is.  Meanwhile, all these problems that exist right now with closed doors and deplatforming.  It'll all be gone, in a fingersnap.

Don't worry about what those people are doing to you.  Take comfort in how you're going to be fine when they're being led up to the guillotine... metaphorically or for real.

Oh, I know... most reading this are going to think I'm indulging in wishful thinking.  That is always the reaction of those who are heavily invested in the status quo.  They wave their hands, they say, "Oh, nothing real is ever going to change; no matter what the technology is, the big stuff is always going to just go on."  After all, we look around and the world sort of looks like 1995.  I mean, the walls are still standing, right?  'Course, a lot of those walls don't surround businesses that used to exist and run the world, but hey... that wasn't the rug being pulled out, right?  They just failed to adapt.  In time.

Strange they don't think about how words like "engagement," "watch-time," "short-form" or "algorithm" would mean nothing whatsoever to an adult in 2005.  They'd look at you like you were speaking another language. Because back then, the internet wasn’t engineered the way it is now. It was still organic, still chaotic, still mostly just a playground where people threw things out into the void and saw what stuck.  There was still room for people to argue that "this internet thing" ought to be ignored by decent people.  Yet those voices, those people... made up of intellectuals, media elites, respected cultural pundits... lost.  Their viewpoint, and their relevance, evaporated.  Some of them maintain rather pathetic careers on youtube... where they can't get more pageviews that one lone pundit endlessly repeating the same post on how bad Emily in Paris is.

This is what happens.  The mass of people shrug.  Change is bad.  We'd rather not think about it.  Look all around.  The zeitgeist is filled with a different present-day class of elites and effetes belying the value of digital doubles, deepfake technology, volumetric capture... and poor little chatGPT... yet these things are so plainly the inevitable death of the entire media industry.  

Where's the government protection for that?  Did the actors and writers really win that strike?  Did they make the technology go away?  They talk like they did.  But it was a truce.  It did nothing more than kick the can down the road.  And not very far, either.  The technology is going to get better.  Does anyone with a brain really not understand this?  Can it not be that those who are invested in the present have an agenda to say otherwise... and no other real arguments beyond that?  They have to pretend this technology is overhyped, that it won't take their jobs, that "true artistry" can't be automated.  They have nothing else they can say.  I hope they're saving their money.

Patreon paints their problem as TikTok.  I think it's a little funny how short-sighted that is.  But I suppose, like the folks just discussed, they've got to wave their hand at some enemy.

I knew the day I joined Patreon that there'd be a day I left it.  And I will.  When the next thing comes.

Spoons

About four times I've tried to write this post today, unable to... hm... get up the nerve.

Yesterday's gift truly threw me for a loop.  Starting in reading it has been, well, um, humbling.  And I've struggled to identify some benchmark I could turn to as a way to grasp this unusual, rather overwhelming kindness.  It's disrupted my thinking so that both yesterday and today, I've been at a loss to produce anything creative.  I've been working around the house, applying myself to physical labour, getting things that should have been put to rights months ago, because my head is in a whirl.

This morning a worthy connection came to mind; it's from the 1955 John Ford film, Mister Roberts.  If you don't know the film, it's difficult to explain exactly how this scene comes about.  Essentially, for decency rendered as an officer, for sacrifices given and for actions taken, specifically tossing a palm tree overboard, the crew decides on their own volition to demonstrate their gratitude to Mr. Roberts.  See the film, if you can.  It's a damn sight better than any other film except for Marty, which deservedly won best picture... and the two of them are close.

This is how the book that was given makes me feel.  If you want to see my face; or hear my voice; and know how hard it's hit me... watch the link.

I'll never watch this film the same way.

So, in lieu of something else, I'm going to take a moment to talk about spoon theory.  This is a metaphor proposed by Christine Miserandino, "describing the amount of physical or mental energy a person has available for daily activities and tasks.  Miserandino applies it to chronic illness and it's logically designed for that, but after a conversation yesterday with my daughter, who brought this to my attention, I think it accurately describes the reality of creative endeavours and our capacity to invent.  In my daughter's case, where I'll begin, it relates to the time she has, as she progresses through the creation of her family unit.  She is, at present, pregnant with her second child.

As she tells it, every day is limited by the needs of her husband, the disabled cousin that lives with them, her not-quite 4 y.o. son (birthday September 28th) and certain medical difficulties arising with the pregnancy.  She has become, in the last four years, increasingly tired of those younger, childless, marriage-less, free spirited persons of her own age who, as my daughter explains, are ready to "take her spoons" in the way of time and favours given, but they don't give very many spoons back, for reasons that obviously don't have to do with the time they have.  I think many of us here can relate to this.  It's not that we don't like our friends.  It's not that we don't want to be there for our friends... is that our friends, particularly those without sincere responsibilities, don't seem to understand that we only have a set number of spoons available to us each day.  And that, when we give a spoon to someone else, because they need us to come help them move, or because they haven't got their rent this month, our sacrificing a spoon means there's something we can't have now for ourselves.

Which is perfectly fine... if now and then, someone comes and helps us clean our house, or move our junk, or clean our carpets, or look after our children, surrendering their spoons so we can use ours for those things we usually don't have time for.

This, however, affects me less than her.  I am only looking after a grandson now and then, and we're grateful that he's collected just as we're running out of the spoons we need to watch him.  Most of the time, I have plenty of spoons when I wake up each morning.  I can spend them on my responsibilities and the things that I enjoy, most of the time.  My issue is a creative scarcity, not a physical one.

Quite a lot of the time, I wake up in the morning without a single creative spoon to my name.  I want creative spoons.  I just don't happen to have any.  I cleaned my carpets last Wednesday with my daughter and when Thursday came around, the one spoon I had was used for the blog post I wrote that day.  I felt it was a good use.  I would have needed two or three spoons to do any serious writing, I didn't have them.  In fact, I haven't had them all week, because realistically, I just don't have the body I had when I was 35.  When I was 35, I didn't have the brain I had now.

Which means, more or less, when I was 35, I had no spoons because I was stupid, and today I have no spoons because I'm tired.

But, I take a rest, I accumulate spoons, and I try to use them as best I can.

Yesterday, by surprise, Osterman, Maddox, Becker and Joslyn sent me a whole freaking bucket of spoons.  I am hip deep in spoons.  I'm just trying to process it.

So, when I feel down; when I have doubts; when I'm not motivated... I know exactly where to go to get myself the spoon I need.  Fellas... thank you.  You cannot guess what it has meant to me.

Not in Harness

My 60th birthday is coming up next week, on the 15th September... and yes, I know, for months now I've been calling myself 60 years old, but that's only because I've been closer to 60 instead of 59, and somewhere along the time I was 12, I decided it was perfectly reasonable to round my age up, when it wasn't for school or some other legal purpose (or when talking to my parents, who were completely unreasonable about such obvious things).

It also happened on my 12th birthday, which I remember I didn't enjoy very much, that I had an epiphany that what I wanted to be was a writer.  Now, some here may recall that this is 3 years before I'd ever heard of D&D, the 45th anniversary of which was yesterday, for the record.  At the time, I thought this obviously meant my becoming a novelist, as I had read many novelists and thought how cool it would be to have that job.  In fact, that very night, I took out a sheet of paper and began writing my first novel, which I wrote all through grades 7, 8 and 9, until growing up before entering grade 10 and reconising that it was a garbage idea for a novel. 

[yes, I remember the intended plot and I won't recount it]

With the arrival of D&D, I did try to write fiction associated with the game, but the substance of such fiction was so terrible and my ability to write could not possibly lift it from that muck, so I turned my mind towards writing more esoteric, albeit, failed projects, though I did manage to write a performance scene that got me into a city-wide competition (I lost), I was published in three years of high school student-literature booklets (in-house end-of-year things) and I did enjoy the experience of having more than one teacher sit me down for a heart-to-heart in order to explain, for my own good, that I'd never be a writer, that I was wasting my time, and that if I would just realise where my real talents were, I'd be a much more successful person in life.

They meant well.  For all I know, what they said might have been true; one nice thing about being this age is recognising that the really awful things that were said to us as children, however misdirected, were also probably true.  Still, I don't think I'd have been happy as anything but a writer.

Writing, which I've done for 48 years, represents a long string of failures for me, punctuated by just enough successes to make me fruitfully stubborn.  It so happens that I've been able to apply the skills and interest I have in the practice to D&D these last 16 years, since finding this blog, but I hurry to explain to the gentle reader, this blog and my internet presence are in fact a thin wedge of the life I lead away from this keyboard.  Just as what I say here hardly represents all that I have done with my life, all that I have been interested in, and all that I wish to achieve.

What it says on the back of my book, Pete's Garage, is 100% true.  I did participate in mosh pits, I did listen to industrial music, I did watch musicians of every kind play.  I did watch them argue, sitting in their little apartments and drinking their beer as they shouted at each other.  I followed them around to their gigs and schlepped their shit, often for no pay but for a seat in the van on its way to another city.  I did buy them dinners and let them sleep on my couch, and I did marry one.  She was the mother of my daughter, the daughter of a musician, and right now I have her piano with her music books and her notes in those music books in my apartment right now.

But how much time have I spent, here, talking about music?  How often have I debated the merits of arranging and preparing for a gig, of getting an album or a CD made, of selling them, of getting on spotify, of all the various aspects that it would take to put a band together and make them practice and find them a space to play?  How often have I spoken about the many hours that I have stood in front of a live audience at talent nights and sang, back when the writing wasn't going so well and thinking maybe the path for me might be a different one?

I know that it probably feels that I can't be talking about me, because I'm the D&D guy, I'm the one that makes all the maps and the game rules and ran all those thousands of hours of campaign-time.  There's just no way that I could have done all that and had any interest in being a musician.  After all, I didn't start singing in the church choir until I was 13 years old, and around campfires when I was a camp counsellor at 15, with a bunch of 8-year-old brats to look after.  I used to sing to myself nearly every time I had a chance to walk alone; I had a repertoire of a hundred songs I knew by heart, though I admit a lot of those are gone now.

But I'm the D&D guy.  I've found my niche, right?  My place.

But then, I was also an actor, wasn't I?  Wrote, produced and directed my own plays, performed at the Edmonton fringe festival.  I could go, right now, since I have the money in my bank account, and get my head shots and pay my fees and join ACTRA, start going out for auditions.  I still have some connections with people in the theatre scene, some of whom owe me a favour or two; I've got the energy to play a father or an old man.  I have a deep, rich voice and I can still hit the back tiers of a big auditorium... which would only get better if I applied the practice.  Might be a fun, social sort of activity.  When I was just 25, those performance companies were always rounded out by 60+ men and women, outgoing, friendly, none of whom expected to win an award but they were there for every rehearsal, doing it for the sheer pleasure of the activity.

Sounds all right to me.  I'm not going to get on Stephen Colbert with my next D&D-based book.  All the 5e players in the world aren't going to change their playing style because I turn out a group of essays on starting a trading town, tackling a dungeon like a military campaign or inventing a guide that tells all the things players can buy.  I've had my run at fame, and it ain't comin'... not for D&D, not for all the fiction novels I write, not for the music I've sung or the boards I've trod.

The only thing that's left, the only thing that really matters, is if I'm having fun or not.

Now, if the people supporting me on Patreon aren't happy because I'm not staying in my lane, I send my deepest apologies.  You know, there's a tale I tell about two hyper-rich businessfolk I saw at the symposium once, about ten years ago.

The first says, "I have to tell you, my business depends on creative people.  Without creative people, I don't have a business.  They are the heart, the soul, the substance of everything that I am able to produce and sell and make money from, which is why I treasure them.  I really respect them, and what they can do, because I know that I'm not like that and I can't do it myself."

And the second one says, "Exactly.  That's exactly right.  And that's why I say to entrepreneurs when they ask how to get started, get yourself some creative people.  The way to make a business work is to gather these people together, harness them to the cart of the business and let them take us where we want to go."

Whereupon the first adds, "Yes, I so agree.  The future begins with harnessing the talent that exists in the world, in order to ensure that our companies perform the best they can."

And so it goes.

It's not about Me

Apart from the fact that I am a central feature of this post, it is a well-written, rationally constructed approach to the need for maps and the scale on which they need to be built. I have no explanation for my "obsessive insanity" except to say that I find the practice of working on the maps presented here both relaxing and personally fulfilling. There is an undeniable sense of satisfaction in looking at something that is, in fact, a step-by-step easily managed process, yet produces beauty. For this is what I, in my insanity, see when I look at my own maps. Beauty.

It is perhaps that I speak from the perspective of someone who is, presently, just 28 days from the age of 60, but the truth is that nearly everything about these abilities that one sees on display, with regards to maps, writing or designing some rule set, is a sort of fraud.  It's supposed that I have these gifts, and that I use them to do these things, but it's all nonsense.  I had one gift when I started with D&D away back, so many years ago.  That is, I wanted to work on it.  It's the wanting that's the gift.  The gift I still have now, as I want to sit for an hour and write this post, when instead I could be out grinding away at a garden, or driving out to the mountains on this fine day to do some hiking or resting back and watching a football game.  Instead, I want to do this.  I want to write.  Even if this post means nothing next to the hundreds of other posts that I've written. That doesn't matter.  It just doesn't.  It's the writing I enjoy, regardless of the end result, and when I want to do it, I just do.

So, the maps.  I made maps when I was a kid.  I made very poor maps when I was a kid.  I had better maps as a guideline, however, and I could see the difference between my work and those maps.  I spent endless hours sitting and staring at atlases ... and when I discovered the map drawers at the university, full of contour maps, survey maps, oil well maps, historical maps, I would go up there on a Saturday, wheedle the key from the map librarian, who became a friend, so that I could spend hours pulling the maps out of the drawers, one by one, just to stare.  I could have played baseball.  I could have rafted down the Bow River.  I could have done drugs.  But I stared at maps.

It's what we want that matters.  If I had wanted to be a gardener, if I had wanted to grow my own roses and orchids, if I had wanted to spend the money on orangeries and hydroponics, assuming I still wanted to be a writer, then I'd be posting pictures of my flowers this month, detailing every aspect of their cultivation and sustenance, railing against the stupid information of other floriculturists.  And I'd be doing that, because I would have started 54 years ago, as a 6 year old in my parent's garden, staring at the plants and physically watching them grow, because I wouldn't have been able to take my eyes off the leaves and little shoots and they came up.  Not because I was an obsessive little kid ... but because that would have given me such pleasure, I would not have wanted to stop.

This is so easily misunderstood when we reach for words like "obsessive."  An obsessive person cannot make a conscious choice about their actions.  So it may seem like I'm being obsessive when I write another post.  That is because others, who do not receive the sense of joy that I do in making maps, think to themselves, "I'd have to be obsessed before I could do something like that."  Because, from their perspective that would not give them pleasure.  Surely, anyone for whom that thing gives pleasure, must be crazy.

No.  Just self-aware, with lots and lots of time spent.  Aware enough not to handwave my earliest efforts as "good enough."  I wanted to make better maps, so I tried to.  I don't mean, I practiced at making better maps, I mean, I saw what I wanted to achieve, and tried to achieve that.  And failed, and failed, and failed.  I never thought, well, "try try again."  I thought, "Well this part looks better, but not that part.  This technique seems to work, but maybe if I tried ..."  And so on.

Do that for 54 years?  You're going to look like someone that's obsessive.

The downside, for me, comes when someone pisses on my joy.  And when it happens, I must admit, I don't respond as well as I should.  I don't hesitate before I lash out.  This stuff is personal to me.  How personal? 

Imagine a total stranger, standing next to you and your child, who says, "Your kid has a big nose."  Now, it happens that your child does have a big nose.  It's something you've worried about, since he or she was just a few months old.  What are the other children, when your child goes to school, going to say?  How are they going to make your boy or girl feel?  What are you going to say when he or she comes home and say, "The kids made fun of me about my nose!"  You're going to feel awful.  You hope the other kids don't care.  You hope that if they tease, it won't make any difference. You hope that your child's going to grow up and that nose is going to develop into something with a lot of character, so that it becomes a positive characteristic.  You know the nose in itself doesn't matter, but the world is stupid, vapid, abusive hole, full of people who think that things like a big nose do matter ... when what they ought to care about is the whole kid, not his or her nose.  

Given all this, it doesn't matter if this stranger has said something that's true.  It's the choice the stranger has made, among all the things that might possibly be said, to say this one specific thing.  And hearing it, you're going to go off the rails.  You're going to shout, "WHO THE FUCK ASKED YOU?" ... and the stranger is going to walk away, saying, "It's just a nose."

Joel, in his blog post, said exactly the kind of things that I want to hear said about my kids.  But I've had others, who weren't inaccurate, displayed the sort of honest truthfulness about my maps that have made me livid with fury.  They don't know the road that's gotten me here.  They only know the "here."  And that's not their fault.

But I have ripped and slashed and stabbed and belittled and abused people who have made comments on this site and elsewhere, because they made some little comment about my kid's nose.  And they've gone away, certain they understand my motivation for this, certain that it's evidence of the monster I am, and certain that I haven't any perspective at all.

All I can say for those reading this, try to forget what I do, or what I am.  I'm going to be dead soon, anyway.  Me, the person writing this, isn't the thing of value here.  I'm not what counts.  What counts is the stuff I leave behind, whatever my motivation or my purpose for doing it.  It doesn't really matter why Caesar conquered Gaul.  We can go over the existant details to death, we can dig though archives and bits of whatever, and yet, in the end, what matters is that Gaul was conquered, which led to the changes in Gaul that led to the eventual development of the France we have today.  All the personal shit, all the motivations, all the bits and pieces about what someone said or what may have encouraged them to do or create something, is just fantasy and immateriality.  The facts of things are what counts.  The maps I make exist.  This is the only thing about the maps themselves that actually matter.

Personal opinions about the maps, why I made them, what they accomplish for any one individual person, none of these things amount to anything more than one stranger's opinion about one child's nose.

So pretend I just don't exist.  Don't come here to know who I am, or what motivates me, or why I do these things or anything about me personally.  Just take from the writing what you can, and move on with your own lives, doing those things that matter to you.

In the end, that's all that counts.

Content is Hard

Content is hard.  For those creators who are dependent on coming up with wholly new material every time they post, or want to upload a video, I feel for them, I truly do ... because on some level, they're dependent on finding something to write about.  Oh, how I have been there myself, so many times.

Many of the once-brilliant creators I follow are so plainly done.  Compare this, which came out yesterday, to Danskin's earlier work.  Compare this, from a week ago, from Olsen's earlier work.  Compare this, from gawd knows when because it took so long for Rowntree to put something up, to his earlier work.  All three examples represent enormous amounts of effort; plain evidence of comprehension and purpose; unquestioned ability and skill.  And all three are absolutely the creator going up his own asshole, for lack of having anything relevant left to say.  This isn't a recent problem.  All three have been struggling for years now.  Since the onset of covid, none of them have remotely produced the relevancy of work they once created.  And that is the key word, because the fault in their work isn't their artistic ability, but in their inability to be relevant.

How I pray I'm not them.

I don't know that I'm not ... but it has been explained to me that part of my path is that I'm not casting around each time I post, or each time I imagine a project, for something new to write about.  I can, at a whim, sit here and write about dungeons and dragons for an hour, easily, on any part of the game, on the spur of the moment.  I'm not trying to write reviews of things, which forces me to go out and find things to write reviews about.  I'm not dependent on gimmicks like "30 things that begin with an 'N'" that I have to write about every November.  I can make maps every day for a couple of months ... and then not.  I can work on the wiki everyday for a couple of months ... and then not.  I literally have no end to the open-ended projects that exist in my setting, that I can't possibly ever finish, because they're monumentally huge.  I'm not dependent on someone else's movie, or someone else's recent release, or someone else's questions and involvement.  If the Q&A lies empty, so it goes.  It doesn't make or break my presence here.

And I have only myself to thank for that.  The teenager me went at this game's design with hammer and tongs from the beginning, certain that I could deconstruct every element in it and make it better.  Gygax's DMG had so many faults and failings that I cheerfully set out to rewrite tables and expand portions of the book.  Single sentences in that book led me to projects that I've pursued for thirty years, some with mixed success, some with startling results.  I may be tired; I may not know, for a week or two, how to create a given table or explain a set of proposed rules, but I'm not bored with the work I do.  It seems all the time that the path in front of me is ready to be trod upon and the direction plain ... and all in all, I don't feel irrelevant.  Most of the time.

I've had moments, certainly, expressed on this blog, when I've wondered if AD&D itself has become so irrelevant it won't survive my lifetime.  I've had moments of enormous blind rage at various successful toadies who, unlike those respected persons I began this post with, do not have ability, skill, insight, a willingness to work or a purpose ... except, perhaps, to bilk people out of their money for shit content.  I have definitely felt ignored.  Painfully so.  But it still feels like the work that I'm doing has application and value.

I can't begin to guess at what to say to those creators who are losing their verve.  I don't believe they know it.  Or perhaps, the well really is dry and this is all they've got left.  In either case, it's a doomed situation.  If they've lost their sight regarding their own work, then nothing anyone else says or does will ever reach through the fog of self-righteousness that a creator has to wrap tightly all round as protection against the slings and arrows of ignorant critics.  That fog is critical.  If I keep insisting that you, dear reader, don't understand what I'm doing, and that you can't understand it because you haven't the ability to do so, then I can sustain myself and my "vision" until the day it all collapses and I collapse with my arms around a horse's neck, gibbering out promises that I'll protect it.

On the other hand, if I've lost the sight, truly lost it, and am unable to see my way to any content that doesn't wallow in the mire or insignificance, then gawd, what a pathetic case am I.  Like a professional guitarist adrift on a desert island without a guitar.  Don't look at me.  Please don't suggest anything.  Please, I can't bear it.  I can't bear what I've become.

It is the most miserable fate I can imagine ... to want to create, for these fellows plainly want to create, though it takes them a year to create and edit just two hours of minimalistic content, in some cases using a team of four or five people helping them.  I can edit 15 minutes of video in an afternoon; I can write 15 minutes of dialogue in about 90 minutes.  Yet these poor souls must needs 7 months to find a subject, read books on the subject, carefully craft their dialogue, purchase props, angst over their camera angles and costumes, painstakingly edit and so on, to deliver a video for youtube that's not quite as long as a feature film, with only one performer and the most minimalist of lighting or movement.  The agony they must go through, questioning every line, reshooting or rewriting every facet of ever second's delivery ... or perhaps the months and months of dreary wall staring as they furtively seek something to film or deconstruct.  I am so glad I'm not them.  Go up my own ass I may, but I don't take 9 months to do it.

Before encountering these recent works from these other creators, I was having my concerns about my own recent efforts.  Does it make sense to run myself in a randomised game system?  The combats are fun, reassuring to see posted, and I look forward to another; but is this whole thing just a weird, mastubatory debacle that I've talked myself into following the collapse of my offline game campaign?  I can't lie to myself, this might be the case.  I'd considered doing something like this before, more than a year ago, but I couldn't see having the time, nor really the motivation to do it.  I had players already.  I could play test stuff with them.

So, perhaps, I've gone off a deep end somewhere.  I admit I'm not finding the randomness "easy," especially the wilderness, which is vastly more difficult than a dungeon.  I reassure myself that it's because I haven't been doing it very long.  There are a lot of twists and turns to account for that aren't second nature, in this format.  I want to get going, but I have to keep stopping because some table needs making.  It's frustrating that I can't just play.

But am I losing my marbles?  I'm not asking the reader ... after all, my own fog of self-righteousness is firmly in place.  I'm taking a moment and orienting myself, looking at the various familiar benchmarks and deciding if these unlikely places really do need to be surveyed.  I'm checking my instruments, my calculations.  Hell, I'm popping my finger into my mouth and using it to test the wind.

Am I losing my marbles?

I don't know.  But this seems like what's next.  I have a lot of other things I could be doing; and happily, I got a lot of solid work done on the Guide this week.  But this, this weird random thing ... this seems to be next.  I don't know what it will produce, I don't know what inspirations it will give me.  I'm trying to trust myself, my instruments and my calculations.  I'm saying out loud, I'm not these others that I used to respect, but have since begun to wonder about.  I think.

I'll have to see.

Soon

For some time, I've progressed away from a format of dungeon mastering tutorials towards the more sustainable desire to just show off my work.  For many of my viewers, this hasn't been a positive development.  As such, those who cared about how to deal with troublesome players, or how to describe a dungeon, or how to encourage role-playing or whatever, have simply drifted away.  Those who remain of that kind know the tutorials are all still here, floating in the enormous backlog of my posts over these last 15 years (if they can be found).

For myself, I got tired of producing these sorts of posts ... less because I began repeating myself and moreso because they received, on the whole, either resistance or passive agreement.  Once upon a time, back when angry birds roamed the earth, these posts garnered a lot of attention and produced excellent discussions that ran for thirty or forty comments; but those days, along with the "blog" I suppose, are gone.

We're in a place now where discussion has lost it's verve.  And for the record, "what can you show me" is a better path.  It removes the casual blatherer from the fore, putting the worker, the operator, "creator" in front.  Of course, there are still performers and hustlers, but steadily in this experiment we're calling the internet, ephermeral things are on the decline.  They'll be with us forever, no doubt.  But there are only so many cat videos we can care about; so many kids dancing well in their living rooms we have time for; and so many people spewing out yet one more diatribe on why the right way to play D&D is ...

I'm rather comfortable shucking off that shirt and dropping it on the floor, where it can be laundered should I want to put it on again.  I have little left to say.  Steadily, I move further and further from the world of game modules, D&D online social events, even the desire to visibly see other people play the game.  I just don't relate.

Recently, JB posted a series of posts detailing numerous modules that were part of some contest.  I couldn't bring myself to read past the first sentence of each post.  In retrospect, I've been running a single "module" for 15 years now, taking place on Earth, where the various boundaries and choices within the module steadily drift from location to location, occasionally upon a specific theme and occasionally just to fill a few runnings with whatever the players are interested in at that moment.  If I need something to happen, I invent it out of my own head.  I don't steal it from other creators because what they're creating is ... of absolutely no use to me.

The trouble, naturally, is that when I'm in a state of creation, I post on multiple platforms and there's new material every day.  And when I'm not in that state, as with the moment ... there's really nothing to say.  I talk about myself.  I talk about my discontinuity with everyone else.

My houseguests have departed as of Sunday.  There are less interruptions, there's no 3-year-boy laughing and running back and forth, back and forth, in what I could only describe as the desirable manner.  I'm finding myself able to think again.  I'm just sort of kicking ideas around.  Working at the job and thinking about getting started on serious stuff.  But for now, just enjoying the quiet.  At my age, quiet is a wonderful thing.

For those waiting, I apologise.  Soon.  That's all I can say right now.  Soon.

Getting it Done

So where have I been?  Those familiar with my Patreon know that I've been spending a lot of time posting there, nearly every day, sometimes three times a day.  It's not that I'm trying to sell myself there, but that it's a better platform for posting what I've done in a given day than here on blogger ... largely because it's central and better for publishing pdfs or pngs.  Much of the material I'm posting there is also being created for my Map Blog, which I've taken up again since January 15th.

For all the things I watch or read about creators at work on the internet, I see little about creators themselves.  The linked video is a year old and mostly on the mark — particularly this insight that creators are not expected to create "content" on Youtube, but "ad space."  This is old news to a journalist like me, however, who learned in university that articles in newspapers have been there to create ad space since the 17th century.  But Youtube is new and glitzy, and teenage creators don't have some old hand cold selling advertising on the phone to tell them what's what, like I did.  All content is for the purpose of creating space for ads.  That's the reason "public material" was invented.

It's no mystery here that I began playing D&D a bit more than 44 years ago ... but more importantly, I began working on my game at nearly the same time.  Less than four months after my introduction, I had an idea for a game world and had convinced some fellow players, and friends who had never played the game, to give it a try.  I don't know what calendar day I launched the world; I'd guess about a month after I'd gotten the D&D books for Christmas of '79.  That is, sometime in the last week, 44 years ago.

Until 2008, all of 28 years, all the time spent in building and creating my world was done alone, with the exception that my players would see evidence from week to week of things I sought to introduce.  In creator terms, it's something like a sincere group of musicians with ten years experience of playing together, who haven't yet published their first album for a record company.  All that while, there's plenty of time to test things on audiences, change lyrics, change the bridge, practice getting it right and building a deep familiarity with the chords and colouratura of each piece.  And there's time to write a lot of pieces, since constant touring and press junkets don't exist to get in the way of being a musician.

Which is why, as most know, the second album is rarely as good as the first.  There's less time.  There's all this fame in the way.  There's the total uprooting of the musician's lifestyle to this other thing.  There are fifty voices having a say beyond the band members.  It takes someone who's either willing to fight every minute for the integrity of their vision, or be willing to say "fuck all of you" and walk away from money, fame, glamour and fans, knowing that in the long run their talent will pay off despite the temporary loss of these things.  The greatest musicians, writers, designers and other creators are those with the strength to do one or the other — take on the industry and win, or do it without the industry.

This is not most people.  Most people with talent will compromise; and nearly all of those without talent can talk animatedly about how fast they'd compromise, if only they got the chance.  This latter describes nearly every person on youtube or any other creative platform.  Because they don't have content to create, they spend years searching sites that might tell them what content they might create if only it would make them rich and "happy."  What they're not doing is "creating," because they haven't anything to create.

To attain the top 1% of youtube creators, the cherished 610 thousand channel owners in the whole world, we need 56 followers who regularly follow our videos and watch them to the end.  This requires a very minimal skill set.  One has to be able to turn on a computer, sit in front of it, use a simple program that can be bought, and talk about something moderately popular for 10 to 20 minutes, three times a week.  There are 61 million creators on youtube.  In front of an audience of 2.7 billion.  There are 44 watchers for every creator.  It takes only the least bit of resilience to get our 44 watchers watching ... and yet only 1% of all would-be creators can do that.

None of this describes me.  I didn't work on my game world for 28 years with the expectation of a musician.  There was no rich moneyed company by which I could ever be "discovered."  When I read the Dragon magazine in my teens, I thought the writing was shit, I thought the approach to D&D was shit, I thought the people involved were amateur writers who would never amount to anything.  And as writers, except pitching to their own audience, that's all they ever were.  None rose to the status of Leiber, Anderson, Anthony or even Asprin, much less Tolkein.  None of the artists achieved anything.  Neither have I, obviously, but for fuck's sake, when I measure myself against a "creator," I'm self-aware enough to measure myself against Zelazny or at the very least Pratchett ... NOT fucking Arneson.  Jeebus.  I may be just another of the D&D hacks out here, but as least I know it.  I'm not here writing eulogies for so-called "legendary" game designer Jennell Jaquays.

Forgive me if I haven't got cares to give about people who have had zero influence on my work or my thinking process.

I attribute my "success," as it were, as I have more than most on Patreon, to my disregard of success as a goal.  It's something I'd like to have.  It's something I think I deserve to have ... but I don't have it because it's not a "goal."  It's not something I'm aiming to achieve and it never has been.  For reasons that make no sense to most people, I'm trying to make a world here — the best possible game world I can create, with the best possible rules, and the best possible tools to make it go.  It happens that a lot of things I've learned how to do, and things I've happened to create, are things that other people find worth seeing or having.  These are things they haven't figured out how to create themselves.  Having these things gives them an opportunity to have a better world, with better rules and tools.

My readers aren't going — I should gawddamned hope — to stand out in the rain at some vigil upon my death, because they and I don't give a rat's crap about my halo effect.  When I die, the spigot gets turned off.  That's the only thing to feel sad about.  Chances are, I'm going to weaken and be unable to do what I'm doing now long before I actually die, just as happens to nearly every creator.  It's a pity that Chita Rivera died on Tuesday, without much fanfare I notice, but it's not like she was in the middle of making of film or anything.  Carl Weathers died too, day before yesterday.  I'm sure they'll be missed sincerely by their families.  The rest of us are entitled to a feeling like, "Gee, I remember watching them," and that's about it.  With the one who says,"I heard this and I am soooo saddened by it," it's more selfishness than sadness.  But I digress.

Now and then, I've got to back away from writing blog posts because this isn't getting me anywhere.  Just now, I'm exercising some 400+ minutes a week — though gently, very gently.  I get in about 90 minutes of floor stretching and 330 minutes of walking, most of the latter on a treadmill that we bought for ourselves a year ago because Tamara needed a firm, reliable surface to walk on.  Calves and thighs are toughening up, I'm shedding a little weight and I'm in a state of calm tiredness and moderate sweating that awakes in brief hot flashes, mostly at night when I'm sleeping.  Blood pressure is steady at 120/80, heart rate is 65-66, I'm eating less and not doing too bad.

When I find time separate from writing for work, I write or edit the Streetvendor's Guide.  I've done all the cloth now, have been stuck for three days completing the small section on rope and cordage for ropes and fishing nets, and am on the verge of starting hides, skins and furs.  At the same time, I finished editing the two introduction sections at the start of the book and I'm cleaning up the section on cultivation, having added an additional three quarters of a page of content since starting on that.  Parts of this work are being posted on Patreon every Friday (I just posted edited versions of pp. 24 and 25), for the benefit of those patreon supporters who give me a minimum of $10 each month.  Showing is about 1/6th the content I'm publishing there each week ... so if you're really interested in knowing how the Guide is going, and that it's actually going, then help me pay for the artwork that's set to support this thing.

When I'm too tired to work on this — because, frankly, wanting to be both accurate and interesting is more important to me than getting it done — I spend bits of time here and there working on mapping the Balkans.  I got interested in resurrecting the map blog because I found I needed some kind of thing to pass the time that felt moderately robotic and yet interesting enough to get my head out of the Guide occasionally.  My partner told me to "smile" the other day, because I haven't for awhile.  It's two weeks into my work-out plan (with the kidney foundation being quite supportive, I should say), and between that and the Guide I admit I've been fairly grim.  There's nothing for it.  On a good day I get three quarters of a page of new-written material done, or a full page of editing done, between other commitments and the limitations of my energy supply.  So when I have enough gumption to distract myself, I work on maps.

When I haven't got the mental energy for those, I drift into some mild problem-solving game like a jigsaw puzzle or Oxygen Not Included, or I drive in EuroTruck Simulator 2, or Two-Point Hospital or whatever, while listening to a movie or music.  This is just waste time, honestly.  But I'm the sort of person who can't just sit and stare.  If I do that, then I start thinking about what I'm not doing; and if I'm not doing the Guide, and thinking about it, this doesn't encourage me.  It fact, it makes me quite aware of how BIG the damn thing is, and how STUPID a person has to be to start a project like this, and how it's still an unbelievable time before it's going to be done ...

This doesn't push me towards doing it, it pushes me away.  I've learned these last ten years that this is a sort of self-preservation thing; that as homo sapiens, spending too much time doing something without an expected yield in the short term is a great way to die of starvation in the savanna.  To get the Guide done, I have to trick my animal brain into thinking I'm doing other needful things.  Then, at some point, playing a game or making a map, I have a thought that goes, "Why am I wasting time with this drivelling shit when I could be working on the Guide?"  Then I close everything and work on the Guide.  It's quite a reliable technique, even if it does involve putting my animal brain to sleep while sneaking up on my ego with a dagger.

Being creative is about getting something done.  It's not about making money, or becoming famous, or winning approval or respect.  Those who succeed at it are those who want to get things done.  If the thing getting done is popular, all the better.  If the success gets in the way of getting the thing done, well, see the success for what it is, kick it to the curb if need be, and get it done.  Because getting it done is all that matters.

For people with nothing to do, who want to have youtube channels or blogs, well of course they're never going to achieve anything.  Because from the start, they've never had anything to do.  

Updating the Generator

With the decision to change from the Character Background Generator "splatbook" to the Streetvendor's Guide, I find myself wanting to update the wiki version of the Generator rather than leave the work I've done these late months languish.  I'm not concerned that doing so will lessen the value of the book, should it come to be published — without a doubt, when I sell the hardcover book, it'll be to people who've never heard of me.

In any case, this means that I'm temporarily putting down the work I've been doing on facilities and hexes.  I'll get back to that, I promise.  I'm just interested in doing this for now, is all.

I'm of a very different mindset than what I see from creators all around me, who covetously protect their material as they were taught to do in the days before the internet.  I'm not concerned about people "stealing my stuff," first because most dealers refuse to see the value in it and also because they're unable to go on churning out new information on the same lines without me.  I'm the goose that lays the eggs, and even a robber must keep coming back to the source for more product.

Secondly, I'm convinced that we're moving continously into an age where the maker is of more value and importance than the product.  The product's ascendence came about in the 17th century, as the middlemen of the new economic age inserted themselves between the creator and the audience as a means of filling their own pockets.  The internet obliterates their necessity — though gawd knows they're the last to know it — because I can talk directly to the audience any time I want, by sitting down and typing.  Therefore the thing that's for sale isn't the product, it's me.

At the same time, the more product I create, the more valuable I become.  It stands to reason that the well-thinking game wizard should realise that whatever they may feel about me personally, I'm producing work on a scale hitherto unseen in the annals of D&D.  I look over the OGL-produced work of the last 20 years, surrounding the lamentations that such work is in danger of being "stolen" by the company, and feel the same as I have for years on this blog.  Take it, dump in the garbage and move on.  Because personally I feel that none of it amounted to very much.  I've looked over hundreds and hundreds of pages these last two decades and found just about nothing to expand my game world or my interest in DMing.  Certainly it wasn't a source to which I went in order to write How to Run or initiate the Wiki.   I don't go to it now for inspiration ... and those that do rarely write anything that I find insightful.

Dismissive as that might be, it's how I feel.  If I felt anything since the development of 3e was worth stealing from, I'd have certainly stolen it.  I do have parts of 3e in my system.  I have nothing, absolutely nothing, from the dreck that's been proposed since then.

I have two concerns.  First, that I earn the support I receive ... and by this, I mean that my supporters feel assured that I am earning it.  That means finding ways to serve the subject material that continuously push the envelope, drawing greater attention to those aspects that are constantly swept to the corner by those whose goal it is to emulate a company who doesn't care about them.

Second, that I'm available for discussion.  I know I'm intimidating; and I know that I'm rarely willing to make concessions to the efforts others make to approach me, just because they've essayed to do that.  But trust me when I say that it's more important to me and you become a better and wiser DM than that you feel better about yourself for what you are right now.  I live in the future.  What I am today means not a damn thing compared to what I'll be tomorrow ... and right or wrong, it's my intent to hold you to that same standard.

As difficult as that is, I promise that in the long run you'll thank me for it.

Please enjoy the changes I'm making to the Background Generator and rest assured that I'm also working on the Streetvendor's Guide.

Practical Learning

"... if you look at any role-playing game from the 70s, Metamorphosis Alpha assumes you're going to draw out 24 levels of a giant starship — and there were people at the time, who were just like me, and said like I don't know how to do that.  How's that gonna work?  And then there's, um, Tunnels and Trolls, says 'Okay, the first thing that's gonna happen is, someone's gonna have to dig the tunnel.'  Map out the dungeon.  And of course St. Andre there was copying from Original D&D where Gygax says, 'Okay, somebody's gonna have to design six levels of a dungeon,' right?

"Now a kid like me was always baffled by this.  How did someone come up with all this stuff?  Because you look at professionally produced modules and you — and I think, I'm never going to make something that good.  You know.  It's always been a mystery to me.  How did all these people in the 1970s — how did they give themselves permission to just go correct things, to create things?"

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

It's a gift that keeps on giving.

Metamorphosis Alpha was originally published in 1976.  The game included descriptions of 17 levels of the "Starship Warden", a 50-mile long damaged vessel.  Not 24.  17.  Most children in the days before helicopter parenting, video games, cellphones and even cable television suffered from acute and crippling boredom, which encouraged the drawing out of physical pictures from descriptions.  It's not a mystery.

Tunnels and Trolls was originally published in 1975 by Ken St. Andre.  I don't have any memories of the game before 1979, and perhaps I didn't play it often enough, but I have no memories of any text saying, "Okay, you have to dig the tunnel."  But I could be wrong about that.  In any case, it's not like we had to head off to a place with dirt with our shovels.  It's just lines drawn on paper, right?

Nor do I have any memories of Gygax saying a dungeon had to have specifically "six" levels.  I accept that Johnson's goal is to stress the difficulty of prepping the game — but again, these are just lines drawn with pencils.

While I didn't play RPGs until 1979, starting around 1970, at the age of six, I had grown remarkably adept at playing in the sand, where we would collaboratively build villages with roads, hotwheels cars, complete with small plastic garages, post offices and police stations, because these things were available and we were boys.  These villages would fill the sandbox from side to side, and then we'd collect rocks, golf balls and wooden blocks and smash these villages "from space" just before dinnertime.

By eight or nine, we were drawing our own comic strips — or in my case, making maps — as well as drawing out spaceships smashing into planets, or whatever took our fancy.  Virtually everyone's binder (a thing used to carry paper) was side-to-side illustrated, because we were punchy with boredom in school and doodling made the clock's minute hand move faster.

By eleven, we were playing playing complex wargames, having moved beyond RISK into Panzerblitz and Squad Leader; by twelve, it was rebuilding the rumpus room floor with anything we could find in order to build large battle maps, on which we move our plastic-model built tanks and miniature soldiers all-day Saturday ... before these had to be cleaned up before everyone went home.  We knew every detail about those tanks; we could rattle off engine types, range, fuel use, weight, etcetera, because we collectively owned all of Jane's Big Books of whatever ... which included scale models of cut-away diagrams of giant battleships and airplanes, which we would stare at for hours and discuss for longer.  Pffft.  Invent 17 levels of a giant spaceship?  Yeah, like we had no template for that.

Anyway, my being 11 takes me up to 1974.  It was another five years before I even heard of D&D; and after first hearing of it, I played it in a space of an hour.

I'm a little fascinated by these people talking in the present about how "in the 1970s," role-playing games were supposedly everywhere.  Um, no.  The friend who introduced me to the game had been playing a month, while the DM had been introduced to the game only three months before.  It was going like wildfire in 1979, but no one in Calgary could have easily played the game before December of 1978 ... because that's when the only game store in the city opened its doors.  So this "what people did in the 1970s" is bullshit.  Yeah, maybe some people played, somewhere, but it wasn't a widespread phenomenon and every one of those people had a wargame-obsessive background like I did.  This is a very tiny subset of the population, with a specific mindset ... the sort that would know exactly how to design 6 levels of a dungeon, or a huge spaceship, without any trouble.

I have mentioned before that I joined a campaign in 1980, run by a fellow who played with Gygax in 1974.  He passed away last year; his name was Bill Hartley.  He didn't publish any modules or get famous in any way ... but he did begin running his own game after moving to Calgary post-school.  He became a teacher, reappearing in my life as my daughter's grade nine english teacher.  That was a very funny parent-teacher interview, I can tell you.  My daughter was barely discussed.

In 1975, I'd wager that Bill was the only player of D&D in Calgary.  And as it happened, he lived just three blocks from where I lived, in a house overlooking my elementary school playground.  I can show you the house.  But as a 5th grader in 1975, I had no idea — though I probably glanced towards his house every day.  I think that's kind of funny.

Giving ourselves "permission" to make things was how the world worked.  I made my first science fair project in 1976, a working circulatory system along with quite a lot of knowledge about it.  I put forth science fair projects each year until grade 10, by which time I'd lost interest in practical science and had moved onto theatre arts.  The same year that I discovered D&D I had also begun performing in city wide events on stage ... which is a different kind of collaborative, creative effort.  I also got interested in football, in those days when I was young, raw and lean, which is intensely collaborative and a good place to wear out aggression.  But it was football or drama, and in the end drama won ... which, CTE considered, was definitely for the best.

I have no idea what kind of kid Jeffro Johnson was, but certainly not the kind that I ran around with when I was building model ships and planes, or building physical representations to display contour lines as a science fair exhibit (1.5 meters wide and 0.5 meters high, built with 5 mm sheets of styrofoam and carefully cut to represent the contoured landscape around Sylvan Lake in central Alberta), or learning how to program computers with punch cards (yes, christ, that's where I started with computers).  Long before I played D&D, I was trained to play D&D.

Make a dungeon?  From scratch?  Oh ffs.  Give me something hard.

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.

Breaking Through This Block

I'm in a funk.

For me, that means not wanting to do much of anything.  Such moods strike from time to time, typically lasting for two-three weeks ... sometimes less if I can create the right circumstances to shift myself back into gear.

These used to worry me in my teens and twenties, but I've learned enough to recognize what's going on.  I'm not "bored."  I'm not having a crisis of purpose or doubt about my abilities.  Creativity is like a gas pump — it goes dry.  A great big pump can fill up dozens of projects and make them run a long time, but sooner or later if something doesn't come along, that gas won't last forever.  That's where I am just now.  Dry.

There isn't any reason.  A creator can go crazy coming up with reasons, blaming it on some convenient recent happenstance, world events, injustices, job changes, someone else's job changes, relationship troubles, the relationship going well, the season, Christmas, the weather, a new pair of shoes ... oh, there are lots of reasons.  I believe firmly that this is a "blame game" ... and that there's no one and nothing to blame because, in fact, we sometimes just need time.

If the pump metaphor doesn't work for the reader, then try this: any creative endeavour will necessarily make use of what we've heard and what we know.  Call this input, or "gathering."  It takes a sufficient amount of input to create output.  We can call this output "creating."  Get locked into a mode of constant, rigorous output, and the time taken creating is not time gathering.  If we don't gather, the supply needed to create is starved.  So one day, for no particular reason, we go to the pump and it's dry.

My problem today, and for a week now, is getting the pump filled.  If I had a contract at the moment, it wouldn't matter if the pump were full or not; that's doable — but from experience I know it's unpleasant and stress-making.  I'd rather get myself pumped before I'm put on the spot again ... and get to creating for my other projects besides.  And so ... reasoning that others relate to this, I decided to outline a few strategies that I've employed effectively in the past.  While getting a blog post written at the same time.  Let's go through them.

1.  Distraction.  This is almost useless, but it's the easiest strategy and therefore a good place to start.  Sleep is a distraction.  Getting a good meal is a distraction.  A few hours with a video game, a movie, a night out, walking the dog ... all distractions.  Any creator will say that when getting stuck on a problem, put it down, do something else, then come at it fresh the next morning.  This works.  It really does.

Problem is, when the pump's dry, it doesn't work at all.  It's six nights sleeping on the problem, its 30,000 steps walking the dog, its a dozen movies and three dozen meals, and nothing's changed.  Wednesday we spent from waking up in the morning until bedtime playing ONI, so that all we feel is very, very guilty.  But not in a mood to work.  Thing is, the "distraction" is what we're doing when it begins to dawn that this isn't a problem that can be cured through distraction, like all those tiny problems.  This is bigger.  As such, the distractions have to be more productive.

2.  Work.  Obviously, you're not creating something deep and intense so this means doing the sort of work any human can do.  Unfortunately, the work you do at "da yob" is either sucking out your wee daily provision of creativity or your will to live, so that's no good; nor is housework, errands or fetching people and things; these things are ordinary and dull and won't motivate you.  You need a knock to your spirit; a shakubuku — the breaking of negative patterns in one's thoughts, words and deeds.

You do this by spending more time with yourself, not less, while minimizing distractions.  Yes, this means meditation ... but given that most people don't meditate regularly, starting now is a bad idea.  A better method is to go on a long walk, by yourself.  Physical exercise works too, but chances are you won't do it more than an hour, and I'm saying a looooong walk.  Three or four hours.  Long enough to make your feet really hurt.  Long enough you have to sit down once or twice because you're tired.  One that makes you think about everything.

Truth be told, sitting in one place for three or four hours will do, but ask yourself: can you sit in one place, by yourself, out of your home, for three hours?  And not start a conversation with a stranger?  Because that's a distraction and the idea is to be with yourself.  Assuming you can stand yourself.  The walk just gives the added sense of accomplishment ... and in a time of not feeling like getting stuff done, accomplishment is a plus.  So push to accomplish distance.

3.   Go through the motions.  This is what happens if I get a contract in the next few days (which is likely).  With my campaign world, there are dozens of projects I can pursue that don't take much creativity; though they are boring.  Many of these I've transferred to the wiki, such as spells, monsters, descriptions of places and such, all of which involves minimal encyclopedia-like writing, editing, rewriting the words of other sources, etcetera.  Off wiki, I can work on maps or the trade system; and with these things, I mean specifically jobs that require no more effort than plugging numbers into boxes.  The world being enormous, and the various systems I've devised to express the world, means that there is lots and lots of pure monkey work that doesn't require a brain, only an effort to be accurate.

In earlier days, before progressing past such things, I used to invent encounter tables, equipment lists, treasure lists, pre-prepped NPC characters (wasted so much time with that) ... even copying sections of the game books or from other materials.  This sort of work was at least "constructive" in a sense, and would often give me ideas of some more complicated notion to pursue.  Such moments of insight were the gas pump being filled.  Copy enough text from an encyclopedia or technical book and ideas are bound to sprout, since what's being done is "gathering."

Lately, though, it's harder for me to feel motivated to go through the motions, as described here.  Much of my game design has become complicated enough that it demands seriously problem-solving and creativity to move forward ... the thing I don't have just now.

4.  Make something bigger and better.  This is the best strategy, since it produces the best immediate evidence of accomplishment.  Take something that already exists, like a map or a table, an existing description or a dungeon, and expand it.  If you have a map that's three feet wide, with an 1 inch = 20 miles scale, start on a project of making that map nine feet wide.  Guess what could be used to fill in the enormous white spaces that appear and thus intensify the impact and value of the map.  If you have a dungeon with nine rooms, and three pages of description, expand it to twenty-seven rooms; expand your description.  Deepen your tables; multiply them.

The benefit is that you've already created the skeleton for a much larger beast than you've got.  You don't need to invent new ideas; you only need to advance your understanding of something you've already got.  You're taking a story that you've already written and exploring the characters on a deeper level.

You may find these things difficult or impossible to do.  That doesn't matter.  Try anyhow.  Remember, the goal is not to make the expanded version, the goal is to get us back into a creative state of mind.  The goal is to kick aside the ennui.

There is a fifth strategy and I'm doing it now.  Talk about your lack of motivation with others.  Explain it in depth and why it troubles you.  This helps too.  I'm feeling just now like maybe there's something I could do this evening.  I'll give it a try.