It's, um, Not What You Think

My apologies for not writing here for days.  For those interested, I've produced content for the map blog, and for a recent project called shifting sands, and for patreon, but not here ... and of course, here is the only place that really counts.

My daughter, her husband and their son had to vacate their former place of residence at the end of February; they can't take possession of their next residence until the 16th of March, so for the present they're bivouaked with Tamara and me.  We're all friendly and pleasant, though our place is just 750 sq.ft., so naturally there are hurdles.  One benefit is that my daughter and I were able to record a video for her let's play site on Monday, which is always fun; she's been in the middle of a long and difficult move and hasn't been able to post anything, so she's glad to have something to put there.  Please have a look if you're willing, give her a like and let it run a bit, since that helps her stats.  It's me explaining how I play Oxygen Not Included, which might reveal something of my general character with regards to D&D.  It is, after all, a design-based logistical game.

I wasn't able to put a preview up of the Streetvendor's Guide last Friday, and the way it looks I won't this Friday either.  There's lots going on, I'm struggling to find quiet time to do my job (which for whatever reason needs doing) and frankly I haven't even been able to open the document since last Thursday.  Lately, the time I've found for myself has been spent making maps because it's comparatively relaxing compared to producing serious content.  It doesn't help that I've run into a block regarding the layout of the wood section early parts ... as that's what I've started putting together.  Things are sure to settle down after a week or so, when I can return to my weekly pattern of equanimity.

Did have a useful conversation about the production of content, motivated by yet another one of thos many youtube videos in which some person talks about all the people who are quitting youtube and how hard it is to make money on the platform, and what's it all for anyway, and besides the real hard part is finding something meaningful to make content about.  You know the type.  Here's an example from a mature, adult woman whose able to express herself competently without having to posture like either a testosterone-driven jackass or an estrogen-possessed flake.

I trust that's an equally balanced insult of people of both sexes.  I don't want to play favourites.

Creating something new is hard.  Therefore, it's obviously easier to create something that's, um, derivative.  Something derivative may receive a lot of views and likes, but at the same time it's not exactly soul-sustaining.  If we make something derivative, it feels like it's derivative, so any actual praise we get for it feels, um, empty.

If later we then create something actually original, we can't help noticing that it gets precisely the same praise as something derivative.  Often, it gets less praise.  This is discouraging.  In fact, it's discouraging in the same way that praise for derivative stuff feels empty.  This is true even if the channel is making money.

All in all, this result undermines one's motivation to produce ... anything.  In fact, it's rather crippling.  Fortunately for me, I experienced this spiral in roughly the 1980s, when my audience consisted of no more than 60 persons at the best of times, and more usually a circle of about 6 friends.  Eventually I settled into a groove of comfortably creating content regardless of anyone ever seeing it.  I had no idea the internet would eventually happen.

Now that it has, I try occasionally to take some advantage of it ... only to be usually disappointed.  But I've been better trained to handle that then most people who are turning to the internet as, um, an alternative to working a real job.  Only to find, all too often, that creating stuff is a lot like a real job that fails to provide the purpose of a job: income.

Lets see ... I ought to provide some sort of advice here.  If you're going to make a youtube channel, film yourself doing something you're already doing every day.  If you like to sail, and you would be doing that anyway, learn how to post four well-secured cameras in the right places around your vessel and then film yourself until the power on these cameras runs out.  Then teach yourself how to voice over, so you can explain where you are, what you're doing, why you're doing it and so on.  The end product of cutting all four camera feeds may turn out to be utter garbage ... but at least you got to do what you would have done anyway.  And you've gained some knowledge of how cameras, editing and overdubbing works.  Win-win.

I write.  If the world were empty of all people, if I were the last man left alive, I would still write down things today because four years from now, I'd enjoy reading what I wrote four years ago.  This is the sort of madness you'll need if you're going to do something for a living, without a boss that pays you money just for showing up.

DON'T decide to do something you've never done before and film that.  Don't.  You won't like the thing ... and if your channel somehow does well, you'll learn to really, really, really hate the thing.  Eventually, you'll hate your fans for liking that you do something that you hate.  You'll hate them.  And that'll come out.  And you'll regret it.  Not just because your channel isn't popular any more, but because it once was, it stopped being, and you're going to utterly hate yourself for letting it fail.  It's a lose-lose.  Don't do this.

DON'T base your channel or anything else you're doing on someone else's work.  You may have a mission to teach people the wonders of history, but if all you're doing with your history channel is repeating information that exists in books, or hundreds of other history channels, in the end you're going to feel like you're on a hamster wheel.  You may have a wonderful plan for your next presentation, you may put hundreds of hours into making your presentation pretty, or witty, but if you're on a hamster wheel and that's not where you really want to be, in a few years you'll realise that this is all getting you nowhere.  Even if it makes money for you.  In the end, you'll realise you're not making any kind of difference at all, any more than all the other copies of your work do.  You'll realise you're not special, and you're never going to be.  You won't like that.  And worst of all, it's not going to be an alternative to doing a "real job."  It will be a real job.  One you might be able, someday, to get numb to, but not one that's going to fill you with joy.

Truth be told, most of us don't do something every day that's worth pointing a camera at.  Sorry.  Just how it is.  Most of the time, these people who sigh and show regret for the internet not being what they hoped for are just too, um, ordinary to be watched.  Again, sorry.  Just how it is.  Performance is for performers.  It's a type.  Not everyone is a class clown.  And most of the time, being a class clown isn't all that rewarding anyhow.

It's great that youtube and the general internet gives everyone a shot at being a class clown, or some other kind of performer ... but realistically, a "shot" isn't much.  It's not fame.  It's mostly not rewarding.  It's mostly a wasted afternoon getting ready for the audition.

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.  

Literally Insane

Heh.

It's important to have a reputation that people online can respect.