#I’m generally more of a visual person not a novelist but its still writing

[kiwibirdlafayette]

Tagged by the wonderful @brigita-byrd !

1. Why do you like to write?

(whataboldassumptiontosay-) hA just kidding

To be honest, I’d probably say its because I’m a storyteller at heart. Not to sound cliche or anything but writing’s basically the biggest escapism I can get and getting to escape into these worlds is, just fantastic (even if that means writing only in my head and never putting it to paper oops)

Also, character acting

2. Would you like to meet your characters in real life?

A lot of them... absolutely, absolutely I would love to meet them. Others, not so much. I’ll leave it up to y’all to determine which is which.

3. If your story was getting an adaption, would you like it to be live-action or animated?

I’m an animation guy, so I’d like to say animation (for IWAY, and IRE at least) and an animated version of Arcadia of Avalon would be neat as well but... live action might be better for the tone of the story but hey, you never know

4. What is the hardest part of writing for you?

Putting the pen to paper, and putting the scenes into words. I first got into writing from improv acting, and I’m more of a visual guy so a lot of the time it’s like- how to I describe this particular emotion? How would I accompany this dialogue with supplementary action? How should I craft this passage in a way that the reader sees the exact same visual composition I see in my head?

(It’s also a reason I draw a lot of scenes before I write it, so I have something physical to work off of)

5. Badly explain your WIP in one sentence.

A repressed gay knight living in medieval England is tasked with finding a fancy piece of dinnerware, and alongside a bunch of other inhumanly attractive guys and gals, learns the meaning of love, family, and destiny.

(and)

Goth musician reflects and grapples with the implications of his past, and tries to resolve it if he ever wishes to be prepared for the end of the world.

6. Do you prefer to plot or fly by the seat of your pants?

It depends on the context, to be honest. When it comes to dialogue/character interaction within a single scene, flying by the seat of my pants is way better because I’ve found its ten times harder to write when I’m trying to stick to certain parameters.

However, in terms of long chunks (ie; anything that’s not a oneshot or concept scene), I’ll try my damndest to stick to whatever plot I have outlined or you get scenarios like IWAY where I go on so many tangent from my outline that the plot goes from 7 to 14 chapters

7. Would you live in your story if given the chance?

IWAY/Perceptions, god that would be fantastic because hell, who wouldn’t want to live in Arcadia Oaks? In terms of AoA I don’t know-

Actually. Changed my mind. I’d want to be a knight I’m completely down to live in this fantasy version of the Medieval era

8. Have you laughed or cried while writing?

hA absolutely I’ve laughed so many times at my own bad jokes I’ve stuck in IWAY and Perceptions like I’m a damn comedic genius (Im not this is practically a roast) To be honest, the only time I think I’ve ever cried was writing the prologue to I Remember Everything (which is Mordred in the Battle of Camlann) and... fuck I think IWAY 9

9. What’s a trope that you love to death?

Emotional vulnerability, hands down.Theres nothing that gets to me more then this character, so caught up in everything, repressed emotions everywhere convinced that its them against the world just- finally breaking down those walls, opening their hearts to those who care about them and letting themselves be loved without regret, and realizing they dont have to carry the weight alone

(sorry slowburn enemies to lovers, although thats a close second)

10. Do you have any goals for your WIP?

For IWAY/Perceptions: Definitely, just... find the motivation to write the last chapter for each of them

For IRE: Get the next chapters out! They’re outlined it’s just a matter of writing it out :’)

And for Arcadia of Avalon- Currently my goal is to solidify the storyline- pick which narratives I want to include and which ones to cut (since the outline I had last year isn’t quite what I want to do anymore) so that I can get a final plot lineup done by the end of the year and start actually writing 👌

And my questions for the folks below

1. Why do you write? (ie; what’s your motivation?)

2. Who, of your characters would you want to spend a day with?

3. What’s your favorite part of writing?

4. What is one genre and/or trope you despise writing?

5. Who are your biggest influences?

6. If your work got a film deal- Animated or Live action?

7. Are you more of an outline person or write-as-you go person?

8. What’s the most emotional thing you’ve ever written?

9. Would you want to live in the world(s) of your story?

10. (and, because I’ve seen most do this)- Any goals for your WIP?

I tag: @shadowofcimmerion @violetcancerian @tunafishprincess @zonbiconbi @akozuheiwa @kouvei-matarra (and anyone else who’d like to give it a go- consider yourself tagged :D) sorry if any of yall been tagged already aaaa

#writing tag #lafakiwi talks #i hope i did this right aaaa #I’m generally more of a visual person not a novelist but its still writing #arcadia of avalon #i remember everything toa #it was always you toa #perceptions toa #IWAY #tag games #about me

[relatablegenzwriter]

heya~ bit weird but do you have any advice for outlining? I always outline but half way through actually writing something I realise I've not thought of something (OTL) Thanks in advance!!

Advice on Outlining

I honestly never thought I’d see the day someone asked me for advice on outlining. When I was about ten and aiming to be the world’s youngest published novelist (lmao look how that turned out), everyone who knew me as a writer also knew that I would never, ever outline before I wrote something. I argued that it sucked all the fun out of writing. I couldn’t let my characters do whatever they wanted if I had to stick to a script. I would have to spend more time planning that I could’ve spent on actually writing my stories. I’d see all the gaps and places where my story was lacking in its plot. I’m not selling this outlining thing well, am I?

As I’ve written more, I’ve also warmed up to the idea of outlining. I’ll again preface this by saying I have never finished a novel, despite having started countless, so I can’t speak to how outlining has helped me throughout a project. But I do have a general sense of what works and what doesn’t, at least for me, so I’ll do what I can.

After some careful thought, here’s my advice on how to outline.

Don’t outline.

At least, not right away. I’ve found that I need to know my story, its characters, its ~vibes~, etc. before I can really make an accurate outline. A common concern with outlines is that you’ll make people do things out of character, or that the story won’t want to go in the direction you tell it to. Test out the waters a little bit first. Write that one scene that’s been in your head–you know which one I’m talking about–and figure out the style, the main characters, the mood, everything you really need to get the feel of your story. I like to write a bunch of beginnings, which can be helpful even if you don’t know where to start your story. Some people like to do character questionnaires so they know who they’re dealing with. Others will have that one scene that they think of when they think of their story, and will write that first to figure out where to go from there. There’s a lot of ways to warm up to the story, so play with a bunch of them and figure out what works for you. The point I’m trying to get across here is that you can’t successfully outline if you don’t know your story well enough. Fortunately, that’s an easy problem to fix.

What’s next?

That depends. If you look up “outlining methods”, you’ll find hundreds of lists, questionnaires, and weird diagrams that look like they came straight out of high school English class. There is no magical way to outline. With that being said, I’ll describe the way that I outline my work, and then add some general tips at the end.

       2. The basics.

Trying to write out every little detail from the beginning will likely overwhelm you and create writer’s block before you’ve even started writing.

don't do that.

Instead, get your basics all in one place: who are your characters? Where is it set? What is the premise? Once you do that, make note of the events that you know will happen. “Lily dies”, “Sam and Evan kiss”, “Aiyana confronts her family”, etc. I sometimes like to fill this out on paper or on a whiteboard like a timeline. Otherwise, making a bulleted list in a digital document also works. The one thing I’d advise is not to make this kind of list on paper, because as you start to insert more events between others, it’ll start to get really crowded.

      3. Fill in the rest!

Start to generate scenes and events that go between the ones you already have. Some things to consider:

what propels the story from point A to point B?

what needs to happen to further your characters’ arcs? (a follow up: do you know how you want your characters to grow throughout this story? what needs to happen in order for them to change?)

what could POSSIBLY happen?

is there a character who’s not doing enough yet who you want to give more attention to? something that’s not highlighted much in your list that you want to focus on more?

And essentially, you’ve made an outline! I know, so few steps. But this is actually going to take a while. This method may not work for you, and you’ll have to find other ones (that I’m not going into detail about because I don’t use them or know much about them). You’ll have to take some time to get to know your story. Step three WILL give you writer’s block, and as always you’ll be able to break through it, but don’t expect this process to be easy. But it is worth it!

And finally…

      4. Change it.

Once you sit down to write your story, chances are you’ll run into a plothole, or something you want to do differently. You asked about this in your question, and all I can say is yes! You’re right! For my oldest WIP, which has been around for almost six years, I can recall four specific outline revisions where I wrote the whole outline again from scratch. (This particular WIP has given me SERIOUS trouble, so take my experience with a grain of salt.) What I can say is that every time you revise your outline, it will get stronger, you’ll know your story better, and you’ll have more opportunity to be creative and revisit your story. I don’t understand why it’s considered the norm to outline once and then move on with a project, when it should be perfectly acceptable to pause your writing, say “that doesn’t look right”, and outline the story again. Your story, especially in the early stages, is fluid! You’ll actually be surprised by how long it remains that way, too. Point is, it’s okay for things to come up in the writing that don’t make sense with the outline, as long as you’re willing to revisit your original plans and reassess. I haven’t seen this approach discussed much if at all, so there’s a very good chance I could simply be a very disorganized writer who hasn’t made much progress on her big projects. But there could also be some legitimacy to this word jumble, so take what you will from it.

      5. Other outlining exercises…

Try to map out individual character arcs as part of your outlining. That way, you can make sure that their development lines up with the events in the story and the development of other characters.

If you’re a visual person, writing plot points on sticky notes and arranging them on a wall is very useful and also makes you feel like This Man. 

Free write (no erasing!), by hand, a summary of your plot–no detailed prose or dialogue, just a straightforward description of what happens. If questions come up, write them into the outline and keep writing. Once you finish you can go back and highlight all the questions you wrote.

Speaking of questions: when one comes up, really dive into it. What I like to do is write the question on top of a piece of paper and make a bulleted list of all the possible answers. Dive deeper into the ones you like, maybe combine a few. You could also do one of those web diagram things (those ones that look like clouds) if you’re the diagram type.

As your outline evolves, reassess why each scene is there. If it’s only purpose is “I like writing it”, maybe it’s time to write it for you and cut it out of the story. (Side note: this still applies to That Scene. You know the one.)

Call someone and explain the plot to them. They don’t necessarily need to be a writer, just someone who’s willing to listen to you relay the plot of a whole story to them. They can give input if they like, but the purpose of this is for you to have to explain your plot to someone else. It’ll be more obvious to you when something doesn’t make sense or belong in the story if you’re explaining it to another person. Especially note any clarifying questions or moments of confusion that they have. If you don’t have a person willing to do this, record yourself talking about it to your phone/camera/tablet/computer.

Don’t be afraid of the dramatic. When you’re first coming up with an outline, you’re exploring ALL possibilities. Even if your answer to “How does Aoife end up at Shauna’s house?” ends up being “She took the bus” instead of “The mailman, who is actually her estranged uncle, kidnapped her from her home and hid her in Shauna’s basement because Shauna and her uncle were having an affair”. You get to be creative, have fun, and even if you take the more realistic route, you’re reaffirming that that’s the direction you want to take.

Best of luck to you!

#writing #writers #writing tips #outlining #answering asks #my advice posts

[alysemeadfad]

ₒₗd ₛcₕₒₒₗ

Grandmixer D.ST.

Derek Showard, better known by the stage name GrandMixer DXT, is an American musician, one of the earliest to use turntables as a musical instrument in the 1980s. Renowned for his scratching techniques and his showmanship on stage, such as breaking in to dance or scratching records with other parts of his body other than his hands

Early in his career, he was known as Grand Mixer D.ST, a reference to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. He was featured in the influential hip hop film Wild Style.

Widely recognized as a pioneer, Grand Mixer DXT is credited as being the first turntablist. He was the first person to establish the turntable as a fully performable and improvisational musical instrument. Especially important is his technique of altering the pitch of the note or sound on the record.

He is also credited with helping to popularize DJing through his scratching on Herbie Hancock's single "Rockit", from the Bill Laswell and Material produced album Future Shock. He is featured in the 2001 documentary, Scratch.

D.ST’s original group was The Infinity Four MC’s consisting of Kingpin Shahiem, Mike Nice, Baron and Legendary female rapper Kimba.

While working with the Infinity Rappers n 1982, he was part of the first hip hop tour to Europe with Afrika Bambaataa, Rammellzee, Fab 5 Freddy, Rock Steady Crew, the Double Dutch Girls, and graffiti artists Phase 2, Futura, and Dondi.

Phase 2

In late 1972, Phase 2 first used an early version of the "bubble letter" or "softie", a style of writing which would become extremely influential and is considered a "giant leap" in the art form.The puffed-out, marshmallow-like letters drawn by Phase 2 were soon copied by other artists who added their own variations.

 Phase 2 quickly embellished on his original form, creating and naming dozens of varieties of softies, such as "phasemagorical phantastic" (bubble letters with stars), "bubble cloud", and "bubble drip".He described the thrill of tagging subway cars as "impact expressionalism".He is also credited with having pioneered the use of arrows in graffiti writing around this same time. Hip-hop journalist Jeff Chang has noted that Phase 2's canvasses from 1973 have "been widely recognized as defining the early genre."

Futura 2000

He started to paint illegally on New York City's subway in the early 1970s, working with other artists such as ALI. From 1974 to 1978, he served in the U.S. Navy and traveled all over the world. In the early 1980s he showed with Patti Astor at the Fun Gallery, along with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton and Kenny Scharf.

Futura painted backdrops live on-stage for British punk rock band The Clash's 1981 European tour.  In 1985, he was on the first meeting of the graffiti and urban art movement in Bondy (France), on the VLP's initiative, with Speedy Graphito, Miss Tic, SP 38, Epsylon Point, Blek le rat, Jef Aérosol, Nuklé-Art, Kim Prisu, Banlieue-Banlieue. More recently, he is a successful graphic designer and gallery artist.

One of the most distinctive features of Futura's work is his abstract approach to graffiti. While the primary focus, during the 1980s, of the majority of graffiti artists was lettering, Futura pioneered abstract street art, which has since become more popular. Conversely, his aerosol strokes are regarded as different from those of his peers, as they are as thin as the fine lines usually associated with the use of an airbrush.

Dondi

Graffiti became a serious part of Dondi's life in the mid-1970s. He tagged using "NACO" and "DONDI", and worked on refining his style, gradually moving from simple tagging to building more elaborate pieces. Using the name Dondi (a version of his own name) was considered very risky at the time, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York Police Department (NYPD) were trying to crack down on writers. In 1979, Dondi officially adopted his name when he painted a giant piece on the roof of his house.

He became a member of TOP crew (The Odd Partners) in 1977. In 1978, Dondi formed his own crew, named CIA (Crazy Inside Artists), which included other prominent artists such as his good friend DURO. For the next 20-odd years, Dondi became recognized as the stylistic standard, influencing generations of graffiti writers.

Dondi pioneered many of the styles and techniques still used by modern graffiti artists. Though he would often do wildstyle pieces for the benefit of other writers (like the famous 2MANY piece), he wanted the public to be able to read and enjoy his work, so he would focus on readable letters with intricate fills and characters.

scratch

Scratching, sometimes referred to as scrubbing, is a DJ and turntablist technique of moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable to produce percussive or rhythmic sounds. A crossfader on a DJ mixer may be used to fade between two records simultaneously.

While scratching is most associated with hip hop music, where it emerged in the mid-1970s, from the 1990s it has been used in some styles of rap rock, rap metal and nu metal. In hip hop culture, scratching is one of the measures of a DJ's skills. DJs compete in scratching competitions at the DMC World DJ Championship and IDA (International DJ Association), formerly known as ITF (International Turntablist Federation). At scratching competitions, DJs can use only scratch-oriented gear (turntables, DJ mixer, digital vinyl systems or vinyl records only). In recorded hip hop songs, scratched "hooks" often use portions of other songs.

Graffiti 

In the early days, the ‘taggers’ were part of street gangs who were concerned with marking their territory. They worked in groups called ‘crews’, and called what they did ‘writing’ – the term ‘graffiti’ was first used by The New York Times and the novelist Norman Mailer. Art galleries in New York began buying graffiti in the early seventies. But at the same time that it began to be regarded as an art form, John Lindsay, the then mayor of New York, declared the first war on graffiti. By the 1980s it became much harder to write on subway trains without being caught, and instead many of the more established graffiti artists began using roofs of buildings or canvases.

The link between hip hop and graffiti evolved as a competition, much like the dance moves of the hip hop culture. Graffiti began to show up on subways in New York and other cities as a form of expression of the culture who listened to rap music. Graffiti distiguished by "tags" or distinguishing marks of the originators and a way to distinguish or stand out from other graffiti artists. Graffiti quickly spread and was picked up by others.

Graffiti is viewed as a form of artistic expression by some and trash by others. Graffiti has been seen adorning the album covers of some rap artists, on sides of buildings, on busses, on clothing, and various imaginative places where you sometimes have to stop and wonder, "how in the world did they manage to get up there?"

Young rappers growing up and wandering the city streets still see graffiti all around them. For some, graffiti represents decay, but for hip hop culture, graffiti provided the visual inspiration that encouraged other forms of creativity and expression, such as emceeing.

Ed Piskor

Ed Piskor is an American alternative comic book artist. He gained his first fame illustrating stories in Harvey Pekar's 'American Splendor' series. Among his original works are the satirical comic 'Wizzywig' (2011) about hacking culture, and the educational graphic novel series 'Hip Hop Family Tree' (2012-2016), which deals with the history of hiphop. In 2017 he created another historical passion project, 'X-Men: Grand Design', a nostalgic look back at the history of Marvel Comics' 'X-Men' franchise.

Hip Hop Family Tree

In 2012 Piskor started a monumental project, named 'Hip Hop Family Tree' (2012-2016). It narrates the history of hiphop and various legendary artists and groups, among them the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Schoolly D., the Beastie Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy, Dr. Dre, Rakim, Will Smith...  Piskor said he was inspired by Robert Crumb's biographical comics about old blues and country artists. Just like Crumb loves music from the interbellum, Piskor is a hardcore hiphop fan. Even as a child he'd try to dig up the oldest singles by certain hiphop artists, particularly trying to find out where a certain musical sample came from? He is so well-educated in the genre that he felt he would be the right artist to make a comic book about the genre. As a bonus he would learn more about its roots too. 'Hip Hop Family Tree' doesn't just focus on the historic facts, but Piskor also illustrated many fascinating and occasional funny anecdotes about certain artists. Graphically Piskor gave the stories a yellowish newsprint effect to match the "old school" feeling.

From January 2012 until December 2015, the stories ran weekly on the website 'Boing Boing'. Fantagraphics later published the series in comic book format. In 2015 'Hip Hop Family Tree, Volume 2' won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. It also entered the New York Times Best Sellers list, landing the artist an interview in Time Magazine. Rap legend DMC (of Run DMC) praised 'Hip Hop Family Tree' with the words: "I'm happy this book is here, because it tells a truth." Fab Five Freddy (Grandmaster Flash) shared a panel from one of the comics on his Facebook page and stated: "Being in an Ed Piskor comic is cool enough to freeze hot water." Chuck D. (Public Enemy) also tweeted favorable comments about Piskor's work.

As a huge fan of comics and hiphop since childhood Piskor also saw a correlation between the two art forms. Both are trash pop culture, initially scorned by true art lovers but eventually gaining more critical respect. Many cartoonists and hiphop artists take pseudonyms to give themselves a different public persona and alter ego. Both rapping and cartooning are often said to be easy. Most importantly, Piskor noticed that both hiphoppers and cartoonists have a tendency to borrow material, or sample, from their predecessors and colleagues. It motivated him to pay more homage to other comics in some of his panels.

Hip Hop album covers

Idea influence

vision boards

[arecomicsevengood]

Nick Drnaso’s SABRINA

This was one of the best-reviewed comics of 2018, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I had no interest in reading it. When a friend saw the profile of Nick Drnaso in The New Yorker, and texted to ask me if I liked him, I had to admit I hadn’t read anything he’d done. There’s a ton of comics coming out all the time, and one of my rules for whether or not to read something is if I think it looks good. Drnaso’s work doesn’t meet this standard.

it looks like reheated Chris Ware. That is obvious, but I mostly hear it from people online who don’t like Chris Ware, which is a perspective I can’t trust. Ware’s work has beauty in it! That’s part of his work’s effect, is the contrast between the beauty of the natural world and the depressive inner lives of the characters that inhabit it. Drnaso’s stuff is ugly, and it’s basically depicting characters whose inner lives we don’t have access to, often because they are so repressed or in pain they don’t have access to it either. This is a valid artistic choice, and I get it, but it’s not that hard to see coming, and it’s off-putting. I’ve read Sabrina now, and it’s utterly joyless. The color palette gives a “pizza under a heatlamp” look at reality, exchanging the vivid for the coagulated.

I didn’t buy it, but a friend gave me a copy recently. It makes sense to me that you’d give it to someone else after reading it. (Tim: Do you want this back?) It’s hard to imagine wanting to open the book up and flip through it after reading just to look at he drawings, which is a big part of the reason I buy comics. Drnaso’s art is the sort of thing that makes people who don’t know anything about comics look and go “So they make this on the computer?” It is very easy to look at it and not think about drawing in any kind of normal human way. There’s an absence of life to it that feels inorganic, factory-made. It feels like a Tupperware container.

I knew that going in. I also knew that the experience of the comic, the quality, could still theoretically transcend that and  offer a good reading experience. The book’s blurbed by the novelist Zadie Smith. It’s a “literary comic,” not an “art comic,” to cite a relatively recent distinction I don’t really believe in. I love literature. I am a pretty big reader of “actual” books, and have written reviews of fiction and poetry before and would like to do so again. However, the idea that reading “comics as literature” means not caring about the drawings seems to derive from some mistaken idea, gleaned from a comic shop clerk, about what “good” comic book art is. Or perhaps the crowd is more highbrow, and so have an idea of “good” art that derives from a gallery context where the human figure rarely appears. Either way, it ignores the role good comic book art defines the reading experience. For any book people that might be reading this, let me try to explain it in brief: I don’t know if they use it on newer printings, but all of the Nabokov books I own have this blurb on them from John Updike, where he says “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written: Ecstatically.” I’m sure a ton of book people have read this, and even internalized it, but have yet to apply this standard to graphic novels. Comics should be drawn the same way prose is written: Ecstatically. Most comics, it should be noted, reach this standard. It’s notable that both Updike and Nabokov were fans of comics, long before the graphic novel era.

The same way I flip through a comic to look at the art after reading it, you might do the same thing with a book of fiction or poetry, if it had good good scenes, dialogue, interesting sentences. All of these things compel you through a book the first time, beyond just “reading it for the plot.” What’s funny is that reading a book for the plot is largely disdained by the literary crowd- all the aspects I highlight are generally considered what marks a book as being “worth reading” by those with even a normal amount of snobbery. A plot is secondary to the amount of feeling a work of literature can inspire.

Sabrina is not particularly plot-intensive. I don’t think it’s particularly sharp in its characterization either: While prose could depict a subjective internal landscape, and a more active art style in a comic would to, Drnaso resists this. The world of the book feels mediated, through these isolated and atomized means. The vibe is that of CCTV cameras or twitter icons. The thing I think of as being Sabrina’s virtue is its timeliness. Weirdly, this is something I think book people disparage a lot! I think there’s even bits of general advice given by writing professors where the use of brand names is disdained because of the way it dates a text, although this might be changing.

So the praise for Sabrina seems highly conditional to me. It’s based on an understanding that drawing takes a long time, so the appreciation for its timeliness is really an appreciation of prescience, which normally you have to wait a few years to praise a book for. Of course, in 2018, timeliness and prescience do feel particularly jumbled. It seems like everyone’s memory is shot, and no one has any idea of when anything happened. Everything happening, however, has been foreshadowed and is somewhat unsurprising, given the precedent, but it still feels shocking because things are happening at a rate of speed they can’t really be processed.

Let me summarize this book. The title character, Sabrina, disappears. Her boyfriend falls into a deep depression, assuming she’s dead, and goes to live with a friend, who is in the military. They don’t talk a lot. They’re both depressed and isolated individuals. The boyfriend starts listening to an Alex Jones style radio show. Eventually it comes out that Sabrina is not just dead, but her murder was filmed, with the killer sending the video out to news stations, before killing himself. There’s then talk on the radio show about this story being a false flag, causing everyone who knew Sabrina in real life to be harassed by the radio audience.

The feeling in this book is pretty limited. It’s a pretty small emotional range. I can appreciate a wallow in bad feeling, or something so emotionally intense you don’t really go back to it often for how demanding it is. (I haven’t reread Building Stories, for instance.) A lot of the joy in comics comes from the drawing, from witnessing perception, seeing how another person sees manifests through their hand. This book feels less about interiority, and more about the media, and experiencing life through this depressing mediated scrim. It’s presented almost as a choice— choosing to embrace computer screens, talk radio, etc., rather than having personal relationships because genuine feeling is too intense.  But the sadness of the book comes down to this presentational style where the natural and organic never enters into it.

Because of this narrow range of feeling, I don’t feel like any of the characters are well-developed or interesting. The thing that makes them feel “real” is how inaccessible they are, absent any passions. The opening sequence depicts Sabrina, but it doesn’t really seem like there’s joy or warmth in her life, or love in her relationships. The spiritually drab quality of distance in this sequence marks the rest of the book, which she’s dead for. In terms of presentation, there’s little difference between sequences involving Sabrina’s sister (who is arguably handling things better and more gracefully) and her boyfriend. The narrative distance from each character is equally voyeuristic. It isolates them, and creates an effect also present in Jimmy Corrigan, where it seems like they’re incapable of relating to one another, and so only hurt each other.

Within the context of the book, there is an article that explains the weird paranoid narrative of Sabrina’s death being a faked tragedy as bizarre right-wing weirdness. This article is spread over sixteen panels, each containing a sentence or two, one of the ways the comic’s layouts remind you of reading on your phone on a mobile app. That article is written by a Molly O’Connell. This character, the one who’s able to see through the falsehood of things and perceive things accurately, takes their name from Molly Colleen O’Connell, a visual artist and cartoonist whose work is very much the opposite of Drnaso’s: It’s wild and free and funny and joyful, more likely to be appreciated as “fine art” or get gallery shows than to be viewed as “literature” by major press outlets. Presumably the two of them know each other through the Chicago comics scene. It is really funny and interesting to me that the character who sees through the falsehoods of the media narrative in Sabrina is named after someone whose work basically explodes all the contrivances Drnaso builds his style around. The person who sees through the notion of a mediated narrative as a tool to isolate people and prey on fear is named after someone whose work feels very natural and human, but is genuinely eccentric, and so has yet to find a mass audience.

This is what the real Molly O’Connell’s work looks like, your reward for scrolling past those Drnaso sequences:

Even if Drnaso isn’t intending to argue that O’Connell is a better artist than he is, I think he understands that his approach has certain limits. That whole New Yorker profile is built about self-deprecation, a Comics Journal interview with him had him saying that he almost threw the book away rather than print it. He knows his work is depressing, but he’s only capable of making the work that he makes. I get that. I respect that, even. It’s just funny that the book, with its critique of the media as this thing that isolates us from one another, ends up creating this additional critique of the media as they respond positively to the book, where they choose this joyless half-dead thing as a high point of a medium which is capable of work that genuinely gives life back to readers.

[spilledreality]

"New Fiction is Psychic Occupation” is generally warm piece on this trend in contemporary autofiction (Knausgaard, Ferrante, Lin, Kraus, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson) of really letting the reader occupy a certain psychic filter. Mark de Silva "Past Resistance" notices a similar pattern but calls it "Facebook Fiction" belittlingly. Here's de Silva making the case against types like Knausgaard:

Here are a few platitudes about memory. It’s subjective. It’s plastic. It’s often self-servingly selective, when it’s not simply fiction. Naturally, memoir, by which I mean that recounting of a human life in which protagonist and author are one, can’t help but inherit these liabilities. They once would have counted as such, anyway. In many quarters—in humanities departments, for some time now, and more recently and troublingly, in American politics and popular culture—acknowledging the frailty of memory and narrative history, whether personal or collective, seems to have brought with it a kind of relief from the age-old demands for objectivity (or even intersubjectivity). In many spheres of life, and especially online, we are now asked to admit to the looseness of memory’s grip, and the tallness of every tale. It’s what authenticity and honesty require, we are told: a frank reckoning with human finitude. But the news isn’t all bad (or is it?). For we are also invited to celebrate a newfound power over our pasts, and our presents too, through a curious form of autonomy that would have come as a surprise to a philosopher like Immanuel Kant: freedom from the tyranny of fact. Subjectivity, partiality, the fragment and the shard have all become refuges from the fraught, anxiety-making project of assembling wholes.

As a novelist, I have watched closely and with some dismay as this phenomenon has manifested in literary circles. Lately, mainstream critics and readers appear besotted by a shrunken, self-pitying strain of autobiographical fiction, one you could call with some fairness Facebook fiction, to distinguish it from the far thornier versions of the past, like Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire Of London, the first book in a notoriously vexing six-volume cycle of memoirs. Novels by Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose own memoir cycle, My Struggle, might be usefully compared to Roubaud’s, if only to measure the diminution in ambition, seem premised on the notion that if it is our fate to embroider and even fabricate our pasts, insulating our preferred identities from the sharp edges of actuality, we ought to openly acknowledge our fraudulence and fantasize with purpose, even panache. (The current White House has taken note.)

For my part, I’ve never found this particular conscription of the imagination, whether in literature, electoral politics, or daily life, especially appealing. Some liberties aren’t worth taking. Reading these authors, one feels that if they had more conviction, they would exercise their imaginations properly in the invention of characters, plots, and settings, without simply lifting them from their own lives; or else they would get down to the painstaking work of research and corroboration that’s involved in any plausible (authentic, if you like) history, including autobiography. Instead, they’ve settled on a middling path, both creatively (why struggle to invent from whole cloth, when you can just use your life, your memories to fill in your novel?) and intellectually (why sift and weigh the facts when you can just make up what suits the tale you you’d like to tell, the person you’d like to be, whenever reality doesn’t oblige?).

This fall, I’ve been examining problems for the autobiographical self in our research seminar here at the University of Tulsa. I’ve also been teaching a course in the philosophy of art at Oklahoma State University. The combination has been revelatory. My aesthetics course has me thinking that the deepest difficulty attending the autobiographical self is one that afflicts art too: sentimentality. Nostalgia, its most obvious form, is hardly the end of it. For the tint of the glasses needn’t be rose. The red of self-lacerating shame, say, or of righteous indignation, will do just as well. As will the gray of ironic ennui.

Do just as well for what, though? Evasion—frequently of the self- variety. This, I think, is what binds the various forms of sentimentality together: the desire to feel a certain way about oneself or the world perverts the desire to know. Fantasy comes first. Yes, memory is malleable and subject to all sorts of failings, no one can seriously deny this, and no one should want to. But why treat these banal faults as insuperable, a limiting horizon of our humanness? When it comes to memory and personal testimony, we nearly always have some form of corroborating evidence to aid us—written records, videotape, artifacts of various sorts, and of course other people’s memories—which we can check our memories against, if we genuinely interested in the truth.

Now, the significance of events may be impossible to settle definitively, no matter how much checking and rechecking we do. But this fault cannot be accounted a failure of memory or narrative; it’s simply a consequence of events almost always being able to bear multiple interpretations. That lends no credence to the more extreme claims we now hear, for instance, that all narrative or memoir is really fiction. This claim is of just the same order as that all news is really fake, even if the people making these two assertions tend to belong to different political parties.

So here’s my provisional conclusion: rather than any intrinsic limitation on the faculty of memory or the practice of storytelling, it is sentimentality—ginned-up outrage at political goings-on that barely touch our lives, say, or tender melancholia about what America used to be like—that stands in the way good autobiography, good politics, and good fiction. That sounds like something we can work on, though, if not exactly master. Nothing like fate.

By way of mediation:

੪: Adding Dyer and Heti to the pack is sharp. "Facebook Fiction" seems more like Megan Boyle's Live Blog than someone like Ben Lerner, who is maintaining a serious ironic distance from his actual lived experience. My reading of 10:04 is that it's as many parts science fiction, poetry, and criticism as it is memoir. But the line that really loses me is:

Reading these authors one feels that if they had more conviction, they would exercise their imaginations properly in the invention of characters, plots, and settings, without simply lifting from their own lives.

It's a deontological appeal to work ethic that falsely equates proper procedure (or traditional conception thereof) with successful results. It seems like a mistake to think of art this way, where technique and materials are given values in themselves outside of their efficacy in imposing themselves on (& providing value to) the reader. Anyway, it seems like he allows that fiction-as-subjective-lived-experience can be valuable as an art form if it's done without sentimentality, so maybe the real point of contention is over how much sentimentality is in the air and how/why/the extent to which sentimentality hinders.

The phenomenology of consciousness isn't captured in this approach to writing, I think I agree, and also that it's troubling so many have taken a literary enterprise at face value. I think it probably speaks to the neutering of critical discourse.

I guess what I'm saying is perhaps there's a way the takes aren't mutually exclusive? Something like, “memory and writing are highly lossy, flawed forms of preserving and disseminating subjectivity, and should be treated skeptically/critically as such — but they're also probably the best we've got, and constitute a central reason why literature is still healthy despite major technological change” (compare the visual arts world, which is in a total mess).

I was messaging with a friend today about how I felt like one of the main benefits of experimenting with drugs was getting a glimpse into an alternate brain state, the experienced possibility of another way of being. This might even be part of the mechanism that makes LSD and ketamine such successful antidepressants: a glimpse, via serotonin or mu-opioid distortions, of a world packed with meaning and significance, helping disrupt the depression's feedback loops.

I wanna quote Brian Evenson here again because he made the same case I would before I did: for me [such fiction] is successful to the degree to which it allows readers to undergo an experience outside their immediate realm of possibility, and to the degree to which that second-level experience in turn functions in relation to the first-level experience that we think of as living. That’s not the same thing as a meaning. Nor does it have much in common with information or figuring out a puzzle. Rather, it is a form of affect intensively conveyed by utterance. […] Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while. It is better at this than any other genre or media, and can do it in any number of modes (realistic or metafictional, reliably or unreliably, representationally or metafictionally, etc.).

#mark de silva #karl ove knausgaard #maggie nelson #ben lerner #brian evenson

[jennacha]

here’s a big rant about The Child Thief

ok i have a big confession to make

I’m kind of obsessed with the book The Child Thief.

It’s not a particularly good book. In fact, I would go as far to say it’s poor. The writing has the cadence of 15-year-old-going-through-their-novelist-phase. I guess I could say it reads like fan fiction. The plot is very messy. The characters are badly written. It feels like a book that wasn’t edited. The word “magic” is used a lot, and it’s embarrassing. There’s a part where a character slams their fist on the ground and yells “WHY?!” and it’s embarrassing. The dialogue feels like it came out of a 1990s teen adventure fantasy movie trying to imitate the success of a Corey Feldman/Haim movie. Several times throughout the book the thought, “Why did the author do this?” popped in my head. However, the author is a fantasy illustrator, so the descriptive writing is a plus. He knows how to illustrate the landscape with words as well as he would in painting. The book is not a special unit dumpster fire piece of shit insult to literature; in fact, as far as I know a lot of people like it and it has gotten a decent amount of praise. It’s just not very good, in terms of the surface level writing. But I can easily see a lot of people enjoying it for basic entertainment value.

So that would be my YA-focus blog summary review of the book.

My public outcry summary review of the book is this:

I’m obsessed with the book because it’s so fucking weird.

It’s so fucking weird in that it’s a perfect shitstorm of the author not knowing what he’s doing, and thinking he’s knowing what he’s doing. Like a perfect bad B-movie that exhibits textbook schlock where the director is incompetent and clueless but lacks any self-awareness, in terms of style, layout, and production.

But also, the author thinks what he’s doing is…cool.

The book is about evil Peter Pan.

I could end this whole thing right there. But I must release these hounds. I’ve been needing to let all this out.

My wretched insanity craves affirmation.

This book should be a carbon copy of every other average to below average dark fantasy novel that you see on the bookstore shelves and never heard of and wonder what the author is doing now with all their not-fame. This book should be one that could’ve been written by anybody and it wouldn’t have made a difference. This book should be one of sixty million examples of nothing special. In a way, it is definitely 100% yes definitely yes all those things. The universe decided that I would be the bearer of the burden of having much stronger feelings about it then necessary. I probably feel more strongly about it than the author ever did. It is in my life now.

The biggest thing about this book being so fucking weird is the mind boggling tonal inconsistency. There are a number of shifts in universe-encompassing moods, which go from “Christopher-Nolan-but-also-kind-of-Stephanie-Meyer-dark-gloomy-the-world-is-unhappy-and-I-like-it-that-way”, to “David-Fincher-the-world-is-ACTUALLY-awful”, to “Oh-right-this-is-a-Peter-Pan-story-whimsical-fun-Goonies-meets-Disney-Channel-original”, to “A-worse-version-of-The-Hobbit-movies-with-some-redeeming-qualities”, to “Quentin-Tarantino-literally-wrote-this.” This isn’t hyperbole. The writing language can be REALLY EMBARRASSING and straight out of a Disney movie. That tone of a fun romp for the whole family is cradled by an abundance of swearing, unsettling fantasy-horror, and extreme, shocking violence.

You know when you’re watching Beetlejuice, and you’re like “Okay this movie is for children” and then out of nowhere Michael Keaton goes “NICE FUCKIN’ MODEL” and grabs his dick.

In The Child Thief, THAT washes over you every time you finish reading a sentence. Only, it’s as if you’re watching Hook, and at one point Robin Williams slices a person’s face off, and the camera stays on the faceless person for a minute and Steven Spielberg walks into frame and points to the gurgling faceless head and describes to you how you can still see the holes where the mouth, nose, and eyes were.

(Yes that actually happens in the book.)

Or if you’re watching Neverending Story and at one point you get expository dialogue explaining how Atreyu was pimped as a boy and had to live on the streets because his mother was, uh, a drug addict or something?. 

(That also happens.)

Or if you’re watching Indian in the Cupboard and the film opens with a little girl about to get raped by her dad.

(I’m serious.)

Or if you’re watching Hocus Pocus and Bette Midler is a vampire and she preys on a 6-year-old kid and neither of them have shirts on.

(I swear to god.)

Or if you’re reading a modern re-imagining of Peter Pan and the story involves blatant themes of gore in acute descriptive detail, mass murder, torture, and scenes with naked women and perverted fantasy-creature-men.

(Oh, wait.)

You’re probably thinking, “All those themes are found pretty much everywhere in every medium, especially the naked women and perverts. Big whoop.” I’ll add, then, all those themes, involving children.

Now you’re thinking, “Jenna don’t you love that movie Drag Me To Hell which involves a child being murdered within the first 2.5 minutes?”

Just hear me out and yes.

The Child Thief is entertaining in how CAPTIVATING the strangeness is. The tonal mishmash of kid-friendly meets rated-R is something I actually like, when it's a hit. I like things that have a quality of whimsy amidst dark themes. Movies such as Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Return to Oz, Darkman have this quality…basically almost every movie from the 1980s during the period when audiences had grown up with movies after censorship was abolished and half the world said “think of the children” and the other half said “no.” There are tons and tons of other examples in every medium of how general tonal contrast makes for unique and effective works of art. My point is, this specific type of tonal contrast also can be done well.

But those movies don’t open with attempted child rape, and they don’t end with children literally being mowed down in a grisly battle scene (I’m serious). I’m making a lot of comparisons to movies because the book almost feels like a movie, in that the author isn’t a novelist, he’s a visual story-maker who wrote a book because he knew that no movie studio would pick this shit up. Maybe the films I listed didn’t intend for tonal contrast to be a calculated driving element for their stories, but the subtlety of tones in those movies allows for one encompassing, harmonious tonal blanket to wrap them in. There is no subtlety in The Child Thief.

The tonal confusion of The Child Thief is, I almost wanna say coincidental. I think the author just didn’t know how to write well, but he’s a very dark visual guy and had all these dark visuals in his head ready to be unleashed. All the horrible violence and awful themes are fine in and of itself, but they aren’t earned if the attitude of “I’m gunna turn the children’s book foundation on its head” isn’t committed to, and “I’m gunna subvert everything you know and love about Peter Pan” isn’t calculatedly plotted out. The author has a bad sense of humor, a poor understanding of what is required of an epic storyline, and treats violence, horror and revenge less like a literary device and more like a fetishization of coolness in a vulgar display of power as a writer.

The misguidedness goes as far as the character writing. None of the characters’ motivations make sense. The author couldn’t keep track of either committing to one motivation or the other, a lot of the times for the sake of the plot. Especially with the Peter Pan character. He’s basically literally the anti-christ (this is 100% canon, if the author says it isn’t then he’s a liar and an idiot) and written like a “troubled villain” but then gets these VERY polarized directions of unrelenting psychopathic Cause It’s Die Motherfucka Die Motherfucka Still, Fool villainy and ham-fisted humanism and victimhood. It’s a case of like, the author meant for him to be the charming bad guy who tricks the audience into being on his side because that’s what Peter does to the characters in the book. But the author found him too cool and wanted to be his friend, but in order to justify being friends with a character who wants to murder everybody, he inappropriately gives him remorse and forces the reader to feel bad for him.

And like all the kids in the book are supposed to super love Peter Pan but the version of Neverland is like this horrific, NIGHTMARE HELL of a place and the kids are basically being used to fight in a war, and all the kids are totally okay with it, because their lives in the real world were really awful and the whole thing is that Peter “saves” them and they’ll do anything for him. And it’s like, okay???????????????????? But wouldn’t it be cooler if the kids were like okay this guy is a fucking psycho and Neverland is a horrific, nightmare hell and I’m learning a lot about myself right now having once trusted him???? And then in their retaliation Peter would show his true colors and enforce aggression onto them in serving as his personal enslaved militia? And it becomes like this inner circle of conflict? And since Peter is the only person who can bring them back to the real world, they play ball but hope to steer their own agenda out of the situation? OH, right, that DOES happen, but with ONE of the characters. ONE. Conveniently, the main character. And god knows there can’t be more than one smart human being at a time.

But if you want to SUBVERT the BELOVED CHILDREN’S STORY FORMAT wouldn’t it be fun to do PETER PAN VS. THE LOST BOYS? Instead of MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE PETER PAN AND THE HOT TOPIC LOST BOYS VS. THE ONLY SEMI-SMART MAIN CHARACTER? Like wouldn’t it be GREAT if the characters WEREN'T DUMB? And the author put in some CONSTRUCTIVE, CHALLENGING CREATIVE EFFORT and treated the interactions like a CHESS GAME instead of a CONTRIVED MISUNDERSTANDING BETWEEN JOEY, ROSS, CHANDLER, RACHEL, MONICA AND THE OTHER ONE? Wouldn’t it be GREAT if ALL THE CHARACTERS TURNED AGAINST PETER but then Peter SLOWLY CHARMED SOME OR ALL OF THEM BACK IN, to make him MORE like an UNEARTHLY MONSTER? Like the lost boys became SELF-AWARE LITERAL VICTIMS OF THE ORIGINAL TALE FORMAT, where Peter Pain is this IMPOSSIBLY CHARMING CHARACTER THAT IS BELOVED BY THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE? ALSO, the MAIN CHARACTER is supposed to be the MODEL OF REASON FOR THE READER TO RELATE TO, but the main character still gets CHARMED BY PETER PAN, WHILE WE KNOW AS RATIONAL ADULTS WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO HAPPEN? LIKE THAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE HOW READING BOOKS IS? When we KNOW WHAT’S GUNNA HAPPEN? BUT THE AUTHOR WANTS TO BE PETER’S FRIEND SO HE DOES IT ANYWAY? AND LIKE SEVERAL OTHER CHARACTERS THAT THE MAIN CHARACTER IS FRIENDS WITH ARE ALSO SUPPOSED TO BE FIGURES OF REASON BUT THEY’RE ALSO 100% PARTISAN IN SIDING WITH PETER? SO IT’S LIKE HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LIKE ALL YOU DUMB, DUMB KIDS?

LIKE OKAY, SO HOW IT GOES IS THAT PETER CAN LIKE WALK ACROSS THE DIMENSION BETWEEN NEVERLAND AND THE REAL WORLD AND THAT'S HOW HE GETS THE KIDS? SO AT ONE POINT IN NEVERLAND THEY ALL HAVE TO SCAVENGE FOR FOOD BECAUSE THE VEGETATION IN NEVERLAND IS DYING, AND THEY MENTION HOW PETER USED TO BRING THEM FOOD FROM THE REAL WORLD? AND IT'S LIKE, HOW ABOUT YOU JUST KEEP DOING THAT? OR LIKE, WHY DON'T ANY OF YOU WANT TO JUST LEAVE? YEAH THE REAL WORLD SUCKS, BUT IS IT WORTH STARVING TO DEATH JUST SO YOU CAN STICK IT TO THE MAN? LIKE ARE THERE PEDIATRICIANS IN NEVERLAND? ARE THERE AT-RISK YOUTH SHELTERS? FOSTER CARE? NEVERLAND SOUP KITCHENS? NEVERLAND SOCIAL WORKERS? NEVERLAND CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES? NEVERLAND POLICE? NO? JUST MONSTERS THAT PAINFULLY KILL YOU, ZOMBIE PIRATES, NO FOOD, AND LITERALLY THE ANTI-CHRIST?

AND THEN THERE’S RIDICULOUS SHIT LIKE, AT ONE POINT ALL THESE MAGICAL FANTASY CHARACTERS HIJACK A NEW YORK CITY FERRY TO GET TO THE HARBOR AND IT’S LIKE, THIS IS SO RIDICULOUS IT SHOULD BE AWESOME, BUT IT ISN’T AWESOME BUT IT SHOULD BE SO WHY ISN’T IT?

AND LIKE ONE OF THE CHARACTERS IS A FAT USELESS KID NAMED DANNY AND THERE IS NO REASON FOR HIM TO BE IN THE BOOK BESIDES TO BE THE TOKEN FAT USELESS KID NAMED DANNY?

BUT DANNY IS LIKE ALSO THE ONLY OTHER SMART CHARACTER IN THE BOOK BECAUSE HE’S LIKE WHY DID I SAY YES TO THIS WHY ARE WE STILL FOLLOWING THIS GUY WHY DON’T WE JUST LEAVE AND IT’S LIKE YEAH PUT DANNY IN CHARGE BUT NOBODY LISTENS TO HIM AND HE’S JUST COMPLETELY UTTERLY USELESS?

AND THEN CAPTAIN HOOK ADOPTS DANNY AND IT’S LIKE OH MY GOD THE AUTHOR FORGOT HE NEEDED TO GIVE DANNY SOMETHING TO DO?

AND LIKE I DON’T EVEN REMEMBER THE MAIN CHARACTER’S NAME?

AND THEN AT THE END OF THE BOOK, SO, THERE’S THIS BIG HUGE BATTLE SCENE WHERE CHILDREN DIE LEFT AND RIGHT, LIKE THE “ANTAGONIST” (NOT PETER) HAS A HUGE SWORD AND IS SWINGING AT THE KIDS LIKE HE’S HARVESTING WHEAT, OH AND YEAH, BY THE WAY, AGAIN, THE REAL WORLD IS LOCATED IN NEW YORK CITY AND THE BATTLE HAPPENS ON LIKE THE FRONT LAWN OF A LIBRARY OR SOMETHING. LIKE THE STORY KIND OF TOTALLY GOES OFF THE RAILS INTO FANTASTIC SCHLOCK. AND AT ONE POINT THE BATTLE IS ABRUPTLY INTERRUPTED BY NYC POLICE AND IT’S LIKE ARE YOU SHITTING MY NUTS THE NYC COPS ARE INVOLVED IN THIS FANTASY BATTLE THIS IS AMAZING, BUT THEN THAT DOESN’T HAPPEN AND IT GOES NOWHERE. AND ALL THE MAIN CHARACTERS ARE DYING, AND NONE OF THEM HAD ARCS, LIKE NONE OF THEM REALIZED WHAT THEY GOT THEMSELVES INTO OR WHAT PETER REALLY WAS, AND AT THE ACT 3 POST-LOW POINT THE MAIN CHARACTER DIDN’T GO OFF TO DO HIS OWN THING AND TRY TO SAVE THE DAY, HE JUST GOES WITH PETER TO DO WHATEVER HE WANTS, AND THEN HIS ARC IS BASICALLY NOTHING AND THEN HE DIES. AND *PETER* WINS. AND AGAIN HE’S LITERALLY THE ANTI CHRIST SO THE BOOK ENDS WITH HIM BRIDGING THE REAL WORLD WITH NEVERLAND, AND BASICALLY BEING THE BRINGER OF HELL UNTO THE EARTH. AND UP UNTIL THEN THE BOOK HAD ABOUT 68 INSTANCES OF THE READER SWITCHING BETWEEN FEELING BAD FOR PETER AND THEN ACCEPTING THAT HE IS HITLER NURSE RATCHED MAO STALIN. SO WHEN ALL THE KIDS DIE, HE HAS A SCENE OF FEELING REALLY BAD AND THE READER IS SUPPOSED TO BE ALL LIKE AW HE REALLY DOES CARE! AND THEN NEVERLAND GETS BRIDGED INTO NEW YORK CITY, AND HE’S LIKE HA HA HA HA I DID IT I WON. BUT IT’S WRITTEN IN SUCH A WAY THAT LIKE, THE AUDIENCE IS SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE, WHEEEEEE! LIKE THIS THING THAT HAPPENED IS THE DOOM OF MANKIND, AND THE TONE SHOULD REALLY BE “OH GOD NO.” BUT THE AUTHOR WAS HAPPY THAT PETER WON IN THE END BECAUSE HE WANTS TO BE HIS FRIEND, EVEN THOUGH LIKE FIFTEEN PAGES AGO PETER CAUSED THE DEATH OF AN ARMY OF CHILDREN (AFTER ANOTHER 600 PAGES OF ALL KINDS OF OTHER AWFUL SHIT). SO NOT ONLY ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FEEL SAD THAT PETER FEELS SAD, BUT THEN WE’RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL HAPPY THAT PETER FEELS HAPPY. HOW ABOUT GO FUCK YOURSELF? HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE PETER A CHALLENGING UNRELIABLE ANTI-HERO, DON’T MAKE HIS DARK QUALITIES SO INCONTESTABLY EVIL, OR, EITHER CHOOSE TO MAKE PETER HATED BY THE AUDIENCE, OR MAKE THE AUDIENCE FEEL FOOLISH FOR BEING CHARMED BY PETER AND PARTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE BAD SHIT THAT HAPPENED AND GO FUCK YOURSELF?

...

I’ll give a different example of both tonal incongruence and bad character writing.

So, the opening scene of the book that involves attempted child rape, so. What happens is that Peter saves the little girl in time by killing the dad, and gains her trust to go to Neverland. The way the story regards the introduction to Peter is that of wonder and curiosity through the little girl’s eyes, as if it was derived from the original children’s tale. So the opener is meant to establish: a gritty “realness” to the book (which is never earned but i digress), and Peter as a mysterious magical hero. Then, the story carries on into describing Peter’s motivation in saving (the book uses “stealing”) children, which vaguely mentions his villainous indulgence (he’s saving children to recruit them in an army in Neverland to fight captain hook because his mommy is the president of neverland and there’s almost-Oedipal themes going on). Fine. However, the cadence of Peter actually being villainous is very very…undermined. Like the actual voice of the NARRATION is misinformed. Like the narration sounds more like Peter’s inner monologue speaking in the third person. Like the third person is in on it. Like the author is painting Peter as this wicked wrongdoer as if it’s a cool thing and he wants to be his friend (Oh wait).

This is how the voice of the opener is handled: Child rape —> Peter prevents child rape and saves child —> Peter is a good guy for doing this —> Peter is still a good guy for doing this but he did it maybe not for the right reasons. As it turns out, Peter is unquestionably the bad guy. Peter was the bad guy from the start, Peter was the bad guy while he was saving the little girl.

The rest of the book is handled like this: Peter is cool and badass  —> Peter is mischievous but still the person we want to follow —> Peter is a psycho...but still cool —> Oh shit Peter has a super awful past and his psycho-ness is the result of being a victim so I forgive him —> Wow Peter’s both a psycho and an asshole—> Okay I dunno about Peter —> The author keeps having Peter save people from being raped as if he’s not an asshole but he’s still a psycho and an asshole so I still don’t know —> The plot has a a lot of stuff so I guess I’m still with Peter —> Okay Peter won but everyone is dead because of him and he’s still an asshole so I still don’t know.

Peter tricks victims of rape, abuse, slavery, etc. into thinking they’re being saved when in fact he objectifies them for his personal needs. Remember how I said this book’s insane tonal confusion isn’t subtle? Well, from the book’s perspective, putting a finger on Peter’s good side and bad side...is subtle. Problematically subtle. Which, on a literary standpoint, sounds like a good thing, but...

This is the part when I say the thing you ACTUALLY SHOULDN’T BE SUBTLE ABOUT is PETER. You CAN be subtle about his tragic backstory. Be subtle about sprinkling his good qualities over his CAKE TOWER of BADNESS. Give him some KICK. Have the flavors INTERACT. Make the audience be like “OOOH, is that cumin?? Interesting! HMMMM! INTERESTING! CUMIN! ON DORITOS! YEAh I am definitely eating Doritos, this is absolutely Doritos, but there’s some CUMIN in there! Okay, back to eating my DORITOS! OOOOH, IS THAT CAYENNE?????” But whatever you do, make it CLEAR what you are SERVING. You should not have a MIXED BAG, a MEDLEY, and try to sell it like not-a-medley. You should NOT make half your plate super spicy and half your plate super sweet and make the audience roll the dice on each bite they take. Peter Pan isn’t some complexass Faustian character study, it’s SUBVERSIVE HYPERVIOLENT DARK FANTASY PORN. IT’S DORITOS

This is how the voice of the opener should've been handled: Child rape —> Peter prevents child rape and saves child —> Peter is the bad guy.

This is how the voice of the rest of the book should've been handled: No matter what happens —> Peter is the bad guy.

I don’t have and never will have the literary criticism credentials to say anything with credible boldness, but I’m going to say this anyway: Using child rape to force the reader to feel a certain way about the tone of the world and the first heroic impression of a character is wrong. Forcing an act of heroism (especially for you to then later say “Just kidding not the hero”) in that context is inappropriate and wrong. That’s like throwing 9/11 into the background of a love story to force the audience to feel extra emotional. 1) There are many, many, many, many ways you can establish “realness” in your opener with or without violence. I’m not saying there is a hierarchy of what kind of awful things involving children are okay to write about, but opening your story with attempted child rape is an unnecessary extreme if parts of your story reads like an episode of Saved By The Bell. Revenge alone isn’t cool. John Wick is cool because of the way revenge is handled. Writing about attempted child rape and then immediate revenge on the rapist is the Epipen-shot-to-the-brain method of forcibly getting your audience to go “I LIKE PETER!”, which isn’t at all earned and probably shouldn’t be in your story… 2) ESPECIALLY if you don’t simultaneously establish with slats nailed on a wall that Peter is the bad guy. The author basically deceived the audience into liking Peter in the worst way possible, ironically, which is what he had Peter do to the other characters. If you want to cleverly deceive the audience into liking Peter, do it through his dialogue, personality, the externalized product of the relationship between him and his environment. Be inventive about it. It’s a book. You got words. Use...words to your advantage. If you want to open your story with attempted child rape at the very least as a way to tell the audience this shit’s serious, don’t.

Just don’t. It’s fine.

The Child Thief can’t be pinned as So Bad It’s Good. It’s poor, but it’s not Tommy Wiseau-acclaim-bad. The only way I can describe it is So Disorderly It’s Weird. But it has potential for being SO Weird It’s Kind Of Genius. Which makes it So Almost SO Weird It’s Kind Of Genius It’s Frustrating.

The book’s biggest detriment is that it takes itself too seriously. The author’s motivating in writing the book (this is fact) was that he recognized that the beloved original tale of Peter Pan has a lot of dark elements, but continues to be celebrated as a children’s story. And he wanted to take that notion and run with it. What happened was that he selectively fell in love with elements of that concept, and instead of writing a story that was meant to pull the rug from under us, he ended up writing a run-of-the-mill edgy dark fantasy that he was obliged to pepper with Peter Pan references. Instead of pulling the entire rug beneath our feet and hauling us onto our asses, he took a small handful of rug here and there and just occasionally tugged at it roughly, so that we’d almost lose our balance and get annoyed and tell him to stop.

The book lacks its own conceptual self-awareness that it built for itself, and the result is two different bodies trying to be forcibly shoved into the same book-sized box, when it should’ve been a new gross, satirical, humorous, unique body entirely.

In that sense, I really think this book could’ve been truly unironically awesome. I love the idea of cartoonishly exaggerating the dark elements (especially the violence) of the original tale that have been culturally ignored, like a lot of (or most) (or all) old children’s tales. My ideal solution to this book would actually be making it even more ridiculous in every way, but strung together with self-awareness and intention, where the author could acknowledge that the absurdity is instrumental, not indulgent. There are many aspects of the book that I really like thematically, and none of them are fully (or at all) seen through to their potential. These ideas aren’t really intentionally presented in the book, but: I like the idea that Peter is a sadistic volatile killing machine because he’s cursed with being riiiiiight on the cusp of hitting puberty, and his body is trapped without that natural sexual/psychological release, turning him into an aggressive animal constantly teased by unfulfilled subconscious heat. I like the idea that the lost boys element would be subverted into an inevitable Lord of the Flies esque shitstorm. I like the idea that the danger and villainy are at first generalized in adults but eventually presented in the children. I like the idea that every single possible fucking thing in the world—both the real world (mostly nyc LoL!) and Neverland—are a threat and are actively trying to kill the children, and the children treat it like an adventure before the horror becomes real. I like the idea of illustrating the outcome of blindly following fun naive figures of leadership. There are even a number of character interaction scenes that I like format wise. Just minus the embarrassing dialogue. That stuff's easy to rewrite in your head as you read it. Also I would take out that part in the book that I described as Bette Midler not having a shirt on while preying on a 6 year old. That part was really fucking uncomfortable. Seriously wtf, Gerald Brom.

I must concede this notion: The writer didn’t set out to create a masterpiece. He wrote the book to have fun. He succeeded, and his readers expected the same thing and received the experience they wanted. Of all the things that could’ve landed in my hands and tickled me in a weird enough way to make me wish it was better, for some reason it had to be this.

I could keep going, but...eh, (sigh).

But lastly—again, the descriptive writing of the world is very lush, and at times effectively horrific. The reading experience is a constant stop and start call-and-response of really great potential, really clumsy writing, and really misunderstood tonal directions. All those things put this book directly on the edge of FRUSTRATING. Uniquely frustrating. It couldn’t have been salvaged by the hands of a more competent writer, because the product came to light specifically out of the author’s unintentional confusion, not his laziness. A lazy product with potential can be salvaged through additions and tweaks, but The Child Thief cannot because the story was seen through the way it existed in the author’s head and heart. It is exactly what it...is. It can’t be imitated, or inspired by, or re-re-imagined. This weirdass fucking book is just sitting on this planet, being read by people, and shit. 

…..Anyway. This was all just meant to be the caption for my fan art. http://jennacha.tumblr.com/post/172559227502/i-made-fan-art-of-a-book-i-both-love-and-hate-lol

#the child thief #brom #gerald brom

[1921designs]

Find your beach

ACROSS THE WAY from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year.

Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis.

Before that came an ad so high-end I couldn’t tell what it was for. There was no text—or none that I could see—and the visual was of a yellow firebird set upon a background of hellish red. It seemed a gnomic message, deliberately placed to drive a sleepless woman mad. Once, staring at it with a newborn in my arms, I saw another mother, in the tower opposite, holding her baby. It was 4 A.M. We stood there at our respective windows, separated by a hundred feet of expensive New York air.

The tower I live in is university accommodation; so is the tower opposite. The idea occurred that it was quite likely that the woman at the window also wrote books for a living, and, like me, was not writing anything right now. Maybe she was considering antidepressants. Maybe she was already on them. It was hard to tell. Certainly she had no way of viewing the ad in question, not without opening her window, jumping, and turning as she fell. I was her view. I was the ad for what she already had.

But that was all some time ago. Now the ad says, Find your beach. The bottle of beer—it’s an ad for beer—is very yellow and the background luxury-holidayblue. It seems to me uniquely well placed, like a piece of commissioned public art in perfect sympathy with its urban site. The tone is pure Manhattan. Echoes can be found in the personal growth section of the bookstore (“Find your happy”), and in exercise classes (“Find your soul”), and in the therapist’s office (“Find your self”). I find it significant that there exists a more expansive, national version of this ad that runs in magazines, and on television.

In those cases photographic images are used, and the beach is real and seen in full. Sometimes the tag line is expanded, too: When life gives you limes . . . Find your beach. But the wall I see from my window marks the entrance to SoHo, a district that is home to media moguls, entertainment lawyers, every variety of celebrity, some students, as well as a vanishingly small subset of rent-controlled artists and academics.

Collectively we, the people of SoHo, consider ourselves pretty sophisticated consumers of media. You can’t put a cheesy ad like that past us. And so the ad has been reduced to its essence—a yellow undulation against a field of blue— and painted directly onto the wall, in a bright pop-art style. The mad men know that we know the SoHo being referenced here: the SoHo of Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, the SoHo that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada, frozen yogurt. That SoHo no longer exists, of course, but it’s part of the reason we’re all here, crowded on this narrow strip of a narrow island. Whoever placed this ad knows us well.

Find your beach. The construction is odd. A faintly threatening mixture of imperative and possessive forms, the transformation of a noun into a state of mind. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. On the one hand it means, simply, “Go out and discover what makes you happy.” Pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do. And it’s an ad for beer, which makes you happy in the special way of all intoxicants, by reshaping reality around a sensation you alone are having. So, even more precisely, the ad means “Go have a beer and let it make you happy.” Nothing strange there. Except beer used to be sold on the dream of communal fun: have a beer with a buddy, or lots of buddies. People crowded the frame, laughing and smiling. It was a lie about alcohol—as this ad is a lie about alcohol—but it was a different kind of lie, a wide-framed lie, including other people.

Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty.

In an exercise class recently the instructor shouted at me, at all of us: “Don’t let your mind set limits that aren’t really there.” You’ll find this attitude all over the island. It is encouraged and reflected in the popular culture, especially the movies, so many of which, after all, begin their creative lives here, in Manhattan. According to the movies it’s only our own limited brains that are keeping us

from happiness. In the future we will take a pill to make us limitless (and ideal citizens of Manhattan), or we will, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy, use 100 percent of our brain’s capacity instead of the mythic 10. In these formulations the world as it is has no real claim on us. Our happiness, our miseries, our beaches, or our blasted heaths—they are all within our own power to create, or destroy. On Tina Fey’s television show 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy—the consummate citizen of this new Manhattan—deals with problems by crushing them with his “mind vise.”

The beach is always there: you just have to conceive of it. It follows that those who fail to find their beach are, in the final analysis, mentally fragile; in

Manhattan terms, simply weak. Jack Donaghy’s verbal swordplay with Liz Lemon was a comic rendering of the various things many citizens of Manhattan have come to regard as fatal weakness: childlessness, obesity, poverty. To find your beach you have to be ruthless. Manhattan is for the hard-bodied, the hardminded, the multitasker, the alpha mamas and papas. A perfect place for selfempowerment—as long as you’re pretty empowered to begin with. As long as you’re one of these people who simply do not allow anything—not even reality —to impinge upon that clear field of blue.

There is a kind of individualism so stark that it seems to dovetail with an existentialist creed: Manhattan is right at that crossroads. You are pure potential in Manhattan, limitless, you are making yourself every day. When I am in England each summer, it’s the opposite: all I see are the limits of my life. The brain that puts a hairbrush in the fridge, the leg that radiates pain from the hip to the toe, the lovely children who eat all my time, the books unread and unwritten.

And casting a shadow over it all is what Philip Larkin called “extinction’s alp,” no longer a stable peak in a distance, finally becoming rising ground. In England even at the actual beach I cannot find my beach. I look out at the freezing forty-degree water, at the families squeezed into ill-fitting wetsuits, huddled behind windbreakers, approaching a day at the beach with the kind of stoicism once conjured for things like the Battle of Britain, and all I can think is what funny, limited creatures we are, subject to every wind and wave, building castles in the sand that will only be knocked down by the generation coming up beneath us.

When I land at JFK, everything changes. For the first few days it is a shock: I have to get used to old New York ladies beside themselves with fury that I have stopped their smooth elevator journey and got in with some children. I have to remember not to pause while walking in the street—or during any fluid-moving city interaction—unless I want to utterly exasperate the person behind me. Each man and woman in this town is in pursuit of his or her beach and God help you if you get in their way. I suppose it should follow that I am happier in pragmatic England than idealist Manhattan, but I can’t honestly say that this is so. You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. “A reality shaped around your own desires”—there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

It is also a fair description of what it is to write fiction. And to live in a city where everyone has essentially the same tunnel vision and obsessive focus as a novelist is to disguise your own sociopathy among the herd. Objectively all the same limits are upon me in Manhattan as they are in England. I walk a ten-block radius every day, constrained in all the usual ways by domestic life, reduced to writing about whatever is right in front of my nose. But the fact remains that here I dowrite, the work gets done.

Even if my Manhattan productivity is powered by a sociopathic illusion of my own limitlessness, I’m thankful for it, at least when I’m writing. There’s a reason so many writers once lived here, beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the moneymaking and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the SoulCycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.

It’s not a pretty energy, but it still runs what’s left of the show. I contribute to it. I ride a stationary bike like the rest of them. And then I despair when Shakespeare and Co. closes in favor of another Foot Locker. There’s no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or, to put it more snappily, “You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps.”

Finally the greatest thing about Manhattan is the worst thing about Manhattan: self-actualization. Here you will be free to stretch yourself to your limit, to find the beach that is yours alone. But sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next. I can see my own beach ahead now, as the children grow, as the practical limits fade; I see afresh the huge privilege of my position; it reclarifies itself. Under the protection of a university I live on one of the most privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they have no limits and who push me, by their very proximity, into the same useful delusion, now and then.

It is such a good town in which to work and work. You can find your beach here, find it falsely but convincingly, still thinking of Manhattan as an isle of writers and artists—of downtown underground wildlings and uptown intellectuals—against all evidence to the contrary. Oh, you still see them occasionally here and there, but unless they are under the protection of a university—or have sold that TV show—they are all of them, every single last one of them, in Brooklyn.

[monokuroo]

Title: Nil Admirari no Tenbin Teito Genwaku Kitan Company: Otomate Release Date: April 21, 2016 Platform: PS Vita Walkthrough

The Gist

After seeing her brother burn himself because of a book, Tsugumi starts seeing ‘aura’ or the glow of a cursed book. She, then, joins a group of people called Fukurou who search for these books hoping to avoid any more victims like her brother.

The Gameplay

Like with most recent games, you can change the name of the main character or leave it as it is.

Once you’ve finished the common route, you’ll choose whose route you’re going to play. At first, I was bummed out. I prefer getting to a route depending on the choices I made as I play.

As you go through the route, some choices lead to happy or bad ends. You can check if you are heading to your chosen end once the libra appears. The left is the good end and the one on the right is for the bad end.

Within the route, you can check your progress on the story. You can also choose which chapter you would like to see. Other things to check out here are if the chapter will give you a CG event or choices, or which end you are going to end up with. It is a nifty system to have, I must say.

The Story

The whole thing about searching for cursed books is pretty intriguing. It poses an interesting question – is it the fault of the author for writing such suicide-inducing books or not? In Nil Admirari’s clunky way of storytelling, it shows that it depends on the intent of the writer. Some write because they are cornered, some have no idea that they have a capacity to produce something like that, and some are plain twisted in their own way.

But the game fails to deliver that.

That’s the thing, the story has lots of inconsistencies.

I thought it would be like in Collar x Malice where it made me think what is really right and wrong. What happens is that one route this character would be the bad guy, in the next route he’ll be the victim and so on. At the end of the game, it made me wonder who is the bad guy.

Clunky way of storytelling

I mean the pacing. The shift from the main plot to the character’s own issues is forgivable since I love the characters. Still, there are scenes where I scratch my head in confusion. Smut coming out of the blue, revelations from the left field – you get the idea.

One of the biggest offenders is Shizuru’s route. I thought the problems are solved and I’m off to the epilogue when the game dropped a twist. I loved twists. But what I didn’t like about this twist is how it disrupts the entire flow of the game.

Misogyny

When I started this game, I wanted to root for Tsugumi and her dreams of living life on her own terms by joining Fukurou. I thought things are looking good because another female character named Shiori leads the team. Then her best friend also got a job as a reporter. The game pretty much establishes a time period where people start accepting women in the workforce.

Uh, no.

Then these people start saying “No you can’t do this or that because you are a girl.” This includes her workmates.

Seriously? (╬ Ò ‸ Ó)

This is sad. 😦

I get it if people outside Fukurou will say that. But for Tsugumi’s workmates, it’s just absurd. For one, their leader and the person everyone respects is a woman. Shiori holds a gun. So why can’t Tsugumi go train herself as well? Why do the other characters insult Tsugumi for being a woman when they don’t say anything like that to Shiori? It’s just frustrating to see her being treated like that when Tsugumi works so hard.

The story could have been good. But at least, the characters make this game not too bad. For the order, I recommend the one I did – Shizuru -> Hisui -> Shougo -> Akira -> Rui -> Hayato -> Secret Character.

Characters

Kuze Tsugumi

With her kind of upbringing, Tsugumi surprised me in ways I didn’t expect.

She is Miss-Goody-Two-Shoes and an innocent girl in the ways of the real world. But she decides to work. Not for her family or anybody else but for herself. Well, part of her decision is probably to get out of her family. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that she wants to do things her way. And that’s praise-worthy.

I expected Tsugumi to be a sensitive damsel-in-distress. But she proved me wrong. She likes doing menial things, like household chores. She strives to do better at her work. Heck, she even wanted to be a decent fighter to be able to stand alongside her workmates. Too bad, she is born in an era where people are extremely judgmental of women.

As much as I want Tsugumi to be on my list of favorite heroines, she falls short on the list. For one, I got used almost immediately with her reactions. It’s easy to guess how she would react because there’s a pattern. One character says something that surprises her and her initial reaction is “!!” or “??” or “…?”. What the heck is that థ౪థ. Is the writer lazy to give her a proper reaction? I’m pretty sure normal people have something they blurt out when surprised.

Another thing is that Tsugumi rarely holds an opinion of her own. More often than not, she describes things as they happen, not how she views things. I guess giving the heroine a “general” personality makes it easier to “insert” yourself in her shoes? But I don’t play visual novels to be “in” character. I play so that I can immerse myself in the story and its characters. Too bad the writer didn’t achieve that here. As I’ve mentioned here, there’s got to be more from her than her surface-level reactions.

Tsugumi’s ready anytime, anywhere ◦°˚\(*❛‿❛)/˚°◦

So early on, we know that Tsugumi is prim and proper. Like how she is scandalized watching a movie with a guy, blushes when he holds her hands or hesitates just going on a date since it is her first time. The surprising thing is, she never hesitates during sex. That never fails to give me a good laugh. She doesn’t even ask the most cliche first-timer questions. She just goes all the way on her first time, no apprehensions at all.

I’ve mentioned in this post how the couple does it anywhere – even in the apartment’s public spaces. I’m legit scared that someone might catch them doing it. Tsugumi, though, with all her good girl upbringing, has never questioned it at all. In one route, she worries what her teacher would say if she’s caught watching a movie with a guy. I wonder what would her teacher say if she knew her student does it anywhere.

Migiwa Shizuru

Migiwa Shizuru is the novelist of erotic and tragic love stories. He lives in the shared house with the Fukurou members. Tsugumi met him when he tried to sell her a goldfish while also trying to hit on her.

I wanted to like this route because the smut is A+. It reminds me of the smutty manga I’ve read on my teens. But I didn’t feel the romance between them. I couldn’t even tell when Shizuru falls in love with Tsugumi. He likes her, yes. He likes her body, for he tries to seduce her a lot of times.

My neutral mood for this route starts when Shizuru treats Tsugumi like a whore who beds anyone who has a dong after seeing her walking in the park with another guy. When does walking become synonymous with banging? I was insulted for Tsugumi. She gives her best even her sleep just to help Shizuru and that’s what she gets? Seriously? Thank goodness I used a guide or else the choices that I want to choose will definitely land me a bad end www. All I wanted was for Tsugumi to slap him and never talk to him until he realizes his mistake. She did slap him. But she also wanted to apologizes afterward. Girl you don’t. You just don’t.

After that, I can’t unsee how Shizuru appeals to the good girl nature of Tsugumi to make her submit. Like that one time when he makes her a “proper” adult. Tsugumi spends the entire route doing everything to become mature for Shizuru. When it’s banging time, he asks her a choice which would make sex consensual. But did she really want it? Or she just wanted to prove herself as an adult?

Hoshikawa Hisui

Hoshikawa Hisui is the youngest member of Fukurou. Like Tsugumi, he also has the power to see the cursed books. He looks like a doll, on top of his pretty looks.

Hisui surprised me in his route. He looks so open in the common route. But he’s rather rigid on some things – which totally makes sense once you get to the bottom of things.

What’s surprised me even more though is this:

[This is my first time but I know everything about it] {rough translation}

[I’m pretty sure I’ll be good at it]

Mind you, Hisui makes it a point how he hates women and not interested in those things. But he knew those things??

Also, I feel like the main moment for climax got turned down to throw in smexy times. I’m disappointed when Tsugumi chooses to ~fiercely~ kiss Hisui in the middle of his monologue. It felt like a great moment to reassure Hisui and build his self-confidence. Instead, she dived right in for sex. What’s with them acting like sexually deprived teens turning into humping in the middle of a serious discussion?

Ukai Shougo

The son of the prime minister who tried to kill himself the same day Hitaki did.

I’m no good with tsundere characters and Shougo is a massive one. He is constantly irritated towards Tsugumi. I get offended for Tsugumi because he keeps on pushing the blame on her when it wasn’t her fault. And it pains me to see her not stand up for herself (the way she does for Shizuru in Shizuru’s route). He just keeps on getting angry on various things. And tells that it is Tsugumi’s fault when it isn’t.

It was difficult to like Shougo. Though once he got over his tsun side, he is pretty cute. It’s fun to tease him and see him blush even while saying a simple “I’ll be going.”

Kogami Akira

Kogami Akira appears cold and distant. He has a couple of mysteries around him like how he doesn’t like people seeing him naked in the bath.

I was spoiled about the major landmine in this route that I’m dreading to do Akira’s side of the story. Even after finishing the route, I’ve tried so hard to think of even one good thing that I found here. But all I could think of is how this is a big disappointment to me. Akira’s route makes all the previous route I played far greater than his.

First off, this route has a clunky pacing and Akira’s route is another offender. One moment, it is building the romance. A few minutes after it is dropping a twist. It is confusing as it breaks the momentum one scene establishes. So even if I know, that he should already be falling for her, the romance is just not there.

Akira has his moments. He can be cute if he wanted to. But then these moments are rare and all over the place. And no, it’s not even in the smutty scenes. He has the worst scene out of the first four.

Shiginuma Takashi is a lot worse on this route too. In the previous routes, he appears as a good host with ulterior motives. But here, Tsugumi gets to know him up close and personal.

Sagisawa Rui

Sagisawa Rui is a medical student who accidentally bumps into Tsugumi every single time.

I know I’ve been waiting for this route. But seeing Hayato watching Tsugumi being taken by Rui is painful. I’m tired of seeing him watching on the sidelines.

What I did, once I get to the point where I’m halfway through Rui’s route, I skipped until the end to unlock Hayato’s route. I swore I’ll come back once I’ve finished Hayato’s. But then this news happened… and I’ll explain later. 8D

Ozaki Hayato

Ozaki Hayato is the first one to invite Tsugumi to join Fukurou after her brother’s incident. Hayato has an obvious crush to Tsugumi that is evident in every route. It’s just so cute!

But choosing guys other than him makes me feel bad for Hayato. It’s been too long. But I loved it. Though the pacing is as clunky as ever and the romance just happened, I still loved it for Hayato x Tsugumi. I even loved the revelation in the end. And I’m looking forward to playing his route in the fan disk.

Secret Character

I never thought I’d guess it right www.

Once you get to Hayato’s story, it is pretty easy to guess who the secret character is. Easy because once you’re there, he is the one who keeps on appearing even when he isn’t on other routes. But I didn’t do his route and wants to save this once I get to the port.

Speaking of port…

Nil Admirari no Tenbin on Switch

That’s right. Otomate is moving to Switch now and one of the titles that they are going to port is Nil Admirari no Tenbin. It will be titled Nil Admirari no Tenbin Irodori Nadeshiko. This port will contain the first game and its fandisk.

For the past weeks, I’ve been debating whether I’d get this or PS4 for my RPG needs. Or if I might need to buy another Vita (I fear that the one I have will die any moment lol). So the move is a welcome change for me.

So what now?

I intended on going back to Rui’s route to actually finish the story. Then do the secret character’s route and then the bad ends. But ever since I heard of the port, my motivation died down www. Eventually, I’ll replay the game so I want to save those ends I didn’t finish on the Switch version. Besides, the port will have the fandisk. So I might as well wait for that.

The important thing is I finished Hayato’s route.

Yes, this is vital www. I’m so shipping this pairing that just finishing Hayato’s route makes my entire playthrough worthwhile.

Nil Admirari no Tenbin Teito Genwaku Kitan (ニル・アドミラリの天秤 帝都幻惑綺譚) #nilad Title: Nil Admirari no Tenbin Teito Genwaku Kitan Company: Otomate Release Date: April 21, 2016 Platform:

#Kaji Yuki #Kimura Ryouhei #Libra of Nil Admirari #Murase Ayumu #Nil Admirari no Tenbin #Nil Admirari no Tenbin Teito Genwaku Kitan #Nil Admirari no Tenbin: Irodori Nadeshiko #Okamoto Nobuhiko #Oosaka Ryouta #Otoge #otomate #otome game #PS Vita #PSV #Sakurai Takahiro #Satoi #Suzumura Kenichi #さとい #ニル・アドミラリの天秤 #ニル・アドミラリの天秤 帝都幻惑綺譚 #ニルアドミラリの天秤 色ドリ撫子 #岡本 信彦 #木村 良平 #村瀬 歩 #梶 裕貴 #櫻井 孝宏 #逢坂 良太 #鈴村 健一

[konvolutes]

RIP John Berger

Rest In Power John Berger. Reading "Ways of Seeing" alongside my art history textbook Junior Year of high school in Mr. Stratton's class ran a parallel critique and affect of reading Howard Zinn's People's History alongside the state-sanctioned US history textbook that same year. Collectively laying a critical foundation/lens that seems to have stuck. When I got to London in 2003 discovered the man was much more than an art critic. Still a lot more to learn and read from this curious fellow.

2016 Interview with the Guardian on his 90th Birthday: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/30/john-berger-at-90-interview-storyteller?CMP=share_btn_tw

“The way I observe comes naturally to me as a curious person – I’m like la vigie – the lookout guy on a boat who does small jobs, maybe such as shovelling stuff into a boiler, but I’m no navigator – absolutely the opposite. I wander around the boat, find odd places – the masts, the gunwale – and then simply look out at the ocean. Being aware of travelling has nothing to do with being a navigator.”

in Confabulations, writes brilliantly about the democracy of swimming – people stripped of telltale trappings, doing their lengths. “When you are swimming,” he says, “you become almost weightless, and that weightlessness has something in common with thought.”

In Ways of Seeing, he suggests that paintings embody the present in which they were painted. Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”.

The Guardian Obit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/02/john-berger-obituary

The art critic, essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his television series Ways of Seeing. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the arts pages of the New Statesman. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which Kenneth Clark, its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had travelled 80,000 miles through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western world. Berger travelled as far as the hut in Ealing where his programmes were filmed, and no farther. What he said in his characteristic tone of sweet reasonableness was:

“In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be naked is to be oneself; to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.”

In other words, art is a commodity and a woman in art is an object. No approach to art could have been more different from Clark’s gentlemanly urbanity. These demotic programmes turned Berger into the hero of a generation studying the burgeoning new university courses on European visual culture. The spin-off book was never out of print. Clark, meanwhile, found himself derided as Lord Clark of Civilisation.

The Times Obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/arts/design/john-berger-provocative-art-critic-dies-at-90.html

Mr. Berger’s intention was to upend what he saw as centuries of elitist critical tradition that evaluated artworks mostly formally, ignoring their social and political context, and the series came to be seen as an assault on the historian Kenneth Clark’s lofty “Civilisation,” the landmark 1969 BBC series about the glories of Western art.

Among many other subjects, Mr. Berger burrowed into the sexism underpinning the tradition of the nude; the place of high art in an image-saturated modern world; the relationship between art and advertising; and, of particular importance to him as a voice of the British New Left, the way traditional oil painting celebrated wealth and materialism.

“Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations,” he wrote. “It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”

#Obituary #Berger #art history #notes #2017 #art

[betelhemmakonnen]

Case Study #1 Renée Green : Zoned for Unforeseen Contact

I am drawn to Renée Green research rich approach to her practice, with no fidelity to materials outside their phenomenological equivalencies and her affective intersubjective worlding of the very personal with the universal. I sense a strong identification with the states of being that she continuously investigates, as well as her invested interest in history, philosophy, literature and their related offshoots.

Linguistic scholar Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of the contact zone as, “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”[1] 

Although, Pratt initially developed this term in the context of linguistic and language theories, the term has found resonance in several other disciplines and practices. In 1994, reconfiguring the concept of the contact zone, Renée Green created a complex, multipart bilingual work called Negotiations in the Contact Zone, in collaboration with a group of invited participants that included Miwon Kwon, Lynne Tillman and Manthia Diawara among others.

“Renée Green organized and moderated a watershed symposium entitled Negotiations in the Contact Zone, in which the artist expertly framed a set of issues that identified a burgeoning international phenomenon within the field of contemporary art. In the relatively intimate gallery space of The Drawing Center in Lower Manhattan, Green assembled what she intended to be a ‘provocative and fruitful dialogue’ between ‘cultural producers (visual artists, video producers, filmmakers, writers)’ and ‘cultural critics’ and steadily asked, ‘What happens when art seems to be taking the face of theoretical critique, in addition to traveling outside of the gallery?’”[2]

Writing about Negotiations in the Contact Zone, Green states that her interpretation of the contact zone within this work is “not only in reference to a past colonial conflict but in relation to the manifestations that ensued from that contact, as well as the various moments when negotiations between different cultures have to be made. The negotiations […] in a broad sense as ranging from the literal special instances to the psychological ways of coping with what appears to be foreign, by using creative enabling approaches.”[3]

The contact zone exists as a contested space of unexpected encounters foregrounding negotiations, mediation and arbitration that make destabilization a durational experience necessary for any form of orientation. Beginning with 1994’s Negotiations in the Contact Zone Renée Green’s works engage, activate and operate within and also as a contact zone, not only in the relationship of the works to the audience but also of the works in relationship to one another. Renée Green’s practice is zoned for unforseen contact.

I want to specifically focus on Endless Dreams and Water Between , a 2009 commission from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, that was also exhibited at the YBCA in San Francisco in 2010. “It includes banners with ‘space poems,’ audio works, a feature length experimental film, three short films and printed ephemera. Sensations and perceptions are intertwined with various histories, sites and people surrounded by water. The installation unfolds from a script written by the artist containing a series of long, contemplative letters exchanged between four female characters and their engagement with a memoir by French novelist George Sand. It is saturated with images of the sea as well as the Bay Area, Manhattan and Mallorca, locations where the fictional characters live.”[4]

In Come Closer: Prelude to Endless Dreams And Water Between, Green writes, “For over a year I’ve been searching for points of entry into an oceanic mass of material I’ve collected over time. It has as its basis my repeatedly evidenced interest in, and attraction to, large bodies of water. It’s isn’t only my interest but also the force or forces of movement as well as the desire to move through water of many others, generations before me, that has been a stimulus for a project about ceaseless desires and attempts to fulfill these – no matter how fertile the attempts might be – and the diverse impetuses leading to the traversal of water and what is or isn’t.”[5]

The installation work Endless Dreams and Water Between  creates impossible encounters via shifting sites within a trans-temporal and trans-locative zones of a poly-indexical present. The term poly-indexical is my attempt at developing an extension of the conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s idea of the indexical present, which she defines in her book Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992. I wanted to connect Piper’s concept to my own practice’s approach to the present as a conjugated present, where the past and the future are tenses of the present also present in the present. The prefix ‘poly,’ denoting many as opposed to one, many-s both the referential index and the context in which it is dependent to connote meaning. The poly-indexical present allows for conjugation which in turn allows potentials of mobility, layering and perceptual shifts. It also exponentially manys the negotiations necessary to navigate Pratt’s “spacial and temporal copresence within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” In Endless Dreams and Water Between, by imagining the contact zones between islands, both mapped and fabled, Green obliquely addresses the complex and intertwined relationships between self/other, history/literature, margin/center, fact/fiction, the past/present, as well as representation/misrepresentation and more. 

“The film installation epicenter resides in Endless Dreams and Water Between, a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is weaved with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space. This film’s stream of sounds, images, and thoughts contrapuntally intersect the two silent films, Stills and Excess; the former is a film of related still images taken from the different international shooting locations, interrupted by a phrase alluding to the paradoxical processes of photography and memory noted by Henri Bergson; the latter film presents a reflection on structuralist film, as a mixed homage and further rumination on avant-garde film aspirations. In this combinatory projection space, the perceiver’s attention splits and circulates, allowing water-thought forms of world-perception to emerge.”[6]

Prioritizing a durational experience within the contact zone, for its YBCA iteration, the exhibition’s entrance ticket, “is good for unlimited returns, with no additional fee, for the run of the exhibition. This generous gesture encourages engaging with this show in stages, so that one may focus on a single part or piece at a time, allowing the texts, images, sounds, and themes to accumulate and make ever-greater meaning. When experienced in this way, this exhibition becomes very personal. Just as one cannot properly experience a book by picking it up and flipping through, this exhibition needs to be engaged like an exploded multimedia novel of great depth and beauty. It develops a relationship with the attentive viewer.[7] In an interview with the San Francisco Gate, Green says, “someone asked me if there is a best way to enter the show and I said, ‘No, not really.’ An interesting approach could be to go through it and observe its formal arrangement without trying to focus and then return and see what calls to your attention. It's not like I'm trying to teach you anything.”[8]

In addition the phenomenological expression of the contact zone in Renée Green’s work, her very specific choice of materials and her method of utility of those materials also operates through this disrupted relational region. The materials also make unexpected contacts. In the installation work Endless Dreams and Water Between, words function as water, banners whisper poems instead of screaming declarations, video transmits dreams and paper presents historic correspondence between people that never existed. In Green’s works, the materials are also zoned for unforeseen contact.

And then there is another form of unforeseen contact she creates with the reconstitution of earlier works into new exhibition, conjugating the cycles of each piece. Green practices a continued rebeginning. For example, “a new series of prints produced for Sigetics provide an elaboration on the Endless Dreams and Water Between constellation: a cast of characters and their colorful thoughts, a compressed textual presentation of the feature film, and a proposal for the material emergence of the ‘momentary nexus’ that constitutes The September Institute, a non-utopian vortex of thinkers, creators, and artists that gather each September in the island of Majorca.” Sigetics was Renée Green’s 2011 exhibition at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, two years post the opening of Endless Dreams and Water Between.[9]

In the one of the video portions of Endless Dreams and Water Between, a voice over narrates the following text, as images of various islands flow across the screen, “We have to get back to the movement of the imagination that makes the deserted island a model, a prototype of the collective soul. First, it is true that from the deserted island it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion.”[10]

Islands are impossible potentials for contact. In the work Endless Dreams and Water Between, Renée Greens zones islands as sites of continuous unforeseen contact.

[1] Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992, pg. 6-7.

[2] Green, Renée, Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press Books, 2014, pg. 19.

[3] ibid, pg. 236.

[4] “Renee Green: Endless Dreams,” Digicult | Digital Art, Design and Culture, Accessed October 01, 2018, digicult.it/news/renee-green-endless-dreams/.

[5]Green, Renée, Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press Books, 2014, pg. 419.

[6] "Exhibitions & Events." ArtSlant, Accessed October 01, 2018. https://www.artslant.com/ny/events/show/156717-sigetics?tab=EVENT.

[7] Earnest, Jarrett, "Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams," Art Practical, March 10, 2010. Accessed October 01, 2018, https://www.artpractical.com/review/endless_dreams_and_time-based_streams/.

[8] Baker, Kenneth. "Renée Green's Intense Show at Yerba Buena," SFGate, April 16, 2018, Accessed October 01, 2018, https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Renee-Green-s-intense-show-at-Yerba-Buena-3195330.php.

[9] "NYAB Event - Renee Green "Sigetics"," NYAB Event - Ida Applebroog "The Ethics of Desire", April 2011. Accessed October 01, 2018, http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/2B86.

[10] Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e) ; distributed by MIT Press, 2004. 

[onaudiopost]

Becoming a Full-Time Podcast Producer

Myths and Legends is a podcast that retells folklore and fables from a modern-day perspective. Still as faithful to the original stories as possible, they’re narrated with dry wit and an often deservingly incredulous tone.

“The original Beauty and the Beast story has, of course, monkey butlers with parrots strapped to their heads...so they can talk to you. I'm not joking at all. It's amazing,” reads one episode’s description.

Its first episode released in April 2015, Myths and Legends is downloaded over 2.5 million times every month, and all together, Bardic podcasts (Myths’ parent media company) have been downloaded over 35 million times worldwide. Behind the success of the podcast is Bardic co-founder Carissa Weiser, as well as her husband and co-founder Jason Weiser. Since starting Myths, they’ve expanded to produce two other regularly occurring podcasts: Who We Are and Fictional.

Not bad for a two-person operation.

Carissa, a former audiology professor at the University of Cincinnati, was kind enough to share her path from professor to full-time podcast producer, what her typical day looks like creating and promoting the show, and some of the biggest challenges she faces along the way.

“Clinical audiology felt like work, but producing podcasts feels like I get to be the Bob Ross of audio every day.” —Carissa Weiser

Tell me about your journey from audiologist and professor to full-time podcast producer.

At first glance, audiology and podcast production look like separate worlds. Call it pivoting, a career do-over, or a complete break. But to me, going from audiologist and professor to full-time podcast producer is all forward motion. I am in my current role today because of my overall background—all of it.

Our first podcast, Myths and Legends, began in 2015 as my husband’s hobby while I was working as a clinical audiologist. It was a concept we honed after realizing it didn’t currently exist. A full year passed between idea and actually publishing the intro, and we didn’t start with the intention of going full-time. Jason asked where the best sound space in our house was to record Episode 1, and I suggested the car. After all, it’s like a sound booth covered mostly with carpet that’s designed to block out noise.

I’ve always loved to write, and eventually I found myself editing episode scripts and helping storyboard future topics. One day, I asked Jason if he was open to me taking a look at his sound settings and maybe tweaking a few things. My involvement with the podcast grew and grew, and somehow I was working 50+ hours a week as a professor by day and staying up til 2:00am every night to produce the weekly show.

Finally, we realized that was just not sustainable. By then, we had founded Bardic, our little media company, and we had so many ideas for additional podcasts and content. So something had to give, and we had a decision to make: stay in audiology and not be able to expand...or take a risk and plunge full-time into the world of podcasting where the sky is the limit but the risk is just as great.

I remember telling family, friends, colleagues, and students that I was leaving audiology for a podcast producer gig. Reactions were varied, but I felt then what I still feel to this day: going full-time in podcasting was the right decision and a job seemingly made for me.

What did you do as an audiologist?

Broadly speaking, I diagnosed and treated patients with hearing loss of all kinds, tinnitus (such as ringing or buzzing in your ears when there’s no external sound), and dizziness related to the ear and human auditory system. The bulk of my clinical experience is from the Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center and at the university level, though I’ve rotated through nearly every clinical environment imaginable throughout my eight year road to a doctorate.

The job itself was one part anatomy and physiology, one part science of sound, and one part ever-changing technology (digital hearing aids, cochlear implants, electrophysiology), all packaged in 100 percent human interaction and empathy.

In other words, for a very long time, my world was psychoacoustics, sound waves, polar plots, speech perception, filters, speech in noise ratios, etc. I’ve brought all of that to the audio narratives I design.

I spent years customizing digital sound for individuals, and so I understand how shaping audio can either bring a world to life or close a person out of an experience completely. To me, I’m still using my core audiology training—I’m just applying it with different tools now.

Describe your day-to-day as a podcast producer.

My day is never boring. We usually start with a status update on all the episodes to make sure we’re meeting deadlines. At any given time, we’re monitoring this week’s episode, mixing the next, editing scripts for the following, and storyboarding a couple weeks after that. I spend just as much time on the steps leading up to sound mixing as I do putting the final narrative together. I can’t stress enough how important having the right content matters in combination with high audio quality for building an engaging audio narrative.

With an indie podcast like ours, we’re also doing social media, writing back to listeners, shipping merch, and writing episode posts.

Essentially, my day is editing and revising scripts, directing re-records, going through raw audio files, mixing multiple audio tracks into the perfect story, and business logistics.

What are some of the biggest challenges of your job?

One challenge is that there are no breaks in what I do, no “sick” days. While I have no set hours, we work around some very real deadlines.

Another big challenge is crafting a compelling audio narrative week after week. It’s a balancing act between understanding the tone of the script, the mood we want to set, and the audio tricks we can use (including the use of silence) to build the right ambiance.

But that also presents my biggest audio challenge in podcasting: maintaining audibility across uncontrolled listening situations. Everyone listens on different sound systems, in different environments, and with different degrees of hearing sensitivity. This means that background music may be too loud for one person but inaudible for another, or the same speech sample too tinny, just right, and unclear for three separate listeners. This is different than simply loudness-matching tracks because it also depends on the listener’s environment and ability to hear—things beyond my control. So what can I do?

There’s no way to control if someone listens over headphones, earphones, or soundfield speakers, in their car on the highway, in a living room at home, or a small office. Are they focused on the show or listening while doing something else? Hearing sensitivity (and type/ degree of hearing loss), level of sound attenuation in the room, type of speaker/sound system, and properties of existing background noise all play a huge part in sound perception, especially when there are no visual cues involved. So in addition to song choices, scripts, prosody, setting the mood, and the overall sound of each episode, I try to make choices that enhance overall audibility, too.

With storytelling via podcast, the challenge is both artistic and technical, and that’s why I enjoy it. In the end, the highest compliment I receive is when listeners write in to tell me they had goosebumps, they shed a tear, or they laughed out loud during an episode. That emotional response tells me that what they heard was powerful and immersive enough to move them, and that’s everything.

The most enjoyable moments?

In all seriousness, my work doesn’t feel like work. I did the 10-hour shifts, 2-hour commutes, triple-booked patient schedule for hours on end in the past. Clinical audiology felt like work, but producing podcasts feels like I get to be the Bob Ross of audio every day.

It’s fun to be a part of such a growing medium in general. In some ways, there are no limitations to what you can create, and that’s exciting.

The best moments, though, are hearing from listeners about how our projects have made a specific difference in their lives. When I read those emails, I know that we’re creating something more than just entertainment.

For part-time podcasters who aspire to produce them full-time, what advice would you give?

Remember that in the ways that count, you already are doing a piece of what you aspire to do. If we look at “going full-time” as a different island altogether—a distant place we’d like to be someday—rather than an enhancement of where we are now, it denies the power of what you can produce at this very moment. Now is the time to start pushing yourself to make the best audio experience you can every time.

When we first started, we didn’t have the best equipment, the ideal space, the flexibility of time, or the experience that we do now. We did, however, make each and every episode better than the last by treating each one like a million dollar gig. Sure, I cringe at some of those early episodes now, but I think that’s normal.

What tools—hardware or software—are essential to you as a podcast producer?

At a minimum, I need a microphone and a computer. The key, though, is having a good workflow for post-processing. Software that can analyze my audio files and smooth out sibilants, plosives, mouth clicks, and breaths is an absolute necessity, especially when time is so precious.

What have you learned about podcasting from other podcast producers? Who influences you and why?

To be honest, I’m influenced most by audiology and conversations with cartoonists, illustrators, and graphic novelists I’ve met through our third podcast, Who We Are. These are artists with unique perspectives on storytelling and creativity on demand. Tom Manning is a Yale-trained graphic novelist who shared a lot about using illustration and text in unique ways to create a complete narrative. The drawings alone or the words alone don’t give you what the complete frame communicates, and I try to do the same thing with scripts and audio design.

Do you think podcasting can be for everyone, or is it a niche industry?

There are some impressive stats out there that indicate huge growth, but it's a very specific medium. With the right concept, the sky is the limit in podcasting. The idea of low barrier to entry is partly because it’s not hard to find a mic, hit record, and start a podcast these days. However, as the novelty of anyone being able to create and publish an episode starts to wear off and major companies continue to enter the scene with branded and paywalled content, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for new, independent podcasts to be discovered among the crowd.

That said, in the great banquet hall of podcasting, there are countless seats still available at the table. The technical side is something nearly anyone can learn. From my experience, it’s really the content, the idea, and the passion to produce something consistently that makes the bigger difference. If you have something unique to say and the dedication to put in the required work, there’s an audience waiting for you.

Jad Abumrad said of podcasts, "My only prediction is that some way, the quality will always rise to the top.” What makes a quality podcast?

A quality podcast has a way of making us forget that we’re listening to a podcast at all. For me, this comes down to both content and audio quality. Content depends on podcast genre; a scripted storytelling show with a single narrator has to be tightly written with enough twists to maintain interest, a conversational show has to truly feel intimate, and so on.

The unifying factor for quality podcasts, though, is great sounding audio that isn’t overly tasking to process. If it’s too much work to focus on the speech signal, whether due to the speech-in-noise ratio, a poor audio recording, or a host of other reasons, the end audio quality can become distracting. So, it might mean greater effort on our part to manage background noise, control multitrack loudness, and account for auditory fatigue. It’s also attention to processing (but not over-processing) sibilants, plosives, and overall speech to improve audibility and create an acoustic scene that matches your content.

When all of these elements hang tightly together on a consistent basis, you end up with a quality podcast that maintains faithful listeners and consistently attracts new subscribers—not because of self-promotion or the best social media rollout plan—but because it’s a quality product. Period.

[symbianosgames]

This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.

Gamasutra contributor Katherine Cross once described Love Conquers All Games' Ladykiller in a Bind as a concrete answer to a pressing question: how do you fuck in games?

Ladykiller players can do it in all sorts of ways, often for many different reasons: thrills, safety, power. The game takes sexual encounters out from behind the fade-to-black curtain and presents them as opportunities for storytelling, critical and drawn-out conversations between characters that advance the game's narrative arcs.

They can also be deeply affecting, or hilarious; Ladykiller describes itself as an erotic romantic comedy, and the way it spins its stories have earned it a nomination for the Excellence in Narrative award at this year's Independent Games Festival.

Here, Gamasutra chats with Love Conquers All Games' founder and namesake Christine Love about how she crafted Ladykiller, and why we don't see more erotic rom-com games.

What's your background in making games?

I like to say that I'm a novelist who made a wrong turn, although honestly, I've been making games for a living for over five years now. My only formal education was a degree in English Literature that I dropped out of in order to finish making my first commercial game, Analogue: A Hate Story. 

The whole process has been pretty much entirely self-taught, and for all five years it's been the same core three person team; I'm a programmer, manager, and game designer, but most importantly of all I'm a writer. Personally, I think games are probably the most interesting modern storytelling medium we have, so it's only natural that the writing leads the direction of my games.

What development tools were used to build Ladykiller in a Bind?

It's built in a python-based visual novel engine called Ren'Py.

There's a lot more code involved than a lot of people assume, though. The game has a unique choice system—as far as I'm aware, no other videogame has anything like this—involving dialogue options with variable timing, which was challenging to implement, but even more challenging to write for!

I ended up having to build a multi-stream text editor in html/javascript in order to help me visualize all the different concurrent branches while I was writing. 

So how much time have you spent working on the game, all told?

It was supposed to be a nice short eight month long project. Instead, it ended up taking three years. To say that it got kinda out of control would be putting it mildly, and the last year of development we ended up crunching pretty hard just to get it done with.

I can't speak for the rest of the team, but I'm still feeling pretty exhausted from that, frankly.

How did you come up with the concept?

Analogue: A Hate Story, our first big game, was all about brutally oppressive society misogyny, and honestly, it was pretty fucking dark to write. After that, we wanted something fun to cleanse the palate; a silly love story that's all about explicit sex felt like the exact opposite, and what we all needed.

Of course, it wasn't supposed to take three years, and the longer it spent in development, the more complex the concept ended up getting. But our core goal was to make something funny and sexy, and that never changed.

There's some good goofs in Ladykiller, which describes itself as a "romantic comedy" -- a rarity in games. What drove you to make a romantic comedy game, and why do you think we don't see such ventures more often?

I think we're starting to see a lot more recognition for romance games in general, but despite that, it's still true that romantic comedy games are pretty elusive.

I honestly don't know why, since I think the format really does lend itself well to games—mechanically speaking, making a romance revolve around tension and back-and-forth is a lot more satisfying than reward-based structures—and I think probably the most important thing to portraying romance/sex sincerely is acknowledging that it's goofy and kinda awkward.

I mean, comedy's hard, obviously. My previous experience was firmly on the side of melodrama, so I didn't feel very confident when I first started the project. I'd definitely like to see more games embrace that, though.

What do you think are the biggest hurdles and opportunities for indies today?

I think being a woman on the internet in 2017 is fucking terrifying, and I truly wish it was possible to make a living in indie games without exposing yourself to that. I don't know anyone who feels particularly optimistic right now.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've particularly enjoyed?

I'm still working my way through the other Excellence in Narrative finalists, because basically everything looks great; I think I'm in some amazing company.

I barely played anything while working on Ladykiller in a Bind, I was just too busy, so my backlog is embarrassingly huge! So far I've really liked Virginia, and was really impressed by some of the storytelling techniques it used—both in terms of wordless narrative, and its willingness to escape from hyper literalism, a rarity in videogames. I'm really looking forward to checking out Event[0] and Orwell, too, since they seem like the sort of thing I'd want to make, so that's super exciting to me.

I did, however, play a bunch of Overcooked in 2016. Quick couch co-op is about all I had time for while working on the game. It's really great if you like yelling at your friends to hurry up and chop some vegetables for you to deliver and oh god take that off the burner, why is the kitchen on fire, please stop, please help.

I'm a big fan!

#IFTTT #Blogger