#Timothy Wilson

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The art of Daniel Danger

[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction

The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.

There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.

Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.

The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.

The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.

So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”

There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”

But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”

There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.

The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/

But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.

Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.

I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.

http://www.tinymediaempire.com/

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]

Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/2022-sdcc-it-stopped-being-about-the-panic-v4

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]

On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-headlight-in-the-path-of-v2

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]

Danger isn’t just a

very

talented artist, he’s also an

extremely

talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc-2022-we-can-no-longer-protect-you-forever-v3

[Image  ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]

Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/made-of-smoke-and-chains-mist-preorder

So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&tags=danieldanger&min_taken_date=1687478400&max_taken_date=1690156799&view_all=1

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-this-happy-place-v6-foil

This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/emil-ferris/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.

(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:

https://midsummerscream.org/

Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award

And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

[Image ID: A photo of me with Chuck Tingle, who wears a pink bag over his head on which he has written ‘Love is Real.’]

To cap yesterday off, I also ran into @ChuckTingle, which is as fine a capstone to a successful con as anyone could ask for:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53065500076/in/dateposted/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger

#pluralistic #writing #haunters #dancing about architecture #spooky #daniel danger #behavioral economics #introspecting #talking about art #gift guide #timothy wilson #tiny media empire #san diego comic-con #posters #sdcc #monster kids #art #raina telgemeier #felicia day #emil ferris #my favorite thing is monsters #inkpot award

[clove-pinks]

Nelson’s signal at Trafalgar

The first edition of Popham’s Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary was printed in 1800; a more comprehensive version was produced in 1803, and a further much expanded edition using letters as well as numbers in 1812. This was issued to the navy in 1813, and from that time, vocabulary signals were part of the official flag signalling code of the Royal Navy.

Nelson’s signal to the fleet before the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 read ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY and was made in Popham’s vocabulary, using the numerical flags of the general Signal Book as re-arranged in 1803. The signals officer of the Victory at the time was Lieutenant John Pasco, who gave, many years later, this account of the incident:

His Lordship came to me on the poop, and after ordering certain signals to be made, about a quarter to noon, he said, ‘Mr Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet, “England confides that every man will do his duty”’, and he added, ‘you must be quick for I have one more to make, which is Close Action’. I replied, ‘if your Lordship will permit me to substitute the “expects” for “confides”, the signal will soon be completed, because the word “expects” is in the vocabulary, and “confides” must be spelt.’ His Lordship replied in haste, and with seeming satisfaction, ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly’; when it had been answered by a few ships in the van, he ordered me to make the signal for Close Action and to keep it up, accordingly I hoisted No. 16 at the top-gallant mast-head and there it remained until shot away.

— Timothy Wilson, Flags at Sea

In J.M.W. Turner's 1822 painting, The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, part of the word DUTY may be seen in the visible signal flags of HMS Victory.

#age of sail #battle of trafalgar #horatio nelson #trafalgar day #naval history #royal navy #napoleonic wars #hms victory #maritime signal flags #age of fighting sail #military history #flags at sea #nelson's signal #joseph mallord william turner #timothy wilson #naval art #england expects that every man will do his duty

[lizormianillustration]

say hi, intrepid heroes!

#dimension 20 #d20 #neverafter #rosamund du prix #ylfa snorgelsson #pinocchio #mother timothy goose #gerard of greenleigh #puss in boots #brennan lee mulligan #siobhan thompson #emily axford #lou wilson #ally beardsley #brian murphy #zac oyama #illustrators on tumblr #illustration

[smallest-clown]

Your husband? We turned him fully into a frog. Yeah, sorry. Yeah he gave up his humanity for you, yeah. He did this after hearing that you only care for him now, not love him. Yeah…sorry.

#princess elody #d20 #dimension 20 neverafter #neverafter #dimension 20 #emily axford #d20 neverafter #brennan lee mulligan #ylfa snorgelsson #gerard of greenleigh #lou wilson #brian murphy #mother timothy goose #rosamund du prix #d20 pib #d20 pinocchio #zac oyama #ally beardsley #siobhan thompson #neverafter spoilers

[contrivedcoincidences6]

#and he was right #lou wilson #ally beardsley #siobhan thompson #brennan lee mulligan #zac oyama #brian murphy #emily axford #dimension 20 #dimension 20 neverafter #pinocchio #mother timothy goose #rosamund du prix #puss in boots #gerard of greenleigh #ylfa snorgelsson #neverafter #dropout

[wurstcrew]

DIMENSION 20'S NEVERAFTER

Hello, little children, and welcome, one and all. If it's a game you want, then a game you shall have. (x)

#dimension 20 #d20 #neverafter #dimension20edit #d20edit #neverafteredit #brian murphy #zac oyama #lou wilson #ally beardsley #emily axford #siobhan thompson #brennan lee mulligan #prince gerard of greenleigh #puss in boots #pinocchio #mother timothy goose #ylfa snorgelsson #princess rosamund du prix #* #pls show up in the tags this time i am begging i want to hang out with the d20 tumblrinas

[say-hi-intrepid-heroes]

i know the editors have gotten a lot of shit for things like mirror brennan and some weird scene cuts, but this completely makes up for it, this was so epic and so well done

#dimension 20 #d20 #neverafter #zac oyama #siobhan thompson #brian murphy #lou wilson #emily axford #ally beardsley #pib #puss in boots #rosamund du prix #gerard of greenleigh #prince gerard of greenleigh #pinnochio #ylfa snorgelsson #mother timothy goose

[theworldshouldhaveendedin2012]

d20 twitter is crazy bc i think they hate the players???? like atp i think they just don’t like their sense of humour and like very potentially maybe don’t know how dnd works bc i think anyone else would get their decisions on the princesses. reasoning with the princesses would be down to rolls that destiny’s children could not clear they are bad socially. also like why do they get to decide that everyone is destroyed like they’re like 6 ppl??? the players’ plan of everyone getting part of a true book gives them control like yh ig if u wanna stop existing dip it in ink but why tf do we all have to get drowned in ink????

neverafter and a starstruck odyssey have had these treatments of being dnfed and hated on in ways that end up as critiques of like the players’ personalities which i hate. norman was created to be brainslugged. he wasn’t a shitty guy bc he got screwed over he was a shitty guy and he got screwed over. the princesses were created to show the party that they didn’t want to completely erase the neverafter. it would be easy to ally with the princesses over the fairies: we don’t want to go back so let’s start over. but the princesses are blinded by pain and want to use that to excuse the apocalypse. they have sympathy for them and maybe if they’d been luckier with the dice they could have reasoned with them but the dice spoke lol.

i have more opinions but imo neverafter slaps and is worth watching and i love my millennials sm

#dimension 20 #emily axford #brian murphy #ally beardsley #brennan lee mulligan #d20 #lou wilson #neverafter #siobhan thompson #zac oyama #d20 neverafter #dropout #mother timothy goose #ylfa snorgelsson #rosamund du prix #pinnocchio #puss in boots #gerard greenleigh #defence

[islandoforder]

five players utterly unable to talk to other characters and one cat who could get away with all of their bullshit but is always off on a lil wander so he can’t and won’t help them

#puss in boots #pib #zac oyama #prince gerard of greenleigh #brian murphy #ylfa snorgelsson #emily axford #pinocchio #lou wilson #mother timothy goose #ally beardsley #rosamund du prix #siobhan thompson #neverafter #brennan lee mulligan #dimension 20 #d20 #destiny’s children #intrepid heroes

[brionbroadway]

live footage of me writing neverafter fic after that episode

#d20 #dimension 20 #neverafter #neverafter spoilers #lou wilson #brennan lee mulligan #ally beardsley #mother timothy goose #pinocchio

[figsclove]

It takes a village and by a village I do mean two old men, a deeply troubled teenage princess, a giant frog man going through a divorce, and a little kitty cat

#ylfa snorgelsson #d20 pinocchio #pinocchio neverafter #d20 #dimension 20 #brennan lee mulligan #neverafter #d20 neverafter #pib neverafter #rosamund du prix #mother timothy goose #gerard of greenleigh #princess rosamund du prix #prince gerard of greenleigh #ally beardsley #zac oyama #lou wilson #siobhan thompson #emily axford #brian murphy

[emiko-matsui]

READ BECAUSE YOU ALL DESPERATELY NEED TO HEAR THIS

the reason there are so many people mad at each other in the neverafter tag and garbage takes and mad at the players is because the season is about philosophy. everyone subscribes to their own philosophy so everyone takes different sides in this story. some people are more nihilistic and some existentialists or romantics or absurdists and you all need to accept that and stop being nasty as hell. I have my own philosophy and think some of you are so fully wrong but i have enough sentience to see that it is fundamental philosophies clashing and not hot takes about d&d

#so STOP being nasty to each other #AND STOP being nasty to the players #dimension 20 #d20 #neverafter #d20 neverafter #brennan lee mulligan #siobhan thompson #lou wilson #ally beardsley #brian murphy #emily axford #zac oyama #pib #rosamund du prix #timothy goose #pinocchio d20 #gerard of greenleigh #ylfa snorgelsson #philosophy

[smallest-clown]

Episode 15 was something huh gang

#how the fuck are they gonna fix this in 5 episodes #d20 #dimension 20 neverafter #neverafter #dimension 20 #emily axford #d20 neverafter #brennan lee mulligan #ylfa snorgelsson #gerard of greenleigh #brian murphy #mother timothy goose #rosamund du prix #d20 pib #lou wilson #d20 pinocchio #zac oyama #ally beardsley #siobhan thompson

[contrivedcoincidences6]

#I love them so much #relatable content #ally beardsley #dimension 20 #lou wilson #mother timothy goose #neverafter #dimension 20 neverafter #d20 neverafter #dropout tv #dropout #dnd

[d20brainrot]

out of context neverafter ep.17

#Tracking Down Death would be such a rad name for a metal album #out of context dimension 20 #dimension 20 #neverafter #never after #Prince Gerard of Greenleigh #Pinocchio #Puss in Boots #Princess Rosamund du Prix #Mother Timothy Goose #Ylfa Snorgelsson #Brian Murphy #Lou Wilson #Zac Oyama #Siobhan Thompson #Ally Beardsley #Emily Axford #dimension 20 neverafter #Brennan Lee Mulligan #d20 #d20 neverafter

[dc-vs-marvel-tournament]

Submitted by anonymous

"It’s too much fun to bully Tim honestly"-anonymous submitter

#dcvsmarveltournament #dc comics #marvel #marvel comics #poll tournament #tournament poll #tumblr tournament #dcau #dcu #poll #polls #deadpool #wade wilson #tim drake robin #tim drake wayne #tim drake #timothy drake #robin dc #robins #batman and robin #red robin #dc robin #dc red robin #robin