Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 31

Her Attitude Changed.

The title is a skogkatt reference, but it comes to me anytime my attitude changes on something.  In this case, my attitude about Amanda Palmer, and, in particular, the dust up over her kickstarter and the ensuing tour.

My general thoughts about her remain more or less the same: I like most of her music, I don't especially like her persona, but I sort of get that she's got reasons for it, it works for her, and it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the music.  Some of the things she's said I really dislike and one of them was what I knew of the whole kickstarter thing. 

(Quick roundup - raised Palmer 1 million dollars to produce an album, went on tour and put a call out for volunteer backing musicians, offering beer and hugs and hanging out backstage.  People got upset.  Palmer cut checks for her backing musicians.)

I was one of the upset people, and I still think that it would have been nice if Palmer had paid local musicians pro rates up front to do concerts with her, and I fully admit that her own marketing narrative on how she came up plays into that.  But I don't think less of her, anymore for doing what she did.

Been listening to a lot of game designer podcasts, and they are all about kickstarter.  I have backed a few games, most recently Tremulus, which was quite good, and if RPGs have a future, that future is probably going to be crowdfunded.  There are a lot of things kickstarter cannot do, but it's making creators put out games like whoa, ones that would not have come out any other way.  So gamers and designers have been holding forth a lot of opinions on the service (and the others like it - kickstarter just gets to be the synecdoche).

One of the fallouts of kickstarter seems to be that the transparency of the process seems to make a lot of people who back it think that they have bought some level of control over how the money is spent, and a lot of kickstarter-local drama comes from that disconnect.  Because it isn't so.  And while it's reasonable to expect certain parts of the process of whatever you backed will go down a certain way, it's not necessarily what you paid for.  With Tremulus, I paid for a .pdf copy of the game as the creators wrote it, not for a certain interpretation of Lovecraft's fiction as it applies to games or a certain interpretation of the ruleset they used. 

I would be upset if the artists didn't get pro rates for their illustrations, but I didn't pay for the artist.  I paid for the art. 

The people who backed Palmer's album paid for an album.  I don't know if the tour was included in the kickstarter (I assumed it was, and, if so, then there's more to be upset about); if it was, then the backers paid for an album and a tour that might not have even come within 8 hours of a given backer's house.  While it's hard for me to see it this way, there is an extent to which it's just as reasonable to expect Palmer to hire musicians instead of calling for volunteers as it is to expect her to put a tour stop in New Haven, if I backed her, or been able to stipulate that she must or must not perform a Dresden Dolls song per set.  It's not ethically equivalent to my mind, but it is equally up to me as backer.

I still think that artists must be paid for their art.  Palmer still had a chance to do something great and failed to do so, opting to do something I think was right under pressure to do so, but I don't think that the people who backed her kickstarter have any more say over what she actually does or does not do than I would if I bought that album tomorrow. 

I do hear it's pretty good.

[Dork] Apocalypse Raven World Loft

Poking at Ravenloft, because that is what I do, and last night I had a sort of epiphany - I was thinking of the darklords in terms of skins from monsterhearts, which is a kind of badass way of revitalizing those creaky bastards (Strahd gets stronger when he denies the sexual advances of others?  10 times more interesting).  Then I decided to fold in the Apocalypse World playbooks, too, and shit got real.

Dominic D'Honaire - Mentalist from Dementlieu, no one ever uses this guy, D&D never figured out how to deal with him.  Make him a Brainer with Ben Wray's Chamber of Fun move, In-Brain Puppet Strings, a Violation Glove... 

Vlad Drakov - Thinks he's a Hardholder, but really he's just a Chopper.  Or is a Hardholder.  Either way, it makes Falkovnia make more sense.

Dr. Mordenheim and Adam - Savvyhead and Faceless (or Ghoul from Monsterhearts).

Harkon Lucas - Maestro D.

Also, ApocWorld/Monsterhearts Sex Moves.  Totally in.

It wasn't just a vote for Obama, it was a vote against Atlas Shrugged Part 3

It was a nice brisk walk to the polling place this morning.  I feel better about voting today than I usually do because it actually required some minimal effort on my part and the walk was very nice. 

Wow, privilege.

Still, a lovely walk. 

(I totally wrote in RON PAUL, with umlauts and devil horns)

(No, I'm kidding.  I voted for president Obama, because the last time I went with a 3rd party candidate... well, yeah.)

[In my defense, I was in a safe state, it's not like I was in Florida or anything...]

(Also, I think Obama's been a decent president [excepting the drones and the other war on terra bullshit].)

(If I did vote for someone else, it would have been Jill Stein)

(Seriously, you thought I would vote FOR Ron Paul?)

(Really?)

(And I never get tired of voting for my representative, Rosa DeLauro, who has voted my way pretty much every time.)

(I am getting tired of voting against Linda McMahon, though, and I hope she gives it up this time.  I am so sick of her, I can't even come up with something clever to say about her other than she can fuck right off in a birch bark canoe and die in a tragic watercraft fire).

(Also go over a waterfall)

(Into a salt-water grotto filled with sea wasps)

(And then climb out through stinging trees filled with funnel web spiders)

(And then get leprosy)

(Yeah)

Fifty Shades of My Dad?!?!

So my father hasn't been a reader since I was small, but he loves gadgets.  My stepma has a nook.  She's also a middle aged white lady (creeping up on retirement age).  So while we were up at my grandparents' house to move furniture downstairs to set up bedrooms for my grandparents and great aunt this weekend, my father starts telling me about how he has started reading!  And I am happy for him!  Then, he starts telling me about what he's been reading, which, spoiler alerts for the title of this post and my stepmother being a middle aged white lady...

Yeah.  He read all three.  And he tells me this with pride, because he thinks that this is something on which we can relate.  And I know this.  I realize this.  I feel for my dad, really, I do.  Unfortunately, these realizations were delayed by lack of oxygen coming into my brain due to gales of laughter.  No, seriously, this happened.  My dad told me he read 50 Shades of Gray, and I laughed at him for it.  I am kind of a monster.  I recovered - my laughter was clearly the shock and hilarity kind and not derision or meanness, but still.  Still.  I am a terrible person, but as dog is my witness, if there is anything - ANYTHING - on this earth that could elicit this kind of response...

So I made it partially up to him by giving him a list of authors to look for (since he's been big into the PR offerings on my stepma's nook), and by having a supportive conversation with him about how he's come to appreciate top 40 country and smooth jazz.

I am a terrible son, and yet, I feel that any more fiendish test of filial devotion would have involved someone committing ritual suicide.

"A Land of Deepest Shade" readable for free in its entirety

GO READ!

Originally posted by asakiyume at "A Land of Deepest Shade" readable for free in its entiretyWhile talking with three_magpies yesterday, I realized a story of mine that's previously only been available to read completely if you bought the magazine (The Colored Lens) is now available for free. It's "A Land of Deepest Shade."

I've quoted the source lines for the title last time I posted about the story, but I'll do so again, because I love the quote

A land of deepest shade
Unpierced by human thought
That dreary region of the dead
Where all things are forgot

We Skated

We still have power, minimal damage - Middletown got nothing compared to this time last year and the Halloween snowstorm of doom. Serious flooding on the shoreline, to say nothing of NY and NJ being under the water.  Everyone be well and stay safe.

cucumberseed @ 2012-10-29T22:39:00

All is quiet and we still have power.  How long that will last is anyone's guess, but so far, we have been very lucky.  Worst disaster today is that I wrecked my attempt at soup.

Fall 2012 Issue of Goblin Fruit is Live!

Originally posted by tithenai at Fall 2012 Issue of Goblin Fruit is Live!Oyez, oyez! As of Friday evening, the new issue of Goblin Fruit is up, with astonishing artwork by Elisabeth Heller, and fantastic poems by Mike Allen ( time_shark ), Sonya Taaffe ( sovay ), Rose Lemberg ( rose_lemberg ), Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, Ruth Jenkins, Alex Dally MacFarlane ( alankria ), Brock Marie Moore, C. W. Johnson, Jennifer Crow ( kythiaranos ), Virginia Mohlere ( snowy_owlet ), and Rachel Dacus.

Step forward.



As early as last year we were guided in our editorial choices for this issue by a certain tendency towards apocalypse -- the last issue of a year which has groan-inducingly been touted as the last since, well, whenever the last time was that people longed to be at the End of History in ways more literal than metaphorical. The first poem we took for this issue with that in mind was Mike Allen's "The Vigil," and so we're particularly delighted to find that this poem sparked Elisabeth's imagination such that she oriented her artwork along its lines, setting the issue's overall tone with a glance.

But this is not an issue of violent explosions so much as aftermaths; it is not an issue of bangs so much as whispers, crouchings, look-over-your-shoulder-ings.

We hope it enjoys you you enjoy it.

As a futher delight, csecooney has set her eye and hand to making up a poem out of lines from this issue's pieces. A taste:

I do not feel beautiful
I tasted mysteries at an early age, drank secrets
while father watched like a
moon, from the upstairs window
the Devil likes his blue-eyed boys
I brought him down
In the wreckage of his secrets

Swords Replace Feelings

3339 words in, rounding out the second section, the fall of Rhus, the fall of Captain Callowry, and the loss of the narrator's arm.  

A question to the writers out there.

So what do you do when you feel you are way off your game?  Write, naturally, and 2012 has been, for some values thereof, my most productive year to date.  It's also felt like I've been cranking out just miserable shit that falls flat every time.  To a certain extent, I can forgive this in Child Sword's first draft (mark 3), since it's a first draft, and I clearly am a writer who's first draft is my sacrifice to Sturgeon's Law (I feel as though people who produce decent drafts on the first go are much better writers and human beings than I am, and that by admitting this, I am showing weakness that will inevitably draw the literary hyaenas to my door), but the rest of it.  It's not a matter of plateauing, either, since I am producing demonstrably weaker work across the board than I was last year.