This blogging daily experiment (#Blogtober) is showing my typical content creation style: few embellishments; lots o’ statements; and little or no soft (or “flowery”) prose.
This reminds me why I stopped blogging here; I don’t really need more content creation outlets. I do content creation all day for work. I’d have to change gears and start driving down a descriptive, narrative-non-fiction road for my efforts to rev up my creative engines.
Maybe my brain can’t do both. That’s a scary concept.
But if I’m being BRUTALLY honest with myself, though, it isn’t the switching back and forth between the two types of writing, journalistic and literary, it’s the switching between two different professional hats. Am I a content creator or a fiction writer? So far, I’ve been paid for only one of those. Granted, I haven’t attempted to get paid for the other, but the strong bias for economic gain is eager to squish out the other identity altogether.
Going from “content writer who also writes fiction” to the opposite, “fiction writer who also writes content” is necessary but so far has proven difficult. Even now I can’t switch my brain to give you a deeper description than that.
Today it occurred to me I should have signed up for some sort of month-long-fiction activity, instead of a blogging activity. I searched the web for “Flashtober.” Is there a flash fiction October, with prompts like #inktober?
Lo and behold, I found this. It’s a post from 2018 that mentions “Flashtober,” a month-long fiction exercise through which writers share their work. (If you don’t know what “Flash fiction” is, let me sum up: Usually spurred by a prompt of some sort and accompanied by a word minimum and/or limit –and occasionally a time limit too,– writers are tasked with coming up with a bit of prose on the spot. It’s meant to flex one’s creative muscles and get the muse juices flowing.
I found some other posts mentioning Flashtober going back to 2017, but the real activity is over on Twitter, where the 2018 guy from above has started a thing! I wonder if I start now I could backdate the prompts. Of course, I don’t have to listen to some random writer dude on the internet for prompts or to write flash fiction, but participating in a community is much more fun than doing it alone. If you search on #flashtober, you don’t get a lot of different users in the results. The community is small. But I’m going to check it out. It could be something the writing community on Twitter just hasn’t discovered yet. They may all be gearing up for NANOWRIMO, so maybe the Flash Fiction month should be moved to say… February, but it’s a start.
In an attempt to keep up with internet culture and what my kid has been up to online, I subscribed to a bunch of subreddits dedicated to the INTERNET MEME.
If you don’t know what memes are, I don’t think this is the blog for you, but bless your little heart. You probably don’t know what Reddit is either. I hope you enjoy your tea at the senior center.
Strangely enough, I see very few memes posted in my social site feeds. Following mostly adults probably precludes me from being naturally served these little works of art. Memes seem to be the realm of those who search for karma points on Reddit. A whole culture exists around making memes, finding good ones and sharing them, and being abreast of all the current trends.
The culture isn’t without its wit. Some memes can be quite meta in nature, and can say very clever things about memes themselves. Often the more sly the joke, the more viral it becomes (in certain circles). I do love a clever meme.
Anyway, how I got started on this quest was at the request of my kid, who after a conversation about his feeds, suggested I follow more subreddits dedicated to sharing memes. At my request he steered me away from the misogynist and racist boards (as I asked him to stay away from too) and turned me toward boards like r/wholesomememes (which has 5 million subscribers).
Although some of the stories and jokes shared are mildly amusing, I’m simply too bored to keep up. Something about it speaks to a young brain, I guess, and not my old one? I’m not sure. Don’t get me wrong, I love many aspects of internet culture. r/wholesomememes is just one example of how humans can respond to hate and negativity with just the opposites. But as far as using it as a distractor to calm my racing brain or to serve up some inspiration, or for whatever reason we all end up falling down rabbit holes online, memes just don’t catch me. Perhaps the subject matter doesn’t relate directly to my life? I should search out subreddits for “writing memes” or “freelancing memes” or “20+ years of marriage” memes. Maybe then I’d feel the appeal. After all, the meme is all about finding that little piece of experience that you share with other people. It is about not feeling so alone.
I guess we just need more GenX memers. Get on that, Dear Peers. I need distraction that is made specifically for me. 😉
Lots of boards & a lot of NOPE for some “features”
From overgrown and verdant scenes, to Instapot recipes, to my own handiwork, my Pinterest account is filled with miles of curated links and shared photos. A thousand hours may lurk behind all the boards I’ve constructed on the site.
But I’m finding I use it less and less, and I’ll tell you why – Pinterest changed their linking system on mobile. It’s bulky and inconvenient, and the viewing of sites linked from Pinterest is presented in Pinterest’s own browser solution. This means that instead of opening up a new tab in the phone’s default browser, Pinterest hands you a partial laid-over window that acts as a browser. This sucks, as the page is then harder to navigate with finger gestures and it dims and closes way too quickly. The forward and backward page option is non-existent. I’ve stopped using Pinterest for recipes, which was once my go-to site, because I can’t get the link out of Pinterest’s browser. If I can’t get it out of there, the link closes or the screen dims. This means I can’t depend on Pinterest to hold up a recipe for me when I’m knuckle deep in meatloaf.
The links for sharing from Pinterest are now housed in links that will take you back to Pinterest’s site and its proprietary crappy browser. I’ve cold turkey stopped sending links from Pinterest to anyone because I consider it immoral to spread this inane annoyance.
I’ve taken to — get this — printing out my recipes. On paper. With Ink. Sometimes it takes me a while to find the original link by hand. I navigate to the pin on Pinterest, find the identifying details, then I go over to Chrome or Firefox to search for the actual site that was shared in the first place. It’s super inconvenient and it is enough for me to ditch the site. I debate whether or not I want to spend the time finding all the recipes and printing them out. I could make my own personal cookbook (which people must do, right?) and be done with it. I’d love to see Pinterest’s numbers since they made the switch but probably they are making money by keeping people within the walled garden. I can’t believe, though, my annoyance is uncommon. It’s more and more looking like a deal-breaker.
The book publishing industry sends a lot of mixed messages. Authors say one thing, agents another. The “Big 5” publishing houses make confounding moves that no-one seems to interpret well.
From the outside, book publishing looks like an impenetrable mystery. Indeed, my impression is that one cannot expect to solve many of the mysteries in publishing until after one gets a book published. In other words, you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job. It’s a Catch-22.
But my drawing exercises this week for #Inktober have helped me see that I haven’t *truly* made an effort to learn the industry, even from the outside. I read how-to-write fiction books. I don’t read how-to-publish books. Those just seemed like something to read once I had a book to query agents about. Now I’m thinking that knowing the industry will only help my writing.
This is where the “pure” authors will have a cow. Literature is meant to be Literature (with a capital L) for its own sake. One should write what they want to read, what their muse moves them to write, what their soul tells them to write. That sounds lovely. I want to do that too. BUT I also want to write a book that will sell. I have PLENTY of stories my soul tells me to write. Why not pick one that is more marketable?
The problem is I don’t know the market. No-one does, really, because we have to predict what the market will be in 2-3 years from now, when a finished manuscript will actually get to store shelves. So trying to “write for the market” is as kooky of an idea as writing “Literature.”
Nevertheless, it’s probably wise of me to pick up some publishing tips just like I pick up writing tips. If I want to learn to draw better, I would find some drawing books and classes. I’ve taken classes in writing. Many writing books line my shelves. I could stand to take in a bit about publishing. Writing fiction, like everything else, is a job, and I’m not giving myself any on-the-job training in one specific aspect of that job. A little more knowledge may help me make choices about what I’m spending my time on.
The New York Times shakes down the story of artificial-intelligence-training database service MegaFace, and how photos of more than 672,000 people on photo sharing site Flickr were used to populate it. The article doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
The MegaFace founders say they used only photos that were designated as Creative Commons by their photographers. Creative Commons (CC) has a few different designations, though, and “able to be used for massive face-recognition development” is not one of them. It’s a distinction that needs to be made clear going forward. Letting a lone blogger use your image for their blog post without charging them is the main use for CC. But even if it isn’t the main use, then the general understanding in the Flickr and larger culture is still that CC is used in this way. This article comes as a shock to a lot of media creators; Surveillance, government-led or otherwise, is not something we had in mind when we clicked off our CC boxes. I have posted tech events here in Philly and although I did tell people I was planning to post to Flickr, I did not tell them that China, the NSA, Microsoft and every university lab across the USA and overseas would have a copy of their face in their databases.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I’ll be deleting stuff off Flickr. I’ve been a pro member for a long time but going forward, I don’t see how sharing any photo online is safe. Sure, you probably won’t experience any disruption to your everyday life if the government develops artificial intelligence that now knows your face. In the long game that we’re all playing, though, this is a tool that can be easily used for mass oppression. I realize I sound wack. I get it. My security friends and I joke about how crazy we sound to non-techie people. Non-techie people want to post their family reunion pics on Facebook and they don’t want to pay for the privilege. They disregard any warnings we send. But even I wasn’t paying attention to this MegaFace development, and it all happened between the early days of the social web, when I was active at Flickr.com, and now, when I am not. Still, I should have known better. I put very few pics of family and friends on Facebook or Twitter. I paid for Flickr pro but I simply never thought about it. I don’t have family on there much if at all but I have hundreds of photos of Philadelphians gathering at tech events. It all has to go now.
We can’t possibly know now where all of this is going, but we can guess. And like I said, it ain’t a pretty picture.
