Down with profit!

For my 300th post, I thought I’d go a little high-brow and talk about a book I’ve been reading called Beyond the Profits System by economist Harry Shutt. The subtitle is “Possibilities For a Post-Capitalist Era,” so that should give you a pretty good idea of what he’s about. I’m really not interested in economics and things like that, but I picked up the book for five bucks when I was buying a textbook, and it was certainly worth the price. It’s a pretty rough read, though - the writing is very academic, and I think it might actually be intended for use as a textbook. Considering I’ll never take the class it was used for, I can’t really verify any of what was in it. A cursory search reveals pretty much no information on it or the author, but that’s normal for a textbook.

        With all that being said, I’m going to assume the book is credible until proven otherwise. The basic idea is that the current model of capitalism, focusing solely on growth and profits, is doomed to fail and needs to be replaced for the sake of public good. First of all, there’s the matter of absurd inequality - not only do we have countries that are far more prosperous than others, but within individual countries, there are people starving to death and others making money faster than they can spend it. Second of all, there’s something called “the business cycle” inherent in capitalism: eventually profits bottom out, and in order to get back the huge growth rates of the past, there needs to be a huge recession. I won’t get into it too much, but from what I understand, the idea is that capitalism revolves around investing excess capital in order to continuously get more. But eventually profitable investment opportunities run out, because there’s too much excess capital. So then you have crashes like the Great Depression, followed by comparatively amazing recovery.

        The part that I found most interesting was a section on how companies could survive without pursuing maximum profit. Ideally, in whatever new system would replace capitalism, non-profit ownership of enterprises would be encouraged. Privately owned companies like we have now would be encouraged in different ways to not accumulate profit, such as tax breaks for distributing the money to their shareholders or employees. New companies could be publicly owned (nationally, or even locally) or owned cooperatively (for example, social enterprises). It’s hard to say which is more interesting - the problems this shows with capitalism, or the good that could be done by the alternatives.

        The way things are currently, the shareholders and so on who create companies basically receive all the profits the company makes. I.e. the people who have lots of money, get to make more money. Employees get more or less the same salary regardless of how profitable their work has become for the company. Meanwhile, the goal of the company is to do one thing: maximize profits. Doing the “right” thing doesn’t matter, unless it happens to be the most profitable thing.

There are some pretty big parallels between the business of book publishing and video game publishing, so I’ll use those as examples. Some of the similarities are…

• most aren’t profitable, and it’s mostly a gamble on the part of the publisher that any individual product will be popular enough to turn a profit
• the ones that do turn a profit are used to help fund the ones that aren’t
• publishers essentially pay the creators with loans, leaving them entirely dependent upon the publisher until they achieve widespread success
• artistic merit or quality, generally speaking, don’t matter as much as profitability
• the price you pay for the final product includes a cut for everyone involved in its creation - the publisher takes their cut, the manufacturer takes theirs, and so on, until the actual creators receive their tiny portion
• depending on the publisher and the terms of their agreement, the actual creator may not have much control over what they create, whether that be in the form of rights or the actual content itself

        There are probably more similarities, and there are differences too (for example, authors are usually expected to promote their own books these days) but you should see the problems here. Economically, it makes perfect sense that only the most popular products actually turn a profit. It makes sense that writers/game developers wouldn’t get anything from the sale of their product until it actually turns a profit. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t make economic sense, right?

        But it doesn’t make any logical sense, or emotional sense for that matter. Authors who don’t become massively successful with their first novels are basically forced to write until they can somehow pay off their initial advance. Game developers that don’t put out a huge success are shut down, and hundreds of jobs are lost. Publishers can gamble with people’s livelihoods by deciding what books and games are published. The vast majority of the time a game developer is closed down by a publisher, it’s really not their fault - see the Guitar Hero series, wait for the Call of Duty crash, and the closure of Pandemic Studios after the release of, arguably, their best game. Then we as consumers have to pay heavily inflated prices, mainly because of things like production costs that could be avoided through digital distribution.

        This is why it’s so interesting to imagine how books and games could be funded in other ways, and in a way that puts the focus on the actual creators. I love holding a physical book, but I don’t like paying thirty dollars for a book - especially when the author gets, at best, a few dollars of that. Reading on my Kindle is wonderful, and paying ten bucks for a digital version of a book is lovely. I like to have a game’s case in my collection, too, but getting an indie game from Steam for ten bucks is almost absurdly convenient. Steam and Amazon probably take their cut from this, but otherwise, someone could create a game or a book and get actual money for it, right away. These services already exist! We don’t even need to change anything to take advantage of them!

        As for funding, Kickstarter is pretty much the perfect example, although it could probably use some more accountability from the people getting the money. The Kickstarter for the PC version (and enhanced 360 version) of Cthulhu Saves the World is a perfect example of this. They only needed $3000, but they got twice that much. Now they’re going to sell the game, and a previous game they created, for $3 on Steam. Two games for three dollars. Development funded by the kind of people awesome enough to donate $750 dollars. If you look at the page, what amounts to a “pre-order” of the game was originally $24. They only needed 125 people to pitch in $25 in order to fund the game, and they got 110. The other fifteen people gave fifty dollars instead. And I’m going to get the game for three bucks! I really want to donate $25, but three bucks is a lot better for my budget :(

        It’s probably a little bit harder with books, but I guess a great idea for a game could easily turn out badly, just as a great book idea could be poorly written. Even so, you create a Kickstarter or something, ask people to pay for the product in advance, and then you have enough money to survive while you’re creating it. Everyone wins in this situation. There are, literally, zero downsides. Except for publishers and retailers, who are no longer necessary in this system. Darn.

        Just to wrap up, think of it this way: if you were a self-employed game developer or writer, you wouldn’t really need to “profit” from what you make. As long as there was enough money coming in, you could pretty much keep doing what you love forever. No need for a fragile salary based job, no need to worry about publishers, just a direct connection between the money and the creation of the game.

What a beautiful world such would be… - The World Ends With You

Bad Writing Showcase 1

I’m calling this Bad Writing Showcase 1 because I can’t think of a better name, even though I hope there won’t be a Bad Writing Showcase 2. Still, I could screw up another post, and I could also showcase writing that isn’t mine. Bad Writing Showcase 1 just gives a better sense of closure than “Bad Writing Showcase.”

        Moving on. Below is a post I wrote a little over a week ago, which I never published because I felt pretty bad about it. I spent a lot of time writing it and trying to make it good, but as it is now, it can’t be what I want it to be. I’d have to do a complete re-write of it (my old Persona post is in a similar situation) and I just don’t really feel like doing that. When I say it isn’t good, what I really mean is that it isn’t good by my standards - I know I can write better than this. I’ve made these same mistakes before, and learned how to fix them. In fact, it’s eerily similar to the MacBeth essay I wrote. I’ve also made the same mistakes a ton of times in other blog posts, but it’s getting to the point where I need to do better.

        Much like my MacBeth essay, if it’s taken paragraph by paragraph, the writing is pretty solid. But much like my MacBeth essay, it was written without a thesis or an outline. It’s just a bunch of slightly related thoughts strung together, with a sloppy introduction and conclusion that try desperately to make some cohesive point out of all the individual paragraphs. It’s ok to sit down and throw out a big rant, because I can post whatever I want and who cares if anyone likes it or thinks it’s good? But I kind of want to take things I’ve written and say “hey, look at this, it’s really damn good and incredibly smart.” Also I fantasize about being paid to write smart things for video game blogs but that’s a risky proposition. So, in short, if I wanted to do those things, I would need to apply all my knowledge about writing to at least a few posts.

        That means taking the time to plan out my thoughts in advance, starting with a clear thesis and making sure everything I write serves to support it, and revising to fix the messy spots. I’ve been working on that for a while, and I’ve got a couple sheets of paper covered in notes for when I sit down to write one of these wonderful posts. It’s getting to the point where the individual paragraphs I had planned are becoming essays in their own right. I need to get other things straightened out first before I can start writing seriously, though.

        Anyway. I’m not going to go through this and point out everything that’s wrong with it, because I wrote it and I don’t want to tear my own work apart. Plus I don’t want to be tempted to improve it. I may start over at some point, but for now, it’s testament to the day I realized I can’t expect perfection to simply flow out of my fingertips. If you’re really bored, check out older posts and see how I couldn’t find a way to write a solid conclusion because they suffered the same problems.

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Gaming and the mainstream

Inspired by a MovieBob episode I overheard my brother watching, in which he has the following to say about film critics and the general population:

It’s often said that the problem with film critics is that we’re out of touch with normal people, because we see hundreds of films a year and thus get tired of formula quicker, and bored more easily, than people who only see a dozen or less. As such, we tend to overpraise certain films for things like narrative abstractions, explicit sexuality, taboo subject matter, or creative violence, because we’re just desperate for anything that surprises us - and conversely that we’re overly dismissive of otherwise solid films because they aren’t different enough to keep us awake.

        He mentions gaming, as well, to say that if every gamer were like Yahtzee or the Extra Credits crew, we wouldn’t get things like Halo: Reach (as he called it, just Halo 3 with a jetpack added). I don’t think that’s anywhere near as interesting as a subject, though - it’s just simple economics, and it applies to games, movies, books, television… If it sells, you make it, even if it’s derivative/unoriginal/starting to get stale after eleven iterations/not even that good/etc.

        Gaming is in a worse position than other mediums, because it doesn’t have the long history of great examples that break the mold that other mediums have, and it’s still a commercial industry at its core. Most games today are made as merely average commodities, as opposed to the exceptional (Portal 2) or the intellectual (), and that’s just how the industry is right now. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with making your game based on mechanics or “fun,” but it’s not really enriching anyone’s life if you have nothing interesting to say beyond “look how realistic our explosions are!” If you don’t have any issues with that, by all means, make what sells.

        But what I’m really here to talk about is the gaming public (your parents, perhaps your children, your co-workers who don’t know what a ‘source engine’ is) and the way they’re different from gamers. It’s not just the gaming media that have completely different ideas and expectations about games from everyone else - the gaming media is for gamers, by gamers, and we share their ideas and expectations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they share ours. But to be accepted as a medium and an art form, games are going to have to deal with the radical differences in its audience. Things are better than they used to be - smartphones and the Wii have brought gaming to the general public, but compared to books and film, it’s still a niche.

        People like your parents and your “non-gamer” co-workers and friends probably play as many video games per year as I watch movies: a handful at best. “Gamers” either play or keep up with more games per year than so-called “non-gamers” have played in their entire lives. We may scoff at minigame collections for the Wii, or cry that “Angry Birds is just a reskinned version of a flash game I played years ago,” but for the average person, these are totally new to them. We may have played similar games in the past, perhaps even better games, to the ones “non-gamers” buy in droves. But there are only a few million “gamers.” Meanwhile, there are billions of “non-gamers.” Very few developers can afford to cater to the gamers now, because the audience isn’t big enough to sustain the costs of development for modern systems. Of the few million gamers out there, how many only buy strategy games? How many only buy shooters? Each genre has its own niche audience among the greater gamer population, while “non-gamers” don’t even know what those terms mean - they just buy the fun games.

        Hollywood makes films for people who only watch a few movies per year, and film critics complain about it. But film is accepted as a medium because the average person still watches some movies, and they’ve probably even watched a few really good ones. The absolute gems of film are just as accessible to them as the summer action films - all they have to do is buy a ticket (or DVD) and sit down to watch. Video games still aren’t accepted as a medium because they’re foreign and strange to most people, who only play those few accessible titles. The difference is that games made for people who have been gaming for years are NOT as accessible as Wii Sports Resort, and the average person can’t get over that hurdle. My dad will occasionally take our Wii and Wii Sports Resort with him when he goes out, and play it with people who have never even seen it before. Could you do the same with Starcraft 2 or The Witcher? Of course not, because they rely on you knowing a lot of other things that you’ve learned from previous games.

        (Side note: among the people who play games on their computers at all, I would guess that the proportion of “gamers” to “non-gamers” is far more skewed than that for dedicated gaming consoles and handhelds, making core games and complication the rule rather than the exception)

        MovieBob said that film critics are “out of touch” with normal people, but he went on to justify that in the context of a film critic. To him, being out of touch and having higher standards for films is no problem, because it leads to a greater appreciation of the medium that “normal people” don’t get when they only watch movies like Transformers 2. But that justification only works if you care about film as a medium, and aren’t one of the people who just want to see something fun or interesting. Hopefully something fun and interesting that blows up. The average person will still see the film critic as out of touch, because to them, Transformers 2 was still fun to watch, and the film critic is just too jaded to enjoy it.

        So what happens to video games? A medium built on us, the gamers, all of us out of touch with what normal people can handle? If you tell someone who hasn’t been gaming for years to “press the L3 button” on a PlayStation controller, they’ll just glare at you. Using a piece of plastic that has four directional buttons, four face buttons, four shoulder triggers, two analog sticks (which press down to provide two more buttons) and now three “control” buttons (start, select, and the PS/X button in the middle of 360 and PS3 controllers) is not a skill most people have. Swinging your arm to swing a sword is much easier to understand, with the next best thing being a button that says “kick” used to make your character kick. Why is it any wonder that normal people like my father can play games on the Wii or in an arcade (granted, not very common these days, but they can handle it), yet he can’t figure out how to watch a movie on my PS3… or how to turn it off afterwards?

        And now, I realize the solution is incredibly simple. Just wait. In another decade or two, everyone will have grown up playing video games. Problem solved. When most people were illiterate, books didn’t have much widespread acceptance as a medium. “Moving pictures” were probably incredibly frightening to people who didn’t grow up with them. Now that video games are in the hands of an audience at least ten times the size of what it used to be, it’s only a matter of time. Yes, video games are complicated. Yes, most people don’t understand them. But that’s changing, as more and more games fall somewhere between “dead simple” and “requires fifteen different buttons to play.” Before long, there will be plenty of games for people of every skill level, and then the medium will be accepted by the general public.

In Which I Debate The Use Of Free Time, or, a long post that ultimately goes nowhere

The point of that long explanation (last time, on my tumblr…) was to lead into my discussion of “worth” or “value” in terms of how free time is spent. As much as I try to do things like “relax” or “have fun,” the efficiency that has ruled my life so far can’t help but extend into my free time. It’s always a to do list of accomplishments, things to finish and then things to start after that. The two contributing factors to this are that the list grows far faster than I can work on it (12, 25, 40, 60, etc. hour games coming out before I’ve finished the last) and I’ve always been able to afford the next shiny game to release. Even then, I’ve looked for ways to make my money go further - efficient to the last - so that I can now download games for every system I own save the PS3. Well, and the Wii. So, theoretically, I have access to infinite video games, infinite books (assuming someone has uploaded them online), infinite amounts of manga, infinite episodes of anime to watch, infinite amounts of data and ideas to mentally digest… Never will I lack for entertainment, surely, but rarely am I truly entertained. The calculation of where to spend my time drains all of the fun from the media I consume voraciously, incessantly.

        I try to see the world, and especially all the digital worlds I experience, with a little sense of wonder to keep from getting too jaded. It’s difficult to do that when I’m rushing from one game to the next, almost always picking the game to play based on how guilty I feel over not finishing it yet, and secondarily how much is left to play. When I finished Portal a month or two ago, when it was free for a couple of weeks on Steam, all I could think was “finally, I can say I’ve done it.” Most people will tell you it’s something you “have” to play, and I’d gone a long time without playing it simply out of indifference. I’d already absorbed most of its content through osmosis anyway, it was just a technicality that I hadn’t actually put my hand on the mouse and done it myself. I did it, though, but for me it just wasn’t the amazing, joyous experience I know many others have had with it. It was just one thing crossed off an endless to-do list, another example that I’m eternally catching up on gaming history. I think the fact that I saw two or three hours invested in Portal as practically a waste because there would be nothing new there for me is bad enough, but the fact that I played it and didn’t enjoy doing so says everything about the problem I have with my free time.

        Portal is pretty much a sacred lamb of gaming at this point, but perhaps the worst offence I’ve committed as a gamer, in my mind, is to not like multiplayer gaming. Party games, yes. Local co-op with friends, yes. But competition against faceless strangers? Count me out. Not in an RTS, not in an FPS, not in an MMO, not in a flash game, not even in a browser-based game. Yet all of the most hardcore gamers thrive on these kinds of games. Final Fantasy XIII and Dragon Quest IX may be huge, expansive games, but when I finish them, that’s pretty much it. It might take 60 hours, or it might take 100. But StarCraft II, Modern Warfare 2, Team Fortress 2 - funny how they’re all sequels - as well as World of Warcraft and all the other MMOs, they’ll consume countless hours far beyond the sixty or one hundred hour mark. When the vast majority of the medium lives on the crushing - or being crushed by - your opponent, how could I possibly be allowed to simply “not like” multiplayer? It doesn’t help that I see very few people saying the same thing. It seems as though I must be wrong, spending my time finishing Persona 4 or actually playing through Final Fantasy X when I could be shooting people in the face day after day.

        Yet this ties into my problem with having too much media available, and the question of what it’s worth to spend my time on something. Perhaps some people will get far more time out of their $60 purchase of StarCraft II or Modern Warfare 2 than I ever could out of the games I buy. Perhaps they only had $60 and had to find a game that wouldn’t just end. It’s hard for me, with my rather large collection of games, to imagine playing a game because I have nothing else to play. But then, would I really want to spend all of that time just to feel as though I accept the largest portion of gaming today? Would it be “worth” my time to be a master of unscoped headshots, or would I just be “wasting” my time when there are so many other things to experience? I wanted to write this as a way to find the answer to that, and yet I still don’t know. It seems almost rude to dismiss something as a “waste,” to say that a form of entertainment is completely invalid because I don’t enjoy it or don’t partake in it. In theory, to spend my time doing the same thing over and over again would be inefficient when I could be working on something shiny and new. In practice, fun is fun, and there’s really nothing wrong about finding fun in a different place.

        If I hadn’t just rediscovered some small measure of why I love single player games and why I love playing through the beautifully crafted environments and stories that my $60 unlocked for me, I might still be worried about all of that. But now I’ve got things to do, and I have a stack of games in front of me that I could, if I’m lucky, finish before going back to university. It’ll take some dedication to righting my wrongs - how could I stop playing Persona 4 in the middle of the last dungeon in the entire game?! - but I don’t know when I’ll find the time again. So I’m going to use it properly and remind myself why I go hunting for PS2 games in the bargain bins in the first place. Why, you might ask? They’re games I can’t imagine I’d regret playing, and I want to give my money to anyone who will take it in exchange for them. I want more of these games to exist, and so even if I never even play this instalment, perhaps I’ll play the next. It would be a shame if we ever lost Atlus or Grasshopper Manufacture, or even Insomniac, so I will gladly throw my money at them. And I will gladly throw my time into their churning machines of glorious entertainment.

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        On an entirely different level, but loosely related by the main “theme” of this post is the matter of writing, and this tumblr itself. Its value. The time I spend on it. I’m above a hundred posts now, at least a dozen of those long, rambling trains of thought much like this one. I’ve spent hours writing for a few close friends and a handful of their friends. Yet I don’t feel that it’s been wasted time. Perhaps it’s a legacy of my ADHD, but I don’t often sustain trains of thought as long as posts like this would have you believe. Writing makes the foundation solid enough for me to keep building, to keep writing and communicating and thinking instead of running in circles all the time. If I forget where I was going, I just scroll up. If that doesn’t help, either I stop or I forge ahead and let the words take their own course. But the act of sharing all of this, making it public and available for anyone who cares to read it, is a marked improvement in transparency for me. It used to be that I had few close friends, only as many as necessary to stave off loneliness and disappointment, and only they could know what really went on inside my head. Even then, I couldn’t always force myself to express what I wanted to tell them, and plenty of half-formed conversations went forgotten because I wasn’t satisfied that they would be… well, good enough. That by starting them in truth I would end up exposing something wrong or displeasing about myself and sour my few solid relationships.

        So to write and share everything about myself is thrilling, terrifying, and satisfying all at the same time. I feel perfectly content saying that this tumblr is all of what I am. That it’s available to all, if they want to read it. I used to hide behind a plethora of personas, and now they’re unified across all of the content I put here. All of the facets of me, converging in one little part of the internet. If I try to put on an act of being “just” a gamer, or “just” a metalhead, or otherwise put the spotlight on any one of those facets - all it takes is this tumblr to shatter that illusion. I like the idea of forcing myself to change for the better. I like the idea of bringing more people into my Precious Little Life. If they don’t deserve to be here, chances are they won’t bother to read any of this, and the point is moot in the end.

        I would bring up the matter of writing fiction, but then I do it so rarely that it would be… yes, a waste of time. I’ve only written two letters so far, and I’m supposed to be writing again, but I have yet to start. I haven’t been able to figure out what time in my schedule to dedicate to it. Soon, I’ll start. When I run out of things to write about for my tumblr, I think. But then I won’t have anything to put into the letter, so it may have to wait until the excitement level rises a little here in my new home. But then I already know that’s a worth investment of time, so long as I have something to write about.

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        Like most of my posts, this one would be “selfish” if I believed you would all feel compelled to actually read it. Thankfully, I know that you’re a human being and will happily stop reading if you find it too long and boring. Like every other post I’ve written for my own benefit and shared for yours (at least if you want to learn more about me), I’m glad that I’ve written it. It comes as a result of several conversations with vael about multiplayer gaming (something he enjoys a lot), which tended to go in circles as he stated his case and I proceeded to ignore it and say what I really wanted to say. For the benefit of us all, then, I hope that I’ve managed to put that to rest for now. If you’ll excuse me, I have some beautiful ruins to explore.

How To Write An Essay

Hey there kids! It’s Demi, back again for writing tips! It’s almost time for school to start, so you know what that means - essays! Oh boy! Here are my very own notes on writing essays, for my own reference while writing and compiled through experience and by express instruction of my amazing AP English teacher. You can look at them and try to keep them in mind, or alternatively print them out and keep them around for reference while writing and editing. I have more for my own reference in my handy-dandy file folder, like essay rubrics and commentary on other essays so I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. Most of the key elements from those things have been used in my essay writing tips. Moving on, first the tips if you’re confident in your method, and then I’ll outline some steps for writing a literary essay. If you’re writing a research paper, you’ll want to do things a little differently, but that’s not too hard when you know your way around a good essay.

- Start with a strong thesis. Don’t use something obvious; try to have a little creativity and insight. Don’t go overboard (Ross from MacBeth is secretly a witch!) but look for a way to make your own interesting conclusions. Your thesis should also be very clear and extremely well written. Your thesis should be the strongest sentence of your entire essay. It is the most important one, so pay attention to it. Rewrite it as many times as necessary.

- Start your paragraphs with topic sentences. These are basically a mini-thesis that introduce the subject of your paragraph. To test your topic sentences, combine them with your thesis to create a small paragraph. If this paragraph works well and sums up the major points of your essay, congrats! You’ve got nice, strong arguments to support your original thesis.

        Example from a short essay I wrote comparing Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet, from Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice respectively: While the author’s styles of writing may differ, the protagonists of Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice share many common features. First and foremost, Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet are strong female characters, both self-assured and determined to be the equal of the men in their lives. After initially rejecting the advances of their future soul mates, Jane and Elizabeth are unable to forget the chances they were given. When they are finally married to their respective husbands, both characters are sublimely happy.

        There’s a slight jump between the second topic sentence and the third, but overall I think that’s a pretty decent paragraph to sum up the main points of my essay. It flows well enough, and it establishes what I’m going to write about, and then elaborates my key arguments. If you have something like this, you know for sure that you’ve got good topic sentences. Then you just need to add good paragraphs onto them!

- Have textual support for your arguments - plainly put, use direct quotes to prove you aren’t pulling things out of your butt. You can use quotes from your source material (book, play, whatever you may be writing about) or quotes from things you’ve researched - as long as it’s related to what you’re trying to prove. Being able to back up your argument with real references will make you look smart, and smart people are sexy.

- Analyze the quotes you’ve sprinkled throughout your essay. Don’t just throw them in there - explain why you picked them, or what they mean and whether or not you agree with them. That’s a little secret - you can quote someone making the opposite argument that you are, and then proceed to prove them wrong. You don’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t, just research things that go along with your argument. Providing a counterpoint, and why it’s wrong, will improve the overall argument of your essay. It’s very easy to make a biased essay, so researching the opposite point of view will help tie things together. You’ll be able to refer to every other point you’ve made, and then make a few new ones.

        Secret PROTIP: You don’t need to quote an entire block of text, or even an entire sentence. You can grab pieces of a quote and integrate them into a sentence just to avoid having to think and sound like you know your stuff.

        Example from the introduction of my Animal Farm essay: The other animals believe that “with their superior knowledge it was natural that the pigs assume leadership” (17), yet they never question the decisions made by the pigs. By following the pigs like figurative (and literal) sheep, the residents of Animal Farm allow the totalitarian regime to flourish unquestioned and unopposed.

        First sentence: Quote integration. See how I got out of actually writing a sentence by quoting the novel? Shows I know the book well enough to incorporate it, and just sounds nicer than whatever I would have written. Also sets up an argument for later.

        Second sentence: Thesis. The topic was the importance of questioning leadership. Important things to note: literary devices. Always a plus for making a shiny thesis statement. Your thesis statement should be catchy and flashy, enough to stand out in your reader’s mind. They should know it’s your thesis, and remember it too.

- Use transitions. Don’t just go straight into a new topic without any kind of obvious connection between the two. This will also help your essay’s organization - if you can’t connect two topics, don’t put them beside one another. Your essay should flow naturally from one thing to another. The final sentence of your paragraph should end things in a way that brings it into the first of your next paragraph. Sentences should also have transitions - however, yet, honestly, moving on, things like that. Google it if you don’t know what they are. Don’t overuse the same transitions repeatedly - every second sentence shouldn’t start with “however, …”, so have a bit of variation. Google a list of transitions if you want to add some variety.

- There are two components to the “sound” of your essay: the style, and the voice. The voice is simple enough, and something to be determined by the purpose of your essay: there is the academic voice, the jovial voice, the sarcastic voice, etc. Your audience determines your voice. This should stay the same throughout your entire essay, and you’ll notice that any time you stray from that it will be very strange for your readers. If you’re writing a serious, academic paper, don’t try to make a joke like you would with your friends. If you’re writing a funny internet article for your funny internet friends, don’t try to sound like a genius.

        Style, however, is something that can vary from sentence to sentence. A short sentence with simple words, or a long, overly wordy sentence. You can use both in your essays, and in fact, you should, because if you have a three page essay with only twenty sentences, you’ve done something wrong. Likewise, you shouldn’t split each of your sentences into three tiny ones because you think it looks cooler to have that many periods. Mix it up and show that you’re capable of writing the way you need to, rather than just the way you want to. Sometimes, a long, flowery sentence is perfectly called for. Other times, tiny, choppy sentences are the way to go. Experiment enough and you’ll find the proper times for both.

- Avoid hyperbole. Should be pretty obvious; don’t exaggerate. Don’t claim that the book you’re writing about is the best book ever, or that Shakespeare is the “most famous playwright of all time” (actually Shakespeare I’m really happy for you and Imma let you finish but x was greatest playwright of all time - OF ALL TIME) or whatever. This is something most people do by default to kiss their teacher’s bum and try to get a good grade, or at least increase their word count. But it sounds better if you rewrite it realistically, I swear.

- Avoid clichés. You may think that it sounds cool to say something your dad says, like “it’s better than a kick in the butt with a frozen boot, you know!” but it doesn’t really add anything to your essay. Usually you can take them out and replace them with something shorter and clearer, which will be better for your essay in the long run. Trust me on this one.

- Take out extra adjectives/adverbs. You don’t need to fully describe the darkness of Grimdark Depthless Land of Eternally Black and Sunless Darkness. Something is not both large and huge. Few things are hugely large. See what I’m getting at? Don’t repeat yourself for the sake of word count or emphasis, at least in this way. Repetition is still a literary device and you can use it that way if you want. But extra adjectives aren’t really a good way to write and make a point, rather you’re over-emphasizing a point you’ve already made.

- Take out extra prepositions. At, under, on, in, of, in the, etc. “In the bedroom under the bed that’s on the floor in the house of the murder.” It makes it very hard to understand what exactly is going on, so try to rewrite your sentence and avoid having multiple prepositions unless you absolutely have to.

- Avoid using a “passive voice.” Try not to use words such as: am, are, was, were, be, been, being. Typically, words like that are used to make a sentence overly formal and make your point sound weak. “The poetry of the 18th century was typically written by aristocrats, but now it is being written by people who are far less well off, many of whom have never even been waited on hand and foot.” What, exactly, am I trying to say there? Who knows? You may not want to go to this level of nitpicking over your vocabulary, but removing these words and rewriting the sentence will be a rewarding challenge if you can find a better way. It makes your arguments tighter and just… it’s something you only notice as a complete overhaul. Entirely passive to none at all.

- Some word nitpicking. Much like passive voice, these are words to avoid using if you can. Much like passive voice, you can use them if you can’t possibly rewrite the sentence. Much like passive voice, your entire essay will sound better if you can avoid using them. Words to avoid forever: is, has, there, it, this, thing, have, had. It can be really hard to avoid them, and especially at first you will find them EVERYWHERE. But the more you work at removing them the less they’ll even work their way in. You will, in all honesty, become a better writer in the course of a few essays if you can rewrite your sentences to avoid them. Much like passive voice. Compare your passive, it this thing have had, essays to your ultra essays and you’ll be so happy inside.

- Something you can always add is literary devices. Some choice ones that won’t be out of place are parallel syntax (that whole “much like passive voice” thing up there), metaphors, allusions. Actually that’s pretty much it on the list of literary devices that aren’t too literary for an essay. So use those if you can.

        1. Pick a topic without being too broad or too narrow in your focus. If you aren’t very particular on your subject, you’ll get too much useless information. if you’re too specific, you won’t find enough information to make good arguments. Use your own judgement.

        2. Do a small amount of preliminary research, enough to have a slight idea of your subject. Chances are you already know something about it. Use this to create a very rough initial outline. First, create a basic thesis, with a little originality. Then give three example supporting arguments you could use for that thesis. Having an idea of what you can write about will help you pick out key information when you do your research.

        3. Armed with your outline, do in-depth research on your topic. There are two strategies here, depending on your time management skills and how early you’ve started to work on your essay. The long-term strategy is to find a lot of sources of information, without reading them until you believe you have enough to pull you through your essay. The short-term strategy is to check out each source and then find another as soon as you’ve finished with what you’ve found. With the long-term strategy, you won’t actually look like you’ve accomplished much until you start working on your information. With the short-term strategy, you know exactly how much information you have and how much you’ve accomplished at any given point in time. The main difference is that with the long-term strategy your essay will come together all at once, while the short-term essay will be a work-in-progress at all times.

        Regardless of what order you plan to gather your information in, when you do start looking into your sources, you will have to take extremely good notes so that you can actually use them to write with. Read through the article (or section in a book, or whatever) and jot down some small notes, then on your second pass write down everything that could possibly be useful in your essay. Copy down quotes that could be useful in your essay, and small phrases that could fit easily into what you write. Repeat the process with all the sources you’ve found. The basic structure of your essay should revolve around these notes. You will be relaying and explaining the information you find, so look at it like a painted Easter egg or something. The squishy insides are the information you’ve found, while the pretty shell around it is what you’ve written using that information. Nothing in your essay should come without information to back it up, and there should be some sort of reference to your research quite frequently. You didn’t make this stuff up, so your writing shouldn’t be the most important part of the essay. All you’re doing is collecting it and putting it in a nice little package, so make sure you wrap it up nice and neat.

        If you’re writing an essay about a book, your process should be slightly different. You probably won’t have time to read the book twice, and even if you do you probably won’t feel like writing afterwards. Your goal then should be to identify and isolate as much useful information as possible on your first read. Use highlighters, post-it notes, write chapter summaries, whatever works for you, so long as you can find the information you need. The more you identify as being useful, the easier it will be to write your essay. So take your time reading, and even if you don’t know what your essay will be about, pick out things that could be useful. You may end up needing it, or you may not. But the more attention you pay, the better your essay will be.

        4. After you’ve finished your research, you will likely have several pages filled with notes and scribbles on your various sources. That’s good. Now, you should have all the information you’ll need for your essay. All that’s left is to put it together. So, now that you have all your information, go back to your outline and evaluate the information you found. If you have a better thesis, start with that. Then look at your arguments and build as many as you need, based on the information you have to work with. If you can’t prove a point, don’t make it. This may not be your final outline, because you may start writing and find it doesn’t make sense, or you can’t argue a point as well as you might like. If you do decide to change your outline again, congrats, you know what you’re doing. Don’t try to fluff up a paragraph just because you need to write a certain amount, because it’s only going to bring your mark down. If 5% of your essay is based on having x paragraphs, you’d be better off losing some of those marks than writing a crappy essay. Of course, you shouldn’t need to worry about that, but what I’m trying to say is that you should write a good essay, whether it’s too short or too long. If it’s good enough, your teacher shouldn’t care whether you met the proper criteria.

        5. Now that you know what you’re going to write, it’s time to decide how you like to write. There are two different strategies here, and I would suggest trying them both to see what works for you, but if you have a gut feeling about it, go for what you like best. One strategy is to write your body paragraphs first, and then complete an introduction and conclusion afterwards. The other is to start with your introduction and write your essay in the order it will be read. I’ve done both, and each has its own benefits and drawbacks. I’ve had good and bad essays with each: waiting to write your introduction and conclusion can mean you have a really strong intro and conclusion that go well with your body paragraphs, or it can mean you have amazing body paragraphs but no strong thesis or conclusion to tie them together. If you get tired when you finish writing your essay, or run out of time, you don’t really want your intro and conclusion to suffer for it. If you write your introduction first and your conclusion last, you may end up having to change your introduction or having a weak conclusion that doesn’t fit what you’ve written. On the other hand, it may help to direct you when you’re writing your body paragraphs. It’s honestly up to you based on your writing style, so try them both and see what you like.

        6. When writing your introduction, your thesis should be absolutely clear to the reader as it should make an obvious point and establish the goal of your essay. The rest of your introduction should briefly outline your body paragraphs, and make a few observation that you’ll revisit in your conclusion. You want to get people interested in what you’re writing, so be interesting.

        The basic format for your body paragraphs should be: topic sentence, lead in to some kind of proof or example, your proof/example, then an explanation and analysis of your quote or reference. Add more proof as needed. The analysis is important, because it’s what your essay is really about; it’s you explaining what you’re actually talking about, and why you included the information you’ve included. Organize your body paragraphs in a way so that they flow nicely into eachother.

        Your conclusion is like a modified version of the introduction, now that you’ve tried to prove your point. Restate your thesis in a slightly different format, and explain the observations you’ve drawn from the information presented. This is where you make everything click, if it hasn’t explained itself yet. By reading your intro and conclusion, someone should get the key points even if they don’t really have all the information. If you think it’s incredibly important, mention it in both the introduction and conclusion.

        7. Now, your essay is done! This final step is optional, but highly recommended. You could just call it a day and hand it in, but I would recommend reading through it yourself and editing it as you see fit, then passing it around to anyone you know who might be able to help you proof-read it before handing it in. If your teacher will do this for you, get them to do so as well before you finalize your essay. The more input you get on your essay, the better it will be. When you have a finished product, the heavy lifting is basically done. Edit and revise as you see fit. Then hand it in and wait for the good news!

        Some other things you could research to improve your arguments in your essays are logical fallacies, annotation strategies (for writing essays on books or other long material), poetic devices (for literary essays), writing style problems (for adjusting your style based on your needs; one example is that passive voice is good for writing lab reports, while not so good for an english essay) and, well, anything you find your lose marks for repeatedly. Your goal should be to identify problems in your writing and correct them in the future. That’s why I’ve kept all my essays from this past year, to compare my original, less-than-stellar attempts to my later essays. Examining my older essays shows the problems with my writing style and mistakes I make repeatedly, so now I know to avoid them in the future. When you can do the same, well, you no longer need anyone else’s help to improve your writing.

Some assorted stuff today. Again, I would have finally typed up my prom post, but I un-gave up on getting the other pictures I was missing because my english teacher said she’d want a copy of the picture I got with her, so that will come SOME DAY MAYBE OR MAYBE I SHOULD JUST MAKE A POST WITH WHAT I’VE GOT, I DON’T KNOW. I guess if I don’t do it tomorrow, it’ll be so late as to be useless. Two weeks late is a bit much. I’ve already got today’s post planned out, so oh well!

First is an interview with Polar Bear Club, which is cool because they discuss how they’ve been helped by the advertising power of the internet, rather than hurt by music piracy, but the real highlight for me is this story:

Your new album is coming out on Red Leader Records this month. Where did the name “Sometimes Things Just Disappear” come from?

We were in the studio and having a really tough time coming up with a memorable/cool/meaningful name that we could all agree on. Actually, pretty much the only thing we EVER agree on is that Taco Bell rules. So we were well in the midst of a competition amongst ourselves that we affectionately dubbed the “Taco Bell Challenge,” during which we all tried to eat one of every single item on the menu over the course over our studio time. As you could probably guess, no one finished and we were all pretty miserable for having tried. But one of the days when some of the guys went to order some tacos, they had a really huge order and were a little short on money, and they had a pretty awkward encounter with a really slick 17 year-old manager guy in a suit who turned out to be one of the best individuals any of us have ever encountered. Our old bass player, Greg, was trying to order his Mexican Pizza and was surprised at the price, and told the manager he was short…to which our hero replied, “you know what? Sometimes things just disappear…” and proceeded to take out a mysterious card and swipe it, giving Greg all of his food for free. Manager dude…if you read this, we love you, and sorry if this gets you fired.

I wish I could be slick 17-year old manager guy who’s comfortable enough with his job that he can do whatever the hell he wants. I do not wish to fail to have that job, however, and so I won’t go looking for it.

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        Next up is an article about how pirating books hurts the industry. In the middle, when she mentions what happens when a publishing house loses money, that scares me. Not having money means they can’t continue to make money, which basically means bad things in the future unless they get really lucky, and I don’t want that to happen to any of the series, authors, or publishers I really like.

        Then the part about the money she actually makes scares me, because it makes me terrified about the prospect of ever living off of my writing, which I never honestly planned to do, but it was nice to think I had the option! She says she “wrote rough drafts, then did edits (in one case, grueling edits), copy edits, and final pass edits. I wrote back copy and front copy, and acknowledgements and dedications. I maintained a website, I blogged, I did copious interviews, I ran contests, I travelled and spoke at whatever convention would have me. I Tweeted, and Facebooked, and paid for a launch party, swag, and postage for review copies and bookplates.” For $25,000. Three books, if you have never in your entire life read a book, is a lot of writing. Many authors I read release at most a book every year, though perhaps theirs are much longer than hers, and perhaps as well their niche is a much stronger one.

        I can’t imagine I would magically become a Steven Erikson or a Robert J. Sawyer overnight, and from some of the other things I read the day I found this about how brutal it is being an author who doesn’t sell hundreds of thousands of copies (have I posted that stuff? I don’t even know, man) I find myself no longer considering writing novels as a career. Writing as part of a greater project, where my work is part of a whole and I’ll still get paid relatively well if nobody buys the product, is still an option, but you can’t just stumble onto those jobs and unfortunately my chance to be Anthony Burch has already passed.

        Then there’s how getting paid an advance actually works. “For keep in mind that an advance is just that: an advance on royalties. So I won’t make another penny on my first three novels until I pay back my advance.” Got that? You get paid with a loan. Then, some day, if you become rich and famous, you get some actual money of your own. Until then, you will sweat blood and books for your masters. However, the internet, as shown by the Polar Bear Club interview, offers many wonderful opportunities for alternative means of success. Perhaps I could sell e-books of my novel to generous strangers until I make enough money to print them off out of my own pocket and make something of a profit. Perhaps I could give my books away and ask for donations. Maybe a major change to the publishing industry is looming on the horizon, waiting to be unleashed the day I get the freedom to write for a living. Who knows?

        The ordeal involved to become a famous author only gets worse, according to the rest of the post, but it’s all there if you want to read it. The main subject is, vaguely, piracy, and so my responses to what she’s said follows.

        I’m one of those people that will go into their local bookstore and actually look for books to buy. I’ve spent many hundreds of dollars on books, and I don’t regret any of it. I don’t expect much for my $15-30. I want, essentially, 2-4 hours worth of entertainment. It’s what I paid for. Generally, I get more than that. That’s awesome. I often buy random books and continue to read everything that author writes until I accidentally forget they exist. I bought The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells because a couple of songs I have reference it, even though Project Gutenberg has it for free. In the future, I plan to read through the “1001 books to read before you die” and, if I can, own many of them. I also plan to have a somewhat impressive collection of books with which to intimidate future acquaintances.

        I have, however, pirated two series of books. One is the Haruhi Suzumiya books, only a few of which are translated officially, and I get the impression they’re not amazing anyway? I’d have a hard time tracking them down and a harder time reading them in public because they’re all fluffy looking. So I suffer through a terribly translated .pdf and it’s ok because I don’t know if I’d get $10-15 worth of neat out of them. The other thing I’ve downloaded is all of the Discworld books, all 30-something of them, and like the Haruhi books they’re pretty short and stuff. They’d probably run me like $10 each - nearly $400 - for like 100-200 pages each I think? Maybe 300, I don’t know.

        But I can get a trilogy of Drizz’t books for $30, which is easily 1000+ pages - i.e. a fair bit more value. If I were buying books, Discworld would be at the very bottom of my list. Like all the music I’ve pirated, I likely would never have paid any money for those things. I don’t need them, and in fact I haven’t read through any of the books I’ve downloaded. I don’t have an ebook reader, and I have a hard time sitting down to read a 200 page .pdf file in front of my monitor. So the fact that I downloaded those books just shows a slight interest on my part, and if it turns out that I’m wrong, and these books are books I would be proud to own and display - I will gladly go out and buy them, no matter how hard they are to find.

Alright, so my speech is roughly ready, homework is all caught up, and now I’m ready to tumblr. This may be long, but I’ll try not to go overboard. One interesting link right now, more over the next few days or something. Then random thoughts.

http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/2007/03/titles_the_reso.html
http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/2007/03/titles_part_2_a.html

        Above links are about the importance of titles. In summary, because honestly there’s only the one interesting part in the entire article: a title must have resonance with the audience in order to work. There are two kinds of resonance: automatic, which evokes something already relevant to the audience. Can be hit or miss, but when it does resonate with someone, it will tell them instantly something about the book and draw them to it. A strong one for me is the song Hollow Place by Polar Bear Club, which has such intense imagery for me that it sends shivers down my spine every time I hear the chorus and I ran home to look up the lyrics immediately after I heard it while driving home from school.

        Come to think of it, I guess album, band, and song names rely almost solely on automatic resonance. The main exception would be concept albums, like The Power of the Dragonflame. Complete crap for a title, until you know what the power of the dragonflame refers to.

        The second kind of resonance is acquired, so you don’t truly appreciate it until after you’ve read the book. These are risky, because they don’t grab you right away, and only become instantly memorable after you’ve made it through several hundred pages of quality literature. When you have something that doesn’t need to fall directly into a specific genre to succeed, you can take more liberties with your titles because people won’t necessarily want the book to be completely explicit with its title (ie Aliens/Predator works better than “Scary Monsters Kill People!”). Acquired resonance is what gets people talking about the book, because it’s clever and deep and etc.

        A good example for this one would be the book Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. When I bought it, I thought eh, kind of a fluffy name, doesn’t seem to mean anything though… So I expected elves and gardens and unicorns on the moon. Then you learn about Moon’s Spawn, a giant floating rock that houses the dying remnants of the Tiste Andii, who live forever but can no longer procreate, so they just wallow in their misery and apathy forever basically. They’re extremely melancholy by nature, as they come from this beautiful, amazing world with no light, and they screwed up and got stuck in a crappy world full of bleh and brightness. Only the amazing tough ones can overcome their apathy and go out to do things, and every single one you see in the books is a major badass. When you see them from a human point of view, they’re intensely tragic because, in reality, they have no reason to be so utterly sad. When you see them from the point of view of another Tiste Andii, it just gets worse, because they connect with eachother on such a deep level of empathy that they know there’s nothing they can do to help. It’s brutal.

        Not all of that happens in Gardens of the Moon, but after you’ve read the book and as you continue the series, it just takes on such a huge meaning and becomes the perfect title, even if it doesn’t immediately grab your attention. I know I haven’t mentioned the gardens themselves, but just imagine what kind of a garden you’d get on a big, floating pile of rocks inhabited by perpetually depressed immortals and their giant ravens who feed on magical energy. They aren’t happy gardens.

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        Slightly unrelated topic: why don’t women use electric razors? I’m not exactly pro at shaving normally, because I get impatient after a while and rush it, but my skin gets pretty irritated for a few days after I shave and occasionally I’ll nick myself. My dad was home for the weekend, and I borrowed his fancy electric razor, and it was wonderful. I got a closer shave than normal (except on the curve of my chin, but a few millimetres there hardly matters), it took a fraction of the time, it was better for my skin, my skin felt better afterwards (shaving cream makes me feel weird for a few days) and there were basically no downsides. Is it because nobody has ever tried to sell them one? So they’re a manly man product, and not a useful product all around? When you see a commercial for some fancy razor, it’s always a tough looking guy with some girl rubbing up against him and appreciating his perfect skin.

        I’ve never shaved my legs, so maybe I’m just ignorant of the tools and technique required that electric razors couldn’t provide, but it’s worth thinking about. You’d think an industry built around telling people they need your products, or else they aren’t beautiful, would be able to better exploit its customers.

        So, I had a brilliant idea for a story I started writing back in september, which I haven’t posted here yet because right now there’s not much to it. When I first started writing it, I wanted to do something really different, and after reading a bit of Lockpick Pornography (warning: contains phone sex within first couple of paragraphs, who knows what the rest is like) by Joey Comeau (of A Softer World fame), I realized that there is probably nothing weird I can write to get to people.

        Solution? Write it differently. In my head, I had a lot of backstory for the characters I was writing, but a story riddled with flashbacks becomes tough to read after a while. Switching points of view and time and etc. are hard even for good writers, and with no clear idea how to handle that, I was just going to use it as a guide to write the present stuff.

        Doing nothing in sociology class seems like fertile ground for whatever part of the brain makes stories happen, because this is the second time this week. I don’t remember the train of thought, but I started thinking I could go back to the story I started in september where a guy goes crazy and kills his girlfriend. In my head, I had an idea for how they met and how their relationship got to where it was, but I never had that in the story. I figured I could add a prologue to show how they met, and maybe a little bit of their relationship later.

        So, alright, we’ve got a prologue to establish the relationship between the first pair of victim and killer. Why not do it for all of them? Prologue I, Chapter 1, Prologue II, Chapter 2, etc. Might slow down later on, when everybody’s made their entrance. Maybe I could do flashbacks to antagonist stuff there, which is probably the best word because I don’t want to have “villains” or “bad guys,” just guys who are trying to stop the other dudes.

        Then I thought about the relationship between the pairs. There’d be some hint in the chapters, but I could do another little scene showing their connection to eachother, and maybe hinting at why this is all happening in the first place. The only thing is that might be a bit much, so I dunno. Prologue I, Chapter 1, Intermission i, Prologue II, Chapter 2, Intermission ii…

        I had another idea, but I totally forgot. I will probably add those prologues, but the intermissions are questionable. The idea only stretches so far before it gets annoying. It’s one thing to number your chapters only with prime numbers, and another to have three (or more if I can think of other reasons) types of chapters. It would help me write smaller ideas more often while I’m inspired, and it could go online instead of being published and looking totally out of place… That and keep me from getting in over my head by trying to imitate writing styles infinitely better than my own.

        Good thing I started studying early and could probably write while I’m at work!