Rynling R&D

Last night I had a dream that I was reading the synopsis of the new Star Wars movie on Wikipedia. It was both very detailed and very boring. Also, Adam Driver himself came to me in my dream and told me that Reylo is canon. I had to tell him that he is a very sweet man but that I don't care about Reylo. He seemed disappointed, and I felt bad. That was it, that was my dream.

When I was in college I drew a comic strip for the university newspaper about how I had never seen a Star Wars movie in one sitting from start to finish. The running joke was that I couldn't keep the plot straight or differentiate between Star Wars and other big American sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, which I had also never seen in their entirety. The real joke was that, as a real person and not a fictional version of myself, I had somehow managed to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of all of these franchises and was therefore able to play metafictional games with their worldbuilding and narrative elements that were borderline clever enough to be amusing to a few other people.

I'm not sure "pretending to not know things about Star Wars" is a joke that would translate well into the present, and I'm grateful that this comic does not exist online, but I enjoyed myself. The fact remains, however, that I'm not emotionally invested Star Wars, and I probably never will be.

Still, it's a lot of fun to watch people get excited on Twitter, and I'm genuinely happy for them that they have something to be excited about. As much as I don't care about Star Wars, it's a wonderful experience to see people actually being nice to each other on social media.

So I found a short essay…

Ten Simple Ways To Get More Attention For Your Fanwork
https://melannen.dreamwidth.org/354977.html

This is all reasonable, at least in my experience, but the truth is that fandom engagement seems to have dropped off for most writers during the past two years. Almost no one posts or links to their fic on Tumblr anymore, but what I do see are posts with massive numbers of notes about how painful it is to be ignored by your fandom, possible reasons why no one leaves kudos anymore, and so on.

There’s a pervasive idea that you can build your own audience if you’re consistent and good at what you do, but the most popular thing I ever wrote was a steaming heap of garbage that I posted on FFN back when FFN was still mainstream in, like, 2009. I think a lot about how maybe I missed a window of opportunity, and how maybe I just wasn’t born in the right year. Like, maybe if I were a little older, maybe I would have been able to “make it” before social media blew up and collapsed in on itself. Or maybe, if I were younger, I would have had access to the resources and platforms that could have helped me develop my skills and community when I was still a student.

I’m afraid that the real truth is that some people are never going to make it, and maybe I’m just one of those people, unfortunately. Even worse, maybe my entire generation is never going to make it.

I don’t have a positive conclusion, except to say that I’m happy to be a shill for anyone who asks; it would be an honor and a pleasure. I’m actually planning on making a post about this at some point before the end of the month, but first I have to figure out what a sustainable level of “shill” would be for me.

- My Haunted Haiku zine is printed and in my hands! I sent a bunch of copies to friends and then created a listing for it on Etsy. Creating four zines in four months feels like an accomplishment! 

- I also applied to the DC Zine Fest just about as soon as the application went live. Tables are distributed according to a lottery, and I have never won anything in my life, so I probably won’t get in, but wouldn’t it be great if I did?

- I’m still working on putting together a Wind Waker haiku zine, and this week I made a bunch of art for it and got started on the layout. It’s going to be a really cool book when it’s finished, if I do say so myself.

- I commissioned one of my favorite Dragon Age artists, @geezmarty on Tumblr, to draw Balthazar and Ceres from The Demon King. Their illustration is gorgeous and super cute, and I love it! I’ve been sending artists various descriptions of the characters and the novel, and it’s been a lot of fun to see how they’re interpreted. Once the semester is over and I have a bit more free time, I’d love to start drawing all of these designs myself.

- Speaking of which, I’ve also been working with @evaisonart on Twitter to design Zelda and Ganondorf for my newest Zelgan fic, Malice. This has been an incredible experience, and it deserves its own post, so I’ll write more about it once the finalized designs have been posted.

- I also worked on another commission with a Zelda fandom artist whose work I just discovered a few months ago. We had a great conversation via Twitter and email, and she created a phenomenal illustration, but she never posted it. Since she’s very active and friendly, I was a little surprised, but then I went to her Twitter and saw that she recently made a series of tweets about how people in fandom should just ignore other people in fandom who like characters and ships that they don’t like, and… This could just be me being paranoid, but I get the feeling that something unpleasant went down. I linked to my account on Tumblr in my initial inquiry email, so I don’t think the artist has a problem with me specifically, but I can’t help but think that I unwittingly dragged her into some sort of stupid fandom discourse. I’m not gonna lie, the possibility that this is what happened hurt a lot, and I feel awful for the artist (even if what prompted her tweets has nothing to do with me). In any case, what I think I’ll do is wait a few months and then ask if she’s okay with me posting the piece myself.

This week I had my mandatory annual in-person Title IX training seminar, and it triggered the shit out of me. I don’t object to sexual assault prevention education in principle, of course, but the way the State of Virginia handles it is far from ideal. “Compliance” took just about all of my energy this week, and I wasn’t able to write.

But I did have some great conversations with artists I admire, and I was able to spend some quality time with Photoshop while listening to the Game Grumps playthrough of Skyward Sword. This wasn’t the best week, but somehow I made it through.

(from Shipping Isn't Morality)
https://shipping-isnt-morality.tumblr.com/post/183726148328/yknow-its-been-a-while-since-i-made-this


I also found another good chain [here] about how, basically, "if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would've fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets."

I still haven't found much of anything that addresses some of the particular problems I've experienced in the Zelda fandom, which are much more intersectional than most of the issues I see discussed on fandom positivity blogs. I will keep looking, but it's been a journey.

I should qualify all of this by saying that I'm not a huge fan of the idea that fandom has to be therapeutic or serve some purpose in order to be valid. There's another good chain [here] that highlights the misogyny and homophobia of the assumption that female and queer fantasies need to be "productive" in order to be allowed to exist. Sometimes you just want to see attractive people have kinky sex for no good reason, and that's okay.

The bogus “Momo challenge” internet hoax, explained
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/3/18248783/momo-challenge-hoax-explained


I'm teaching a class about demonic women in contemporary Gothic fiction this semester, and some of my students are obsessed with the Momo Challenge. I have vague memories of the Blue Whale Challenge from an old group conversation on WhatsApp, but I didn't pay any attention to it then, so it's been interesting to watch this urban legend spread and develop in real time.

By the way, maybe this is just me being weird, but I think Momo is actually kind of cute.

- As of a few days ago my book has a page on the publisher’s website and a listing on Amazon, and they just asked me to pick out a cover. Apparently the official release date is September 10. I feel weird, like, are we really doing this thing?? I guess we’re really doing this thing. *nervous laughter*

- I finally finished an academic article on Ganondorf that I’ve been working on since August. This essay means a lot to me, so I sent it to a friend who generously agreed to help me with proofreading and formatting. He just sent it back to me, so this week I’ll go over it one more time before I submit it to a journal called Games and Culture.

- I finished putting together my Haunted Haiku zine. I’ve been working on this every day during the month of March, and I’m starting to get excited about showing it to people. The cover, which was created by Sarah Winifred Searle (whose graphic novel Sincerely, Harriet is phenomenal, like easily 15/10 stars), is a true work of art, and I’m playing around with her design in Photoshop so that I can make a bookmark to send out to people along with the zine.

- I finally got around to translating the third page of Nintendo Dream’s Wind Waker developer interview.

- I posted the second story in the A Hero’s Inventory fic series. For some reason it hasn’t been easy for me to put these story ideas into words, and I’m only averaging a sentence a day. Thank god these stories are supposed to be short by design.

- I posted the first two chapters of that Contemporary AU Zelgan idea I wrote about earlier, which I’ve decided to call “Malice.” I’m already super emotionally invested in this story, and I contacted dark fantasy artist extraordinaire Monica Doss to inquire about commissioning character designs and a cover illustration.

- Speaking of commissions! I just discovered the work of the indie game dev Bynine, and I like their style a whole lot, so I commissioned them to draw Yunobo from Breath of the Wild. Because why not? Yunobo is my secret favorite character from the game, and this artist has a talent for drawing Gorons.

It seems like I got a lot done now that I’ve written everything down, but you know the funny thing? I feel as if I accomplished nothing because practically no one is paying attention. I keep hearing that there’s a minimum seven-year line to breaking into any given field or market, but it sure would be nice to have some external validation right now. I’ve been feeling super worthless for the past few months, so I’d like to start up these writing logs again. We’ll see how this goes, I guess.

I like when people use Patreon as a tip jar.

Some of the most talented and prolific webcomic artists and indie game developers I know do this. They’re like, “All of our content will always be free and open to everyone, but leave a dollar if the spirit moves you.” They then use the platform as something resembling a development blog, with all posts unlocked.

(If I were ever going to set up a Patreon – which I’m not – it would be like this, I think.)

What I don’t like is when people use “reward tiers” to incentivize people to give them more money each month. That’s gross capitalist bullshit, and it makes scrolling through your feed on Patreon distinctly unpleasant, like, YOU AREN’T RICH ENOUGH TO SEE THIS POST LOLOLOLOLOL.

I like when people use Patreon as a subscription service.

I support a few people who come out with a new set of postcards or LINE stickers every month, and they use Patreon as a way to distribute them. I also support a few people who do this with their zines and use Patreon’s option of charging supporters by “work” instead of by month.

(I’ve fantasized about doing this, because I love designing paper goods and sending things to people in the mail, but it also kind of seems like a full-time job.)

What I don’t like is when people use Patreon as a subscription service according to reward tiers. This can go wrong in two ways. First, if someone shows something cool to people in lower tiers but then says YOU’RE TOO POOR TO AFFORD THIS, IT’S ONLY FOR PEOPLE WITH MONEY HAHAHA, that’s kind of shitty. Second, I’ve known people who say that they’ll send you their zines if you give them, like, $20 a month, but then they only come out with maybe one or two zines a year. I love zines, but there is no zine in the world that’s worth paying someone more than $100 on Patreon.

Basically, I hate capitalism. It’s not that I think independent creators don’t deserve support; rather, I think it’s disgusting how Patreon normalizes using exploitative methods to extract as much money as possible from people who want to support independent creators.

During the past week I finished another playthrough of Link’s Awakening. I now have two Nintendo DS systems, one Nintendo 3DS, and one Nintendo 3DS XL, all with Link’s Awakening downloaded onto the console and three perfect save files on each version. I’m not self-actualized enough to be able to say whether Link’s Awakening is my favorite Zelda game, but wow I sure do play it a lot.

Shigeru Miyamoto has said (as quoted here, for instance) that he intended for the Zelda games to resemble miniature gardens that you can visit anytime you like, and that’s exactly what Link’s Awakening is for me. The game is a lovely green space that’s relaxing to wander around while following any number of branching paths, and it’s almost meditative in that I often find myself thinking about other things while I “walk.” As much as I enjoy the stories of the various Zelda games, I think it’s nice that you can play most of them without having to bother with too much text or context.

And honestly, although I’ve probably overanalyzed the game halfway to death, I play Wind Waker for the same reason, to chill out and clear my mind. I’m looking forward to the day when Nintendo releases the game for the Switch (or another portable console), because it’s exactly the sort of digital garden I’d like to be able to walk through the next time I’m stressed out on an airplane or in a hotel room.

After the porn ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18266013/tumblr-porn-ban-lost-users-down-traffic

Tumblr loses almost a third of its users after banning porn
https://sea.mashable.com/tech/2777/tumblr-loses-almost-a-third-of-its-users-after-banning-porn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393500
That last post reflects my own experience. I used to get around 600 to 800 notes a day in 2018, while now I'm only getting about 350. Then again, I don't really post anything these days, so that could be a factor as well. I was actually looking forward to Tumblr quieting down a bit, but the trolls haven't left yet. Because of the relative silence, their mindless barking seems to echo even further, unfortunately. I've been putting more effort into customizing Twitter to be a less chaotic experience, but it's still difficult to express a healthy and multifaceted personality on that trashsite.

Echo of footsteps
A sharp fluorescent buzzing
Empty grocery store

I spent way too much time watching Dan Bell's Dead Mall series on YouTube last night, and it creeped me out. Dan Bell himself is appreciative of the period architecture and kitsch aesthetic, and he doesn't film in a way that attempts to create elements of horror where none exist, but there's still something upsetting about these places.

This video series is all very Rust Belt; and, based on the specific locations, I would assume that this slowly creeping neglect is connected to both rural depopulation and the institutionalized economic marginalization of Black communities. That's upsetting enough in and of itself, of course.

But there's also a more universal memento mori quality to these videos that inspires a dread of cultural senescence.

I feel like someone should make a video series along the same lines about abandoned websites, because they give off the same sort of energy. It's not nostalgia, because the affect is distinctly negative, but it's similar. I think what makes the urban exploration of abandoned malls unpleasant is that they're "abandoned" instead of "closed," meaning that the lights are still on and the water is still running. If they were completely shut down and gradually being overtaken by nature, they would be beautiful, but there are still people inside these almost-dead buildings, and that's disturbing. In the same way, online spaces like Blogspot/Blogger feel weird because there are still a few people using them, and websites for children's movies from the 2000s are a little eerie because someone is still paying to host them. You want to feel nostalgia when you look at the past; but then, when you realize that it's not safely in the past, it's uncomfortable and uncanny.

Also, can I be real for a second? Tumblr is starting to take on an "abandoned mall" feeling, and I don't like it.