Rynling R&D

14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living

This is a deep matter, and I won’t try to unlock all the nuances here. I will now simply share 14 tweets that capture the stale taste of life without a counterculture.

I'm proud, I guess, to be a contributor to whatever counterculture still exists. At the same time, I'd really like to be paid for my work. Being broke all the time sucks.

If I had money, this is what I'd do:

1. Buy a Steam Deck, which I've wanted for years
2. Take a three-day vacation at the end of the semester
3. Commission an artist to work with me on a comic project
4. Start a small press maybe

That's not even a lot of money, just $3000. But even $3k is a lot when you don't get paid for anything. I'm not delusional enough to think that I ever had the potential to become the next big thing, but I wish there were more opportunities. Even working for free is super competitive, and I hate it.

The strange world of high-speed semi-automated genre fiction
https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper

Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months. Writer’s block is a luxury she can’t afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on Twitter for access to the beta test.

I read this article when it came out and blocked it from my mind because it made me so upset. Now, having been reminded of its existence almost two years later, it still makes me unreasonably upset.

But at the same time, an evil part of me feels malicious glee toward the type of writers who brag about how many words they can produce in a day. Like, good for you. A machine can do that, and more. I feel better about my slow progress now. The fact that my words are fought for and then chosen with love and care might not mean much to "consumers," but it means something to me.

Idk man. I recently tried to read one of the popular "cozy mystery with monster romance" books on Kindle Unlimited, and I couldn't make it past the first ten chapters. All the bland and generic coziness made me want to commit acts of domestic terrorism. Like where does Amazon keep its servers. Asking for a friend.

Always, in the back of my mind, there's someone reading what I write and somehow baking it into the worst possible interpretation. Something I'm always afraid of is coming off like a victim, but I don't think this has anything to do with me as an individual.

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This isn't about being a victim, and it's not really even about late stage capitalism. The experience of feeling like an outsider due to circumstances beyond your control is universal, because of course it is. And, while I respect the fantasy of finding friends and working together to achieve success in a hostile system, I'm much more interested in exploring the reality of what it means to do your best but still fail.

Why reblog machine-generated art?
https://ms-demeanor.tumblr.com/post/734136970463313920/why-reblog-machine-generated-art

I don’t think that all AI art is ugly. I don’t think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that ‘having soul’ is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don’t think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don’t think that’s a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

This is an interesting and well-written perspective on AI art. I disagree with the first half of the excerpted paragraph, as I think 100% of AI art looks overly processed and dumb as fuck, but the main problem with AI art is definitely capitalism, by which I mean the main problem with AI art has less to do with AI and more to do with human artists not being paid, compensated, or otherwise able to make a living. Also:

Not everyone wants to make good art that’s creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren’t passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their YouTube video.

This is a perfect way to put it, because:

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I personally don't like AI art, but it feels reductive to say it's all bad all the time. I wish the corporate resources potentially saved by using AI art for disposable graphics were used to support human artists engaged in more meaningful projects, but that feels like a different conversation.

Google's enshittification memos (03 Oct 2023)
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

This is a long post, but it's well-formatted and worth reading.

When I say "fuck capitalism," this is what I mean. It's also good to have solid documentation for something I've been lowkey upset about for the past two years, which is that Google doesn't really work anymore.

I was invited to participate in a roundtable on "public scholarship" later this week, and I have some thoughts.

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TLDR: It's not "promoting the work of people from marginalized positions" to expect us to perform uncompensated labor while exposing ourselves to harassment, and I think younger scholars need to be more realistic and judicious about what "public scholarship" actually means.

...but of course I won't actually say any of that. What I'll do instead is be gracious and polite while supporting the other panelists and speaking as little as possible.

I recently read Andrew Ross's 2021 book Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. It's not a long book, but it still took me more than two months to finish. There's nothing wrong with the writing; it's just depressing.

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Anyway, the main thing I took away from Sunbelt Blues is that apparently the Mormons bought up a bunch of wildlife preserves, which they plan to use as a biological ark in the event of an apocalypse. As a result, the Church of Latter-day Saints is the largest landowner in Florida. True story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_Ranches

TikTok for Authors: The Ultimate Guide
https://kindlepreneur.com/tiktok/

Well, I'm here to say that, for now at least, TikTok is definitely worth a look for authors who want to expand their social media audiences. In fact, I might go so far as to say that TikTok is the best social media for connecting with readers.

After all, you don't see shelves at your local bookstore with Facebook favorites.

Here is my experience: I started out knowing nothing about the platform before beginning preliminary research for this article. But in just a few short weeks, I managed to get my TikTok subscribers over 1000, and saw measurable increases in my book sales and newsletter signups. The hype is real, folks.

NOPE. 🙃

For the record, I briefly attempted to engage with the Bookstagram "community," and it made me hate myself. A few of my mutuals on Instagram are distinguished older professors in their late sixties and seventies, and when I see them trying to create Bookstagram "content" I die a little on the inside. Then again, they're going to have to put up with my Bowser fan art, so

I’m going to say something that can easily be interpreted in bad faith, but I’m going to say it anyway because I think it’s important.

A new trailer for the new Legend of Zelda game was released yesterday morning, along with the official game title and release date. Nintendo’s tweet of the video gained hundreds of thousands of notes within minutes as it was widely shared and celebrated across social media.

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Speaking of capitalism, the reason why most people do “exciting” things during vacations is precisely because the feeling of being excited is supposed to be a sustained mental state with an appropriate build-up and wind-down. This is why, back when broadcast television was a thing, advertisers would pay exponentially more for ad slots during the weekend, so that they could connect the “excitement” of their ads with the excitement of a good weekend augmented by big-name sports games and tv shows.

The Twitter news cycle is very much a 9-to-5 workday sort of thing, however. Nintendo is incentivized to make its announcements during what has become the prime time of the American online news cycle, which is 10am East Coast time. This timing is good for American journalists being paid to stay on top of press releases, not for like. Students who need to go to class.

ETA: What I'm trying to say is that I'm frustrated by mental health professionals' lack of understanding concerning how social media works and how it affects people, and I hate how medical science reconfigures normal life experiences as brain dysfunctions. I hope all neurodivergent people are doing okay.

Opossum Country by Ben Jelter
https://benjelter.itch.io/opossum-country

This is a free, ten-minute lo-fi horror game about a trailer park. If you're worried that it's making fun of the sort of people who live in a trailer park, there's definitely an element of that, but the story goes in a direction that I wasn't expecting. The moral of the game is essentially that you shouldn't jump to conclusions about a community you don't understand. I mean, if the game can be said to have a moral. Which it arguably doesn't. Regardless, the ending is a banger.

Ben Jelter also made another free, ten-minute Game Boy game called The Last Employee, which definitely has a moral: fuck capitalism. That being the case, I'm guessing that Opossum Country is created from a place of deep sympathy for people on the margins of society. That's cool, but it doesn't stop the game from being creepy as fuck. The overworld pixel graphics are great, as are the more detailed character portraits.

So I realized, now that I'm spending more time on Itchio, that a lot of these retro Game Boy games are made with a program called GB Studio. Not only is it free, but there are also a ton of free graphics asset packs floating around Itchio. I also found a few free pixel art resources for Clip Studio Paint. I unfortunately never got the hang of CSP, but Abode has a decent set of instructions for creating pixel art on Photoshop (here). All good to know.