Inktober2023: Proactive Procrastination

 OR:

Pick It Up and Phone It In

I've been dealing with some motivation problems of late, evidenced in part by my absence from this blog. I participated in a drawing challenge early last year and I really liked how it went... until I didn't. Inktober of that year was rather anemic. I was only doing a few drawings, mostly leftovers from other projects or miscellaneous challenges that were only Inktober-adjacent. Overall, though, my motivation was shot. I just about got through the winter in terms of making my annual holiday card, but I felt totally spent after that. 

It's not because of the onset of AI-based art programs like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, though it certainly doesn't help. DeviantART has become a bit of a minefield. I'll think I've discovered a new artist and fervently peruse their catalog only to find they're using AI on basically their entire portfolio. That can be very disheartening. 

Fast forward to the first of September when the Inktober 2023 official prompt list drops. Leading up to the day, I was thinking about how I would explain to everyone that I wasn't going to participate in the event this year, that I really needed some time away to think about things. Seeing the list at first didn't inspire anything in me. Actually, that's a lie. It inspired despair. My motivation issues got put on full blast when I saw that list and felt absolutely no drive of any sort to make anything of it. I'd been making some vector pieces off and on in the months before, mostly text-based pieces, puns and turns of phrase, things like that. About 2 weeks later, I took a look at the list again and focused on a single word from the dead center of the list, halfway through the month. 

I got an idea. 

It was the word "demon." I was looking at the shape of the letters and got an idea to write out the word but with a pitchfork taking the place of the "m." I'd been watching some tutorials for Inkscape and all the various text-based effects one can do with a little pre-planning and some basic tools. So, on a lunch break from work, I opened Inkscape, and made my little bit of word art, Demon with both the "m" and the "n" being replaced by barbed pitchforks. 

3 days later, I had all 31 prompts done. 

Actually, it was more like 4 because I took a break after the second day. Some were straightforward, some were a little more elaborate, but all 31 were effectively in the can. I had even thought of going back a few days later and sprucing up a few, but I decided against it. I was pretty damn impressed with myself though I do say so my... self. There was no pre-planning, no juggling of work and play throughout the month of October. My only real responsibility would be posting the illustrations on a schedule. 

In years past, my rule was that I could come up with ideas and sketches the moment the prompt list dropped. I could start actual work on the illustration as soon as the weekend before the 1st, so I'd have something to post that morning at the very least. This year, I threw that workflow completely out the window and more or less by complete accident. I even thought to take it a step further and try to automate the posting process. 

Instagram has an option available to all its users to toggle between a personal account and a professional account. There's no cost or anything, and you can cancel at any time. One of the biggest perks is the ability to schedule posts up to 75 days in advance, descriptions and tags and all. I thought I had it all figured out... until I didn't. When I post to Instagram, I'll also have it post to Facebook, where most of my family spends their social media time. Many of my relatives look forward to my Inktober posts, so I was more than a little disappointed when I found that scheduling an Instagram post did not include the option to mirror the post on Facebook. 

So, I'm still posting the images on the day, though some may end up getting scheduled anyway depending on how busy I may get on a given day, if I have a rushed morning or something like that. Like I said, it's disappointing, but hardly the worst thing in the world. The first full week of Inktober is done as I write this, and the response has been so-so compared to years past. I'm not bothered by this. I expected it in a way; word art doesn't exactly set the world on fire. It may get a good chuckle here and there, but it's just visual metaphors through text, like concrete poetry. 

And that is how I told myself no, and got the job done anyway and with time to spare. 

The Sincerest Form of Preservation

On the off-chance you're new here, my site's name may baffle you. It is a reference to the H. P. Lovecraft story In The Walls of Eryx about a man trapped in an invisible maze in the jungles of Venus while searching for powerful crystals. It's not a particularly well-liked story by Lovecraft fans, namely for its pulpy sci-fi trappings and notable lack of cosmic horror. I don't share this opinion, though I won't call it my favorite. That seems to change with years. Many years ago, I would most certainly have called it my favorite. I even wrote fan fiction in the same setting. I suppose I'm more fascinated by it than anything, how different it is from his other works in terms of theme yet how distinctly "his" it is. There's a quote attributed to Lovecraft that goes something like this:

There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces' —but alas — where are any Lovecraft pieces?

He's referring to his major influencers and how they seemingly compartmentalized his work accordingly. Stories like The Outsider are very much in the vein of Poe while his "dream cycle" including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath are very much the kind of fantasy the Lord Dunsany dabbled in, among his many other achievements. As for those allegedly elusive Lovecraft works, the easy answer would be The Call of Cthulhu and all its tangents like The Color Out of Space. Meanwhile, In The Walls of Eryx or Imprisoned with the Pharaohs or Herbert West: Re-Animator don't necessarily fall into any of these categories, though it's not as if being in one of them would have helped his circulation back in the day. His work was rarely seen outside of Weird Tales, the most notable exception being At The Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, published in Astounding Stories, a periodical known mostly for very traditional "super science"-styled sci-fi. Ironically, In The Walls of Eryx might have fit in quite nicely there. That is, the magazine wouldn't have gotten letters of complaint about whether or not it belongs, like what happened with Mountains. To Astounding's eternal credit, though maybe a result of prior commitments, this didn't stop them from publishing Shadow in subsequent months. Nonetheless, Lovecraft's most mainstream exposure being such a cold reception likely didn't help his deteriorating mental state at the time of publication. He died in 1937 of stomach cancer and very nearly took all his work with him, further being buried under the weight of World War II causing a change in tastes. Fortunately, a colleague named August Derleth bought up the late writer's catalog and has been more or less solely responsible for keeping his work available and in the public eye for the last 70+ years. His influence is incalculable; even Ghostbusters owes a few of its themes to Dreams in the Witch-House and a few tendrils of the Cthulhu Mythos. 

And then there was the time he showed up for real.

I suppose this is all a roundabout way of saying I chose the name Decay-Proof Record Scroll because one of the most obscure pieces from an almost-unknown author features an item that allows written words to be fully preserved in an otherwise hostile and all-consuming environment.

It also ties back to one of the first blogs I ever kept, the now long-defunct Yahoo! 360. I had just graduated college as a film major with a particular interest in silent films which have had no shortage of problems in terms of preservation. While I'm far from heartless to the loss, I also hold a somewhat complicated opinion to the notion of art preservation. I guess it's akin to Buddhism's philosophy of loving without attachment. Try to preserve the work, certainly, but not at the expense of something else. I didn't put it so diplomatically at the time. Rather, I called the Mona Lisa an overrated object of social manipulation, that if it didn't exist, something else would take its place as one of the most beloved, studied, and overall recognized paintings in the world. 

In my defense, the Mona Lisa went missing for about 2 or 3 years before anyone noticed it, and only after it was returned did it gain its iconic status. If I was waxing cynic before learning of that theft, I was full cynic afterwards. Actually, that story is half a lie; some people did notice the painting was gone the next day, and there was indeed a formal investigation, with suspects including Pablo Picasso and motives ranging from profit to misguided nationalism. It was some purple prose by Walter Pater being dug up from the late 1800's and quoted in newspapers of the time reporting on the theft that swayed the public perception from indifference to unbridled fervor. Suddenly, this painting most people outside of art criticism walked by without a second thought was now a national treasure. 

I'm not saying any of this to admonish anyone for their love or affection or otherwise deep, personal connection to the painting. If you like it, love it, or think it's just okay, I cannot take that away from you and I wouldn't take the chance were the means available to me at the push of a button and the promise of all I'd ever desire in return. Likewise, if you somehow have a deep disdain or severe loathing for it, I only wish it's not for the painting itself but rather for the wishy-washy "Ignored Until Stolen" public attitude surrounding its rise to stardom. To put that last point in perspective, I've never been to a drive-in movie theater. They were beyond passe' by the time I was born, with the majority being abandoned and the remaining few serving more as museums and novelties than anything else. I'd always hear stories of people missing them dearly, only to find many of them had never been to one either. On top of that, when I started perusing the more obscure and seedier sections of my local video stores and also many, many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I discovered that drive-ins were more often than not a dumping ground for movies not fit for proper, sit-down venues. I wasn't expecting drive-ins to be arthouses or anything, but I wasn't expecting this nexus of frugality and camp in the form of parking lots converted into oversized living rooms. 

Of course, I absolutely adore the schlock and cheese and corn and trash-ure of drive-in fare, what's often collectively referred to as so-bad-it's-good. Many of those films face similar preservation hurdles, if only for having been produced very cheaply, very quickly, and often by production crews eager to move onto their next project rather than rest on their laurels. Much like early television or comic books, nobody was working under the paradigm of posterity. It's easy to forget that apart from audio recordings or maybe home movie cameras of the 8 and 16mm variety, there wasn't a good, reliable means of recording what we saw on television or bringing the theater experience home. The Olympics were first broadcast on television in 1936, but Sony wouldn't bring Betamax to our homes until 1975, and even that would remain a niche market until VHS a few years later. This created an odd social phenomenon in many up and coming filmmakers of the era. Since they couldn't simply rewatch the movie they just saw, barring a trip to the movie theater or hopefully seeing it on television, they had to resort to other means of recapturing those fragile, flickering memories. 

Stylistic influence is nothing new to art and entertainment, but this notable lack of accessibility started a game of creative telephone. George Lucas wasn't born when Flash Gordon was shown in theaters. Instead, he saw reruns of it on television. This is one of his many inspirations for Star Wars, an effort by him to recapture the feeling of watching those serials, but also improving on the formula with improved production values and an overall more unified aesthetic. Admittedly, the marriage of mystic science fantasy with a grungy industrial aesthetic is more than a little cumbersome, but all these years of reflection across all manner of home media haven't yet spoiled mine nor anyone else's fun. Similarly, Uncle George's foresight to merchandise his creation in the form of toys, books, and comics may look to all outside perspectives as a cynical cash grab (by someone who wanted to stick it to FOX for cutting his budget), but just like those filmmakers who had to resort to other methods to remember those films and shows of yore, it provided a toolkit for those who wished to follow the narrow path he meticulously carved out amid the hard-boiled concrete jungle of 1970's Hollywood. 

When a video is posted to YouTube, it is assigned a unique number to identify its place on the servers. Tom Scott has a fantastic video explaining this process and how YouTube will practically never run out of numbers for its videos. Because of this setup, among many other reasons, YouTube has what some consider a very draconian attitude about changing videos once they've been posted. Put simply, once it's there, you can only remove it via the nuclear option. That unique string of digits is now a corpse marker, and buried along with that video are all the comments and metrics that it brought in its lifetime. As such, if you make some glaring, factual error in your video, there's no slipping in an updated version into the same slot. That must be made a separate upload and the choice then is to either leave the old, erroneous version up, warts and all, or remove it and try to see if you can recapture what you once did before. As I said, some find this model frustrating, but more seasoned and therefore methodical content creators take it as an impetus to double, triple, umptuple their work before airing it in the global village's public square. 

I do have one major complaint about this approach that keeps me from going full apologist. When a video is removed from YouTube, there's at least a 50% chance I will have no idea if it's only that particular video that's been removed or if it's the entire channel that's been taken down, be it by the powers that be or by the content creator personally for one reason or another. 

There was a video in one of my playlists depicting an artist drawing some simplistic, but very stylized portraits on a large sketchpad using what looks like an ink mop (the kind used to fill in squares on a Bingo card), all while giving advice on how to build an art portfolio without a lot of practical experience. It's not actually the most informative video, more a meditation on the subject than practical advice, but it was nonetheless very well made. I wanted to link it to someone as an example of how to make a simple video look more polished. Unfortunately, this video was removed by a means I am not aware of. I am not aware of it because it is the only video from that particular channel I ever added to the playlist. I did not subscribe to the channel, and I do not recall watching any other videos from this particular content creator. When I go to that video's page, there is only a generic "Deleted Video" screen. I say "generic" because this is indistinguishable from any and every other deleted video's page. What I wish YouTube would do in this case is direct me to the channel that made the post, provided it's still available and active. They're more than willing to distinguish between a video that's been deleted altogether and a video that's been set to private to limit its viewing, but there's no means of directing me to the content creator if they're still active. 

Look at all the "not helpful" on display here.

This is important because, as discussed before, a video may be deleted because it's been updated and posted anew, with the old one deleted following a period of overlap to direct viewers to the new version (usually through a note in the video's description or among the comments). Besides that description of the video's content I just gave, the only other clue I have of this video's existence title of this video is a rough memory of its title: How to Build Your Portfolio Without Practical Experience. Once upon a time, it was easy enough to search for a video by its title. However, despite YouTube's policy of "now and forever" when it comes to uploads, virtually everything else about the video can be changed on a whim. In fact, there used to be an easily-exploited way of guaranteeing your video would show up in search results even if it had nothing to do with what people were searching for. All one had to do was look up what the trending search for that particular day was, which was often a video's title, and then change your title to match it in the hopes your unrelated video would show up alongside the Real McCoy in searches. Obviously, this is extremely underhanded and more likely to earn you the scorn and ire of total strangers who were already not interested in your video in the first place, and now had all the more reason to actively dislike it via its heavy-handed presentation. Luckily, it didn't take long for YouTube to resolve this issue and tweak its search engine to look for other factors besides matching words to a title, much to the frustration of people who used to rely on that to find videos they'd seen previously but forgot to add to a playlist.

This disappearance happened some time ago and despite my best efforts in searching, it doesn't appear the video was mirrored anywhere else like Vimeo. I've also not been able to work out the identity of the creator, much less what may have transpired before deleting the video. There was hardly anything objectionable or controversial in the video itself, so the deletion may simply be the result of its creator updating it and deleting the old, or it may be the result of the channel being banned from the platform for some egregious reason. I still think about it every now and again. It clearly left an impact on me, if only for its presentation rather than its content, and I've been trying to figure out how to channel that impact through the lens of that frustration of it being inaccessible. 

I don't remember exactly when I came up with the idea for what to do next, and I can't be bothered to search my notebooks to find out where I sketched up my game plan. Said game plan is to pay homage to the video in the purest sense possible by recreating it. This won't be a direct imitation, not only because I'd be working from memory, but because I'd use the opportunity to discuss the video's disappearance as much as to pass on its advice. 

My art style is drastically different from the artist of that old video, and it would feel more than a little cheap to try and replicate his style for the sake of a little nod in video form. My envisioned result would almost be closer to a parody than anything, as I'd likely use Sharpies on Post-It Notes to make the drawings while opining about the video it's paying respect to. That it would be deliberately hamfisted and lowbrow would be representative of the frustration at the source material's disappearance while the overall idea would hopefully redeem any perceived negativity, or at the very least make clear the frustration is with YouTube and ephemeral media in general rather than the content creator in question. By preserving its overall notions and tones, I'd be honoring its memory while adding my own little twist to it as well. 

Basically, this.

I thought of this idea again a few weeks ago when I remembered another video that appears to have gone missing. I don't truly know if this is the case as I haven't found any gray exclamation marks floating in blank space above a line of unhelpful text, but given the nature of its original posting, it may as well be. Once upon a time, YouTube encouraged social interaction on the platform along with getting more people to post content by allowing users to post videos as replies or direct responses to other people's videos. Essentially, when you watch someone's video, you could either opt to leave a comment below, or you could click another option available to create a video that embodies your response. This was usually a script to engage a webcam and allow you to upload a quick vlog right then and there. There were other options for reply videos, but they ultimately worked the same way. When you saw the original video, the right hand side of the screen of recommended videos would typically be populated with replies. This system didn't stick around mostly due to it being exploited by opportunistic parasites to inflate their own metrics, a la the title search loophole previously mentioned. Many of these videos still exist. It's only their spotlights that have been extinguished. 

The very first YouTube channel I ever subscribed to was The Momozone. The content of the channel varied, but it was largely focused on positivity and motivation. One of these videos encouraged a call to action by viewers. If memory serves, Momo was addressing concerns of YouTube changing its layout and/or possibly accepting a buyout offer from Hulu. At the end, he asked viewers to post a video in response voicing their own concerns over the changes and announcing their support of keeping things the way they were. It's one of these responses that will likely be next on the docket for preservation by recreation. The video in question is very brief, maybe less than 30 seconds, of a young man holding his camera at arm's length and pointed back at his own face, which is almost completely obscured by a towel wrapped around his head and secured by his other hand. One eye and maybe part of his nose are visible, as are much of his surroundings as he turns in place while also apparently moving from his bathroom to a hallway in his home. While this is going on, he very shakily and nervously expresses his desire for YouTube to not make any drastic changes to its platform as it may hurt smaller content creators in their effort to get noticed. He apologizes for his shakes and stumbles, explaining that he's not comfortable being on camera. 

Basically, this.

If it sounds like I'm making fun of this guy, I promise that I'm not. Why he didn't simply point the camera at something else while talking into the onboard microphone, I don't know, but asking that is not giving him any sort of grief. Rather, it's one of the most humbly human things I've ever seen. I'm watching someone overcome a shyness to make his voice heard. What's not to respect about that? Much like the art portfolio video, the reenactment/pastiche or whatever is a springboard to talk about a broader subject such as anonymity or the fallacy of free speech somehow needing to cross a threshold of arbitrary soft skills or proverbial chest-thumping in order to be regarded as valid. 

And I demand to be taken seriously!

I have no idea when I'll get to this, if I bother with them at all. I may end up waiting until I've got more of a catalog to work with than two videos. I've got a few others in the pipeline with a similarly elusive deadline, so these may be relegated to warm-ups for those. 

Countdown To Inktober 2018

I've officially become that guy, that guy who uses spreadsheets for almost everything imaginable. I tried setting this up as a checklist in Evernote, but it wasn't particularly convenient. 

It's currently the 20th of September, which makes it exactly ten days until the start of this years Inktober. This will be my third outing, I'm very excited for it, and maybe I'll get some of you to join in if you haven't already by talking about it here. 
For those who arrived late, Inktober was started back in 2009 by an illustrator named Jake Parker. It's grown significantly in that time, and while there are many takes on it, but the original goes something like this: the official Inktober site publishes a list of 31 single-word drawing prompts, a slew of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. You've then got 31 days to bring each individual prompt to life through the traditional medium of ink. That's the barest of the bare bones about it, and as I said, there's no one approach as all artists are of varying technical skills, comfort zones, and work ethics. 
Obviously, the important thing is to have fun, but of equal importance is to challenge yourself, push your skills, get out of your comfort zones, and try a new work ethic. Artists have a reputation for being rather persnickety and temperamental, working in a kind of ad hoc sort of flow. While I'm firmly of the opinion that creativity is not like a faucet or light switch that can simply be flipped on or off, I don't buy into the pretentious rhetoric that it's so elusive and nebulous that forcing it in even the most passive way would vaporize it on the spot. I think that's selling yourself short. Too many people see it like the Golden Goose; finding out what makes the fowl tick will stop its ticker dead, on account of being dissected. In reality, it's more like a muscle. You can injure it, of course, and there's certainly limits to what it can do, but you won't know it until you try, but it's best to take it slow, stretch it a bit, and pace yourself. 

I like to follow the official prompt list because it's the most well-known and it creates a nice common ground to see what everyone else is doing and how everyone approaches the same challenge, often in wildly different ways. 

For this year, the challenge I've set for myself is that I'm actually doing 2 prompt lists, the official and a new one I found on Instagram through a stationery company called MosseryCo. They're the pink column of the spreadsheet, with Jake Parker's being the gray. These lists are published in the early days of September to give participants some prep time, and I'm taking full advantage of it. I mean, I've got double the workload this year, so it's for the best. Yeah, this means quantity over quality (or at least some repetition), but like NaNoWriMo (in November) it's more about the process than the results. It's about getting rid of old and bad habits while trying to get used to new and good ones. 

In terms of medium, I'm probably playing faster and looser than ever. My first year was fairly strict, I made proper, traditional ink drawings in my sketchbooks, and the only digital work involved was some color correction and lighting adjustments in post. My second year I tried a hybrid approach of using an Iskn Slate tablet to "record" my traditional drawings and then digitally paint over them. What both of these years had in common was that there was more than one occasion I made an exception to my own rules. This year, I had an idea that if there was ever a day when I couldn't come up with anything, I would look to the corresponding day on the other list and combine the two. As I've been going through the pre-planning stage, though, I haven't felt much desire to do that. While there are some common/recurring themes between the lists, they are ultimately separate entities that will be resulting in at least 62 full-fledged drawings. As for bringing those drawings to life, I'm keeping that open depending on what's best suited to the idea, but the majority of drawings will be made using Paper by 53. It's hardly the most robust drawing app. In fact, the fine folks at 53 will insist up, down, left, and right that Paper is not a drawing app, but a notetaking app geared towards more visual thinkers. It's meant for making flowcharts and Venn diagrams rather than full, proper illustrations. Of course, that never stops anyone from using it as a drawing app, hence their own hashtag #madewithpaper, but it's overall not the strength of the app. It's got limitations and even, dare I say it, some shortcomings, but that's what I love about it. 

However you decide to participate in Inktober, I'd like you to keep something in mind. To crib a phrase from Stan Lee, every year is someone's first. If this is your first, I bid you welcome, hope you meet a lot of interesting people, and overall hope you have a lot of fun. 

Dropped a Pin in my Coffee on Twitter

OR:

The Painful Sting of Spam

When I posted my Ko-Fi link to Twitter and pinned it to the top, I was very surprised by the response it got. It got a number of likes, and even a few retweets. I was very appreciative of this. Unfortunately, it also got replies in the form of spam. A self-proclaimed artist who steals most of his assets and then slaps his own name on them has a habit of posting spam links on forums on Thingiverse. He's been banned from Thingiverse at least twice by now, and had some of his models taken down on other sites for violating the Creative Commons agreements on his stolen assets. I've written about him several times and talked with many of the artists he's ripped off. I've openly mocked him, for which I make no apology, and he's done absolutely nothing to prove me wrong. 

There was retribution, however. It's extremely petty retribution, but annoying in its toxicity nonetheless. 

The way many sites handle spam is not to delete the comment so much as obfuscate it. The first time I saw this was on DeviantART, when I was dealing with an art thief and all-around bully who didn't quite understand how comments worked. What would normally have gone in a private message or even the main comment thread on my profile page went straight onto my most recent upload. I didn't want to outright delete the comment because that would leave a "comment deleted by artist" label, which looks really tacky and potentially makes it look like I'm censoring criticism rather than cleaning up spam. The matter's academic by now since DeviantART handles comments a little differently since then, and this particular individual had been banned before for similar behavior, so now those comments have their own special sort of "There Once Was a Hole Here" label. In short, he's gone and I get to save face. 

Bringing it all back to the semi-current situation (I did this circa October of last year and kind of forgot about it until today while rearranging my Wordpress page), this spammer replied to my pinned tweet about my Ko-Fi page with his own damn site. Now, you would think I could simply delete a tweet that is a reply to my own post, but Twitter isn't set up that way; every reply is a comment unto itself, so to speak. This isn't necessarily a problem, except that when it comes to spam, what I would hope should be an obvious thing to spot, Twitter likes to give the benefit of the doubt a little too much. It's funny to me how much people complain about Twitter being trigger-happy with suspending accounts and deleting tweets that are barely offensive, while I can't seem to get spam off my own pinned tweet. 

If I pin a tweet linking my own Ko-Fi page, how does a reply that's nothing more than a URL to someone else's website not qualify as spam? Better question, when he replies two or three times with the same URL to his own site, how is that not spam? Why does that report need to be queued? Harassment and bullying can have a lot of reasonable doubt to it when it isn't outright racist or life-threatening, but a URL with no context posted multiple times not only to me, but to several others virtually picked at random should be as open and shut a case as it gets. 

It may seem that the obvious solution would be to block the user in question. Sure, but blocks aren't retroactive. Yeah, my page would effectively be invisible to him, as he would also be to me, but everything he's already posted as replies to my tweets are still there, and still visible to anyone else. It's literally the same problem as reporting his replies as spam. The only difference is that the spam may eventually be dealt with, whereas if I block, the best I can hope for is he gets banned and all his tweets receive the unperson treatment. 

Sadly, it seems Twitter is holding onto a very archaic idea of what spam is. They're more than welcome to prove me wrong, but it's based on whether or not they think there's a real person behind it or simply a bot programmed by someone and left to run. I don't know if these are really a thing anymore (I haven't seen them on Twitter in years, and they only cropped up on Instagram for about a month before disappearing), but there used to be these "promotional service" accounts that would temporarily take control of your account and tweet a self-promotion on your behalf. It would seek out relevant hashtags and then add your message as a reply. For example, if you were trying to push your 3D printing services, your stock reply would show up attached to any tweet that used the hashtag "3DPrinting" or whatever. If this sounds like a bot, that's exactly what it is, but here is where things get a bit Kafkaesque. The bot works at a speed that is only about equal to a human being. That is, there's enough of a delay between posts that it could just as easily be done by someone casually browsing the hashtags and typing up the reply themselves. The idea is twofold, that this tricks any automatic algorithms searching for hummingbird levels of communication, and that it doesn't violate Twitter's terms of service anyway because it's self-throttling. 

I've heard some sects of the Amish have a similar attitude about technology, that there's nothing wrong with them using a machine to do a job, so long as it only works as well as a person or an animal. That's fine for them, but Twitter isn't trying to maintain a lifestyle consistent with a particular era of history. Spam in 1998 is no different than the spam of 2018, and every bit as irritating and unwelcome. The only difference is that I am fundamentally lord and master of my e-mail's inbox, while my social media page is a little more democratic by comparison. The former is a letter SLIPPED UNDER my door while the latter is a wheat-pasted flyer SLAPPED ON my door. 

My point is Twitter may be more aggressive with spam than I am giving them credit for, but my experience has not given me any reason to rethink my position to the contrary. When I flag something as spam, and it only hides it from my view until the report is deemed worthy of action at a later point in time (possibly never), that is not even addressing half the problem. I don't want my front door used as someone else's billboard, and the fact that I can't see it from inside my house is not peace of mind. 

Basically, I wanted to use a paint scraper, but had to get a new front door. I deleted the pinned tweet (which I hated doing), reposted it (likely to the annoyance of followers), and repinned it (effectively erasing all the likes and retweets along with the spam). Twitter, we need a better solution than this. 

Driving Miss Daily

Once upon a time, Douglas Adams had a radio show with a totally uninspired name he couldn't tell enough people wasn't his idea called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future. It only had a few episodes and has only aired every few years, but it's easily-available on the Radio 4 site... wait, what in Hel's Realm is RealPlayer? Anyway, their last episode was about the idea of convergence, what we today may refer to as the Internet of Things. IoT is a common name in the hacker/maker/modder community and refers to a networking of several specialized devices. Probably the best, most common example of IoT if you're still lost on the concept would be any sort of peripheral you can control with your smartphone, like a bluetooth speaker or a lighting system. Instead of one gadget that does everything, it's several gadgets that do a few things. Almost 20 years earlier, for this radio program(me), one of its speakers painted a scenario in which the technology to make connected devices would be so streamlined and inexpensive you'd literally pick up a gizmo off the street, post something, and then drop it back on the ground before carrying on with your day. Hyperbole aside, while we're nowhere near using our tablets the way some countries use bicycles, there's probably a drawer somewhere in all of our homes that would make anyone from back then think we'd made it. 
Unless you're crazy diligent about trading in your smartphones or you've got some wicked protection plan for your tablets, you've likely held onto more than a few. Those that aren't taking up real estate in your junk drawers are probably lucky enough to be dedicated music players, alarm clocks, cameras, gaming devices, and maybe even digital sketchbooks. Such was the case for my Xperia Z Ultra, a very early entry into the "phablet" market, and still impressive in terms of size and resolution. It was my gateway to a fully-digital workflow. I'd done digital art before when I had my laptop, but I was still scanning drawings and bringing them into GIMP as layers to rearrange and edit. I'd long since given away my little Bamboo tablet because I never got used to the hand-eye disconnect, and I didn't have a mouse to get around the hassle of using a trackpad or trackball. My first Android phone was so small and the drawing apps available were so rudimentary I never bothered with that either. When I got that Sony, however, it was a whole new world, especially when I came across Zenbrush. Between that and Pixlr, it became my daily driver. I ended up giving away my laptop because I stopped using it. I still don't have a proper home computer apart from the old Chromebook I mentioned in my last journal entry. Over the next few years of having the Xperia, I started to move away from the single device setup into a multi-gadget workflow again when I decided I wanted Zenbrush 2, which wasn't going to be available for Android. That was when I resolved to get my first iPad, the mini 3. As you might imagine, I started using the Xperia less and less for drawing. Later on and totally out of the blue, I had to send my Xperia in to Sony to fix a bricking issue. This was going to take some time, so because I'd bought the phone unlocked, I had a golden ticket with my cell carrier to get just about any phone I wanted. I'd been seeing some YouTube videos about shooting videos using only an iPhone, so I thought I'd give that a go. I got my iPhone 5C, used it for a few weeks and fell in love with the camera so much that when I got my Xperia back, I kept the 5C as a dedicated camera. Following Inktober 2017, I upgraded my iPad to the Pro, and sent off the mini 3 with the 5C to an Alzheimer's charity to be repurposed as music players for the elderly. I was also eligible again for an upgrade with my carrier, so I got the SE to use as a backup in case I needed to send in my Xperia again. January rolled around and for my trip to Albuquerque to see family, I decided I didn't want to bother with two chargers (as my iPad goes with me everywhere), so migrated to the SE and simply never bothered going back to the Xperia. 
This created kind of a goofy situation that probably shows off how persnickety I can be more than anything about convergence. As I only use my iPad for drawing, and the SE's smaller screen isn't always desirable, I used the Xperia around the house for music, Twitter, Comixology, and occasionally drawing. Unfortunately, it's developed a fatal flaw. 
I'd looked into sending it in to Sony again a few months ago because its USB cover had broken off. It turned out whatever protection plan I had in place that let me get it fixed the first time wasn't available anymore and I never realized how long I'd had it. They literally told me to find a third party to fix it because they couldn't even give me an Out Of Warranty repair quote. This had happened before I migrated to the SE, so maybe I unconsciously saw the move as inevitable. It was also reaching a point where apps like Facebook and Instagram stopped working because its version of Android was so old. 
Fast forward to about a week ago, when I set it to charge up overnight and awoke to find that it couldn't get past about 74% battery life and was hot to the touch. I didn't think much of the heat because it's got a big battery with a charger that pumps a lot of amps through it, so hand-warmer was also on its list of duties. I figured something got jostled loose or maybe the wall adapter was going, so when it drained down to critical, I plugged it in again and left it plugged in all day. When I turned it back on, it was still stuck around 74%. I discovered that the instant I plugged it in, my app that monitors my CPU temp would immediately warn me of overheating. Using a different wall adapter with a lower amperage made no difference. Either the charging circuitry inside the phone was going out, or the battery itself has finally lost its full capacitance. My money's on the former, but in either case the only way I get more than a few hours of use from it is to turn on its Ultra Stamina mode, which only lets me access a handful of applications (mostly phone and camera related), reducing it to an alarm clock that is literally on its last day unless I decide to tempt fate and charge it up again. 
The app that took up the most space was Autodesk Sketchbook, and while I had backed up PSD files of most of my stuff some time ago, I realized how long it had been, so I spent about an hour one night when it was plugged in backing up everything to Google Drive.
Let that be a lesson to you digital artists out there. Even if you've already heard it, here it is again. There are two types of backups, those that fail and those that haven't failed yet. 

BACK... UP... YOUR... STUFF  

How long ago did you do that? Too long. Do it now. How many storage solutions have you got? Not enough. Get one more. 

Anyway, it's not like I stood to lose anything super precious; even when I drew on the Xperia, they were often silly little comics or cartoons for blog posts or Twitter. Still, it's an important habit to keep up, and I only wish it was this convenient and streamlined back in the day of using Zip Disks on my iMac. 

This marks the end of an era, with Hanging Lanterns as the last painting on my Xperia Z Ultra. Thanks for everything, big guy. 

I think 4 years is a pretty good lifespan for a smartphone. 

Even I Use MSPaint

I didn't have MSPaint growing up because mine was a Mac household. Plus, by the time I was drawing digitally, I had a wide array of apps to work with, but I've always had a respect for the use of a limited toolset in creating art. A professor of mine had a quote from Jean Cocteau on every syllabus of his, and I still love it. He said, "Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."
Similarly, I used to use a 3D modeling program called Strata Base. The company is still around, but the exact freeware program is long since retired. On its user gallery, someone commented on an image made with the software, "It's not the tools, it's the talent." I don't know of a concrete origin for that quote, but it's effectively saying the same thing as Cocteau. 
It shouldn't surprise anyone that many talented artists out there have done some incredible things with MSPaint, which in no small part helped keep it from the brink of extinction. Recently and thanks to Vox, I came upon an artist named Pat Hines, who shared some of his tips and tricks, including the use of gradients. Making gradients is actually easy, but it may not be obvious to users of more ample drawing applications. 
Zenbrush, my personal favorite drawing app despite the likes of Procreate and Autodesk Sketchbook residing on my tablets, has many similar qualities to MSPaint in terms of having a limited toolset, so this is a little bit of a handshake between these two gateways. 

Sirens in the Old Mountain Town

Had a few entries kicking around in the drafts bin, but not really feeling it on most of them. Some are outdated, and others just turned into "out of my system" exercises that I was satisfied with once I had enough on screen. In any case, until I get those solidified, here's a new ambient soundscape to go along with a recent painting. 

A Dryad for the Cracked Earth

Birthday present for my Mom:

Pair of Paintings for a SoundCloud post:

No True Inker (An Inktober Meditation)

2017's Inktober is closing in on its first week and despite a few technical annoyances, it's gone far smoother than anticipated. Like last year, I've been posting the finished results (and the rough sketch made on the Iskn Slate) to my Instagram, where they're immediately shared to my Facebook and Twitter. They're also being mirrored on a special Pinterest board (sans sketches) and sometimes an alternate or discarded version of a piece will be posted to DeviantART. At the end of the month, I may also post them all to my Artstation, possibly Behance as well. 

Exactly one year ago to this day, I wrote about how Inktober was as valid as any other holiday (possibly more so). I wholeheartedly stand by that and even found a few people saying the same on their own journals and social sites. Unfortunately, with this newfound solidarity comes an inevitable gaggle of snobs and purists out to ruin it for everyone, if only passive-aggressively. If anyone's ever given you a hard time about something you DIDN'T do for a holiday, you have an idea of where this is going. 

It's a mild grievance, and though it could have turned into a full argument, I decided to back off and carry on, bearing no ill will against the other person and continuing to follow their work. Besides, they have an unfortunate pairing of personality traits where they've got a very dry sense of humor but are more than a tad inept on the delivery front, so it may well entirely be a misunderstanding. I only bring it up because while that person may have had their tongue firmly-yet-obscurely in cheek, there does seem to be a bit of a fervor over whether or not participants are having a "TEH-RUE!" Inktober experience.

The teal-furred buck of the situation is, unless someone is simply posting duckface selfies with the Inktober hashtags or something equally unrelated plugging up search results (read: trolling), I'm not going to get all flustered about it, and you shouldn't either. If you're pumping out 31 drawings in 31 days from the 1st of October through the 31st, you are doing Inktober. Everything else is merely how much of a challenge you want to make it for yourself. 

This year, it seems for whatever reason there's been some thundering from atop Olympus in the form of a social media post* from Jake Parker admonishing people who don't toe the line on the "TOWOOO!" spirit of Inktober. Brad Colbow has a video showing this post and his reaction more or less mirrors mine. 

With all due respect to Mr. Parker, he may have started Inktober, but apart from due credit as coiner of the term and a snappy logo design, he doesn't own it. It exists with or without him. There's no application process and despite a few would-be pedants insisting otherwise, the original rules are fairly vague and open, with very few stipulations that could be seen as dictatorial. As for the author of that "bad habits" post, I have to ask: What if you're already a traditional artist and therefore don't technically have those bad habits this event is, according to you, meant to cure? Is the "TREW!" Inktober experience exclusively digital artists trading their screens and styluses for pen and paper? Even with the "full experience" statement at the end, this likely isn't meant to be any sort of heavy-handed decree, but it does put up a wall where one is not welcome. Is Danica Sills, for example, not doing it right because she uses watercolors and follows a different prompt list than others? If you watch her videos, and you should because they're awesome, she is not shy about sharing her various stumbles and hurdles brought on by the project and the changes in her focus and habits it brings up. Going back to Brad Colbow, the part he was gearing up for most about Inktober was the schedule, the daily deadline, something he typically doesn't have to deal with to that degree in his line of work. Why are the "digital artists who overuse Ctrl+z" the only people for whom Inktober has meaning? 

That's the key matter to bear in mind if you're going to pursue this: what does it mean to you? 

For me, I view it in much the same way as NaNoWriMo. The next great work of modern literature is not going to be born of someone hammering out a 50,000 word manuscript in 30 days. Prove me wrong, please, but we need to be realistic about this. What's the point, then, some would ask? I say to the same two words to those people for that event as I do for this current one: WORK ETHIC. Sticking to a set schedule with structured deadlines, along with the accountability of sharing your work in public, is going to work wonders for you. 

If you need a little more guidance than that, here's a free caveat: get out of your comfort zone. If you're typically a digital artist, why not try ink and paper? If you're typically a traditional artist, maybe now's a good time to dive in to digital and see what, if anything, you've been missing? If you're only a mere margin-doodler, why not take on a big project to see how far your creativity goes? If you've never livestreamed yourself drawing via Twitch or Picarto before, why not give your fans something to tune in to? 

Here's one more pearl of wisdom if you're feeling a little anxious about it thus far. As much as I don't agree with the "Boot Camp For Spoiled Digital Artists Only" sentiment, I will give it its due credit. Being able to infinitely undo your work can have a negative effect on your productivity, especially if you're already a total perfectionist. That said, even if you're doing Inktober digitally, you can't hit Ctrl+z forever. Hell, even if you're working traditionally, ink is cheap and paper is cheaper. If you've got 5 drawings done, and you're struggling with number 6, you've got 25 more ahead of you. That's not meant to intimidate you, that should give you relief. On the off-chance it doesn't, here's another number: 3.26%. That's 1 drawing out of 31 as a percentage. That is peanuts. 

A wise man once said, "We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better."

Speaking of being better, this has been a tough week for me on a personal level. I won't bother going into details because it's pretty first-world stuff on the whole and, in light of the recent tragedy on the Las Vegas strip, there's other goings-on in the world that deserve your attention, sympathy, and action more. Still, it's been a progressively crummy week with the first signs of "bad to worse" hitting home early yesterday. As of right now, apart from my morning coffee to keep me from falling asleep at my desk, I haven't eaten since yesterday morning. Obviously, this is not a good thing to do and I need to fix that as soon as possible. I still feel it's worth noting that my old go-to treatment for depression started working again. Yesterday, all I wanted to do was go home and try not to think about how much better a place the world might be if I wasn't in it. 

I drew this instead: 

and then I decided to give myself a buffer and made this one:

When I was done, I felt better. It was a legitimate escape from what I didn't want to think about, and I didn't go back to it when I was done. Yeah, the drawings suck, but that was never the point. It may be silly to say, "Inktober kept me going." but making art makes me happy. There came a time when it wasn't enough, so I tried something else. That worked for a time, mostly still does, and now this is helping all over again. It may not be the case for you, but it can be such for others. Once upon a time, I would have hated the very idea of something like Inktober, because it would turn my ersatz therapy into a detestable tedium, and that's the last thing I would have wanted. My process was too precious to me to muck it up with deadlines or themes or other sorts of rules. I was treating creativity like a fragile blossom, and what I've learned since then is that while you can't force creativity, you cannot be afraid to push yourself a bit. You don't actually know how far your comfort zone reaches until you try to go outside of it. 

If you've been hesitant and want to try it, it's not too late. Sure, you've got a little catching up to do, but no one's going to give you grief for, say, 25 drawings in 25 days, or 15 drawings in 15 days.... 

*Edit 7th October: when this entry first went live, I was unaware the post in question was from Jake Parker; I was under the impression it was a comment on a post of his and the various screencaps didn't show a username, so I assumed it was someone else, with other similar comments from Parker adding to the drama. While this doesn't change anything I've said, it is worth noting because, at the risk of calling Jake Parker an elitist snob or even a full-fledged hypocritical liar or something along those lines, this is what his website looks like:

Conflict of Interest, much?

There's also a number of items in the art supplies list specifically for the task of undoing mistakes... in traditional media. Again, this isn't trying to hate on the man; I'm willing to chalk this up to a poor choice of words. If I were more paranoid, I'd say he was getting some pressure from one of his sponsors because their traditional art supplies weren't selling as well as they maybe would have wanted. The point is there's a difference between encouraging people to challenge themselves, get out of their comfort zones, and drawing a line in the sand. 

Special thanks to YouTuber Baylee Jae for the clarification. 

Incubus Stoner

Here you go! The official 2017 #Inktober prompt list. Pass this along or tag a friend who's doing this with you. - #inktober2017 #inktober #inking #drawing #ink #drawingchallenge #sketchbook #illustration #jakeparker #artistsoninstagram #artists #artnews #drawers #brushpen #micronpen #copic #penandink #kuretakezig #pigmamicron #micron @jakeparker

A post shared by Jake Parker (@jakeparker) on Sep 11, 2017 at 1:09pm PDT

Cheaper Tablet Than H420

Huion, a company known for making cheap graphics tablets, including some full-fledged pen displays meant to compete with the Wacom Cintiqs. To put the caliber of materials we're looking at in perspective, Scott Adams has used a Cintiq UX21 since around 2004 to draw Dilbert. It's equivalent today would be the 22HD, starting at around 2,000USD. Most of my artist friends use a Wacom Intuos of some variety, which go for between 200-300USD. I have an ISKN Slate, which has a roughly 8x5" drawing area and costs around 180USD. There's also iPads, which are becoming increasingly popular, but the software selection is still limited and doesn't give you the full range of tools a desktop solution would. 

Huion's H420... is 30 bucks. It has a drawing area of 2x3". It's basically one step below those screens you sign at the grocery store when you use your credit card. However, someone at Huion decided to market the thing as a full-fledged graphics tablet on par with Wacom's budget-conscious Bamboo series (which go for around 100USD), and some artists took on the challenge. Ultimately, it's not the tools, it's the talent, but along with bragging rights and impressing clients, the advantage of something like a Cintiq or an Intuos is that you've got more room to work with for precise movements (the drawing area essentially mirrors you screen, so think about that trackpad on your laptop for an idea of the interface) and you spend far less time fighting the technical challenges than you normally would, letting you focus on the creative challenges. 

I'll be using DeviantArt​ Muro, their browser-based drawing and paint program and post the result. Muro is free, widely-available, and has a playback function for showing a timelapse of the process. 

Ivya Rephyouse Mi

honey, you lose me... so telephone....
DeviantART: http://neuronplectrum.deviantart.com/art/Senmiya-Kisby-Wyre-668851778

InkTober

Holidays are funny things, many with storied histories ranging from quirky to downright dark. Many are holdovers from Pagan rituals while others mark historical events (birthdays, wars, deaths, etc.). These can be repurposed as religious holidays, their original meanings glossed over in an almost Orwellian fashion, and others get put through a Kafkaesque wringer of red tape for the sake of making 3-day weekends in February. I'm sure there's at least two holidays that were made up by greeting card companies to fill a gap in their schedule. Many controversies have been sparked over to what extent a holiday should be observed, especially in regards to school closures. Comedians have built careers on the reality of the crawling chaos that is Christmas, with Black Friday bleeding into Gray Thursday (while Small Business Saturday never quite catches on). 

As time goes on, I've found I get less and less enthusiastic for holidays, ignoring most altogether and avoiding whatever I get roped into. For example, I've plans to see my family in December, but to be long gone at least a good week before Christmas Day. I'm also having my own Thanksgiving dinner this year with my roommate due to various rifts in her family that have left it deeply splintered. Part of me is a bit nervous about this, mostly from people placing an alarming emphasis on specific days holding specific meaning. 

"But it's about spending time with loved ones! And if it's not on the day..." they cry out, to which I whisper back, "Who's says I'm not already doing that?" Seriously, I don't get the idea that somehow a gift from someone you care about is less important on one day than another. Sure, Christmas Every Day diminishes the, er, meaning or importance or significance or mojo or whatever, but it's not a comet during an eclipse, either. Still, it gives me pause. I wonder if I'm missing something, if I've just become some embittered Scrooge sitting in the corner with arms folded and punctuating the statement with a mighty, "Harumph!". 

Then I realized there was a double standard in my thinking. I was cynical towards "traditional" holidays, but "new" holidays were getting the No True Scotsman treatment by yours truly. I was saying Pi Day was dopey, Talk Like a Pirate Day was stupid (I mean, okay, it kind of is, but you'll see where I'm going with this), Palindrome dates are an excuse for semi-clever marketing (9-9-99, 11-11-11), and Christmas in July is just an excuse for kids in summer camp to make ornaments in Arts & Crafts. Now, when I see people posting their old photos for Throwback Thursday or adorable kitten videos for Caturday, I may not get as excited for it as I do New Year's, but events like NaNoWriMo come closer than Talk Like A Pirate Day ever could. Tumblr taught me that October is Black Cat Month, when cat lovers paradoxically raise awareness about violence against black cats around Halloween as well as their statistically lower adoption rates while many shelters set moratoriums on adoption because of the aforementioned violence. I think it's great to see people get excited like this over some shared interest. My point is it's as valid as any other holiday, even if you don't get the day off. 

As much as talking about black cats got me riled up, I'm simultaneously "celebrating" black cat month with another internet-inspired holiday: Inktober. Started by illustrator Jake Parker back in 2009 as a challenge to himself, the idea is simple: each day has a word or other kind of prompt attached to it, and you make an ink-based illustration for each one. Proper hashtags are applied when posted to social media to make your work searchable for other participants and onlookers, and you get to see radically different interpretations of the same given theme. There's a few other takes on it, different prompt lists or simply keeping the "one per day" part. There's no wrong way to participate, really, but I decided to stick with the original, and have been for the past week. 

I am doing things a little differently, though, if only by my own standards. I've been drawing digitally almost exclusively for around a full year, off and on for maybe another two. Despite my misgivings, I have generally not missed working traditionally, especially the scanning and photographing and editing of pieces before being uploaded and posted to my DeviantART or ArtStation or even Twitter. For this Inktober, I thought it might be fun to go back to the simple purity of ink and paper, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of scanning. So, I made a kind of compromise. The drawings I post to my Instagram (where this event really seems to come alive) are taken with my iPhone, sometimes at odd angles and many times with shadows left in, and then edited in some program like Aviary or Pixlr or Paper. The edits are generally cosmetic, mostly tilt shift focus or vignetting or color filters, and no new lines are added to the original drawing nor is any part of the drawing erased (only cropped). 

Whatever you celebrate, have fun with it. 

RED Talks (vertical)

Based on Richard Leach 's poem Red Dome

Itself based on an image by Hanan Kazma. 

Made with DeviantArt muro with the dome made in Sculptris. A background was first drawn in Muro, then imported into Sculptris as a background. The exported render from that was then brought back into Muro whereupon the edges of the dome were rubbed out to give the impression of being buried. A bit tedious, but it was a good exercise. I was going to do a more straightforward painting, and I still might, but this will do for now. 

This is a special vertically oriented version of the painting, essentially a remake. It's the exact same process as before, only in a "portrait" format.

Ad-Friendly, User-Enemy

Hopefully, I don't have to dump a bunch of links to get everyone up to speed on what's recently transpired on YouTube. I will, however, drop a quick summation of events so we're all on the same page. As we know, YouTube is supported through advertising revenue. Companies buy ad space in the form of banner ads, overlays, and pre-roll ads which give the option to be skipped if they're over a certain length. The revenue paid is based on something called CPM, or cost-per-thousand views (Roman numeral M). In the early days of this setup, only a select few users would be allowed in on this revenue. There was an application process, with judgment based primarily on the size of this potential partner's audience, the number of subscribers. Average views per video can count as well, but this is generally the exception. Over time, as YouTube grew, the partnership model was abandoned in favor of something more freeform; sharing in advertising revenue was an opt-in setting available to any user. Despite this freedom, the ad-revenue model came with a few provisos as to what content a channel can show. This has mostly to do with copyright, use of music, video clips, and gameplay footage, as well as product placement. Enforcement has generally been loose, with fair use doctrines keeping it that way as best they can. 
A few months ago, however, YouTube revised their terms of service to somehow be even more broad yet more restrictive. Now, copyrighted material was secondary to the overall nature of a channel's content. To that end, channels deemed "not advertiser friendly" would be stripped of their monetization. No one seemed to notice this change until about a week ago when YouTube personality Phil DeFranco posted about a dozen or so of his videos being demonetized virtually overnight, and with seemingly no appeals process. 

Naturally, this has led to people announcing the proverbial death of YouTube, which seems to crop up anytime anyone anywhere says "YouTube" and "money" within two full sentences of one another. It's a plethora of various concerned parties all talking past one another, but we'll try to compartmentalize the cacophony for clarity's cake.... sake. First and foremost, there's YouTube itself, a subdivision of Google that costs billions of dollars to maintain, yet offers little more than a hole in Google's pockets for their trouble. The act of hosting videos on servers made available to stream at will to anyone in the world consumes a massive chunk of change and as far as most viewers go, this costs them nothing out of pocket. Next, you've got the content creators, who seem to come in two distinct flavors and even bring two very different audiences with them. Here's the most concise way to put it: if I go to YouTube right now, without logging into my Google account, and browse the front page for trending videos, the ones that seem to get the most circulation, views, comments, and overall traffic, tend to come from content producers who frankly don't need the ad revenue, like CNN or ABC or some larger corporate entity who's using YouTube to supplement their other venues like TV, radio, and even print. If I log in, however, my browsing is a little more... inclusive. This is mostly due to interests in things like gaming, 3D printing, obscure movies, etc., generally the stuff which flies under the radar of the bigger guys. When looking at YouTube through these ruby-tinted goggles, it seems like a fantasy world, where John Q. Average-Guy can set up a webcam and have an audience of thousands upon thousands entirely by virtue of being himself. While I don't think this concept is a total fantasy, and I'll certainly never let it stop me from making it a reality, we have to face the current reality head-on. 

Film critic Bob Chipman said this of comic book geeks and I think it holds true for the overall dynamic of YouTube's audience. Die-hard fans of comics, games, and old toys get a lot of attention from Hollywood, as evidenced by their presence at conventions and similar events. However, beyond that, the sum total of these super-geeks do not represent even 1% of the average film-going audience. Michael Bay's Transformers is not made for people like me who grew up with the cartoon and never totally outgrew it. They're made for everybody. Now, why that seems to mean the franchise in question has to be watered-down, homogenized, or retooled from the ground up is another discussion entirely that we won't get into. The point is, however big these smaller channels like Armoured Skeptic, Boogie2988, Tested, and MrRepzion get, however many views their videos pile up, they do not have what it takes to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Team CoCo, Electronic Arts, BBC, or Viacom. Prove me wrong, please, but it's more night and day than David and Goliath between these two sides of the coin. It's at this point that content creators need to step up their game, assess their plan, weigh the pros and cons, brainstorm, and make some incredibly difficult, executive-level decisions about why they're doing what they're doing. None of these decisions are wrong, whether it's walking away or kicking in the afterburners, but choosing not to decide is not making a choice (sorry, Rush). 

If you're relying exclusively on advertising revenue from YouTube to support yourself, you are setting yourself up to fail, you will fail, and no one will ever feel the least bit sorry for you over it. I hate being the guy to say that; I never want to stand between someone and their honest living, let alone kick them when they're knocked down from it. The sad reality is this is the big leagues, where the pros play, the wild west, where angels fear to tread. When you make a public figure of yourself, even as an iconoclast/vigilante/anarchist/pundit/pirate/whistleblower, you become a brand, a service, and even a product. You adopt an identity, a character, even if it's only a distillation of yourself. That identity becomes your life, and it's up to you to control who lives it and when. 

What am I saying with all of this? What's my solution to this problem? It's simultaneously simple and complicated, so try and keep up. 

You need to give yourself as many options as possible and pass as many of those options on to your audience as possible. Can your videos only be seen on YouTube or do you also embed them on a Wordpress or Blogger page? Do you have a Patreon? Do you sell merchandise through Etsy, Redbubble, or eBay? Do you have a Paypal, Ko-Fi, or even Amazon wishlist set up? Basically, whatever it is you're doing, you have to do more of it, and you need to give your audience as many ways to show their support as possible. People aren't unreasonable, and while many are greedy, plenty are more than understanding enough that the entertainment they consume is the result of someone else's time and energy, which is only fair to compensate in some way. The web is a great big toolbox, and there's no reason to only use a hammer to build a house. 

Goodnight, and good luck.