Philosophy

One education system to rule them all

In my continued Googling for stuff about Animation Mentor (even though I’m already set to begin the first course this June), I found this interesting blog post: The Downfall of traditional education.

The blogger writes:

The UK animation industry is being taken over by Animation Mentor. I don’t have exact figures but I have the feeling that 3 out of 5 animation graduates hired in UK come from Animation Mentor. In few years, 50% of the animator in the industry will probably come from the online animation school.

Why is that?

Animation Mentor has been offering the industry, the exact kind of profile it was looking for. In 18 month, they create more job opportunities to graduates than what traditional education would provide in 4/5 years.

Of course, this mostly further excites me about doing Animation Mentor.

But I guess I also found this post interesting because of a very long and detailed discussion I’m having on Facebook about the college education system. I think I posted this opinion before, but I kinda wish most professions were taught like animation is taught at Animation Mentor: get working professionals to give personal attention to a group of students’ work, and stop teaching other stuff (general education requirements and required electives). Animation Mentor makes it quite clear that they don’t teach character rigging or special effects animation or lighting or rendering, etc. You get 1.5 years of just character animation. I think that’s awesome. (And from what I’ve heard, that’s what the big studios look for anyway: people who are great in just one area, not jacks-of-all-trades.) But I also think you could have an AM-like program for any of those other areas as well. You’re not working for grades or a degree, you’re working for a skill. You’ll never be a valedictorian, but you won’t care, because that never meant anything to you anyway.

That said, I haven’t even started Animation Mentor yet, so maybe I shouldn’t be talking.

I also thought the comments were interesting. One guy says:

at my university we’re told that after graduating we should go to AnimationMentor, Bournemouth or EscapeStudios.

Ha! “After graduating”? Why not… instead of graduating? (Really, if I’d known about Animation Mentor while I was still in college, I probably would’ve done my best to get my parents to let me drop out. (I still need their support!))

Another guy says:

My tutor told me to rate a short which had very limited animation technique but had a very anti Disney/Bluth agenda, and was thus seen as artistically superior over the Lion King and the Nightmare before Xmas(wow, I’m old!). I rated Disney last and I got the interview, which came to a real bad end when I was asked where I would like to be in a 5 years time. I said ‘well I would be happy if I was working for a big studio, working in commercials’….the interviewer pretty much convulsed and replied ‘Happy? Working for a big studio? You’re evidently not interested in making important artistic films. You’d be best having a rethink at the next university you interview at’.

This is why you have working professionals teaching. I think it tends to be hard to lure them into teaching positions (and some pros may not be very good at teaching anyway) because of the time and dedication it takes, maybe for not so much pay. But the Internet may help to change that. Having professors who are professors for a living teaching students who do not plan to be professors for a living just doesn’t seem quite right does it? (At George Mason, they did have some working professionals teach some of my night classes, and I think they were better, since they could impart some knowledge on what working in the industry is actually like. Unfortunately they were from professions I was not really interested in, like requirements analysis for military contractors.)

Anyway, I also find this academic artistic snobbery to be somewhat typical, annoying, and yet funny. I hear it in the music area a lot. You want to orchestrate like John Williams? Tonal melody stuff? Ugh! Write crappy atonal minimalist music like this instead! And then when we both stink at writing music, we can both be professors who compliment each other all the time! Good work! Fortunately it’s not like that everywhere, but it’s there. Mostly in the art categories. Writing, drawing, music, theater, etc. Professors who couldn’t make it professionally decide they have what it takes to teach.

Really: teaching should not be something you do because you can’t do anything else. Which is too often what it is. And I’m not sure adults should be doing it full-time anyway, at least not on the high school and college level. (Though a lot of college professors are also involved in research.)

OK, enough rambling about that.

I usually find that my deep interests in things last about 2 weeks, and then get taken over by something else, and may or may not come back. But with Animation Mentor looming on the horizon, I’m as excited as I’ve ever been about anything, and it hasn’t faded, so I’m really hoping that I my interest stays this high and that I do actually become good enough to animate professionally. Woohoo! Woooooo! Wooowaaaawoooowaaaaahh! Etc. etc.

Oh, someone I know also said that he concluded that Animation Mentor was a scam. A bias I can sort of understand, because most online schools are pretty scammish, and, as someone else pointed out, I’m not sure the name “Animation Mentor” sounds very prestigious.

But enough about me, what about you?

By S P Hannifin, ago

Get taught how to listen to music

I was browsing the web in my usual fashion, whatever that is, and came across these lecture videos from Yale.  The course is about “listening to music,” though I really have to listen to the course to figure out what exactly the professor means by that.  Here are some of my reactions to some of the things this professor says.

Does knowing musical theory improve listening?

First the professor recalls asking his son to listen to something and then asked him “Well, what’s the mode of the piece?  What’s the meter of the piece?  What’s the bass line doing?  Can you identify any chords?”  And of the son had no response.

Woah!  Woah!  What the heck?

Do you really have to be conscious of all that?  Or, I guess the real question is: what’s the point of being conscious of all that?  Does being conscious of all that make you enjoy the music more?  If so, would you argue that not being conscious of that makes other people enjoy the music less?  That seems like an incredibly condescending argument.

Now, if you want to analyze music for your own interest (say, perhaps, you’re a composer), then of course it can be a great mental exercise to be conscious of that stuff.

But you certainly don’t need to if you just want enjoy the music.  Which is really what the entire point of music is.

And no matter how much you analyze that stuff, it’s not like you’re going to figure out how the human perception of music works.  At least not just with analysis alone.

So the professors “experiment” with his son here seems incredibly pointless.

Why would we want to listen to classical music?

So the professor asks.

What?  Really?  You don’t know?  Why does anybody want to listen to any music?

Does he mean “why would we want to listen to classical music instead of pop music?”

You’re not implying that some type of music is objectively better than other music, would you now?

He says that the Nation Public Radio asked this question, and one of the big responses was: for relaxation.  Not a whole lot of relaxing rock n’ roll or pop music out there, huh?  (Maybe someone out there can start a new genre… lullaby pop, or something.)

Some of the other responses: it helps people concentrate, and it provides a vision of a better world.1

I want to change your personality…

Says the professor.

That seems pretty snobby to me.  “I’m going to make you better!”  How arrogant of you to assume you have that ability.  Actually, this seems a pretty important point for all teachers, and all people in general:

DO NOT PRESUME YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO MAKE OTHER PEOPLE BETTER.

That’s condescension.  It’s an insult to others, and an overestimation of yourself.

I hope to instill you with a love of classical music…

After hearing that, I would’ve dropped this course right away.2 Why would he hope to do that? If he was a classical music artist selling an album, or a record store owner, I might understand. Instead, it seems like “I like classical music, so everyone else should too.” Now there’s nothing wrong with desiring other people to agree with your opinions (I love when people agree with my opinions, who doesn’t?), but to think it’s worth actively pursuing seems, again, quite condescending. That would be like if I said “I like Danny Elfman, and if you don’t, allow me to enlighten you on the brilliance of the Alice’s Theme track…” No! That’s a terrible way to think and act, as if you have to actively pursue “converting” people to your subjective opinions. It’s not like people have different musical opinions because some people are just dumber and need to be instilled with some knowledge that will change their opinions to the “right” ones.

If I were a professor teaching such a class, I would definitely want to inspire others to listen to more of the same kind of music I loved; who doesn’t like sharing the things they enjoy?  But I wouldn’t have my mind set on changing people’s personalities and lives to be more like mine, as if there was an objective right and wrong about music preferences…

The end

That was only the first 7 minutes of the course, and I already disagree with this professor’s teaching philosophy.  Ha.  Though maybe I’m just misconstruing everything he’s saying.  It looks like a pretty educational course, though, once you get deeper into it, and actually get to the meat.  The first 7 minutes, though… yikes.

Anyway, I gotta go to bed now… I get to go to work all weekend!

——————–

1 I wonder if this has more to do with the fact that most non-classical music includes lyrics. There aren’t very many purely instrumental pop or rock artists out there.

2 But maybe not, if it was going to provide an easy A. I’m not the one that made grades matter.

By S P Hannifin, ago

The price of your dreams

I was thinking about Shark Tank, that ABC show that we’re still not sure whether or not they’ll make a second season of, and I noticed one of the sharks had uploaded this pic to twitpic.  “Every dream has its price.”  How quotable.

Price can of course mean more than money.  There’s all the time it will take to pursue it, all the risks you’ll have to take, all the gambles, all the questioning yourself, all the uncertainty… dreaming dreams is a blissful business, but pursuing them is a nightmare.

My dream is to own a theme park.  Gah, where do I even start?  I don’t know.

And then you have people who say “you should be goal oriented!”  OK, if I want to own a theme park, what should be my first goal?  Get rich?

And then people say “forget the money, do what you love!”  But I can’t, I need money to do what I love!  Or doing what I love is leading me nowhere; I’m still miserable from having to go to work everyday and having too little time left to do what I love.

Is that the price of dreams?  Going mad because you don’t know how to pursue them?  Because you’re stuck at work or in school staring at the clock wanting to go home and work on something fun?

How do you make those times enjoyable?

How do you relax when you know you have so much work ahead?

Should you live in the present or be planning the future?  How do you do both and stay sane?

I don’t know.

Thus is the price of dreams.

When is my vacation?  Will I ever be alone?

By S P Hannifin, ago

Yet even more long blatheryness about consciousness

My family and I are off to see the musical Wicked tomorrow.  Should be fun.  It will be the closest to thing to a vacation I’ve gotten and will get for a while, methinks.

The rest of this long blathery post will be yet some more thoughts I think I thought while reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett.

Funny little story

Here’s just a funny little story from page 59 of Conscious Explained by Daniel C. Dennett:

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy … [he was] making sure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced … one spot produced a delighted response from the patient: “It’s ‘Outta Get Me’ by Guns N’ Roses, my favorite heavy metal band!”

I asked the neurosurgeon if he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how ‘high fidelity’ the provoked memory was.  Would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record? … The surgeon hadn’t asked the patient to sing along.  “Why not?” I asked, and he replied: “I hate rock music!”

Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man, and I expressed the hope that he would just check to see if he could restimulate the rock music, and this time ask the fellow to sing along.  “I can’t do it,” replied the neurosurgeon, “since I cut out that part.”  “It was part of the epileptic focus?” I asked, and he replied, “No, I already told you — I hate rock music!”

I wonder if I could make everyone in the world love my music and hate other people’s music by operating on their brains?  I wonder if I could also religiously convert them too, so that they will all think I’m a god.  But, of course, I believe that would be morally wrong, so I would have to operate on my own brain first.  Then I will believe it to be right.

Ha ha ha!

On page 62, Dennett writes:

There is a species of primate in South America, more gregarious than most other mammals, with a curious behavior.  The members of this species often gather in groups, large and small, and in the course of their mutual chattering, under a wide variety of circumstances, they are induced to engage in bouts of involuntary, convulsive respiration, a sort of loud, helpless, mutually reinforcing group panting that sometimes is so severe as to incapacitate them.  Far from being aversive, however, these attacks seem to be sought out by most members of the species, some of whom even appear to be addicted to them.

When I realized he was talking about humans and our habit of laughing, I could not help but engage in involuntary convulsive respiration myself.  When you laugh at the thought of how strange laughter is, you can create an internal infinite laugh loop.

Thoughts on the whyness of things and such

On page 64, Dennett writes:

We can give a perfectly sound biological account of why there should be pain and pain-behavior … what we want is a similarly anchored account of why there should be hilarity and laughter.

I think one has to be careful in asking “why?” because it can mean two different things.  There’s the cause-and-effect why and the purpose why.  For example, if I ask “why does the heart pump blood?” you could either answer “to get blood to other parts of the body, duh” (purpose why) or “because the brain tells it to, duh” (cause-effect why).

The thing is, purpose why applies only to human actions (and perhaps animal actions); consciousness and planning create purpose why.  Nature works only with cause-effect why.  But we tend to project a purpose why understanding of the world sometimes, especially on things like evolution and living systems.  Why do we have hands?  Not to grab things; nature doesn’t know anything, and it doesn’t care about grabbing.  You could argue that being able to grab things has provided an evolutionary advantage.  OK, but that still doesn’t answer how hands came to be.  Before creatures could grab things, nature didn’t say “it would be nice to have a body part that could grab things!”

Ultimately I think the reason we have hands, the reason we laugh, the reason we cry, feel pain, etc., all lie in the complexity of DNA replication over many millions of years (and the effect of having physical advantages (which is not to say that all elements of the human body have some evolutionary advantage; I doubt they do; why only one thumb, for instance?  There’s no advantage to having only one thumb)), and since that system is too complex for us to understand at the moment (and there are things about it we may never be able to fully know anyway, like the entire DNA structures of all of our ancestors), we might as well say that it’s random, that there is no reason.

All that said, asking [the right kind of] why might still help us learn something, but we should realize that it might be something we can never know.  Dennett might call this “defeatist thinking” … but oh well.  (Oh well?  More defeatist thinking!)

Knowing thyself

On page 67, Dennett writes:

Perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the high reliability of introspection, our personal powers of self-observation of our own conscious mind. … We are either “infallible” — always guaranteed to be right — or at least “incorrigible” — right or wrong, no one else could correct us.

This reminds me of a post I wrote a long while ago in which I blathered about why I hated being a teenager.  (It has nothing to do with a “maturing brain” and everything to do with society and parents trying to continue to maintain power and control over “teens,” which is a pretty new word/concept in the scope of human history.)  If you read the comments, someone says:

Though I can’t say I agree with the phrase “That’s why” in cases like this… “That’s what made me moody and depressed” — I really don’t think anyone has the authority on how their responses work to stimuli. If you’re on that level, you ought to be able to supersede them and establish control over your mind; however, I think that inability to control goes hand in hand with deficit understanding.

To which I responded:

Yikes! But then, who does? Does anyone? Shouldn’t I be the authority on how I feel, if I speak for myself at least? Can’t I know what’s making me miserable?

Now, I’d still defend the notion that teens being forced to do things makes them miserable. I think it makes just about everyone miserable.  Would parents in their 30s or 40s really want to trade places with their teens? I think not (though some might not admit it). But then, how many teens would agree with me? What are the reasons teens give for being so “moody”? The world is stupid and no one understands them?

So, I still agree with myself on the issue of “the myth of the teen brain” (and the myth that there even is a “teen” stage of psychological development), but I also agree that in many circumstances (uh… except this one) we should be cautious of thinking we can understand why we feel what we feel.

In fact, I think this is kind of exploited in works of fiction like the show House, when a character might say something like “I’m trying to help you!” and House will say something like “no, you don’t care about me, you just feel guilty about about what you said to Chase” or some other psychological twist that sheds new light everyone’s motivations, which is one of the reasons the show is fun to watch… the characters’ true motivations for everything is almost always in question (OK, maybe not always, but still).

How well can we truly understand our own motivations and causes of our feelings and our own thought processes and whatever? How are we to know?

On a side note, I’ve always thought it not only useless, but also a bit dangerous to too deeply psychoanalyze yourself (or believe someone else’s psychoanalysis of you). You’re probably likely to be wrong about yourself, and then acting on your own psychoanalytical conclusions, you may destroy yourself even further whilst thinking you’re helping yourself.

Though maybe I’m just saying that because I’m uncomfortable being too self-conscious… oh wait, oops, I was psychoanalyzing myself there…

But, really, if someone tried to convince me that they knew how their own mind worked, and what their subconscious desires were, I’d think “oh brother” and not believe them. Unless they agree with me on the teenager issue, of course.

That’s all folks

OK, is that enough?  I think so.  I kind of rambled, and I’m not sure I’ll fully agree with everything I said a few days from now, but writing all this helped the spare time go by today at work, and it made me feel as if I was doing something useful with that spare time, even though you can probably tell that that was not case.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Be nice to other people

Not long ago I realized that Derek Sivers is on Twitter after someone retweeted a tweet of his. The tweet was:

Smart people don’t think others are stupid.

And I thought, uh… yes they do. Everyone does. So I tweeted:

Smart people don’t think others are stupid. They know.

OK, I know, lame, not funny. But still, at one time or another, everyone thinks that at least a few other people are stupid, or at least their actions are, or their ignorance about something is. That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone thinks they are better than everyone else, that the human population is made up of arrogant snobs.

However, I would say that a smart person is nice and polite to everyone. Just listen to those Leo Laporte calls in my last blog post. He’s talking to people who obviously don’t have much of a clue about certain things. In the privacy of my home, I can laugh my head off. Are those people stupid? Or is that way too harsh, and we should try to understand where they’re coming from? After all, not all people have nearly the same level of experience with computers… and if Leo Laporte, who’s making money off of people’s ignorance (you don’t call in to have a question answered if you’re not ignorant about something, and we’re all ignorant about somethings), started laughing or belittling his more-ignorant-than-usual callers, people might fear calling him and he wouldn’t be in business for very long.

In other words, it’s just good manners to not treat other people as if you think they are stupid, even if that’s what you think, and everyone is bound to think it now and then.

Also tweeted by Derek Sivers was this article: Are you capable of being ruthless to get ahead?

Go ahead and read the article, it’s a pretty quick and easy read.

OK, are you done? What took you so long? You must be stupi… uh… I mean… very good.

There’s nothing really innovative about a person like Saul. There have been people like him since the beginning of mankind. There are probably monkeys like him. And while I envy their power of success, I ask myself: could I do something like that?

Well, if I wanted to, I don’t think I have the social skills. I don’t think I have what it takes to pretend to be interested in what someone else is interested in to get ahead. I’m just not sure I could make up something interesting to say about any topic on the spot. I could pretend to be interested in some people, if such an act is mainly comprised of asking people questions about themselves. (Some people feel honored and important when others ask a lot of questions about them, others can get annoyed and suspicious.) But I couldn’t keep up the act that I’m interested in, say, fishing, or NASCAR, or gospel music. Perhaps trying to research those things to get myself ahead would simply be too much of a sacrifice of my time.

But I also just think it’s wrong. I mean, isn’t that using people? As much as I might joke about thinking other people are stupid, I could never in good conscience become someone’s friend for only the sake of business.

And I know that that might be how a lot of businesses work, especially when there’s a lot of power and money involved. Perhaps in Hollywood, where rich producers and celebrities can never know the difference between true fans and the people who just want to kiss their… you know.

So maybe not playing that social game is bad for business and won’t do you any favors in terms of getting ahead.

But, come on, wouldn’t businesses everywhere be better if no one was being “ruthless,” if no one was playing some social game, if people were pursuing their true interests and not trying to climb some power ladder?

And I’m sure there are a lot of people out there that agree with me, and those are the people I’d rather work with.

But only if they’re interested in Mozart.

By S P Hannifin, ago

More boring thoughts on consciousness

I’ve heard that later this month, Google’s Blogger will be discontinuing the FTP upload feature, which means my other two blogs, Stuff I Found and Book Quotes, will sadly have to come to an end. I could convert them to WordPress or move them to something.blogspot.com, but I think I will just kill them off, and integrate future posts that would’ve belonged to them into this blog here. It’s probably a better idea just to have everything in one place anyway, yes? So I shan’t be using Google Blogger ever again; it’s all WordPress from now on.

And now on to our regularly scheduled blog post. On page 24 of Daniel C. Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained, Dennett says:

Love is one of those phenomena that depend on their concepts, to put it oversimply for the time being. There are others; money is a clear instance. If everyone forgot what money was, there wouldn’t be any money anymore; there would be stacks of engraved paper slips, embossed metal disks, computerized records of account balances, granite and marble bank buildings — but no money: no inflation or deflation or exchange rates or interest — or monetary value. The very property of those variously engraved slips of paper that explains — as nothing else could — their trajectories from hand to hand in the wake of various deeds and exchanges would evaporate.

Basically I think he’s saying that things like money and love are things of the mind, concepts that come from the mind. How we act in relation to them is dependent on how we think of them, how we understand them. And we can disagree about our philosophies toward them, but there’s not some tangible non-psychological objective evidence in the outside world we can ever use as evidence to support our position. For other things, this is not true. The examples the author uses are diseases and earthquakes. Our understanding of those phenomena can and has changed through the years, but those phenomena remain the same. An earthquake doesn’t shake differently when you understand; but how you spend your money does change depending on how you understand it. Money’s very existence is dependent on our understanding of it.

Of course, the author is then planning to apply this concept to consciousness. Is consciousness more like love or an earthquake? The author will argue it’s more like love… but to me it seems a confusing question, and may require me to think differently about the concept. I’ve always thought of consciousness as a purely physical phenomena, right? What if love is understood as a purely physical phenomena, as an emergent property of chemicals moving around in the brain? Is love then like an earthquake?

The trouble is, creating this dividing line between things like love and money and things like earthquakes and diseases seems a bit fake. It’s like, there are these physical things that tangibly exist, and then there are concepts, emergent properties in the mind. Usually I’m OK with creating that dividing line, but consciousness sits right on it, it links the two. It leads to the philosophical questions of solipsism… everything you see, everything you feel, hear, sense, they are all physically in your mind… what is the nature of existence in general? It’s like asking on what side the dividing line is in relation to itself.

So I disagree with the author and would say that the question is invalid; it’s too oversimplified. Still, its implications are worth exploring, and oversimplifying may be necessary to get anywhere, so I’ll keep reading.

As I was reading this part of the book, I also thought, hmmmm, what about religion? Where would God fit into this? Is God like love or an earthquake?

Atheists and theists argue about whether or not God exists, but not about the nature of the existence of money (or at least don’t argue about it nearly as often). We don’t say that money isn’t real, though we do understand that it’s more a psychological concept than a tangible property of the world. We don’t say that money’s existence is relative to our beliefs, yet we have no problem in having different understandings of it.

Whether or not you believe in God, you’d probably believe that the nature of His existence doesn’t change with your beliefs, but how you act in life and towards God (or lack of God) and other people does depend on your beliefs.

So it’s like God is perpendicular to the dividing line between psychological concepts and tangible worldly concretes. Both theists and atheists treat the belief in God more like it’s an earthquake on some distant planet nobody can see, and that makes it like love, because that sort of understanding is all that’s left.

Confusing?

And then the question is: so what? What can we do with this way of thinking about the nature of the existence of God? Anything?

Perhaps understand that the dividing line itself doesn’t exist? That we are part of both understandings of the world, both psychological and physical beings, and, most importantly, that both understandings of the world are the same world? Can that understanding change the way we act?

Or, if you don’t feel like thinking about God, what about the nature of an objective difference between moral right and wrong? What about the nature of Truth itself?

Obviously, I don’t really know, and I’m really just confusing myself. Argh!

The author says on page 24 and 25:

If the concept of consciousness were to “fall to science,” what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were “reduced” somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy?

…

I am confident that these fears are misguided…

… let us remind ourselves of what has happened in the wake of earlier demystifications. We find no diminution of wonder; on the contrary, we find deeper beauties and more dazzling visions of the complexity of the universe than the protectors of mystery ever conceived.

Yes, yes, I agree, because I are smart. I’ve heard similar fears from composers and music lovers who think that if we could explain why we think certain melodies sound so beautiful then they might not sound beautiful anymore, as if the beauty is in the mystery of why it’s beautiful. A “we-murder-to-dissect” kinda thing, understanding it might kill the wonder of it. Nonsense! The only beauty I see in a mystery is born of the desire to solve it, to one day truly know.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Paul Williams writes article about nothing

Does music need “professional” musicians?

Paul Williams, the songwriter and current president of ASCAP, recently wrote this article.  It’s pretty short, but one thing is missing from it: a point.  The only point I can see is that “piracy is bad.”  Well, duh.

Anyway, I’m going to go off on a little tangent here.  I think at some point in the future (perhaps still hundreds of years away) people will no longer be able to make a living off of writing music.  One reason is quite simple: computers will write music.  People won’t need to.  People will continue to write music, though, because it’s fun.  People being able to make a living off of writing music is, from what I can tell, a pretty recent phenomenon in the history of human existence.  (As are the sorts of economies we have now, for that matter.)  The creation of beautiful music doesn’t depend on people making a living off of it.  The reason people defend and fight for being able to make a living off of it is because it’s a dream come true! Being able to make a living off of doing something you love is just fantastic.  (At least, I imagine; it still hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’m working on it!)

So, I’ll whole-heartedly agree that piracy is bad, and I’ll defend protocols and systems that try to counter it (as long as they don’t get in the way of what us legitimate non-pirates want to do, which they do too often), but I won’t do this in defense of the music.  The music will always exist.  Piracy is bad for moral reasons, not monetary reasons.  Well, it is bad for monetary reasons, but I’m not against it just because I want more $$$$, like perhaps a number of other composers and publishers (and PROs?).

My automatic music generator

Recently, I’ve been continuing work on my computer program that will, if my daydreams come true, write music.  OK, it’s still such a difficult task that I probably won’t live to see (or hear) it work, but it’s still a puzzling challenge that obsesses me sometimes.  Anyway, I spent the day thinking about new algorithms to try out.  To help me do this, I began writing a semi-fictional dialogue.  In it, I appear as a character and I meet with William Wobbler, a character from my recently finished screenplay The Melody Box.  The two of us then contemplate how to create a computer program that can write music.  It’s a lot of fun to write, and if I ever succeed at my goal of creating this program and if it makes me insanely rich (a dream that motivates me), then I will someday release it to the public so that everyone can learn how it was done, and how my thought process worked while creating it.  Or if I die having failed (which is more likely), I can leave it for generations after me to perhaps have something to work with (though the possibility remains that it is and will forever be useless garbage, but, I don’t know, somebody out there might read it).

I guess that’s it.  I have to go back to work tomorrow.  Snow got me an entire week off, but the vacation’s over now!  (The week off did give me a torturous glimpse of what life might be like if I could ever make enough money writing or composing to work from home.  I risk becoming a hermit then, but it’s still something I cannot stop myself from desiring.)

By S P Hannifin, ago

Why In Fact Publishing Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon: A Play in One Act

CHARACTERS:

ELTON P. STRAÜMANN, a modern-thinking man with exciting ideas
SEAN, a humble wannabe writer

Act I

SCENE OPENS ON STRAÜMANN and SEAN, standing.

STRAÜMANN: Do you want to buy this self-published book?

SEAN: No.

STRAÜMANN: Obama is awesome.

CURTAIN FALLS

John Scalzi wrote a longer version on his blog that goes into a bit more detail on the subject, but really I think it just comes down to marketing, and the whole business of that.  A catchy professional-looking cover is part of marketing.  Potential readers have to expect that your book will be well-edited.  And having bookstore shelf-space is pretty huge.

Scalzi seems to miss one thing (which is not to say he doesn’t believe it; I just didn’t notice him mentioning it): a self-published book is NOT automatically worse than a professionally published one.

That said, from my few observations, self-published books definitely TEND to be of lower quality.  The few self-published books I’ve looked at have been so unspeakably awful that I’ve lost most faith in them.  I’m not very likely to buy one.  Ever.  At least if things stay as they are in terms of quality.  See this older post.

That said, I do think there are unpublished writers out there somewhere who’s works of fiction I would enjoy immensely; I do not believe publishers and editors are the almighty gods of determining what writing is good and bad.  I am that god.

So what self-publishers really need if they want to prove Scalzi wrong (though the character Scalzi created would never be so adept) is to 1) actually polish their writing (I think editors are a huge help, but not the end all be all, and certainly NOT the reason publishing will not die soon) and 2) market better.  Now, how exactly one “markets better” is a huge subject, and not one that I claim to have much of a clue about.  However, starting a Twitter following campaign is probably not the way to go.  If you are dumb enough to market like that, then of course your writing must be garbage.  (As in many arts, it’s a lot easier to recognize what not to do.)

It would be nice if there was a way for self-published books that aren’t garbage to get noticed more easily.  I’m sure there are some people out there working on this problem, perhaps through blogs or sites that review self-published stuff, or at least track sales.  And there’s the whole book-podcasting thing.

But can self-publishers ever market with the power of the big publishers?  I don’t see how, unless they just overwhelm the market with quality content, which I can’t see happening.  The big publishers have the money to market.  If your self-published book does well and a publisher becomes interested in your material, you’d have to be a complete idiot to refuse… and though you’d benefit from that, you’re also making them stronger.  Not that that’s bad.

All this talk kind of makes me want to be a publisher… but I can’t really afford such a gamble right now.

The only other thing that remains to be seen is the effect of book piracy.  When publishers aren’t making money, will that even the playing field?  Will there be enough pirates to do that?  How popular will ebook readers become?  I still think ebook readers and ebooks are a bit of a rip-off, so I don’t see myself switching any time soon.  I can’t predict the future very well (I thought the iPhone sounded like a dumb idea… (so does the iPad for that matter…) but I was right about blu-rays winning the high-def format war) but if a lot people think like me, ebooks and ebook readers will either have to become drastically cheaper, or remain about as popular as they are now, which doesn’t seem very (though enough that publishers are continuing to pursue it).  But… who can know?

A rather lengthy aside: if ebooks do become much more popular, I have a very very tough time believing publishers and distributors wouldn’t have to change their business models drastically.  If I were a published author, and the publisher and distributor were no longer dealing with a bunch of physical inventory, then their roles would be completely different.  I’m not even sure why I should need the distributor at all if all they’re doing is hosting digital files, besides to make my book easier to find.  But shelf space becomes infinite.  And certainly the publisher shouldn’t need as much $$$$ if they don’t have to deal with paper.  Look at this recent fight between Macmillan and Amazon regarding ebook prices.  Macmillan wants to charge $15 for some ebooks?  What morons out there are buying ebooks for that price?  (I shudder to think.)  I have to side with Amazon on the issue… but even $9.99 is too much… what in the world are publishers thinking?! I guess they just don’t how to work this business yet and are trying to be safe… and rip people off while they can… (Or are they trying to counter ebook piracy losses early on?  And punish the legitimate buyers?  Nah…)

Another aside, as I browse Scalzi’s blog… Scalzi wrote about the Amazon vs. Macmillan and wrote a post about supporting authors.  I guess I might seem cold-hearted, but… NO.  Ever hear the phrase “don’t quit your day job”?  Yeah, well… Not that I think stealing is the way to go, but when I buy a book, it’s a trade for my benefit, not the author’s.  If you [authors] want more $$$$, maybe find a way to cut out the middle men with all this new technology?  Oh, but no, you don’t want that… well don’t go whining about financial troubles to me then.  (Not that Scalzi is really whining, I’m just being dramatic.)  If Amazon’s move was against authors (as Scalzi seems to claim), it was also for readers.  So are the authors against readers?! What do authors think about Macmillan’s pricing?  If they think $15 for an ebook is OK, then I’m not sure I want to read their books because they obviously don’t mind being published by a company who would like to rip-off customers.  Thanks!  Don’t ask us, the audience, to do something about it.  You do something about it.  You’re the ones getting paid.

OK, I digress…

Anyway, to sum up my point, publishers won’t go away anytime soon simply because most people who buy books buy them from professional publishers.  That’s really all it comes down to.

Now you must admit that my play is better than Scalzi’s, right?

By S P Hannifin, ago

You have to learn rules to break them? Nonsense.

Just a quick little post…

I was ruffling through some books on screenwriting (like books on writing in general, some look interesting, brilliant perhaps, but most look like over-analytical, repetitive, worthless blither), and I saw the phrase “You have to learn the rules to break them!”  That phrase seems to pop up a lot in books on artistic instruction.  I’ve never been very fond of it.

There either are rules or there aren’t.  This “you have to learn rules to break them” is a lazy middle ground for scared confused people who don’t want to think one way or the other.  If there are rules, then they have to name them, and then someone else comes up with counter-examples, and they fail.  If there aren’t any rules, it might make the point of a book or lesson seem useless.

I guess the problem really lies in that creativity and art in general cannot be taught, making books about creating art seem hypocritical.  So, to justify the writing of their books, authors try to pull out “rules” … otherwise, the book is just a collection of subjective opinions, isn’t it?  Well, yes, actually it is.  That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unhelpful, but it does mean the author can’t always be objectively right.  And for some reason a lot of artists and authors really want that… for it all to be objective… if even in some small way.  That’s either because the artist is too afraid to think for himself and wants to create an objective way to think about the arts, or the artist wants everyone to agree with what he thinks based on things greater than mere opinion.

I would say there are rules, but they are psychological, complex, and many times subjective.  We can’t yet write books on them, and merely knowing what they are might change them.

However, we can write books on our opinions and patterns we find, and I think it’s perfectly valid to say that those patterns emerge from the shadows of those subjective currently-unknowable rules.

But to say “you have to learn the rules to break them” is just an excuse for people to teach them.  If it were true, it would imply that rules could only be broken within a set of other unstated rule-breaking rules, for which the rule of learning the rules to break them doesn’t apply, which of course is hypocritical nonsense.

What people should just go ahead and say is: “You don’t really have to learn this, but here it is if you’re interested.  And you might discover it by yourself anyway.”

By S P Hannifin, ago

Avatar is so anti-American! OMG!

I’ve been hearing quite a bit about how the story for the new film Avatar is “anti-American” or “anti-military” or whatever. I don’t really get it. I saw the movie, the images were fantastic, especially in 3D. The climactic battle sequences with rocket guns leaving 3D trails of smoke and futuristic helicopters duking it out with giant alien birds were probably the best battle sequences I’ve ever seen in cinema. The story, however, was (like Star Wars) pretty basic. Not that that’s bad, it could’ve been much much worse. It’s probably good that it was basic; makes it that much more accessible, which it almost has to be when you’re spending a bazillion dollars on the special effects.

Unlike Star Wars, though, Avatar does not take place a long time ago in another galaxy far far away, but in our future with our very own great great grandchildren (or whatever, I didn’t do the math) in our galaxy. So I guess some people are thinking “Wait a minute, are you saying that’s that what we’re gonna be like? Evil industrial money-hungry warmongers who don’t mind killing other beings who are as conscious as we are? How dare you!” Now, that could very well be exactly what Cameron is trying to say, but at no point in the movie did a character look at the camera and say “You better watch out and not end up like this, America!” so I can’t respond as if one did.

And if you do sense an anti-American theme, what about the Americans that end up being the heroes? The theme would obviously have to be that indigenous people are too stupid and weak and distrusting to save themselves and must depend on external help, and American people provide such help! American people are actually so much help that a race of thousands can be saved with just the help of three or four (short and less symmetrical) Americans! This is a message to the world! We are America; we are powerful enough to crush you, and benevolent enough to stop ourselves.

But I can’t buy any of it. Everybody agrees that war is bad. What we argue about morally and politically is the nature of its necessity. Similarly, no human is going to prefer living in a flat grey cold metal room when the beauty and wonder of Pandora is just outside the window, especially when the Na’vi (the indigenous aliens of Pandora which are conveniently quite human-like but just a bit more visually interesting) seem to stay very clean, well-fed and sheltered, out of danger, and have no waste management problems. The only reason we humans would prefer a less beautifully green living atmosphere is to make the aforementioned aspects of life more practical. A toilet may not be the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s extremely practical. Most humans would probably want to stop being humans and become Avatars, as the main characters in the film do.

Here on Earth, you’re perfectly free to live as naturally as you want, so why don’t people who claim to want it actually pursue it? Because they don’t really want it. They want to keep using their toilets and air conditioning and email, and then complain about the evils of industry. Meanwhile, beautiful green nature will freeze you and burn you and starve you and get you dirty everywhere. Woohoo. (But not Pandora!)

I digress. In Avatar, the differences between good and evil are pretty easy to recognize. The story might’ve been more powerful (to some audiences) if the differences were more ambiguous, but that would’ve also made it more challenging, and thus more risky business-wise. If you find it anti-American, I guess it’s because you feel the film is negatively stereotyping Americans. But in the film, you really only see the Americans that are part of the story’s conflict, so you’d have to be assuming an awful lot about the Americans in that future that are not part of the battle and/or that are still on Earth. Kinda seems like you’re doing most of the stereotyping yourself.

(Also, I don’t recall America ever invading any country as different and beautiful and wondrous as Pandora, so I don’t see any important similarities between the Pandora invasion and any real-world historic or current invasions.  If Cameron wanted to make a statement that such beauty and wonder are inherit in any culture we invade but are in the eyes of the beholder, he wouldn’t need many special effects for that.  And he wouldn’t make as much money.  And I think others have already tried.)

By S P Hannifin, ago