Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
It’s easy to get excited and arrogant when things are going well but it is important to remember that success is very fragile. Digg sold for $500K after being worth $200 million just a few years ago. In the same time period, RIM, maker of the Blackberry, lost 95% (!) of its value. There is continual disruption in our industry and you are likely to fail if you get complacent or stop evolving.
The Internet is a shark.
I was trying to explain this to a friend in email, and the only compact term I could come up with for what I’m talking about was “urban ennui.” Urban ennui is that feeling that arises when you’re caught between a city’s majesty and its dungeon. It’s the combination of pretending you’re sober enough to talk to a pretty girl on somebody’s balcony at midnight and curling into a fetal ball in your apartment because the pressure is too much a week later, and then doing it all again because escape is unthinkable and unwanted.
Seriously, there are times when David Brothers writes things and I want to shake my fist at the screen because he’s put it so well. Holy fuck, people; he’s an amazing writer.
(From here, all of which should be read.)
I’ve recently decided that I should look into reading tea leaves. This isn’t a joke, as much as a passing thought; I’ve been drinking loose-leaf tea for months, and always have leaves left at the bottom of the cup, so I figure maybe the fates are trying to tell me something that I’ve been missing out on all this time. The Internet tells me that it’s called “tasseography,” or even more excitingly “tasseomancy,” and that seems like something I would happily claim as a part-time career. “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m a writer, but on the side I dabble in tasseomancy.”
He saw quickly that the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera randomly recorded what he called (in one of the series resulting from this discovery) Unfortunate Events: altercations and accidents, pissings and pukings, fights and fatalities. The Street View cars usually go about their business unnoticed – or at least unheeded – but occasionally people respond to their all-seeing presence by giving them the finger (hence the title of another of Wolf’s series, FY). And so Wolf combed through mile after uneventful mile of boring footage in search of moments that might or might not prove decisive
– Geoff Dyer, writing about the Google Street View-excerpting work of artist Michael Wolf.
Have you ever seen Hearts of Darkness, about the filming of Apocalypse Now? In it, one of the actors talks about the experience of filming, and how deeply life-altering it was for all of them. Obviously this is a very extreme and prolonged example of the kind of experience we’re talking about, but back when I saw it, it was the first time that I’d ever heard someone talk about this kind of emotional upheaval outside of a therapeutic context. It opened my eyes to what is possible when people come together and, for a short period of time, agree to live in a reality that is completely saturated with something outside of their daily lives.
– From here.
That comes from a piece about San Diego Comic-Con, which officially opens tonight. It doesn’t directly connect the making of Apocalypse Now with the mindset of SDCC in terms of “the horror… the horror,” but that’s a connection that I admit to tenuously making in the past. Every single SDCC I’ve covered as a journalist has had that kind of weird disassociation with reality at some point along the way – A sense of “I know this isn’t what life is really like, but it’s all I can remember now, and that’s not a good thing” – that, even when you know it’s happening, is astonishingly unsettling. It’s like comic convention as Stockholm Syndrome or something.
When people ask me whether or not I miss going to San Diego, that always comes to mind. I think I do… but is that really me thinking it…?
This is apparently a presentation drawing by Jack Kirby used to sell the OMAC series to DC Comics, back in the 1970s. Firstly, it’s an astonishing piece of work. Secondly, OMAC is the comic that originated the phrase “the world that’s coming,” so this drawing is, oddly, directly responsible for this blog.
Thanks, Jack.
When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I’d deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that’s far more prevalent.
New York makes it easy to forget that there are millions of people with hundreds of interests—NASCAR, surfing, raising chickens, owning land—for whom a tiny constellation of concrete boroughs that are frozen for half the year is not adequate. New York makes it easy to forget that many Americans would probably find paying $950 for a 10-by-10 room overlooking garbage cans either unaffordable or unappealing, or both. New York makes it easy to forget that the vast majority of people in the world don’t read Gawker, The Awl, the Observer, the New Yorker or even the New York Times, and that that doesn’t necessarily make those people uninformed.
From Cord Jefferson’s piece, here.
This resonates with me, even though I’ve never lived in New York (and suspect, now, that I wouldn’t enjoy doing so; Portland does that to you, as does age). I feel like we left San Francisco for similar reasons, even if we didn’t know it at the time.
It’s San Diego Comic-Con this week, the time of the year when the comic industry gets even more self-obsessed, and the rest of the genre entertainment industry joins in; I’m not going to the show this year – Second time running, although this year I had a period of thinking “Do I want to go? Maybe I do,” unlike last year’s very definite sense of “I don’t want to go, not in the slightest, how can I get out of this?” – but that hasn’t stopped me from having at least one San Diego Anxiety Dream.
On the years when I covered the show for io9, I would get those every single night of the week or so before the show; covering the show for that site was a big deal; we were all (“All” being, in this case, five of us) given schedules for where we were meant to be on each day, what panels we were to cover and write up, what parties or extra-curricular activities we were expected to attend, and so on. Your time very definitely wasn’t your own, but that was part of the thrill of it in a weird way; you were being “a journalist!” and so everything was okay. But with that weight of expectation came the week of pre-show nightmares, each one a melodrama of missing a panel for whatever reason – it was always something mundane – and the result being calamity and disaster. Everything will be your fault if it goes wrong, the dreams explained, and you know you’re going to be late for something, don’t you?
I always thought I was the only person who had these dreams until recently, when I saw various other comic journalists write about them on Twitter. It was a weird moment of shared weight and shame, and also incredible relief that I’m not going to be at the show this time around. As I said, I’m still getting the dreams, but I wake up and remember that I don’t have to be at the convention and everything seems much lighter afterwards.
I lose track of people, sometimes. I mean, I knew that already. It’s a result of going to two elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools: you lose track of people and you find new people. You know someone for eight months at the most, or however long a school year is, then you make new friends for the summer, and then you make new friends in the fall, and you keep it moving.
I’m good at making friends. I should be better at keeping them.
That’s David Brothers, who remains one of my favorite writers on- or offline; he’s a friend, and so I can’t say that sort of thing to him (I have all manner of talented friends, and I find it really difficult to be sincere in my praise of their talents and work, which is frustrating to me; I’ll gush about them to other people, behind their backs, but in person, my sense of awkwardness gets in the way), but still. He’s writing about the ease of losing friends through no real intent to dump them; just losing track, by accident, and suddenly it’s too late to get back in touch without it being weird. I read that, and I thought, yes, that’s me, I do that all too easily and always feel bad about it. There are some wonderful people out there in the world whom I love dearly, and have let disappear from my life.
