Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Pornocalypse Now (adbusters)

Hopefully I'll have time to comment on this later, but for the time being, I direct your eyes to a surprisingly to the point & thoughtful article about porn in Adbusters:

Second, unlike women, men have largely failed to re-evaluate their sense of purpose in the 21st century. Feminism as a social revolution resulted in the emancipation of the female and the displacement of traditional male roles. Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution.

And this takes us back to our imaginary Orwell. Picture him sitting on a couch, in his underwear, at 2:00 a.m. His naked profile lit by the warm glow of a laptop screen. He’s surfing the net, reading about how Hitler invented the first sex doll, which prompts him to play a quick round of Call of Duty. He’s tossing grenades and sniping Nazis, but then he gets bored so he pops in a bukkake DVD and tosses off to the image of a female performer being submerged in seminal fluid. He’s satiated and disconnected but in the virtual world he’s still a dominant, violent, virulent alpha male.

The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.

Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?


(Read article)

Monday, April 20, 2009

Fallen Nation eBook downloads



Out of curiosity I recently looked into the download figures on the Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning eBook. The tally is a bit over 55,000, with some possibility that it could be more as the metrics on one of those hosts started several months after I posted it. (There are versions on a couple different hosts.)

Though it's hard to know how many people downloaded the book and never read it, that still seems like a considerable number to me. I actually made the decision to release the novel as a free eBook, along with the print version on Amazon, after getting stonewalled by the press time and again.

Well, the press is still stonewalling me on this title because I released it print on demand- though I'd love if that changes as this number keeps going up. (Any takers?) In the meantime, I'm happy it's getting out there. And I will keep moving forward...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

This is what happens when you let the designer write copy.

(Ignoring the fact that I have been a "professional" writer in the past.) As is often the case at work, today I am fueled by caffeine and snarkiness. As we work on a massive overhaul of the TLA website, I have been doing a lot of mockups lately. And by a lot, I mean A LOT.

To keep myself entertained, sometimes instead of using lorem ipsem, I wrote fake copy. Here is a small piece from the mockup today: "What the hell is going on? This copy will explain that. It might also entice you to buy something. Don’t act so surprised. That’s why they call it “ad copy.” Well, the “ad” part anyway. I don’t remember why it’s called “copy” anymore.

It may go on slightly longer than this but hopefully not too much more or else it’ll throw off the balance of everything, and designers will cry pixel tears. And just because they are pixelated (and restricted to 256 web colors) does not mean they are not real. Oh no."

Somehow, I doubt this will make it to the live site.

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