Sorry to miss a week plus. That's something I was hoping not to do. There was traveling, and then there was traveling again, and a funeral. As these things go, I suppose it went pretty well.
I called Girlfriend the other day and said "apparently I'm depressed." I wanted her to know that this was the sort of boyfriend she has: one who doesn't say, "Honey, I'm depressed," but says "apparently I'm depressed." I cited evidence, most particularly the 12 hours I had slept the night before. I didn't feel like I felt depressed. Today, I have just felt like I was depressed.
But this isn't what I came here to talk about, and it's not what you came here to read either, and anyway it's getting better. I re-learned today that there are some things I just shouldn't do: sleep until noon, wait until the afternoon to shower, go more than three days without shaving, or let myself run out of clean clothes. That's a solid recipe for feeling pathetic, and having remedied the latter three of those issues, things are looking up.
Yesterday I did something I had been meaning to do for some time--maybe years; I don't remember. I went back to DeadJournal and looked up my college-era blog. I had really expected the site to have disappeared, taking three years of my maudlin navel-gazing off the internet forever. But no! The site is still there, and my blog is still there, not even as if encased in amber, but still waiting for me to post to it again.
Not trusting to the internet to preserve that indefinitely, I saved the pages to my computer. I don't know if there's anything I want to do with them, but I didn't want that volume of my writing to disappear if I could help it. Looking back cursorially over it my first impression is that I was more depressive in college than I remember. Perhaps that isn't true of all the posts. The most recent post is from the end of 2006, and that wasn't a good year for anyone I know.
If I find anything worth sharing, or mocking, I may put it up here.
On another note, if I had posted last week I would have made mention of the Kickstarter campaign for season 2 of JourneyQuest. Heck, I still will; it's still going on. If you haven't already, take an opportunity contribute money towards people I like being funny and awesome. A seven-episode season is guaranteed, but with another $40k they can make ten episodes, and with $200k they can make two seasons at once!
At any rate, as an aspiring artist, I support the payment of other artists, and the development of new ways to fund art. It's exciting to me when fans of something enthusiastically fund it, just like it scares me when I see people taking art for granted.
Then again, JourneyQuest episodes on YouTube all have upwards of 30,000 views, and the Kickstarter campaign has 501 backers as I write this. I don't want to imply that 29,500 people aren't pulling their weight, but I do wonder if we're moving back into a patronage model of the arts, and what that would mean. Off the top of my head I imagine it would lead to the tastes of a smaller portion of the population being catered to, which may not be a demonstrable evil, but which I think is far from an objective good.
I feel like there's a definite tug towards the patronage route. I wonder if it's just a sense of artists not valuing their work high enough. Are you familiar with the 1000 true fans theory?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
There's a guy (Jeff Roberts) in the games industry who runs a small-ish Middleware company, but his tools are licensed for use in hundreds (if not more) of games each year.
He'll pick an indie game developer, and pay them $1k a month as a sort of patronage to just make whatever games they feel like. I do like the lack of direction from him to the artist, although there is probably some bias of what happens given the selection process.