August, 2016 - Ina Disguise

Climbing Trump Tower

August 10, 2016 No Comments

I happened to tune in just before Steve, from Virginia, an ‘independent researcher with an important message for Donald Trump,’ was yanked to safety by an impatient and very strong policeman. He looked about nineteen, and very confident that he would not get a hearing any other way.

Since Ina Disguise exists for exactly the same reason, I am thankful that I do not live in America, and that I did not know that wealth imparts such power in the USA. In the UK, if you have something to say, then a PA checks it and passes it on if it seems useful. In America, you are supposed to accept that your bank account dictates your worth, and nothing that you have to say matters unless it is wrapped in dollar bills or accompanied by a spectacle of some kind.

The reactions online were interesting. Would he have been shot down if he was black? Was he crazy? Would they let him complete the climb? His video, which clearly stated that he did not think that he would get a hearing otherwise, indicates that he is a shy geeky guy that likes climbing, and feels that he has something important to say to Donald Trump. Since it is likely that he is considerably more intelligent than Donald Trump, I doubt that Donald Trump will understand what he has to say, which is a shame.

The most shocking part, was the men who complained that he looked like a girl, and that they would like to see footage of the beating he would get from the police once he was in the building. He apparently left the building in a stretcher, so either he was extremely tired, or he cannot walk at present.

After seeing scenes of evident brutality in Turkey recently, this is of some concern. Are we so overcrowded, as a planet, that seeing people get beaten is simply entertainment, and is it so impossible that a young man has something relevant to contribute to an arrogant and extremely spoilt man’s publicity campaign in the form of running for President?

Why on earth would a country be so deluded as to assume that a man who has struggled for nothing in his life, who evidently despises women and people of other races in equal measure, be competent for a role which has become pivotal to the rest of the world? With power comes responsibility. Should the rest of the world be forced to allow an ill-educated, vicious, and evidently thoughtless nation pick the person in effective control of the balance of global power?

In the course of watching this, I discovered facebook live, and have been watching people all over the world discussing health, talking about themselves, partying, having sex and generally sharing even more information about themselves. Most of it is not very interesting, progressive, or useful. Just lonely people trying, like my cat, to reassure themselves that they exist at all.

Poor Steve from Virginia is now being sent for psychiatric evaluation as a result of his stunt. Having been in much the same situation of not being listened to, and feeling forced into the public eye in order to exist at all, apparently, I completely understand why he felt he needed to pull a stunt. Presumably climbing is his thing. I hope that he gets to submit whatever he has to say, at least.

It has been suggested that Trump is actually paying him to do this, since he got into a spot of bother with his second amendment suggestion for Clinton yesterday. If this is the American idea of diplomacy, then we have a lot to fear in the near future. Neither candidate is good for the rest of the planet.

If it was up to me, and it is not, I would get as far away from the special relationship with America as possible. I noted in a recent poll that I am not the only person who feels this way. Putin has never been so popular in Europe.

As it is unlikely that America will make any significant changes, we can look forward to more input from China and Russia within our lifetimes, and a war will probably be invoked to take care of our current over-population problem.

Such is the illusion of choice. You can see clearly what is going to happen, and since nobody listens, there is little you can do about it. Might as well climb Trump Tower, create an alias, or go off on some other tangent. Brutality, cheap manners and lack of taste wins, because America decides who gets the guns. This is not the world I choose to live in. With role models like this, forget America as a worthwhile ally and think again.

Note for regular readers – I had yet another massive laptop disaster, and Best Adventure Ever has been lost for the fifth or sixth time. Lucifer Ogilvie is also gone, but it was a minor loss in comparison. This is another new computer, and I will be rebuilding the old one, since evidently it is my lot in life to spend several months building the equipment I need as I am not particularly wealthy. There will be a short delay as a result. Anyone would think that somebody does not want me to complete the Wolfe projects. Tough tittie, I will be doing it anyway, since I am too shy to go climbing any towers.

Uncategorized

Drunken Buffoonery – Wolfe’s Birthday

August 6, 2016 No Comments

Here, I am, in probably my favourite place in the world, my mother’s house, on my own. What joy!

Twisty is here, and is very kindly looking after mother, whilst I have a moment of utter selfishness, taking stock over the last nine years.

Nine years ago, almost to the day, my mother had a stroke whilst her other two daughters sat and watched it happen.

Nine years ago, the day before, the Banking Consultancy job ended because the banks went to the High Court to prevent them having to give people like you money because they had not done business properly. I laughed as a room full of people wept over their lost mortgage payments, since they had given up their normal jobs on the basis of getting twice or three times the money they normally get. Yes the class renegade was right, as usual. The world is a muddy, murky place.

The night following this, my sister called me to tell me that a random blood clot coming adrift was my fault, and that she was entitled to my home. Apparently this is acceptable behaviour in my family.

The day after that, the other sister was let into the house to await news, and used the time to get keys cut to my home so that she could go through my belongings, threaten me and invent spurious stories to back up their claim to my mother’s money. You would think there was lots of it. There isn’t.

Four years later, after a corporate scandal in which I earned my brother quite a bit of money by being honest, he ‘took control’ in order to attempt to take all the family money. I was to live in a rented flat. My family are poison, and they tried to use me to rob their own parents. I was so ashamed. You cannot really invite a gentleman to share a life like this.

I like to attribute my 160lb weight loss to David Wolfe, because by some irrational quirk of fate, I loved him, despite his many obvious failings. I regarded him as someone who lacked, and needed the very thing he was trying to avoid. I had no other reason to want to go on living, after finding that my family, who had never been very great shakes, were utterly worthless, self- obsessed and inadequate people who would cheerfully kill me for a tenner.

The reality was somewhat different. I had a great deal of knowledge, gained over a lifetime, and I just happened to like him for a variety of deeply emotional reasons. There was something about the pain that he inadvertently expresses that I plugged into very readily. My relationship with Twisty is along similar lines. We share pain, and we share tolerance of things that most people cannot even touch in the course of their relationships. It does not always go well, but altogether it is a very healing and healthy relationship.

It is a strange thing, to pick your knight in shining armour on the basis of their ability to deal with pain, but life gets complicated as you get older, and you are fortunate if you can find someone as special as David or Twisty. One has been blamed for nothing at all, on the basis of spite, and the other has been blamed for the state of the world, on the basis of plain, old-fashioned motivation. Life is always chaotic, because it is life , and chaos is the nature of life.

My current focus is on Boris, because Boris has gone as far as he can go without me. Boris will be shocked, but Boris will not be hurt, because hurt is not the nature of my work. I have enough love to give Boris, because Wolfe does not understand what I do, and neither does Twisty.

To clarify this rather abstract concept, I am positing myself as a kind of wireless extender.

I love, therefore so can you. Go forth and love.

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economics, motivation

Fakery and Modern Marketing

August 4, 2016 No Comments

I see so much fakery online, particularly since I started on the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing Project. People talk about authenticity, but when authenticity includes Rihanna explaining why she did not bother to design her own shoe collection, you realise that people basically jump on linguistic bandwagons without considering what the words they use actually mean, never mind whether it means anything to anyone. I seriously offended a few Rihanna fans, when I pointed this out at the time.

Last week, I happened upon a ‘social media guru’ advising his apparently adoring fans on how to achieve – wait for it – 125 hits on your blog using twitter. He wrote an entire post on it, with largely useless and irrelevant advice, so that you too could achieve a small fraction of what I achieve with every single post, and I do that without an subscriber list or tremendous amount of effort. I am sorry to say that this guy has evidently missed the entire point of Twitter.

Likewise, people like David Wolfe put a tremendous amount of time and money into achieving massive follower lists, by hook or by crook, as investors and media alike like to be validated by looking at largely fake numbers on Twitter and Facebook. I think I have about 50 likes on the Ina Disguise page on Facebook, and I have 25,000 regular readers, and another 16,000 or so who find me in the bookshops rather than on the website.

You could say that I am stupid for not taking all the conventional advice on offer, for not bothering with vanity advertising on facebook or google, for not bothering with heavy marketing budgets or promotion, but the reality is that fake followers are worthless, that your regular readers like to dip in and out of your topics, depending on what they are, and that they do not want to commit to hanging on your every word without you providing something unique and special.

What is important is getting your work into the right hands, very easy for somebody well connected such as Nigella Lawson, who did not even have to know anything about cooking, but extremely difficult for everybody else. Matt Haig was lucky enough to be circulated amongst the ‘right people’ for his book on depression, and now he gets media coverage before he even writes the book. As he is on my friends list on facebook, I have a peep now and again, and he is an extremely unassuming guy. One of the writers on the Hunger Games also friended me for a while, and he was also very dull.

Really what I am trying to say is – you will not get your follower number on your gravestone, and it is entirely meaningless in terms of being picked up by someone who matters. It just isn’t how social media works. Spending your time and money inflating your numbers, is time and money you would be far better to invest on producing better work and thinking of ways of getting it to the right people.

The only people impressed by huge numbers, are people who seek to leech from you as much as provide you with opportunities. It is a marketing con, designed to promote flotsam over serious content, and unless you plan to produce endless flotsam at a rapid rate, it is not much use to you.

For Wolfe, I can understand it. He is interested in ignorance. Ignorance pays the bills. Ignorance lasts for a year or so, and ignorance makes money when people want a fast solution rather than acquiring any knowledge. Wolfe is in the ignorance business. He has taught me an awful lot about the difference between depth and distribution, and he is right about many things. He is right, and he is wealthy, at the expense of being respected or particularly liked long term.

Especially for writers, there is a wealth of useless vanity advertising that you could indulge yourself with, but it will not get you into the hands that help. Spending your time oiling up a crew of equally vacuous authors and hangers-on on facebook may sell a few books, but it does not demonstrate love of your craft or a development of your skill. It is up to you which you prefer, but as with most things, success does not correlate with talent or skill.

On the first day of my author’s page on facebook, I was attacked by a gaggle of genre writers who refused to believe that anybody could write in several genres for the same series, which was essential for the Best Ever and Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing series to attract people to David Wolfe. This was considered rookie madness. It has, as any raw foodist will tell you, been a very successful strategy rather than churning out yet more tiresome raw recipe books that only raw foodies will read in terms of numbers.

At the same time, another writer complained that nobody should put out free work. A year later she complained that she could only dream of the numbers I had reached, with minimal effort. She is still churning out the same Agatha Christie rip-offs and her sales number in the hundreds.

My journalist friend asked with considerable disinterest how I was doing, as she is in this ‘no free work’ school of thought. My view is – get over yourself – your first two books will be worthless, your third might be OK, and why on earth should anyone want to pay for an unknown author, any more than they would pay to hear a pop song for the first time? You have to establish yourself. Yes, an email subscription might be a good idea, but it is probably better for you, and better for your readers, if you spend your first few years establishing your name, learning your craft by putting out some free work and seeing what works for you. There is a host of options for doing this, some are covered in previous posts (see Shameless self-promotion)

Look a bit more closely at the big names you admire. Are they really any good? Rather than matching up to the numbers, look at actually being better than they are, regardless of the financial benefits. You will be a lot happier with lower financial, and higher personal expectations.

creativity

Boris Exhaustion

August 2, 2016 7 Comments

So, I now have three Boris related books on the way from ebay – I was very picky, there are a few more that I didn’t bother with, I have several lengthy videos on youtube to sit through, and I dabbled with a few family ones, since that is the point I am at with the book. I am already suffering from Boris exhaustion. There is an awful lot of material and associated reading to do.

On the plus side, I see that my approach is totally radical, and may make readers weep a bit. Presumably this is a good thing.

It has been incredibly difficult to get the feeling of the thing across to Twisty, who knows my work and knows me extremely well. He is making a lovely job of the cover, but it is not easy to convey the flavour of the thing even to a friend who knows exactly what I am up to.

The first idea was a very strong yellow, black and white newsprinty type cover. I have seen a few union jack type renderings of Boris, and whilst they are very nice and have that 1960s Carnaby Street optimism that we like from Boris, this is absolutely not what is going on in the book.

I suggested a pale primrose was nearer the mark, and we now have a slightly satirical cartoon with more delicate colouration, which again is very nice, but still not quite there. Lucifer Ogilvie is not exactly Boris, he is just built from similar bones. Who knows where I shall drag him eventually?

Generally speaking, I prefer to binge read before deciding on a project, so this is all out of order for me. It is the equivalent of catching someone’s eye at a party, and then suddenly spending a month with them and nobody else. A little bit awkward, with flashes of sort-of-ok.

My academic reading is happening, slowly, but there is an awful lot of pop-conservative crap out there, which is no use at all for this. I kind of know what I am going to end up saying anyway. My weird brand of conservative communism runs pretty deep, having listened to fairly strong and dearly held opinions from ma and pa.

Still sewing like mad, and, family rows permitting, we should have some new art material shortly. Still no emotional visions on Boris – maybe there won’t be any, who knows? Maybe this is a brief aberration, just for fun?

My Slovenian friend, a political journalist I have done some creative stuff with in the past, is delighted at the new project, so perhaps we can fire a few in that direction once done.

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