I have a lot of thoughts – as usual – and while the corridors are definitely narrowing, I wouldn’t say that WordPress is deliberately trying to your life more difficult and pack you off to an intellectual prison. Though we have to admit people are being packed off to prison and the current US administration doesn’t give a toss just who you are, unless you tout their flag.
I don’t mean the American flag, because it’s not a fascist symbol. Just so we’re clear.
My life has been busy, and trying to get back into the swing of things is having the consequence of things not looking quite the way I expected: Trideja sells music. Not a lot, but enough to matter. Campfire looks a little suspect with its poor organization, missing iOS store, missing physical location, and enthusiastic customer service. That’s not a complaint. They’ve never done me wrong, and they’ve never hidden anything necessary for a writer to do their work. It’s just, needlessly messy.
Soundcloud also does a brisk bit of music promotion provided you don’t need help from their nonexistent customer service. I say “nonexistent” but the truth is they did get back to me, two weeks after I needed their help. Not so good. Gaining some followers that way is neat except that the majority of them want to promote my music, but then mysteriously disappear or don’t exist, somehow. Either people dig your tunes or they don’t; paid listeners are only going to get you so far. Reddit’s reputation is pretty lousy, and yes, that matters.
Draft2Digital/Smashwords is doing fine and the former has a far more aggressive profit strategy. That’s a good thing. Fanfiction.net, meanwhile, has me swimming in questionable artist commission requests. That would be great if any of them were real. Following links takes me to suspicious pages – and I’m careful about doing that. The private messages would be more convincing if any of them mentioned the name of the work or didn’t throw it between square brackets.
I’m sure LLMs will eventually get it to the point where they can generate a personal sounding message, but we’re not there yet. Give it time. Free users only get so much priority. Paid users put their lives at risk. It’s scary and tragic. How can we manage in a society that doesn’t seem to know which end is up?
I’ll write in my Substack about that, though how long I stay there is questionable, too, with it being financed with a member of the broligarchy. The short answer is prayer and education. Learn as much as you can, even – no – especially when it is uncomfortable to do so. The analyzed life is a ticking bomb.
That’s it for now. I’m still alive and getting things done. As always, take care of yourself!
Afterthought: Some of my recently revamped music has made it into James Bunting‘s offshoot of Meteor, Go For It! Check it out if you like a bit of fun. The music’s pretty decent.
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