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The Cinematic Orchestra – Arrival of the Birds

This is the kind of contemporary classical that I love. It doesn’t have the anxiety-ridden, dread-brewing atonality that neoclassical is infamous for, but also doesn’t stray into the saccharine synths of new age. This kind of music very specifically has been my musical hyperfixation for a very, very long time. Some of my absolute favorites, with some notes:

Ólafur Arnalds: closest match; a similar small orchestra feeling with similar tempo and feeling. Specifically, his NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is exactly the kind of thing I think people in this post would love

Max Richter: more ornate, grander scale, but not baroque; think the quiet, pensive moments in great films / TV shows. This is apropos, since that’s the majority of his work, e.g. the Black Mirror soundtrack

The Cinematic Orchestra – Arrival of the Birds

This is the kind of contemporary classical that I love. It doesn't have the anxiety-ridden, dread-brewing atonality that neoclassical is infamous for, but also doesn't stray into the saccharine synths of new age. This kind of music very specifically has been my musical hyperfixation for a very, very long time. Some of my absolute favorites, with some notes:

Ólafur Arnalds: closest match; a similar small orchestra feeling with similar tempo and feeling. Specifically, his NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is exactly the kind of thing I think people in this post would love

Max Richter: more ornate, grander scale, but not baroque; think the quiet, pensive moments in great films / TV shows. This is apropos, since that's the majority of his work, e.g. the Black Mirror soundtrack

you think you’re going to have a normal field trip and she shows up wyd

I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on  all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for  free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.

Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others

There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em. 

No there freaking isn’t. A millionaire is not a billionaire-lite. A millionaire is not someone who has absolutely no risk of suffering personal want, and the power to fix multiple social issues and chooses not to.

I chose my words deliberately. If I’d meant “and millionaires” I would have fucking said that. I didn’t forget. 

So much has been said about the difference between a million and a billion that I would have hoped it was no longer necessary to explain it, but here we are. 

 A million is a thousandth of a billion.  A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. 

If you earned £1000 a day, and spent nothing, it would take you three years to become a millionaire. It would take you 2,470 years to become a billionaire. They’re not even close to the same kind of thing. Obviously it’s fortunate and unusual to be in possession of a million anything at once, (although it’s worth noting that different currencies mean significant differences in how much wealth we’re actually talking) but in a career where it often takes years to create and sell even one book, it should be understood as equivalent to several years of salary coming at once. The safest thing for any writer would be to assume it will never happen again. Your next book bombing - or simply not getting the lucrative film deal your last book did – these are very normal occurrences. Yeah, that wouldn’t in itself take you back to poverty, but it could very easily mean the status of “millionaire” is a one-off blip, not a static condition.    And factor in one fairly normal problem like having to pay for your own or a relative’s longterm care, or any kind of health crisis at all for writers in the US, and you could be back to average levels of wealth at best very quickly.  Also how the hell do you know who is a millionaire? You don’t. 

And people are very quick to assume writers are millionaires, because a book has sold fairly well or has been made into a film or even simply because they’ve heard of them. That’s a big part of the point of this post. People think writers are much, much richer than they are. They are very unaware of how often even books that make money don’t necessarily make money for the writer. (Just look at what happened to Peter Beagle, for a particularly heinous recent example.) They are very keen to find loopholes to  put writers in a special category of person it’s okay to exploit.

Recognised variants:

The “it’s not what it looks like” explanation

The “I know this looks bad, but let me provide context” runaround

The “outlining the extenuating circumstances” ramble

The “really this is as much your fault as it is mine” reproach

The “it was a hard decision and you should pity me” appeal

The “here’s why I had no choice but to do what I did“ rationalisation

... but

... but

No. It's not that easy. It doesn't "just happen" and the insistence that it does only exacerbates the loneliness that people without those others in their lives feel every day.

April Fools Day (April 1) is one week away. To that end, I just want it known now, well before the day, that this blog will NOT be posting any jump scares, fake announcements, freak-out posts, fake hackings, fake emergencies, fake news, and “gotcha!” stuff on April Fools Day. We’re staying safe and chill around here.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNSKILLED LABOR.

“You see, no labor is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages.”

And I’m just like… Oh honey… You are *this* close to the point.

Yes. That’s why the homeless/unemployed exist. So that we’re always so insecure in our survival that we will accept any demeaning thing they want to do to us. But the thing is that we NEED people in “menial” jobs. Software engineers, managers, CEO’s Lawyers, politicians: they can take a week off of work and everything is fine. Nobody goes hungry.

“Menial” laborers all take a week off work and society comes to a grinding halt. People start going hungry.

So why can’t we allow those workers to survive? Don’t give me any bullshit about how profits will go down, I don’t give a damn about how many zeros are in Jeff Bezo’s bank account. Tell me why it will cause more harm to allow workers to comfortably survive than to allow them to be sick and food insecure and homeless.

“Shouldn’t the man who invented the iPhone own his own creation?”

"Shouldn't the man who invented the iPhone own his own creation?"

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.