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you can’t pay your rent with “the unique platform and reach our site provides”

A very nice editor at Huffington Post contacted me yesterday, and asked me if I would be willing to grant permission for the site to republish my post about the seven things I did to reboot my life.

Huffington Post has a lot of views, and reaches a pretty big audience, and that post is something I’d love to share with more people, so I told the editor that I was intrigued, and asked what they pay contributors.

Well, it turns out that, “Unfortunately, we’re unable to financially compensate our bloggers at this time. Most bloggers find value in the unique platform and reach our site provides, but we completely understand if that makes blogging with us impossible.”

I translated this on Twitter thusly:

This set me off on a tiny bit of a rant:  

I’m very lucky to not need exposure or “reach” or anything like that, at least not right now and not this way. I’m also very lucky to be able to walk away from things like this because I believe it’s the right thing to do. If I’d offered this to Huffington Post for nothing, because I hoped they’d publish it, that would be an entirely different thing, because it was my choice.

I don’t know what the going rate is for something like this. At six cents a word, which is SFWAs lowest professional rate for short fiction (not a perfect comparison, but at least something to reference that’s similar), it would be $210. That’s not nothing, but it’s not house payment money. Maybe I should have just taken their fabulous offer of exposure?

I don’t think so, because it’s the principle of the thing. Huffington Post is valued at well over fifty million dollars, and the company can absolutely afford to pay contributors. The fact that it doesn’t, and can get away with it, is distressing to me.

The exchange I had with this editor wasn’t unpleasant, and I know that she’s doing what her bosses tell her to do. I don’t blame her for the company policy. If I’d brought this to Huffington Post and asked the site to publish it, it would be an entirely different situation, I think, (I already posted it on my Medium account, anyway), but this is one of those “the line must be drawn here” things for me. I don’t know if I made the right call, but I do feel good about standing on principle, and having an opportunity to rant a little bit about why I did.

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ephemeral nightmare (proof of concept video)

This is a proof of concept I made to test out a project idea I’ve had for a little while, sort of similar to my Ephemera Mashup. The main inspiration for this came to me awhile ago, when I was in a bar downtown that was silently playing Mondo Hollywood on TVs. That film, without sound, is a collection of images that are strange but also good, and I thought it would be fun and cool to collect films from the Internet Archive, and cut together something of my own.

The idea with this particular proof was to create something that was a little creepy and slightly off, that could be projected onto the wall at a warehouse party, without sound, as background art. I ended up with something that works with or without sound, and (I think) rewards varying levels of attention. In fact, I rendered the audio only, and put it on my Soundcloud, because I think it’s cool and weird all on its own.

So, to make this, I grabbed a bunch of public domain footage from the Internet Archive, and cut it all up. Then I tossed it into iMovie and applied some filters. I modified the audio in Audacity, and mixed in some other audio that I also created in Audacity by modifying other public domain works. If I like it, and feel that it was worth the time, I’ll make some more like this that actually have more deliberate cuts and choices in the content. At the moment, this is primarily clips that I eyeballed, thought were interesting, and tossed into the edit timeline.

I got sort of fascinated by some old burlesque and stag footage that I found at the Archive, so that’s in here, and may offend those with sensitive dispositions.

Photo Credit Tony Case on Flickr
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Seven Things I Did To Reboot My Life

About twenty years ago, I had a portable spa in the back yard of my first house. One day, the heater stopped working, so I called a repairman to come out and look at it. He told me that there would be an $85 charge no matter what, and I told him that was okay. When he got to my house, he opened up the access panel where the heater, pump, and filter lived. He looked inside, then looked back at me.

“Did you try pushing the reset button?” He asked.

“Um. No,” I said.

He pushed the reset button, and the heater came back to life.

“That’ll be $85,” he said. I paid him.

This post is about realizing that I was sitting in cold water, and not doing anything to turn the heater back on. This post is about how I hit the reset button.

Continue reading… →

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thanksgiving vs. christmas

A bunch of my friends got together and created a face-meltingly funny holiday musical, called Thanksgiving vs. Christmas. If you like the things I like, boy howdy are you going to like this.

So, here’s an embed for ya:

You can listen to the whole show online for the low low price of free, but you can listen to it whenever you want and support the brilliant creative people who made it when you buy it at Bandcamp.

Enjoy!!

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Halloweeney Tabletoppey Gamey Stuffey

So I was thinking about putting together a list of horror-themed games that you can play, and while I was doing that, I realized that we have played two of my favorites on Tabletop: Betrayal at House on the Hill and Dread.

I also realized that I’d made an episode of Not The Flog that was about Halloween-themed games. So instead of sitting down and writing up something long and exhaustive and interesting that would seriously cut into my Blizzcon preparation time which is really actually preparing and not just playing lots of Diablo III and Warcraft and Hearthstone I swear.

So, presented here for your amusement and education are a series of videos with a gaming and Halloween theme.

Hey, since I have your attention: what’s a horror-themed game that you like to play around Halloween? Maybe we’ll end up with a neat list, after all.

Videos after the jump!

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