The Ravens Nest

Spoiler: It Continues Unabated.

Ironic that I’m starting out this missive with a photo of my new furry companion, Louisiana Cajun Black (his full name) or Louis (prounounced Louie for short) or just “lil buddy.”

Normally, I’d top this thing off with my logo or perhaps some piece of A.I. art that I experimented with and nailed using NightCafe. Why? Fucked if I know, I like having images for my things and guess what? I’m not monetizing this thing to fund constant commissions.

Sometimes, yeah, it’s a photo, whether it’s one bummed from the web somewhere or even one of my own photos like this.

I saw a note today on Substack that I want to address. Understand that I’m not taking offense at it but I’m going to offer counterpoints. Whatever your decision is from there is completely on you.

Part 1. Business

This is something you need to consider first. If you’re going to monetize, I’d suggest working out a budget to include art that you can commission or create yourself. and I were shooting the breeze about art one day on his Guilded server a couple of years ago. I went to a technical school for commercial art. Never saw that program through. Work, bills, you know the story. I learned relatively bupkis during my time in there, however, a few weeks playing around in Photoshop to make chatroom avatars taught me more. When he told me that art school was a waste of money, I believed him because I’d experienced the same. He recommended a few books to me. I’ll go ahead and link the following:

Figure It Out! The Beginner’s Guide To Drawing People

Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth

Drawing The Head And Hands

Those three books, he informed me, would be better than any art school education. I haven’t gotten them yet but I’m going to. Anyway, the budget here is going to be in your art supplies. Pencils, paper, pens, so on and so forth. If you’re new to it, it’s going to take time and that’s most important. You can even hire artists while you teach yourself and slowly phase your own artwork in more and more. If not, you’ll need an art budget if you want illustrations for your Substack. That’s what I’d recommend.

If you’re not doing this to monetize, and I don’t blame you. The algorithms change like I change my socks, this is a side hustle at best for most of us. That’s cold, hard truth. Maybe you’re doing this just for fun, like myself, okay, in that case, how you illustrate, to me, is entirely up to you. If you use an A.I. Image Generator, I don’t care, that’s not something that’s gonna bother me. Fact is, presenting this for free as just something to do means that people like myself will use whatever tools are at our disposal. While I don’t quite understand the visceral response to it, I understand that it has caused a visceral response. That being said, understand that it is not my visceral response, therefore it is not my problem.

The Bottom Line is still the same: Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing. Writers like myself have a budget of $0. It costs you $0 to read any of my posts and I’ll never put them behind a paywall. With zero dollars for a budget, don’t expect Penguin/Random House gloss and polish. Manage your expectations.

This is business. If Against All Odds is hypothetically pulling in $1k per month, then that means I have a budget of one thousand dollars every month to find an artist, commission a piece, research, get articles written, artwork slapped to it after it’s been finalized and paid for and then put it up, make sure the right tags are on that sucker and then promote it, wring my hands over algorithms and what changes may come along, hope I don’t write anything that shunts half my readers away (…after this last couple of sessions…yikes) or do something to potentially disrupt that flow of money.

That’s a full-time job…for a hypothetical of half of what I bring home from my actual job. That’s no benefits, no sick time, nothing. I don’t know of anyone that can live on $1k per month and we’re not even factoring in Cost of Living, we’re only talking this part right here. Assuming success, this means that people will have to just bear with me as I present text only and possibly get the algortihmic equivalent of shuffled off into the dustbins somewhere.

Profits have to be present so that I would be able to afford bills, artwork to top AND still have money to live on.

Alternately, I could “just” not write them at all. I’m sure some would prefer that.

However…

Managing Expectations:

It seems that there are those in the community of authors who have such a visceral response to the appearance of AI that they’ll do most anything to shame you into it. Here is the post with the name excluded that prompted me to write this.

This is what I’m talking about when it comes to this type of sentiment. This is someone who is taking great offense at this kind of thing. So let’s do this and manage some expectations.

First, she starts with how much AI anything is hated. So we’re operating already with someone not in their rational mind, machinegunning you with morality and purity spirals …again…like that works and thinks less of me as a person.

Okay so from the opening to point six. I need no longer be concerned because this person seeks nothing less than my total acquiescence which will not be in any way shape or form forthcoming. So this is a rage post doubling as rage bait. How is any of this our problem? It’s not. This is a problem of that particular person. That’s all. There are no two ways about it. This person also shows that they’re infuriated by ideas. We’ve seen that so many times before that it now begs the question, what is she going to do about it? Well I’m afraid the answer is, this is as far as it goes.

What I can imply from the vilification and name-calling is that this person wants an excuse to look at you as something subhuman. We have seen that type of sentiment lead to real-world violence and we’re still going to do that? Nothing about what was posted endears me to their cause, in fact, the only inclination I have is the extension of a middle finger, a fine “get fucked and stay fucked” and send you on your way.

There’s another expectation to manage; the fact that not everyone will sign on for every moral crusade you have been inspired to have. In fact, you’re going to have opposition. There was a movie I saw called Cop Land and if you haven’t seen it, I recommend sitting down and watching it at least once because it was something Ray Liotta’s character said to Stallone in the movie when he told him “Being Right Is Not A Bulletproof Vest, Freddie!”

Sadly, he’s right. From my own personal experience, after seeing Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills I did what I could to dig deeper into the case files only to find that my initial suspicions that the West Memphis Three were guilty as hell, now I had major doubts. I found others like myself who believed the same. Then we ran into the people who didn’t and some of them were the most vicious and vile people I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing. They love to bully and cry foul when they were taken to task on it. When I say bully, I meant they bullied. They wanted to have some type of place of recognition for having Damien Echols executed and for keeping Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley Jr. locked up for life over a crime that there was no way they could have done as alleged.

Whether or not you believe the same as me isn’t the relevant part of this. The ones that came after us for supporting The West Memphis Three were the same people that took some moral high-ground going with feels over facts and riding on nothing more than their hatred for the three based on perceptions that weren’t real. After eighteen years, the State of Arkansas knew they were cooked and that’s why they presented the Alford Plea to them, finally freeing them but still up to chicanery denying them the ability to gather evidence for their innocence and exoneration.

Eighteen years. They didn’t spend that arguing feels, they spent it and still do, fighting an uphill battle on facts.

That’s exactly what this post is, a soft attempt at bullying before the much harder-line ones come in to harass, dox and yes, even visit violence if not convincing others to do the same.

Another fact is this; if you’re offended by something, then that’s on you. Learn to control yourself and stop trying to control what is clearly not yours to control

Let’s talk about the “it’s so ugly” portion of this argument.

What you see on Against All Odds is only a final result that comes after generating dozens of flops, wasting lots of credits and finding something that I think is close enough for inside baseball whether it actually depicts what I want it to or not. Even the text of the stories hardly matches the pics posted at times. Again, I’m not looking for perfection, I’m looking for close enough.

In the story, By The Light of The Moon pt 1. We see three images. One of Draven in the studio with his guitar (and I had to change his signature guitar to a Les Paul because NightCafe can’t seem to get so much as a B.C. Rich Warlock, much less the B.C. Rich Beast right) another where he and Lysandra meet and then another illustration of the two of them walking at night that I just kinda thought was cool.

Later on while dicking with NightCafe, it finally produced an image that was so close that I might go back in and swap it out but here it is…

This one was so much better. The two of them finally close after more than ten years of being estranged, messaging through a very patient Udo, pictured here…

Keep in mind, these are images that I said “Yeah, that’ll work” and the rest was already written. As much as I try to keep the prompts going with the story, that is not always the case. I have tons of examples I shared with a friend over a few nights, absolutely roasting what the machine did. I’m well aware that the machine ain’t perfect but I’m not looking for perfection.

Remember the point I made about business? Well that applies here. The stories that I write for Against All Odds, I’m going to give you full disclosure here, are not entirely me. There are dice rolls involved and random tables. Now look, if you’re in doubt as to whether or not the writing is mine, well, let me show you two examples of how you’re dead wrong.