As opposed to the somewhat invisible design of things like book guts.  I’m talking about things like covers, t-shirts, wall prints, mugs, website headers — the stuff that’s meant to be seriously looked at.

And here’s the thing:  I’m not an artist.  I’ve got a couple of artistic bones in my body, sure — I’ve won a couple of games of Pictionary and I can usually decipher kids’ fridge drawings, so I’m not completely without artsy skillstuff.  I’m just not an artist.  Really, I don’t even know if I’m a designer.  The internet tells me that designers are people that sit around bitching about how clients are all idiots that insist on ever bigger logos, and I’m of the apparently unpopular opinion that logos should all be so damned sexy that everyone wants them bigger and on a t-shirt.  So, y’know, So I just don’t know if I (want) get to be in that fancy designer club, either.

But just last week Warren and I sold a week’s worth of apparel with nothing but a giant imaginary logo on, so, y’know, could be I know what I’m doing.

Of course, I really can’t tell you how to design a cover or a t-shirt or a logo.  Pretty much everything I do kinda starts out with a plan and quickly becomes “season to taste and then cook with some amount of fire until it’s done but not burned” or “hit it with a wrench until it stops making that noise and apologizes or it at least starts making some more pleasing noise” or “if nothing seems to be working that probably means it’s time to pop open another Red Bull.” None of which really works well for instructions or documentation.  Besides, I strongly doubt you want to make things that look like things I made, anyway.

What you want, probably, is to make something that you know looks good, and it’s going to be a really nice bonus if other people think it’s pretty, too.

And that I can sort of help with. 

A lot of my (design or otherwise) instincts stem from intent. By that I mean before I really start thinking about how I want something to look, I spend some time thinking about why I want it to look.  A cover has one job, honestly: It’s there to make you want to pick it up and look inside. The old “don’t judge a book by its cover” chestnut was really very likely started because people didn’t know that a cover has that job – they probably thought its sole purpose was to keep a little spill of Red Bull from seeping into the inside pages or something. 

When we make things look pretty on the outside, we increase the perceived value of the inside.  That goes for pretty much anything.  And yes, yes, there are as many definitions of “pretty” as there are stars in the sky, of course. But that’s something you should absolutely keep in mind whether you’re wrapping an album or a book or a magazine or even making a t-shirt, yes (because that’s a “cover” too): whatever your cover is going on, it needs to make the insides look better, before anyone even looks at them.

If you can’t do that – and don’t worry, if you’re on the internet someone will tell you so, and, really, you can ignore the first person that says “that looks a bit crap,” but you might want to listen to the third – if everything you make seems to get nothing but crit and no love… well, you know, that’s all right, actually. There’s a LOT to be said for staying plain and simple.  I love plain craft-paper wrapping, me.  If no one wants to touch your cover with a twenty foot pole, you might want to scale it back to just the title and the author on a solid color. Dialing it back down to basics never hurts.

The one thing I’m certain that 90% of first-time designers (and more than a handful of “seasoned” ones) never think to do is step back from their design and take a look from a distance.  And I mean that absolutely literally: set the thing to full screen, stand up and walk across the room, and actually look at the thing, from some real distance.

Hell, if you’ve got something you’re working on right now, go ahead and do that: pull it up in another window, stand up, and look at it from across the room.  Hell, leave the room – go make coffee or something – and then come back and look at it again.

What does your design look like, at a glance from a distance?  If it’s a book cover, can you even make out the title?  How about the author, or what’s going on with the colors and images?  Does it look like a book or does it look like a blob of colors and nonsense with nothing really going for it?  Because that’s what people are going to see on a shelf or in a thumbnail image. Whatever you see from across the room – if it doesn’t catch your eye or make a lick of sense, it’s not going to do any better for anyone else.

This is even *more* true of wearable or wall-hanging designs.  I mean, look, it may look great to you when you’re a foot away from the monitor (or design on the desk) – but those things aren’t meant to be held up right next to your face.  T-shirts need to look good from five feet away (fifty if you’re marketing to the restraining-order demographic), and wall art should really look as good when you’re on the couch as it does when you’re right up on it with a magnifying glass.  And if you want to sell it online, again, you’ve got the thumbnails thing working against your lovely design – there are a ton of people that just will not click through to “view larger” if they can’t make any sense of the teensy thumbnail image.

And if people aren’t even going to invest a click, they certainly aren’t going to give you a sale, right?

There will be, I’m certain, people screaming about the crassness of my commercialism and how design exists in a perfect and magical bubble of art that transcends the base desire to make money.  And I’m… not really talking to those people because, as I said at the beginning, I’m not part of their fancy club.  I’m chock full o’ base desires, not least of which are my desires to pay rent and Make Stuff that people want, and the best days are the ones where I can kill two birds with one well-designed stone.

Now, if you didn’t click that inline link up there in the middle, I’m going to send you there again, here at the end. You really should go here and read Warren talking about Designing To Be Wanted, two years ago.  Because, yes, he says “magazine” a lot, but that’s just what he was on about at the time.  What he really means is “Stuff.”

I’m running short on spare minutes today, so this one’s going to be short and offsite-linky. 

First, the disclaimers: Emma’s a dear friend, I adore her art, and fantasy makes me break out in hives. So Ems’ Dragon Heir is something I’m immensely proud of (because my friend Made it, and you should already know how I feel about Making Things), and I think is beautiful (because I love the art), and it makes me itch and shut the browser window (see above for my unfortunate medical condition).  And you’d think that last should override the first two, and leave me with nothing nice to say – but that just means you’ve been on the internet too long.

I’ve got nothing (else) but brilliant things to say about Dragon Heir.

First of all, if you do like fantasy, Dragon Heir is good. One of the nice things about having an editor-brain is that I can shut off my personal preferences and simply gauge the quality of a work – and this work is quality. I’ll be very annoyed (and more than a little creeped out) if you decide that just because I’m not particularly fond of a genre, you can’t enjoy it.  No, seriously, that’s just creepy, please stop following me.

But mostly, I adore the Idea of this incarnation of Dragon Heir.  Oh, didn’t I mention that?  This is actually version 2.0 of the comic.  Here, let me let Emma explain:

What makes this project interesting is that Dragon Heir, being my oldest comic project, was starting to show its age; especially in the early issues. So what you’ll be reading here is actually Dragon Heir:Reborn. The story that was told in the first five issues of the comic is being redrawn and in some places entirely rewritten, so even the Dragon Heir veterans amongst you should find interest here.

Do you understand what Emma’s doing here?  We all have projects – previously published or just sitting in an old folder, that we’re awfully fond of, but they’re a bit dated or worn around the edges.  Like a sturdy and perfectly good bit of old furniture that just needs a good sanding and a new coat of varnish. Dragon Heir was originally published through Sweatdrop Studios, and it is, in fact, still in print and available to buy. But Emma wanted to put a bit of shine and polish on a new release, and so instead of just sticking it in the garage and thinking “gosh, I’d sure like to sand and varnish that thing, you know, when I get some time,” she’s put herself to a strict weekly release schedule, online, and she’s doing the project live and free to air.

So we all win: Emma’s doing her update project on a manageable and realistic schedule, her established fans get new and improved content of a story they love, and new readers get to jump in from the beginning and start the story for free.

Now what about you?  Have you got an old NaNo that never quite got that last bit of polish it needed to go live? Or did you self- or small-pub a book some years ago that you’d really love to go back and square the corners? Do you have an online gallery of first-drafts or even finished pieces that don’t show your evolved style?  There’s something for you to pay attention to here, then – maybe setting yourself on a public and weekly schedule is the way for you to start breathing some life into that project that’s not quite right.

And if none of that’s relevant to you at all, I’ve still given you a lovely new story to read, for nothing but the cost of clicking and bookmarking this link.

I didn’t set out to write a POD manifesto, honest.  And I still haven’t, but I know I’m only a technicality away from a neatly bulleted list of demands. I think this spew of infodump following Shivering Sands is my decade in review, in a strange way.  Because I cannot be alone in this, can I? The ‘00s really were defined by marking the things that were dying, weren’t they?

It’s almost  as if this first decade of the century was all disappointment that the predicted apocalypses (apocali?) of the ‘80s and ‘90s never came true.  So (the internet) just started documenting deaths and near-deaths with gleeful abandon, in case maybe 2000 was just an estimate for the end of the world.

Print is dying, we said.  Magazines and newspapers are kicking it by the dozens, and books can’t be far behind.  eReaders will kill those before we know it, surely. And if that doesn’t do the trick, then surely global warming and deforestation will just kill the trees that make our paper, and that’s the endgame, there.  Movies and television are dying because of Hulu and YouTube and The Pirate Bay. Pretty soon we’ll only have video game commercials and dancing badgers to watch.  Music and is dying, and that’ll kill off the ‘zines.  And those that hold on will surely just become Tumblr blogs.  And, oh yes, the internet is even dying, because wasn’t it different in ‘99 before it went all 2.0. And, hell, Twitter is the blog killer, and the Singularity is coming, anyway, so pretty soon we’re all going to be communicating in faster-than-light transmissions with our AI overlords and then, only then, when the world is all burned off, can we start the cycle again with new and relevant information instead of recycling the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s.

I mean, seriously, I know we do this every generation and all, but the ‘00s really do seem, in review, like one long whinefest about how we were all going to start Making Things as soon as the undergrowth of the 1900s burned off so we could start fresh.  Again, I am old enough to recall we’ve done that every decade, but I think maybe this one came with an extra century of bullshit baggage.

So here we are about to hit the Tens, and there’s still a handful of really stubborn folks swearing it was 2012 all along, but most of us have finally decided, well, fuck, I guess we’ve just got to keep going with what we’ve got.  I’m very likely putting a pretty bow on a series of coincidences, but I’m having a little laugh at how many folks seem to be genuinely getting excited about finally breaking down and using the tools that’ve been around for ten years.  Maybe it is, as I and plenty of other people have mentioned, that the brave souls that’ve been, ha ha, beta testing Lulu and Cafepress for the past ten years have gotten all the kinks worked out.  Certainly there’s some degree of personal relevance as I get off my own ass and start Making Things with a fury and a purpose.

Mostly, probably, that last.  But this is my braindump, so I’m gonna run with it.

Because here’s what I want from the Tens, from everyone, but especially myself: I don’t want to hear about what doesn’t work, anymore.  I don’t want to watch the blogs and the skies for signs of what ends are nigh.  And I’ll probably still keep an eye on the sea levels since I live two blocks from the shore and that just seems like a good idea, but I mostly just want to focus on Making Things Work.

(Segue for hitting a point home: Print isn’t dying, it’s evolving.  (That’s ©Warren, but damned if I can remember where he said it to give you a link.) How we use books and magazines and newspapers will define what they are.  Same with music, video, pictures, and networking, of course, but since I’ve got a soft spot for “inks on stuff” that’s the one I’m gonna focus on.  Nothing about the years between 1999 and now killed anything that wasn’t already dead, and any good mechanic knows a machine graveyard is just a spare-parts shop waiting for a wrench.)

But I’m taking my end-of-the-decade energy to cull the blogs and people and influences that tell me on a daily basis What’s No Good. The writers that spend more energy writing about how the venues are dying than they do making any sort of new content? Gone.  The design blogs lamenting the death of creativity? Out. Twitter folks whining about how hard it is these days to find time/energy/muses/anything worth anything? Blocked. Review sites gleefully dedicated to pedantry and “oh this isn’t new or exciting”?  Well, I never really cared for snarky review sites anyway, but I‘m renewing that avoidance.

If all you’ve got for me is a list of reasons not to care, I’ll give you one more: I don’t care about you.

Going forward, I’m only looking for solutions and innovations.  I want to see how you Make Things Work, for you.  I want to know how you pulled off your epic kludge and goddamn if it didn’t just do the trick.  I want to hear about the publications that are pumping out books and magazines and newspapers because they can and they want to and, goddamnit, people like them.  And I want to buy the t-shirt.

We didn’t all die in a fire when the century ticked over, and some of us have been looking back ever since. I say it’s time we say, well, that was a bit of luck, then, and just go with it. We didn’t have to start from scratch on the foundation of the old, doomed world – but that doesn’t mean we can’t build a new one, anyway.

And all that’s just a bit of silliness to ring out the decade, sure.  Don’t take me too seriously, folks, ‘cause god knows I don’t.

But it still sounds good, doesn’t it?

One of the things I never get tired of hearing about Shivering Sands is: “It looks like a real book!”

I mean it is, obviously, a real book in that it’s really pages of printed words on paper with a cover.  But what I think most people mean by that exclamation point of whodathunkit! is that it doesn’t look like a POD book.  Or, more precisely, like they expected a POD book to look like.

And that’s down to two things: One, Lulu use good paper – the interior is 60# white text stock, which means it’s a solid weight that holds crisp printing, and the cover stock is 100# laminated so it’s not too light or to heavy, and it holds vibrant color and clear text.  And two, I didn’t make the thing with 12 different typefaces all double-spaced and centered at 20pt.

I can’t say much about the first point beyond yes, POD shops do use decent paper these days, so you’re not getting a “book” that’s just copy paper with a wire-o binding stuck on.  That’s a bit of a big deal compared to ten years ago, or what you’ll get at Kinkos, sure – but that’s just where we are in the technology, now.  POD shops are (mostly) all at the point where they can and do offer affordable “real” books.

But the second point, well that I can talk about a little more.  Because a good looking book with crap content is still a crap book – but wonderful content that you can’t actually read is also a crap book. So I want to talk about the design of book a little, because Warren gave me the wonderful content to play with, but I’m pretty proud of having made it look good.

There are a lot of rules, guidelines, public and private knowledge, and general best practices to book layout and design.  And I broke about as many as I followed, so hell if I’m going to even attempt to quote them all, heh.  Instead, I’m just going to talk you through some of my process and intentions, and you can take from that what you will.  One of the blessings and curses of POD is that you’re in charge of the finished product, after all.

So, to start with: Type.  Shivering Sands is – with the exception of the three instances of Futura Bold on the cover – set in Caslon.  Top to bottom, front to back: one typeface.  And that strict adherence to a single type isn’t absolutely necessary, but it really is a good idea.  At most, you should really only have two typefaces in your entire book, and one of those should only be headings.

And, look, I get it – I love fonts, I do.  I download types that I can’t even think of a use for just because I think they’re pretty.  And even though my aesthetic leans to the clean and minimalist, my first draft of Shivering Sands had about four or five different typefaces to see how things could look.  There’s a very real temptation – especially if you usually work with web-safe fonts – to go a little fancy in print.

The thing is, looking at that first draft… well, I already knew this, but it really hit home when I was seeing the layout on my screen: a book isn’t about a hodgepodge (or even a well-behaved family) of fancy fonts.  A book, at its best, a collection of ideas in (if the designer does their job right) a portable and readable format.

And Warren’s ideas and the words he uses to make them solid, whatever he may say about them, are like the prettiest girl in the world:  They don’t need makeup.  So for draft two of the book, I pulled back to a single, simple, nearly invisible typeface.  And suddenly every page was drop-dead gorgeous.  No single word was vying for attention with an exaggerated ascender or stroke-weight.  When you read Shivering Sands, your eye should quickly learn the shape and weight of all the letters… and then completely ignore them, and just let the content beam straight into your brain.

Which isn’t to say that the layout is boring.

I knew going in that we were going to be working with essays – a lot of short form pieces – and I wanted to stick some even shorter bits in from Twitter.  Those Twitter bits between pieces were my idea – I started calling them sorbet, to cleanse the brain palate between rants, heh.  But there is some attention to the details of the format that makes navigating a book like that as easy from start to finish as it is if you just pick it up and let it fall to a page.

Tiny little things like changing the right-page headers to the title of the essay if you’re four pages in.  It’s a small detail, but it lets you easily flip back to the first page if you’ve just opened the book on a whim.  Right-justifying the bursts of sorbet (that still cracks me up, and that’s all I ever want to call Twitter, anymore) and dropping them to small-caps to clearly define that you’re on a page of concentrated information that exists alongside but independently of the essay content.  Even the full-page, left-side titles to each essay – the “take a deep breath, ’cause we’re heading into the next one” pages serve to break the book into digestible chunks of content.

And some of that I would, of course, do very differently for a work of long-form fiction, or a photobook, or anything else.  The point is, it’s a really good idea to think about layout – any layout, from books to shirts to web to notes – in terms of how you want it to be read, and how you can help the reader follow along.

And that leads me to the actual content.  It’s probably not technically design, but there is some overlap.  Warren picked about 90% of what went into Shivering Sands and I did my job as editor to pick a couple more essays and all the Twitterbits. But when you’re dealing with any sort of modular content (essays and art/photos being the main ones), it’s worth your time to sit down and fiddle with the order a bit.  A book is, after all, a container – and an organized toolbox is a lot more useful than a junk drawer.  For my part, I just put the essays in roughly chronological order, because they flowed quite well that way, I thought, and then I spliced in the sorbet with some eye to complementing the surrounding content… with the occasional bit of random thrown in for fun.  If I did my job right, Shivering Sands should read like an album, with one piece flowing into the next as well as any one piece stands on its own.

By way of some general advice: we’re very used to the web breaking left-aligned paragraphs with a double-space, and sans serif typefaces to make everything easy to read.  That’s because we’re usually digesting smaller chunks of text, serif typefaces look a bit crap on a monitor at smaller sizes, and browsers are pretty crap at justification for anything but the narrowest columns. 

For books, it’s a really good idea to pick a serif typeface, a comfortable and consistent line-height, and indent the first line of a new paragraph. There are SCIENTIFIC reasons for that – serifs leading the eye along a line, indents clearly marking a new paragraph without the jolt of a double-break, etc – but mostly it just looks good, let’s be honest.  I’d lay odds that the books you may have picked up and thought “Oh, this isn’t a real book” are the ones that just didn’t follow those three simple steps.

And, as with any rules, there’s wiggle room:  I went with a much looser justification and taller line-height for Shivering Sands than I would have for a navel, for instance.  A little to give the lines room to breathe, and a little because I’ve been doing the same in my web layouts of warrenellis.com for ages – it’s an aesthetic I find pleasing and readable for essays and dense info dumping.  And I had a bit of fun calling back to the web-roots of the pieces in things like the full-indent and padding in inline quotes (which, in turn, is the web calling back to newspapers, magazines, and academic texts) because, again, it was my book to play with, and I think it looks good.

And that’s basically your takeaway, right there.  You must own books, I really hope, so you can thumb through and pay attention and learn how to make them look.  Start simple, with the layout of your own book, and then find the places where you want to have a bit of fun and make the design more “you.” And then, when you’re done, and you’ve got your printout or your proof, just flip the book open to a random page and really look at it.  If you’re honest with yourself and you say “this looks good” – then there you go.  If not, well, maybe just dial it back, just a bit.  Remember that you’re making a Thing For People To Read, and that doesn’t mean it can’t be a work of art… so long as people can read it.

I’ve got a print-out of some of Warren’s more… well, sane or insane, time will tell… twitterings, and “Universal Health Care” is one I’ve wanted to do for a while.  I’m not sure if it’s going to do as well as last week’s SPACE BASTARD, because I’m honestly not sure what the overlap in demographic is, there.  Do SPACE BASTARDS care about health care?  We’ll find out.

The design process for SPACE BASTARD went a little like this:  Warren said, “Twitter people want SPACE BASTARD on a T-shirt.” And then I said, “Well then I guess I need to figure out what the hell that looks like, don’t I?”

… yeah, that was pretty much it.  But it worked out well!

This week, for HEALTH CARE, Warren sent me that first bit in text, and he’d thought out the general layout and style of the prescription fact sheet you see above.  After fiddling with it a bit, and adding in that perfectly generic little wave bit, it occurred to me that it needed a little something, and I told him I was tempted by the idea of adding some side effects and maybe an “ask your doctor” line, just for fun.  YES, said Warren… and then I thought about it a bit…

“Hmm, lessee, side effects,” I thought aloud, “There’s dizziness, vomiting, seizures are always fun…”

“Multiple udder-like nipple extrusions and the Samoan Octopoid Scrotum Death!” says Warren.  

And that’s why he’s the brains and I’m the mechanic.

Radio silence until Monday, likely.

TOTW: SPACE BASTARD expires tomorrow, to be replaced Monday — so if you want one you’re running out of time to hesitate.

(Happy()Sad) has no expiration, but I wanna pop the link back up in case you missed it (or just forgot).

If you’re reading this from my actual site (vs. RSS reader, etc), you’ve got the whole right side of the page to keep you occupied with brilliant content. It looks like Warren’s music-blogging again, and that’s always a fantastic read.

Have a great weekend.

This is a quick (for long-winded values, I’m sure) segue from my ongoing (and going, and going) POD notes and rantings to a bit that may seem a little ahead of itself: Telling people that you’re Making Something.

Because you’re going to have to, when you’re done, you know.  And you’re likely going to have a little bit of an uphill time of it, because the internet’s half broken, isn’t it.  Oh, you know what I mean — you’ve got a blog, probably, but (Wil and Warren, you’re not to answer this one, because I’m not talking about you, yet) how many people read your blog?  I’m not being mean about it — this isn’t supposed to put you off before you even start, trust me — but how many people do you pull over, and worse, how many of those people do you interact with?

That’s where the internet is half broken, right there, that last bit: Comments are shit. 

And people keep trying to find ways to fix what is an inherently crap system is the main problem. I mean, how many fucking ways are there to leave a comment, these days?  You can log into a wordpress or typepad blog, only maybe some of your readers don’t have (or want to make) accounts for either, so there are OpenID plugins and trackbacks and ShareThis and Stumble and Delicious and Technorati (and oh there’s one that went to fucking weed, innit) and All Manner of networking and feedback and pingback and chatback and every-damned-thing-else to address a “problem” that’s, honestly? Not solvable.

Most of the time, people aren’t going to have anything to say in response.

But, without that feedback, a lot of us lose steam, because how else will we know we’re being heard, or that anyone even cares?

Which is how the internet’s half broken, of course.  Because one half, the Social Networking half, revolves around the idea that he who has the most friends, wins.  And the other half, the Individual and Personal half, revolves around the idea that a single person should have a comments form on every page, and somehow the magic of connectivity will fill the lower half of every post with feedback and community.

Hahaha.  But no.

I mean, yesterday I asked my 400ish twitter followers a direct question: What are you making?  And I got, as expected, about 20 responses.  Warren and Wil probably would have gotten about 100 (in fact, you can go look at the comments to Wil’s post on Making Things to see I’m absolutely right in that estimate), but they’ve both got HYUGE audiences.  And that’s responses to a direct question.  So what hope is there of building an interactive community around just general discussion and feedback?

Well… there’s really not.  Not if you insist on using just one bit of the half-broken internet out of the box.

But then what the hell DOES work?  See, here’s my crazy thought (and I got it from Warren who’s cleverer than you and me put together, so you know it’s true): We really could try interacting with Internet People like they’re real, you know, People.

Oh stop huffing, I haven’t even explained yet, and when I do, whatever you were about to shoot back will sound retarded.

Look, imagine you’ve got four friends over, or the five of you are out at the pub or whatever.  How amazingly awkward would the conversation go if, every time you made any statement, you then paused until each person responded directly.  Only once each person had said something could you move onto the next bit.

Like this:

• PERSON ONE says “Rough weather today!”
• PERSON TWO says “Yes”
• PERSON THREE says “Yeah it’s kinda blowing out there.”
• PERSON FOUR says “I had a rough day at work.”
• PERSON TWO says “Don’t  hijack the conversation! We’re talking about the WEATHER right now”
• PERSON FOUR calls person two a Nazi
• PERSON ONE gets into a long, involved attempt to mediate between PERSONS TWO and FOUR
• PERSON FIVE says “Too long, didn’t listen.  But it is cold out…”
• PERSON ONE says “Okay, good, we’ve all discussed the weather and I can see PERSON TWO is just going to pout until we move on to the next dedicated topic: How were our days at work?”

I mean, honestly, that’s a worst-case comment scenario, true — but it’s also just fucking ridiculous to think about EVER doing in “real” life, isn’t it?

Oh, I of course forgot the part where PERSON ONE is obsessively checking to see if weather.com has pinged his phone with a forecast that agrees with his initial statement.  And is also staring at the table next to them, hoping some strangers will come over and agree, too.

That’s really just no way to have a conversation, is it?

But we want our blogs and our internet communication to be interactive, so we go with the half-broken system, even though none of us are so socially stunted that we think that’s how it should work — just because that’s the system that comes built on to the tools we’re using.

And you’ll note I’ve lopped that system right off my blog, because I’m no fan of tech that solves a problem that isn’t really there.

Conversations don’t happen in blogs. (There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.  There are little networks of the faithful that do hang out in the comments sections of some of the bigger blogs, sure.) Conversations happen in forums, or on Twitter, and probably in GoogleWave while people figure out what to do with it, and in stranger places like FaceBook walls and roll-your-own networks, sort of.

(That last never really took off in the direction I expected, but then again, Cafepress have been around for ten years and we’re pushing for an uptick there, too, so I may just need to be patient)

But blogs aren’t social networks — they’re stations — and no matter how much crap we tack on to try and make them more interactive, they aren’t going to be (that definition of) networks because, ostensibly, a blog is a place where you talk and people dial in to listen.

That was a segue of its own, so let’s circle back to the original point: How do you get people to come listen?

Well, unless you’re very attractive and taking out 50-feet restraining orders on a daily basis, I don’t imagine you’ve got people peeking in your windows to hear you singing in the shower.  And when you go out to grab a drink, I somehow doubt hundreds of people walk over to you to find out what you’re thinking.

If you’ve got any friends at all, I’d imagine you went out and found them, or got introduced by other people, or met them at work, or school, or by bumming a light 15 feet away from the bus stop.

If you’ve got online friends, I reckon you brought them over from the meat-filled world, or you met them over on Whitechapel, or someone on Twitter RT’d them, or you went looking for something in particular and found them by happy google chance.

And if you — and by extension, your Thing You’re Making — want an audience, you’ve got to tell those people when you’ve got something to show them, and lead them back.

Which is why, even though FREAKANGELS has been running into its third volume, now, Warren still twitters, blogs, and mails you a link, every week.  It’s why I sweep off the sidewalk and tell everyone the new discussion thread is open — and also ask everyone how they’re doing, because it’s a forum that’s tacked on to a comic, but it’s also a forum of people I know and want to hear from.

And it’s why Whitechapel is all everything else the other 6 days and 23 hours of the week, because no community is there for just one thing.  They’re there for each other, and themselves, too.  And that’s why you can hit 9 out of ten threads on Whitechapel and find links and directions out to other people’s blogs and stores and projects… and you’re far more likely to see comments in the thread than you are on the individual pages, just to hit that point a little more home.

So.  How do you find an audience for the Thing You’re Making?

You don’t.

You find people you like. And if you can’t find any, you find people that like the things you do.  And you join their community — or, if there isn’t one, you make it and you tell everyone that’ll listen until four people show up — and you find out what they’re doing and you tell them what you’re doing.  And you pay fucking attention to someone instead of your Google Analytics page of “unique yet nameless visitors” and maybe you end up buying their project before you even get around to selling your own.

And before you know it, you’ll have five friends who really probably don’t often comment on your blog, but they’ll all RT the link to your Thing You Made when you Twitter it’s live. 

Oh, and also, you’ll have five friends, and you won’t be that guy that bitches about how hard it is to make connections online.  That’s a win, too.

FREAKANGELS is free every Friday, just like everything else the grown-ups always told you not to take from strangers.

Every now and again, someone will realize that I’m up at (a little before) 4am every Friday to post the comic and start the weekly discussion thread on Whitechapel.  And good heavens, no, I don’t have to be, haha.  There are plenty of ways to automate the entire process (well, this part of the process — fortunately there’s not reliable way of automating scripts or art, yet).  I could even have wired the comic into the (runs on Vanilla) forum to auto-post the discussion thread when it all goes live.

But Warren and I decided — way back in the first days of webdev for the sites, when they were still just notes in email — that since I’m usually up anyway (either still or, more often, just because I’m crazy), and past noon GMT is when he’s getting online for the day, that we might just as well team up in the mornings to shake the community awake and say g’morning.  So I get the comic and our forum, and Warren does the links and hellos via his website, social nets, and mailing list.

So, on Friday mornings, I help out (a leettle) with something Warren’s very good at and has been doing for ages: engaging with the people as more than just "nameless audience of who-knows-whats."

Which is the point where this post circles back to the POD and DIY topics I’m still on about, yes.  (FREAKANGELS is not Print On Demand, but it is web-to-print.)  Because these things you’re making (and you are making them, yes?) — well, you probably want to sell them to someone eventually, right? 

(Oh, don’t worry, I’m going to address the crassness of commercialism and the horrors of working for profit, later.  Suffice to say, for now, that it’s all well and good to make stuff for the love of making it, but at some point you’re going to have to eat, and I endorse projects that pay for at least the energy and supplies to make new projects.)

So, for right now, let’s assume that you are making something, and you do want to sell it to someone: You probably want to find those someones and let them know that you’re making something.  I mean, when I put it like that it’s a no shit sorta statement, innit?  And now that I’m into it, I can see that this is going to lead to a whole long post about networking, socializing, marketing… and not being a prick about it or losing sight of the Making Things goal that started the process.

But first I think I need coffee.  So you go read FREAKANGELS while I get good and caffeinated, and I’ll be back in a bit with that bit of a POD segue.

I’m typing this up from memory and with a mid-grade fever, so apologies for any rambling and/or disconnected bits.  What this isn’t going to be, anyway, is a how-to or a step-by-step.  Those are all over the net, and if you can’t type “publish book lulu specs instructions etc” into Google, then I certainly can’t help you.

Speaking of specifications: Step One is read through Lulu’s FAQ. No matter what your skill-level or comfort with uploaders/layout/publishing/design/whatever… well, okay, honestly?  It’s always a good idea to read the  FAQ, anywhere.  When a site makes a FAQ/Help section, it’s because people have frequently asked the same questions you’re going to have, and very often the questions you’re not going to realize you’re going to have until you’re halfway through the process.  Giving it a browse first is going to save you time and headache.  Hell, I’ve been working publishing for a good long while, and Lulu’s Getting Started guides saved me some time.

Lulu’s user forums are, unfortunately, not as helpful.  And it’s a damned shame, but someone needs to go through and take a flame-thrower to a lot of the undergrowth in there.  For answers I couldn’t find in the FAQ, I found that searching the forums lead me to a LOT of dead-end or not-found pages. Very frustrating.  If you can’t find the answer to a problem in the static help pages, you’re a lot better off switching over to Google than you are trying to find it in the forums.

Which leads me to Lulu’s Contact System.  If you’ve got a problem that you just can’t find the answer to in the help pages or elsewhere, then you’re going to want to talk to a real person.  However, we’re all pretty used to getting an automated “trouble ticked received” email when we contact support — but Lulu’s automated response is a little different than most.  When their system sends you a reply, it closes the ticket.  You’ve GOT to reply to the automated response to get through to a real person.  And I get the why of that — a lot of people’s first line of attack is to ignore the FAQ and go straight to a real person, and Lulu are a truly DIY site, so they’re trying to cut down on questions that people could answer themselves with just a teeeensy bit of effort.  But, ha ha, if you’re like me, you’re used to ignoring the automated contact responses and waiting for the real person… which means you’ll be waiting for a good long forever.

As I said in earlier posts, how you go about putting your book together is completely up to you, and what you’re comfortable with.  The Lulu templates will give you a bit less control over what the finished product looks like, but it’s a really good place for the people that are just starting out.  Do you already understand why your inside margins need to be a titch wider than your outside?  If that question just kinda terrified you: that’s all right, but you probably want to start with the templates.  Trust me, your book is still going to be lovely, the important thing for you is just getting your content into a pretty and readable format.

If you are doing the layout yourself (and even if you’re using the templates), the most important advice I can give you is to give it a proofread after layout.  Yes, I know you’ll have already scanned for spelling errors and typos — but you don’t know how your sentences are going to fall on the page until they’re on the correctly-sized page.  You want to look out for widow and orphan control, yes (those last lines of a paragraph that slip over to the next page), but you also just want to look at general readability.  If you haven’t put at least one forced line-break in your book, somewhere, then you could use just a little bit of polish.  And, you know, this probably qualifies as advanced advice — but if you’ve taken the time to craft enough guts to fill a book, I’m operating under the assumption that you want to make it shine as much as possible.

Pictures:  There are a few pictures in Shivering Sands, and they are all right.  What I mean is, if I’d been making a book of B&W photography and my focus was on crisp and clear images, I’d have gone with something else.  But for supplemental images in a book of otherwise, they’re just fine.  Now, I haven’t looked at Lulu’s full-color books, but online reviews (and many photographers in Warren’s network) seem to say Blurb is slightly higher quality (for slightly higher prices. You very likely get what you pay for.)  Since, again, I don’t have first-hand, hands-on knowledge of either, I can’t speak to that with any authority — but, again, Google is your friend.

For B&W text, Lulu is just gorgeous.  They use a good weight and brightness of paper, and the text is very crisp and clear.  We went with the standard paper (instead of the economy-grade) to keep international shipping rates down.  That’s something to think about when you’re picking your size and format — the economy-grade paper will shave some pennies off your final cost, but it’s going to screw your overseas audience.  It’s a choice you’ll have to make — for Warren and I, it was very clear, but depending on what you’re making, and for whom, your decision may differ.

Order a proof copy.  Seriously.  I went over my PDFs of Shivering Sands twelve billion times, and I still missed a straight quote on the back cover the first go ’round.  Yes, it’s going to mean you have to sell a few copies before you start making a profit, but really? That’s better than the alternative of the first person that buys your book not giving you any feedback except “You misspelled your name on the title page, dork.”

And, after you push your book live — wait a week before you start linking it out to the public.  It can take 3-5 days for it to start showing up in the Lulu marketplace search results, and I know you’re thinking but I’m giving people the link so…, but there are going to be people that go browsing through the rest of the site before they decide to buy — and if they can’t find their way back to you, you just lost a sale because you couldn’t wait a week.  See?

Lessee.  I want to get into some general marketing, and a few more advanced notes, but I really am running a fever, and this is running a little long, anyway.  So I think I’m going to push this first part live, and come back for Part Two.  That’ll give you a chance to ask me any questions, too, so that works.

By the by, if you’ve opened a Lulu account to order Shivering Sands, you can already start looking at their publishing tools.  You should even have a sample book they’ve set up for you on your account page.  That’s worth taking a look at.

Now, I’m gonna go fall down for a while.  You go have some fun.

Whoo, that last one was a bit of a rant, wasn’t it? But I needed to get that out of my system, because I’m tired, I’m just dead tired of the “everything’s broken/too hard/scary/etc so why bother trying?” nonsense. And I know it’s not new, but a few years back it just started snowballing because here’s the truth of it: It’s a million billion times easier to tell people what’s wrong than it is to try and make something right.

I’m am well self-aware enough to recognize that following a ranty post with that last statement is comedy gold, yes.

But now I’m going to switch gears and go a little hearts and flowers and rainbows on you.  Because I do honestly get that it’s honestly hard to start something, and it’s even harder to finish it.  Yeah, I know, I really do.  But now’s the time to do it, isn’t it?  Haven’t you noticed how many people — complete strangers, even –  are getting genuinely and creatively excited about Doing Stuff?  Part of it’s very likely the end-of-the-decade rush — it’s hitting some people like a ton of bricks, but it’s infecting even more people with cabin fever.  Folks are dusting off projects they first started thinking about in 2005 or 1999, or just finally flipping the switch and starting on something completely new.

And if the feedback I’m getting is any indication (and I’ve got comments disabled here because they don’t suit me, but I do pay attention to Twitter and I read everything on Whitechapel) — there are a LOT of you right. on. that. cusp. of taking the first step.  So look, I know I’ve been giving you lot a hard time about “just getting it done,” but before I get into my list of Stuff What I Learned Working With POD sometime tomorrow, I wanna back up a step and talk to you.

Here’s what you need to do, right now, tonight.  No, NOT tomorrow morning, or this weekend, or once your work rush has let off a little, or after the holidays, or sometime in the New Year: Right. Fucking. Now. 

Decide what you want to make.

And I’m talking about the single most complicated and ridiculous creation you can think of…

NO STOP IT I DIDN’T SAY HOW or WHY or WHEN, I only said WHAT.

Just the THING.  That’s all.  Is it a book?  Is it a script? A necklace? A toaster-cozy? A shirt? What is it?  What do you want to make?

And oh I mean it when I say ridiculous and complicated.  Look, if you want to take 365 photos of your toaster, one for every day of the next year, sometimes with toast and sometimes with a bagel and sometimes with an English muffin and one shot with a Very Dangerous Fork, and you want to blow those images up to 8.5×11” and put them into a monthly magazine with no words and just a picture of the appliance in its knitted cozy on the front and that’s what you want to make?  Then that’s what you want to make.

That’s what you want to make.

I SAID STOP THINKING ABOUT THE HOW OR THE LOGISTICS OR THE MONEY OR THE TIME.  STOP IT.

This moment, right now, this THING that you’re deciding to make, this thing exists independently of the fiddly bits for now.  This, what you’re doing here, is something that back in the olden days — before the slagosphere wasted all your time telling you how not to do things — they called a goal.  It’s a beautiful and magical thing that doesn’t need money or time or effort to believe in.  It’s only different from a dream in that you made it yourself, instead of letting your subconscious do all the work while you sleep.

Now, okay, here’s the little-bit harder step, are you ready?

Look at that THING you just said you wanted to make.  Really look at it.  Now, right now, tonight, NOT tomorrow morning, or this weekend, or once your work rush has let off a little, or after the holidays, or sometime in the New Year: Right. Fucking. Now.

DECIDE WHETHER YOU’RE GOING TO DO IT, OR NOT.

Period.  This is it.  You’ve been putting it off, or you’ve been planning to get around to it, or you know that once you get a little spare time it’s at the top of the list… for HOW long now?  I’m looking at you.  I know you’re already taking a breath to rattle off the list of all the things standing in your way.  and what’s more, I know you know they’re just excuses.

And it needs to end, now.  Your life is never going to GET less stressful.  It’s honestly not.  That’s not how life works.  When we put off the things we want to do, the stress of that adds into the stress of life.  You’re not going to GET more hours in the day.  You’re never going to have enough money to put aside spare time.  You’re not going to suddenly have That Moment where it all gels and you suddenly break out and start doing what you want to be doing… unless you MAKE that moment, right here, right now.

Oh I’m making a sappy speech right now, sure I am.  Imaginary music should be swelling on my cue.  But I’m telling you the absolute truth, okay? If you say, right now: “Oh whatever, I’ve heard that before, but it’s different for me, I’ve got different troubles and it’s not going to hurt me to wait until 2010″ — then you’re already out of the game, and I’m sorry, but that was that.  You might get there in ten years, sure, anything’s possible… but it’s going to have to be a different you that gets you there.  Because you, right now, haven’t got it.  And that’s fine — not everyone does — but it’s really time for you to put your energies into whatever you think is more important than Making What You Want.

The rest of you, well, you just signed on for a metric fuckton of work, and tomorrow you’re going to start realizing how much — but you’re all going to make it.  As long as you’re telling the truth, as long as you’ve decided you’re going to make your Thing, as long as you’re not shitting yourself just so you can feel like this paragraph is for you — you’re in.  It truly is just that easy — you make your goal and then you do every damned thing you can to get it done. You’re making a THING.  What, you think you can’t make a little Time?  Time isn’t half as hard as making a Thing! If you can write a book, you can make time.  If you can sculpt, you can create the moments to do it. If you can make pictures or music or knit or anything, then a little jiggery-pokery of space-time is nothing at all.

(That’s all a lie.  It’s hard as all fuckity, honestly.  But you said you weren’t lying when you said you wanted to do this thing, so you’re fucking well in it, now.)

That’s it.  Do it, or don’t. Shit, or throw out the pot. Pick one, and stick with it.

And if you come back tomorrow, I’ll be here helping the folks that, just like you, decided to Make Something.

Warm dry home; helpful, hot husband who smells good; fat black cat; swimmy blue fish; wonderful editors; a marvelous agent; amazing publishers; super-cool boss; the Eden Moore books earning out; Boneshaker continuing to do well; distant family having a good time without me in better weather than I’m presently experiencing; a secret clubhouse that serves the world; friends who swing by with goodies today; friends who would totally swing by with goodies today if they were in town; friends who are in town but have other plans; friends who express the wish that I were back in their town; Trader Joe’s meat selection and “wine country” chicken salad; Tofurkey (shut up, I love it); candy-colored hair; shiny black boots; a big brick tower; reading recommendations; independent booksellers; chain booksellers; libraries; book-loaners; book readers; new wool coat with a hood; having about 1/3 of my holiday shopping finished already; fuzzy hats; too much work because it’s far better than not enough work; one vehicle which works and is fun to drive; Etsy; novelty tee shirts; The Gap’s revamped selection of jeans; Christmas travel plans; new work-out music; CuteOverload.com; McKay faux-chicken seasoning; Advil; pixelated socks; leg-warmers (even though I didn’t appreciate them the first time they came around; Coke Zero; six different styles of goggles; out-of-town conventions; in-town conventions; tights on sale at Nordstrom Rack; new headphones that keep my ears warm; uncommonly good cover karma; fingerless gloves; plastic cutlery and paper plates; sorted, itemized receipts for everything; hand sanitizer that smells like lavender and chamomile; footie pajamas; Google; cheap red wine; thrift shopping; PBS; good reviews of my books from people I don’t know (and to whom I am not related); my paper shredder; a pack of wild cards; and cheese.

• The Scrap Shop by hopelarson on Etsy
  "I've set up an Etsy storefront to sell my comic pages and illustrations" - Hope Larson, brilliant graphic novelist
  (tags:comics shopping )

Several new books have arrived in the mail this week.

First of all, there are two great books, by friends of mine, that I read in manuscript, and for which I provided a blurb. The first is Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, by Steve Goodman (aka the DJ and producer kode9), and coming out shortly from MIT Press (as part of the same series as my book on Whitehead):

The second is Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), which is available now from Zero Books:

Zero Books has also just published two more worthwhile volumes. One is the brilliant One-Dimensional Woman, by Nina Power (aka infinite thought). The other, edited by Mark Fisher, is called The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson; it’s a collection of essays responding to Jackson’s death, and it includes an essay of mine (a smoothed-out version of something that initially appeared here in blog form), together with many smart essays, deeper than mine, by many people whose work I highly respect, including Joshua Clover, Mark Sinker, Geeta Dayal, Ian Penman, David Stubbs, Owen Hatherley, Dominc Fox, Reid Kane, and Alex Williams — to mention only people whom I have met before, or heard speak before, or whose work I have encountered in the blogosphere (I hope I haven’t missed anyone; there are lots of interesting articles in the volume by people I do not know at all).

I hope this doesn’t sound like in-group blog cronyism — the real point, I think, is that, in spite of everything, the blogosphere really has worked, for me and for many other people, as a stimulus to thought.

I also just received in the mail my copy of Les diff�rents modes d’existence by �tienne Souriau — a book that has been out of print for years, and is now once more available thanks to the interest of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, who provide a lengthy joint introduction. (For now, this is only in French. I have been looking forward to this book ever since I read an earlier article on it by Latour, also only in French for now, but forthcoming in English translation in The Speculative Turn).

• I think the speakers on my laptop just died…? #
• Thanksgiving! Not the day you want your fancy remote meat thermometer to die. Oh wells. Guess we do this the old-fashioned way… #

Wil Wheaton has a message for your dreams tonight:

Here are today’s stats for the fabulous urban fantasy adventure about a neurotic vampire/thief and her wealthy blind client, now with Bonus! Cuban drag queen and military intrigue — and yes, I’m making an early day of it:

Project: Bloodshot
New Words Written: 2594 (not great, not bad)
Present Total Word Count: 83,005 words
Goal: 95,000 words by December 12





Things Accomplished in Fiction: Argued extensively with a seeing-eye ghoul.

Things Accomplished in Real Life: Day-job work; went to the University Book Store and signed their stock as well as a few mail-order books; did more last-minute Thanksgiving shopping; beat head against wall.

Reason for Stopping: The apartment is not clean and people are coming over tomorrow. I need to change the litterbox, sort out food prep arrangements, vacuum and mop the (filthy) floors, and maybe even do some laundry, we’ll see.

• Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020 | Popular Science
  "scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels."
  (tags:sci tech neuro )
• World around us: Experimental Soviet “flying tank”
  "The Antonov A-40 Krylya Tanka was a Soviet attempt to allow a tank to glide into a battlefield after being towed aloft by an airplane, to support airborne forces or partisans."
  (tags:history war )
• BBC News - Mussolini’s ‘brain and blood for sale on internet’
  "The granddaughter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has said that blood and parts of his brain have been stolen to sell on the internet."
  (tags:crime )
• The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia
  Like it says.
  (tags:research )

• @stevensanders Oh, I really didn't mean that to be catty! I was genuinely surprised when the camera pulled back. in reply to stevensanders #
• @stevensanders I'm fine with that. in reply to stevensanders #
• I'm actually making surprising progress considering how chatty I've been today. Also: I'm craving tortilla soup with lime… and donuts. #
• @patrickkeller No, but I drive by there every day… in reply to patrickkeller #
• We wished we had an intern today. #
• Donut adventure fail. Voodoo dnt have apple cider donuts, so we went to Sesame. They wr out of ACs & the others we got wr 2 greasey 2 eat. #
• (We did have an intern from KCAI's writing program for a semester. Great guy; hope he felt like he got something out of it.) #
• What did you do? RT @mattfraction i'm sorry best show #
• RT @milkfedllc Out today: Invincible Iron Man #20, Uncanny X-Men #517. Previews: http://is.gd/53CLb & http://is.gd/53CNa #
• Out today from @warrenellis: Anna Mercury 2 #1, Astonishing X-Men Vol. 5: Ghost Box, Ignition City #5 #
• Out today from @brianmbendis: New Avengers #59, Powers: Definitive Collection Vol. 3, Powers #1 #
• Out today from @brubaker: Captain America: The Death of Captain America, Criminal: The Sinners #2, Incognito #
• Okay… those are my public service announcements for the day. #

Ta-dah! No reviews yet, but there’s a five page preview for you to digest. In short - Ares takes his team off on their first mission. Hi-jinks and adventures ensue!

It’s not the full total of comics pages appearing this week. The final issue of JMS’ Thor run comes out - THOR: GIANT SIZE FINALE. It’s apparently got a six page preview of the first issue of my run in it, which hits next week. 604 apparently has an enormous gatefold sleeve, which looks pretty damn nifty actually.

Oh - as a break from the war and chaos, I direct you at a friends of mine’s parents Sri Lankan humanitarian work, which could do with your support. Go nose.

I give you stats for the dirigible/pony-express story with zombies, the Goodnight-Loving trail, and a 19-year-old Union veteran who’s stuck with a mechanical foot.

Project: “Reluctance”
New Words Written: 2885 (uh oh)
Present Total Word Count: 7525 words
Goal: 5000 words by November 29





Details: Aw, crap. Way too long. Will shelve it for now, and try to fix it next week.
[:: headdesk ::]

Nathan of An Un-canny Ontology, responding to the same posts by Levi Bryant that I cited in my Tumblr workblog, asks the question: “What exactly happens during translation? What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?” After mulling over this question for some time, Nathan concludes “that objects predict, expect, or anticipate other objects – they recognize potential.”

Now, I am not sure that this is the right answer — or, at the very least, I would argue that it isn’t all of the answer. Nathan makes this claim because, for instance, “for leafs [sic] to translate photons of light into complex sugars, they must recognize the photons of light as photons of light.” I suppose this is true in a sense: leaves will not — cannot — translate just anything into complex sugars. But I don’t see why “recognition” has to be the precondition. If anything, I’d say that the leaf’s “recognition” of the photon is a consequence of, rather than a precondition for, its “translation” of light into sugar. Re-cognition, and indeed any form of cognition, always comes afterwards; it is the error of cogntivists (which we human beings, unavoidably misunderstanding ourselves, tend to be much of the time) to think that cognition is a ground of action, when actually it is a result of action.

I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly. (Whitehead’s actual entities are a bit like Leibniz’s monads, but actual entities touch each other directly, as monads do not. Cf. also Gabriel Tarde, who posits monads that — unlike Leibniz’s — interact with one another directly).

Levi puts it this way:

One of Harman?s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman?s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman?s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of ?translation?. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation. �(from this post)

I largely agree with this (as I’ve said before, here and here). I think that it is precisely right to generalize what Kant says about the mind’s encounter with external reality to all interactions between/among objects. However: unlike Levi, I am unwilling to equate Kant’s argument for the cognitive inaccessibility to the thing-in-itself with the thesis that “objects never directly encounter one another.” This is because contact or encounter cannot be reduced to cognitive access. In Kant’s account, we are affected by things-in-themselves, even though we can never know them. This is indeed the source of one of the most-remarked problems with Kant’s thought: he seems to be saying that, in some sense, things-in-themselves cause our perceptions of them, even though he explicitly says that causality is merely phenomenal (i.e. merely produced by the way our minds organize our sensations). There are two ways to resolve this dilemma. One is Hegel’s and Zizek’s way, which absolutizes Mind or Spirit or Subject, by saying that even the inaccessibility of things-in-themselves is in fact posited by the Mind in the first place. Obviously, I find this undesirable. The other alternative — or, more precisely, the move in the opposite direction — consists in distinguishing the way things affect other things from “causality” understood as a Transcendental Category (i.e. roughly, as a form of cognition). Causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that the mind is non-cognitively affected by things-in-themselves. Or — to make the speculative realist generalization — causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that an object affects, or is affected by, another object.This is one way of describing Whitehead’s distinction between “causal efficacy” (what I am calling non-cognitive affectivity) and “presentational immediacy” (which, for Whitehead, means the type of causal connection discussed by Hume and by Kant).

So I agree with Levi and Graham that an object never cognitively grasps any other object in its entirety. (This is what Levi calls epistemological anti-realism). But I disagree with their move of equating this cognitive inaccessibility with the claim that objects never directly encounter one another. My non-vicarious version of ontological realism consists in claiming that objects do directly encounter (or affect) one another — only they do so non-cognitively. This is precisely why our ontology can be realist, even when our epistemology is confessedly anti-realist. The translation that happens in every encounter between objects — i.e. when, in Whitehead’s terms, one object prehends another object — is a direct, but non-cognitive, encounter (in Whitehead’s terms, it is a process of feeling, in which an “actual entity” determines itself by making a “decision” about how it will feel that which moves it to feel. An object functions for another object, Whitehead says, as a “lure for feeling”).

[I know that Levi and Graham won't agree with my account here, and probably Nathan won't either. But none of this would have come clear to me -- to the extent that it has come clear -- if not for my puzzling over what they wrote].

I had a few people asking when I had grown a sexy fringe in the backmatter to PG2.5. I hadn’t, alas. The days of fringes are long behind me. It was my good friend, the splendid uberlady Jill Stafford, as pictured here. Due to me being momentarily shit, we didn’t caption her up. Man! What were we thinking(Answer: LET’S GET THIS TO THE PRINTERS ASAP). Pah! Anyway - our model was Jill Stafford, who was wearing the still-available-photo-T-shirt and does art like this…

And you should go see more.