You know me. I'm a bitter, cranky, miserable Slav (in other words, a Slav) with a chip on his shoulder and an axe to grind about some new pet cause every couple of months. I seldom if ever pull a punch and I don't suffer fools gladly. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of the popular web series "Zero Punctuation" was once quoted as saying in an episode of said series, "[Art] is all for not if it isn't surrounded by self-important bearded tossers who read too much into things for a living." Which is the sum total of my personality.
But are guys like me really your enemies? Savage critics with a superiority complex may be ham-fisted, blunt, and even downright arrogant and rude, but how much damage can we actually do when our actions are ostensibly meant to raise the standard of the art world we're so passionate about? Naturally, obsession and misguided actions can have negative consequences, but I would argue that there is a far more insidious enemy at work.
Encyclopedia Dramatica is a wiki maintained mostly by trolls and people with a lot of free time and not a lot of ambition. Nevertheless, it does make for some entertaining insight into the slimy underbelly of the internet. Many of the articles describe certain individuals who are recurring sources of drama or incidents in which much trolling and laughter was had at the expense of some poor netizen whose ego or emotional instability caused them to do something titanically foolish.
For example, let's take the wonderful world of webcomics. For those not in the know, webcomics are sequential art taking advantage of the publisherless medium that is the internet. Unfortunately because the lack of publishers translates to a lack of quality control this means that for every "Adventures of Dr. McNinja" and "Order of the Stick" there are about a hundred knock-offs of "Penny Arcade," gag-a-day comics that don't actually tell jokes and use cheap violence in lieu of actual humor, animu-art based fantasy epics that are neither, abysmal diary comics, and a slew of other works with bad art and even worse writing.
A stereotype about the webcomics community is that the artists in the scene are faux-alpha-male egotists who respond to any and all criticism of their work with screaming, personal attacks, and death threats that they have neither the inclination nor the psychoses to actually carry out. And indeed this is often the case as evidenced by the now defunct Blogspot blog "Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad," run by four different authors giving scathing critiques on not only the comics themselves but also the bad attitudes of the creators. The attempts at trolling the blog by fans and the artists themselves is unintentionally hilarious all on its own.
What about the ever-popular deviantArt? DA suffers from many of the same problems as the webcomics collective in that it's ruled primarily be egos that do not have the talent necessary to back them up. Again, publisherless medium. Flame wars get started over imagined transgressions routinely and a cult of Japanophiles seems to be calling most of the shots now as they drive so much traffic (read: potential ad revenue) to the site that the admins give them a free pass on all of their bad behaviour with only a slap on the wrist for the worst violations of the terms of service.
Of particularly hilarious/depressing note are several incidents in which several DA users came to the Concept Art message boards. If you haven't heard of Concept Art, it is a forum run by and for professional and semi-pro artists and art students. Just a casual perusal of the works on display in the Finally Finished section is enough to make your jaw detach from your skull just so it can fall to floor faster. And yet even the most brilliant pieces have brutally honest and constructive critiques following them. The CA forums are built on the ethic of constant self-improvement.
So of course the deviantArt kids come in expecting to make waves and promptly flip right the hell out once they are given criticism instead of fawning praise. This has happened several times. Furry artists, fan artists, and even one case of a girl who drew absolutely filthy fetish manga that I won't describe here for the sake of decency and because any description of it would be followed by the sound of screaming, most likely your own.
Where does all the drama come from? What is the root cause? Simply put: fans.
The egalitarian nature of the internet has caused many young and aspiring artists to confuse fans with critics, page views and traffic figures with value, and vapid comments on their profiles as a sign of talent on their part. Fans are the lifeblood of a professional artist. Graphic artists take commissions to supplement their incomes, musicians need fans to buy their albums and merchandise, filmmakers need fans to buy tickets for a consistent return on their production costs, authors don't sell many books without fans, and magicians and other performers need fans to continue expanding their clientelle and getting paid gigs.
But fans are not critics. Their support is to be enjoyed and valued, but should never be mistaken for advice. If you forget that, then they become parasites.
The magic community is seeing a new tech-savvy generation utilizing the internet to spread magic to the masses, but the online magic world is incestuous and unambitious. Not too long ago I had a brief and unpleasant conversation with a young man on YouTube who was not even old enough to drive a car and had only ever performed one paying gig for his relatives, but was making videos telling people how to go pro. Myself and only a handful of other people were the only ones disagreeing with him and offering constructive criticism. The rest of them were kids like him telling him to ignore us and babbling about how cool and great he was. Such an environment is poisonous.
If you are going to use the internet to spread and develop your art, you must seek out those who are going to give you the hard truth. If you let the YouTube masses be the only source of feedback you get, you'll begin to believe that you're good enough and will simply stagnate, slack off, and wither away into obscurity as the parasites find a fresh new host to feed off of. And you, dependent on the euphoria their flattery and praise gives you, will have already burned the bridges to the people who could have helped you while you desperately try to bring that good feeling back. Is that really what you want?
The internet is a bold new medium and still has a lot of untapped potential. But it's still largely unchartered wilderness. Here there be monsters.
But are guys like me really your enemies? Savage critics with a superiority complex may be ham-fisted, blunt, and even downright arrogant and rude, but how much damage can we actually do when our actions are ostensibly meant to raise the standard of the art world we're so passionate about? Naturally, obsession and misguided actions can have negative consequences, but I would argue that there is a far more insidious enemy at work.
Encyclopedia Dramatica is a wiki maintained mostly by trolls and people with a lot of free time and not a lot of ambition. Nevertheless, it does make for some entertaining insight into the slimy underbelly of the internet. Many of the articles describe certain individuals who are recurring sources of drama or incidents in which much trolling and laughter was had at the expense of some poor netizen whose ego or emotional instability caused them to do something titanically foolish.
For example, let's take the wonderful world of webcomics. For those not in the know, webcomics are sequential art taking advantage of the publisherless medium that is the internet. Unfortunately because the lack of publishers translates to a lack of quality control this means that for every "Adventures of Dr. McNinja" and "Order of the Stick" there are about a hundred knock-offs of "Penny Arcade," gag-a-day comics that don't actually tell jokes and use cheap violence in lieu of actual humor, animu-art based fantasy epics that are neither, abysmal diary comics, and a slew of other works with bad art and even worse writing.
A stereotype about the webcomics community is that the artists in the scene are faux-alpha-male egotists who respond to any and all criticism of their work with screaming, personal attacks, and death threats that they have neither the inclination nor the psychoses to actually carry out. And indeed this is often the case as evidenced by the now defunct Blogspot blog "Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad," run by four different authors giving scathing critiques on not only the comics themselves but also the bad attitudes of the creators. The attempts at trolling the blog by fans and the artists themselves is unintentionally hilarious all on its own.
What about the ever-popular deviantArt? DA suffers from many of the same problems as the webcomics collective in that it's ruled primarily be egos that do not have the talent necessary to back them up. Again, publisherless medium. Flame wars get started over imagined transgressions routinely and a cult of Japanophiles seems to be calling most of the shots now as they drive so much traffic (read: potential ad revenue) to the site that the admins give them a free pass on all of their bad behaviour with only a slap on the wrist for the worst violations of the terms of service.
Of particularly hilarious/depressing note are several incidents in which several DA users came to the Concept Art message boards. If you haven't heard of Concept Art, it is a forum run by and for professional and semi-pro artists and art students. Just a casual perusal of the works on display in the Finally Finished section is enough to make your jaw detach from your skull just so it can fall to floor faster. And yet even the most brilliant pieces have brutally honest and constructive critiques following them. The CA forums are built on the ethic of constant self-improvement.
So of course the deviantArt kids come in expecting to make waves and promptly flip right the hell out once they are given criticism instead of fawning praise. This has happened several times. Furry artists, fan artists, and even one case of a girl who drew absolutely filthy fetish manga that I won't describe here for the sake of decency and because any description of it would be followed by the sound of screaming, most likely your own.
Where does all the drama come from? What is the root cause? Simply put: fans.
The egalitarian nature of the internet has caused many young and aspiring artists to confuse fans with critics, page views and traffic figures with value, and vapid comments on their profiles as a sign of talent on their part. Fans are the lifeblood of a professional artist. Graphic artists take commissions to supplement their incomes, musicians need fans to buy their albums and merchandise, filmmakers need fans to buy tickets for a consistent return on their production costs, authors don't sell many books without fans, and magicians and other performers need fans to continue expanding their clientelle and getting paid gigs.
But fans are not critics. Their support is to be enjoyed and valued, but should never be mistaken for advice. If you forget that, then they become parasites.
The magic community is seeing a new tech-savvy generation utilizing the internet to spread magic to the masses, but the online magic world is incestuous and unambitious. Not too long ago I had a brief and unpleasant conversation with a young man on YouTube who was not even old enough to drive a car and had only ever performed one paying gig for his relatives, but was making videos telling people how to go pro. Myself and only a handful of other people were the only ones disagreeing with him and offering constructive criticism. The rest of them were kids like him telling him to ignore us and babbling about how cool and great he was. Such an environment is poisonous.
If you are going to use the internet to spread and develop your art, you must seek out those who are going to give you the hard truth. If you let the YouTube masses be the only source of feedback you get, you'll begin to believe that you're good enough and will simply stagnate, slack off, and wither away into obscurity as the parasites find a fresh new host to feed off of. And you, dependent on the euphoria their flattery and praise gives you, will have already burned the bridges to the people who could have helped you while you desperately try to bring that good feeling back. Is that really what you want?
The internet is a bold new medium and still has a lot of untapped potential. But it's still largely unchartered wilderness. Here there be monsters.
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