Hey, what do you know—I was able to find an actual Christmas pulp cover, after all. This is from True Experiences circa 1947. My personal caption for this is “In the end, we returned the presents, but kept the brunette.”
Nice muff-tiara headband thing she’s wearing! I could easily do an Outstanding Pulp Women’s Hats feature without drawing a heavy breath.
This was a rather common cover theme. Like our pretty cover girl here, many of us have occasion to feel somewhat overwhelmed by this, the most wonderful season of the year.** Since I may be swept away by the old yuletide glow any minute now, I feel compelled to get my interweb mouth breathing and knuckle dragging in while I still have the chance.
General Promotion
One of these days I am going to get around to doing a study of common pulp cover themes. Like the above, they had a number of tried and true ones that they used over and over. As it is, the next feature updates for Hil-Gle.com are going to be on Hillman Periodicals and a new Ajax Telegraph on Types of Ponzi Schemes. After that, I am hoping to post the game Big Three. Some time during the next year I hope to post the games Worlds of Fear and Alley Tanx. A new mini module for Weird Detective Mystery Adventures may also soon appear. After that, the WDMA website itself will start to make the migration to Hil-Gle’s own pages, probably with a complete re-write.
Yep, that’s my plan. There, I wrote it down. Now all I have to do is have absolutely no life whatsoever during the next year and I should be able to pull it off.
Did I mention that I was writing a novel? Yes, I am. Even as we speak. Mister Multi-task, that’s me—that is, when I am not also Mister Fun. (I am a real nowhere man.)
I would describe the novel’s current state as ‘goob’. Goob is not quite a blank page, but rather many, many decorated pages, many of which are going to have to be renovated before I can even think about doing anything with them. But I can’t even do that because it’s not done yet. I like to completely mess something up before I fix it. I do get things done, though—even as messy as my method seems. I know this because I have submissions in the mail.
Inter-Drift-Nets
I don’t know if any of you have ever checked out the online writing market listings before, but they are somewhat of a mixed bag. It seems that the more impressive the name, such as Litmags or Market List, the more likely they are to be of very little use. I mention the above two by name, since they appear to be utterly abandoned. In both cases, someone cyber squatted themselves a name, set up an interface and then… died… moved to another planet… realized that their conviction for cyber stalking would prevent them from using a computer terminal for a while… forgot the internet existed… or were just so massively unimpressed with the amount of money google ads actually nets them that they became entirely disinterested.
With the Litmags website, the operator dutifully listed all of the lit mags he knew and then set up an area for people to “comment.” By comment, the operator seems to be inviting his prospective audience not merely to review the contents of these various magazines, but also to type in their contact information for him. So what exactly is it that you have accomplished, oh cyber guru? Sadly, the internet is filled with these non realized projects.
More typical of the not useful supposedly useful sites is Market List the Genre Fiction Writer’s Market. Here the operator has invested in the domain and a nifty interface. As for the information provided, it’s at best the outcomes of year and a half old google searches or perhaps a crib job from Novel and Short Fiction Writer’s market. It has a lot of listings, mind you, and they are nicely laid out, but all of the information is stale and most of the links are broken. It seems to exist primarily as a pass through for the Google Adsense postings for vanity publishers. *1 Having gone the Adsense route myself, I can see why he became less than enthusiastic about vigorous maintenance. The internet is like retail: you have to love it. It is most distinctly not the magic money machine.
Of course small press magazine websites themselves are not exactly paragons of usefulness, either. “We have a website, but we hate it” many of them seem to say. Some of your more established magazines have websites which declare cold war on the internet, with such pithy statements as “We cannot in any way take time out of our incredibly busy days to learn how to use a computer or get our freaking email so all of you computer nerds will just have to submit to us via the post or not at all.” Better yet are the magazines who ask you to use their automated submission system and then charge to access it. I’m sure the idea of charging salesmen a fee to answer the door has occurred to many a small businessman, but few have had the audacity to follow through on the threat. Given how piddly little money is involved in literary short story market, charging people for the experience of being rejected by email seems petty. *2
As for this website, I intend to keep it monetary-free. This is a writer’s website. If someone sees my byline on something and chooses to write down my web address, this site gives them something else to read. Mission accomplished. If I draw them to the other topics covered on these pages, fine. If the other content on the pages draws readers to me as a writer, better. Soon the entire universe will be mine. MINE! ALL MINE! In a completely non monetary way.
Quite a few websites are out there to promote books—books seeking a publisher or published books, with the website acting as a tease.*3 I am reminded of a feature which at one time appeared on The Painful Truth, written by a woman who had once been the personal secretary to both of the Armstrongs. The moment the book leaped to print, the website came down. Ditto a fine website done by a lawyer on the crime sensation Charles Ponzi. The content was shoveled onto the printed page and the cyber page went blank. I am of a mixed mind on this practice.
As of late I have chanced on (and joined) a website dedicated to the Continental Professional Football League. For those of you not in the know, the CPFL (sometimes known as CFL or as Continental) was a secondary market football league formed mostly out of the semi pro United Football League and the Pacific Coast Football League. It played for five seasons during the 1960s. At one point it had up to 35 teams operating. At present, the website is still in research mode: gathering information on the league’s rather nebulous history. That said, our webmaster has already reached the conclusion that the league’s ultimate failure was due to some conspiracy.*4 I smell a book coming on! Gaining factoids is a good use for a website.
A cyber acquaintance of mine had her research project on Alien Abductees booted because the website she set up didn’t gain significant traction. Sometimes I think you just have to plow ahead with a project. Obviously, if she couldn’t get any abductees, then there is no project. But in general, if you’re going to do something, do it. If you do it right, people will be interested. I hope that’s where the CPFL project is headed.
As opposed to being subservient to something else, I am more interested in the website as a form itself. At least that is how I would eventually like to treat my website.
My old acquaintance Dennis Kitchen (Kitchen Sink Press) used to have a tag line for his old company which went “Like money down the drain.” *5 Having done hobby game publishing before, I figure I am better off with this web model. If I get a lot of hits, I will print again or bring it to a firm. With this forum I can test the level of interest best and then go from there.
In any case, I am following my bliss. The rest, they say, will take care of itself.
Oprah’s Gone
(Wherein your author does his best imitation of a proto fascist drunken beer hall speaker circa Germany 1924 or so only transposed to modern circumstances. And I mean it, although the transition between ranting about financial injustice and then into commentary about Oprah is pretty daft.)
Too Big To Fail is the single most useless concept in all of Western Civilization. We used to hunt the trusts. We used to outlaw monopolies. When financial “innovations” went astray, they were regulated or banished. Just as there is nothing new under the sun in retailing, there should be nothing new under the sun in accounting.
We have seen what happens in crony capitalism. We have seen what happens when the government pumps money into zombie banks. The Japanese did it. Why in the hell are we doing it now?
People who claimed to know what they were doing clearly didn’t. Now they want another bite of the apple and again on our dime. If we do this we might as well jettison the free enterprise system. It would be a command economy, commanded by people whose mastery of the subject is demonstrably questionable. Being ruled by welfare plutocrats is the worst of all possible worlds. At least dictators and kings are good at something.
Ban credit default swaps. Do not regulate them on an open market. Ban them. Ban all derivatives. And if other countries snap up this market, let them. It won’t happen. The people who threaten this are bluffing. Do not allow asset class bifurcation of loans. Keep all loans real with real recourse and actual returns. No more computer games. Again, if someone else takes the market away, we can walk it off to the port and cheerfully wave it a fond goodbye.
And finally, when a big bank or big anything fails, cut it up and distribute assets to the most capable solvent entity, even if that entity is smaller, even if that means cutting it between several entities. You might even think about giving the assets to banks in places where the credit card holders or mortgage payers actually live.
I’m not actually in that bad of a mood, to be honest with you. It’s just that the most commonly seen economic headline during the Great Depression was “Recovery Around the Corner.” Today’s news is largely the same. Although it is debatable as to whether FDR’s programs had any real impact on circumstances, you cannot change things unless you change things. Give someone else a chance to screw things up. I want new rules and new crooks, at the very least.
Change is not above the perception level of the common person. Disasters are pretty obvious. Lack of vision is really obvious. Even those occasional brilliant actors are doing so in obvious ways, sometimes in slow motion. One of these obvious visionaries is our own Oprah.
Yes, I said ‘Oprah’ and ‘visionary’ in the same sentence. And no, I have not run out of radioactive crack. (I still have some left, thank you.)
Remember, she’s an obvious and slow motion visionary. As amusing as it might be to think that Oprah is quitting syndicated television to concentrate on lesbianism full time, I do not think that this is the case. Instead, I think the chocolate parade float is cresting a new and obvious wave.
This wave is the Internet Part Stupid and it is coming to a street near you. It’s already in your street, where cable TV companies are busily splitting up perfectly good impulse lines and adding new junction boxes. Soon your perfectly cable ready television will be perfectly ready no more. Channels will soon be subdividing and multiplying once more. The once banished box will be here to stay and it will be watching you forever more.
Forget what you heard about TiVo or HuLu or website X or delivery system Y. The winners have already been chosen here. All that remains to happen is the duck duck goose dance of vertical integration. (Actually already in the offing, as I will explain.) There are several systems in the pipeline, but essentially your TV is about to become cloudware, capable of delivering ala carte offerings of any movie ever made or acting as a CD changer for the video world. Or it will just be television in fun sized bites.
It’s in the fun sized market that Oprah is going to compete. Just as the majority of people in their cars play the radio as opposed to a CD, the majority of TV viewers are not going to regularly plop down in front of the tube with an agenda to take in the great works of cinema. Basically people are going to sit down with a general idea in mind and set the tube to stun. Or Law & Order.
The way fun sized television is going to work is the way radio stations work today: no variety in offerings, just a steady stream of the same. Your typical channel has about three hours of programming that it repeats eight times a day. That’s today. In the future, there will just be more of them. Want to watch I Dream of Jeanie for three hours? There she is. Ditto Law & Order. And soon, All Oprah.
The way syndicated terrestrial television goes is that the packager buys the show from Oprah and her elves and then resells it to local television stations. The stations then try to recoup their investment in Oprah’s expanding ego by selling commercials. In the new model, wherein Oprah’s station is everywhere, the money goes directly to her. Given that ad revenues are actually going down, this may not be so much as a grab for a greater portion of the pie as it is an attempt to husband what pie she has remaining. And no one is better at husbanding pie than Oprah.
Not everyone is thrilled with this or as certain as Oprah is. The wild card here isn’t the internet or another delivery on demand system, but rather what remains of the over the air television market. It too is subdividing. In fact, it’s gaining ground against cable—which, in bad times, is the first thing people cut. Already there are dozens more stations over the air for free. The real question is where these stations are going to get their programming from now that the Oprahs and reruns running for fun sized cable outlets. There are only so many TV preachers to go around. The market is so uncertain that General Electric essentially gave NBC away for a promissory note and a promise not to freeze its offerings out. That’s running scared.
The Internet Part Stupid does have a lot of potential, beyond being able to see Casablanca at all times of the day. There’s a possibility for online play station games, interactive community events, even direction-able fiction. It won’t happen, but the potential is there. (It’s just going to be porn and people watching Law & Order. ) Chances are, by the time everything fits together, television itself may be passé. In fact, there may be no saving television as far as a certain demographic is concerned. I’m guessing that cable is hoping the porn will bring them back.
If we play our cards right, this will all come full circle, with both cable and over the air essentially being free--as in largely advertiser supported. With 60 plus channels coming over the air for free, cable is going to have to prove that it is worth any money. If I was a betting person, I would bet that long term cable will simply not be able to make the case. If they can put interactivity over the air, cable is a bunch of dead boxes overnight. In the mean time, I think the short term result is more money for Oprah. I am willing to go out on a limb and say that in the medium term, all money will eventually be Oprah’s. And then it will be worthless, thanks to our banker friends.
My Gloating Over The Latest News On Climate Change Data Having Been Faked
I like clean air. I like clean water. I do not think heavy metals should be placed in the ground or in ground water. I want both the air and the water to be as clean as we can possibly make them. Our air is cleaner now than it has ever been in my life and I am thankful to the Environmental Movement for this. I want more of this, even if it impacts my monetary quality of life.
That said, I knew the climate change data was faked. And faked in part is faked in total in the science field. It’s been dribbling out for the past few weeks now. Just today, like a thief in the night, released on Sunday to minimize impact, it was revealed that all of the research on which the climate change model was based was twisted, tweaked, fabricated, faked and false. Revise your conclusions, my ass. How’s about an apology to all of us climate change deniers?
I am not going to be holding my wonderfully clean air filled breath.
I hope to do a few more before the ho ho ho fairy takes me away. In any case, please have a Merry Christmas.
** By my estimation, our pretty little cover girl is around 84 years of age if she’s still alive today. This particular publisher was big on using agency supplied professional models.
*1. The way Adsense works is that, unless you are very vigilant, you have next to no control over what type of advertiser shows up on your site. If you want a demonstration, head to our Weird Detective Mystery Adventures Online site and check out the listings for any of the psychic abilities.
*2. Many of these magazines have a circulation equal to Hil-Gle.com, which has about 300 readers, some of whom come to this blog. I may start posting some original works of fiction on the website as opposed to just reprints.
*3. The Hil-Gle website, by contrast, is for anything I have done or ever will do. This does not make me better, just cheaper.
*4. He might want to rethink this conclusion. The idea that the television networks were in collusion against the CPFL makes little sense on the face of it. Factually, the CPFL was set up as a minor league which paid its players. Its TV appeal, if any, would have been to local independent stations, not networks. From a personnel standpoint, CPFL was at odds with big time colleges. Any attempt on the AFL or NFL to cooperate with the CPFL may have endangered their draft arrangement. Without the ability to “sell contracts” as the minor league baseball teams do, the CPFL was lacking a needed revenue element. Also, the drift in CPFL leadership direction seems to be key. Changing one’s mind midstream is what doomed the WFL, XFL and USFL (not to mention the All American Football League.)
*5. He had a better tag line for Bizarre Sex Comix: “More Popular Than Professional Hockey… It’s Bizarre Sex!” I used to spend hours shooting the breeze with Dennis and his staff at the old Chicago Comicon. Both him and Alan Hanley were very generous with their time.
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