Publishers Weekly says my “obvious love for the form animates the volume.” And I’ll animate again! I’ll never stop animating volumes.
The above quote has been my bio on Bluesky for the last few years. Finally, the time has come to make good on my promise: I’m animating another volume, folks.
I’ve signed a deal to produce an art collection that takes a broad look at the entire history of science fiction art. It’ll be titled either The Art of the Future or The Art of Science Fiction – tbd – and it’s coming out Fall 2027 from UK publisher Frances Lincoln.
Not bad. Not the most sophisticated but also not bad as a simple summary of funneling through a scene without ever using complex language.
It does also work for the whole story except that there are actually many ways to hit that fourth point. He brushes over one of the big divisions but do remember this is not a sophisticated analysis.
The fourth step can rehook or complete. It can be happy or sad. It can move the character toward their goal (comic) or away from their goal. It can be understood or misunderstood by the character(s). It can lead to a return to a new normal or a rejection of the normal.
Also really have to be careful about his idea of character centered storytelling. Character is ONE of the ways to engage an audience. The truth is that you center what you’re selling. He’s talking in terms of marketing but that’s not what I mean by selling. I mean that storytelling itself is a transaction. You, the story teller, are promising that the story is worth listening to. The audience is giving you their attention under the condition that the pitch you give them at the opening, that it is “worth listening to because…,” will be satisfied by the end. It has to be worth the price of attention in correlation to how they value their attention.
Character and Plot are usually high value propositions in story telling AND they necessarily comment on one another. So, if you don’t know you want to do something else, they’re a safe bet for what you’re selling.
What he gets wrong is that he isn’t selling character in his examples, he’s selling plot. And he’s not selling either character or plot in the video as a whole, he’s selling architecture.
Again, he never gives the terminology, or even acknowledges what he’s really doing, but he’s promising ad nauseam that ‘a mentor teaches the art of success.’ With him as the mentor, you as the student being taught, and success defined as learning this useful process so you can use it.
There’s no surprise in there. I’m going to mentor you in this, I’m mentoring you in this, you can now go use this.
Straight lines like that in storytelling are usually a good sign that architecture is what you’re selling. That there not only IS a 'formula’ but part of the transaction is offering up the formula as a desirable thing, letting your audience self select.
His first example does this beautifully actually. One way to really sell the fairy-tale architecture is to start with the words “once upon a time.” That immediately tells the audience what architecture they’re going to get. If the next line is about a princess, prince, step-child, poor-but-good peasant, or the magical land of Toronto, Canada then you know HOW that architecture is going to be played out. That doesn’t mean each step is predefined. It can have as many surprises and variations as any other story. BUT the form that all of that will fit into is set because the only people willing to listen to that sort of opening are the people who WANT that form. You’re telling them that that is what you’re selling. The people who will buy in to that statement are the people who like that form.
The reason I included the magical land of Toronto, Canada, is because you can also promise NOT to follow the form exactly. You hear 'once upon a time,’ immediately succeeded by something that does NOT belong to the anticipated architecture, you know the story is going to explicitly transgress the form. The pleasure will lie in the transgression. That’s actually WHY you won’t be able to totally deviate from the fairy tale formula if you promise transgression. The thing you’re transgressing has to exist in order for you to transgress against it.
If you’re interested in fairy tale architecture by the way, I HIGHLY recommend Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp. Which you can find on the internet archive. It’s truly excellent and bounds it claims with academic rigor. He doesn’t claim to describe ALL stories. He doesn’t even claim to describe all FOLKTALES. He is very precise in saying he is describing the folktales of a particular region and culture. Though his patterns fit quite a few other folktales as well.
I time stamped this in because it is 51 minutes or so into the broadcast and what I’m trying to show is only about 3 minutes. It’s over by 53:28. Though you can also scroll back to see the report that won him the award. What I really want to show is very short award speech, where he does what our journalism should have done from day 1 of the current regime.
I suspect that Santiago Campos will have a very hard time finding a professional position in journalism after this acceptance speech, precisely because real journalistic outlets should be beating down his door for this behavior. Speaking truth to power, especially in a language it understands, is a frequently punished behavior.
We need less opinion presented as news, here in the US. That’s not the same as needing zero opinion. There’s a reason journalism is colloquially named the fourth estate.
We’ll never get total independence, that’s simply not the way our world (currently) works and, at least for now, no one has a good transition plan to move from the current state to a new one. Though there’s no denying that that state of things has been intentionally designed.
Still, from even before November 7, 2000 - when (almost certainly intentional) misreporting by John Prescott Ellis fundamentally altered the political direction of the US in his family’s favor as a precursor to its current state - significantly more direct statements, like the above, based reasonably upon the facts without sugar coating the bitter pill have been in short supply in the name of “fairness” as our news has been ever increasingly co-opted by the new robber barons of our age.
To the point that a significant percentage of Fox’s competition for information and opinion delivery is in the pocket of a single family, the Ellisons, who are a Trump ally. Some of the other big players are, of course, Elon Musk, owner of the site formerly (and forever) known as Twitter, and Jeff Bezos, who owned (and then shuttered) The Washington Post in addition to owning Amazon. Allowing the robber barons to put a very large thumb made out of gold plated gold on the scales of information. Not just news but the opinion generating materials that set the tone and scripts for how we judge the news. Musk’s scandals of altering the algorithm to determine what does and does not make it in front of user’s eyes is simply the most amateurishly blatant example of that.
This attitude, that it is a journalist’s duty to call out how the powerful are allowed to alter our world to their benefit under the thin veneer of just business as usual in a system of just capitalism as usual, has been shockingly absent and actively silenced.
Good for him for standing up.
Shame that the youngest person with the most to lose in that room is the guy with the stiffest spine. Probably lost his future prospects in journalism in those three minutes but he also said more than years of supposedly non-partisan news. Opinion and comedy has screamed the obvious the entire time but that’s not what was needed. They aren’t held or responsible to the same degree. Truth via reporting, with calm and reasonable critique, out of the news desk, is what we’ve needed. I hope some company can show as much spine and hire him anyway.
When asexual individuals engage in physiological intimacy, the motivation differs from that of allosexual (non-asexual) people.
Sensual Touch: Many asexuals enjoy non-sexual, tactile intimacy such as cuddling, holding hands, and kissing.
Responsive Desire: A physical relationship might happen because the asexual partner chooses to engage in sex to fulfill their partner’s needs, out of curiosity, or simply because they enjoy the physical pleasure of the sensations without needing a sexual target.
Masturbation: Many asexuals experience libido (a physical urge for release) and handle it as a purely biological necessity through solitary release, often disassociated from partnering.
Understanding Attraction vs. Drive
Scientific studies highlight that asexual people can physically produce all the typical bodily markers of sexual arousal—such as vaginal pulse amplitude or erections—when shown erotic materials, even though their subjective reports of feeling attracted to the stimuli are significantly lower. This demonstrates that the body’s mechanical response can occur independently of sexual attraction.
Most studies on aces are sex-focused, because the majority of the studies are done by Anthony Bogaert or Lori Brotto, both of whom are not ace. And they cannot imagine that anyone would not have primary or secondary sexual attraction, so both of them have issues with focusing on sex too much, the lack of sex, or mixing up terms like sexual attraction with libido, which we know as aces are not the same thing.
I spent a semester reading all of their papers for an Asexual paper I was doing (since I am ace spec and queer)… and I’ve done other uni papers about queerness as well. (A queer marathon, for example).
The conflation with touch stance, sex stance and sexual attraction is problematic with both of these academics.
But my major beef with both of them is saying there has to be biological determinism in order for someone to be ace, which categorically has shown not to be true, even with being lesbian or gay.
Biological determinism is the idea that there is a certain gene or set of genes that makes one queer. This is not the same as saying “You were socialized to be _fill in sexuality_ to be against it.” It’s more like saying ones sexuality CANNOT EVER CHANGE OVER A LIFETIME. And w all know that’s not true. There are aces that genuinely discover later in life that they are ace, even though they felt sexual attraction before. (And no conversion therapy doesn’t work).
This can be due to trauma, or it just genuinely happens that their sexual attraction becomes less.
After my paper, I did address this problem to Brotto, and Brotto pushed back and said there HAD TO BE A REASON that the whole ace spectrum was ace and it could not change over a lifetime. But I literally have met aces that genuinely did not have trauma and it did change for them over a lifetime.
In addition, Bogaert hated on trans people openly in several of his papers, and dismissed outright that trans people’s sexualities (sexual orientations including asexuality) could change, despite several trans orgs with plenty of data to show this is true.
Bogaert spent an entire chapter, because he could not imagine total lack of sexual attraction, on aces who masturbate. In fact his favorite line to requote and insist that people quote from him is, “Clean the pipes” which really disturbs me that he had to overly focus on sexual activity of aces in all of his studies and then insist that people quote him and went on a tirade against Julie Decker, actual ace, for not quoting him. He also was as bold to say that he, n invented the term asexuality, when the term existed before he was alive to refer to our sexuality. And unless he has a time machine I don’t think so. (KICK HIM OUT)
The other big claim that Bogaert likes to make is that ALL aces (who he claims agree with him) have paraphilias, (i.e. attachment to objects) and that’s why they are ace. !@#$ Him. Kick him out.
Look, I’m not against allosexual people doing studies on us, but being this hell bent and focused on not the identity but sex is odd to me.
That said, the above, is kinda true and kinda not true. As Julie Decker argues: It’s better to ask the ace in front of you how they feel on sex stance, touch stance, and how their asexuality reacts to primary and secondary sexual attraction than to assume or look at statistics.
I try my best to honor the range of asexuality out there. I love my Black stripe aces, the ace fluxes, the gray aces (Both the ones with and without primary sexual attraction and both those with and without secondary sexual attraction).
But Brotto and Bogaert both have this itch to boil us down to one person and one type and then plant a discovery flag on us when we were the ones that defined it for them.
Thus after reading ALL of the papers on asexuality at a high niversity level and doing actual field research, I can categorically say that Brotto and Bogaert are both off their rockers. We are awesome in our diversity.
I’ve met Black stripe aces that did not want to be touched at all with romantic attraction. I’ve met Gray aces with high libidos. I know aces who are in poly relationships. I know aces who are panSEXUAL (yes, sexual, as in they are 100% sure of their secondary sexual orientation once they get past the no primary sexual attraction.)
And it is breathtakingly awesome out there. Something that statistics and biological determinism can’t capture is that.
Still, the best study on aceness out there is Julie Decker, who closed her book saying she thought she had not captured all of aceness, but just because it wasn’t in her book, to not discount it.
And that’s what aces can bring to academia about us: to look at the range of the identity itself.
YES. Some people have a high touch stance and are ace. But some also are less accepting and that’s OK.
YES. Some people HAVE NO sexual attraction, but also are higher on sex stance. That’s also OK.
Yes. some people have NO sexual attraction, have a low tolerance to touch and do not want to engage in sex. That’s also OK.
Some people have low sexual attraction to celebrities. Some have high attraction to celebrities…
How is that person ace, it’s best to ask. But I kinda think it’s best to ask how people are allo, too in any relationship and allos could learn from us ace specs on how to negotiate boundaries in a relationship.
It’s not all one way, or majority rules in sexuality. The only defining characteristic of asexuality is no, limited or conditional sexual attraction, though finding this out through sex stance is 100% valid. (BTW, I wrote to AVEN and aven said his was too hard to explain and refused to change their definition away from only including Black stripe aces. But this is so bad. This would be like saying People of color only come in Black because it’s hard to understand that Indigenous, Latine, and Asians exist.)
And then I’d read Brotto and Bogaert and their cohorts with some caution because it seems like they are cutting out their subjects. At least Brotto will stop comparing us to amoeba as a hook after I asked her to stop.
BTW, excuse the typos, I’m typing this before going to (art history) class… I’ll clean them up later.
