Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #151-182

Thirty sketches in one convenient gallery. Cheers!

Story Seed #54
A New Spell for Utopia

Magic exists. Stories are spells, wishes in long form. And, as The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs illustrates, the wish one makes is rarely the results one receives. For more than the last fifty years we’ve been telling tales of apocalypse and dystopia. This is most noticeable in our movies and television. Watching a film is a more social activity than reading a book. We all see the same images running at the same speed. Groups can experience the same story all at once.

Most tellers of tales of terrible futures will tell you that their stories are meant as warnings, not predictions. That’s assuming they’ve thought about their premises in any ways other than exciting settings for adventures. The thing about magic is that it’s tricky. Warnings are part of the spell, often the spark that burns up the normal world. Ask Adam and Eve. Ask Orpheus. As Oedipus. As those dumb kids who who went to Crystal Lake. The Gods know that the best way to make something happen is tell human beings not to do something.

So we’ve been casting spells to avoid apocalypse and all we’re doing is calling it up. The Gods are laughing.

We are all magicians because we all tell stories. Some of us have larger audiences but we all shape the world. Imagine putting power into creating a world that we want to live into, a world for our children’s children’s children. It would mean learning to tell different stories in different ways. The vision of a horrible future is not banished just because the story ends on a note of hope. Hope is nice but it’s not a roadmap. Once we’ve lived through the End, how do we live then? Or better, how can we live well, period.

Weave your spells, magicians. What does a good world look like? How do we live in it?

Recommendation
Toren Atkinson’s Post-Apocalyptic Movie Guide

Toren Atkinson has a list of a Post-Apocalyptic movies. It’s not complete. It doesn’t include zombie apocalypse films. But it’s a good overview. He helpfully includes a notice on whether each film ends on a positive note for those who want to enjoy a story set after most of humanity has died without getting too depressed.

Local News

I started last week feeling frustrated and unmoored. I’m writing on this on Tuesday morning feeling simply unmoored.

The day job is a chunk of time that I wade through that leaves me with only a small amount of time to create new art. I’ve got two shops (Zazzle, Redbubble) that I’m having fun working on each morning but they’re online stores. Despite what my spam comments suggest, people don’t end up on websites by accident. You can’t walk past an online store and decide to go in and browse. Either you know it exists or a search engine shows it to you. And in order for a search engine to show you something it has to know the something exists. So I’m trying to figure out how tag my stores in such a way that search engines direct people to them.

Basically I’m learning to write summoning spells.

It was recognizing that I was trying to work magic that helped to change my attitude. Google gives the definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

In order to get someone to come to my stores I need to make them search engine friendly. Right? I need to somehow include words and tags that match up with what my potential audience is putting into said search engines. Oz? Cthulhu? Frankenstein? Thousands of results show up. Mighty Nizz? That wild child shows up on the first page. David Ingersoll? Using Bing I don’t appear for a few pages even though I own davidingersoll.com. Using Google my website shows up on the first page but I do occasional searches for myself on Google and Google’s algorithms are designed to give you more of what you’ve searched for in the past.

Search engines and website feeds are more and more designed to give you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. Or to give you more of what has already been designated as popular. The more popular something is designated, the more it is fed to searchers and the more popular it becomes.

I could be discouraged. Oddly, I’m not. I’ve ignored “search engine optimization” for most of the time that I’ve had a website.I didn’t care much about increasing the traffic here. I’ve only got so much time to do individual illustrations. Having more people commissioning me for more illustrations is appealling but only to my ego. Unless I quit the Post Office I don’t have time to take much more work than I’m already taking.

The online stores are different. The work is already done. Each piece can be sold multiple times so the more people who see an image or product the more chances that some of those people will purchase it. So now I have to learn to ” influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

Am I really performing magic?

It’s fun to think of it that way. I’ll be doing research and learning new skills and being boringly practical about everything but “have fun” is a primary motivation for me to do anything. I’m only feeling unmoored because there are so many directions I can look for information and so many new skills to aquire that I’m uncertain where to head first.

And that’s fine. To be unmoored is also to be in motion. Time to choose a direction to point my sails.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that you are a magician. The daily slog is real but it’s also an illusion. Fight it when you can but, when you can, give power to the moments of joy and wonder that present themselves. Share those moments. Magic lasts longer when performed in collaboration.

See you next week!