101–110 of 273 posts
Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that interests me about Dall-E and other art-making, is, I wonder if it will eventually lead to individuals making their own high-quality animated feature films and "triple-a" games. Will these tools get to the point that an individual can make a unique triple-a game in their bedroom?
Well, there are already high-quality films / games by small teams with no external funding, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A , Braid, and Celeste. But for long form stuff like these, the tools don't matter as much, it is more like writing a novel where the key is to get something done every day. The main issue is perseverance - a tool dropping the workload from 100 days to 10 days is nice, but it does…
Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…
It's fine if there aren't answers to these questions. But if you're going to create something professionally I think they need affirmative answers.
Creating is very personal, rewarding, and fun. Those are reasons enough to be creative. But they aren't reasons for commercial success or critical respect.
Hi Ahmed, I want to read your piece, but your opening sentence needs some work: >Us denizens of the Internet have become familiar with concepts that were foreign more than a decade ago, one of the most that causes the most influence is going viral. This is largely unintelligible and, as a writer, I think something you should consider making more concrete. Otherwise, you run the risk of leaving your readership confuse…
This is so patronizing.
People need to be able to receive constructive feedback and improve, without feeling attacked.
I did not detect snark, or superiority in this feedback comment. Instead, it seems to genuinely attempt to offer constructive feedback.
The parent pointed out a specific fragment that needs re-work, which is an actionable item for the OP. Perhaps it could have been framed more positively, but constructing a place where people cannot offer direct, actionable feedback is quite unhelpful for all involved.
I hope anyone who wants to pursue the arts doesn’t let pessimists like this discourage them from expressing themselves in the ways they love best. I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick. My path was to find a full-time job that used different parts of my brain from my art. I used my limited free time to brainstorm, create, and publish whatever I could make ti…
My advice to them is that if there is anything else they can do, do it. Being a professional actor is miserable. The odds are it will fail entirely; most of the remainder will barely make subsistence.
Much of what I do is to provide a place for people to be genuinely creative in ways that they couldn't afford to if their living depended on it. We get to take artistic chances that please us. You don't get that if your livelihood depends on it.
A few people have taken my advice and concluded that they needed to do this. Some have had minor successes. Good for them. Others tried and discovered that indeed, it was not fun and not good for them, and they left. None, fortunately, are starving, convinced that persistence is the key to success because they read it on a motivational poster.
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Because artists make the world an objectively better place in an uncommonly powerful way. Because it's an excellent investment, socially speaking. Because investment in the arts (I mean serious investment. Not like USA) has worked pretty well for some countries.
I enjoy the arts as much as anyone else, but the narrative that art by default is a transformative force for social good is just that, a nice marketing sleight of hands. Most art is entertainment, with a rather minuscule slice having something interesting to say. Not to say that entertainment isn't valuable and pleasurable, but there's a big gap between that and it advancing humanity.
And we're talking all realms of unrestrained creative effort here. Science, technology and stories about dragons. Opensource software as well as basement watercolorists. This is where the shiny new legos of our society come from.
~ A take ~ "Quality" is what we say when what succeeds is not what we think should succeed. There's an actual objective function that defines success: that's fitness. Quality is what we call the difference between that one and the one we'd like. Expecting everything to rearrange itself to use our function is a high-"quality", low-fitness strategy.
I don't think that's how I use the word "quality." Yes, it is not synonymous with popularity. But no, I don't think there's something wrong with the world that people prefer a certain thing that is "lower" quality. Is champagne higher-quality than coca-cola? Of course it is, but no serious person argues that the world ought to prefer champagne to coke. Quality is a combination of a bundle of--cough--qualities, not al…
You can certainly be a working artist. Get paid to create things for someone else while doing your own thing on the side. I thought this was pretty much the standard, you were either a working artist or a starving artist. The big stars that can make a good living from patronage is small compared to artists overall.