Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
Ever wonder how to carve a survival bow if you really, really needed to?
First, here’s how NOT to carve a bow.
You don’t use a 2×4. You don’t whittle it down to nothing. And you don’t skip the whole thing about picking a strong piece of wood, fully drying it, soaking it in oils, etc.
Here’s the right way to do it, out in the woods, where there are no 2×4’s.
Take it away, Survival Lilly.
Hear me now and believe me later in the week: first impressions matter more than ever.
In the old days, you got to know people because they LIVED NEXT TO YOU, or because you saw them at the feed store when you saddled up Bessie and rode there on Saturdays.
These days, you can use the Twitter or the Book of Face to meet people around the world, except for North Korea and some other places where the Series of Tubes is illegal or the secret police only let you use a pirated version of MySpace or whatever.
Online, people make a first impression about your entire life in less than two nanoseconds, based on three tiny little things:
Sidenote: If you don’t understand the headline reference to Achy Breaky Big Mistakey, here’s the original Billy Ray Cyrus video and a link to Mullet Junky, which is guaranteed to make you feel better about your hair. Enjoy.
So, instead of giving you five big Twitter boo-boos, or seven, I’m giving you 30 dumb moves to avoid on the Twitter — ten no-no’s apiece when it comes to your profile photo, your handle and your bio.
I believe, deep in my soul, that ten times three equals thirty, or possibly 30, depending on whether you use the metric system and what edition of the AP Stylebook you sleep with.
You see the worst ones on Facebook, but Twitter is not immune from wacky profile photos.
Do not:
1) Make the duck face
2) Try to be sexy
3) Flash gang signs with your hat on sideways
4) Take off your shirt to show us your tattoos or how much you enjoy fake orange Oompa Loompa spray tanning (it makes you look like a reject from Jersey Shore)
5) Pretend to chug tequila or smoke the Biggest Blunt Known to Man
6) Make the duck face while trying to be sexy, flashing gang signs with your hat on sideways, showing us your tattoos and pretending to chug tequila
7) Use a self-portrait shot on your phone, using the mirror in the bathroom (we can tell, and yes, Mirror in the Bathroom is a good tune from the GROSSE POINT BLANK soundtrack)
8) Go with extreme close-up (I see your pores!) or incredible longshot (that might be a person, or Bigfoot) or a weird angle (up your nose)
9) Use a shot with two / four / six different people and make us guess which one you might be
10) Wear sunglasses, hats and other accessories that make it impossible to tell if you’re a 12-year-old girl, a 35-year-old man or a wax dummy
Basically, don’t freak people out or make people guess who you are. And don’t try too hard.
Now, there are some variations that aren’t bad. Random photos and symbols are sometimes bad, but not always. If you’re a writer or editor, go ahead and use a photo of books as your profile shebang. Totally fine. Actors can use the Hollywood sign or the comedy and tragedy masks. WE TOTALLY GET THAT. But the weirder you get, the weirder your first impression will be.
Also: A huge STAR WARS geek can use Yoda as a profile photo. Just remember the first impression — even if you’re a 6-foot-tall redheaded supermodel — will be that you’re a short, 900-year-old frog-thing with wrinkled skin. It is not really a surprise, or remotely cool, for men to be use photos of THE MATRIX, lightsabers, Captain Kirk or Call of Duty 17: Blowing Up Stuff on Mars. Yet it is unexpected, and therefore kinda cool, for women to be into comic books, Spock, anime and all the things that would make you say “dorkahedron who lives in mom’s basement” if a man picked it for his profile shot. This is a paradox, and possibly unfair, but tough noogies. (My AP Stylebook is silent on the correct spelling of “noogies,” so by my reckoning, I’m establishing the correct spelling right here and now, for all time.)
Also known as your name, moniker, nickname, special badge for the Series of Tubes and “what Keanu Reeves is supposed to call you when you jack into the Matrix.”
This is more of a Twitter thing, though these 10 achy breaky big mistakeys also apply to what you pick as your email address, blog title or any visible tattoo involving the alphabet rather than a drawing of Wolverine riding a My Little Pony.
Do not:
1) Use a handle that nobody can pronounce, like “puqnI’loD,” the Klingon word for grandson (I looked that up at Klingon Language Institute, which actually exists, and this fact frightens me)
2) Throw in a bunch of slang numbers in your handle like “2legit2quit,” unless you are, in fact, MC Hammer
3) Use lots of random numbers, because everybody really, really wants to be buddies with “fred349829402”
4) Get your full first, middle, last name and favorite hobby in there, aka “LauraIngridHasselbackLOVEShorses”
5) Use initials or whatever to make it completely impossible to know whether you’re a man, woman or cyborg from the future sent to kill Sarah Connor (there is actual science here, and not just me spouting off, but that is a post for another day)
6) Be so obsessed with pimping your business, book, movie or album that your handle is simply the name of your business, book, movie or album, and once you move on to the next project, you’ll abandon that handle anyway
7) Put serious TMI into your handle, as in “singlemomthinksmenSTINK” or “stillunemployedyear3” or “livinginmomsbasementplayingcallofdutyallday”
8) Get all lovey dovey with a handle that’s a bunch of mushy nonsense about your husband, wife, kids, dog, ferret, capuchin monkey or boa constrictor, as in “debbie+fluffy4evah”
9) Appropriate the name of a celebrity, unless it’s to make fun of Snooki, Jonathan Franzen, Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump or any of the “Real Housewives of I Don’t Care” — and yes, you should follow @EmperorFranzen and @English50cent
10) Try to be funny with some kind of gag handle, a la Bart Simpson and “@ipfreeley”
It’s hard to screw up when you only have 160-characters or whatever.
Despite this challenge, there are bazillions of bios out there which are assaults upon the English language and, left unchecked, will not only tear the very fabric of society, but will rip a hole in the space-time continuum, sending Jean-Claude Van Damme back in time to battle an ancient Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 9: NIGHTMARE AT THE NURSING HOME.
Do not:
1) Try to give your life history, in chronological order, using Every Abbreviation Known to Man
2) Claim to be a pro photographer, Olympic gymnast, black belt in Gracie jujitsu, supermodel, billionaire CEO, secret agent, actor, bodyguard and author who also drives Indy cars–we might believe two of those, maybe three if we’re drunk, but not six or nine
3) Throw in a bunch of wacky symbols and graphics that nobody understands, or use numb3rs & txtspk 2 say what8vr u cld say uzn wrds
4) Share TMI details that nobody needs to know, like how many times you’ve been married and divorced, how many kids you have or the nicknames of your seven most favorite cats
5) Treat the Twitter, the Book of Face or any other social media shebang like it’s a dating website, telling us how you enjoy slow dances, long walks on the beach and all that nonsense — and as a bonus, here is the worst bio page ever
6) Expect us to believe you live on nine different continents by listing your “location” as “London, Moscow, Tokyo, Kenya, NYC, Antarctica, LA and the International Space Station” (yes, somebody is going to comment with a link to Wikipedia proving there are only seven continents)
7) Get all cute with your location by saying, “in limbo” or “everywhere but nowhere” or “right behind you”
8) Turn it into a resume with where you went to college, a summary of skills and your career goals–please save all that for LinkedIn and such
9) Make it completely obscure by writing it in French when you are NOT FRENCH AT ALL, using a Gertrude Stein poem instead of a bio, wussing out by using a quote from a famous person — or Capitalizing Every Word Of The Entire Bio While Not Understanding That People Actually Want To Be Able To Read The Stupid Thing Without Getting A Migraine
10) Trying to be shocking by saying insanely offensive things while packing all seven of the FCC’s seven dirty works in there and working very hard to make your profile form an obscene gesture using ASCII art nonsense
Will I do the same sort of post for the Book of Face? Nope. Sorry. I do this for fun, and for free, and the Book of Face keeps getting breached by hackers and such, so I’m kinda mad at Zuckerberg and all that.
Also in the future: There will be robots that mow your lawn and space-age looking trikes that turn into flying cars. Just wait. Are you done waiting? Here you go. If Daniel Craig doesn’t already have one of these, he’ll steal one this weekend.
No, this isn’t the start of a joke leading to a bar and the cats ordering cosmos or something. It’s a real video of a seriously unlikely friendship that works: two pigs walking a cat.
If you’ve ever owned cats, as I have, you know how impossible this is. Dogs are social–they’re pack animals. Cats are solitary hunters, if not psycho killers, God bless ’em. And I tried to walk our three cats.
Did. Not. WORK.
Here’s what usually happens when you try to walk a cat and this Cat Walking Guru, who is a braver man than I.
Listen: today was an extraordinary day, with people around the world watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify.
This was clearly terrifying to her. Death threats have forced her family out of their home and into hiding.
Nobody willingly signs up for that, or to have their life put under the microscope.
Dr. Ford had nothing to gain and everything to lose.
The same is true with the second and third women who came forward. They aren’t hiding behind anonymous accusations. The media revealed their names and they’re paying a price for speaking out.
So I watched today. I listened to Dr. Ford.
And I believed her.
The floor plans, maps and Evil Twin theories from the hired prosecutor didn’t convince me at all. Just in terms of tone, Dr. Ford was extremely polite and calm. She never lashed out. Brett Kavanaugh was angry, shouty and out of control. Not the kind of temperament you want for a judge. He kept interrupting senators, especially the female ones, even turning around to ask them questions instead of answering the ones they posed.
The contrast between the two couldn’t have been more stark.
This is bigger than politics. Don’t take my word for it–listen to Chris Wallace on FOX News.
From covering crime as a reporter, I know how few rapists and sexual assault cases actually lead to a police report, an arrest or a conviction. It’s insane and it needs to stop, because the damage is deep and lasting.
That’s why you saw so many photos today of people in colleges, offices, bars and airplanes watching the live feeds.
This has unleashed a stream of people I know telling their story on Facebook or Twitter–for the first time–of why they didn’t report. Because they didn’t think anyone would believe them. Or they did report it, to their father, to a teacher, to the police, and it didn’t matter.
I read stories from people in their twenties to women in their seventies. They didn’t remember every detail, like the exact date, but they remembered the assault and the face of their attacker.
And I know friends and family with stories that are still too raw and painful, that they still won’t share.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We can do better.
This isn’t my usual thing–it’s not the first page of a Classic Novel professors decided in some secret meeting, probably in a Best Western outside Cleveland, they’d force all of us to write term papers on. And it’s not a bestseller which absolutely stinks.
It’s a random book I saw on the Twitters.
I did read out the first page of the prologue, and the first chapter. The cover and synopsis are more fun to play with, though.
Let’s check out the cover, then the synopsis / back page text, and we’ll chat.
Southern Syfy has arrived in this “Dukes of Hazzard meets Buck Rogers” adventure tale.
In a future spawned from the headlines of today, enter a world of contrasts, where Man has conquered the heavens, while at the same time becoming quickly obsolete on his own world. A world where science and technology brings exotic fantasy creatures to life … for the right price. Where hot rod rockets and redneck “spacers” rule the skies.
Tiger Thomas was a rocket pilot during the Great Space Rush, when humankind colonized the Solar System in the twenty-second century. Now, all that’s winding down, and so has the demand for old spacers like him. He makes a living now doing whatever jobs he can find, legal and otherwise.
Returning to his hometown of Huntsville, Tiger looks forward to a relaxing weekend back on Earth. Who knows, he might even re-kindle that old flame with Lulah Carter, “the one that got away” years ago. A dinner and dancing … who knows what might happen.
But when he rescues a genetically engineered, anthropomorphic fox girl from a clan of vicious, hillbilly thugs, his homecoming quickly turns sour.
Somebody wants this sexy, furry darling back. BAD! And they’ll do whatever it takes, including killing anyone who stands in their way. Tiger and newfound companion soon find themselves on the run from a deadly, high-tech unit of bounty hunters. And if that ain’t bad enough, revelations about this beautiful vixen starts to disturb him. Is she really a victim? Is there more to her than just a pretty face and a bushy tail? Is there something else? A part hidden and dangerous, waiting for the right time to manifest itself? And with all that to ponder on, there’s also one other small problem … he finds himself irresistibly attracted to her.
Oh, and then there’s that whole Lulah thing again. As if things weren’t complicated enough.
Well, so much for a relaxing weekend.
The cover: Hey, I like it, especially given this looks like an indie book on a low budget. Does the job for a sci-fi novel just fine. Thumbs up.
The synopsis: This is what got me to write a post. You had me at “Dukes of Hazzard meets Buck Rogers.”
Here’s a shot at the synopsis to pump up the wild stuff and slay boring bits:
Southern Syfy has arrived in this “Dukes of Hazzard meets Buck Rogers” adventure tale.
In a future spawned from the headlines of today, enter a world of contrasts, where
Hot–rod rockets and redneck “spacers” rule the skies. Man has Yet conquering the heavens made man while at the same time becoming quickly obsolete on Earth, his own world. A world where science and technology brings exotic fantasy creatures to life …—for the right price. Where
Tiger (If your love interest is a fox-woman, don’t make your hero’s first name Tiger–confusing, and no, you can’t call him Tiger and reveal in Act 3 that he’s a genetically engineered tiger thing) Thomas was a rocket pilot during the Great Space Rush, when humankind colonized the Solar System in the twenty-second century.but now that space is civilized, he’s a cast-off, all that’s winding down, and so has the demand for old spacers like him. He making a living now doing whatever jobs he can find, laws be damned. legal and otherwise.
Returning to his hometown of Huntsville, Tiger Thomas looks forward to a relaxing weekend back on Earth. Who knows, he might even re-kindle that old flame with Lulah Carter, “the one that got away” years ago. A dinner and dancing … who knows what might happen.
But when he rescues a genetically engineered, anthropomorphic fox girl from a clan of vicious, hillbilly thugs, his homecoming quickly turns sour.
Somebody wants this sexy, furry darling back. BAD! And they’ll do whatever it takes, including killing anyone who stands in their way. Thomas Tiger and his newfound companion soon find themselves on the run from a deadly, high-tech unit of bounty hunters. And if that ain’t bad enough, revelations about this beautiful vixen starts to disturb him. Is she really a victim? Is there more to her than just a pretty face and a bushy tail? Is there something else? A part hidden and dangerous, waiting for the right time to manifest itself? And with all that to ponder on, there’s also one other small problem … he finds himself irresistibly attracted to her.
Oh, and then there’s that whole Lulah thing again. As if things weren’t complicated enough.
Well, so much for a relaxing weekend.
Southern Syfy has arrived in this “Dukes of Hazzard meets Buck Rogers” adventure.
Hot-rod rockets and redneck spacers rule the skies. Yet conquering the heavens made man obsolete on Earth, where science and technology brings exotic fantasy creatures to life–for the right price.
Thomas was a rocket pilot during the Great Space Rush, but now that space is civilized, he’s a cast-off, making a living doing whatever jobs he can find, laws be damned.
Returning to his hometown of Huntsville, Thomas looks forward to a relaxing weekend. Who knows, he might even re-kindle that old flame with Lulah Carter, “the one that got away” years ago.
But when he rescues a genetically engineered fox girl from a clan of vicious, hillbilly thugs, his homecoming turns sour.
Somebody wants this sexy, furry darling back. BAD! And they’ll kill anyone who stands in their way. Thomas and his newfound companion find themselves on the run from deadly, high-tech bounty hunters. And if that ain’t bad enough, revelations about this beautiful vixen starts to disturb him. Is there more to her than just a pretty face and a bushy tail? Is there something hidden and dangerous, waiting for the right time to manifest itself?
#
Feels faster and smoother. Mostly, it’s a matter of killing words. Could we have killed even more words? Maybe. Always worth trying, though I was working hard to edit with a light touch. Itchy Pencil is a real disease. There is no known cure.
The other bit I wanted to delete is everything dealing with his old flame, which felt like the B plot. You don’t see her on the cover, and there are no high-tech Boba Fett types chasing her around the galaxy. The fox girl as the A plot, though fox girl NEEDS A NAME if she’s so important to the story, and that name better not be something like Fox Amber Harrison, or I will throw the book clear across the room.
What say you–how else could we give the synopsis of “Dukes of Hazzard meets Buck Rogers” a boost into orbit?
Sure, there are stinkers–bad movies and terrible shows on the Glowing Tube–but overall, we are living in a golden age for entertainment on Whatever Type of Screen You Prefer.
Why is that?
A few theories:
In the old days, most movies and shows (a) were cheaply made and (b) looked cheaply made. The real exception to this are sitcoms filmed in a studio, which look about the same. Everything else? Massive differences in production values.
So when a film truly looked good–typically because it had a great director and a big budget–it blew everything else out of the water.
The difference was even more stark on television. A great example: back in the day, BBC seemed to take pride in the worst possible production values on the planet.
Lighting, costumes, camera angles–all that matters. You notice bad production values the most when it comes to terrible monster costumes and special effects.
These days, everybody has upped their game. Even bad movies and shows LOOK good.
And CGI has gotten cheap enough that average TV shows can afford to do special effects you used to only see in blockbuster movies.
When there were only a few big studios, and three major TV networks, competition wasn’t nearly as tough.
Today, you have movie studios around the world cranking out more films than ever, plus 3.53 bazillion cable channels making content along with Netflix and Amazon making shows AND movies.
There’s never been more choices.
This has two counter-intuitive effects: (1) it’s easier to get things made, since far more sources might bankroll it, and (2) killing a flawed project or series is easier, too, since there are plenty of other projects that deserve a shot.
The fact that most movies and series don’t become amazing successes isn’t the real point. You can’t predict which ones break out and make mountains of money.
Can’t win if you don’t play.
So everybody plays, and takes risks, because being safe and conservative isn’t the way to hit a home-run.
That creative, competitive environment helps give birth to today’s great shows and movies.
With production values good across the board, and special effects cheaper than ever, what makes a movie or show stand out and break out?
A few years ago, when cheesy CGI spread across the land, I hated it. Terrible CGI was easy to spot and immediately killed your suspension of disbelief.
Today, CGI is incredibly advanced.
Here’s the unintended side-effect, though: great CGI is more affordable than ever, but it still takes a lot of time, money and most of all, planning.
You can’t rush it.
And good planning makes for good storytelling.
There’s a reason Pixar is famous for great stories. They know exactly how long it takes to do an animated movie.
If they screw up Act 3, the director doesn’t call back the actors and do reshoots for a few weeks. Redoing all that footage in an animated movie takes a lot more work.
That’s why Pixar goes crazy with storyboarding and planning the structure of each film. You have to nail that story before you commit. This is why Pixar spends so much time emphasizing storytelling, and perfected their 22 Rules, which are worth checking out. Roll film:
With live actors, you can shoot hundreds of hours of footage and a great editor can take all that footage and do the structure and storytelling.
Can’t do that with animation–or CGI-heavy movies, which is just about everything today.
The more action and CGI you use, the more important planning and storyboarding becomes.
I think this is a key reason why Marvel has been on a hot streak. Every one of their superhero movies takes a ton of green screen and CGI work. They know it. And they have to plan not just for each movie, but how all the different movies tie together, with setups and payoffs stretching all the way back to the first Iron Man movie.
The best jokes contain painful truths. When it comes to music, I joke that the life cycle of bands is (a) starving unknowns, (b) big breakout hit, (c) rehab, (d) lead singer goes solo and band breaks up, then (e) reunion tour 20 years later when they’re all broke, sober, married and need to pay the mortgage.
So it gives me unbridled joy (note: don’t ever try to put a bridle on my joy; I will punch you into next week) to learn one of my favorite bands OF ALL TIME is back together and cranking out new albums.
Toad the Wet Sprocket is the weirdest possible name for a great band.
I say that with love.
Honestly, you can throw together a sweet band name in two seconds using this simple formula: “the” + active adjective + non-threatening animal.
Check it out:
However: While the name doesn’t really work on every level, at least you remember because it’s so flipping weird.
Though I take great joy in dissecting terrible music videos, or divining why brilliant ones work, it’s nice to simply share a great bad with people who might not know they exist.
Also: To the punk who broke into my car when I was a starving reporter and stole all my tapes (yes, music once lived on these things called “tapes”), you took every Toad album I owned, and if I ever see you, and figure out you’ve got a closet full of cassette tapes from your criminal past, I think that’s punishment enough, because tapes are a terrible idea. They always get snagged in your car stereo, with the tape spilling out like intestines full of music, and maybe, maybe, you could take a pencil and wind everything back into place after you did some scotch-tape surgery. Tapes sucked.
Back to Toad the Wet Sprocket: Whatever you think of the band name, the music is beautiful.
Toad can play rock or folk, fast songs or slow, electric or acoustic.
I bet they could even do a medium-paced song that’s neither happy nor sad, if you asked nicely.
Here’s one of their more famous songs:
And here’s a slow burner that still slays me:
Welcome back, Toad the Wet Sprocket–so happy you’re making new music and hitting the road again.
If you want to check them out, here’s a link to the band and their tour schedule. See them live. DO IT NOW.
A nuclear war is–scarily–far more likely than an alien invasion, zombies or other apocalyptic possibilities. How would you survive?
I say this with love, as a big fan of the Mad Max movies: the smartest ways to survive involve doing the opposite of Mad Max.
If you’re like most people, you drive a car. Maybe it’s a Ford F150, or a Toyota Camry.
And maybe you change the oil yourself. I’ve done that. Changed the headlights a few times, replaced the battery, even changed an alternator and such.
HOWEVER: Working on modern cars is increasingly tough without all kinds of computer diagnostic nonsense. It’s crazy difficult today, with the lights on and a NAPA store down the street full of fresh parts.
After any sort of nuclear war, driving whatever car you can find around the radioactive wasteland is just a bad idea. Because it’ll break down, and chances are you will not be able to crawl under the car with a wrench and just fix it.
Even if you’re a pro mechanic with your own set of tools, spare parts and gas will vanish in a hurry. Your car will eventually break down, or run out of gas, or both. And being stranded means death.
But let’s say those problems don’t exist. You have a magic Tesla 3 that that runs on solar panels and never breaks down. Great. Roaming around the countryside is still a terrible idea, because you’ll want to stop wherever there may be resources, like food and water that doesn’t glow in the dark, and there will be people there, defending those resources from raiders like you.
Those local people will have the advantage. They know the territory and will have set up defenses and traps. You’re gonna lose.
Mad Max is a lone wolf, right?
Only in the movies does a lone hero win real fights while being outnumbered 10 to 1, or 100 to 1.
Any serious effort to survive an apocalypse, fictional or not, means having a team or a tribe.
You need people who are good at different things: finding food and water, healing the injured, creating shelters, making fire, crafting tools and clothing.
And you need people to watch your back.
Sure, if you can’t find a decent supply of food and water, move until you do. But once you do, stay put.
Any sort of nuclear war will affect different areas in different ways. There’ll be places that get hit with all sorts of bombs, like major cities and military bases, and other places left untouched.
Prevailing winds and ocean currents will also bring radioactive fallout to some places while sparing others.
You don’t want to wander far and wide, because you’ll inevitably wind up in a place where the geiger counters go nuts.
Of course you might need to do a little hunting and gathering, or go on supply runs. Even so, do that from a solid home base. Because staying put in a good place is the smartest option. Fish, farm, grow mushrooms, whatever floats your boat. Build a wall. Set up watchtowers and keep a lookout for dudes driving Interceptors with big turbos sticking out of the hood.
Mad Max famously carries a sawed-off shotgun with maybe four shells, two of which tend to be duds.
Shotguns are also a bad idea. You need a weapon with plentiful ammo that you can make. A slingshot, a bow and arrow, spears you can throw–anything is better than a weapon that only gives you two bites of the apple.
Remember the bad guys in every Mad Max movie? They carry crossbows a lot of the time. Because that’s sustainable. You can re-use the ammo and make new crossbows a lot easier than trying to manufacture more AR-15s for your friends, since there won’t be any factories making bullets anymore, either.
Same thing with armored muscle cars and semis. It takes a tremendous amount of time and resources to keep a single car functioning and fueled up during an apocalypse. A fleet of vehicles would be insanely tough to keep going.
Your time and resources are better spent improving quality of life and survivability: growing more food, building better walls, crafting new tools. That sort of thing.
Mad Max is a great character on screen. To survive a nuclear apocalypse, remember him and do the opposite.
Previous posts:
Listen: I get how watching the news right now is like a train wreck, except each new day brings a bigger, more fiery train wreck than the day before. And you just want it to stop, and go back to normal, but can’t turn away.
As a reformed journalist, I’m a complete and utter news addict. Went to rehab–didn’t help one bit.
So I feel you.
Here’s what is really going on.
In normal times, a scandal is big news for weeks or months. One large scandal can easily end a political career, or bring a CEO down.
What’s happening now is a flood of scandals and outrages, and yes, part of that is because the world’s most powerful man is a moody, incompetent toddler. But it’s also by design.
Vladimir Putin has a large country with a tiny economy. He can’t beat the West in economics, or even in a straight military conflict. What he’s doing is sowing discord, distrust and chaos through lies, misinformation and propaganda.
Brexit and Donald Trump are only two examples. Look hard enough–or listen to the intelligence community pros and reporters who cover national security–and you’ll see evidence of this information war being waged all over the free world.
Putin’s strategy is perfectly aligned with what Donald Trump has done his entire life: use conflict and chaos to build his name ID and get press coverage. The twist is, Trump didn’t care whether the coverage was good or bad, as long as they spelled his name right. Affairs, divorces, scandals–didn’t matter. Just get him on the front page or the Howard Stern show.
Working in reality TV only cemented this strategy. If everything goes right on a reality show, the ratings stink. What sells? Conflict and chaos, betrayals and big fights.
And when there’s a new political scandal or outrage every day, it’s hard to remember the seven train wrecks from last week, or last month.
The other half of this is attacking the foundations of truth–the free press–while trafficking in lies, misinformation and propaganda.
They want average people to be numb and apathetic, and to mistrust what’s coming from real journalists.
To create doubt and fear.
It’s easy to get hooked on the news in times like this. It feels like the middle of a presidential primary, the days before a Super Bowl, the first moments of a war.
When you care about something, getting glued to the screen is easy.
I’m not saying you ignore the news, quitting it cold turkey.
The trick is balancing out gathering information, and being informed, with taking action.
Because gathering info in a time like this can never end. There’s always a new scandal, another angle you hadn’t considered, a rabbit hole to go down.
The more you care, the more you tend to read and watch, and it certainly feels like you’re doing something.
Except it’s not actually taking action, and it’ll take average people refusing to be apathetic to bring things back to normal.
Elections alone won’t win this kind of fight, especially if you live in a country where elections are partially or fully rigged.
Check out this chapter for more on Winning the War on Truth.
Thank you to all the readers of this silly blog. I’m running experiments and on a streak of posting once a day–so now’s a good time to switch things up. What would you like to see?
WordPress shows which country people are reading from, and I’m noticing Finland, China, Turkey, India–and some place called the Isle of Man, which seems a bit sexist. It’s 2018, not 1518.
I’m running a plugin that translates the blog into the following languages:
If you’d like another language on the list, tell me and I’ll get it going.
What first pages of popular or classic novels are highly over-rated, or put you in a coma, and deserve getting bled on with a red pen?
Which music videos are completely bonkers–or so wondrously complex that the lyrics and images need deciphering?
And is there a movie, TV show or streaming-thing that begs to be watched and dissected?
Should I open up the blog to guest posting goodness, as long as it’s not Karen reposting her Facebook feed full of MLM about essential oils?
Tell me if you’d enjoy more series, like Fitness Tips for the Apocalypse, or want one-offs like weird news stories about psycho killer raccoons terrorizing Olympia (real story) and Texas grandmothers shooting monstrous alligators who ate their miniature horses years ago (also real).
I’m also thinking about adding more analysis of current events and tips on fighting lies and propaganda, seeing how the world has gone completely mad. Bit more serious than I intend for this blog, but these are not normal times.
Happy to listen to suggestions however you want to give them, except by telegram, Twitter DM’s or showing up in person. Not kosher.
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guy@redpenofdoom.com
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@speechwriterguy
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The Red Pen of Doom 