MetalSucks.net

History:

-“We launched in December, 2006.”

-Started with just the two main editors under the pseudonyms Axl Rosenberg and Vince Neilstein because, from one interview they gave: “It’s just that if the father of a fourteen year old girl you met at Avenged Sevenfold show is looking for you, and he thinks your name is 'Axl Rosenberg' it’s going to be a lot harder for him to track you down”

-From that same interview, they knew they had made it “The first time one of our heroes from our youth threatened to sue us, I knew we were onto something”
-Vince quit his job to focus on it in July 2009. Axl did the same 6 months later. Has grown to include 2 more editors and 13 contributors.

Facts:

-It makes money: “Enough to support two of us full time, an army of freelance reviewers and to pay for server costs and site upkeep”

-Bloggers are a bit secretive, though Vince said, “My profession is a full-time blogger! (and pseudo-ad salesman). I went to the University of Michigan and graduated with a BA in Communications Studies”

-Written from Brooklyn, NY, where they also hosted a Music Festival in August, 2011 called The Metal Suckfest.

Statistics:

-Broke 100,000 unique visitors in May 2009, 500,000 in November 2012 and currently sits at just over 1 million.

-60% of visitors from America, “the rest in the places you might expect - - of course the English speaking countries like the UK, Canada and Australia, and the countries where metal is popular like Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc. “

What makes it unique:

-The mixture of humor with news and gossip.

-For instance, they'll rate Game of Thrones episodes by how metal they are, or have giveaways if people can guess an unreadable band logo.

Strengths:

-Updates ridiculously often, I counted 15 updates for yesterday, April 16^th.

-Good sense of their community, holding regular contests and features.

-Uncluttered, simple layout the lets you pick what you want to read rather than plastering everything over the front page.

-”We’re honest and unwilling to compromise our opinions”

Weaknesses:

-”because of that, we often find ourselves the subjects of hate”

-Comment section filled with elitism and downright toxicity.

-Reviews sometimes based more on personal taste.

Advice:

-”Just start writing!”

World Construction Zone - wear silly hat at all times

Writing a world is a bit like choosing the surface for a painting. It can intensify a story or make it moodier and slower. It can makes characters totally reasonable or utterly ridiculous. When it works, it brings out the rest of the story while being interesting on its own.



Take, for instance, Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It initially appears to be
set in a bog standard magical girl universe, complete with school, love
interest, a lead and her best friend, one of which is impulsive, the other more reserved and sensible. But there's also a hint of a darker underbelly, which really shows in the first plot twist, arguably one of the best I've seen and made all the more dark by the initially vanilla presentation of the world.


A good world is interesting, but not so much it detracts from the story or characters. Many of the old-school science fiction books suffered from this pitfall, in their slavish devotion to plot above all 
 

Seriously, one of the darker

worlds I've seen 

Drones, spies and a national police state, oh my!

Mark Mazetti, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times, spoke Tuesday to a half full hall at UCO. This isn't really a political blog, so I'll try to keep editorializing to a minimum because better spoken people than me have already outlined how foolish the whole 'War on Terror' is.

Alright, I lied. I'll opinionate a bit. One quote that really caught my attention was that Mazetti is of the opinion that it's only a matter of time before armed drones come back home to visit and maybe blow up some weddings. The Dorner manhunt was conducted with facial recognition software and surveillance drones, so this is totally unsurprising. It's nice that someone who is an expert on the subject is also of that opinion. If you're waiting for the dystopian future, it's already breaking down your door and telling you to stop resisting.

It's also interesting how the Manning and Snowden leaks have made the intelligence community more timid than ever of the press. Intelligence members must literally go through a polygraph to prove every five years that they haven't been talking to the press. I wonder, if you stand outside the Pentagon, can you feel the paranoia wafting off?

Excessive secrecy got them into this mess and they're absolutely convinced it'll get them out. I mean, there'll always be wacky hijinks to bury in the intel community. I understand that many of them do just want to protect the country. I'm just worried about how they define protect.

I mean, the community clearly has no compunction against spying for political reasons. COINTELPRO clearly shows that. So I don't really buy this whole schtick about how they're our neighbors and friends. 

We're a democracy. Democracy requires informed voters and you can't have that without information. National security is not a catch-all defense against transparency when you're protecting us from terrorism, which is literally less likely to kill an American than lightning.

The War of the Rose Rocks

Kurt Hochenauer, author of the liberal political blog Okie Funk, spoke to our class today. I'd known him previously as the guy who occasionally wrote editorials for the Oklahoma Gazette. If I had one take away from the short lecture, it was try, fail and keep trying. If I had another, it would be to find niche that no one else fills. His comments on interesting titles basically boiled down to, "Get people to want to read your stuff"

That said, you got to have stuff worth reading. Again, find something only you can provide and get people in the proverbial door.

You've also gotta have a thick skin to blog. Some insults are just downright funny ("Cardigan-coated twit") but the internet really seems to bring out the misanthropy in people.

Planning a Brave New World

Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest fame, was also famed for having no real plans for the directions of the series. He wrote the pages for the one week, turned them in and didn't have any plan for the next week.


From his page on the Dragon Ball wiki: "At that time, it began to be more fun to think up the story than to draw the pictures. But with the story, I basically only thought of each chapter. That is why I end up getting caught in these quagmires. (laughs) Around the time of Trunks' time travel, it was dreadful. I kept drawing, and it just got more and more incoherent."

By that point he'd been writing Dragon Ball for about half a decade. And the incoherence led to a certain zany charm in the early days. Dinosaurs and kung fu masters coexisted peacefully on Dragon Ball's Earth.

Dragon Ball was enormously successful, obviously, a juggernaut that modern shonen (boy's manga) pay homage to when they're not outright plagiarizing the things that made it such a money cow. So it is entirely possible to just start writing and see how the fictional world turns out.

However, most fiction depends upon an internal set of rules that the reader uses as a sort of map to understand the world. When these rules are broken, it still has to make sense.

They should be broken. That's the second reason they exist: to heighten dramatic tension. People will keep turning pages because "You said people can't do that but this guy is. Why?"

Rules exist to be broken, but they have to be broken on purpose. There's a whole Tvtropes page to plot twists that make no sense. If you don't want the dubious honor of being on that list, keep your rules breaking logical and consistent.

Rambling About Media

For right now, I'll be keeping this blog about fictional world building, but I'll analyze anime, sci-fi and fantasy film and comment on metal bands as necessary. For how I'm gonna write, I'm just gonna take a step by step look at the process of world building.

Except there are no steps. It's like Calvinball or playing with Legos: there are no rules.

It's creating form from the void and the best world builders are toddlers with god complexes.

I'm just going to analyze how the author(s) created the world to plug their characters.

Rambling on what makes speculative fiction

So, I'll be talking about a creative story idea I have had for many years now. It's a fantasy idea I really need to sit down and get started writing on, but I've seen some authors and dungeonmasters write out how they create the worlds they use to tell their stories.

"Sure, let's put the cart before the horse and I'll break down how a universe for speculative fiction gets created," I thought.

But first, let's talk about speculative fiction.

Creative writing professors and dictionaries can all regurgitate a definition for speculative fiction, but if you wanted that you'd go get a dictionary or a professor. In my opinion, speculative fiction is divided from other fiction by one simple thing: It creates an alternate universe and uses that alternate universe to toy with our preconceived notions and help the reader discover something about the human condition.

I hope that doesn't sound like nonsense, so I'll break that down. The alternate universe bit should be fairly clear, so I'll talk about the playing around and human condition bits.

We orient our worldview around certain ideas and conceptions we get through life, starting with the first time you stick a fork in the socket and you get the conception, 'Sticking a fork in a socket will hurt me' Simple things like that and more complex things like justice and the purpose of life. We run around with these ideas all our life and rarely question them. I know I'm not gonna stick another fork into a socket anytime soon.

The point of speculative fiction, again in my opinion, is to break us out of our comfort zone. What if, when we open up our wardrobe, we don't find clothes, but a portal to another world? What if, magic really did exist and there's a giant conspiracy covering it up? What if, centuries in the future, people flew around in ships and explore space much the same way the oceans were explored? What if?

It's escapism in its purist form. The schoolkid looking out the window on a stuffy day stuck in a boring classroom and imagining himself on the swing set outside. What differs speculative fiction from a writing down a daydream is that the fiction should tell us about ourselves and what drives us.

So it takes that daydream and makes it sensible. There are rules. Ok, so you can be a wizard or a witch but you'll need a wand and you still have to go to school. There'll still be prejudice and the nervous butterflies in your stomach right before you ask a girl out.

It reintroduces us to the things we've already learned in our own life but from a different angle. A fresh perspective can mean more than any number of statistics, photographs or lectures.

Well, I was going relate this to the new Disney movie Frozen but I guess I'll leave that for the next post: what separates good speculative fiction from the bad.