domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
sohois
10hr ago
Merchandise is the biggest earner for IPs by a huge margin, indeed the value of Star Wars was probably 90% merch sales when they bought it
SkoomaDentist
10hr ago
I don't think spamming a page and half long zero effort AI slop counts as "fun".
4nji2
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
11hr ago
Silly and indicating pop/stereotypical conception of aspects of the world/history. If she understands that her understanding is in fact surface level, sure.
If however she considers herself your equal (given your high minded posting history, I am comfortable putting you at least a step above a person who thinks bodyparts were measured of alice subjects), than you have the worst of both worlds. A chip on her shoulder, but without the receipts to justify it.
Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.
But, seriously, go indie.
Trad publishing would be hard enough if you were willing to play the idpol game, because you'd be competing with all the other people who are also willing to play the idpol game, and trad publishing is a tournament market where a few well-connected authors make it big and everyone else waits tables. But the fact that you are not willing to play makes it hopeless.
You are like a student applying to Harvard on the strength of his SAT and AP scores, unwilling to do extracurriculars or networking because that's not what education should be about, refusing to disclose his URM status and without a legacy family member to vouch for him; it's not going to work.
I see from the sibling comments that you don't want to publish serially. That's not ideal (you are leaving money on the table), but not quite a dealbreaker; while serial publishing on Royal Road or similar supported through Patreon is the usual way to fund a work in progress, once it is finished the standard practice is to delete the free copy and put it on Kindle Unlimited, so you can just jump straight to that.
And I also see that your goal is to make enough money to quit your job. As you correctly note, if an online novel gets popular enough it will eventually be acquired by a trad publisher anyway. If not, it is very unlikely that it would have ever gotten traditionally published in the first place, or that it would have paid back its advance if it had. None of those self-published guys you see at your local's writer groups would have made it big if they had tried trad publishing instead of online publishing; they would have just failed.
If you are serious about this, you have to commit one way or the other. Make a desperate all out effort to get traditionally published, including ticking the idpol boxes, and understand that you will most likely fail anyway. Or put all your effort into being an indie author, including adapting your writing to the serial format, and understand that you will most likely end up as a midlister doing his own marketing and outreach and never making as much money as you are currently making in a well-renumerated job.
And if neither of those are acceptable to you, just quit now, before you waste any more time on this.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11hr ago
I said significant bodily injury, not serious bodily injury. Purposeful infliction of significant bodily injury still is aggravated assault in New Jersey, though a lower degree.
b. Aggravated assault. A person is guilty of aggravated assault if the person:
(1) Attempts to cause serious bodily injury to another, or causes injury purposely or knowingly or under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life recklessly causes such injury.
(7) Attempts to cause significant bodily injury to another or causes significant bodily injury purposely or knowingly or, under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life recklessly causes such significant bodily injury.
Aggravated assault under paragraphs (1) and (6) of subsection b. of this section is a crime of the second degree; and under paragraphs (2), (7), (9), and (10) of subsection b. of this section is a crime of the third degree.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11hr ago
The US government is seeking stakes in Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, among other firms:
Expanding on a plan to receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Lutnick is exploring how the U.S. can receive equity stakes in exchange for CHIPS Act funding for companies such as Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung. Much of the funding has not yet been dispersed.
Similarly, a few months ago, the Trump administration approved Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel contingent on the USG receiving a golden share that gives it considerable supervisory authority:
The golden share gives the US government veto authority over a raft of corporate decisions, from idling plants to cutting production capacity and moving jobs overseas, as previewed in a weekend social media post by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.
It's an interesting turn for the traditionally market-oriented, small government party to start making a play for the commanding heights of the economy. The Federal government has a long history of giving out subsidies as a matter of policy, but it generally hasn't tried to assert an actual stake in recipient businesses (it will sometimes assume control of failing institutions, but this is generally an emergency measure rather than a long term plan).
- Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
- Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?
- Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?
- Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?
lagrangian
11hr ago
I can't magic male role models out of nowhere
Is there some variety of tutor/coach you could hire that suits any (special?) interests of his? This is about as close as it gets to magic, if it's an option financially. College students work pretty cheap. Math, piano, programming, personal trainer?
Rosencrantz2
11hr ago
This is entirely obvious advice but I would read the bios of individual agents on literary agency web pages and then research any who seem promising -- you'll likely be able to find e.g. video of them speaking on panels. When you find a hit, write to them in earnest as if you are someone they'd want to talk to outside of a business transaction. Given the economics of publishing, you are shopping for them not the other way around.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
Such a pity that both Bizonacci and Leonardo of biz vanished from the earth. So much was lost when they messed with the captcha rules on /biz/ under admittedly severe pressure from shills, the board is barely a shadow of what it was. Someone made a full Chainlink waifu picker CYOA! Someone made a thematically-appropriate Chainlink RPGmaker game where you wait around for ages. NFTs that were just a printout of the amount of gas you paid to get them. Tasteful monerochan lewds. All these memories lost, like tears in the rain.
TitaniumButterfly
12hr ago
Thanks. For some reason doing that just felt impossibly onerous.
odd_primes
12hr ago
It seems like they are still pretty deep in the hole. They paid $4 billion in 2012 dollars, and the movie profits are nowhere close to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/
Note those numbers also don't include marketing costs, which are often $100 million plus for a blockbuster.
Disney+ lost $11 billion, the theme parks have been a bit of a mess apparently, so I don't see how merch could come anywhere close to filling in the gap.
starfighters
Such a good example. In the second most recent Star Wars movie they had a dyed-hair girlboss talking down to a fighter pilot saying the last thing they need are any more “trigger happy fly boys” … in their ongoing ship vs ship combat. The writers repudiating the spacefighter dogfighting aspect of Star Wars. Something that hypes boys much more than a disapproving HR manager talking down to a combat pilot for being too high-T.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
12hr ago
Cowboy Bebop is generally cited as an example of an English dub which is at least as good as the original Japanese. I haven't watched it with the Japanese audio, but I at least can confirm that the dub is really good. I'm almost always a sub person, but this is one I watch dubbed.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
13hr ago
I've been going back and rewatching some anime from my childhood. Currently, I'm rewatching Bobobo-bo-bobobo. It's one of the only anime in my mind that has a dub that's superior than the original sub. The plot is translated well, but some of the jokes are actually better when translated. The narrator, for example, is much superior in the dub. This brought to mind an interesting question: Which anime dubs are actually superior to the originals? Bobobo and Ghost Stories are the only two that come to mind. Bobobo being true to the original and Ghost Stories being completely different.
What are you guys' picks for anime that have superior dubs?
Tenaz
13hr ago
"Going for a run, he showers off the sweat" is no more correct, so it's not really about the tense here. "Going for a run, he listens to music" is only very slightly better. The issue isn't actually that the latter action has to take place during the former; it's that "going for a run" is actually a description of a static event, describing the start of the run.
So I'd say that "going for a run, he stepped out the door" is actually more correct than either of the other two, and also more in-line with the original example. It's an odd case where the sentence structure only works if the latter action is somewhat taken while the start of the former action is happening.
"Starting his run, he stepped out the door" is best of all. Or "Following the man, he stepped through the door behind him." In both cases the former action sort of describes and informs the latter but is also an action in its own right. I'd argue this is precisely what's happening in the sentence you described too. "Hefting" isn't actually separate from swinging the mace; it's a description that informs the swinging of the mace, similar to "Using all his strength, he swung the mace."
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like.
In contrast to you, I think the ideological reason is very important here - it's not the only problem, but ignoring it brushes over a big part of the picture.
I doubt their explicit goal was to alienate men, but there's an exceptionally female-biased undercurrent behind a lot of Disney's decisions that can't be ignored - see: Star Wars, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, etc. They certainly believed they were regressive franchises that alienated women due to their supposed focus on male characters and upheld harmful stereotypes by failing to depict strong female heroes the way they wanted. As such they were very intent on portraying "powerful and strong women", and creating storylines which preached to men about their supposed privilege and shoved women in their faces which were ostensibly supposed to be admirable but just ended up being odious. Hell they placed ideological messages in media for female audiences too - see: the Snow White reboot. But these narratives are particularly repulsive to men due to the consistent portrayal of them as incompetent, oppressors, or dutiful little allies whose only role within the story is to lift up the strong female Mary Sue. They chose to belittle their male audience instead of appeal to them. You get what you deserve.
I think what happened here is that once they acquired Star Wars and Marvel properties, many of the creatives behind the scenes saw the opportunity created by the fact that these were primarily male-dominated IPs which they could use to incalculate the existing male fanbase into feminism while bringing in a fresh crop of female viewers. They assumed they had a lock on the existing fanbase due to their significant legacy power. When that didn't succeed, and their audience then went on to complain about the fact that they were being forcibly shut out of cultural properties that they were patrons of in the beginning, the answer was always to double down with something along the lines of "If you're not progressive enough to get with the times, you deserve to be alienated. How sad for you to live in a world where men aren't catered to all the time, you misogynist". Then the original audience left and Disney panicked. In practice, they did in fact "alienate them by pandering to girls", and some of that was intentional on Disney's end.
What really gets me is that Disney is actually capable of creating pieces of media that are worth watching if they didn't prioritise progressivism over actually good storytelling (in practice, this does end up being a tradeoff; if you prioritise irrelevant metrics of success, that will sometimes come at the cost of other considerations, especially when it means your main female character might need to fail and be very imperfect in order to be a realistic and relatable character). Andor is a sterling example of this, with a grounded premise, nuanced character writing and believable portrayals of the banal nature of evil that resonated with mostly everyone. Disney's not entirely incompetent and are actually capable of creating properties that cater to the original fanbase, they have just chosen not to in favour of other considerations due to heavy ideological capture.
Until they learn to stop doing this and openly issue a grovelling apology for the last decade, I hope they keep losing their male audience. Vote with your feet.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
14hr ago
Hmmm, street walking, were you? (Scribbles note)
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14hr ago
What's strange is I've known many women who are into Star Wars. It's basically a tentpole franchise, at least before Disney bought it. My mom loves Star Wars -- even was on Star Wars fan forums back in the 2000s. I almost dated a girl back in high school who was really into me; I met her in school, and we flirted (to really date myself) at a Star Wars premiere, which she was really excited to go to. I don't think Disney needed any help making Star Wars appealing to women.
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like. Too many creative leaders at the company have spent too long telling stories that women like, that they don't have experience telling stories that men do. This applies to their parks as well: long before lightsabers were the hot Disneyland souvenir, Davy Crockett coonskin hats were the big seller in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a man who loved cowboys-and-indians stories and trains: Disney was a children's brand, not a girls' brand. There are plenty of heterosexual male fans of theme parks, but show me a straight man who likes EPCOT and I will show you a man who is incredibly angry at the Disney company. They took a park about science, technology, and cultural awareness -- a "permanent world's fair", as it was described -- and turned it into a place to get drunk and ride rollercoasters.
Once upon a time, Disneyland was a place about exploring the frontier, riding canoes, riding on a train, riding on a space-age train, there was a show where they simulated going to space on a rocket... the Disneyland of the 1950s and 60s was a respectable place for a little boy to be into. But more and more Disney's parks feel like places for little girls to wear dresses, women to go on a "girls' trip", and gay men to be Disney adults. They've lost touch with what boys are into, and have gotten stuck in a rut of being a "girl's place." I genuinely blame the introduction of the Disney princess dress -- which, surprisingly, dates back only to the late 90s -- as the beginning of Disney as a brand being wildly associated with girls and not boys. (Disney Channel basically being "dumb sitcoms for preteen girls" probably didn't help.)
That said, I don't believe girl-power storylines are the problem with Marvel. I also don't think it's "franchise fatigue." I think the problem with Marvel is that the early MCU films had a kind of grounding in the real world: Iron Man had war on terror connections (and got worse over time), Thor was relatively grounded and intimate for a story about a norse god and at least had the real-world mythology connection, Captain America had the historical fiction angle and the connection to fighting pseudo-Nazis (which they later handwaived away as villains because ???). Avengers feels realistic compared to what comes out of Marvel these days.
Guardians of the Galaxy was wildly successful, but I guess I'm in the minority who didn't like the first film and preferred the second, and especially the third. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the first Guardians, the only time I've ever done that. Marvel seriously overreacted to that success, and took everything in a cosmic, ungrounded, fantastical direction. The early Avengers films earned their cosmic dimensions. The recent films ask viewers to accept a lot of wild and unbelievable stuff without earning it. Time travel! Multiverse! Alligator Loki! Wanda creating an entire fictional town! Apparently Kang (and Loki?) has the ability to CONTROL ALL OF TIME now? Or he did, because Kang is no more.
Really, the problem with Marvel is that they're running into the limits of comic book stories trying to reach general audiences. I don't read a lot of comic books, and generally don't care for superheroes. But I liked Iron Man 1; it didn't feel like a comic book story. It felt grounded and human, and was more like a science fiction film than a comic book movie. The real problem with Marvel is baked in: most of their stories are about fantastical, ungrounded, space events involving mutants and aliens, and this quickly becomes confusing and alienating for general audiences. There's a reason comic books aren't considered hard sci-fi.
There are lots of complaints from comics fans about what they did to MODOK in Ant-Man, but my response is always that MODOK as a concept looks hilarious and stupid, like something a child would design. There was no way to translate this into live-action in a way that general audiences wouldn't find ridiculous. Making it a joke was inevitable.
(And the new Fantastic Four felt genuinely AI-generated to me, all of the effects had a ludicrious quality and the soft, undefined edges I associate with AI video. I don't think they used AI to create it, but dang if they didn't create a great imitation of AI art.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
Sequel trilogy merchandise was also a complete dud from what I remember. So where the theme parks (which themselves cost billions to build).
DiscourseMagnus
14hr ago
...that's eerie. I feel like this detail does actually enhance the narrative, and somehow the fact that you chose to leave it out of your initial telling actually further enhances it.
YE_GUILTY
14hr ago
Maybe not by box office receipts alone, but counting other revenue streams like merchandise, I wouldn't be surprised.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both.
Did they actually get a return on Lucasfilm? I know they made a decent profit on the first few films, but Lucasfilm cost them 6 billion, IIRC, I don't know if they managed to net that much across all their SW projects.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14hr ago
I mean, reliability level of "some dude on the internet" but, I can tell you I saw a mountain lion about 20 feet from me hiking in Central VA last year. It was slinking up a not-human-navigable trail on a hillside, stopped, looked at me. I looked at it. It walked away.
YE_GUILTY
14hr ago
Disney is back where it started:
But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)
They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.
So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.
The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?
So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."
And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.
Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.
That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)
But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.
I mean, Trump representing a turn from free markets was something talked about since his first term. If I remember correctly all the Blues were mocking the very idea, even endorsing Rainbow Capitalism, starting with Clinton's "will breaking banks up stop sexism?".
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