Aren't you glad no one has added this beasty yet.
On Audience

Aren't you glad no one has added this beasty yet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about audience recently. Particularly in regards to the reach of ideas and my ability to make supplemental or total income from my creative endeavors. I noticed a button on imgur.com the other day that shows the view count on images and some basic analytic information. Turns out a few posts I put up way back in the height of Minecraft mania in 2010 have been kind of popular. Almost a collective quarter million views popular. Ongoing popularity appears to stem from occasional threads like this one from a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/2fxado/complete_environmental_overhaul_19_idea_thread/

I was a little dumbstruck to discover that the most seen of my creative works is almost certainly fan concept art for Minecraft.

In order the posts were:

and

I think I can claim partial credit for at least some of the many ideas shown above that are now ingame. At the time I was very active in the r/minecraft community and the enthusiastic response to each image fueled fire to create the next. Eventually I tired of that game and have only recently reinstalled Minecraft to impress the three year old L with. The amount of new content is pretty staggering. I no longer feel as inspired to spend hours creating virtual sculptures or exploring the endless random and repetitive landscape.

My previous blog still draws views, much to my shame as of the 365+ posts I am proud of about 60 and embarrassed by closer to 200. Even so the views trickle in 3 to 20 a day, mostly drawn by the papercraft R2D2’s and the zombie Pikatchu, Sonic and Mario. Sometimes a more specific search for creatures from Bas-Lag or one of the many other appropriated characters lands someone among the virtual tumbleweeds.

Since 2011 I’ve had four classes of my own and two more shared with a colleague. I’ve generally engaged regularly with between 50 and 120 students each year. This audience is amazing and I learn a lot from them in return. A lot of my creative energy in the past four years has been channeled into the day to day tasks my students undertake. Last year I told my graduating year 6 students that they could count me in their fan club, that when they earnt masters, published books or got jobs at NASA I would be delighted to hear about it. I am confident that I can count at least a few of my students in my fan club.

My Instagram and Twitter followers are mostly robots, what they get out of it I do not know.

I am convinced that the Facebook filter bubble doesn’t know me as well as it thinks it does and therefore the people who see my posts on Facebook are probably not the people who most want to. I see a lot of content from distant acquaintances in my feed, I seem to develop ‘liking’ relationships with people I barely communicate with because we share links that entertain each other. Yet even when my feed is supposedly set on “Most recent” – And I check regularly because it reverts of its own accord- if I go to the profile of good friends I see posts that have not shown in my feed. So the value of FBook as a social communication tool is limited as there is really no way of knowing if the people that count are seeing your content let alone engaging with it. Add to this my disquiet at growing toxicity of the FBook platform and you can count me happy to jump ship if ever a reasonable and open competitor begins to develop market saturation.

Summer is coming up and there are big changes afoot. Typically as long as I am somewhere I can work it takes me about two days without work before the creative urges become overpowering. So I think it is about time I set about cultivating 1000 true fans by finishing, funding, making building and publishing some of the ideas and projects I’ve got kicking around. Because all to soon I will return to the classroom where all my energies are funneled back into keeping our space the best place I can make it for my students to learn and grow.

 

 

 

 

Image credit to user Torridon_Snails of Walkinghighlands.co.uk
Creation

I have been stewing on this idea for a while and last night I settled on the URL.

I like sharing stuff, but I don’t like Facebook very much (freebooting in particular has become a pet peeve), I’ve never succeeded in making Twitter habitual. Facebook is kind of inescapable and I’ve no intention of cutting myself of from it any time soon however, I want ownership of my posts and feed in a way Facebook will not provide. So I intend to primarily share via this platform for now. I’ll post here daily to begin with but not all posts here will be shared to FB by default.

This blog is also to serve as a kind of accountability check for myself. I need a place for the kind of reflective record keeping that could be called I diary. I need it to serve a greater purpose than a live journal though. I am a creative, very much an ideas man and plenty crafty with my hands too. My biggest issue is that I struggle to see projects through to completion or for that matter to put enough time into my creative endeavors during the hum drum of school term working weeks. I have a number of projects and ideas I would really like to see through. Sharing progress publicly adds stakes, stakes are sometimes all it takes.

As for the title, I am named for the mountain Liathach on the north west coast of Scotland, Liatach is my middle name. According to my personal mythology my father climbed Liathach as part of some cadet like activity when he was sixteen (Confirmed by serendipitous fatherly phone call during the composition of this post). It left a profound impression on him, so much so that he gave his firstborn the name. I in turn gave it to my first born as well. Dad took my sister and I to climb it when I was fifteen and my sister was only ten, none of us has yet been up the final thirty metres to the mountains true peak. Liathach is one of the rarer set of munro that can be climbed direct from sea level. The day we climbed we saw a seal frolicking in the kelp in the bay below before turning to face the mountain which has in turn left its mark on me.

Photos from user Torridon_snails  of: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16251 

The view West from the lower peak. I was last at this point 22 years ago, long before ubiquitous digital photography. I suspect dad has at least an image or two from the climb in hard copy somewhere.

 

The view East to the true peak. I was, in a truly fifteen year old fashion, petulantly furious that dad wouldn’t let us make the traverse to the true peak. Remembering the 10 year old sister who made it up to this point with probably less complaint than I and looking at the path ahead. I now understand completely dad.