Category: WorkCategory: Work

You’ve been writing for months, right? Maybe a year or two. When is your big break gonna come? Steven Pressfield was “fifty-two, specifically, when he sold his first novel.”

From Rain Bennett, who recently interviewed Pressfield:

“I think about all the writers, filmmakers, musicians, and entrepreneurs who have quietly decided that if it hasn’t happened by a certain age, it probably won’t. Who have looked at the overnight success stories on social media and measured themselves against a timeline that was never real to begin with.”

As Sean Cannon said on one of our Escape Pod Zoom calls, “you just have to be a little bit better so you can survive the war of attrition.” Don’t count on overnight success. Keep making the work, stacking the days, so you can get up and do it the next day. The overnight success happens after years of overnight work.

If you bought movies in the UK on your Sony Playstation, some of those movies will soon be deleted from your account.

“Sony said that affected customers will lose the ability to stream titles including Outrage: Way of the Yakuza, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo 3, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas “due to our content licensing agreements.” As of September, Sony will remove any affected titles that UK users bought from their PlayStation library, per the notice.”

Oh, and the Sony Playstation is going to stop making game discs in 2028, meaning you’ll buy all your games… digitally.

There’s a rumor that Bandcamp cut “most of the remaining engineers,” prompting some folks to download their purchased music just in case the site goes dark (the site as been sold twice in the last few years, I think).

The digital goods economy is fragile. In the never ending quest of convenience, we’ve paid for things and let someone else store them, whether digital music, movies, or even our websites on sites like Squarespace.

Like Morpheus said in The Matrix, “They are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys.”

He was talking about Agents that prevented people from escaping, but that seems like an apt comparison. Are you gonna buy CDs again? Blue Rays? Host your own website? Manage your own email list?! Are you really going to escape this system?

I said “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer” back in 2024 and it’s just becoming more true by the day. The allure of all this centralization was convenience and reach. Then, after all these years of handing over our entertainment and audience to the corporations we end up owning nothing.

Start today. Download your data. Make back ups, both locally and in the cloud. Own your work. Build a website and host it with someone you trust. Host your videos. Buy a record (or a digital download) direct from the band.

Or, put all your work into the hands of corporations who will wipe out everything you’ve worked on (sites like MTVNews, Spinner.com, folks who amassed legions of fans on social media etc) with a press of a button.

It’s none of my business what the kid that sat in front of me in 10th grade science had for breakfast, and people working at social media platforms bought multiple vacation homes convincing us that it is.

Your attention is coveted by the social media platforms, along with the cell phone companies that will gladly take your auto-pay unlimited-plan payments. Heck, Tim Cook is saying iPhone prices are going up.

We don’t need better devices and apps and service plans to keep up, we need better systems and networks to continue making the work we’re called to make.

For the last decade we’ve put our best work on social media – videos, images, hot takes – you name it! But with so much time and energy devoted to publishing on so many platforms, our websites and newsletters just became digital brochures; static and boring.

So it was refreshing to hear Natalie Brite on Amelia Hruby’s Off the Grid podcast talking about where we limit our imagination.

“For so many entrepreneurs and micro businesses … this total dependency, where there’s no imagination outside of social media, it’s like my imagination stops at social media marketing and it’s like there’s so many other ways, right?”

I’ve seen this for decades. I was one of the first 3,000 people to sign up for Twitter. I’ve subscribed to a lot newsletters since I began this journey in 2001.

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In an interview with Frame Set, cinematographer Todd Banhazl (Winning Time, Hustlers, Nike) is asked for advice for young cinematographers trying to make work like his:

Don’t make work like mine, make the most personal thing possible, and really try to spend time shooting what you love in the way that you love it. I really mean that. I don’t know if that means it sounds like a platitude, but like, there’s a lot of cinematographers out there now that I feel like the technology has been democratized, like everyone’s a DP, so I think the thing that sets you apart is making the work personal, and like being brave to make it personal.

Writing good subject lines and building our websites is great and all, but it’s secondary to being brave and making the work you love.

Watch Banhazi talking about “The Cameras Behind Olivia Rodrigo’s Lo-Fi Music Video.”