Talking shop #2: Two types of success in online writing

Go to Google and run a search with the terms “how to blog”, “blogging guide [fill in current year]” or similar, and you’ll find yourself tripping over ten thousand nearly identical blog posts about how to blog successfully. But what exactly does it mean to be a successful blogger?

If you’re new to the site and don’t know my style, then don’t worry — this post isn’t one of those “guides” that starts out pretending to criticize such courses and ends up trying to sell you on one of its very own, and one that mostly likely upsells you on a far more expensive one. There are so many of these interchangeable online courses available now that if they were put in box form like how they used to sell PC games, they’d likely reach beyond the orbit of fucking Jupiter.

No, this post is just the opposite: yet another opportunity for me to complain, this time about the often soulless approach you’ll find towards online writing (and crossing over into other forms of creative work, poking my nose into areas of art I might have no business talking about. But I’ll do it anyway. And if I ever end up trying to sell you an online course, please unfollow this site and cancel me from the internet forever.)

Also, to make it clear: I like money. Of course I do — I’m a good American capitalist after all. I’d also like to make a lot more money than I make right now, though naturally I have ethical and moral limits to what I’d do to get more, just as most of us do (aside from the ones selling bullshit courses, of course.)

As much as I’d like to afford the good meat, I still wouldn’t do that. Also yeah, I’m using unused anime and game screenshots I had lying around like I usually do in these kinds of posts; this is part of how I economize. (Also, watch Yuru Camp.)

I also recognize that writing, and more broadly speaking any creative/artistic pursuit, very often has a commercial element to it. Criticism of any kind of creation merely on the grounds that it’s “commercial” is meaningless, since almost everything exposed to a public audience has that commercial aspect — the creator and/or publishers trying to find said audience, to market the writing, painting, music, film, or whatever other medium you’re dealing with. And there’s plenty of great art out there that has a strong commercial element, however you’d measure that.

That said, there’s also plenty of creative work that can’t find an audience, maybe because it never gets noticed in the massive sea of similar-looking work, or because it’s too bizarre and obtuse or in too small a niche to have much appeal to most people. It is entirely possible to successfully market bizarre art and make massive amounts of money doing so (as two guys in particular have who I’ll bring up later, and not in the most favorable terms.) But generally speaking, the vast majority of both that and even of more “normal” work never finds much of an audience, beyond maybe the creator’s family and friends, if even that.

How is this connected to blogging? There are tons of experts out there ready to tell you what exactly you need to do to be a success at writing online, but without acknowledging that there are different kinds of success in online writing. You might be able to divide this form of “success” into several categories, but here I’ll stick to just two broad types.

I won’t let my obsessive nature entirely take over this post.

One type of success, and the only one that I believe many of these guides acknowledge, is what I’d call the business-oriented or profit-driven type. Monetize and go for the clicks by writing about only what’s hot and trending and optimize all your posts with search engine optimization tactics (and search engine meaning Google, because that’s the only one people use.) Don’t worry about the longevity of your posts or the fact that almost none of them will be relevant to anyone months or years from now — that’s not your goal anyway. It’s clicks now, money now.

This sort of writing is naturally appropriate for those writing online for marketing/commercial purposes. If you provide goods or services that you want to advertise, or more likely you’re a freelancer writing posts for someone else providing said goods/services, getting eyes on your work is your chief concern. There’s a reason requests for articles written purely with SEO in mind demand a bunch of very specific phrases and terms be used, typically frontloaded for maximum effect — the crawlers¹ that scan sites for new information look for such phrases to match with what people are searching for in the present and recent past, and matching your posts with the relevant searches is one of your primary goals.

And of course, if you’re trying to get more eyes on your writing in general, it’s a good idea to use these tools. Mandatory, even, because this is how Google selects what sites and posts to put on page 1 of its search results. It doesn’t give a damn how much work you might have put into a post — arguably, aside from judging effort by word count which is not the only indicator of effort anyway, it can’t even tell how much you put into it. You simply have to learn how to game the system while still writing articles that people will actually want to read and that you actually care about writing. That’s the tightrope you have to walk if you want to make a real impact writing online for yourself without burning out on it.

And remember: there’s no such thing as bad publicity! Except there actually is; don’t let people say otherwise. This is an old cliché that I wish would die.

But there’s the rub: do you actually care about what you’re writing? If you’re writing purely for money, the likely answer is no. When I worked as a freelancer, I wrote for all sorts of small businesses, and most of the work I produced was on subjects I didn’t really give a damn about. Very occasionally I’d get a request for something touching on geography or history somehow, usually in connection with travel, but I never managed to get anywhere near writing about games, anime, or music as I do here. I knew that work was out there, but my path never took me in that direction. Yet as long as I was being paid, I didn’t care.

Now imagine you don’t have a profit motive in writing. Or maybe you do, but you’d like to balance that with your desire to write what you want (which as noted above can be a difficult balance to achieve.) Or maybe you just want to increase your visibility so you can get more people reading your short stories or your novel or playing your indie game or whatever you might have created. In these cases, I think the above monetization advice doesn’t work so well. Aside from the use of SEO tactics, which I’m too lazy to bother with on this site but I know can be very effective, I believe the conventional wisdom about online writing only takes you so far if your primary goal in writing is personal satisfaction.

Here I want to dump on two artists in particular, two who have made careers out of being flashy and extremely divisive: Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. These two have found great commercial success, selling their work at auction for insane amounts of money. They are both undoubtedly master marketers — if that’s your business, you’d do well to study how they operate.

Their artistic work also has absolutely no emotional effect on me. It’s all a complete dead end as far as I can tell. I don’t want to go so far as to call these guys talentless hacks as some people do, since they absolutely have some kind of talent; otherwise they wouldn’t have the art world by the balls. I just think their artistic work is pretty close to worthless from that emotional angle.²

Maybe they’re simply not going for that effect — both have emphasized the importance of profit in the art industry, and I’d be a hypocrite to argue with that, since as I’ve said I’m interested in making money too. But then, I’m not a professional artist. I’m an attorney, and I get my money by providing clients with legal services. You could say there’s maybe some art in that work, but it’s not the kind of art that anyone outside our niche would give a shit about (and I’m not the type of attorney who goes into court and makes dramatic speeches either, so that’s definitely not true of my work.)

It’s great if you can make massive amounts of money doing what you love, but that’s hard as hell to pull off.

There’s a reason I’m picking on Hirst and Koons in particular: I’ve seen online writers cite them as examples of how we should approach our craft. Granted, I have the luxury of keeping this blog purely as a hobby, so I can really write whatever the fuck I want here (and I can use as many fucks as I like without fear as well.) But unless your goal is to make Hirst or Koons money, which God bless you and good luck if it is, this seems to me like terrible advice. It’s the same sort of advice I see from people who take a completely cynical attitude towards artistic work, who harp on the importance of timely and trendy “content creation”³ above all else without regard to its emotional impact or its longevity, and who are probably also on the goddamn NFT train. It’s all money, all profit, all fucking soulless.

Now again, I have to emphasize that it is absolutely possible to be both commercially and artistically successful (however you’d define the latter — though technical skill is important, I also pin it on that “emotional impact” element that is admittedly going to vary from person to person.) There isn’t a starving artist dead or alive who actually wished to be starving, and I doubt any of those “died penniless and were discovered after their deaths” types like Van Gogh and Lovecraft and so many others wouldn’t have preferred success during their own lives.

I only question this purely profit-driven approach to creative endeavors. I write here because I like expressing my views on art I enjoy and occasionally on art-related legal matters.⁴ If I were a professional artist, I think I’d be working first to express myself as I wished and only then hoping to get recognition for it. Because of personal circumstances, I don’t have the ability to take that gamble, so to make sure money I became a lawyer. And sure, being a lawyer isn’t the most conducive thing to leading a happy and healthy life. But the alternative as I see it is worse. I’m not sure why I’d want to try to become a writer by only writing what I thought other people wanted to read, following trends without any regard to my own feelings. That sounds like a truly miserable life to me.

Honestly, I’d rather sit on this “power source” than do that — it’s probably more comfortable. Don’t tell me the people who made Ryza didn’t realize what this looked like; I’ll never believe it.

But then, I don’t know why people do a lot of things. I’m not the one to listen to about how to make money online. Go buy one of those bullshit courses if you want to know about that, or far better still, dig up some actually free advice on that. Maybe the good people at Automattic can provide some free advice as well; I think WordPress might provide some free seminars on SEO or whatever, though not having taken them I can’t speak to their quality.

As usual, it’s probably best to ignore my advice, since I’m not exactly the happiest person on Earth anyway. I can only speak for myself. I will probably be writing more utter bullshit about writing at some point, though, so please look forward to that.

 

¹ Am I the only one who thinks of weird robotic spiders or squids feeling around websites when I hear about SEO crawlers? Like something designed by H. R. Giger.

² I’d say I feel the same about stuff like the famed drip and color field paintings of Pollock and Rothko, but in their cases, I think there’s something there that hits other people emotionally but that just doesn’t hit me. By contrast, I don’t even see that in the work of Hirst and Koons. The fact that people have paid millions for their art says more about the quality of humanity in general than it does about the quality of their work in my opinion.

This isn’t an issue of my disliking “weird art” either, since a few of my favorite artists are early 20th century surrealists like René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst, and they painted some weird as fuck stuff. Yet I always at least thought their paintings were fascinating, and often emotionally powerful even if they were more on the abstract side. Maybe this really is just another matter of taste that can’t be argued over.

³ The constant use of the term “content” for what we do is also something I have a problem with. It just feels to me like reducing all our work to the creation of something samey and bland. “Content” in this context makes me think of tasteless paste people 300 years in the future might eat out of tubes to sustain themselves, maybe on a colony ship flying to a new star because humanity has somehow managed to nuke the entire Solar System. I won’t push too hard on this, though, because there are plenty of excellent writers and video makers whose work I enjoy who also use the term.

⁴ And just in case — I know it’s unlikely that anyone reading this site would disagree with me on this point, but yes, games and anime absolutely count as art. I might dump on Hirst and Koons above, but I also don’t like to draw a distinction between “fine art” and “popular art”, or between low and high art or any of that shit. Same with genre fiction like fantasy and sci-fi vs. “literary fiction” — there are good and bad examples of both, and one type is not inherently better than the other.

SimCity 2000, Part VII: The Ruling Class

At five in the morning in the pre-dawn light, a foul-smelling cloud of smoke billows out from the hills and into one of Hell’s neighborhoods.  A truck transporting dangerous industrial materials overturned, causing a chemical spill.

Sadly, this kind of accident is common in Hell, where not much thought is given to things like safety standards or public health.

Pollution problems don’t stop the growth of the industrial sector.  The city continues to expand northward and builds its first road connection to its northern neighbor.  Road, rail and highway connections cost money, but they also help expand a city’s demand for commercial and industrial development.

As we can see in the annual budget, Hell has finally paid out on its bonds, and the money is now rolling in.  However, despite Hell’s newfound wealth, life in the city still sucks.  Fire department funding is still low, there are only two police stations and one hospital in the whole city, and Hell’s single school is now crowding up to 70 students into each classroom.

Where’s that surplus going, then?

To this new upper-class residential development – an escape from the filth and bustle of the city.  The homes here are powered by solar energy, a newly discovered and totally clean source of power, and they’re even hooked up to a water supply.  Across from this development is an art museum, the only museum within the city limits.  This new development is unofficially known as “Paradise”, and its property values are so high that only the members of the small elite class of business and political leaders in the city can afford to live there.  The mayor also has a convenient private road built there to visit his friends and to have drinking parties on boats in the lake, and other rich person stuff like that.

Placing man-made lakes and forests is expensive, but it doesn’t really matter – the city can spare the money now.

As we can see, this retreat is located far away from the rabble.  Its residents can’t even see the city, which is mercifully blocked from view by a mountain.

Even so, no mayor can ignore the plight of his citizens for long.  Because SimCity 2000 shoves that plight in your face with notices that your citizens are demanding something or other.  In this case, it’s another hospital.  The old hospital is still the only hospital, and for decades it’s been insufficient to serve the community.  Perhaps all the gang violence has something to do with it.  Knife and bullet wounds have to account for at least a quarter of the hospital room visits in the city.

On the upside, those Death Wish citizen vs. gang wars seem to be going well.

At the insistence of his advisors, the mayor agrees to dedicate a small part of the city’s annual surplus to the building of a new hospital.  After all, Hell’s citizens can’t work and pay taxes if they’re dead.  Note that hospitals and other public service-related buildings don’t go into effect until the year after they’re built, so they remain empty and inoperative with a default C+ grade until then.

But the rumblings from the citizens don’t stop.  They now demand a new school, probably to relieve the effects of the crowding on their children’s current and only school.

Aw, come on.  A B- is like a… barely passing grade.  It’s fine.

Still, the mayor caves in because he realizes it’s important to at least educate the little shits so they can bring a steady stream of revenue to Hell in the future.

Hell’s average citizens aren’t the only ones complaining.  As the city continues to grow, industrial demand falters.  The phrase “Industry Needs Connections” is pretty vague, but what it means is that your city needs either a seaport, which is impossible in Hell because there’s no sea or river in the city limits, or a connection to its neighbors by rail or by highway.  There’s nothing you can do to solve this problem other than build one or more of these kinds of connections.  Unfortunately, they’re pretty expensive – especially railroads, which cost $25 per tile, require 2×2 tile train stations to operate, and basically demand that you either demolish a path through your existing city or build the railroad on its outskirts (or use a rail to subway connection through the city, and subways are even more expensive to build!)

Since the connections required for continued industrial growth are costly, we’ll wait for a while to place them.  In the meantime, the citizens again make a demand of the mayor – this time for more police stations.  Apparently those citizen-gang wars aren’t going so well.

A look at property values in the city might be useful.  The value of each tile is determined by several factors, including pollution and crime.  The presence of trees, water, and other desirable stuff like parks helps increase the value of land.  The darker the blue on this projection, the higher the value of the tile.  As we can see here, downtown Hell has mostly low-value land.  The areas not shaded in are the cheapest possible.

The upper-class neighborhood to the far southwest, however, has very high property value (the cheap land to the north are the solar power plants.)  This is because there’s very little to no crime or pollution here and because of the value added by the man-made lakes and the trees, which are invisible in this mode.  The mayor’s mansion, of course, is on the most valuable land of all.

Son of a bitch.  Industrial demand refuses to rise still, so we have to build a highway and create a connection with the town over by dragging the highway off the map.  Highways are expensive and a pain to build through cities because of the demolition required, but they can relieve traffic if placed correctly, and they boost industrial demand if they use connections.  You have to connect highways to roads with onramps to make them functional, because otherwise your citizens won’t be able to drive on them.

Oh yeah, don’t worry about that break in the highway up there.  People can drive across it somehow.  Perhaps there’s a car elevator or levitator there that we can’t see, or maybe there’s just a burning pile of wreckage where cars have driven off the highway and crashed into the pavement fifty feet below that people can now drive over.

Since Hell is now the state capital, it should probably have an airport.  Airports boost commercial demand.  All you need is a 2×6 block of tiles to build one (it has to be that large to accommodate a runway.)

Placing an airport next to two schools is probably a terrible idea.  But let’s face it, those kids aren’t learning anything useful at those schools anyway.  Maybe at least this way one of them will become inspired to be a pilot.  Meanwhile, the kids of the elite attend an actual good, non-crowded school in their own neighborhood that we can’t see because it’s a private school.

Will the 99% be satisfied with the meager services they’ve being given?  Will they attempt to overthrow the mayor by force?  Find out next time, because I don’t know either!

SimCity 2000, Part VI: Mayor Tony Montana

After taking its place as the state capital, Hell undergoes a transformation.  Life doesn’t really get any better for the general masses, but the new city’s new status spurs the building of upper-class neighborhoods removed from the rest of the city, sheltered away on the edges of town.  Meanwhile, the heart of government teems with lobbyists and other forms of lower life.  (Ha ha, just kidding, if you’re a lobbyist reading this right now.  Well, sort of.)

The city assembly now serves as the state capitol building, and the assemblymen now convene in a nearby office building.  Shortly after this change took place, the mayor ordered the funds for the statue given to the city to be spent on a commission of a statue… of himself.  Standing in the middle of a giant man-made fountain.

Even though the mayor was generally considered a worthless drunkard, nobody could seem to get rid of him, and he kept the bulk of spending and city planning power for himself.  People simply did their best to ignore the gaudy monument.  Notice that even the pigeons avoid his statue.

Not far away, at Hell’s only hospital, a doctor takes a smoke break on a balcony outside in the cold night air.  This one hospital isn’t sufficient to serve the entire city, he knows.  In fact, the city only allocated money for a thousand beds in the facility, forcing twelve of the 1,012 patients currently in the hospital to sleep on chairs in the hospital’s waiting rooms.  Because of its crowding problems, the hospital was given an F by the official hospital grading board.

The doctor asked his colleague that day what the hell the city government was planning to do about the problems the hospital faced.  The other doctor laughed.  They both knew that the city government wouldn’t do anything.  An appeal to the mayor was pretty useless at this point.  Most people couldn’t even reach him for a meeting.

Remember that mayor’s house offered as a reward for the city reaching a population of 2,000?  It’s finally been built.  Far away from the noise and danger of the city, in the middle of a small forest of specially planted trees surrounding a man-made moat.  The mayor also commanded the construction of a hydroelectric dam specially for his use so that he doesn’t have to rely upon Hell’s unreliable power grid.

The mayor’s house in SimCity 2000 is useful for finding out how popular the mayor is.  Which isn’t terribly useful.  The mayor, having absented himself from the filthy smog-ridden city, delegates most of the everyday decisionmaking authority to a group of city planners answerable only to him.  He spends most of his day in his mansion’s giant game room and in a massive hot tub like the one in Scarface, and of course he’s drunk as often as he can help it.

Rumor has it that he’s started doing blow too.

One of the decrees the mayor issued from his new retreat, shortly after Hell was named the state capital, was that no new spending should take place that wasn’t already budgeted for until the city could pay off the principal on its bonds and rid itself of debt completely.  Honestly not a bad idea, but for the fact that the city really needs another hospital, seeing how the sole hospital in Hell gets an F.  Still, one shitty hospital is better than no hospitals, right?

Of course, the mayor was sure to get his man-made moat-lake and forest and personal power plant built before issuing this decree.

Hell Tech, where the children of Hell learn to become efficient worker bees, is overcrowded too.  But it’s not too badly overcrowded.  Only 38 students in are forced to sit on the floor and have class in the hall instead of in a classroom.  And enough of the students are in detention (or in juvenile hall) enough of the time that there isn’t a real overcrowding problem anyway.

After seven years of austerity and an overcrowded hospital and school and too few police stations, the city finally saves enough to pay off its first bond.  This only leaves the second one to deal with, reducing the city’s bond-related expenses and driving up revenue.  Even though each bond has to be paid off in full, you can pay off each one separately, so once you have $10,000 in the bank and no impending necessary expenses like an almost-dead power plant, it’s not a bad idea to get rid of that debt.

As Hell marches towards freedom from its bond payments, we can see that the new coal power plant is nowhere near dying.  It and its predecessor have been spewing out deadly coal dust or soot or something from their smokestacks for 69 years straight.  That’s something to be proud of.  It is running almost at capacity, though, so once growth starts again, we’ll have to find a new energy solution.  Or just keep building more hydroelectric dams, because they’re now powering more of the city than the coal plant.  (Hydroelectric dams also don’t fail every 50 years – they last forever without further maintenance payments.)

Now that Hell is freeing more of its revenue for future spending, let’s look at what we’ve already done.  The four buttons near the bottom of the toolbar are useful in this regard.  The button on the bottom right of this section shows how the city is zoned without any of the pesky buildings in the way.  Proper zoning is important – you can’t just throw a zone wherever and expect it to get developed.  Zones will only develop within three tiles of a road.  Industrial zones should generally be placed away from residential (although we decided not to be so careful in this case) and commercial zones should be interspersed throughout the city to make the industrial and residential zones more active – basically so people have places to go to get lunch or shop for clothes or to watch sex movies in an adult theater.

Notice that while the churches are built in residential zones, they’re not officially part of those zones.  I think there was a cheat in the DOS version of the game that caused a lot of churches to be built all at once, if you typed in a swear word.

The top left button in the group does more or less the same thing, showing zones, along with the specialty buildings, this time in orange.  I never used this mode as a kid, and I don’t use it now.

This button on the bottom left removes the roads, power lines and trees from the map.  As far as I can tell, this mode is only really useful when you’re trying to place water mains under roads and want to see what you’re doing.

Finally, the bottom right button makes all the signs on the map invisible.  Signs can be intrusive, so this is a useful tool.  We haven’t created any signs yet, but let’s try making one with the SIGN button in the middle of the toolbar.

Just type the text in, and…

… now we know that someone in this apartment complex likes balls.

To remove the sign, click on it with the sign tool again and delete the text.

There’s also the help button.  It brings up the game’s help file index and screws up the graphics.  I’m not sure if it’s the game’s fault or just the fact that I’m playing on VirtualBox.

As the city continues to work towards paying off its bonds, another wave of tornadoes descends upon it.  The first twister destroys the exact same factory that was knocked over in the tornado wave 12 years earlier, but misses every other building in the city.  This property must be cursed.

A second tornado touches down to the southwest, well away from the city.  However, it comes dangerously close to the mayor’s residence on its way south.  The passed out mayor has to be carried to the basement by his staff while the tornado passes.

Once again, the writers at the Courier decide to make up a story about the tornado causing millions of dollars in damage, even though it didn’t do much of anything aside from vaguely threaten the mayor’s mansion.  The Courier is mostly used as bird cage lining by Hell’s residents now, so nobody notices.

After tornado season passes, business continues as usual in Hell.  Out of nowhere, the ordinance advisor demands that the mayor fund an anti-drug campaign to help Hell’s children.  A staffer advises her that the mayor isn’t available (meaning he’s sleeping off a hangover) but that he’s pretty sure the mayor doesn’t care enough to approve funding.  Go away, ordinance advisor.  Unless you have ideas about saving money.

Even though the city’s bonds have been almost paid off, life isn’t getting any better for most of Hell’s citizens.  In fact, the austerity program that the mayor put in place is probably making life worse.  Will Mayor Scarface loosen his grip on the city before the citizens have finally had enough and riot?  Will he be deposed?  Will he perhaps go out in a blaze of glory firing a huge machine gun at his enemies who are trying to invade his mansion, a giant white mountain of cocaine in the background?  Or will Heaven make its will known by sending another tornado, this time directed straight towards his house?  Only time will tell.

SimCity 2000, Part II: Debt and drought

The mayor awoke in his dingy hotel room/apartment.  He cleaned up, put on a cheap suit and walked down the street to his rat- and roach-infested office in the commercial district three blocks away.  He went to his office and sat down in front of his giant secondhand oak desk covered in scratches and coffee cup rings.

He saw a sticky note stuck to the top of his desk.

Mayor – the city has $1 left in the treasury.  The residents are also threatening to riot if we don’t build a functioning water and sewage system.

One dollar left?

One dollar.

The mayor also just realized that he had not, in fact, installed any water pumps or water mains and that for three years, nobody in the city had had access to running water.  Presumably they all bought bottled water to cook and wash with, like he did.

However, since there was only one dollar left in the treasury, the mayor figured that he wouldn’t be able to build any water pumps or mains anyway.  So he sat down behind his desk, pulled a bottle of whiskey out of a desk drawer, and decided to wait a year and see how the building already planned would develop.  Maybe the new growth would bring in more taxpayers and the city would be able to start digging itself out of its hole.

While our mayor gets drunk on cheap bourbon in his office, we learn that Boston has installed subways.  This is the game’s way of letting you know that new technologies are available, and that other cities have them, and that you don’t.  And that you can’t afford to build them because you only have one fucking dollar in the treasury.

This also happened.  Judge Stevens is definitely going to get in trouble for commenting on pending legislation.  Also, that sandwich sounds appetizing, doesn’t it.

A year passes.  Despite the new growth in Hell, the city is still losing money and is now in the red.  There must be some way to cut costs, right?

There is!  Impose a sales and income tax on residents and businesses in the ordinances section and cut police and fire department funding in half.  Crime will rise, but that’s a risk we’ll have to take.

We don’t need more police stations.  The citizens can just buy guns and take the law into their own hands.  That’s the American way, god damn it.

So now we have $47 of cashflow per year.  That’s not great, but at this rate at least we’ll be out of the hole in three years, and hopefully more citizens will move to Hell and add to the population base.  Is there any other spending we can cut?  We don’t spend anything on health or education, so we can’t cut spending there.  What about transit, though?  Do they really need all eight of those dollars?

Apparently they do.

Raising property tax is also an option, but we’ll hold off on that for now – higher tax rates mean lower growth rates.

One year later… the plan is working!  Now we have a hundred dollars of cashflow projected for next year.  Soon we’ll be rolling in it.

Another year passes, and-

Next year’s projected cashflow is now… $-41.

Someone in the city’s accounting office is going to get fired, I swear to God.

The downturn in the city’s fortunes might have to do with the fact that the industrial and commercial sections of Hell now look like this:

Maybe some drug deals are going down in those abandoned buildings, but that’s about all the business that’s being done.  (Actually, there are definitely more drug deals going on since we cut police funding by 50%.)

What we have to do now is place more residential zones to bring in more citizens and drive demand for commercial and industrial zones back up.  However, we can’t do that with negative 28 dollars in the treasury.  Money has to be raised.  Jacking up property taxes won’t help – it will only drive demand for residential zones down and reduce the population, leading to lower tax revenue.  Totally defunding police and fire services is also an option, but that will only give us a trickle of money coming in every year – and then we run the risk of fires and riots breaking out.

We truly have no choice now – we’ll have to take out another bond.

The interest rate is only 4%.  This could be a lot worse.  Now, instead of interest payments on one loan, we’ll be make interest payments on two loans.  But the only alternative is stagnation.

I swear that I didn’t plan this out – but it does seem appropriate that the amount we’ll owe at the end of the year on our loans is $666.

Now that we’ve issued our second bond and owe an assload of money every year, we have to act quickly.  Zone the shit out of this desert crater with heavy residential.  Build tenements with no running water and broken air conditioning units and no fire escapes.  We don’t care as long as people move in, start paying taxes, and get jobs at our currently empty, run-down factories.

You might have noticed the little blue things to the left of the police station.  Those are water pumps.  They cost $100 each and draw water to supply to the surrounding buildings.  They can also be attached to pipes that you can build to supply all parts of your city with water.  Our mayor finally decided to spend some money on running water – not necessarily because he’s concerned about the citizens but because he knows that running water means a higher population density and more tax revenue.  Remember – it’s all about the $$$.

As the water system map shows, the newly powered water pumps are supplying… nothing at all.  This may be due to the fact that Hell is in the middle of a desert.

Also, we’ve spent over a quarter of our second bond proceeds and we’re still losing money every year.  The new residential zoning has spurred rebuilding in the industrial sector – but will it be enough to save the city’s finances?  Probably not.

Meanwhile, the mayor is still drunk off his ass, sleeping on the floor behind his desk.  His staffers pretend not to notice as they answer angry letters and phone calls from citizens who are forced to bathe by rubbing their hair with soap and pouring bottles of water over their heads.

SimCity 2000, Part I: Welcome to Hell

For years, SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite games.  This city-building simulation was one of those games I grew up with – along with Civilization, Age of Empires, the original Mario and Sonic titles, the Thief series, etc.  So I thought, for a little while when I have bits of free time, that I’d return to the past, to a time when I didn’t have to worry about making god damn student loan and car payments.  You can now download SimCity 2000 from the games section of archive.org (god bless those people) or get it for a very low price at GOG, but I didn’t have to do either – I installed an old copy I still own of SimCity 2000 on CD onto an old copy of Windows 98 on VirtualBox.

lol only 90s kids will remember flying toasters

Instead of playing a reasonable game of SimCity, though, I’ve decided to make things hard for myself.  Our future is full of uncertainty – especially in this January of the year of our Lord 2017 – and I swear to God the people living in my SimCity will feel exactly the same sense of uncertainty.  They may also feel a profound sense of fear, division and mutual hatred.  Because they’re going to live in possibly the worst city ever devised.  We’re going to try to make the worst city possible, in fact, that will still attract citizens and remain in the black financially.  This is probably going to turn out part SimCity 2000 screenshot LP, part tutorial, part… whatever else I feel like throwing in, and it will run for as long as the game is interesting, or until the entire city burns down.

Here’s the starting screen, in which we can edit a map before we start building our city.  This randomly generated map looks great – a river and a nice flat plot of land to build on.

We’re not building a place where anyone in their right mind would want to live, though.  Let’s take out that river and move the tree and water sliders (the blue and green ones at the top left on the bar) down to zero.

That’s better!  Damn.  Who wouldn’t want to drop everything and move here right away?

Time for perhaps the two most important decisions in a SimCity’s lifespan: when to begin building and how much money to start with.  And the name, though that can be changed later on by changing the city’s filename in the game folder.

Let’s start in 1900.  This guarantees that we will have as little technology as possible to use to our citizens’ benefit.  And playing Hard Mode goes without saying.  No Easy Mode for us.  Note that, like in Medium Mode, we’ll be starting with $10,000, but unlike in Medium Mode those ten thousand dollars will be borrowed dollars.  Meaning we’ll have to pay them back at some point, plus interest.

As for the city’s name…

Seems appropriate.

Upon starting the game, we find that our nonexistent city already has its own newspaper.  Amazing!

According to the Hell Courier, Hell already has citizens and traffic problems.  Even though Hell’s population is currently 0 and there are no roads or even structures of any kind built yet.

Since the writers of the only newspaper in town (?) are clearly insane, let’s put the paper away and find a place to build.  We’re looking for someplace flat.  Building on hills and mountains is difficult, expensive, and a pain in the ass.

Let’s pick this nice valley in the center of the map.  What better place to build a thriving metropolis than in a crater in the middle of a desert.

Before we start building, though, it would be a good idea to check on our finances.  We only have a $10,000 bond, after all, and we also have annual payments to make on it.  Since the interest rate is 3%, we’re on the hook for $300 a year.  Keep in mind that that $300 is merely the interest – it doesn’t count towards the principal, which in SimCity 2000 has to be paid off all at once.  So we’ll be making these interest payments for a while.

At the side of each line in the city budget, we can ask our advisors for their opinions.

You dipshit.

The bond advisor tells us to raise taxes (in the property tab at the top.)  That could work… if we had any taxpayers yet, which we don’t.  We’ll quickly learn that at least half of our advisors are morons and that the other half are assholes.  That’s politics for you, though.

On the other hand, here’s some good news!

Okay, time to start doing something with that $10,000 bond.  If we just sit on it, we’ll lose money with no progress to show for it.  The first step is to select a power plant.  If we’d founded Hell at a later date, we would have a lot more options in this window, but in 1900 the only choices available are coal, hydroelectric, and oil power.

Oil power can be thrown out right off the bat.  It’s too expensive relative to the amount of power it provides, its only benefit being that it’s “marginally cleaner” than coal power.  That leaves the only other alternative hydroelectric power.  You might be thinking that it costs just as much as coal power megawatt for megawatt, and you’d be right – if Hell had any waterfalls to build dams on (or any water at all on its surface, which it doesn’t.)  As it is, each $400 dam will have to be built on a manmade waterfall, which costs $100 each to place.  Still a better deal than the oil power plant, but not by much.  The dams are also clean, but honestly – we don’t give a damn about having clean power in Hell, do we?  So let’s go with coal power.

The citizens can complain about the pollution, and they will.  But they’ll still come to Hell all the same.

The plant is built!  It will have to be replaced in fifty years, but that’s a long way off.  And if we don’t have enough money in fifty years to spend $4,000 on a replacement plant, we’ll have failed either way.  We can always squeeze our population for taxes for a few years to cover the cost if necessary – once we have a population, anyway.

Our first task is to place industrial (yellow) zones, where Hell’s citizens will work, and residential (green) zones, where they’ll go to sleep and probably to drink and fight in the streets as well.  People usually advise placing these two types of zones far apart because of the heavy pollution that industrial zones produce.  But since we’re building Hell, we don’t care about that.  People will still move in, trust me.

Finally, a few commercial (supposedly blue, but really looks more like purple) zones, where our people can buy their cheap goods made in Asian sweatshops and their horrible processed foodstuffs and instant ramen cups, because that’s all anyone is selling in Hell.

The people are moving in!  There aren’t quite enough of them to make up the gap in the budget caused by the annual interest payments, but we’re getting there.  Once we’re making money, we’ll be on the road to success.

The Hell Courier, two years after its city’s founding, proudly trumpets “Hell Awakens!!” when the city’s population hits 2,000 and when I get a free mansion to build thanks to my grateful population.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to spend a lot more money before we can make it.  We’re exclusively placing dense zones (which support a whole lot more citizens per tile but are also more expensive than light zones.)   We’ve also had to build a police station and a fire station, which cost a lot of money and also require an annual payment to maintain.  This is a hard price to pay at the moment, but going without police or fire services means that in the event of an emergency, we’ll only be able to call up the national guard.  And they’re not very good at quelling riots or stomping out fires.  Unless we want to see our city pillaged by angry citizens (likely, under the circumstances) or burned to the ground, we need to drop $$$ on these essential services.

You know what we don’t need to drop money on, though?  Hospitals and schools.  Our citizens don’t need good health or education to work in dollar stores or toil in factories.

Maybe it’s not quite time to build our complimentary mayor’s mansion just yet.  We don’t want the masses overtaking his house and killing him in his sleep over his horrible mismanagement that easily.

A quick glance at the 1903 budget sheet also reveals that we’re about to run out of money.  Fortunately, the mayor has a plan prepared just in case things really go badly. It involves getting into his ’83 Trans Am and driving out of town at midnight.

Maybe a few city ordinances can help us close the budget gap.  What does the ordinance advisor suggest?

Are they now?  Let’s see what that will cost.

 The people can go to… well, they’re already there.  In any case, no to pollution controls.  I’m trying to save money for God’s sake.

These two should help a bit.  If we legalize gambling, we can open casinos, get the gamblers drunk on cheap drinks, and then give them parking fines the next day for improperly parking overnight after they pass out.  In all, this excellent plan only generates $15 a year, but that’s fifteen dollars closer to paying off the city’s debt.

Time will tell whether Hell has to take out more debt to survive, or whether it will be able to stand on its own feet soon.  For now, though, the mayor retires to his improvised apartment in an old Motel 6 (since we haven’t built the Mayor’s House gift for reaching 2,000 people yet.)

Anime for people who hate anime: Kaiji

Time to scare off most of the people who came to this blog looking for travel posts! Yes, I am an extremely depressing nerd. Sorry, everyone. Anyway, this group of posts is going to cover anime series that I’ve enjoyed and that you can also enjoy without feeling embarrassed or hating yourself – I don’t care who you are.

It’s true that watching anime has a kind of stigma attached to it. Most of my friends don’t know I watch any anime at all – they think it’s all either cutesy stuff for little girls, unlimited perversity, or glowy superhuman guys throwing energy balls at each other. And a lot of it is. But some of it isn’t! Animation is just a medium, after all: the creator can fill that medium with whatever he wishes, and some have filled it with interesting characters and compelling stories.

As a side note, I’m not going to stop writing travel posts, so if you come here just for that then, you know, please don’t unbookmark me or anything. This isn’t going to become an anime review site, either – I know people with way more knowledge about this stuff than I have, so if you’re looking for “a series like _____ but with more mechs” I’m not the one to ask about that. Thanks!

Anyway, on to the subject of this post:

Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji

Kaiji is the story of the title character, a young man without much in the way of motivation or marketable skills who is up to his eyeballs in debt because of bad decisions. As he mulls over his fate, he’s invited to join a mysterious event by a mob-connected loan shark. This just happens to be a gambling event taking place on a totally isolated cruise ship against other debtors. Said loan shark tells Kaiji that if he only joins this game, he’ll have a shot at clearing his debts if he’s among the winners. If he loses… well, let’s not think about what might happen if he loses. Despite his misgivings, Kaiji takes up the offer and shows up at the dock where the ship is about to depart. What Kaiji doesn’t realize is that he’s about to enter a world of insane gambles and deception where he have to will risk his health and even his life.

A little background on this series: Kaiji was created by Nobuyuki Fukumoto (aka FKMT), a Japanese comic artist and writer famous for his gambling comic series. But Fukumoto’s works aren’t just about gambling: they’re really about power, skill and the meaning of life. Kaiji’s real search throughout the series is for a sense of purpose. A lot of the gambles he’s forced to take part in to clear his debts involve defeating someone else and destroying his chances to succeed for Kaiji to succeed himself. Despite this, Kaiji always manages to maintain his humanity and does his best to help his fellow debtors, even when the people running the gambles (a large, extremely shady corporation called Teiai) impose rules that seem to demand the winners sacrifice the losers.

Kaiji might look depressing, and it is. It really is.

But Kaiji is also uplifting. Under normal circumstances, Kaiji is a loser who can’t achieve much of anything at all. But when he’s pushed to his limits and exposed to great danger, he seems to unlock a hidden genius within himself that allows him to escape, to survive and to succeed where others have failed. Kaiji will have to rely on this ability, one that he doesn’t even seem to realize he possesses, to defeat his creditors. Kaiji is all about building up tension to the point where you can’t believe he’ll be able to get out of his predicament, before he finds a way – an extreme and unpredictable way – to come out on top.

Throughout the series, Kaiji runs into other characters, some allied to his cause and others standing against his efforts. A lot of these characters have their own interesting backstories. The “bad guys” have their own clear motivations that usually aren’t any worse than Kaiji’s. They’re simply looking out for their own interests, which happen to run directly counter to his. Even the head of Teiai, an old billionaire, is a little sympathetic despite being without a doubt the most black-and-white evil character on the show, because he’s also clearly fucking crazy.

If I ever get old and rich, I’m going to drink extremely expensive wine out of a bowl like a dog.

So hey! If the above image didn’t convince you to go and watch Kaiji right now, I don’t know what will. The series is currently two seasons in, and the comic is much further along, though Fukumoto hasn’t finished the story. Even so, the end of the second season does have a sense of finality to it, so don’t be afraid to dive in right away. As far as I know, Kaiji hasn’t been licensed in the States so you can easily find scanned/fan-translated version of the comic and torrents and Youtube links with subtitles of the anime series. Kaiji is well worth watching if you enjoy stories about gambling. It’s also worth watching if you just enjoy good, compelling stories with a lot of truly effective suspense to them.

It also features the most detailed beer can in animation history.