For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a rather ambitious project. Ambition is often misunderstood, but the way I choose to approach it, it’s about doing something “just because”. It was in this “fuck it” framework that Book Worming Party, my latest programming project came to being.
Book Worming Party – even the name should tell you how mad this project is – combines three of my interests: literature, visuality, and programming. What can I say, I’m a talented man (and above all, modest).
Book Worming Party is a program (written mostly in JavaScript) that takes a work of fiction and, based on calculations and interpretations it makes about its nature, turns it into semi-random visual art. It translates words into color, plot into shapes, genre into affect. There are no separate “kinds of art”; art is art.
This is a bit special, unusual post, squeezed in-between the regular flow of Home for Fiction posts. It’s basically an email reply I sent to a Narrative Nods user in regard to my response to a review.
This surely sounds a bit complicated (and perhaps the headline a bit overwhelming), so here’s a very brief background.
Some time ago, I decided to stop working on offering updates for Narrative Nods – for reasons you’ll see below. I also don’t feel motivated to work on the rest of my apps. This became apparent to users after I left the following response to a review on Google Play:
[…]Frankly, I think you might be quite right. This app is rather pointless, certainly not as engaging as a fruit tapping game or a selfie camera app. I’m considering removing it from the Store or, at the very least, never bother with it ever again. There’s more important things out there. Cheers!
This was understandably misinterpreted as sarcastic, so I had to offer another response:
Thanks for the support, but you might’ve (understandably) misunderstood me. I wasn’t being sarcastic in that response. I actually believed—still do—that the app isn’t as useful as I’d initially thought. Its main flaw is that it needs users to put in the work, and not everyone is mature enough for that (that’s what the ‘fruit tapping’ part implied).
This, again inevitably, was misunderstood further. Google Play allows only 350 characters in a given review – or “review” – or response, which makes it impossible to properly express what’s going on. A user emailed me and asked me not to be hostile and feel hurt by negative feedback.
Today’s post is a chance for me to extend my response to a more general audience. The purpose is for other users of my Android apps to have a proper explanation about the situation, as well as for others to catch a glimpse of the dynamics involved. Great teaching material regarding digital misunderstanding, among other things.
“Nothing is more important than cats. And even they are not very important” Old Chinese proverb (sort of)(more…)
Time flies like an arrow (fruit flies like a banana). It was exactly two years ago when the first post of the Home for Fiction blog appeared. A lot has happened since. The blog itself has grown a lot in terms of readership, and I’ve made apps, I’ve written books, and I’ve even composed music – I certainly didn’t expect that when I began this journey.
Ultimately, however, I’m definitely not the kind of person who focuses on numbers. I’m a fiction writer, after all, and writing fiction is not about accurate figures, but about abstract beauty.
And so, to put it bluntly, I write and code what I feel like, and I simply do not care about audience receptionAren’t you disgusted when you see creators - writers, coders, painters - begging their audience? Few things are more pathetic than degrading yourself for audience reception (be it in terms of attention or money), and that’s especially the case when dealing with audiences plagued by unfathomable stupidity. I have basically stopped responding to so-called reviews left for my Android apps, because I’m exhausted by dealing with people complaining that… the app is coded in English, not their native language..
Presently, I feel like blogging and coding. However, both the blog and the Android apps might disappear one day, if I feel they no longer serve their creative purpose.
We can’t discover new oceans if we don’t have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” — André Gide.(more…)
