DVS Press

Health – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 5

rpmfidel January 18, 2020 January 17, 2020Non-fiction, Writing 1

Picking it up from yesterday with focus area number 3: 3. Health and Fitness Health, like finance, needs to be a priority on some level for every single person. Ignoring your health will have a massively negative impact on you and your creative output. First, you will be unable to do your work with maximal efficiency. If you are tired from lack of sleep, your focus will be shot and you won’t be able to write. If you ignore a problem like diabetes, you won’t be able to function mentally, and you may lose time to being physically ill. Likewise,…

Beauty in Art is the Reverence of God

rpmfidel January 17, 2020 January 17, 2020Analysis, Art, Education, Ethics, History, Non-fiction, Philosophy, politics, Writing 4

I’ll try to give my broadest, most robust theory behind beauty in art: Beauty in art is the iteration of God’s creation. Yes, this is Platonic. When a painter paints a portrait of a beautiful woman, he is iterating God’s creation directly. If he is painting a woman that is born of his own imagination, he is painting an iteration of the concept of female beauty, which is revealed through God’s creation. This extends to music. Beautiful music is a display of the perfect mathematics that underly God’s creation – an ordering of pitches over time according to mathematical relationships.…

Family – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 4

rpmfidel January 17, 2020 January 17, 2020Non-fiction, Writing 1

Family One of the most prolific composers of the Baroque period, Johann Sebastian Bach, had a total of 24 children across two marriages while being the music director at five churches at once. I bring this up because our society is full of messages that a fulfilling career and family are at odds with one another, when they aren’t. I’ve known musicians who tour extensively, all over the world, and who still have families. Active military personnel, who are often deployed for long stretches of time, still have families. If your own family is something you really want in your…

Money – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 3

rpmfidel January 17, 2020 January 17, 2020Non-fiction, Writing 0

Picking it up from yesterday: Let’s take a look at some of these life obligations and what they mean for somebody who has a desire for high creative output. 1. Money Personal finances, for most people, are something that can only be ignored at perilous risk. We live in a world where we cannot provide for all of our needs, so we must earn money to pay for most of what we consume. Even a stay-at-home parent has to carefully manage a budget to ensure the needs of the family are met, even if the duty of earning the income…

Obligations and Focus – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 2

rpmfidel January 15, 2020 January 17, 2020Non-fiction, Writing 1

Picking it up from yesterday: Obligations and Focus When it comes to ordering your priorities for creative output, or even just life in general, I find it helpful to consider what things are obligatory, or unavoidable if you want to maintain your health, sanity, happiness, and integrity. These obligations will change according to where you are in life. For most people they break down into: Money Family Health Creativity and Purposeful activities Leisure and Hobbies Social time Life/household Maintenance You can’t really avoid any of these totally. You have to have money to live. You have to take out the…

The Attention Economy and Alternative Publishing

rpmfidel January 15, 2020 January 15, 2020Non-fiction, politics, Writing 0

Great thread here to spark this article: I sell my books a variety of ways – Amazon, all other alternative direct sales, and through patronage on subscribestar. The problem with building alternative platforms or alternative methods of artist support is not, and has never been, the difficulty of actually programming or organizing such a venture. The problem has always been attention. Building alternatives to Amazon to sell your books is largely putting the cart before the horse. In fact, it is more like building a cart while the horse is still being trained in Arabia. Also, there are dozens of…

Setting a trap for bike thieves

rpmfidel January 14, 2020 January 14, 2020Non-fiction, Philosophy, politics, Uncategorized 0

Is this wrong? https://ktla.com/2020/01/09/2-men-accused-of-luring-thieves-with-unattended-bikes-then-beating-them-with-baseball-bats-and-posting-attacks-on-youtube/amp/?__twitter_impression=true Serious question – this is basically what the police due with “sting operations” and “honeypots,” so how is it different when it is done by private individuals? If you have a right to protect your property with force, does that right extend to defending it when you have set up the violation of your property rights as a temptation to wrongdoers? It seems to be this crime is operating in the nebulous world of “intents” – those favorite devices of the slave morality. Had these people just left a bike in front of their house (which…

All it Takes is One Complaint

rpmfidel January 14, 2020 January 14, 2020Non-fiction, Philosophy, politics 2

Apparently, for Mailchimp to cancel your account. I’ve used Mailchimp for years, and stuck with them through the degradation of their interface, to the point where the site is barely usable, but that’s probably going to have to change now. It’s not that the complaint was libelous; it is – Stefan is an anarchist, not a “nationalist” or a “white nationalist” (something which is a contradiction in terms). It’s that the company will cancel your account immediately after a single false accusation of wrongthink. This response was so quick and the accusation so ridiculous that it makes me think that…

Align Your Priorities for Creative Output

rpmfidel January 14, 2020 January 14, 2020Non-fiction, Writing 1

Life is full of demands. Life is full of obligations. Life is full of temptations. Life is often too full of things that each of us wishes to do, and the time during the day is too short to get it all done. The speed of modern life doesn’t help, and it is all too easy to find oneself caught up in the cacophony of urban activity and feel completely drained every day. This is the reality of limited time and unlimited wants. When it comes to figuring out how all of it goes together, I have found that priorities…

10 Ways to Make Your Protagonist Likable

rpmfidel January 13, 2020 January 14, 2020Non-fiction, Writing 0

I’ve cautioned in the past regarding making a protagonist in a story a “Mary Sue” type of character. In short, you don’t want to make a character that lives out your own power fantasies and to whom the plot offers little resistance to the character’s overwhelming power. It’s good to avoid characters like this, but sometimes writers tend to go too far in the opposite direction, creating wimpy, base, or unlikeable characters that the audience doesn’t really care about. In order to avoid having a character feel too super-powered, they instead make them weak or detestable. This is not wise;…