Justyna Dorsz – Page 22

Scott is back

Scott Siskind is writing again. You might not know who that is. Until today I didn’t know that name either.

Scott used to write a very popular blog about psychiatry and science called Slate Star Codex, and he wrote it under the pseudonym Scott Alexander. New York Times planned to write an article about him and was adamant to use his real name despite his protests. So he deleted his blog in an attempt to protect his privacy.

It didn’t work. Many people supported him, but trolls and haters posted his real name everywhere. Some called the clinic where he worked, trying to get him fired. He didn’t want to cause them any more problems, so he quit.

Now Scott’s back. You can read his new posts. Or read his old posts here. Scott himself prepared the list of his popular posts.

I recommend “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup” and “Nobody is perfect, everything is commensurable”.

Unique beliefs

I’ve been reading “Oversubscribed” by Daniel Priestley. You should read it too. It’s full of insights that will make you consider your goals and how you approach your work.

I will write more about it when I finish it, but here’s one question that was asked at the beginning of the book:

What are your strongly held beliefs about what you do?

I have some strongly held beliefs but I want to do more research before I write about some of them. One of my beliefs, though, that I often write and talk about, is that you need to be good at a few different things so that you can earn money in various ways.

You should never be dependent on just a single income source. It’s particularly important for those who have regular jobs. So many people consider being employed a sign of stability — it’s anything but that. People who are employed are most vulnerable to factors that they can’t influence at all. Nearly all my friends that had jobs were at one time or another fired or disappointed with money or their bosses or other demands of their contracts. And yet, they could do nothing.

With the pandemic, it’s even more visible. I read an article today about airports firing hundreds of employees. And what will most of those people do? They will look for another job where they will be as vulnerable as they were now. It’s not even their fault. We were all conditioned at school to want to be employed.

The only option is to break the pattern. Don’t get comfortable. Have side business. Find ways to monetize your hobby. Look for opportunities.

Steam – 2020 Year in Review

Steam shared their 2020 data, and it’s interesting.

The first thing to note is that each month there were 2.6 million new people who bought their first game on Steam. In 2018 it was just 1.6 million. That’s very good news for indie developers like my brother and me.

As soon as we released our first game, someone pirated it and made it available to download for free as a torrent. Anyone could play it without paying for it. And yet our sales are increasing because more people are joining Steam and buying games legally.

50.7% more hours played compared to 2019 — not surprising. People had to stay home due to the pandemic, they got bored, they played games. However, they not only played freely available games like Fortnite. They actually bought 21.4% more games.

I thought people would be buying games less and less. Not only are there so many free-to-play games, but you don’t even have to buy all the games that you want to play because Epic gives away a free game every week. It looks like it didn’t hurt the market after all.

You can read the whole Steam year review here.

Dog sitting

I spent the day dog sitting 🙂

Morning Pages

In the last week of 2020, I bought a notebook and decided I was going to write morning pages, starting from January 1st, 2021.

If you don’t know what morning pages are, Julia Cameron, the author of “The Artist’s Way”, says it this way:

the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness

You can read a longer explanation on Julia’s website.

A lot of people recommend doing morning pages: Tim Ferriss talks about it sometimes, Austin Kleon wrote about it too:

You might think you know what you’re thinking, but seeing your thoughts down on the page tells you what’s really going on inside your head.

I have tried to make it a habit a few times already, but I never stuck with it for longer than two weeks. This time I bought a notebook specifically for writing them. I wrote morning pages on January 5th, 2021, and then the notebook got buried under all my other notes, and I forgot about it. I unearthed it yesterday and wrote in it again. This time I am determined to stick to it.

There’s one thing that makes building habits easier — public commitment. I’ve decided to write morning pages every day, and I am announcing it here publicly. So you, Dear Reader, have now become my accountability partner.

Another thing that Julia says:

Morning pages are nonnegotiable. Never skip or skimp on morning pages.

I like this attitude. Developing a habit is easier when you convince yourself that there’s no possible way to get around it.

Space Botanica

You’ve probably heard that you should choose a niche for your store and that all your designs in that store should be thematically consistent. If you want to make designs with a completely different topic or style, then you should create a new store for them. When customers visit your store or see your logo, they should know what to expect.

When I was starting with designing t-shirts, I heard that too. I had a separate store for my designs with ducks — somehow that store never got popular. And another store with monsters, it didn’t get any traffic either. I also had a store named “Fox Shiver” that was supposed to be about little foxes in frozen lands. I didn’t know it was going to be as popular as it is, so I kept adding different designs to it — a lot of cats and space art. Now my store is a mess, and I might need to fix it one day. Or maybe I will leave it as is.

Here’s one of the designs that should not be in my store. It’s plants and space combined. When I made it, I only had a separate store for ducks and another one for monsters, but not a store for space designs. So I added it to my Fox Shiver store.

When you decided on a niche and know what you want to draw, then that’s good. You are probably a more organized person than a lot of artists and definitely more than me. If you can’t decide on a niche, don’t worry about it. You can add all your designs to one store, and after a while, you will see what’s popular or what you like to draw the most. You can always move some designs to another store if you want to. The important thing is to create.

Adventures in Crime Fighting

My blog is becoming monothematic lately. I’ve been spending much of my time dealing with people who steal my designs and sell them as their own, and so I mostly write about that.

Two days ago, I reported listings with my art to Amazon. They acted on it immediately and removed the listings. A few sellers then wrote to me asking to let them keep selling apparel with my design. Here are some quotes:

“let us sell this t-shirt till they are sold out as we have massive inventory in Amazon”
“this t-shirt is the best seller in our store”
“the new employee listed it”
“in the future send your designs to us”
“you know sometimes we can’t know if we have infringed other’s copyright”

People don’t realize that what they did is a criminal offense. But when more and more artists start suing them over copyright infringement, they will soon learn.

Unlearning

Schools should have taught us about a lot of things: law, managing money, doing taxes, budgeting, nutrition, negotiation, communication… the list goes on.

Worse even, schools not only didn’t teach us useful things, they taught us things that we now have to unlearn.

I remember when they asked us to choose our career path. We were fourteen years old. Fourteen! We had a so-called “career day” where we were given two-page descriptions of the most common professions: doctor, nurse, police officer, teacher, programmer. Guess if “writer” or “artist” were on the list.

There were possible income brackets and schools you needed to finish for each profession. And they asked you to choose one. This kind of narrow thinking and conforming to social pressures is one of the major things that everyone should unlearn. That’s a huge topic, and I will write more about it later.

But for now, there’s one other thing that school taught us wrong — writing. We were asked to write so many essays, and yet most of us can’t write a compelling article on any topic — and it’s not a surprise. We were judged on criteria such as length of work and the number of arguments that we presented. Adding adjectives — a bad practice — was an acceptable way of making your writings longer, and teachers encouraged it.

No wonder we can’t write concisely and clearly. Schools didn’t teach us that, they taught us the opposite. We have to unlearn what we know, and then learn to write well ourselves. That’s one of the reasons why I started this blog, and you should too. If you want to write better, you need to practice often, and starting a blog helps establish a habit of daily writing.

Artists and lawyers

I hired a law firm a month ago. I wrote about it here and here.

On Monday, I spent two hours at a notary public office authenticating another bunch of screenshots of websites where my design was sold illegally. It will be used in court.

I thought it was unusual to sue someone over the use of your art. Before I talked with a lawyer in December, I hadn’t even been sure if my art was protected by law. Now I am much more informed about my rights.

And it looks like other artists are too! This past month I talked with others and it turns out that some of them have attorneys too. There’s greater awareness among artists now. Some have considered hiring lawyers, but are afraid of costs, and I understand that. I was worried too, at first. But my lawyer is excellent, and thanks to her negotiation skills, some of the sellers have already paid the compensation, so my legal fees are completely covered.

I talk about it with any artist who wants to know because it’s my hope that more and more artists will consider protecting their art through legal means.

One thing that surprised me after I hired a lawyer and we contacted the illegal sellers and asked them to pay the compensation — is that so many of them think that they did nothing wrong. In their minds stealing art is not a crime, some claim that it’s barely a minor offense. I wonder what their possible defense will be in court.

It is payday

There’s an old, but awesome, game called Dungeon Keeper. Have you played it? There was also a sequel. You are an evil overlord of a dungeon and you have minions that do your bidding. You have to pay them though, so every once in a while the narrator would say “It is payday” and all the minions would go to your treasury and take most of your gold.

The voice that says “It is payday” stayed with me forever. Here, listen to it:

Voiceover by Richard Riding

So, I thought about it today because today is a payday of sorts.

You probably already know that Threadless is my favorite website to sell designs on. I write about them so much that soon you will think that my posts are sponsored. But I have to let you know about another good thing that comes from working with them. You see, they have partnerships with companies like Hot Topic and TK Maxx. Every now and then some of your designs might be selected and, with your permission, sold in Hot Topic and TK Maxx stores or on their websites.

You get paid every quarter, and today is payday.

Open your Threadless Artist Shop here 🙂

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