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Oct. 5th, 2019 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. So I posted this article to scans daily (DW's comic book fan site) to see how fellow comic book fans viewed it.
Comic Books Incorporated -- Interview with author and media studies professor Shawna Kidman
The two excerpts that struck me as interesting about the article and I posted are:
Part of your personal narrative has been a shift from working in the comics industry to becoming a media scholar. How did your earlier experiences inform the approach you took in this book?
Yes, my first encounter with comic books was as a worker, not as an academic, and not as a fan. Part of why DC Comics hired me was actually because I didn’t fit the profile of most of their job applicants; I wasn’t steeped in comic book culture and I didn’t have a typical fanboy/fangirl perspective. But I did have a media background—I’d had jobs in film development and film financing during and after college. That helped me to understand the Hollywood folk the company was interacting with, and that’s really what DC needed around 2005 when it was trying to improve its west coast presence. During the few years I was there, first as an assistant and later as a creative executive, I got a crash course in comics and read a ton. I spent a lot of time with editors, met a lot of writers and artists—it was amazing. But I learned more about the business side, since that was what got me the most excited.
I think this separates me from a lot of scholars in this space, who are drawn to comic books because they love the medium. It was the dynamism of the industry that I loved. The maneuverings and politics were endlessly fascinating, because they seemed like a little window into the heart of Hollywood: small subsidiary vs. major conglomerate, creators vs. executives, original stories vs. pre-sold content, and the never-ending effort to milk the life out of every single product, whether or not it was popular. I was also a history geek, so I read everything that Les Daniels wrote, and the Gerard Jones’ book, and anything else I could get my hands on. But all of those guys, even though they told great stories, largely ignored the business. And because I was witnessing it first hand, seeing how the decisions were getting made behind closed doors, I knew there was more to it—that part of the story they were telling must have gotten lost. That nagging feeling stuck with me. But I didn’t have the language or conceptual background to articulate what the story was, or how it fit in to the big picture.
That’s when I decided to go to grad school for Media Studies, which basically meant “film and television”. Still, I thought about comic books every day. Everything I had learned while working was so relevant and seemed to give me this unique insight into art, and history, and Hollywood. That notion, that I had something to say because I had been a worker, and that industry dynamics matter in the creation of culture, pushed me towards Industry Studies as a subfield. I learned everything I could about regulation, distribution, and intellectual property. And slowly, with this new vocabulary, I was able to start giving context to my work experiences, and put it together in a coherent narrative. Of course, it took about a decade more of research to actually get there.
And...
You discuss comics fans as “privileged,” which would seem to be the exact opposite of John Tulloch’s concept of television fans as a “powerless elite.” In what sense are comics fans privileged and how is their influence felt within the comics industry?
Yes, this is definitely true. I believe that comic book fans are privileged in many ways, so much so that I don’t really consider them to be a subculture at all. I’ll stick to just two points though, which I think most directly address Tulloch’s argument. First, comic book fans are very well represented in the film and television industry, disproportionately so. Comic book publishers estimate the comic-book-reading audience in the US at two million people, or less than 1% of the population. Now if you spend any time in Hollywood, you quickly realize that way more than 1% of the people are reading comic books. Sure, some of them are just looking for source material, and some of them may be overstating their reading habits, but even so, it’s an extremely well-regarded medium within that creative community. This is even more true when you look at the upper echelons of the entertainment business. A huge portion of the guys who have been dominating Hollywood for the last thirty years are lifelong comic book fans. Now this may be for good reason—comic book reading could theoretically improve creative thinking and thus statistically increase the likelihood of someone ending up with a career in media. Regardless, I think you would be incredibly hard pressed to argue that comic book fans are a population that lack access to cultural production or decision making.
Second, even comic book fans who are just fans—who have no role in the media business and don’t desire any—get a kind of preferential treatment in Hollywood that is, again, disproportionate with the community’s actual size. By this, I mean that media gatekeepers typically take the opinions of comic book fans more seriously than they do those of other interest groups or cultural communities. There are many reasons for this. For starters, comic book fans often fall into what some consider the “right” demographics—young, male, white, educated—so advertisers are willing to pay more for them. Many comic book fans have also been early adopters of technology. So a fan presence was established early on the web and remains highly visible. This is one of the reasons Hollywood flocked to San Diego Comic-Con in the early 2000s—they wanted online fan support (this has changed a bit in recent years, but that’s a discussion for another day).
Of course, comic book fans are not all-powerful and they are not one thing—this is a heterogeneous constituency that is sometimes heard, sometimes not. But if you identify as a comic book fan, you are generally far more likely to be catered to by mainstream media producers, and your criticisms are far more likely to be heard, than would be the case if, say, you identified as a hip-hop fan or a reader of romance novels. Relatively speaking, comic book fans are among the most powerful consumers of media out there. Which is part of why comic book adaptations are so incredibly prevalent across film, television, and gaming.
I'm curious to see how the actual comic fandom views this. I know how I did, not well.
Weirdly, the scans daily crowd sort of agrees with her. LOL! They may be more academically inclined than I am.
2. Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See
It also has an annoying habit of fixating on things. But that's not what the article is about.
Last week, Quanta reported on the filtering mechanisms that allow us to focus our attention on stimuli of interest — that let us tune out the music in a room to listen to a nearby conversation, or disregard greens, blues and yellows in a crowd when searching for a friend wearing red. That kind of processing, which involves the suppression of some sensory data to highlight signals that are more relevant, is directed by a goal.
But other processes operate well below this level of awareness, filtering out information that the brain deprioritizes without our willing it, or even knowing it. In these cases, our focus is directed not by a goal but rather by particular properties of the stimuli, like their brightness or motion — properties that we’re seemingly hard-wired to consider important. “It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective,” said Duje Tadin, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester. “If something is moving, it’s often fairly important to your survival.”
Scientists have long known that our sensory processing must automatically screen out extraneous inputs — otherwise, we couldn’t experience the world as we do. When we look at our surroundings, for instance, our perceived field of view holds steady or moves smoothly with our gaze. But the eye is also constantly making small movements, or saccades; our visual system has to subtract that background jitter from what we see.
3. I thought about posting this on FB, but as I've slowly discovered (because I'm rather dense) that FB is an impossible place to have a decent discussion on anything. (Except for daytime soap opera spoilers...it works rather well for that.)
Anyhow... this article was rather interesting, it's not about what you think.
Do People Who Live in this House have the Right to Be Struggling
"Though the family is a fiction, and the framing at MarketWatch was intended to maximize outrage, it’s not as if the situation portrayed doesn’t exist. Urban dwellers in several North American cities will have to make $350,000 to be able to afford to buy a three-bedroom home in a neighborhood that isn’t necessarily ritzy, particularly safe, or home to great schools. No amount of real anger at a fake budget will change the reality that housing prices in many places are so high that, yes, if you’re not making what seems to be an obscene amount of money, you can’t afford to live what has long been the definition of a middle-class existence.
The interesting thing is not that class resentment is so easily baited—it’s that the same viciousness that is rightly decried in the service of commenting on the spending habits of the poor or millennials are seen as righteous when directed at those who are considered rich. When an Australian real estate mogul no one had ever heard of told millennials to quit their avocado toast habit, he was rightfully pilloried. But when it comes to wealthier people, let’s hear everyone’s suggestions! Because caviar sandwiches.
Could our fictional family move to Muskegon, Michigan, instead of living in an expensive city? Sure. Maybe their companies will let them work remotely, or maybe they’ll get a lower-paying job in Muskegon, or, hell, invent cold fusion. But even if those imaginary undertakings come to (imaginarily) pass, it does not change the fact that this normal house, in Brooklyn, will still require about half a million dollars to live in, as will many, many other normal houses in America’s high-priced cities."
The solutions, on a policy level, aren’t so different from the general solutions to the problems plaguing affordable housing everywhere. The government should subsidize and encourage more housing for all families, and supplement what building there is with more usable transportation. What citizens should do is vote for those policies—not fall into the traps of hating your fellow citizens (or the imaginary versions thereof) who do, indeed, struggle. Our (manipulated) outrage is unempathetic, adding to the anger in the world while doing nothing to achieve a solution. Next time you see a story like this, remember that.
4. Why the Flu Shot Cannot Give You the Flu
5. Impeachment Battle to Turn for the First Time to President's ties to a foreign country
[Sorry the frustrated Political Science Major and Constitutional Lawyer in Me, can't look away...I'm following it with my fingers over my eyes, and an absurd curiosity that has a wee bit too much in common with my curiosity about horror movies]
WASHINGTON — Alexander Hamilton, as usual, got right to the heart of the matter. When the framers were designing the Constitution and its power of impeachment, one of the high crimes they had in mind was giving into what Hamilton called “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
For the authors of the country’s charter, there were few bigger threats than a president corruptly tied to forces from overseas. And so as the House opened an impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s interactions with Ukraine this past week, the debate quickly focused on one of the oldest issues in America’s democratic experiment.
The emerging battle over the future of Mr. Trump’s presidency will explore as never before the scope and limits of a commander in chief’s interactions with other countries. His adversaries echo the fears of the founders in accusing Mr. Trump of committing high crimes by pressuring Ukraine to dig up dirt on Democratic opponents while holding up American aid. Mr. Trump contends that impeaching him would infringe on the ability of future presidents to conduct foreign policy.
Unlike the impeachment battles involving Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, the debate over Mr. Trump turns on whether a president can solicit or accept help from abroad to advance his political fortunes and where lies the line between the national interest and personal interests.
Honestly, there's a reason "Hamilton" came out and was so successful just prior to the 2016 election.
5. 18th Century Quaker Dwarf who challenged slavery, meat eating, and racism
"One Sunday, 18th-century Quakers living in Abington, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, were met with a strange sight outside their morning meeting. The snow lay thick on the ground and there was Benjamin Lay, a member of the congregation, wearing little clothing, with his “right leg and foot uncovered,” almost knee-deep in the snow. When one Quaker after the next told him that he would get sick or that he should get inside and cover up, he turned to them. “Ah,” he said, “you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half-clad.”
Lay always cut a striking figure. An 1818 article, republished in the newspaper The Friend in 1911, many years after his death, described him thus:
… only four foot seven in height; his head was large in proportion to his body, the features of his face were remarkable … He was hunch-backed, with a projecting chest, below which his body become much contracted. His legs were so slender, as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him.
His act of protest in the snow is of the sort that might make the news today, but in the 1730s it would have been radical almost beyond understanding. This was a time, writes Marcus Rediker in his recent book The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, when “slavery seemed to many people around the world as natural and unchangeable as the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens.” Lay was an abolitionist, vegetarian, pacifist, gender-conscious, anti-capitalist, environmentalist Quaker, with dwarfism and a hunchback, and he wanted to change the apparently “natural” order of things.
Despite his ultra-radical leanings, Lay has been almost entirely excised from modern history books. “The wildness of his methods of approaching antislavery is part of it,” Rediker says. “He was extremely militant and completely uncompromising.” This level of abolitionist militance was unprecedented, and only began to become common after the 1830s. Lay sits outside of the standard narrative of the movement, and his disability and lower socioeconomic status make him difficult to place in a clear historical model. “He just didn’t fit the story,” Rediker says.
The snow protest was by no means Lay’s only performed, dramatic, nonviolent act of radicalism. Quaker neighbors of his kept a young “negro girl” as a slave, and continued to justify the practice, even in the face of his exhortations on both the evil of slavery in general and the “wickedness” of separating enslaved children from their parents. When the neighbors refused to listen, Lay invited their six-year-old son into the cave where he lived and innocently entertained him throughout the day. The boy’s parents panicked. The Village Record, a local newspaper, later described how Lay “observed the father and mother running towards his dwelling; as they drew near, discovering their distress, he advanced and met them, enquiring in a feeling manner: ‘What is the matter?’” The parents, understandably terrified, explained that the boy had been missing all day. Lay is said to have paused, and said: “Your child is safe in my house, and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negro girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice.” Taking the Bible as his model, he seems to have generated living parables to show people the evil of their ways. (Another version of this story claims that the child was a three-year-old girl.)
Comic Books Incorporated -- Interview with author and media studies professor Shawna Kidman
The two excerpts that struck me as interesting about the article and I posted are:
Part of your personal narrative has been a shift from working in the comics industry to becoming a media scholar. How did your earlier experiences inform the approach you took in this book?
Yes, my first encounter with comic books was as a worker, not as an academic, and not as a fan. Part of why DC Comics hired me was actually because I didn’t fit the profile of most of their job applicants; I wasn’t steeped in comic book culture and I didn’t have a typical fanboy/fangirl perspective. But I did have a media background—I’d had jobs in film development and film financing during and after college. That helped me to understand the Hollywood folk the company was interacting with, and that’s really what DC needed around 2005 when it was trying to improve its west coast presence. During the few years I was there, first as an assistant and later as a creative executive, I got a crash course in comics and read a ton. I spent a lot of time with editors, met a lot of writers and artists—it was amazing. But I learned more about the business side, since that was what got me the most excited.
I think this separates me from a lot of scholars in this space, who are drawn to comic books because they love the medium. It was the dynamism of the industry that I loved. The maneuverings and politics were endlessly fascinating, because they seemed like a little window into the heart of Hollywood: small subsidiary vs. major conglomerate, creators vs. executives, original stories vs. pre-sold content, and the never-ending effort to milk the life out of every single product, whether or not it was popular. I was also a history geek, so I read everything that Les Daniels wrote, and the Gerard Jones’ book, and anything else I could get my hands on. But all of those guys, even though they told great stories, largely ignored the business. And because I was witnessing it first hand, seeing how the decisions were getting made behind closed doors, I knew there was more to it—that part of the story they were telling must have gotten lost. That nagging feeling stuck with me. But I didn’t have the language or conceptual background to articulate what the story was, or how it fit in to the big picture.
That’s when I decided to go to grad school for Media Studies, which basically meant “film and television”. Still, I thought about comic books every day. Everything I had learned while working was so relevant and seemed to give me this unique insight into art, and history, and Hollywood. That notion, that I had something to say because I had been a worker, and that industry dynamics matter in the creation of culture, pushed me towards Industry Studies as a subfield. I learned everything I could about regulation, distribution, and intellectual property. And slowly, with this new vocabulary, I was able to start giving context to my work experiences, and put it together in a coherent narrative. Of course, it took about a decade more of research to actually get there.
And...
You discuss comics fans as “privileged,” which would seem to be the exact opposite of John Tulloch’s concept of television fans as a “powerless elite.” In what sense are comics fans privileged and how is their influence felt within the comics industry?
Yes, this is definitely true. I believe that comic book fans are privileged in many ways, so much so that I don’t really consider them to be a subculture at all. I’ll stick to just two points though, which I think most directly address Tulloch’s argument. First, comic book fans are very well represented in the film and television industry, disproportionately so. Comic book publishers estimate the comic-book-reading audience in the US at two million people, or less than 1% of the population. Now if you spend any time in Hollywood, you quickly realize that way more than 1% of the people are reading comic books. Sure, some of them are just looking for source material, and some of them may be overstating their reading habits, but even so, it’s an extremely well-regarded medium within that creative community. This is even more true when you look at the upper echelons of the entertainment business. A huge portion of the guys who have been dominating Hollywood for the last thirty years are lifelong comic book fans. Now this may be for good reason—comic book reading could theoretically improve creative thinking and thus statistically increase the likelihood of someone ending up with a career in media. Regardless, I think you would be incredibly hard pressed to argue that comic book fans are a population that lack access to cultural production or decision making.
Second, even comic book fans who are just fans—who have no role in the media business and don’t desire any—get a kind of preferential treatment in Hollywood that is, again, disproportionate with the community’s actual size. By this, I mean that media gatekeepers typically take the opinions of comic book fans more seriously than they do those of other interest groups or cultural communities. There are many reasons for this. For starters, comic book fans often fall into what some consider the “right” demographics—young, male, white, educated—so advertisers are willing to pay more for them. Many comic book fans have also been early adopters of technology. So a fan presence was established early on the web and remains highly visible. This is one of the reasons Hollywood flocked to San Diego Comic-Con in the early 2000s—they wanted online fan support (this has changed a bit in recent years, but that’s a discussion for another day).
Of course, comic book fans are not all-powerful and they are not one thing—this is a heterogeneous constituency that is sometimes heard, sometimes not. But if you identify as a comic book fan, you are generally far more likely to be catered to by mainstream media producers, and your criticisms are far more likely to be heard, than would be the case if, say, you identified as a hip-hop fan or a reader of romance novels. Relatively speaking, comic book fans are among the most powerful consumers of media out there. Which is part of why comic book adaptations are so incredibly prevalent across film, television, and gaming.
I'm curious to see how the actual comic fandom views this. I know how I did, not well.
Weirdly, the scans daily crowd sort of agrees with her. LOL! They may be more academically inclined than I am.
2. Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See
It also has an annoying habit of fixating on things. But that's not what the article is about.
Last week, Quanta reported on the filtering mechanisms that allow us to focus our attention on stimuli of interest — that let us tune out the music in a room to listen to a nearby conversation, or disregard greens, blues and yellows in a crowd when searching for a friend wearing red. That kind of processing, which involves the suppression of some sensory data to highlight signals that are more relevant, is directed by a goal.
But other processes operate well below this level of awareness, filtering out information that the brain deprioritizes without our willing it, or even knowing it. In these cases, our focus is directed not by a goal but rather by particular properties of the stimuli, like their brightness or motion — properties that we’re seemingly hard-wired to consider important. “It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective,” said Duje Tadin, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester. “If something is moving, it’s often fairly important to your survival.”
Scientists have long known that our sensory processing must automatically screen out extraneous inputs — otherwise, we couldn’t experience the world as we do. When we look at our surroundings, for instance, our perceived field of view holds steady or moves smoothly with our gaze. But the eye is also constantly making small movements, or saccades; our visual system has to subtract that background jitter from what we see.
3. I thought about posting this on FB, but as I've slowly discovered (because I'm rather dense) that FB is an impossible place to have a decent discussion on anything. (Except for daytime soap opera spoilers...it works rather well for that.)
Anyhow... this article was rather interesting, it's not about what you think.
Do People Who Live in this House have the Right to Be Struggling
"Though the family is a fiction, and the framing at MarketWatch was intended to maximize outrage, it’s not as if the situation portrayed doesn’t exist. Urban dwellers in several North American cities will have to make $350,000 to be able to afford to buy a three-bedroom home in a neighborhood that isn’t necessarily ritzy, particularly safe, or home to great schools. No amount of real anger at a fake budget will change the reality that housing prices in many places are so high that, yes, if you’re not making what seems to be an obscene amount of money, you can’t afford to live what has long been the definition of a middle-class existence.
The interesting thing is not that class resentment is so easily baited—it’s that the same viciousness that is rightly decried in the service of commenting on the spending habits of the poor or millennials are seen as righteous when directed at those who are considered rich. When an Australian real estate mogul no one had ever heard of told millennials to quit their avocado toast habit, he was rightfully pilloried. But when it comes to wealthier people, let’s hear everyone’s suggestions! Because caviar sandwiches.
Could our fictional family move to Muskegon, Michigan, instead of living in an expensive city? Sure. Maybe their companies will let them work remotely, or maybe they’ll get a lower-paying job in Muskegon, or, hell, invent cold fusion. But even if those imaginary undertakings come to (imaginarily) pass, it does not change the fact that this normal house, in Brooklyn, will still require about half a million dollars to live in, as will many, many other normal houses in America’s high-priced cities."
The solutions, on a policy level, aren’t so different from the general solutions to the problems plaguing affordable housing everywhere. The government should subsidize and encourage more housing for all families, and supplement what building there is with more usable transportation. What citizens should do is vote for those policies—not fall into the traps of hating your fellow citizens (or the imaginary versions thereof) who do, indeed, struggle. Our (manipulated) outrage is unempathetic, adding to the anger in the world while doing nothing to achieve a solution. Next time you see a story like this, remember that.
4. Why the Flu Shot Cannot Give You the Flu
5. Impeachment Battle to Turn for the First Time to President's ties to a foreign country
[Sorry the frustrated Political Science Major and Constitutional Lawyer in Me, can't look away...I'm following it with my fingers over my eyes, and an absurd curiosity that has a wee bit too much in common with my curiosity about horror movies]
WASHINGTON — Alexander Hamilton, as usual, got right to the heart of the matter. When the framers were designing the Constitution and its power of impeachment, one of the high crimes they had in mind was giving into what Hamilton called “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
For the authors of the country’s charter, there were few bigger threats than a president corruptly tied to forces from overseas. And so as the House opened an impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s interactions with Ukraine this past week, the debate quickly focused on one of the oldest issues in America’s democratic experiment.
The emerging battle over the future of Mr. Trump’s presidency will explore as never before the scope and limits of a commander in chief’s interactions with other countries. His adversaries echo the fears of the founders in accusing Mr. Trump of committing high crimes by pressuring Ukraine to dig up dirt on Democratic opponents while holding up American aid. Mr. Trump contends that impeaching him would infringe on the ability of future presidents to conduct foreign policy.
Unlike the impeachment battles involving Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, the debate over Mr. Trump turns on whether a president can solicit or accept help from abroad to advance his political fortunes and where lies the line between the national interest and personal interests.
Honestly, there's a reason "Hamilton" came out and was so successful just prior to the 2016 election.
5. 18th Century Quaker Dwarf who challenged slavery, meat eating, and racism
"One Sunday, 18th-century Quakers living in Abington, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, were met with a strange sight outside their morning meeting. The snow lay thick on the ground and there was Benjamin Lay, a member of the congregation, wearing little clothing, with his “right leg and foot uncovered,” almost knee-deep in the snow. When one Quaker after the next told him that he would get sick or that he should get inside and cover up, he turned to them. “Ah,” he said, “you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half-clad.”
Lay always cut a striking figure. An 1818 article, republished in the newspaper The Friend in 1911, many years after his death, described him thus:
… only four foot seven in height; his head was large in proportion to his body, the features of his face were remarkable … He was hunch-backed, with a projecting chest, below which his body become much contracted. His legs were so slender, as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him.
His act of protest in the snow is of the sort that might make the news today, but in the 1730s it would have been radical almost beyond understanding. This was a time, writes Marcus Rediker in his recent book The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, when “slavery seemed to many people around the world as natural and unchangeable as the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens.” Lay was an abolitionist, vegetarian, pacifist, gender-conscious, anti-capitalist, environmentalist Quaker, with dwarfism and a hunchback, and he wanted to change the apparently “natural” order of things.
Despite his ultra-radical leanings, Lay has been almost entirely excised from modern history books. “The wildness of his methods of approaching antislavery is part of it,” Rediker says. “He was extremely militant and completely uncompromising.” This level of abolitionist militance was unprecedented, and only began to become common after the 1830s. Lay sits outside of the standard narrative of the movement, and his disability and lower socioeconomic status make him difficult to place in a clear historical model. “He just didn’t fit the story,” Rediker says.
The snow protest was by no means Lay’s only performed, dramatic, nonviolent act of radicalism. Quaker neighbors of his kept a young “negro girl” as a slave, and continued to justify the practice, even in the face of his exhortations on both the evil of slavery in general and the “wickedness” of separating enslaved children from their parents. When the neighbors refused to listen, Lay invited their six-year-old son into the cave where he lived and innocently entertained him throughout the day. The boy’s parents panicked. The Village Record, a local newspaper, later described how Lay “observed the father and mother running towards his dwelling; as they drew near, discovering their distress, he advanced and met them, enquiring in a feeling manner: ‘What is the matter?’” The parents, understandably terrified, explained that the boy had been missing all day. Lay is said to have paused, and said: “Your child is safe in my house, and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negro girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice.” Taking the Bible as his model, he seems to have generated living parables to show people the evil of their ways. (Another version of this story claims that the child was a three-year-old girl.)
no subject
Date: 2019-10-06 03:02 am (UTC)The whole struggling thing is relative to where you are and what you make. Salaries in NYC seem really luxurious to people living in areas where average salaries are much less. Where I live, housing is increasingly outpacing average salaries. The problem is that there are people making huge salaries at the university and in some business areas (IT particularly), and the students who come to this university come from above-average income families. (Lots of Range Rovers and Mercedes being driven by students here!) The rents are insane. A one bedroom apartment runs about $900 a month, then you have utilities on top of that.
The average income for the working class in this town (mostly in jobs without benefits) is around $24,000 annually. It simply isn't anywhere near keeping up with the rising costs of housing and utilities and cars and taxes.
In other words, I believe that the wealth gap is increasing at an insane rate, and it makes it hard for people to understand that an income that is big in their community won't do jackshit for someone in another community.
All they know is they don't have enough. Relativity doesn't even begin to be put into the calculation.
I love the Quaker dwarf. What an amazing guy.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-06 03:24 am (UTC)NYC is very odd. And the article sort of points it out. If you look closely at the house shown in it -- it's between two houses in disrepair. And in a neighborhood where the average "family" income is $45,000 (which is the equivalent of $24,000 in your area).
Average market rent in NYC is $2300 for a one bedroom, $1000 for a studio, and $3,000-$4,000 for a two bedroom. If you can find a rent stabilized or preferential lease -- you're lucky and those tend to be in pre-war 1920s buildings that have issues and over 60 units, and in areas further from Manhattan.
In order to live comfortably in NYC you have to be making at least $100,000 a year. Otherwise you are probably struggling to make ends meet.
And in NYC? The average family income is $45,000 and below. Many people work three jobs. The ones who don't -- commute two-three hours a day. My commute is one hour and a half. Some of my co-workers commutes are two hours.
Houses here run from $500,000 and up. Property Taxes are high. A studio apartment can run from $250,000- 500,000 depending on location.
Upstate, it's a different story -- much more affordable. But in the city, the cost of living is high. That said, there are ways to make ends meet. You can find cheap food options -- if you look, and cheap entertainment. Museums have free days. Also you can take public transportation or bike. (Although personally I think biking is dangerous in NYC.)
no subject
Date: 2019-10-06 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-07 12:19 am (UTC)I think the reason it's still going strong is it's not too specific. Comics is a medium, and the comic book fandom pretty much covers the gambit. It's also fairly cult and underground, unlike television, so harder to find fellow fans to discuss. Most of the people in the community don't post in their own journals at all -- just in the community which is also interesting.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-07 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-07 02:54 pm (UTC)Yeah, I agree. It's also hard to see who you are speaking with and what their background is... or age. I really can't tell from some of the posts. Although that is to an extend true of all fanboards.
I'm guessing part of it is due to a fear of being too exposed on social media. Don't know.