Blaise Lucey
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Looking for More?
I’ve moved my more abstract stuff to Substack, where I’m writing Litverse! Hope to see you there.
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The Attention Economy 2020: Social Media, Mobile, Streaming
In Tim Wu’s excellent book, “The Attention Merchants,” Wu paints a grim history of advertising attempting to get attention, especially as technology enters the picture. He is undecided as to whether digital ads are a 99-cent store, a cesspool, or both: “Over the long term [digital ads] would become something of a 99-cent store, if…
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The Essence of “Essential” and “Inessential” Workers
“Farewell to the arts,- to eloquence” – Mary Shelly, “The Last Man” (1826) Weird things happen to language during a crisis. We have no way to describe what’s happening, so we invent new phrases. During the “outbreak” of the “novel coronavirus”, we comfortably added new phrases to our daily lexicon. None are more popular than…
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The New Influencers: More Artists & Chefs Turn to Instagram Live
Influencers – they used to be Instagram stars who went to hotels and restaurants with the hordes of Followers promising all businesses exponential growth and wealth. But quarantine is changing that. Chefs, artists, musicians, dancers, and everyone else in the service economy suddenly have time on their hands. Lots and lots of time.
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What Baby Yoda Can Teach Us About the Future of Memes
When George Lucas was pitching Star Wars and every major studio was rejecting it except for one, he probably couldn’t have imagined the three words together: “Baby Yoda memes.” Although, given that the word “meme” orginated from the Ancient Greek word of mīmēma (“imitated thing”), maybe Yoda himself – a connisseur of broken English translations of ancient…
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Deepfake Face Generators & The Uncanny Valley
The aptly named “thispersondoesnotexist.com” generates faces randomly. The ostensible purpose of this deepfake face generator is a little unclear, but I’m assuming the developers wanted to show how real deepfake faces can look. The result is… creepy. With a click of the mouse, you can generate faces of people who never lived. “Deepfake” is a…
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The Stranger Things Chicago Episode is Bad – But It Could be the Future of TV
Source: Netflix The first season of Stranger Things took me by surprise. Literally. My friend introduced me to it and, seven hours later, I was still sitting on the couch. The second season of Strangers Things failed to captivate me in the same way. But one episode was particularly egregious: the Stranger Things Chicago episode.…
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Systems Online: An Album Exploring the Digitization of the Self
My band, Job Creators, released out latest album, Systems Online, on June 27. We worked to polish six songs that we are really, really proud to share with everyone. If you’re curious, you can listen on Spotify or, if you’re old-fashioned like me, you can buy the music on iTunes by looking up “Job Creators.”…
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An Interview with Alec Hutson on Self-Publishing, Fantasy, and the Book Industry
The battle has been going on for years now: traditional publishing vs. self-publishing. For fantasy and sci-fi, romance and young adult, a million different options are available to those brave enough to try. And whether you decide to traditionally publish or self-publish, getting your book discovered is a problem. Amazon has weird algorithms. Goodreads has merciless…
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Promoting Your Book with BookBub: A Case Study
My first novel, Blest, was published last year in March. It wasn’t traditionally published, but it wasn’t traditionally self-published, either. I worked with Alloy Entertainment to outline and write the book. It’s been an interesting process, because we’re also working with the Powered by Amazon team. Powered by Amazon takes book marketing to a new level.…
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