In this week’s episode, we take a look at Meta’s new Threads social media platform, and investigate why dragons in the CLOAK MAGE series never seem to eat people.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 160 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 14th, 2023. And today we’re going to look at Threads versus Twitter. We’re also going to discuss why dragons in the Cloak Mage setting don’t actually eat people, with a few exceptions.
First up, let’s have some updates on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report I am 17,000 words into Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which puts me on Chapter 4 of 20 if I remember right. Still hoping to have that out in August, though it might slip to September. We’ll see how the next month and half goes. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is now recording Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs for us. He also is on Chapter 3 of 20, I believe. And if all goes well, that should be out towards the end of August or sometime in September. And then once Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is done, my next project will be Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the 14th and final book of my Silent Order science fiction series as part of my Summer of Finishing Things, since I hope to finish both the Dragonskull series and the Silent Order series.
Before we get to our main topics for this week, Reader Joachim has some questions about Silent Order: Thunder Hand: I finished both the free story as well as the book. You always build up the power of the main character very carefully, so you don’t need to cut back. I noticed you use metric units instead of US measurements. Why?
Thanks, Joachim. I’m glad you have enjoyed the books and have read this far into the series. In answer to your question, as of right now, I believe on Earth in 2023, more people use the metric system than the US measurements of miles and in feet and yards, so 100,000 years in the future, probably there will be more descendants of the people who use the metric system. So that’s why I use the metric system in the Silent Order books, because I figure eventually that will probably be standard in the future, since I think only the US is the only large country that uses standard measurements at first and pretty much everyone else uses the metric system.
00:02:12 Main Topic #1: Twitter vs Threads
Now for Main Topic #1: Threads versus Twitter. A reader emailed to ask if I was going to get a Threads account. The short answer is yes, but only if they come out with the Web client, since I won’t install the app on any of my mobile devices. The longer, more detailed answer is that Threads is Meta’s new micro blogging site. Basically it’s a clone of Twitter, however much they might strenuously deny that since Twitter seems to be entering a death spiral. Twitter wasn’t exactly in great financial or technical health when Elon Musk took the company private. And Mr. Musk’s decisions after acquiring the company do not give the appearance of having improved the site’s reliability. I haven’t posted very much on Twitter recently, simply because the login page isn’t working half the time, which means that usually isn’t worth wasting the time to try.
To be fair, I didn’t use Twitter all that much anyway, even though I’ve been on there since 2009. To really have effective engagement on Twitter, you need to post like 30 or 40 times a day and reply to lots of people. And I simply don’t have the time or interest for doing that. To be honest, I suspect most people listening to this would prefer that I write the final Dragonskull book instead of wasting time on Twitter. All that said, it’s pretty clear that Twitter is not in good shape as a company at the moment. Maybe Mr. Musk and his team will turn things around. Or maybe they won’t. To snark a bit, if Mr. Musk ends up destroying Twitter, I think it will be for the greater civilizational good.
Twitter was frequently a malignant place, whipping up angry mobs who attack random people, which has had negative effects in many areas of life. We all have no doubt encountered examples where someone had a Twitter mob go after them or misinformation spread about them on Twitter and that is never good. Twitter’s oversized cultural importance and prestige I think was a bad thing, and the reduction of its cultural hegemony is only in my opinion, a good thing. This leaves an opportunity for someone to come along and seize Twitter’s market. There have been various attempts to replace Twitter both before and after Mr. Musk bought the platform, but Threads is so far the only one to gain any really major traction. This is somewhat unfortunate, since Threads is owned by Meta, which is the current nom de plume of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which already dominates pretty heavily in the social media market.
Longtime readers and listeners will know that I am not a fan of many of the things Meta has done as a business or many of the business decisions that Mr. Zuckerberg has made. However, even I must concede that Meta probably has the most experience of actually managing and maintaining a functional social network. As many people have found out the hard way, managing a social network is hard and making it profitable is even harder. One of the regrettable truths of the Internet age is that managing an online community of any size requires a heavy hand, or else it quickly degenerates into a cesspool of crackpots, crazies, and people posting images of various perversions, ranging from mildly disturbing to outright horrifying, to say nothing of seriously illegal. There are privacy concerns about Threads, which are frankly all the same as the other privacy concerns for Facebook and Instagram, but Meta’s business model is at its core collecting data to sell to advertise, and since I advertise on Facebook, Meta already knows a lot about me anyway.
I won’t install the apps on my tablet or phone, though. Half the privacy concerns from social media come from some of the apps on mobile devices. There are still privacy concerns from using the sites on a desktop web browser, but not nearly as many. I’m old enough that whatever I have to do anything online, I prefer to do it on a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard, or a laptop if I’m feeling lazy. So I never installed the Facebook or Instagram apps on any of my devices I have, which has turned out to serve me well. So to sum up, if Threads comes out with a web client version, I’ll use it, but I won’t install the mobile app, and if it doesn’t come out with web client or Threads ends up crashing and burning, I won’t lose any sleep over its absence from my life.
00:06:08 Main Topic #2: Reader Question from Cloak of Dragonfire (Spoilers)
And now to our other main topic of discussion this week, a question from a reader that requires spoilers from Cloak of Dragonfire in order to answer it. So if you haven’t read Cloak of Dragonfire yet (though to judge for my sales chart, a very large number of you have. Thank you!), stop listening to this episode right now and go read Cloak of Dragonfire instead. So, spoiler alert after this point of the episode.
Anyway, a reader asked how I came up with the idea in Cloak of Dragonfire that eating a sapient being would have an effect on Dragon similar to the consumption of methamphetamine in a human. It came about because I was thinking about fantasy world building (one of my favorite topics) and an obvious question arose. In the setting of Cloak Mage, why don’t the dragons just eat people? I mean, seriously, why not? The logical answer is that there is a cultural taboo or legal prohibition against it.
However, lots of activities are taboo or illegal, and people still partaking them all the time. The dragons of course, don’t really want to kill humans, since that reduces their number of potential admirers, because what the dragons really want is to be surrounded by a circle of devoted admirers in awe of their magnificence. But that comes back to a cultural taboo again. Some dragons with darker inclinations, like Tarthrunivor or Ferruinvar might buy a private island, stock it with a dozen people kidnapped from surrounding countries, and have themselves a hunting party like the Boyars’ Hunt in Ghost in the Ring. But what if there was a more serious reason the Dragons didn’t do that?
While I was working on Dragon Skull: Wrath of the Warlock, which I wrote before Cloak of Dragonfire, I was thinking about this and I happened to click over to YouTube, which for some reason was displaying a lot of official clips from Breaking Bad that day. Breaking Bad, if you are not familiar with it, is about mild mannered chemistry teacher Walter White, who receives a fatal diagnosis. And desperate to provide for his family after his death, decides to serve manufacturing and selling illegal methamphetamine. During the series, Walt descends from a man trying to provide for his family into an evil man in love with the power of money his drug dealing brings him, and in a tale as old as ancient Greece, his hubris soon brings about his nemesis and bring his downfall.
I have to admit, I didn’t like Breaking Bad all that much. It’s too dark for me, but it is a superbly executed example of story structure with an emotionally satisfying ending. Methamphetamine is very, very bad for you, and you shouldn’t try to use it, or make it for that matter. But while I was thinking about that, the answer came to me. What if eating a sapient being had the same effect on a dragon as methamphetamine did on humans? For the world building to work, the effect had to be in a dragon similar to methamphetamine, because another drug like fentanyl or heroin wouldn’t have worked for the worldbuilding. A depressant style drug would just made for a stoned lassitude-prone dragon, which would hardly be a threat to any characters. But dragons are more innately magical than elves or humans in the world of Cloak Mage and can change shape with ease. Their bodies, therefore, are more easily controlled by their minds than in humans and elves, which means that if they knowingly choose to eat a sapient creature, it has an immediately deleterious effect on them.
Addiction takes hold swiftly, usually followed by homicidal mania within a few months. Interestingly, this only happens if the dragon knowingly consumes a sapient creature. Due to their intensely magical nature, it has to be a choice freely made without compulsion. If a dragon unknowingly ate a sapient creature like some orcish warlord is making ground meat out of captured dwarves, nothing would happen. It has to be a conscious and uncompelled choice. Ferrunivar and Tarthrunivor are much darker or more ruthless dragons than Varzalshinpol. Compared to Polvimrandur and Delaxsicoria, who are all basically pretty cheerful, but Tarthrunivor is old enough to have the self-discipline to keep his ruthlessness and darker impulses in check, and would view consuming a sapient creature as an unforgivable folly, though he has been tempted by the idea.
Ferrunivar, by contrast, was much younger and much less self-controlled. He also considered himself an artist, and artists often enjoy doing avant-garde that shock their elders. Think of how many musicians, actors, and artists came to a bad end through the use of drugs, which, as it happens, is how Ferrunivar met his downfall. Anyway, I hope that was an interesting look into the creative process behind Cloak of Dragonfire and why the dragons in the Cloak Mage series do not eat people.
So that’s it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and enjoyable. If you liked it, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Until then, I hope you all have a safe and pleasant week and see you all next week.
