sethstanley

A is for Apollo, who wouldn't retire

Read more about Apollo's death

B is for Big Daddy, caught in a fire

Read more about Big Daddy's death

C is for Cady, cuffed, singing and sinking

Read more about Max Cady's death

D is for Drexl, Clarence shot without thinking

Read more about Drexl's death

E is for Elle, Bea plucked out her eye

F is for Fireball, blown to the sky

G is for Gollum, boiled up in lava

H is for Hans, dying hard on the Plaza

I is for Imhotep, eaten alive

J is for Jack, too cold to survive

K is for Kevin, left by a tree

L is for Louise, finally free

M is for Medusa, who lost her head

N is for Noah, filled with dread

O is for Otto, who sank without trace

P is for Pennywise, with fear on his face

Q is for Quint, devoured by Jaws

R is for Rell, squashed by stone doors

Follow me on Twitter for more!

It's the end of my first week using Coil, and I just wanted to articulate some of my thoughts about the platform, strategies for how I might grow some kind of following between here and Twitter, and look at opportunities to connect with other Coil users.

1. Creating and formatting posts

As a blogging platform, everything I've needed so far has been easy enough to find. I can write copy, format it neatly, create links and add images! Thumbs up emoji.

If I ever get round to recording some bad REM covers, or I decide to become a Youtube influencer playing Minecraft all day – I can embed that audio and video too. For now, I'm sorted.

It's not Wordpress, but that's fine. It's much simpler to use. I used to really enjoy the level of theme customisation I could achieve with Wordpress, but with functional power comes great complexity or something.

2. Where is everyone?

What I find lacking about Coil is access to data that would be useful to help me to start connecting with other creators, and subscribers who find my content interesting.

I would really like to be able to search for users I know are on Coil. At the moment, I'm searching for those users on Twitter, and searching their profile or tweets for a URL to go and read their Coil content. It's a bit clunky.

When someone follows me, I'd like to know who they are. I can go say thank you and follow them back if they're a creator. I don't have to rely then on other social media like Twitter to engage with a targeted audience. Or is that what other people are doing? Bringing an already established following on Twitter directly to Coil? I'd be interested to know...

3. Analytics

How do I know if the content I'm producing is effective or not?

I'm ending week one with 11 followers. Meh. Needs improvement, I know. I think only Coil subscribers can follow you, so I guess that means I've only earned XRP when those 11 users have browsed my content?

I don't know how long they've spent engaging with which posts so I don't know what kind of content to spend more time developing...

My best performing Tweet so far, I had hoped for better results...

My XRP tipbot account indicates some small payments through the ILP & Coil, so I guess I set the payment pointer up correctly. But it's not worth a wet fart at the moment. Can only improve though, right?

A dashboard that showed me some numbers about how many people are reading what content for what length of time would be really useful.

4. Connecting with others

So, as a content creator, I want to get paid. I never expected to be a millionaire on day 7, but I thought I would have made more than £0.07.

ILP & Coil payments on XRP Tipbot

So, if I only get paid when Coil subscribers are browsing my content, how do I drive more of them to my content, and how do I convince more regular users to subscribe to Coil?

I know, I know. If I could crack that, I get to unlock the secrets of the universe. I'm just speaking out loud here, and if anyone has any advice or tips, I would love to hear about what's worked for them.

I know what I do isn't everyone's brand of cola, but I believe that everyone can attract an audience on the Internet, however niche their content may be.

My strategy for now is to grow my Twitter following. Post regularly – try and engage people who are interested in #movies #illustration #popculture #coil and see if they're willing to make the leap from Twitter to go look at my content on here.

There's a real challenge with a lot of people to make them understand the benefits of paying to view content. We've all grown up on an Internet largely full of free content. So why do we have to start paying for it all of a sudden, they ask. Ad-free, quality content is a tough sell.

I saw today that there is a sub-reddit for the Coil Community which I've joined. It'll be interesting to see how many people I connect with there and how I can translate any of that good networking into better, more targeted content on here that ultimately increases my micro-payments.

I'll try and chart my progress in amongst my movie-related posts and talk about what's working or not working for me. Fail fast and make good decisions, I guess.

5. User feedback

As far as I can tell, the only way to get feedback on a post is by someone upvoting you, which keeps you on the Top or Trending lists.

That's ok, but any deeper-level of discussion about Coil content needs to take place off-Coil, which feels kinda counter-intuitive to me.

For example, I'd like users to be able to respond to this post below. I'd find it helpful for people to add hints and tips, tell me where they think I'm going wrong and what I'm doing right. All in one place where I and others can refer to as a useful resource.

I'd like to see more content on here from @Coil where they engaged with the community more frequently and kept them informed of some of the big items that might be coming up soon or at least scheduled on their product roadmap.

I hope this outpouring of thoughts is useful to anyone in a similar position. You can reach me on Twitter or Reddit and I'd love to hear from you if you want to discuss further.

Til next time, stay safe out there!

Recently I watched Free Solo, the extraordinary 2018 award-winning documentary about climber Alex Honnold, who had a desire to ascend to the top of 3200-feet tall El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, without a rope.

It's an incredible piece of film-making about an astonishing physical feat, that I still cannot get my head around. I really can't recommend this film highly enough and suggest you seek it out at the earliest opportunity. For a film about a sport I'd previously had no interest in, it pushed and pulled me a number of ways that really got me thinking.

El Capitan, Yosemite National Park

It was utterly intriguing on a number of levels. There was insight into the free soloing climbing community. Their meticulous preparation, the knowledge of the routes and the sad, sad stories of the people they'd lost along the way. It was a glimpse into a sport and a group of people I had no idea about, and I was fascinated.

I was also totally engaged by Alex Honnold. A man who lived out of a camper van, ate canned chilli and had the aura and energy of an articulate surfer dude.

He seemed different to me to most people. Some of the things he said quite early on in the film made me think – this guy doesn't process fear and consider consequences in the same way that most people would.

His strength of focus, his obsession with climbing El Capitan, his apparent lack of emotion and the way he related to people around him, including his girlfriend, had me guessing that he was somewhere along the autistic spectrum.

It's never directly addressed in the film, but these things can be hereditary and when the emotional distance of his father is explained by his diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome – for right or wrong, the dots started to join in my head.

As much as that made sense to me, to explain some of Honnold's behaviours and outlook on life, I don't want to focus on that – it's Honnold's emotional detachment that makes him stand out in this, but to me, it felt like an incredibly dangerous attribute to have.

Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan (still from Free Solo trailer)

On this climb, the only things that stood between Honnold and certain death were his climbing skills and strength, his knowledge of every nook and cranny of the rock face and sheer luck.

Someone who processes emotions normally is climbing this monstrous stone face with the nagging doubt in their mind – “What if I die?”

Alex Honnold did it saying “So what if I die?” No harm done. People move on, it's not a problem.

There seemed to be a distinct lack of awareness of his importance and uniqueness to the people around him.

Dizzy heights

The pursuit of excellence without due consideration of the pitfalls is dangerous. A more mainstream view of fear makes us weigh up the pros and cons of a situation.

What's our attitude to risk here? How likely am I to hurt or fatally injure myself? What is the impact on others?

What are the consequences to others if I throw caution to the wind?

Even though I knew the outcome of the film (spoiler alert -Alex lives!), I spent most of it on the edge of my seat, because I have something that he appeared to lack: empathy.

I don't know what it feels like to climb up a rock face so high you'd struggle to see the ground, but I know that feeling of being up somewhere high and fearing the consequences of falling. It's not pleasant.

I cannot acknowledge the presence of fear and somehow hold it in a separate bucket in my brain at the same time.

I know you're there, fear, but right now, in order to stay alive, I just have to pretend that you're not. Cos if I let you in, I could really screw this up.

Nah, I couldn't do that.

I froze every time Honnold moved hand-over-hand, grasping for the smallest detectable changes in the rock's texture, far too slight to call a hand-hold. My whole body tensed at every micro-adjustment of his feet as he leant into El Capitan. I held my breath as he karate-kicked his way to a grip that he had previously fallen at when he'd practiced the climb on ropes.

Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan (still from Free Solo trailer)

He handles the move like he just pretended to mess it up on previous attempts, to elicit a dramatic moment in all of this. He takes a second to wink at a nearby camera.

It was too much to bear at times and I was only watching. Watching thinking how can he do this? There's so much at stake!

Honnold isn't completely fearless. His levels of preparation indicate he knows EXACTLY what's at stake, but he's going to do it anyway.

And he aborts an attempt to climb when he senses there are too many people around to watch and he's just not feeling it. A 100% reckless individual would have just done it regardless.

Unlike Honnold, I don't need a CAT scan to tell me that my brain doesn't respond to normal stimuli. I know it does. I am not a risk-averse person by nature, but I don't enjoy the thrill-seeker highs of extreme sports and the like.

I enjoy life just fine with my feet on the ground and a realistic sense of the kinds of situations where I'd consider the feelings and wellbeing of my family before I embarked on something that might put myself or them in danger.

Because a little fear is healthy and necessary to keep us alive. It makes us query that what we're doing is right. It helps us examine situations we find ourselves in from all the angles.

To live a completely fearless life would see us take unnecessary risks that put us and those we love in needless peril.

And then I got to thinking a little more about things closer to home that might not be dangerous or life-threatening at all, but that we're fearful of.

Climbing the walls

Everyone has their own personal rock face to climb. The thing that they focus on conquering in their lives. Mine is public speaking. I hate it. I'm forced to do it at work – as many people are- and we have to fake it to make it, right?

But if I could do it with confidence, if I could take the time to karate-kick to a ledge and wink at the camera – well that would be something else. It would be an incredible achievement for me to prepare a public presentation, pull it off with style and feel like I've gotten over a massive mental blocker. A detachment of fear that I could be really proud of. Where no one gets hurt.

Go and watch Free Solo when you can – even if you don't think it's your thing (it's currently on Disney +) and then come and tell me on Twitter – what you thought about it and more importantly,

what's your El Capitan?

Thanks for reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urRVZ4SW7WU

For as long as I can remember, I have toyed with the idea of writing an unofficial story, a whole book perhaps, on characters from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I can't put my finger on why that is. Wherever possible, I've tried to carve my own path and let my creativity find its own light, but I've always come back to these characters, seemingly as addictive to me as chocolate itself.

Perhaps it's because I always wondered what happened to them. I was never rooting for Charlie, the least interesting child of the piece.

As a child, I recall obsessing over what happened to the other kids when they left the factory, and I always considered it a shortcoming of the wonderful 1971 Gene Wilder movie, that their eventual fate was brushed over.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator was nowhere near as successful as the original novel, and took quite a radical turn away from the first book.

Roald Dahl was never one to shy away from taking a brave approach to his writing, but it feels to me like the success of the first book was too much to live up to and the characters just weren't utilised as well in the sequel.

I often found myself fast-forwarding 15 or 20 years into the future. Charlie would be a young man. I had lots of assumptions and unanswered questions about what might happen to him, and the other fabulous characters in this universe.

There are more stories left to tell with these people, and sometimes I see glimpses in my mind of one coming together...

So much time, so little to see!

How was the factory faring under Charlie's leadership?

How was the Wonka brand coping in today's society with social media and tech-savvy kids looking for the next cool thing?

Who would ebb and flow into Charlie's life? Who might he meet to help him run the factory?

How would Charlie's character be affected after the death of three of his grandparents? How would he cope after Willy's death?

How could Willy continue to influence Charlie's life from beyond the grave? What surprises might he have left behind?

What of the Oompa Loompas? What stories do they still have left to tell. How could they play a part in a new tale?

And what of the other kids?

How would Charlie respond to Augustus Gloop, who has never been able to shake the smell of chocolate from his nose, since falling into the chocolate river, rallying the others to take over the factory?

As Augustus assembles the kids back together into a formidable unit, ready to plan an assault on the factory, why can't he find Veruca Salt?

How has that mean-spirited, rude, arrogant, bratty little girl changed after her experience in the factory?

What has become of Mr Slugworth/Mr Wilkinson? How might he have a part to play in a new story? Where do his loyalties really lie?

So many questions!

I feel like I have answers to some of those questions. Not universal answers, these are just my answers. My assumptions.

This was a childhood favourite book and film of so many of you, I'd be interested to know if you have your own answers – or questions!

Tell me what you think on Twitter.

I really don't know what I'm going to do with this. I've been knocking it round for years. I'd love to have the time to work it into a novel. I might write something, and if I do, you can be sure I'll put it out right here on Coil. I'd be interested to know if that's something you'd want to read.

Don't forget, if you're not a Coil subscriber, you can sign up now for the price of a few Wonka bars and an Everlasting Gobstopper (that's $5 a month).

I'll leave you with this wonderful remix clip of the moment that Wonka, completely out of character compared to the rest of the movie, takes off on Charlie to test his temperament.

Right, I'm off. I have a real hankering for some peanut M&M's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UDnTJcjPhY

I love lists. Although I'm not especially keen on making them. BORING!

I'm all about reading them. I was thinking recently about the internet's general preoccupation for thinly disguising blog posts as lists and wondering why the concept of 'listicles' was such an effective way to package content. And I came to this list of conclusions:

1) Before we click on a link on the internet, we mentally theorize about what we're about to click on. If the title is, ooh let's say, 6 ways Donald Trump might cause an extinction level event – we have an understanding that we're going to read 6 things – it's quantifiable. We can see an end to it, and make a judgement about how long it might take to read.

2) It's probably not the first time you've seen Trump and ELT in the same sentence before – but if that's your bag and it's the content you're here for, the title or headline sets you up perfectly. You know exactly what's coming, as long as the title of the listicle does what it says on the tin.

3) Something about the attempt at categorisation and order makes YOU feel good! Our brains have to process and filter out SOOOO much 'stuff' everyday (you know, just like, 'stuff', dude), that when a piece of content gives us what we were looking for on a plate, we can consume it effortlessly.

Content creators that write clearly, concisely and to the point, delivering what users want like an IV data drip straight into the brain, will fare better (I'm generalising) than those who meander, lead their readers down blind alleys, and get caught up in the trappings of language for their own self-indulgent reasoning.

Hmm. I may have some work to do on that front.

I don't know about you, but lockdown is making me look deep inside the abyss within myself. There's a guy in there who looks a bit like me but he could sure as hell do with a shave and a haircut. He smells good though.

It's not easy to occupy yourself with much to do – oh Rick Grimes, purveyor of 'things' and 'stuff', where are you now, to lead us through this most boring temporary apocalypse? Tell us, O Bearded One, how to cross-stitch and grow vegetables in order to keep the boredom zombies from eating up our own brains!

What do you mean, you can tell I'm cracking up?

Let me take my own advice, and get on with these lists of tv, film and music etc that might help you to focus in on some 'things' and 'stuff' for the rest of lockdown – in no particular order. On another day, I'd give you another 10 lists of 10. These aren't canon by any stretch. Let's do it.

Top 10 classic movies to make you feel better about life

1) Groundhog Day

2) Back To The Future

3) Beetlejuice

4) Karate Kid

5) Memento

6) Aliens

7) Nightbreed

8) The Incredibles

9) Raiders Of The Lost Ark

10) Superbad

Top 10 movies/tv shows I'm looking forward to

1) The Boys Season 2

2) Umbrella Academy Season 2

3) Tenet

4) The Invisible Man

5) Soul

6) Locke And Key Season 2

7) Fargo Season 4

8) Lord of The Rings (Amazon)

9) Stranger Things Season 4

10) Bill and Ted Face The Music

Top 10 tv shows to watch

1) Boardwalk Empire

2) Breaking Bad

3) The Boys

4) Moone Boy

5) After Life

6) Unbelievable

7) Tiger King

8) Better Call Saul

9) Derry Girls

10) Friday Night Dinner

Top 10 artists to listen to ( The Beatles is a given, don't @ me)

1) REM

2) Chic

3) Zero 7

4) The Zutons

5) Blur

6) Supergrass

7) Pink Floyd

8) Talking Heads

9) Doves

10) David Gray

Top 10 favourite albums (at the moment)

1) REM – Murmur

2) Roger Waters – Radio K.A.O.S

3) Blur – Parklife

4) Supergrass – I Should Coco

5) Pearl Jam – Ten

6) Crowded House – Together Alone

7) David Gray – Mutineers

8) Hole – Celebrity Skin

9) Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

10) Fun Lovin Criminals – Come Find Yourself

Top 10 Twitter accounts you should know about

1) Luke Flowers

2) Jerrod Maruyama

3) SJ Watson

4) Scott C

5) Muppet History

6) Gallery 1988

7) McFelty

8) Jon Burgerman

9) Film Stories

10) James Gilleard

Top 10 video games I've been playing recently

1) Spiderman

2) Fortnite

3) Witcher III

4) Sims 4

5) Shadow Of The Colossus

6) God Of War III

7) Unchartered

8) Super Streetfighter II

9) Sonic The Hedgehog

10) Buzz

Top 10 travel destinations to go to or go back to

1) Iceland

2) Florida

3) Las Vegas

4) Rome

5) Venice

6) Norway

7) Majorca

8) Japan

9) New York

10) Alaska

Top 10 blog posts I need to finish (I'm a procrastinator!)

1) Rock Myths II: The Dark Side of Oz

2) 5 techy things to do in lockdown (A Seth Stanley comic)

3) Expanding the Stanley-verse Part 3

4) John Hughes quiz

5) Seven stories

6) Wordless Wednesday: Florence

7) Willy Wonka novel outline

8) Rock Myths III: The Satanic Verses of Led Zeppelin

9) Wordless Wednesday: Cruising

10) Tim Burton quiz

Top 10 books I enjoyed reading

1) IT -Stephen King

2) Weaveworld – Clive Barker

3) All Families Are Psychotic – Douglas Coupland

4) Blink – Malcolm Gladwell

5) The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson

6) Imajica – Clive Barker

7) How I Escaped My Certain Fate – Stewart Lee

8) Start With Why – Simon Sinek

9) Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

10) On Writing – Stephen King

All listed out now huh? You can sign up now for just $5 a month to support me and all of my fellow content creators here on Coil.