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Sunday, July 05, 2009 ( 2:25 AM ) posted by Setsuled I found this beautiful resignation speech by Sarah Palin deeply inspiring; So inspiring, I recorded my own resignation speech (for some reason Vimeo cut the sound off the first few seconds); Resignation from Trompe Setsuled on Vimeo. #Saturday, July 04, 2009 ( 6:31 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #36 I'm looking for a tree in a forest. Another lovely World of Warcraft day. A zombie makes an uninspired tourist. But they're cool with going any which way. English dubbed anime still sucks ass. Sounds classy as a used car commercial. It's always the same Canadian cast. Money they make, talent they could marshal. Ten dollars says Willow Palin's pregnant. To-day was all about the blueberry. Though they're really more violet in pigment. Lenny Bruce was an orange spider faerie. "Red was the colour of the dress she wore." And there are neckties all over the floor. I finally did a quest with a group last night in World of Warcraft--two players that just happened to be nearby. They probably thought I was pretty rude because I barely talked--I was playing on Tim's wall mounted television and the chat text was too small to read. But it was fun. A couple shots of spiders on the back porch last night-- A dead one;  A live one; 
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Friday, July 03, 2009 ( 6:51 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; English dubbed anime still sucks ass. Sounds classy as a used car commercial. It's always the same Canadian cast. Money they make, talent they could marshal. This was prompted by seeing the trailer for the upcoming U.S. theatrical release of the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie. It'd been a while since I heard English dubbed Evangelion--I'd forgotten how astonishingly awful it is. And yet it's par for the course for English dubbed anime. It's funny how they don't tell the celebrities involved with the Hayao Miyazaki dubs to adopt extremely phoney sounding affectations. "This is how it's done! Talk like your little sister begged you to do the voices while reading a story you really hate." I honestly don't know how the productions studios aren't tremendously embarrassed by these products, and then I remember all the money they make off of the incredible imported animation. I was excited to read about the second Rebuild movie on AICN, which is currently in Japanese theatres. The AICN piece says, "The film took in $5.37m (Y512m) - for comparison, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened at $5.88m (Y560.7m)," which is slightly comforting after I read about the spat between Michael Bay and Megan Fox in which she said, "I mean, I can't shit on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don't want to blow smoke up people's ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting." To which Michael Bay replied that he 100% disagreed and added, "Nick Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star before he did Transformers -- and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys." To which I reply, What? Can Michael Bay really be that deluded a motherfucker? Holy shit, Megan Fox must have only cut off a steady stream of ass smoke for a split second. Does he honestly not know about the hit sitcoms Shia LeBeouf, Will Smith, and Martin Lawrence were all in before he cast them? Or Good Will Hunting? And--Nicholas Cage--holy shit. Really, Michael? You never heard of Moonstruck, Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Honeymoon in Vegas--fucking Leaving Las Vegas for which he won an academy award a year before he appeared in your aptly named The Rock for being dumb as?! Do you spend more than twenty seconds a day without a sycophant's mouth around your cock? Holy fucking shit. Not to mention he took Megan Fox's characterisation of Transformers as an attack on his career as a director. What a fucking infant. # Thursday, July 02, 2009 ( 9:02 PM ) posted by Setsuled I just came back from lunch at my parents' house where my mother had the television on CNN's endless Michael Jackson coverage, in this case Larry King's tour of Neverland Ranch, and I couldn't help thinking of this; As much as Citizen Kane was an illumination of the ultimate, distilled destiny of the American Dream, so, it seems to me, is the life of Michael Jackson. It's the hardwired sense that the rational objective in life is to obtain sovereignty through money. It doesn't mean Jackson was cruel or despotic--neither was Kane, or William Randolph Hearst. It's just a reflection of the shame felt by Americans for depending on anyone else financially--creating one's own financial fiefdom is the natural result of pulling away from that shame. As Leland said Kane wanted love "on your own terms"; Both Michael Jackson and Charles Foster Kane were people obsessed with reclaiming something from childhood--innocence, or more specifically, the ability to accept love. They were both, as children, betrayed by the world of adults so what they're left with is the American psychological programme and the freedom to exercise it to its conclusion. I find myself thinking again about the sort of freedom granted by internet socialising and how text and online society might reflect the fundamental nature of the American psyche. Anyway, I'm running very late to-day. Look what I just screwed to my desk!  Last night's tweets; I'm looking for a tree in a forest. Another lovely World of Warcraft day. A zombie makes an uninspired tourist. But they're cool with going any which way. I was also sorry to hear Karl Malden passed away to-day. Looks like it's another celebrity apocalypse. I guess this one started with Dom DeLuise? Why didn't Dom DeLuise get round the clock CNN coverage? # Wednesday, July 01, 2009 ( 8:48 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #35 Only the farmer you need is missing. He always buys bait in the pier cafe. Proper world wars often break for fishing. Parrot networks are loud, lofty and fey. Harpies never do anything alone. They'll drink boxes of tea in one sitting. The night is as boring as a bald bone. While an idle, hungry fire's spitting. A cow can keep a building very warm. But it's much smarter to keep it frozen. Some tasty fish swim in a handy swarm. Stranger meat's delivered by the dozen. The world is almost as flat as flat bread. And wet as Weary Willy's nose was red. I forgot to mention yesterday how happy I was that Al Franken finally got the Minnesota senate seat. But, jeez, you wouldn't know it from the news channels to-day--all I see when I switch between CNN and MSNBC is Michael Jackson coverage. Yeah, it's a sad story and everything, but enough already. I'm starting to run out of steam, but I actually got quite a lot done to-day so far--I've already drawn and inked a page, gone to the bank, and unloaded the dishwasher. I have a bottle of sake I want to finish off, maybe I can to-night. I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a couple months now and last week I reached the end of the third season, so now I'm switching between Angel and Buffy. I'm kind of considering abandoning Buffy though--next to even just the first couple episodes, Buffy is clearly nowhere near as good as Angel. Though, to be fair, Buffy at college was a quickly abandoned storyline for a reason and the mayor turning into a lousy cgi monster had to be one of the worst payoffs in television history, so this isn't exactly Buffy at its best. I am surprised to find third season Buffy in widescreen--I guess I really haven't watched it since it first aired, when the network probably cropped the image. The odd thing, though, is that it often doesn't seem to have been composed for wide screen. Whedon seems to forget what was actually in one shot when he switches to the next--like here--  Oddly halved, nervous Buffy face doesn't quite match up when we cut to--  Buffy face in false contemplation. I guess it doesn't seem strange after all the cameos by the boom mic in the third season, but Whedon seems to mess up at least one shot in every premiere--a film crew member's sneakers accidentally make it into a shot on the series premiere of Angel, and who can forget this accidental showcase of Alan Tudyk's mime skills from the Firefly premiere;  But I guess I can't imagine the stress of running three television series at once. None of these problems seem as bad as Willow's haircut, which I think actually mainly speaks well for the show. Gods, I miss second season Willow. She calls a guy a "cutie patootie" in a third season episode. Ugh. Willow brand cute must have been a difficult balancing act, but she tumbled right off the tightrope on that one. # Tuesday, June 30, 2009 ( 9:08 PM ) posted by Setsuled My tweets from last night; Harpies never do anything alone. They'll drink boxes of tea in one sitting. The night is as boring as a bald bone. While an idle, hungry fire's spitting. Last night, Sarah Silverman tweeted, "If this is real it's incredible. Worth the remote control moment alone." And she posted a link to this video; Since it seems to be part of a series, I think it's unlikely to be real, but I find it fascinating anyway--the kid's very committed to the role, and of course, it's his or the writers' idea of what they consider believable, so it's something of an indicator of what World of Warcraft means to kids. I had my own World of Warcraft frustrations last night as I found myself playing it an hour later than I meant to, trying to kill a certain quota of harpies near the Stonetalon Mountains. Part of the frustration was just in knowing I'm probably not going to have time to play WoW again until I've finished this next chapter of my comic and I wanted to accomplish something. I was doing okay killing one harpy at a time, but the fiends kept wanting to gang up on me. I gradually completed the quest, chipping away at it eventually by letting myself get killed by other harpies as I concentrated on just killing one. It occurred to me this might be the heart of the game--past the package and everything, this is the bit that engages in strategy for a solo player, trying to figure out how to kill things slightly more powerful than you, or obtaining a level up by other means. I suppose matching wits against other players is more enjoyable--I've been getting more invites to join guilds lately, often from people who aren't even nearby, which makes me wonder what interests them in my humble level 24 undead warrior. So far, Tim's all the WoW society I've really needed. I haven't really experienced the joy of team coordination yet, but I think I can say at this point with some certainty that World of Warcraft isn't as good a game as Warcraft II (I don't know about Warcraft III, I've never played it). I know I probably just sound like an old jerk who thinks everything was better in his day, but much as I was saying about Super Mario Brothers a couple days ago, I think there's demonstrably more of a game present in Warcraft II than in World of Warcraft, and I think the key factor here is the concept of levelling up. In the classic role playing game, levelling up was simply a way to gauge the knowledge and skill a character had accumulated. But now it's kind of become something that makes computer RPGs seem like the place where the capitalist myth went to die. All around me, in real life, I see people who've worked hard all their lives for something not being rewarded at all, or certainly not in the way they desired. The world of writers, artists, and musicians is an even stronger example, as capricious subjectivity of the audience, and the unreliable preparation granted by traditional training, deny guarantees of success for hard and/or good work. Which is not even mentioning the people who give all their lives to their art and genuinely aren't good at it. That's not how it is in World of Warcraft--in World of Warcraft, you kill a bunch of enemies, you do your quests, and you will gain experience points--you will level up, you'll get status, precious objects, abilities, and what used to be difficult will become easy. Warcraft II--like most older video games--wasn't like that. The more you played, the harder it got, the more it demanded from your intellect. The fun in Warcraft II was in strategy, learning to deploy your units in the right locations, from the right directions, in sufficient numbers. It was probably harder to design a game like that--you'd need to figure out the right balance, decide what was reasonable to expect from a player. It probably ought to give one pause to consider that chess doesn't have level ups--it isn't a game one looks for in computer RPGs, and it's not role playing either. I'm so tired right now. I just came back from lunch at my parents' house with which I had a glass of wine. I suppose I probably shouldn't have. I'm thinking I'll probably put off drawing the first page of the next chapter 'til to-morrow. Which means I'll probably be seeking the level up teat to-night, too. Here's what Lelia, my character, looks like right now, by the way;  I have to admit, she's not keeping those eggs very warm. With breakfast to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest. The first story, "THE MERMAID OF THE CONCRETE OCEAN", strongly reminded me of another story by Caitlin, the title of which escapes me, which was about a woman and a young man who desired to know the dark secrets of the woman's past which she dreaded to divulge, and when it was eventually told, the dark secret the young man had sought turned out to be less fantastic than he imagined yet was precisely the sort of heartbreaking horror--made more terrible by its simplicity--that would cause someone to spend a life seeking ideas of more fantastic horror. The new story features an old woman talking to a young man about the motive of an artist she loved to paint mermaids all his life. Again, the root is a simple horror, that if told straight would probably hold no horror for the reader at all. So much of Caitlin's work is in creating the horror by how the characters feel about it--Dogs with really long legs aren't particular scary. The more important thing is how they disturb the people who see them. Much of Caitlin's work seems to be negotiating with the psyche of the reader to respect the sanctity of what's truly terrible*. Following "THE MERMAID OF THE CONCRETE OCEAN" is another new Sonya Taaffe poem, which is very pretty and sweet, apparently about someone getting more than they bargained for. Lastly, there's another story by Caitlin called "THE ALCHEMIST'S DAUGHTER", or rather a partial story. It's set in H.P. Lovecraft's dreamlands, in the city Ulthar featured most prominently in Lovecraft's "The Cats of Ulthar", and those cats, indeed, play a part in Caitlin's story. Mostly it seems to be an autobiographical fantasy with Caitlin casting herself as an alchemist's daughter engaged in experiments, attended to by a nurse in a setup not unlike her Second Life role playing relationship with her partner, Kathryn Pollnac. It's an enjoyable read, and it's nice to see another narrative perspective on Lovecraft's dream world, which was always one of my favourite subjects of his works. Yesterday, my sister went to the mall with me to help me pick out glasses, and she spotted this fellow in a shop window;  Fabulous, no? We also poked fun at this oddly anxious bust of Zeus;  "Um, I'm, like, king of the gods? Okay? If--I mean--you won't hit me, will you?" *By reader, I don't mean the literal audience, but the hypothetical, phantom one prose addresses by existing. # Monday, June 29, 2009 ( 10:16 PM ) posted by Setsuled Here's some footage from yesterday; The music is "Sous le Ciel d'Afrique" performed by Josephine Baker. To-day was another busy day, and to-morrow shall also probably be busy. I think it's mainly that I let so many things accumulate while I was working on my comic last week that they're all dog piling me now.  Saturday night, I watched Women in Cages, a 1971 grindhouse film directed by Gerardo de León that'd been on my "to watch" list for a couple years. It floated to the surface of the internet soup for me a couple days ago, and my appetite was whetted by a quote from Quentin Tarantino on the Wikipedia entry about it, "'[the film] is just harsh, harsh, harsh,' he said, and described the final shot as one of 'devastating despair.'" It's not a happy ending, though I'm tempted to make a top ten list of movies with more impressively bleak endings, except such a list would probably ruin the endings of those movies for people. The influence Women in Cages had on Tarantino isn't as blatant as Lady Snowblood or Thriller - A Cruel Picture, but neither of those pictures as strongly resembles Tarantino's sensibility for composition as Women in Cages. De León seemed to like putting together scenes with subjects or objects in the extreme foreground related to subjects or objects in the extreme background. Shots like these;   reminded me of shots like this memorable one in Pulp Fiction;  And, actually, I was reminded of shots from Citizen Kane like this:  Deep focus, a camera keeping simultaneous focus on both foreground and background, was a revolutionary technique when Citizen Kane was made--the above shot, in fact, was beyond camera technology at the time and is in fact a process shot, but there are plenty of examples of deep focus in Kane, the effect of which, for me, was always to heighten the sense of dizzying extremes in the life of Charles Foster Kane. In Women in Cages, which is unmistakably a fantasy film, as it is a sexploitation film, the technique both makes the events on screen dreamlike and more threatening in their enormity than the cheap sets and costumes otherwise might be.  Such brash blocking sensibilities also serve to convey the point of view of my favourite character in the film, a heroin addict named Stokes played by Roberta Collins, who's not established as the central protagonist, but Collins' commitment to the role and her character's desperate and pragmatic ruthlessness make her far more interesting. Jeff, the actual main character, is a sort of ditzy, bland goodie two shoes. She's annoying more than anything else, and I found myself rooting for Stokes in her various attempts to murder Jeff.  Pam Grier as the villain is barely more than two dimensional, but functions well enough as an old fashioned movie foil whose most interesting quality is always style--Grier's got it in spades. Another composition technique de León seemed to like, which I don't see often from Tarantino, is arranging three or more characters artfully for dialogue sequences;   I was sort of reminded of Kurosawa, who was a master at this sort of blocking. Women in Cages has a few significant flaws--horribly unconvincing day for night shots and a few instances of extremely awkward and artificial action choreography. But what really impressed me was the economy of story telling--the opening credits, with just a few establishing shots, effectively convey the criminal vessel Zulu Queen's nature as a sort of floating brothel and drug den, and characters are introduced and defined very swiftly and unobtrusively in the prison. My tweets from last night; Only the farmer you need is missing. He always buys bait in the pier cafe. Proper world wars often break for fishing. Parrot networks are loud, lofty and fey. # Sunday, June 28, 2009 ( 9:48 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #34 Sink water is pretty clean for the hands. Two glasses of drinking water's not cheap. Dangerous aliens have acid glands. Jeff Bridges has a secret hover jeep A blank screen can start a nasty rumour. Jerri Blank is never acceptable. The tall centaurs have no sense of humour. But to courtesy they're susceptible. One axe is better than two if it's big. Grindhouse violence is cheap, potent tender. Economic traps are easy to rig. Mary Poppins is greater than gender. You won't be too dry when you have oil. Entropy is the fate of a foil. I had million and one errands to-day, beginning with the wonderland of Wal-Mart and its denizens of mullet men and angry, enormous women on motorised buggies with noisy children running around them (I was there for an oil change). Later, my quests took me west to Ocean Beach. Here are some pictures;   Cat in a window I walked past.  One of the many wild parrots in Ocean Beach. A passing woman, who saw me taking the picture, explained the legend was that hundreds of them escaped from a pet shop sixty years ago. You hear them a lot more often than you see them.  Our pelican overlords and their surfing serfs.    View from the end of the pier.    
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Saturday, June 27, 2009 ( 4:13 PM ) posted by Setsuled I love the crazy angles on those buildings. Last night's tweets A blank screen can start a nasty rumour. Jerri Blank is never acceptable. The tall centaurs have no sense of humour. But to courtesy they're susceptible. Sometimes World of Warcraft reminds me of an enormous miniature golf course, which, I know, seems to be a contradiction in terms. But the way it has theme areas partitioned off from one another, there's no way anyone could mistake it for organic, unlike the regions in Oblivion. When one looks at the area where Durotar ends and The Barrens begins, one sees that the dirt changes abruptly to a drastically different colour like stripes in Neapolitan ice cream. Last night, I ran all the way from Crossroads, in the middle of Barrens, to some mountainous area in the west and then north to a small, isolated valley with a bunch of elks and centaurs. My character's level 22 and everyone there was between levels 24 and 29, so I figured it was just right for me. I did okay, so long as I could fight one at a time, until I ran into some level twenty-nine elf-centaur lady, who mopped the floor with my ass. Didn't stop me from trying five times--I got her down to less than half her hitpoints. Tantalisingly close. Of course, sooner or later, I'll just level up and it won't mean as much when I beat her. I watched the 1932 version of Scarface last night, which I hadn't seen in a while. It's a little more sensational than I remember, but I still think it's easily a thousand times better than the cheesy Brian DePalma version. I love Paul Muni's innocent glee and the way he pushes around his bosses. You get the impression he's like a monstrous puppy, playing with the world and not quite having a sense of the harm he's causing or what his decisions say about him. The violent anger provoked by his sister going out with guys would disturb even the most meagrely introspective person, but not Tony. Which is what makes him seem so dangerous--he has absolutely no internal compass. At the same time, it's what prevents him from seeming evil. He just seems like another hapless force of nature. Happy birthday, Robyn Massachusetts (it's her birthday, nothing's meant by the juxtaposition. Though she may be a hapless force of nature, who knows). # Friday, June 26, 2009 ( 11:38 PM ) posted by Setsuled Okay, here's the Snow video. Try and ignore the ellipses. And while I'm at it, here's a video Amanda Palmer just posted on her Twitter of her covering "Billie Jean"; Really nice. And a female vocalist kind of contributes to my interpretation of the kid being metaphorical. The piano sounds great--Palmer seems consistently great at doing covers. # ( 5:44 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #33 Five apples will usually defeat four. Coppola's claret's better the third day. Most cars are much too noisy to ignore. Yet they have very little to convey. In the evening, stone ducks won't run from cats. Split pea soup oddly resists exploding. I avoid a variety of fats. But some banks never commence eroding. On the fifth day, the claret's not so great. Plastic plants never want to be broken. Lots of people don't mean there's a long wait. A caterpillar army has woken. Kittens can be consumed by pure wrath. Cats quietly project psychic bloodbath. Looks like I forgot to finish the sonnet yesterday--that's how tired I was. I guess I'll pass last night's four tweets onto the next sonnet, which were; Sink water is pretty clean for the hands. Two glasses of drinking water's not cheap. Dangerous aliens have acid glands. Jeff Bridges has a secret hover jeep. I think I actually got eight hours of sleep to-day and I woke up at 12:30. That's progress. After yesterday's marathon, I think to-day shall be dedicated to slacking off in the most satisfying ways I can manage. With breakfast I watched the new Haruhi Suzumiya. The previous episode had been a pretty low key, "summer vacation" episode where the characters just engaged in various normal summer activities like swimming, lighting fireworks, going to a bon festival, and catching cicadas. To-day's episode featured the characters living through the same events, though with Kyon, the POV character, experiencing deja vu. Eventually, he and the esper character discover Haruhi has trapped them in a time loop of that particular August. This show just keeps being great. Anyway, remember there's a new Venia's Travels online to-day. And here are a couple new cat videos; EDIT I was rather irritated to discover YouTube chopped off the end of the new Snow video below so I deleted it and uploaded a new version with a credits sequence comprised of two periods. Hopefully that's enough image information so no-one freaks out too much from black screen. What the fuck, YouTube? I'll do my own editing, motherfucker. Edit again It got fucked up again. Nevermind, maybe I'll fuck with it later. I'm too hungry now. # ( 12:48 AM ) posted by Setsuled The new Venia's Travels is online. Well, that only took twelve hours. Shit. Still not as bad as the sixteen hours on Chapter eight of Boschen and Nesuko, but, fuck, I'm tired, and I still need to pick up pasta sauce. # Thursday, June 25, 2009 ( 9:15 PM ) posted by Setsuled My tweets last night; On the fifth day, the claret's not so great. Plastic plants never want to be broken. Lots of people don't mean there's a long wait. A caterpillar army has woken. I woke up at 11am and I've been colouring since noon--I coloured three pages over the course of eight hours, and I still have one more page to cover. This largely because I slacked off so much early on--you'd think I'd know better. I feel like a toasted loaf of bread in the rubble of a primitive bakery. The sad thing is, if I could put off colouring now, I can't think of any activity I'd be able to enjoy doing. Headache. It's probably a good think the wine was bad by last night--my head would be filled with masticated twinkie by now. So. I just read about Michael Jackson's death. I guess with Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, this makes three. Though Michael Jackson was actually someone I cared about as a kid--I remember liking Thriller and Captain EO anyway, and seem to remember always getting fixated on the "Billie Jean" music video. I always had a sense that what I was seeing wasn't complete nonsense, that there was definitely something going on, but I couldn't figure out what. Very mysterious, maybe I thought it was something I was too young to understand. Adults wouldn't explain it to me when I asked, though now I suspect it's because they couldn't figure it out, either. Looking at it now, it seems to me to just generally be about the life the singer's smallest actions could take on--that his touch lights up lamp posts and concrete tiles, and then he disappears in a woman's bed at the end. I suppose one could simply look at it as the nature of gossip around a celebrity, but I think there's something more basic about impression and the paths carved from comprehension limited by socially anticipated behaviour. Looking at the lyrics, the most significant one seems to me to be, "be careful of what you do cause the lie becomes the truth." The kid, which doesn't feel like a literal kid but more of a metaphor for lowest common denominator expectation, has to be his son because it's what makes sense to everyone. Anyway, I'd better get back to colouring . . . # Wednesday, June 24, 2009 ( 7:17 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night I tweeted; In the evening, stone ducks won't run from cats. Split pea soup oddly resists exploding. I avoid a variety of fats. But some banks never commence eroding. I just got back from lunch at a franchise Mexican place called Rubio's where, while I was eating, I overheard the conversation of a bunch of young hairy guys in leather, talking about life of a band on tour. The biggest guy told a story about how he and his cohorts had at one point something called a "drilldo", which was a dildo which featured a drill bit that I guess was somehow motorised. He said he and his friends would present the drilldo to girls as part of a "contest" to see who'd take it. He stopped, waiting for laughs, and the other guys, who now that I looked at them, seemed to be much younger than the big guy, laughed weakly. Then the big guy told a story about a girl who went with the band's guitarist after a show to a curtained off area the big guy said, "she thought was the lounge." Apparently she was really embarrassed when the guitarist pulled back the curtain and the rest of the party saw her blowing him. Again, the big guy at Rubio's waited for a laugh, and when the laughter was even weaker than before, he said solemnly, "You know what's weird is girls put themselves in that situation." Yes, funny how that works. Human behaviour must seem incredibly strange when you get used to ignoring your own responsibility. It's weird how they just gave me a burrito because I ordered and paid for one. What a bunch of suckers--I basically own the restaurant now. It's interesting the big guy decided it was a good time to pull out those chestnuts, like it was time to induct the younger breed into The War on Women. I'm so tired. Didn't see much sleep to-day and I won't see much to-morrow, either. But I guess that's okay since I have a lot of colouring to do . . . # Tuesday, June 23, 2009 ( 7:14 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; Five apples will usually defeat four. Coppola's claret's better the third day. Most cars are much too noisy to ignore. Yet they have very little to convey. Stayed up much too late again last night. Part of the problem is just that I'm so hardwired for the nocturnal schedule--I feel much more alert at night, even if I'm tired from lack of sleep the day before, and when I've finished eating dinner, I find myself compulsively doing random things. I almost started playing World of Warcraft, but stopped myself by saying, "If you're awake enough for WoW, you're awake enough to colour your comic." I applied the same self-remonstrance when I almost watched an episode of Evangelion and then almost started watching a movie. This was 4am, mind you. What I did do was burn a bunch of files to disk to make room for yet more downloads, and while the disk was burning, I reached into my desk drawer and found these;  My family brought them back for me from their trip to Hawaii a couple years ago. I rather like them--they remind me of Tom Waits' "Shore Leave"--"and I bought a long sleeved shirt with horses on the front and some gum and a lighter and a knife and a new deck of cards with girls on the back." Though I guess the girl on these cards kind of bears an unfortunate resemblance to Orson Welles. I played Solitaire while the disk burned--it'd been a long time since I'd played with real cards, though I used to play all the time in high school, usually when I was supposed to be working on something. I played twice last night and lost twice, which made me again think the computer Solitaire is rigged--I always win on the computer, and I have to wonder if a bunch of people complained about never winning so Microsoft doctored it. It would make sense to me, since I see this as a culture increasingly ill-equipped to face disappointment or unpleasantness. I guess that might be inevitable when an entire culture is in the process of uploading itself into a virtual environment--the point is it's safer, you're not actually in a room with someone where you might have to account for yourself or acknowledge you're in a disadvantaged position. Video games can be hard, but stress is increasingly taken away from the prospect of "losing"--in World of Warcraft, death just means you need to run back to your body from the graveyard. Kids these days should try playing the Japanese Super Mario Brothers 2--released as Lost Levels in America in the collections, not to be confused with the game originally released in the U.S. as 2, which was actually a very different game. Japanese Super Mario Brothers 2 was a hard motherfucking game, and even Mario 1 was a considerable bitch near the end--unless you performed the careful trick of stomping a koopa shell from a very precise angle in world three-- --you otherwise only have a few lives before you're sent back to the beginning of the game, which means there's tremendous pressure to get the timing and coordination right with Mario's sensitive physics; And when you did it, you really felt like you accomplished something. In games these days, I just feel ashamed the longer it takes me to beat them, and when I do, I just feel like I got what I had a right to. It's gotten so that it's often like watching a movie you need to make adjustments for, at least in terms of accomplishing something through skill. There's the beautiful virtual world to explore aspect, that games like Oblivion and World of Warcraft have. But as I was telling Tim the other day, I wish Blizzard would maybe have an unannounced "realism day" for WoW, where suddenly anyone can attack anyone, regardless of faction, getting run through would automatically kill you, bleeding would diminish your ability to function normally, characters would need to eat and sleep--maybe even include sex and pregnancy. That would be a sim. Sure, it's nice to have a game I can play while getting drunk, but there used to be other kinds of games. Don't mistake this for a right wing philosophy. In real life, yes, I believe everyone has a right to health and the ability to pursue happiness. Real life is too precious to fuck around with. Maybe if we had more games and art with higher stakes more people would be able to appreciate that. # Monday, June 22, 2009 ( 8:45 PM ) posted by Setsuled Yes, I know I forgot to say, "Please." The music is "New Shoes" by Angelo Badalamenti from the second Twin Peaks soundtrack. Twitter Sonnet #32 All my energy sleeps with the pasta. Space gods drained me dry on the first of May. My massive scanner is not from NASA. Nintendo Cylon heads would be flat grey. A small grey mob has taken the concrete. Doozers shall change radishes to fuel. Please tell car companies not to compete. Shanghai Lily is on call through Yule. Pez dispensers can't feed you for a week. Dusk is overcrowded with fishermen. A wealth of feeding tubes beset the meek. Consider the gravid grace of the hen. Good eggs might be ghosts in the glib present. Their broken shells make life sharply pleasant. I was really sleepy yesterday for some reason, and it wasn't until around 11:30pm that I finished pencilling a page. This is pretty sharp contrast to Saturday, when I pencilled and inked two pages. I have a backlog of pages to colour now and still three pages to draw. Hopefully I won't spend all day on Thursday colouring. I don't know why I was so sleepy yesterday. Amanda Palmer twittered about The Smiths' Hatful of Hollow, which put me in the mood to listen to it, and I ended up just lying down and staring at the ceiling with it playing, rather like Duckie in Pretty in Pink, I guess, except there was no Molly Ringwald for me to mope over. I switched to Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine, which made me feel a little more energetic, but not much. I tried out a couple more anime series this morning--Mushishi and Queen's Blade, mainly on the strength of the fact that both seem to be popular. Mushishi is very pretty, and seems to be courting a kind of Lain meets Princess Mononoke vibe, but it's supernatural entities aren't nearly as imaginative as Mononoke's. The characters speak in an almost ritualistic, halting manner and say very little--combined with the bland creatures, it adds up to an incredibly dull package. Queen's Blade, on the other hand, a far less ambitious series, and is essentially softcore bondage porn about medieval girls with massive breasts fighting each other--a lot of the drama seems to be concerned with who's going to be topless next. The size of the breasts make them a little too silly and the skin is a little too shiny for my taste, and the unrealistic armour deflates a lot of the tension for me, but if you happen to like those physical attributes, and you're into bondage, you might want to give this series a try. At the very least, you'll want to see the bunny girl with hands in her hair that squeeze her breasts to spray glowing pink, acidic milk on her enemies. # Sunday, June 21, 2009 ( 7:26 PM ) posted by Setsuled Who's hungry? A lot of these go by so fast, I think they deserve closer examination.  It took me a while to figure out these were doors open a crack with the shadow of a man projecting through across the floor. The spirit of sugar hesitates just outside your room.  "Um, yes, for dessert I'd like to order whatever would most make me feel socially backward." Speaking as someone who generally doesn't like cake, I have to say this does actually capture cake's True Form for me--it makes me feel nauseous looking at it before I eat it and really unhappy about myself afterwards for having eaten it.  I still don't get it. Pickled mummy?  This looks like something Leland Palmer would enjoy for Father's Day. This is all from the opening to an anime series called Honey and Clover, a josei series, which means its target audience is women, ages 18 and up. I watched the first episode this morning, and the show itself isn't nearly as strange as the opening suggests, and seems to be concerned with the lives of a group of pretty college guys living in a dorm together and this girl;  Who's, believe it or not, supposed to be 18 years old. The men in the picture are ages 18 to 24. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in anime--I'm reminded of Tenma from School Rumble and the entire cast of Lucky Star. It's played for humour in School Rumble, but a lot of times I get a weird feeling this is some kind of sly indulgence for paedophilia--"We'll cast a ten year old and just say she's an eighteen year old." Who can really argue the motives for a stylistic choice? And yet, this is josei, and a very popular series. What appeal could this have for women? My guess would be that it completely desexualises the POV character for the audience. If one presumes there's nothing to do with paedophilia going on, then one sees the two male characters that instantly fall in love with the girl in the first episode as having only the most chaste infatuation with her beauty. The more disturbing subtext is so enormous, though, it's hard to believe it's unintentional until one thinks of something like Twilight, and maybe looking at Honey and Clover one can get an idea of what someone outside our culture sees when watching abstinence porn like Twilight. I may need to keep watching this series, at least for a few more episodes. I really don't know if the disturbing reflections of sexual repression are entirely unselfconscious, and it might be fascinating in either case. With dinner last night, I watched "Doppelgangland", a third season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer written and directed by Joss Whedon, and rather disappointing after the past couple very nice episodes--and I figured out why I enjoyed the early Whedon episodes more when I was younger; they're written with sitcom logic. In most of the early Whedon episodes, characters are permitted to lie extremely obviously and other characters will believe them for comedic effect. I'm glad there's less and less of this as the series goes on, because it really undermines the subtler character work writers like Jane Espenson and Marti Noxon are doing in the other episodes. My tweets from last night; A small grey mob has taken the concrete. Doozers shall change radishes to fuel. Please tell car companies not to compete. Shanghai Lily is on call through Yule. # Saturday, June 20, 2009 ( 5:35 PM ) posted by Setsuled Last night's tweets; All my energy sleeps with the pasta. Space gods drained me dry on the first of May. My massive scanner is not from NASA. Nintendo Cylon heads would be flat grey. Last night's spider in my bathroom; The music this time is "Brand New Lovesong" by The Pillows from the FLCL soundtrack and "Into a Dream" from the His and Her Circumstances--I think it was written by Shiro Sagisu, but I'm having trouble finding information on it. The past few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I've watched have really raised the bar on the series--"The Zeppo", "Bad Girls", and "Consequences". Faith and Xander have suddenly become the show's first truly well drawn characters, in my opinion. It's refreshing to see Xander so pathetically vulnerable after the first two seasons where everyone inexplicably put up with him being a dick. "The Zeppo" brings to the spotlight the season-long subplot about Xander's feelings of inadequacy that come together over late adolescent insecurities mixed with feelings of diminished masculinity among girls who are far more capable than him. Though "The Zeppo" takes a pretty humdrum tact by employing a peer-pressure plot that forces Xander to behave out of character in several instances while a subplot about the rest of the gang saving the world being downplayed for comedic effect annoyingly diminishes what's normally the show's main plot, it sets Xander up well for the succeeding episodes. "Bad Girls" was improbably nice--Buffy and Faith turning into a two girl gang could've easily been corny, but actually comes off very cool--I rather wish it'd gone on a few more episodes, but Faith's inability to face what she'd done at the end of "Bad Girls" is perfectly dealt with in "Consequences" as she attempts to harden herself. There's an amazing feeling of reality to the portrayal of her character, and innocent Xander is the perfect contrast; he wants to help, but he's pathetically ill equipped to do so. It's not as funny as it usually is because you can sense how badly Faith needs help and the fact that the person who most wants to help simply can't is terribly sad, and Faith nearly killing him doesn't make you hate her. It's a great moment.  It's weird how it's already starting to feel like crossover moments when Angel's onscreen, though I'm sure they were already planning the spin-off series at this point. Before starting the rewatching of Buffy, the last season of Angel was the most recent Buffy-verse thing in my mind, and it's really strange to see the sorts of characters Wesley and Cordelia are at this point. I guess they changed gradually enough I didn't really notice, but the differences we're supposed to take five years as making to the characters seem impossible. I guess I don't mind, though, except Cordelia became more obnoxious when she grew wiser. Grocery shopping last night, I only bought Francis Ford Coppola products--a jar of his puttanesca sauce and a bottle of his claret. Haven't tried the wine yet, but his wine's usually pretty good. Hopefully I'll be able to have some to-night, but I have a lot of drawing to do . . . # Friday, June 19, 2009 ( 9:41 PM ) posted by Setsuled Twitter Sonnet #31 I met several spiders throughout the day. All work and treks to-day were slowly done. When the bat's away the zombies will play. I think some people seem bored of fun. Some buttons will do bonus secret things. Apple products oughta be edible. Prefab hardware is the domain of kings. To serfs it's sweet but indigestible. To-night mixed Malibu and Bacardi. Called it the "I Have Enough Rum" cocktail. It probably makes some kind of party. But I fear inertia shall yet prevail. A cat sits precisely in the centre. Of a room that's only real in winter. It's odd how the day where I got plenty of sleep turns out to be lazier than the day where I got barely any. Maybe it's because on days where I haven't slept I tend always to feel like I'm forgetting something. When I've had enough sleep, I kind of don't care if I'm forgetting anything. So to-day I went to lunch with my mother and sister and then watched Out of the Past with my sister. Always an enjoyable movie. With breakfast to-day I watched the new episode of Haruhi Suzumiya, the second new episode of this season, broadcast three weeks after the first. The first season, released in 2006, was initially broadcast out of chronological order, creating a different narrative by putting the bigger events near the end and some of the more low key events that take place later, earlier in the series, which also gave the show a fascinating non-linear feel. Then one watched the show in chronological order and appreciated it in a different way, and now the old episodes are being presented in a chronological order but with fourteen episodes dispersed among them, and already I'm seeing lines in the older episodes suddenly taking on new meaning from the context. It's almost like Brion Gysin's cut-up technique being applied to a show. That some of the episodes involve time travel adds yet another layer of fun. This is shaping up to be a good year for anime, with the next season of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei premiering next month. I only hope it's fansubbed by a group willing to encode their files properly. I found myself watching a lot of Chuck Berry videos to-day for some reason. This set of clips someone put together gives some interesting perspective; It's weird how he's not talked about as much as other rock legends. I suppose part of the problem is that he's still touring. It reminds me of Peter Bogdanovich saying on the Citizen Kane DVD commentary how Orson Welles predicted people would love him when he was dead--and it's true. The years before his death, Welles was reduced to doing commercials and hosting cheesy TV documentaries, unable to get funding for his own projects. But after his death, he became a god in the world of cinema. I suppose it all has to do with ego. Well, I've wasted too much of to-day. I'd better get to the grocery store . . . # |
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