Category: Connections

Brendan painstakingly imitates a Photoshop filter, third in a series

January 23, 2008 /

I will probably never love another episode of television as much as I love Battlestar Galactica, season 3, episode 9, “Unfinished Business.” And not just because it has images like this:

GET UP. We're just getting STARTED.

I’ve spent at least the last year and a half (actually, more like seven years, since my undergrad Drawing I class) being obsessed with this limited-tone art style. I called it “rotoscoping” once, and Lisa and Will jumped on me because there’s no animation involved, so I have to admit that it’s actually what people call “tracing.” But selective tracing.

As was likely very obvious to anyone in my family, and as I only realized yesterday, my playing around with tone is blatantly derived from my uncle John’s painting and wood engraving work, especially his portraits of my grandfather (which he often combines with layered collage). Mr. Olmos there has some features similar to his, like the disappearing eyes which Ian and I inherited. I hope I get to look that craggy eventually. Right now people are still asking me what my major is, despite the obvious gray in my hair.

I almost forgot to mention that this is the first thing I’ve ever inked with the brushes I bought in 2003, and although it was a lot slower than my usual pens, I completely get why cartoonists get so excited about it now. There’s a feeling of dynamic control over the line weight that you just can’t get with pens, even the brush pen with which I inked a lot of later Xorph strips. (Not that there are actually any distinct lines in the finished images below. Good.)

So I made a picture and it’s a wallpaper if you want it: the images below link to 1600×1200 and 1600×1000 (widescreen) jpegs. There’s also a browser-sized version if you just want to zoom in a bit.

Adama at standard ratio, with logo.

Adama at normal ratio, no logo.

PS Can Battlestar Galactica be back on now plz

Update 2008.01.26 0001 hrs: Naturally, UJ has a much more cogent post on the subject (the art, not Battlestar), along with one of the portraits I was talking about.

You are hereby ordered to waste your afternoon

January 22, 2008 /

Everybody should be reading Starslip Crisis, and if you’re not, you need to start. With the Spine of the Cosmos. Once you’re done with that–if you just want to get the stuff that majorly advances the plot–you can read about the Ars Ad Astra gala, the Starslip Catastrophe, the Battle of Cirbozoid, the subsequent Glorysong, the Shark Time Jump, the Battle of Terra and… well, just read everything from that onward, it’s pretty recent. Then get kind of put out that you have to wait until tomorrow for the next one. Then go back to the beginning and read all the other stuff in between, because you’ll see the way all the story arcs tag into each other in startling and funny ways.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever love Starslip like I loved Checkerboard Nightmare, but come on, it’s still in the top five comic strips ever made. Reading back through to do this roundup, I noticed that some of the random-seeming asides are actually jokes that have just taken years to pay off. That’s Arrested Development-level, man.

Read Starslip Crisis.

Bing bong bing

January 21, 2008 /

I downloaded LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 because it’s the first album I’d heard of that was specifically designed to be run to. Unfortunately it’s way too slow for that, but it’s still pretty good music. I had been rating everything on it three or four stars on iTunes, and suddenly–halfway through a song I’d already rated–I found my mouse hovering over the five-star button. Because somebody had started playing chimes.

This is a serious problem and I don’t know what to do about it. As soon as a song incorporates chimes, handbells or tone bars of any kind–especially, as they are often used, in counterpoint–I will unconsciously decide that it is the greatest song ever and listen to it ten times in a row. I can’t help it!

I would say that this is a flaw in my musical taste, but it is widely agreed that my musical taste already consists largely of flaws. This is a crack in the very foundations of my aesthetic sensibilities. It is a metaflaw. Chimes are a sloppy exploit for the kernel of my brain.

Someone recommend a song that will ruin chimes for me forever. I want to change.

The Cryptid Epiphany

January 7, 2008 /

I know this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to smugly bury, when you’re writing, but I have this obsession with transparency? So here’s an example of how sometimes the world just drops stuff into your lap.

Almost a year ago I started writing stories about Proserpina, another name for Persephone, probably most well-known for the thing with Hades. In the very first one I threw in a remark about “her faded black tattoos.”

Later I decided to add an Australian of European descent, and only later did it occur to me that I’d set up her semi-suitor as an older man from “down there.” Right?

Then last week I decided to bring the tattoo thing back in, so I had to come up with a rationale for it. Poking around on Wikipedia led me to tā moko, traditional Maori tattooing; apparently New Zealand was becoming more economically entwined with Australia toward the end of the 19th century, so that’s a reasonable connection. Then I looked up the origin story of tā moko.

It’s about a man who descends into the underworld to find the wife he drove away. Persephone inverted.

I have traditionally viewed with skepticism the English-lit platform of divorcing the author from the work, but man, I could not have done this on purpose. The title of this entry comes from a discussion I had with Leonard a while back about his writing process; apparently this kind of thing happens to him all the damn time. I understood the sensation of epiphanic writing when he described it, but I couldn’t find any examples to hold up from my own corpus. This is about as close as I’ve come.

Mild ethical issues here: there’s a growing concern among Maori that moko is being appropriated by whites who have neither full grasp of nor entitlement to the art form, and, well, I’m kind of doing that. My defense is that I do plan to set it up with an explicit Maori connection, somehow, and to respect the source. I’m not sure whether recontextualization of a minority culture’s mythology is inherently evil or not, but I do think it’s inevitable. Origin stories are virulently memetic because they’re supposed to be. Eventually I’ll have to do a theme-post about how often I rip off and mash up mythology I don’t really understand.

I always thought Rowling gave arithmancy short shrift

December 28, 2007 /

Stories I have written that revolve around invented or reinterpreted methods of divination: Stella, Jaboullei, Rob, Shekel and Jewel. I was kind of surprised it was this few–I feel like it’s one of the structures to which I keep returning. There’s another one coming Monday, if you hadn’t guessed.

I think the reason I keep coming back to this is a variation on the existential dread I feel when considering the persistence of objects (eg the lives of sapient dishes): the amount of potential information in the world, and how quickly our ability to capture and interpret it is growing, and how insignificant that capability will always be–in an obscure way, these things terrify me. They also thrill me. Look at what we can discover! If time and distance are the universe’s crypto, divination is the original side channel attack.

I also live in constant fear of side channel attacks, by the way, to the point where I have resigned myself to much-more-likely primary channel attacks. I kind of never want to be even mildly famous, as that would destroy what flimsy comfort I take in anonymity.

Anyway, you’ll know I’ve gutted the shark on this theme when I write the one about logymancy. Meanwhile I want to do more of these little collect-and-explain entries; I think they’d be a better point of entry to Anacrusis for new or hesitant readers than just the sheer blank mass of the archives. When one of my best friends refers to my writing corpus as “a stupid amount” and my own mother is too intimidated to read them, I am pretty much failing to sell my product.

Okay look I finally wrote my fanfic post

December 21, 2007 /

Every two weeks I post a new bit of what is, I must reluctantly admit, Star Wars fan fiction. This week I made Han Solo a girl. Andy really liked that, and this started as a response to his commentary.

Luke and Leia hold at least as much mythic significance most people of our generation as, say, Theseus and Ariadne would have held to your typical Athenian. Putting them onstage applies a certain pressure of reader expectation to your plot; twisting that can have the same effect as subverting other, more generalized social norms, and has the benefit of coming from an unexpected direction. Sumana’s excellent post about slash and subversion points out that such twists can “disorient and reorient” your experience of the original work. It’s exactly what Euripides did with Medea, and Virgil with Aeneas (and Dante with Virgil).

But since our high-information society allows–indeed, legally requires–traceback to the writer who first introduced any given character into our awareness, we no longer have stories that seem to have spontaneously informed our culture. When every dollar has a serial number, there is no common coin. The consensus-approved solution is to wait until the story you want to rewrite is a) old and respectable and b) in the public domain, and right now, the former still takes longer. The problem is that the rate at which we produce stories is accelerating, and a story that fills the Western imagination one year will likely have been forgotten in the tide of newcomers eighty years later. This is what fanfic tries to solve.

My basic conceptual issue with fanfic is that it caters mostly to niche audiences; it tends to reinforce cliques and generate closed language instead of transcending boundaries and bringing together disparate audiences (props again to Sumana for illuminating that distinction, although at the time it was in the context of neo-web projects). Cross-genre fiction appeals to a unity of two groups, where crossover fanfic appeals only to an intersection. In that way I actually have more sympathy for stories written in the context of ultra-popular milieu: you can parse and enjoy Star Wars fanfic without being a Star Wars fan. If you’re alive and reading English in 2007, it very likely has connotations and relevance to you.

Of course, by the same token, the word “fanfic” has enormous connotations (and connotations of enormity) to people who’ve been internetting for a while. It’s usually either a sniveling kleptomania that must be stamped out or a persecuted child who must be defended. I maintain that fanfic is a gradient based on how well you hide your influences, that authors who deride fanfic as stealing could use a strong dose of self-examination, and that I personally prefer work on the better-hidden end of the scale because that means you had to do the work of hiding it. Lazy fiction is not good fiction, and I say that as someone who is pretty lazy, pretty often.

There is another thing some do to moustache and it costs, I am told, a nickel

November 1, 2007 /

Can you believe Sam Elliott’s IMDB photo shows him without a moustache? I mean, it doesn’t even look like him!

Sam Elliott, clean-shaven.

Ian and I typed almost simultaneously today that his only real job in Tombstone (which I finally saw, and did anyone else realize that Ben Foster was doing a Val Kilmer imitation throughout 3:10 to Yuma?) was to grow a moustache, which is also what he did in The Big Lebowski and (apparently) Ghost Rider. Looks like he’ll be reprising that role in The Golden Compass. You can’t argue with success.

Sam Elliott, moustachioed.

I guess it’s like they say: some are born to moustache, some achieve moustache, and some have moustache thrust upon them.

Sam Elliott, action figure.

I’m willing to bet that anyone who meets Sam Elliott quickly becomes the latter.