Archive for June, 2008
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Bullshit Quotient
I read a lot of webcomics.
Like…a lot. I used to work in an office where my job consisted, mainly, of filling in a number of colored blocks on an excel spreadsheet, and making sure that within a given time, I spread the needed amount of work to be done, evenly with those blocks. Simultaneously, I was supposed to make sure that I didn’t use the same blocks too often.
I know, this sounds oddly like one of the original games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It also sounds like…Scheduling. It WAS scheduling. The relevance to my point, is that filling in the colored blocks required very little of my time. In fact, in a given day I could fill in the blocks in approx. 15 minutes. Now if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that with that kind of …alacrity, I was left with 7 some-odd hours of time each day to sit at my desk and stare into nothing like a malfunctioning robot.
So I started reading webcomics.
I had Penny Arcade on the radar for a long time, but having read it as often as I did, there wasn’t much in the archives to rely on to maintain my sanity. I started reading PvP, Dominic Deegan, Scary-Go-Round, Goats, Wigu.com, VG Cats, and an endless list that could take up the rest of this post, but whatever. There’s shitloads of webcomics out there, and I read many of them.
And a lot of them suck balls.
Like…genuinely awful work. The art in a lot of them is half-assed, but that’s something that I can get past pretty easily. What amazes me, as a writer, is how fucking shitty the story in a lot of these are. And to top it off, is something even more insidious, and I’ve even DONE it.
Referencing OTHER comics and pop culture.
Oh god. I feel dirty every time I do it, but there are more than a few comics that make it their exclusive demesne.
I’ve been an advocate for a long time of referential dialogue. I believe that referencing popular cultural moments from television, film and music, have the capacity to raise the bandwidth of our communication. Not only can I convey the circumstances of an event, but I can also place you in a specific emotional context, all through referential dialogue. That’s powerful stuff.
My issue with webcomics, and in the greater sense all creative endeavours, that rely solely on referential dialogue, is that they lose the thrust of their own message in the act of co-opting the referent. Using these symbols isn’t a bad thing, until your own intent is lost. At that point we’re simply engaging in emotional masturbation.
So I don’t want to name any names, but god damn it Kurtz, sometimes your work chafes my friggin’ nuts.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Argue: Where two people scream at each other
And nobody changes their mind about SHIT.
I was privvy to a second-hand conversation about Anime a little while ago, in which the proponent of said claimed that nothing could ever be considered Anime that didn’t come from Japan. And that he wasn’t interested in anything other than the “bleeding edge” (a phrase I fucking HATE btw) content coming out of Japan.
That was it. He dismissed everything else, out of hand.
Fuck. There are few things in this universe that will instantly arouse my ire more than somebody who just writes something off without even considering it.
For instance: Many moons ago, I was somebody that took a massive shit on anything that Michael Bay has ever directed. But I realized, to my consternation, that I really hadn’t seen much of his work. It was a reputation that I believed in, not empirical data. I must SEE his work. SO I watched Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon…now the next movie would have been Pearl Harbor, which probably would have killed me, but since I was too busy nibbling the barrel of a shotgun, I was unable to press “play”. I had determined, for myself, that his work was the lowest quality schlock. If they didn’t hate one another, Bay and Uwe Boll could start a club.
My point was that I was doing something that I myself hated. I was dismissing him out of hand, without having seen any of the work I was shitting on. Now if you’ve ever compared JPN vs. US animated items, you can probably understand 2nd Hand Conversation’s objection to North American content. It’s shit, a lot of it. Okay pretty much ALL OF IT.
But here’s a quote from that conversation:
“Someone has to prove to me that, over a long period of time, original english stuff is better than stuff produced in Japan”
Are you fucking kidding?
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Western Plague Lands
I’ve been sick as a bugger for the last 3 days.
My brother made some off-hand comment about his throat being scratchy, and the next day I woke up with Typhus. or Polio. I can’t figure out which…
I’ve been tasked with the job of coming up with a Lexicon for the Panda Girls treatment. A document specifying particulars words that will bear high significance in our world. I compared it, on the Axe and Crom comic site, to words like “Switch”, “Plugged In” “Agents” (some of these are two words….sue me).
It can feel like an exercise at times; writing these words for Axe and the movie. But all too often I realize, midway through something, that it wasn’t just Axe sending me to the Bronx for a sugar cookie: He had something specific in mind, and the outcome will be important. This is a good lesson to take away: Sometimes, you’re wrong.
Jesus…sometimes I’m RIGHT. The rest of the time I’m just shitting things up.
I’m going to drink a bunch of Neo-Citron now, and pass out for nine hours.
Later Bitches,
C