Somebody asked me to do some Dwarf Fortress fan art, oh, like six months ago. I’ve been working on it quite a bit, off and on, and I think I’m finally getting somewhere.
Archive for ‘comics’
I went down to the Anti-Israeli War on Gaza protest today. I’m sorry, I didn’t take any pictures.
The reason I didn’t take any pictures is that it was the most standard, ordinary protest I’ve ever been to in my life. If I had to pick one protest to describe the average Austin protest in the least exciting terms, it would be this protest. If I asked you to imagine a protest in front of the capitol, the protest you imagined would be this one. It was about a hundred deeply committed-looking, sincere-looking folks standing at the very front of the capitol carrying signs and chanting the exact same slogans we’ve been chanting for a while now.
Exact same. For a long time. I was there maybe half an hour, that’s all they did, chant slogans. I hate chanting slogans. I don’t mind if you do it; I find it rather peaceful to listen to, but I personally will only rarely chant slogans. Not my thing, man. But anyway, a guy chanted slogans for about twenty minutes. Then he mentioned that they’re trying to get Austin City Council to pass a resolution condemning the attack on Gaza, which was odd, because we were at the State Capitol at the time. But I understood where he was coming from. Austin City Council would at least let them speak on the issue. They know they’d never even get a hearing at the state house.
Then he handed the mike to a lady and she went through the chants again, but in a woman’s voice. Everybody dutifully chanted along. The best one was “Netanyahu you can’t hide, something something genocide.”
I truly feel that the war in Palestine deserves some new chants. It seems to me that all really good political chants are based on schoolyard song rhythms. A political chant is really just a hundred people yelling “eenie-meanie-minie-moe” with different lyrics. The situation in Palestine is sufficiently grave to deserve some of America’s much-vaunted cultural skillz. We can come up with a few jingles for them, guys.
There were a heartening number of people honking their horns as they drove by. The secondary benefits of a protest, which are really the only benefits there are, were in evidence. People were meeting each other, receiving reciprocal confirmation that there were others out there. Chanting slogans has a semi-mystical emotional effect on people, putting them in some sort of deep synchronization, or polarity maybe. Some money was raised. Attractive politically active folks met, creating opportunities for more liberal anti-war babies someday. Most of all, it does the heart good to get out there and see a community of disparate people who are all moved enough on this issue to try to find parking downtown on a weekday. In this city that qualifies as commitment.
So we didn’t change anyone’s mind, but we felt easier in our own. No pro-Israeli groups bothered to make an appearance, and why should they? They know they can’t defend what’s happening. And they know that they don’t have to, that nobody is going to listen to us anyway; not only at this protest, but ever. Israel gets to do what they want to the Palestinians and nobody really knows why. It’s just the way it’s all turned out. You can’t expect a protest group to come out and demonstrate in favor of an injustice that isn’t even under threat. It would be like cops demonstrating in favor of the prison system.
They’re not listening. Nobody’s listening. We’re all just tired and don’t know what to do. It’s not our country. It’s more or less our country’s fault, but when you consider how much trouble we’re having even getting our country to listen to us in our country it becomes a little less immediate.
After all, here we are on the capitol steps, talking about going down the street to city hall, because we know for a fact our state would rather choke to death than listen to us, on this issue or any other.
Israel is one of the true intractable s of American life, like gun control. It’s utterly polarized and neither side has any interest in the other’s proposals. I am an example of this partisan gridlock, I am really not interested in Israel’s plans to kill the fuck out of the Palestinians and I think Israel’s been behaving like a bad neighbor in general for a while now. You can’t hijack aid convoys and still be a good guy in my eyes, and I have to admit that I’m pretty fed up with the number of corpses they seem to need to feed a “dream of peace.”
But nobody actually cares what I think on this subject. No minds can be changed, no policies will be rethought. Just the subtle grinding of icebergs of public opinion, and a hope that things will change somehow before another person dies over there.
Whoops, another person died while I was typing that sentence.
Well, anyway, soon. Maybe someday soon enough people will decide it’s stupid to try to kill another type of person into submission so that we won’t do it anymore. As much. Maybe. I hope.
I personally don’t plan on killing anybody. Raise my daughter to not kill anyone. Trite generalities like that, that’s all I have. Against the certain knowledge that somewhere on the other side of the world bombs are falling on unlucky children.
My LJ-etiquette has really suffered lately, and I do apologize. It’s oddly tricky to post the same blog in three different places. I miss LJ and it makes perfect sense that I should be able to post to both my blog and LJ at the same time — it’s the exact same concept, the exact same words.
But yet I keep messing it up.
I’ve been spending the morning with pure evil.
Peggy Noonan, discussing waterboarding in 2009 and whether or not the Bush administration should be found accountable:
“Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. …”
aaaaand HITLER! Hitler’s opinions about art:
I have observed among the pictures submitted here, quite a few paintings which make one actually come to the conclusion that the eye shows things differently to certain human beings than the way they really are, that is, that there really are men who see the present population of our nation only as rotten cretins; who, on principle, see meadows blue, skies green, clouds, sulfur yellow, and so on, or, as they say, experience them as such. I do not want to enter into an argument here about the question of whether the persons concerned really do or do not see or feel in such a way; but, in the name of the German people, I want to forbid these pitiful misfortunates who quite obviously suffer from an eye disease, to try vehemently to foist these products of their misinterpretation upon the age we live in, or even to wish to present them as “Art.”
No, here there are only two possibilities: Either these so-called “artists” really see things this way and therefore believe in what they depict; then we would have to examine their eyesight-deformation to see if it is the product of a mechanical failure or of inheritance. In the first case, these unfortunates can only be pitied; in the second case, they would be the object of great interest to the Ministry of Interior of the Reich which would then have to take up the question of whether further inheritance of such gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes cannot at least be checked. If, on the other hand, they themselves do not believe in the reality of such impressions but try to harass the nation with this humbug for other reasons, then such an attempt falls within the jurisdiction of the penal law.”
I’ve actually been looking for that quote since I briefly saw it and eternally misremembered it in 2002, it’s a real pleasure to have finally found it.
Hannibal is some goofy shit.
I can’t pay attention to it but I enjoy having it on. It’s sort of like Walking Dead, except I enjoy having it on.
Who could follow the plot? It’s based on zig-zagging as wildly as possible as they can from the books, and as a lover of the books I find that a bit goofy. I guess that’s how True Blood fans feel, but they deserve what they get.
I am having a good music time right now.
There are few albums that create such a strong impression of place and happening for me as Do Make Say Think’s classic album, Do Make Say Think. It has four songs and they’re called Do, Make, Say, and Think. Each one is over ten minutes long. The whole thing can be considered a very conceptual best-of, where one of the coolest post-rock bands takes everything they do right and puts it on one album. It makes me think of walking around cornfields in the dark under a quarter moon.
That’s the only song with words. I think, if you make a fifty-minute album and you only use words once, they should be interesting and intriguing and poetic. Well done, then, my good band, you have passed another one of my challenges.
“Standing up or standing out.”
Is that a choice? If so, what one do I choose?
The sort of thing I think about while wandering cornfields at night.
I have so many more ideas for things than I’ll ever get around to. Here’s one:
Okay, so it begins with mass suicides of bankers. But it turns out that they’re actually being kidnapped by aliens who drag them into fictional worlds and use their combination of rationality and trauma to be used as weapons against other aliens, essentially firing bankers out of banker cannons. This leads to the collapse of the world financial system, but it also leads to people exploring and tracking the aliens. It turns out that there is a type of energy in fiction, that collective consciousness does actually create an energy field that is much weaker than gravity but very constant and, more to the point, capable of treating 3d space like 2d. The aliens travel, essentially, by rotating the psychosphere until two points are adjacent, then stepping through.
Eventually, though the aliens are gone, humans discover the transport system they used to get there. The only thing to do is to send lots of teenagers into the system to let them explore it and try to figure out what’s going on. Teenagers that survive and return with useful artifacts are given enormous bounties.
The story needs a Jeff Goldblum hippy professor who explains it all while whacked out of his gourd on Yage or something and a main character whose main characteristic is that they never, ever panic. That’s how Kit Carson was so good at pioneering things, he never panicked.
Actually, you need Daniel Boone and Squire Boone in there too. It can mostly be about how shitty and insane pioneers can be. You could get a couple chapters out of wacky pioneer stories happening in Grant Morrison-space.
I bet religion would have a whole different meaning out in the Phlogiston. People would have to literally build Belief Beacons so they could navigate.
So the main story is about how these characters, let us say Hot Teenagers #1 -#5, representing all five genders (because gender constructs would definitely be a tangible thing in the Phlogiston) use their wilderness perspective to actually tangibly discover whatever the fuck is wrong with people. Out there in ideaspace they discover a device that actually detects evil. So they come back to earth, and they detect the most evillest conspiracy they can — Halliburton. And they instantly discover they can’t bring it down (I assume because Halliburton kills a few of them), so what one of them does is use their inside information to construct oodles of evidence that they themselves are in on the conspiracy, then trick the police into getting caught and revealing all their accomplices.
So the last time I asked for comments and criticism about my comic, it turns out that I’d disabled commenting by accident. So I guess it’s worth trying again; does anyone have any thoughts they might like to share about Feef, this story which we are engaged in?
Starts here:
http://unnecessaryg.com/artwork/feef/index.html
After watching a human mind “boot up,” I do think I understand us a little better. I definitely understand parents better.
It’s amazing how quickly she learned to respond to images. Watching movies and TV was something that she had down almost from birth. I guess it’s not amazing that we made an object that conforms to our instincts. But she learned to recognize herself and her loved ones in still photographs with a speed that I found nearly alarming.
The image-based portion of our brains is so powerful. So powerful, and so far from our control. It is literally true that you can influence, control, and program the mind with images alone; after all, that’s what writing is.