How I Will Improve My Skills as an Artist

     Yesterday I posted about wanting to improve my artistic skills. Alright. Since I know where I am, (pointy point A) and where I want to be (pointy point B), it's fairly easy to figure out how to get there.

   THINGS I'VE GOT TO IMPROVE

   I've never been a big fan of my own line work, but it might be just one of those inescapable things that come with your own style, like the sound of your own voice. As it is, though, I just think that my lines are kind of weak. Tablets work for me, though. Maybe I could digitize my pencil underwork and use the tablet instead of traditional pen work. Couldn't hurt.

   Another thing I need to learn is coloring. I was never much one for coloring books as a child, and they say that coloring is one of those things more for left-brained people, but coloring with light and shadow effects is really important for the illusion that the drawing is depicting a three-dimensional space.

   THINGS THAT ARE GOOD ENOUGH AS TO IMPROVE NATURALLY, HOPEFULLY

   Posing and proportions of figures, as well as perspective, including three-dimensionality of figures. I'm not quite the best at the underlying shapes that comprise figures yet, but I think I'm good enough not to have to worry about it.

   THINGS THAT ARE FINE AS IT IS

  Design and attitude. I guess that's something that can't be taught. I've got my style, and I suppose a keen eye for what works and what doesn't. What really matters, though, is a love for the craft. I'm not going to lie and say there's no end of that, but there's certainly not a shortage of it.

Past, Present (which is actually slightly in the past, but not enough for anything of any real significance to happen within the timeframe) and Future (hopefully.)

   They call the things I did the past, and the things I am doing the present. They call the past the past because it's passed, though they don't call the present the present because it's a present: rather, they call the present the present because it's pre-sent, or before the future (it involves, like, Latin past participles, which is something up into which we shall not get. Or at least not here.) Likewise, they don't call the things I will have done the future perfect tense for nothing. They call it that because you get the future by combining the present (where we are) with the past (where we have been) and, like, extrapolating them. Thus, the future perfect is a combination of the present and the past, or, in other words, the future perfect is the presast. That is why they say the thing which they say, they thing which they say being "presast makes perfect."

   I once was unskilled, but now am slightly better, and I hope to improve even more. It's not enough to be good, is it? You have to be great, or even the best. At whatever. And at whatever, I practice when I can find time and materials. I do not know the future, but I am an optimist, or at least a realist in a world that's going to rock (see post The Good New Days.)

PAST:

   Since 100% of the art I ever did was done here in the past, it was kind of hard to choose an example. I settled on this pic of a serving wench I drew for Cap'n Patches and the Pieces of Eight, a pirate adventure taking place in a world where dogs and cats sail the high seas:

Ahhh! Kill it! Kill it!

   Alright, I wasn't very proud of that one when I first drew it, (and now I'm putting it on the internet- great) but I feel it's pretty typical of that era (that era being Sophomore to Junior year of high school.) You can see my earlier abortive attempt at drawing digitigrade feet on the top there, then my slightly better version on the bottom. The tail is also slightly better on the bottom one, as on the top it's just sort of pants. The skirt is far too tight to allow any degree of movement whatever on the top; slightly better on the bottom, with, if you'll notice, some curvature on the hemming as it goes away behind the leg from the viewer, giving illusion of a three dimensional space, so that's not bad.

   On the top, it's not that the head is too small; I think the problem here is with the neck. Plus, the face looks like a dude's, which I tried to work out to the right. The forehead slopes too much, and neither thick eyebrows nor thick whiskers are very feminine. Also, I wasn't sure where to place the ears at first, making her look more like a bat or something. This is why nowadays I like doing a pencil under-sketch before doing the inking on top. Not only does it allow for underlying anatomy to be worked out, but it also allows for sort of a quick and dirty preview before the final inking is applied. Which brings us to

PRESENT:

   Just, a drawing I just did right now specifically for this post. That's as close to the present as you can get, making it a pretty good example of where I am right now. Revisiting the world of Cap'n Patches feels good.

   Note, like I said above, how I pencil before I ink. I like the posing of the figures here. I'm actually impressed by my own talents on this one (low expectations, I guess), though there's still a lot left to be desired. It's nothing yet like

FUTURE:

   What I hope to be able to do one day.

Behold the majesty.

   Thomas Novotny over at Ohnitsch Cartoons is one of the more incredible toon artists out there. I guess there's hope for me yet, as he has been getting better ever since he first started posting, though even some of his really sloppy early ones aren't as blinding as some of my own worse ones.

Eh, I guess that's better.

The Price of Your Freedom

   To solve the problem of the price of your freedom, we must keep in mind that the truth will set you free. In other words, You and Freedom, or "your freedom," are put in the set of the Truth. From there, it's a simple logic problem:

{Freedom, You}= Truth
Truth= Beauty
Pretty= Picture
Picture= 1000 words
Talk= Cheap
Cheap= 2 bit
2 bits= 25 cents

Your Freedom= $250

   Plus tip, that's $287.50, payable to any soldier (so long as that soldier is on your side, of course.)

The Most Disappointing Thing

   Looking up the word "velamen," I found it to mean the thick, spongy integument or epidermis covering artificial robots. This was the coolest thing ever. Skin for robots. Then I looked again, and it actually said it was the spongy covering on aerial roots, not artificial robots. This was the most disappointing thing ever.

A New Theory for Your Consideration

   New theory: it was not Hobbes who was imaginary, but Calvin. Bear with me on this.

   In Freudian psychology, we have the id, the ego, and the superego. The superego represents restraint and the id represents impulse, yes? Between them is created to ego. Makes sense so far, right?

   So my theory is that Hobbes represented both the id and the superego, which has between them the mediation in the form of Calvin. Hobbes is more mature than Calvin (obviously) thus representing restraint and superego. But for the mediation of the id and the superego to be such a trouble maker, that would require Hobbes's id to be extremely powerful. He'd have to be like some kind of wild animal or someth... Oh.

   We do see Hobbes's libido (id power) to be quite strong at points. Pouncing on Calvin is, after all, one of his defining character traits. He is shown to have the hots for Susie Derkins, even going as far as to suggest her becoming a member of GROSS- and even, at one point in '96, he is shown to have the hots for Rosalyn the babysitter. He seems to be fair obsessed with smooching, although he'd be the first to admit that he doesn't know where babies come from. And who could forget the "hot tigress babes" of the National Geographic magazine (man, have we been there, brother.)

   You know that Bill Watterson knows enough about psychology to know his basic Freudian theory. The natural extension of a sapient tiger, the wild animal balanced with the philosopher, would obviously be a six-year-old boy who never ages, even as the years go by. Obviously.

  ...

  Yeah, I'm still working on it.

Sparks

   For thousands of years people used to wear woolen clothes and when they took them off at night they saw sparks. I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes? I am sure that they ignored them and the children asked them, Mother, what are these sparks? And I am sure the mother said, you imagine them! People must have been afraid to talk about the sparks so they would not be suspected of being sorcerers and witches. Anyhow, they were ignored, and we know now that they were not hallucinations, that they were real, and that what was behind these sparks was the same power that today drives our industry. And I say that we too in each generation see such sparks that we ignore just because they don't fit into our picture of science or knowledge... 

   I think the notion of science- what is scientific and what is not- will change in time. There are many facts that cannot be worked out in a laboratory, and still they are facts. You cannot show in a laboratory that there has every been a Napoleon, you can't prove it as clearly as you can an electric current, but we know there was a Napoleon.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

What This Blog is About

   I use, like I said, a lot of my ideas in my fiction, so the things here have got to stand alone. What that leaves is my art that is unconnected to any projects, as well as some of my more introspective pieces. This is really my art/theory blog. You will see my theories get more advanced, maybe, and my art get better, hopefully. I update this blog daily, and that is not arbitrary: it is for the purpose of doing the awesome and unique. I hope to one day watch the Lion King, the greatest animated film of all time, every day for an entire year, and blog about my experiences with it it each day. Will it be as good by the end of it?

  No, probably not.

  But I will notice some stuff each time, and when I do, you'll be the first to know.

Pro Tips for Poets

A little metaphor goes a long way.

Start out by writing as many sonnets as possible. It doesn't matter if they're good or not; what's important is that you practice with a rigid poetic structure so you get the feel for stressed and unstressed syllables.  Mastering this makes your free-form poetry all the more powerful.

If you want to describe something as being deep or lush, use words such as "deep," or "lush." I'm not kidding on this one; it's amazing how much you can accomplish through imagery alone.

Assonance! Assonance with s is always good when not overused, with p is best used subtly so as not to halt the action with the hard consonant sound, and with f is somewhere in between s and p, so use as your own discretion.

Thesauri are your friends. Poetry is all about the nuance of phrase, and there is no such thing as true synonym, as each individual word in the English language conveys something slightly different. I've found it best to find the feeling you want to convey first, and structure the rest around those words.

Just because it rhymes doesn't make it true.

My Bed Sheet

Awe-inspiring, aren't they?

   The sheet on my bed, the last thing I see of the day, is pretty dawgin'. As you can see, it is covered in Disney characters. I don't know much about the sheet in question, but from the tag I can tell this much: it is a 50% cotton, 50% polyester blend, manufactured by a company by the name of Pacific, which just might refer to Pacific Fabrics & Crafts, though to the extent of my knowledge that company only makes fabrics, and doesn't sew them into bed sheets on their own. This is really all I can tell about it, seeing as how the rest of the tag is all frayed...

This is why they tell everyone but the customer not to cut these things off. Because they've got important information on them. What should happen is, the customer does cut off the tag, then archives it in a safe place so that they never lose care instructions.

   Presumably, it was made after 1973, when Robin Hood came out (a property that the sheet maker seems to love, as fully 20% of the bed sheet, or four out of the twenty individual frames on it, depict the characters therein, second only to Alice in Wonderland characters, which has 30%, or 6 out of 20, of the frames, after that, Bambi has three of twenty of the frames, or 15% of the sheet. The rest of it is covered with non film-specific Disney properties: the Ducks, the Mouses (with dog,) and apparently Chip the 'munk.) What year after 1973 is not clear, as all the copyright says is WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS, with no year. But, anyway, that's not the point. The real point of this is, the characters seem to be aware of the characters in neighboring frames:

 

   And yet...

Whoa, Robin. Bow Safety 101. Really, I can expect this kind of crap from Skippy there, but you?

Hell, or High Water

   Clichés rock. I know that as writers, we are told to avoid clichés like the plague. There is a difference between a cliché and an idiom, though, remember- everyone uses idiomatic expressions and figures of speech, and they only become cliché when they are used banally, incorrectly, or even pretentiously. There's a certain familiarity with clichés that allows us to build off of them to achieve new heights, or remix them into complete non-sequiturs while still having people know what's going on. This allows us to layer our humor: the inherent wit of comparing two things cleverly, as well as the angle of sheer bafflement that we feel when we come across something incongruous. Think of it as a complex pun cum pop culture reference.

   The imagery is never separated from its form; at some level, the message and the messenger must be one. Clichés, with their familiarity, allow us to see both, because at once we know what they mean and wonder why they are so idiomatic. We can achieve some rather clever things with this, turning clichés on their head:

Came the flood, we stood together in high water,
Professor's son and farmer's lovely daughter,
Sandbagged and sturdy, doing rather well.
What broke us were the good times: They were hell.

-from Orson Scott Card's view on the subject. 

   Also. We must remember to keep it in mind that at the end of the day, not only is not every idiom a cliché, not every cliché is an idiom. These can't be remixed as well, but still, sometimes, it's fun to use non-idiomatic clichés. At the end of the day, that's just something you can't buy. Also, at the end of the day, "at the end of the day" is just something you can't buy. And "just something you can't buy" is also just something you can't buy.

  Clichés!

Surf's Up

   And not a day after I upload a drawing I did in my spare time in High School French just for the sake of getting a drawing uploaded, I finish coloring the "Surf's Up" picture from my first post. Huh. Well, here it is. Coloring sure makes you realize all the mistakes you made in your original drawing (yeah, I see what's wrong with the surfboard), but I promise I'll get better at this.

I Haven't Uploaded a Drawing in a While...

You're very welcome.

This is What is Up with That

   "It’s not like gravity, you know? You can’t just assume it’s in the background of the story, and if someone falls off a cliff, it’s a given that they’d fall ‘downward’ and go ‘splat’ unless there’s a robot to catch them or something. You have to say GRAVITY or A FRIGGING CLIFF or something, and it gets tedious. I don’t know.”

-The Narrator, in the short story POPULAR CULTURE

   The Machine of Death is a machine that knows how you will die. It takes a blood sample and spits out a slip with your cause of death on it. This cause of death is always accurate; that is, you will definitely die how it says you'll die, though the language your Slip uses may be misleading, vague, or ironic.

   That is what the header image of this blog is: a Machine of Death slip, one which predicts death "LIKE A DISNEY VILLAIN." Meaning, of course, death by falling. The quote above, about the Machine predicting death by falling, is from my M.o.D. short story POPULAR CULTURE, in which the narrator dies due to popular culture (funny how that works out, eh?), and which I submitted to Machine of Death Vol. 2. (No, my story did not get selected to be published, quite possibly because it was competing against 1,957 other stories to be in the same collection (link opens in new window). That's a word cloud of the titles of all the submissions, which is understandably a big file that may take a while to load; nevertheless, my story is right there near the upper right hand corner for the world to see.)

  So that's how that works.

Creativity

   As Scott Adam's Dilbert says in today's strip, creativity is random, and if it were anything but, "someone would have figured out the algorithm by now."

  Creativity is not just making stuff up, though. If it were, innovation would be the lowest ideal instead of the highest.

   In Foundations of Abnormal Psychology, psychologists Philip Jackson and Samuel Messick point to three things that make creativity differ from just making stuff up. Creativity is Apposite, Transformative, and Poetic. Creativity must seem necessary and obvious, offer a new view on things, and offer ideas in a poetic way.

  We can say that a child with an active imagination is creative, when in reality it might not be. Anyone can lie wildly. If the lie actually makes sense, though, then we might believe it. If it seems like the truth, then we treat it as truth. This is why Picasso said, art is lies that tell the truth. We treat the lie as truth because that's how we treat Art. So while creativity in one sense is just making stuff up, it is also having the made up things fit together in a believable manner.

Look, You're (not) on TV!

   It's a common childhood fantasy, that you're the star of a TV show, being filmed by hidden cameras. It makes your successes and shortcomings mean something, because there's an imaginary audience there to share them with you. Fully 90% of all my prepubescent actions were carefully calculated moves designed to increase and hold onto viewership. Which totally justifies some stuff.

   But if you're an artist, every moment could mean something in reality, for real people instead of just an imaginary audience. Every silent moment of contemplation could yield inspiration for art. It really does make these things worth it. The audience is only there for the best stuff, the stuff of which you're actually kind of proud. You can't pick-and-choose everything that happens to you, if your life is television. But you can pick your best arts to show people.

   Not everyone can or even should be a TV star, even imaginarily. But if anyone's got something to say, they can find a way to say it through what they make. That makes it worth it. It's not in some pretend audience, but real people. Infinitely more gratifying.

At the Cutting Edge of the Cutting Edge

   Let's talk about pioneers. Not the covered wagon kind, but the metaphorical trailblazers, those who pioneer advances in their own fields. The ones who get there before anyone else. Like Marines, only with innovation instead of fewness and pride. It's like what a character says in Other//half (again with that!), we all travel in our own circles, but only on the edges. Everyone's unique, but not everyone's a leader instead of a follower, and even the leaders are also followers. I think it was that rascal Newton who said, "If I have seen farther, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." It's not enough to be unique, then. Most people aren't even leaders at all, except for maybe on a part-time basis. A pioneer is someone who leads themselves.

   I'm glad, though, that I'm not a pioneer. It's not an, it can be awfully lonely at the top, sort of thing; it's an, I would absolutely have screwed it up had I gotten there first, kind of thing. But that was back when I was an ignorant kid. I mean, a really ignorant kid. Like, an actual child.

   For example. Had I been the first to come up with the idea for a Wikipedia article on "Coolness," I would have put, like, a picture of a dude in a trench coat shooting dudes all up, and maybe had some stuff about Batman in there. I had completely forgotten about Cool's roots in Africa, and they way it migrated to the Americas with the slave trade until it eventually settled in Japan with the dropping of the atom bomb. Cool has had a long and storied history, deeply rooted in cultural attitudes and zeitgeist, and I had completely forgotten about that. Don't get me wrong, Batman is still cool, but he's not even mentioned in the current Wikipedia article. And you better not vandalize it to make that so. Or, if you do, don't implicate me in it.

   But maybe I can put on this mantle now. I've become a little better at knowing what I'm talking about since then. A little bit of research can go a long way. For one thing, it'll put you above those who haven't done any research at all. For another, look impressive enough, and people assume you know what you're doing, right? It's one thing to fail utterly at making a new Wikipedia article. Going off in a completely new direction is another. Since no one's been there, at least you can make it up as you go along and still look like you know what you're doing. In that sense, it's the pioneers who have it easiest. Had I gotten there first, it wouldn't matter if I had screwed it up, because it wouldn't be "screwed up." It would just be.

  But, yeah, it helps to know what you're talking about.

Standard Deviation

   There is no shame in being a statistic. It is unavoidable. Even within the realms of standard deviation, the deviation is standard. There is a difference between being a statistic and being a peon, and there is quite a lot of room for individuality within statistics.

   We pride ourselves in being statistics, actually. If we feel that there is something greater than us, then we advertise that we're a fan of that thing. We do this, sometimes with our very actions instead of just our words. We choose to define ourselves, limit our potentials, for what we feel to be a cause greater than our own. If you love something, become a statistic for it. In Other//half, a character says,

"We all travel in our own circles. But only on the edges."

   No single attribute you might have is capable of making you entirely unique, because we build ourselves out of many bricks, and many of the bricks are shared. With these bricks, though, we all choose the architecture of how to build ourselves. Each second you spend living is a second that is entirely your own, and you have your own vantage point even if you share it with someone else.

  Wow, it's really gotten away from me now. Anyway, uh... Do not be ashamed of being a statistic. Unless it's one of those shameful ones, of course. But other than that, do not be ashamed of being a statistic.

Why I Use Strikethroughs Sometimes

   There are some thing I don't want to say but I still took the time to write. Gosh darn it if I'm not using that which I labored so hard to produce. It'd be a perfectly good waste. Alright, maybe it wouldn't be a waste if it's good practice, like a rough draft. But even then the rough draft can be retained, for rhetorical effect. Retained, with a strikethrough.

Yuri! (Gagarin!)

   Yuri Gagarin was said to have said, of his first voyage to space, "I looked and looked, but I could see no God." While that is a neat nihilist quote that never really was said, I think it misses the point. When you're in space, the sky ceases to be above you as there ceases to be an "above" when gravity cuts out. The sky is thus around you- not only above you, but also below you and to your right and left. You are in the sky.

   Now, traditionally, God was the sky. In Greek mythology, the sky god was always the ruler of all other gods, from Uranus to Zeus. Uranus was literally the sky itself. While Cronus, Uranus's sun son (sorry, I got hung up on the sky thing) and Zeus's father,  isn't really said to be a sky god, I think it's pretty clear that he could be said to be based on his relatives and their sky-y positions. Cronus jealously swallowed any children he had so as to avoid being overthrown the same way he overthrew his father until he swallowed a stone instead of Zeus, who promptly overthrew him because of this. It was, after all, the Greeks who invented irony.

   So, my point is, if you can't see God when you're in the sky, that's because you're in God's belly.

   The end.

Post THE TWENTY-SECOND, In Which I Play Detective

   I tried my hand at detecting on my walk earlier today. There was a dead jackrabbit on one side of the road, female from complete speculation based off of the way the fur of its hind legs was wet in the back (I figured it had peed itself, but maybe it was just a hare who enjoyed wading through things using only its rear legs. I didn't smell urine, but then again I didn't smell much, meaning it was only recently deceased.) Using my superior intellect, I deduced that it had been hit by a car. Based off how the blood trail was along the side of the road, I could tell that they didn't go that far out of their way not to hit (her.) The blood trail came from the north, suggesting that the car (traveling on the correct side of the road) hit her there, and she rolled a meter or two, maybe even skidding. This would have embedded some gravel into her underside, but I didn't check.

   On the other side of the road, there was another crime scene. I think that there's some kind of serial litterer (like a serial killer, but dropping small bits of trash instead of bodies) roaming our roads. All the beer cans and bottles were right next to each other by the side of the road, suggesting that they had been dumped there from a stopped vehicle. Right next to that, more, older bottles, which suggested that it was some kind of regular drop off point. It was the right side of the road, which means that they were traveling north. The closest houses on this part of the road are to the north, so it must be some kind of regular dumping of the evidence before getting home.

   Continuing north, there was a white mailbox that was open, which was curious because it was open the day before that. The mailhuman would have closed the door to the mailbox had she delivered mail, which meant that either the owner of the mailbox deliberately leaves the mailbox open for whatever reason once the postage is received, or they had neglected to shut the mailbox and then went on a holiday, leaving behind them a notice to hold the postage for the days they had been gone. Based off of the detriment that had collected on the interior of the mailbox door, however, I could reasonably guess that it was the former rather than the latter. You see, there was a very clear indication that the inside of the mailbox door had been rained on, with deep rings left from evaporation of water. Since it has not rained in a while, and there were several rings from evaporation, there was a probable pattern of leaving the mailbox door open. Now, I'm not sure why they would want to do that. Maybe it's some sort of clear indication that the daily mail has already been received or something. I don't know.

   I'd have to say that I'm rather pleased with my own detective skills, since I'm the only one who could even say, which instantly makes my answer the correct one. It's nice to see things word out that way, isn't it?

In Case Your Terrible Life Still Isn't Inspiring Great Art

   Okay, so, your life generally really is terrible, which inspires emotion which inspires Art. Even then, will your Art get recognized in your lifetime? That's another thing they say about Artists, isn't it. That some of the greatest artists aren't even recognized until after their deaths. This isn't universally true, of course. I mean, it's certainly not true with Mozart, who was a child prodigy, or even Da Vinci, who was commissioned a lot by like the Medici house or whatever.

   But, um... Shoot, van Gogh was known during his lifetime, wasn't he? Based off of his friendship (or at least relationship) with Gauguin. But, didn't he only sell one painting in his life, for, like, marbles? Or I think that was Mark Twain selling Tom Sawyer or something, was the marbles thing. And he was popular in his time. I mean, he was friends with Nikola Tesla, for crying out loud.

   Nevertheless! There's probably at least one artist who only got discovered after his or her death. You can always comfort yourself with this fact.

   I guess why I'm saying this is because I kind of think that I've got something to prove, artistically, only my life isn't all that terrible, so I build these theories for myself. I'm not into art for art's sake. Well, I am, but it's just a hobby that I want to be an occupation. Make money doing things you enjoy doing. Everyone wants to be successful, but not everyone's entitled to it, but even if I out of all people am entitled to it not everyone gets what they deserve. So for me it's just motivation to work harder. I want to be known during my lifetime. Not after it. During it. Even if I'm discovered or whatever, if it's only after my death, I'm still going to consider that a failure from Heaven.

  Yeah, I guess that that's an admission that I'm not yet famous. Or even yet pro. Which means that I'm an amateur. Why are you even putting up with me, then?

   Man, I sound like a moody teenager or something.

   You should feel bad for reading this. Like, really, really bad. Be ashamed!

The Dark Arts (No, not like that...!)

    I never really believed that art had to come from a dark place. Someone who only knows pure gushes of emotion will be at that much of a disadvantage over someone who has known no suffering but does know craft. In order for stories to hold our attention they have to depict pain and suffering, yes; but this pain and suffering is fiction, and can in fact be fictional. A basic understanding of how these things work is helpful- after all, interplanetary science fiction with no understanding of how planets work might as well be fantasy instead of science fiction- but your life doesn't need to suck just for you to be an artist.

    There is truth in beauty (and, you know, beauty in truth.) We find art in truth, does that mean truth is a dark place?

    Even if art does come from darkness, maybe someone who's never had a dark life can produce art that's ever truer than the one who's had to go through all of this pain and suffering. They would have to dig deeper for their art, find emotions that are purer. The miserable artist goes for the obvious, thus producing art that would be only slightly better than bush league. Craft is more important than emotion. If your life sucks, all the suffering in the world wouldn't save your art if you also suck. If that's too bad for you, then maybe you can, I don't know, turn your sorrow into more art.

    I think what it is is that people with pain and suffering actually do art to let out their demons and stuff, and in the process of making so much art they get really good at it. Seriously, guys. You're going to have to practice if you want to get good at anything.

A Trilogy of Sorts

Working on an idea that is as of yet entitled Complex, which is to be a study of free will and psychology, intended to complete the trilogy started by the original Italian Job and continued by Inception: Michael Caine in a heist with an ending that is ambiguous due to wobble. I don't think Michael Caine is still going to be around by the time I'm finished with it; if not maybe I'll name the main character Maurice Micklewhite, or even Michael 101 Dalmatians, in tribute. Here are the teasers for each of the three in (the) sequence:

1. If you could press a button to make world peace, would you?


2. We ran bravely in these new worlds, for what was both an infinite and infinitesimal amount of time. We created new laws of physics and mathematics for ourselves, seeing what would happen if rational and irrational numbers were swapped, or were the same thing, seeing what a circle would look like if pi equaled anything other than pi. We ran these simulations as if they were a computer programs, only there were actual souls down on our little worlds, to be saved or damned through their choices in sinful worlds that were not real. And then we awoke, we were thrust backing into our mortal bodies, only now with the knowledge that infinite and finite are the exact same thing, two synonyms to express the same concept.


3. To tell if a robot is sentient or not, one needn’t go through the pseudoscience of the Turing test. One need only ask it if it’s sentient. But what if it lies?

So, it's a trilogy of sorts to complete a trilogy of sorts. This idea... is more Inception than I had originally thought.

More on That, I Suppose!

In my fourth post, I blawgged about how I'm frightened by EMP devices. (You really don't need to click on that link. I literally just told you the whole thing.) It's really the entire notion of electromagnetic pulses that scares me, but EMP devices in particular. There's a big solar storm going on today, which is releasing a lot of electromagnetic radiation, but from this distance the radiation can't fry anything on a small scale, just hitting major infrastructure. Meaning, the power may go out, but it won't fry your VHS tapes. On a smaller scale, however, like say the scale of a device intended for the sole purpose of frying our VHS tapes, our VHS tapes are going to get fried pretty well, demolishing all our precious stop-motion LEGO Jurassic Park sequels. Along with, you know, important banking documents and stuff. While with a solar storm the power could go out at any time, with some terrorist weapons it could actually irretrievably zap all our digital information.

In order to avoid this, I suggest printing stuff out. Or use a computer that uses vacuum tubes instead of silicon transistors. Whichever's easier for you.

Conceiving the Inconceivable

...in a sense.

   I was reading a psychology handbook today, and the relationship case study described someone as 'badgering' her girlfriend. Remembering how often I have to look up pictures of badgers on the internet, I realized that all the nouns and even the verbs on that page had searchable images related to them. But not the articles or prepositions. Doing what any reasonable person would do, I decided to see if anyone had conceived the inconceivable, that is, imagined the unimaginable, and put up a picture depicting the word 'at.' Then I realized that it would just show a bunch of pictures of @s. So I decided to do an image search of the word "a." Then I realized it would show a bunch of pictures of the letter "A." So I decided to do an image search of the word "an."

A lot of the results were... interesting. Mostly, as was to be expected, entirely unrelated junk. A lot of it was that Skyrim "I took an arrow in the knee" meme, which got old after about the fifth or sixth one, but there were a few that made me laugh out loud (okay, that one is better in context, I swear). I seriously think that here were more offensive images with safe search in heavy mode than in medium mode. Of course, it makes sense: why would these images get reported if nobody ever searches for the word "an?"

The word "of" turned out be be almost entirely clean, even with safe search firmly in the "off" position. Pictures of Lord of the Rings, Prince of Persia, that kind of stuff.

There was not, as far as I could tell, a single picture of The The on the search for The. The images here were just as innocuous as the word "of" with all the randomness of the word "an." Mostly just pictures of actors who were in movies that had the word "the" somewhere in them. Which is most movies.

So, uh, yeah. Morals here? Don't... don't... uh... Take arrows to the knee. Seriously, I mean it. It will mess you up, and you won't be able to be an adventurer anymore.

Why We Are All Different People Instead of the Same Person

That sounds like the name of a foreign film, doesn't it? Presumably one from India. Or Korea. Not from Germany, but just maybe from France, (where, I think, that would be Porquoi Nous Sommes Tous Personnes Differentes au Lieu de Person Identique. Eh, that makes it sound more like a thriller.) I guess I can see it as hailing from Korea.

It's a good question, though, isn't it? Philosophically. Biologically, of course, this is easily answered, but easy answers are no fun. But, philosophically. Is it really important for us to lead different lives, always with the Descartian possibility that we might be the only one to exist? Perhaps we need to feel alone. Or we need to lead our own lives. Being different people forces us to need to learn to learn from others' successes and failures rather than just our own. If we were all the same person, the concept of independence would be alien to us. But I suppose that we need to cut our own paths. There's a difference between depth and breadth, and although we would know what we would have to do to add to human experience as a whole if we were the same person who already knew what we already did, as different people we need to do the things that have already been done before in order to make experiences that are true to us, that is, to give experience depth. The falseness of separation makes truth every time we discover something for ourselves. If we were the same person we would already know about ourselves, and be forced to explore the cosmos surrounding us since it would be the only thing to do. But we are all different people, and so we must turn inwards, each time, several billion times, in order to discover anything. If we were the same person we would have no need for art, which is just a form of fiction and thus communication of ideas, the fictive elements ensuring the art means something different for everyone. We have art and beauty and love, because we need to communicate because we are all different people. So I guess what I'm saying is that we are different people to make life worth living.

Just a thought.

Post THE FIFTEENTH, In Which I Feel the Need to Justify Myself (by throwing in some plugs for some of my upcoming projects, shweet!)

    I've had to pick up a lot of slack from my second post, in which I guess it kind of sounded like my self-esteem is based entirely on other people's opinions of me. Let me, as many a politician before me has said, set the record straight. As I said a couple of days ago, not all of my observations go into this blog, and when I'm trying to tell you something about myself, the thing I'm trying to tell you might have already been said in something I wrote earlier. So permit me, if you will, to quote myself. I'm going to do it anyway even if you don't, because by the time you read this it will already have been written, so there's really nothing you can do to stop me, so you might as well not even try.  I'm quoting myself here out of necessity, since there's really no point in bothering with rephrasing a perfectly good phrase, though I realize that bringing attention to the things I said that I at least think are clever may be seen as needy and egocentric. I myself think it's more laziness than narcissism, as well as free advertising for the projects I'm doing.

    So anyway.

    In my song which I wrote, which is written by me, and performed by my band which I'm in, and of which I am a part, which band (the band being mine) performing my song (written by me), which song having the lyrics of my own, and also being my song, which song's name being titled, by me, as GUNSEL (Well, actually, we don't quite perform it yet, as it's not entirely written, as well as it being a sequel of sorts to another song, The Schwa, we have not yet performed because that song has also not yet been written, and besides our bassist is only a future bassist (presumably with the lasers and everything)), in which song, GUNSEL, I wrote:

"Please tell me that I'm not a quitter."

 (This being a reference to The Schwa, GUNSEL's prequel, making a reference to the French word quitter, meaning to leave (The Schwa is apparently a French song about leaving.)) It's not like the narrator of GUNSEL doesn't know whether or not he's a quitter, he just needs the verification that he's not.  The reason for this is revealed by another thing I've written.

   In Other//half, which is a webcomic I am currently developing, one of my characters says to the other,

"I'm only one person. Can't ever be anyone else. I can't even see myself straight on. Only reflections. Only ever reflections."

(And then, you know, since the story of the comic revolves around the science of duplicating yourself, the character's "other half" says, "hey! You can look at me," and it's really inspirational and uplifting and crap.) So, that's about not being able to see yourself from an outside perspective, but you can gauge yourself based off what other people say about you. This is, however, kind of tricky, since the more opinions on you there are, the more you enter the public sphere, the more you will be idolized- and vilified. We have to be different people, though, instead of the same person. Maybe I'll write a bit more on that later.

    See, needing other people is about being a professional. I only can control how good I am at what I do. Whether anyone else is better or not is independent of me. If you want to be pro, then you have to work to be better than everyone else at what you do- you certainly can't wait until everyone else gets worse.

...

So, anyway, yeah. That's what I do with my time.

Post THE FOURTEENTH, In Which My Priorities are Revealed

    Went to the big basketball event last night.The mascot was a good one. He was athletic- doing flips, skating around, the like. He really acted with his whole body, his gestures extending up his head and out his arms. I took my fair share of mental notes. I did not, unfortunately, get a photo op with him, but I did manage to use him as a model to draw what I thought was kind of a bad drawing, but other people seemed to be impressed by it, so I'm posting it here:

I drew what was meant to be PaRappa the Rapper in the lower left corner there. Under him, written in pencil, the phrase "it does not matter what she wants," which is entirely unrelated. In the upper left corner, an eagle, I suppose.

  Oh! There was also a game going on at the same time. Our side (The, you know, Bighorns) lost, though maybe it's because I jinxed us by acknowledging that the other side also had talent, an act which those around me saw as being akin to being Benedict Arnold. Good time; both sides gave it their A game, or as I said there, at least their B+ game. 


   I'll get that photo op... One day. For now, I'm stuck with pasting a cutout of me onto a photo of him. That picture I will not show here. It's... personal. And also so far fictional.

My Observations on the Nature of My Observations (and where you should expect to see which things I observe)

   I don't post all of my thoughts here, you know. Not even all of my thoughts that are even worth writing down. Most of my observations I incorporate somehow into my fiction. It goes into different fictional universes depending on the taste of the observation: if cultural or technological, probably science fiction; if pop-cultural, probably urban fiction. Something has to happen there. The rest of what I dream up can either go into my social networking, if the observation is somewhat immediate, or my web logging, if it would need elaboration. Or, you know, if I'm stuck for a daily topic. Or I feel that I've talked too much recently. Blogger lets you write posts without posting them. Just, as drafts. So that allows me to write and space out what I say.

   I also write the odd essay, which is also in my bag of tricks if I need a daily topic, so I can just plop it onto the web if it's the eleventh hour and I haven't posted anything yet. Just... a pre-written essay, that I wrote to practice essay writing. The ability to write essays on the fly is a good skill to have. When you need to talk without going on tangents, it gives you organizational skills for your thoughts, so I've written essays, and I'll post them here if I feel that there's no way I'm ever going to need it (even then, it's no faux pas to use an essay you've blogged previously, is it?)

  Sometimes, I just write the idea down to remember it and incorporate it into something later, especially with the names of characters in my dreams. These names tend to be dreamlike, obviously, so they work best for fantasy or sci-fi, and the plots of the dreams in which these characters appear generally get incorporated into my fiction immediately, or else get mutated to become incorporated later.

 Other than that, like I said, I use my time for edification. Even my popular culture participation is an edification of my art- it's incredible what you can remix a plot into.

More on Machine Intelligence, I Suppose

   I don't think computers will ever be able to become intelligent- gain true sentience- become alive. Not the way we're making machines. When I was thinking last night about the computer's lack of sensation (outside of  maybe webcams,) I realized that to the machines, what we type into them would be a form of sensation. It lets them "see" or maybe "feel" but definitely "know" something from the outside world, doesn't it? That led me to the realization that as of now, computers are basically just stimulus-response. Of course, I always knew that this was the real reason computers could not become self-aware-- a modern computer becoming self-aware is as ridiculous a notion as a punch-card computer becoming self-aware, if not even more ridiculous because the modern machine is more advanced, which would lead to a sense of credibility and the idea that it is science instead of magic behind it.

   Looking at a computer mind from the anatomical viewpoint of a human mind, the computer can sense things and generate involuntary (programmed) motions- the extent of a computer's brain is the mesencephalon, or midbrain, a part of the brainstem. An android would have a cerebellum of sorts to measure out movement, in the form of maybe gyroscopes or something (there's all kinds of ways to built robots.) But that's pretty much it. All of these machines lack other basic brain bits- cerebrums, for one, from which come consciousness. The cerebrum takes up most of the brain. It is true that memories are stored here, and that computers do have the capacity to remember, but we can't extend this metaphor too far. I suppose the RAM would be its short-term memory, with the ROM as its long-term, if we were to, but that's beside the point. Our memories form a part of what we do, while what computers do is dictated by their programming, which although stored in the memory is a completely different thing to them. It would be ultimately impossible for this framework to form a conscious entity.

    Where would the "I" of a robot be? Would an android dream of electric sheep? Would a computer have no mouth but feel the need to scream? Would batteries truly not be included? Would Rossum's workers be universal? These are iconic references I'm making here, people.

   ...

   I mean... if you really are all... people.
Mmm.

The Good New Days

    I suppose I should preface this one, but I really have no reason not to let it stand on its own.

    The phrase "the good old days" is somewhat ubiquitous to our culture (is it possible to be only somewhat ubiquitous?) This phrase, of course, generally refers to the past, but I don't believe that to be the case. The good old days, you see, take place not in the past, but the future. The internet and other global technologies allow anyone from anywhere to share their thoughts. Such unprecedented dissemination of new ideas means only good things for us as partakers in and purveyors of media. As purveyors it means we can always find an audience (so long as we are of at least moderate talent,) and as partakers it means that the stuff that comes at us is top-notch. New records in media are being set and broken every year.

    The only concern I have about the future is the coming SINGULARITY, as there is no room for humans in a post-singularity world, but it's probably not going to happen.

    Probably.

    Even if computers do learn how to become actively intelligent, it wouldn't be that bad, would it? It's not like they take up space like we do. They exist purely in electronic form, meaning they can't... feel. Senses to them are- I mean, would be- completely different. Seeing through a camera would be entirely separate from looking through eyes. They wouldn't have senses as we know them, inside their metal boxes. Poor guys.
   But maybe I'm getting off of the subject. More on this later, maybe?