Noise

   Grahh. So... many... memes. Doing research for yesterday's post. It's like every single background character has a dozen different memes devoted just to them. Making me depressed for my own stuff. Why I art. What's the point of saying anything original if anything you do is just part of the noise? Even though "noise" really only means, in communications theory, that which prevents a message from being received clearly. I'm working with a written medium here, so it's an active medium: anyone who'd want to read me would have to go out of their way to do so. As opposed to a passive medium such as television. It's not noise because it's the message you're looking for.

   Okay, better. It still won't prevent people from arriving here and not finding what they were looking for, which would be considered a form of noise (an inordinate amount of people seem to think that I've got EMP blueprints or something on this site, after this post, but man is that a frightening thought. Are you all... terrorists? Or, do you want to pull off an Ocean's 11, or, what?)

   Alright, so, as everyone who knows how George R. R. Martin feels about these kinds of things knows, he's not a big fan of fanfic, but he's alright with the fanart of his work. He says that it's better to work with your own characters. That's one way to do it. Fanart, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother animal entirely. It's just making art, but with someone else's characters. A good drawing is a good drawing. Anyone can do character design, so it's kind of overrated in that regard, (which is why, for instance, video game companies looking for character designers are actually looking to see if you can design good environments and vehicles and stuff before any actual character design), but, it's significantly harder to write your own believable character. Handling someone else's character well isn't really that hard. You've got to learn to do that with your own characters, got it?