The Whole Thing's Just Sketch

This whole thing has been one long, slow-burning, radical hellscape of a day. Fascinating and informative, but also a very long, forced phonecall you can't hang up from because you don't want to offend the nice people on the other end of the line. If this is the way the healthcare industry is incorporated into our economy, the whole thing is kind of unique but very broken. This is not what I'd thought I'd be having flashbacks about, 24 hours ago. But it is.

But uhh I guess I've got a plan now, like health-care wise I mean. Being 26 I'm no longer on my father's coverage, and now being graduated I'm not on the school coverage. I guess so much as shopping around, entering your info in to see what kind of PREMIUMS and COPAYS you'd have, allows companies to... not even the providers themselves, but like these go-betweeners; it's weird but I think I have an idea of what that is because it's one of the jobs they never got back to me on when I tried to jobsearch back in Rexburg... and then they call you, but it's still allegedly okay to give out your credit card info over the phone???

TtDebrief

New condition, Promise of Power, is great. We lost the second time we played against Hastur, the mythos deck being so stacked of mean cards which I did not remove from the deck pool, in my hubris after winning so soundly the first time.

Alex and I are just boss at Pandemic Legacy Season 2. We did lose one game, but came back swinging in our second half of the month. Didn't even need either of the rationed event cats available to us. We're so far just, staving off starvation and plague, exploring more of the world map. Will things get insane, will the goals and rules change as dramatically as they did this far already into Season 1? Will the other two horsemen of the apocalypse show up for us to beat back?? Good questions all.

We could play games all day, as laborious as it got. Got some power naps in there, during down times. So that was good.

Gloomhaven has a programming mechanic?? Dang, could that game look ANY shinier?

Blog/diary Dilemma

Hm, I haven't written in my monthly diary doc in weeks, (already wrote in it this month but I can always return of course,) but it feels like it's sucking some of the vitality out of this blog, the working-things-out bits, because I can be more unfiltered over there. Maybe more rambly; snatching up every evocative idea and connection. I can't even remember what I'd write, right now were I to write there the second time this month, but just the idea that that's there kind of lessens my will to get even vaguely personal here, which is just no fun/good.

Not that it's been that way recently or anything, meaning within the last few days; besides I suppose that's only one kind of content.

I should post to my other blogs more...

TtD

Post for tomorrow, already set up. Rests, rested; tests, ongoing. I'm ready for Tabletop Day. Are people still up at this hour? I guess they don't plan to be for terribly long; I on the other hand...

So Signs of Carcosa came in the mail; all the cards and pieces present, though we've yet to shuffle the expansion cards into their game decks. We've recruited a couple cousins into our midnight playing.

Gonna set out on Pandemic Legacy Season 2 sometime tomorrow as well. The other games we're planning on playing, I don't know. And Alex knows the people who are coming later on better than I do.

But yeah. My alarm's about to go off in five minutes to wake Alex up; I woke up maybe twenty thirty minutes ago.

Let's do this.

Completely Objective Review of Infinity War

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

11:00s

Well, I got to implement that idea I had, of not using any electronics before noon. Alright, I did check the time, but that's acceptable I think. Other than that, I didn't even use my fitbit, just cus y'know it was out of juice and all, but one of the productive things I could do was find the charger for it, amongst all the unpacked things I brought home. (First place I checked, so... I got it at least, and my fitbit's all juiced up now.)

Waking up at eleven after a late night of, misreading the time at eleven the previous night, there was only one waking hour in which I had to apply the, electronics-free thing... but I feel I got so much done in that hour, so I'm going to call this a success!

Also anyway I'd better head to bed because mom likes my bedtime to be at 11 p.m. all the time.

Lost Carcosa

Had an idea today; no electronics before noon. I'm always at my most productive artistically when I have to entertain myself myself. 

So my brother posted about it today; I was there when it happened, the passing itself not the writing of it (since it had been precomposed into a Google Doc,) but link Link here here. He wrote about Eldritch Horror expansions, but update on that: since the post went up a few hours ago, our lovely mother got us/allowed us to get one of those. Signs of Carcosa. We chose this expansion because our first and till now only was Forsaken Lore, which added new cards and things without really introducing any new game mechanics. On that path, we are further expanding inward rather than outward; this expansion has a few new characters and assets, a couple new things, while still keeping gameplay the same. Other expansions, well there are a few larger ones and a few smaller ones, I think 9 in total, introduce sideboards and, well this one still has the new prelude card things, but anyway. (I was backing Cities in Ruin, a smaller expansion, because basically all it does is introduce a new mechanic; we were also looking at Masks of Nyarlathotep, the latest expansion, a big one, which introduces so many things it could practically be a post unto itself.)

So anyway. Continuing to play prologue games of Pandemic Season II, looking forward to Saturday when we can crack into January for real.

...What about writing, though, on the computer... probably too much of a temptation to, like, look at pinterest while I work though... I've still got that AlphaSmart; don't have to count that as electronic...

So Yeah It Gonna be Big

Some week coming up. "Some" in the, non-sarcastic, sort of way. Pandemic Legacy Season 2 arrived today, in the mail, after our prior ordering of it, over the worldwide web. Played a prologue game to get the hang of it; perhaps we'll play again ere Saturday. 

Saturday is International Tabletop Day, once again; our festivities will consist of playing board games, midnight to midnight. 

Sunday I have a solo section in church choir. Yup.

Thursday, the local clan's basically rented out the theater for the Infinity War premiere. Pre-ordered tickets I mean, and there are a lot of us.

Wednesday it looks like a temple trip.

Tuesday and Friday, ???.

AutobioGraphic Novels

One of my favorite graphic novels is Fun Home, Alison Bechdel working out her complicated relationship with her late father; there are complex literary references, this interplay with how these things connect to her life (and I tried getting through listening to the cast recording of the Broadway musical adaptation, but just too much was lost in the translation,) and I think that most of life can be put in terms of these frameworks, every moment a puzzle piece fitting more than one place, filling more than one role, a dew drop on more than one strand of spider web. 

(One of my other favorite graphic novels is Neil Gaiman's Mr Punch, similarly autobiographical and frameworked into subtle cultural allusions.)

Right now, in my life (well, not my life, but the lives of the projects going on,) the literary framework is some cross between The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and The Outsider, the HP Lovecraft story with the twist ending I wouldn't dare spoil. L'Etranger's title is translated, outside of the States, as The Outsider. Yeah. That's the kind of, coincidence/interplay, I'm talking about, although it's not really playing out in my own life so to speak. But, those, and a host of existentialist philosophies, all weaving together and tightening the narrative that I'm writing (which I'd been thinking lately I'd never get to work, its initial conception being so juvenile.) That's good. Another project ripening.

(Alright, I'm not sure how entirely autobiographical Mr Punch is, but I'm led to believe it's at least semi-autobiographical.)

Maus, that's the one I couldn't think of! Also, also non-fiction. It's been a while. (There's this awesome book-with-CD ROM, Meta Maus it's called, and it's jammed with all sorts of archival stuff, alongside the original two volumes.) Pulitzer is fine and good, but I believe Art Spiegelman should get a Nobel prize in literature for his contributions to the form. None of my other favorites would exist without Maus...

Ripening, anyway, but no fruit ever falls from my tree under its own weight. It's always, the winds of deadlines, that kind of thing, that forces those morsels dislodged. And these are all personal projects; there are no deadlines. Hm.

Shatter was the first comic book ever written, arted, and published entirely digitally (am I going on a mind map of comic books now, it looks like I am, though that hadn't been my intent; hold on--) and for some reason the first issue began auto-playing as a slideshow sort of deal on one of our computers as part of its boot-up back in the 90s. Freaked me out if I read too much into it; I only realized what it must have been through some hefty research and a background reference to its existence as part of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It remains pretty obscure; I'm mentioning this now, though, because there was a physical copy of like issue 6 in the old comics section of the magazine rack at the gas station, as we traveled home back from college two weeks ago...! 

(Thought it bore bringing up.)

It May Take a While to Digest This One; That Said, On the Other Hand I Can't Remember the Last Film I Watched That WASN'T Unusual

With the score for Isle of Dogs, Alexandre Desplat may have proven himself an equal to Ennio Morricone. Which is, of course, insane to contemplate; nonetheless I stand by that claim. Maybe it's all the whistling, I don't know.

A Man; A Root, Too-- Ranama!

Got all this stuff I brought back from college, and now I also need to field all the stuff of mine we'd been keeping in the garage, because now we're clearing out the garage and so all that stuff of mine needs to be put elsewhere as well. Not getting rid of it though. Even as I make the futile effort to outrun some of my past, it turns out a lot of it is yeah stuff I really want to hang on to??

Contemplating this, I looked at a root, which had thorns coming off of it for some reason, and got deja vu, the past overlapping the present. 

The root is symbolic. I don't know what the thorns mean, what does any thorn mean, but the root is probably also symbolic of like root-type stuff.

Or not. It was just a buried thing, some branch of a tumbleweed that had gotten impossibly thick, and gotten crushed and caked under layers of dirt. Not a root at all. But something I could have sworn to seeing once before.

I found them though. All the drawings I'd looked for and hadn't been able to before. I've mentioned a few of them before; here for one, at least, here; and I probably would have mentioned more had I found these before. The first time I ever drew myself with a skunk's body, and a couple times that later canonized this depiction. Is something I would have talked about.

Other than that there's a... I mean things are... heck I've run out of things to say; I just didn't want to end this post on the skunk note is all.

THO SKUNKS ARE BAWSS

Laufreyson

Finally on my laptop- had to wake up to write this and I couldn't find my Kindle anywhere, so. I'm dreaming I'm Loki, god of mischief, wandering my spacious Asgardian flat and looking for some staff that has power over life and death. Probably left it back on Midgard, that's what I'm leaning toward...

Yeah I really don't know where I'm gonna put all my stuff though. Oops.

Some Great Pachydermic Portion

This place is dying, and empty. So many cousins grown up and moved out, even at the Jamiesons'. Are they all off somewhere right now? Or could it just be school. I don't know. I only ever look over there during the day...

Unfinished business still clings to me like cobwebs, but I feel the anxiety build again if I so much as think on their existence. Better that than the anxiety mirroring, though; the anxiety of the nothing that I'm currently responsible for. I work hard at avoiding both.

It hasn't even been quite a week yet, but I don't want to rest, like would be acceptable so soon out. I'm terrible at this, you know; only ever good at making plans when they've got absolutely no basis in reality. I'm slower at constructing my own life than I am even at the construction of my fictions. It's funny how I only realize this, sitting here writing that.

Half lying, actually; leaning back, couched, writing this on my Kindle, as I've been writing all my posts since arriving back home. Haven't booted my laptop back up since getting out of school; could have something to do with, avoiding everything, like I've written. I'd thought it was, pride or something, but this is actually beneficial to my writing, it being like this. The lack of ease in composing forces me to really consider my words, and I was just thinking about how good it would be to get to writing fiction like this as well, little scenes and tableaux and all.

I do have a writing blog, don't I.

A Poetic Epiphany

Limericks are, 8, 16, 26 and another eight make 34, syllables long. 34 is twice 17. That means you can put TWO haiku into one limerick.

Too worn out to deliver the, "so what," of this revelation. You're going to have to figure it or for yourself.

I'm Guessing, Now

I guess it's still sinking in. I guess I don't WANT it to sink in. I guess I don't feel any different.

 It feels weird, not quite the same weird as from coming back from my mission three years ago. A different weird, but the difference in the weirdness makes it weirder.

People keep wanting me to, well they try to get me ins with graphic design positions, which is very nice, but I don't really want to think about graphic design again. Except thinking about what typefaces are being used and, I guess I did get relatively decent there at the end... I started caring about negative space, for one. Ugh, I actually really don't want to think about it, turns out; I'd thought it was just something I was saying. But ugh.

More Thoughts from the Car Ride Home

Jumanji is Swahili for many effects. Captain America: Civil War has direct effect on the plot of every non-cosmic MCU entry that comes after it. Civil War is a Jumanji event. Death is just as important as birth, but are all other points in life equally important?

Shows set in the '50s, the props department populating the set with actual magazines and artifacts from that era, but you can practically smell the mildew when they're reading that magazine and acting like it's a current issue. I feel like they should acknowledge this sometime, be all, what's up with that? And maybe the audience thinks it's a one-off fourth wall gag, but then it turns out, no, one of the characters is a forger, artificially ageing documents, who'd practiced on all the magazines in the house, and this subplot about this painting becomes very important because the painting is a forgery, too. Or, like, a document out something, like this old will from a century ago, the main plot was about that, but that was totally a forgery.

Random Thoughts from the Car Ride Home

Why am I using Trebuchet right now? Why doesn't the spellchecker like the word trebuchet??

I had a dream that knives stick into your forehead could record your memories, like thumbdrives for your soul. The same technology would also be able to create steampunky magitech cyborgs, but I've got a question: how would you set the knife down, if it could only interact with the spiritual realm without cutting the physical?

I think a good way to cure zombies would be violently frenching them. But if that were the case, the zombies would take over the world, since nobody would admit it if they discovered the cure.

The last person you'd ever expect Batman to have had as a roommate world probably be Thomas the Tank Engine. 

COMIC SANS FROM NOW AHN

So like I was looking on CartoonBrew a couple of days ago and it said and it said and I said I know exactly who that is 

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/events/a-chat-with-the-burden-filmmaker-niki-lindroth-von-bahr-whose-films-will-be-screened-in-montreal-157577.html

I guess I'm graduated?

And One Last Gasp!!!

2:30 in the afternoon. There's something that had been bothering me, I'd thought it rather silly but it was worth looking into... Half a credit hour for a normal semester of five, hour-and-a-half seminars, but the special study course I'd signed up for, to get that course in retroactively and thus be able to graduate tomorrow, was for a full credit hour's worth of class (one credit hour being the minimum possible, on the independent specialized study program.) I'd completed five seminars already, of course, so it was possible, if it was the case that it was to be just a normal semester's load, that I be done....

Nope, going into Kathy she said that, unless my agreement with Lisa was explicitly otherwise, I WAS expected to do ten seminars. Alright.

2:30, five seminars at an hour and a half each, due today... That put me out at 10:00, 11:00 if I needed to take breaks in between seminars. Well alright. Glad I got to her in time.

I got on it, and finished up of course.

And now I'm finished with classes, and can graduate.

Five seminars in a row, though; I tried to get a good balance with my choices the last round of five, with semesters and semesters' worth of art seminars from which to choose, all these different people talking about all their different occupational experiences in all these different occupations. I made sure to get in a painter this time, probably should have gone for a printmaker too, but I had the run of the crop and could just choose whatever looked interesting. Video game design, 3D modeling, architecture...

Why are the photographers more fascinating to me than the painters? He's talking about his artwork, exploring with the medium itself, cutting into paintings, disrupting the surface itself. Limiting his oeuvre, focusing it. Like he's got a goal with why he arts. What draws me to art, I think, and cast my mind back to a few hours ago, going to get my cap and gown, in public with all the life around me. It's the human stories. And that's what the photographers are, documentarians. The value of technical artistry isn't to be admired, it's to be invisible.

The speaker is Japanese, TAC architect Tony Yamada. He talks about Japanese minimalism, turns off the slideshow when he doesn't need it, as opposed to the American slideshow tradition of having the whole thing be illustrated. If I'm learning so much that's going to influence my creation from now on, I'm always going to be learning, shaking it up, so I may as well start now.

So last time I saw Kody (Bro Keller) he told me to get in touch with him again, regarding what my decision was regarding my future and everything, and I could do that today. Before the seminar scramble, coming back home after getting my cap and gown. Last time we'd talked he'd given me some suggestions of graphic design people on campus, but after the thoughts, fasting and prayer I'd put into it, I could be confident and be forthwith with him: I want to go into filmmaking.

It's what I've always wanted to go into; funny how I'm not really able to admit these things. Even back in high school and before, when my parents thought I was undecided; nope, filmmaking.

I guess I expected him to give me the contacts of the folks he knew in the Church's filmmaking unit, but that's not the way he talks. When you're talking to him, he's like an interviewer, he stays quiet, and lets you do the talking.

But so am I.

He mentions film school, though; it's funny but that's not something I'd ever really considered for myself till now. Film school costs money. So does filmmaking; seriously half my day till then was trying to work out, in the back of my mind, how to pay for a few particular assets I want for a film I've been increasingly moving to the front burner. President Workman, in my exit interview talking about getting myself an education, said get a job and put myself through school. Cool, but I've never been the best at job hunting, coming recently to the conclusion that finding a job for me is like finding a spouse; I'm not one to date around, and don't want to come in through the front door (by which I mean, the whole resume, job interview, process.) But maybe I don't have to.

Chris Grim, character modeler at BLUR, in his seminar mentioned repeatedly the importance of networking. Which is basically what it is, that I need, how that would work for me. He gave great tips on landing jobs, even through the front door being sneaky about it.

Also, filmschool, great networking tool.

Ah My Masterpieces

Well, I didn't win Masterpiece tonight, but far and away got the most art to take home- a whopping eight pieces, which, let's see, that doesn't quite double me, from my ten pieces I already have from prior games (though I can only find nine; there's a tiger from Lauren that seems to be missing... somewhere in my pile I'm collecting, as part of "packing up.") Lauren did show up tonight, but not soon enough to put any of her own pieces in this time-- she could join, but only as part of a team with someone who'd already been playing, halfway through.

The way we play Masterpiece at art night is, I've told you before but I feel it bears repeating, super fun. We don't play with the art piece replicas that come in the box, but we make our own art, on cards sized to be compatible with the game components. You finish the game with an art piece, or otherwise sell it to the bank before then, you get to take it home. 

The highest intrinsic value in-game that a piece can be worth is $1,000,000, so going game mechanics-only it doesn't make any sense to overbid that, but, the way we play with the added layer of getting to take the art with you, pieces can sometimes sell for far more than a million, particularly if the artwork itself is impressive. I told you I didn't win, but doing the math in my head, I actually possibly would have won had I not bid over $1,000,000 on the final piece of the night, which was a guaranteed take-home of course. (Everybody starts out with a piece, and my starting art was the one and only $1,000,000 painting; I could sell it to the bank early and sit rich throughout the whole game. Fortuitous.) 

Actually thinking about it, I would have come in third, which is what I came in anyway, so, yeah, well worth it. No, wait, fourth, I would have come in fourth, since the art piece itself was still worth in-game currency, so I made some of my bid back thus overshooting the guy in fourth place. Haha. (He did come in second place in terms of how much art he got to take home, though- both of the pieces I did, both of the pieces Carla did, and a couple others.) No, wait, still third, since I would have had that million fifty still in my collection... Yeah, third.

All my masterpiece wins, minus the tiger which you can find on IG anyway, here. The top row is the stuff from tonight. The Yay one is embroidered, into the paper. That's the one I spent so much on. Because it's awesome. The one below it is the $1,000,000 piece I started out with. The mermaid one turned out to be a forgery; I auctioned it to the guy on my left (the fourth place guy I mentioned,) who auctioned it to the couple on my right, who traded it back with me after the game, for a piece I'd had, rendered in acrylic, depicting a breast pocket with plants growing out of.

So that's, like, the final Art Night. Huh. Last one of the semester, and this is my last semester, soo... Before heading out I did get a chance to tell Lauren I'm making it to BLFC this year, and she's going with a friend, so I've got their permission to hit them up when the time comes.