Dudes (Doods)

The Batman: The Animated Series episode Feat of Clay pt II has some of the best animation I've ever seen from anything ever. And a stellar voice cast to boot. But yeah.

So. It feels like an elephant in the room, but the elephant is too stupid to be worth talking about much, because it's a, I guess, greedy cameelious elephant and if you talk about it the elephant wins? I feel that maybe messages SHOULD be sugar-coated, like Batman has all these guns and all this darkness, but Batman's a good guy and he always wins and nothing too bad ever really happens, so like you acknowledge the world is there and is full of badness but don't really swim around in it too much. Thinking about all the ways the world is wrong and unjust and unmerciful just takes the wind out of my sails, maybe because it raises the issue but doesn't really suggest what we can do about it.

Conference should be a, well safe space for lack of any better term, and it does suggest what we can do about (issues,) so it's Batman in that regard, but there's this big old Joker wildcard in that it's live, and in a peoplepacked venue, and so it doesn't feel safe. I'm always afraid that the speaker is going to get violently assassinated while we watch or something, but the next worse thing does happen, increasingly. Some random rando in the audience yelling three or four times about how the POTUS is a sex predator is a sail dewinder; it's merciless and unjust and offers no solution in sight. Though, to be fair and forgiving of others' actions, it does take guts to pull such a stunt, and I wouldn't have been able to do it. Certainly an odd choice of venue. Let's talk about something else.

I had a minor sort of meltdown in the store today. Didn't really do anything, just sort of collapsed in defeat, there onto the ground just past the checkout registers. The cashback option feature, at least of the automated checkouts, is just so poorly programmed; once you've gotten there you can back out of the cashback itself but there's no way to back out of the transaction in toto by that point. I got help, but nothing was really satisfactory, the cashback option I wanted still didn't work out mathematically, not with the whole transaction having gone through like that.

But collapsing like that anyway, something I've felt like doing many times and for a long, long time, was that right? I run around like a little kid, skip and jump and sing when I'm happy, and if you're allowed to do that, why does it disturb people if you display your emotions when you're upset? It's a minor sort of thing, but one I could have handled a lot lot worse; are our coping mechanisms supposed to be 100% invisible, and if so, why?

Another question. I sketched some of the speakers and stuff at conference, and I think they're pretty darn good, but how do I, maybe not these ones, but, display, anything? Or does anybody? Being an artist is like a tough thing because nobody's supposed to run around all boasting and everything, but displaying your art, even disclosing your art, is like hey here's something really personal. judge it. Brother Keller says people who are like, "oh. you're an art major." react that way because they're scared, because it takes a lot of bravery to be an artist. Not only because nothing's a guaranteed thing in the field, and steady jobs are hard to come by. But also, probably, because of that exposure, and vulnerability. And two different YouTube comments on two different YouTube videos both are about how whatever particular Nolan films, Dark Knight and Inception, are overrated and bad films, which is clearly not the case, and no artistic endeavor is safe from criticism.

And making art is like the most selfish thing you can do, but then sharing that, though it may be the opposite of that, still feels selfish as well because it's like, hey look at this thing, yeah it's pretty great, I'm pretty great. Even if it's genuinely improving other people's lives, however it would do that, it doesn't feel selfless.

So it may be just like cultural expectations and weird constructions of morality, where it's all based on absolutely no rocking the boat and if you do you're selfish, but it just feels weird. They even have a point, how selfishness is bad, like that's totally valid, maybe drawing attention to yourself is selfish maybe they do have a point, and so, it makes this particular meme difficult to dislodge from your brain. Like corn in your wisdom tooth hole. Or wisdom teeth in your cornhole. As is wont to happen.