YouTube: A Cautionary Tale

   YouTube keeps advertising videos at me. Which is alright, gotta keep up with the one channel I'm subscribed to, but there's always the videos it suggests that it thinks you might be interested in. Sometimes, it's brony stuff. Mostly...

   A few months ago, February 3rd according to the internet history which I'm going to trust as it matches up to having occurred on a Tuesday, looking up tutorials on how to fix washers, but apparently autoplay was on and the videos just kept on going, from the washer one to a second one and from there randomly jumping to prank compilations.

   This continued on for 5 1/2 more videos.

   And every week, when YouTube its scratching that artificially intelligent brain of its, trying to figure out what kind of videos it thinks I would be into, keeps on going back to the 45 minutes straight where funny prank video compilations were playing. The screen was off and the sound was down and we were having dinner, but YouTube has no way of knowing that. So when it wants desperately to please me, it proffers things like SEXY WOMEN FUNNY NAUGHTY PRANKS, or whatever. Because, that's the only thing I seem to have shown continued interest in.

   I know how easy it is just to delete that history from YouTube's databanks, but I'm leery of rewriting history just to make the present slightly less annoying.

Thespian Acquiescence, But More Importantly...

   A note on Sundays: seriously, new strips of Sunday strip Thespis are coming out, and I've got 5 or 6 already totally completed from a couple of years ago, leading up to the new storyline coming up. They're... somewhere, on the computer. And they totally exist! At press time, of course, we have none. No new strips of Thespis, posted up, right now, like I promised I would do on Sundays. They are coming, and hopefully the seemingly overly obvious explanation that they are not up right now will be necessary in the future, but for now, uh...

   The strips, these new old ones, are, turns out, on a file format that our PC no longer supports, so I need to find some way to transport the files to the laptop so that I can convert them there to JPEG. (OH, if there were only some means of doing so, like if they invented a portable drive of some sort...!)

   Last week being Spring Break at the local school district, however, even if we did have all those things that I promised you we still wouldn't have one today (such it is when you start a comic strip for high school distribution.) So we're free to have today's blog post deal with other issues. And all that explanation seems rather petty now, seeing the issue we'll be dealing with...

   It's weird, like it feels like this should be affecting me more than it is, but, 11:51 Utah time, weighing in at 9 lbs. 5 oz., I... well... I'm an uncle now. See me mother's blog for more stuff on that; this is a way bigger deal for her than it is for me (becoming a grandparent versus becoming an uncle, hmm, let's see...) but it's still, you know, okay, I guess...

   On my mission, one of the people I worked under, Rachel, her name is (or maybe it's Rachael, I always was spelling her name wrong in my journal...) she asked me one time if I had any niece's or nephews. She said that I've got a sort of certain, amiability, about me, and I suppose assumed it was avuncular? I had to answer no to her question of course, but, you know...

   Not that we've met yet or anything.

Thespis Strip Dated Sunday, April 5, 2015

Click to embiggen.

TRANSCRIPT

Collin: What are you doing?!

Just look at yourself.

Look at the gifts you’ve been given.

Look at who’s given them to you.

Were you worth it?

Well, you were, but are you worth it now?

You can’t only be nice when it suits your purposes.

Trying to make you a better person through bribery? We knew it would never work, not really.

But there’s already this time and energy given to give you what you want.

All the labor costs, the multimillion dollar industry. Looking forward to the future. But you always go back to naughtiness.

Santa invests so much in you.

And you let him down each time.

Surf's Up Plus

   Going well back into the archives of the blog... The first post, actually; perhaps you'll remember it.
http://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2012/02/i-had-dream-once-where-if-i-ever-got.html
I posted up, well, it's just an anthropomorphized wolf thing with a surfboard and swim trunks. A drawing of one, rather (wouldn't the other one be so rad, though?) It seemed t' fit what I was going for...

   The next month, I came out with a digitally colorized version of the same, slapping over a translucent color layer in Photoshop. Still really early days stuff. Years ago.
http://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2012/03/surfs-up.html
I noticed in colorizing it (to whatever mild extent that I did; I suppose it was just my "style" back then) a couple of the mistakes I'd made; we all learned something and yay happy fun times.

   SO I'm not sure if it needed to be done, or whatever, but recently, a few weeks ago but far more recent than the other stuff, I assembled a new version based off of the original drawing; all digital this time (that is to say, even the "ink" layer is digital; traced over the original sketch.)

Click to... well, you know.

    If I noticed mistakes last dye job, it doesn't come close to the number I caught with this one (caught, but, released I suppose? I noticed it all but corrected nothing, anyway; it wouldn't be really the same drawing otherwise (arguments about what that constitutes in relation to having the drawing be traced over on a new layer notwithstanding.)) I suppose I should be happy? Means I must be getting better, after all...

X-Files, Rogue Nation, Tomorrowland (Oh, My...?)

   Well, originally this post had been going to be on the Tomorrowland movie Disney's doing, which I found out only today is a thing (I screamed. I screamed like a little girl.) Even if it turns out not to be that great, it's still going to be a goshdarn Tomorrowland movie, in the vein of the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean*, directed by goshdarn Brad Bird and starring goshdarn George Clooney and goshdarn Hugh Laurie. Oh, with a goshdarn script cowritten by Damon Lindelof, by the way. I'm not kidding when I said I screamed. If you don't need a change of pants after hearing that lineup, I don't know what's wrong with you. (Continence, probably.)

   Oh, and looking up Britt Robertson, who plays the main character, just now, it turns out that I do actually recognize her-- she played one of Dan's daughters in the wonderful, vastly underrated 2007 Steve Carell romantic comedy Dan in Real Life. So that's nice too.

   But the discovery that Tomorrowland is a thing comes on the heels of learning of the existence of the latest Mission: Impossible film, which is totally going to be the best of the lot (though, of course, I say that about every M:i installment.)

   And now it comes to my attention that Fox is starting the X-Files again after a hiatus of... shoot, does the "I Want to Believe" movie count in that...?

   So, yeah. I love these things. You love these things. That's all that can be said, really, and all that need be.

I Don't Consider Myself to be a Busy Person...

   I haven't actually posted anything really since my mom linked to this and the other blog on her blog... Officially, so far, it's been, uhh, twice, since she linked last, saying how it's one of the things I do. Twice. Euh. I totally have all the posts for the interim days planned out in my head, 80%ish, but... "School work keeps him from writing as much as he would like," yeah...

   I don't consider myself to be a busy person, but looking on it, I suppose I kind of am. At least during this school season. I have things to do. The true earmark of business, tell you what.

   I have yet another English paper due on Thursday (they just keep coming at me) and I want to get it in before the literal eleventh hour this time, so I've been working on that (Feb 5th 30-point paper: turned in 11:58 pm; March 1st special credit paper: turned in 10:42 pm; March 5th 100-point paper: turned in 11:54 pm; March 12th 30-point paper: turned in 11:53 pm.) Started reading the assignment today, which I'll finish tomorrow-- and I kid you not, I've actually started writing a bit about it. Here's the part where I make some witticism about procrastinating tomorrow instead of today, which occurred to me today, but there's no way to fit it into the English language that sounds nearly as clever as it initially did.

   With the baby coming up, as well, I've been spending a bit of time the last few days sewing up quilts and receiving blankets at my grandparents' house, learning how to do that n' all, and throwing a couple together... Begin at 9:00ish in the morning and break only for a late lunch, so it takes time, but, oh, it looks darling; it's a shame I don't have pictures for you at the moment.

   But, see, my day is packed full, with, those, uh...

   Two things. I consider that busy... (Only had, like, 12 hours of downtime today.)

Partials, U2, and Mormon Decency

   This is like my fourth time urinating today; why is there so much of it? And why is it coming out so clear? I remember drinking only a single cup of water today, but there must have been more in there...

   Anyway!

   Just finished Dan Wells's Partials, book 1 of the Partials Sequence. It's postapocalyptic YA scifi-- and it actually is all those things; it isn't until you stumble across something like this that you realize that those other post apocalyptic scifis for the YA crowd aren't really all that postapocalyptic, and only technically scifi. And stumble across this one, I did. Let me explain.

   Looking up *Ruins* to find OSC's Pathfinder 2, top results showed that it's also the name of Partials 3. Partials? What is this? Ooh, book trailers. And it's by Dan Wells? The Dan Wells? So I purchased a copy to download.

   And I'm not here to give you a review.

   Alright, maybe a little.

   Great if you like: 

• Strong female protagonists who are also minorities
• Institutionalised teen pregnancy
• (and thus) Real political conversations regarding fake politics
• Genetic engineering as the next nuke   

   Anyway. I had known of the books before, actually, turns out. There's this little post he did regarding U2 of all things, which I was of course all over and have been itching to have an excuse to share (it captures the roller coaster experience of attending a live U2 concert perfectly! Or so I'd imagine.)

   Oh, and it talks about Partials. Which totally confused me why he'd be talking about that, up until this point when I've actually read it.

   http://www.fearfulsymmetry.net/?p=1509#comments

   I'd recommend following that link if you're a fan of Dan Wells and/or U2, and wonder how they feel about each other.

   Even if not that, click on the link only to be sure to read the comments; BC Woods's seemingly unrelated one is easily one of my favorite things of all time (hey, the whole post is that as well.) In it, he talks about the attitude he used to have against Mormons, how he used to view us as polite robots with no understanding of human suffering, and how Dan Wells changed that: "you clearly understood what real darkness was and you were just a polite and decent person ANYWAY."

   Seriously, click that link.

My Records from Forever

   Today we had a bit of a run-in with law enforcement. Running across the street from cousins' to our place, to get shoes to play basketball, Alex ducked into the bushes. Passing police cars happened to spot him, and notice him not wearing shoes, in fact wearing only pajamas, and attempting to make himself scarce to get out of the way as the cars rolled by... Yeah. They figured he was a runaway, or something... I was inside as Alex breezed by, telling me that there was a police officer who would like to see me at the door.

   Oh.

   Act. Natural.

   We chatted. The officer asked me my name and Alex's, how to spell that, our relation, my age... writing this all down. The story of why Alex (who breezed back by with his shoes on) would be dressed as he was. Where our parents were at (Dancing with the Stars,) so that made me the babysitter technically... He drops his pen at one point, and I help him pick it up (apparently speaking in present tense now!) Talking with people isn't difficult. I was never nervous talking to girls until I learned that I should be.

   There's a scene in National Treasure where Riley tells Ben, dude they're gonna have your records from forever dude they're gonna have my records from forever. That feeling is here, to be honest, just a little bit.

   What are they going to do with these records? I'm thinking. My criminal records are... I'm clean, right? That (genuinely funny) near-86 at Wal-Mart, they don't record that kind of thing if it doesn't go all the way through, yeah? And, what about records higher up? Are they going to run me through an FBI database? Do they keep things like internet search history there?

   Oh crap. They're gonna find my web comics...

   The conversation (well, Q&A) wound (returning to past tense again) down, as another vehicle paused at the corner-- Grandparents' Prius. Paused, and rolled back, noticing the police vehicle in the driveway. I pointed them out. Blocking the driveway now, so there was no way the police would be able to escape a conversation with them. I went back inside and left them to it.

   Funny thing is, the ensuing conversation probably confused the officer(s) even more. Grandma reiterated the dubious story of the normality of dressing up in pajamas without footwear, for one. And also (wondering if the officer could get any straight answers from me) called me autistic... which the guy said I most definitely do not seem... so, hmm.

   It's genuinely still a toss-up whether this is going to get anywhere, if it's going to get filed as an official incident or whatever. Shoot, probably. I don't know police procedure. So who knows, maybe the FBI will use some of their resources to look into me, instead of trying to track down Jack the Ripper or whatever.

   Still hilarious, though.

Grape Juice

   At the end of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox, they break into the supermarket and all drink juice boxes. Apple, of course, for everyone except Ash, who's chosen grape. Which juice, characteristically, stains everything it touches: Ash has got a ring of dark purple 'round his lips. Which kills me, because that's how that works.

   I was watching the film one day at that scene when Mom came in: "why is that fox wearing lipstick?" It's grape juice, but this is the first time I've ever really noticed. In the film, there's a recurrent theme of Ash being [appropriate hand gestures here] different, and from that there's... I'm going to call it speculation, deeper into his character. I'd never held it, but I always found it quite lovely and poignant, the notion that Ash is actually gay and doesn't realize it yet though his father does. Just watch it again with that theory in mind. It really adds something stirring to the relationship, doesn't it? But up until that point I hadn't given the idea much thought or credence (his "dress[ing] like a girl" is his superhero costume, for one.) But since then...

   Grape juice has stood as a symbol of homosexuality, to me. Subconsciously. I didn't even realize it until today, when context brought it to my attention.

   In all innocence, they served grape juice at Grandmother's house...

Butterflies

   You know that joke where the man dreams he is eating a giant marshmallow, and when he wakes up, his pillow is gone? That actually happened to me once. It's apparently a joke about eating your pillow in your sleep or whatever, but I never realized that; I just figured it must have been a common (enough) experience that I wasn't the only one.

   The pillow turned out to have fallen off of the bed and rolled underneath it, in case you were wondering. But none of that is what this post is about.

   I had a dream once, when I was very young. A different dream. I know I wrote part of it down, in stapled-together homebound book format, or at least illustrated it. The original book has probably been lost to the garage, like so many others from that era (the likewise unfinished books of the Aladdin and Dragon Tales dreams spring to mind,) but it wasn't much of a plot, so I can remember it well. Even then, it wasn't so much a plot as an idea... the dream was about a butterfly. The dream was about a butterfly. And I was the butterfly.

   And though I never would have forgotten, I never would have thought, I'm not the only one to have had this dream. The butterfly fell asleep as I woke up. As we woke up. We dreamt that we were butterflies. The butterflies dreamt they were us. And to this day I still can't figure out...

   whether I was Zhuangzi dreaming... or Zhuangzi was me.

Raymond Babbitt in Vegas

   I'm not sure how, popular or whatever, it is to like Rain Man, anymore, especially for an Aspie or for anyone, (I'm probably going to get torn to shreds for this,) but, Rain Man! I think that it's a terrific film. Smart, iconic, unevil, and with heaps of Tom Cruise. My legs are jelly.

   The climax and most iconic scene is Vegas- Charlie gets Raymond to count cards, everyone has a gay old time and makes a lot of money over the course of the day to the point where Charlie's debts are made up for, and the question inheritance money practically gets mooted, with the only cost being never being allowed to set foot inside a casino ever again. Also that wad of cash lost when Raymond pulls a number out of his butt at the roulette wheel, but, no matter.

   So. Happy ending, yeah? But the movie keeps going... the story's not yet over. Hmm. Let's examine that.

   See, in this scene Charlie has made concession to Raymond's talents, true, but he was still using Raymond the exact same way he uses everyone else (whether the "yes" had been actually in response to a question posed a half-hour ago or not, it was still an accurate response to the question posed to Raymond then and there.) The Vegas scene gets Charlie out of his monetary problems, (which I guess is kind of important since it was all he could think about before,) but I don't think people realize the implications there; he's still using Raymond. You know, the reason he whisked Raymond away from the mental institution in the first place? He's still doing that. That's bad.

   Charlie is the true broken one: Raymond, though not without his problems in relation to change, is more than happy to deal with Charlie on Charlie's terms, but you don't see much of that going the other way. To put in simplistically, though not inaccurately, Raymond is just a problem that needs to be dealt with, because that's the way Charlie sees the world at first. (Prized. goshdarn. rosebush.)

   It isn't until the fire alarm and the scene at the pancake house that there's a full reconciliation between the two brothers, and Charlie is totally transformed. Charlie is able to approach Raymond on Raymond's own terms, for the first time that's real (i.e., syrup.) Charlie making concessions to and taking advantage of Raymond's savant skills in Vegas is a step that highlights both Charlie's and Raymond's natures, bringing the two (finally) together in a way that Charlie can swallow, and in the waffle house Charlie is ready to approach Raymond as a whole person, not just a savant, but an autistic savant. A bundle of complexities. Actually a pretty nice guy once you get to know him.

   It's weird, how many people overlook that.

   Or at least, I don't know, I think people overlook that, but-- the implications of the Vegas scene sure as heck never get brought up in any of the parodies, when it would seem that that's the most riff-able aspect of it, so...

   I was always disappointed that I wasn't named Timothy, but at least my middle name is Charles. I think that's pretty cool.

Thespis Strip Dated Sunday, March 8, 2015

 

Click to embiggen.

TRANSCRIPT:

Collin: Comics are tough.

Well, they're kind of easy, but they're tough.

See, with a sitcom or something, you're allowed to time the humor out in real time, using pauses and beats to achieve maximum comedic effectiveness, instead of the tools you have to work with in comics, using spaces between panels and vision-directing action lines in the hopes that the reader of the comic will read it in any semblance of the comedic timing you have in your head.

On the other hand, with a comic, you only need one joke per strip, and even then only at the very end. Any sitcom set up like this wouldn't last very long.

Not as a sitcom, at least.

Maybe as a cooking show, if all the humor is food-based.

Another thing about comics is that you don't know if any of the humor is even getting through at all. With a stage comedy

(which I know all about)

(or at least used to until my character derailment)

you can tell when the humor is reaching your audience.

For example, this week's entire strip was one elaborate pun, but I have no idea if it got through to any of you.

Still to come: more about the difference between humor on the page and humor in real life.

The M/W/F Supremacy

   I just realized, even with the Ludlum-style post name, that wouldn't have been much more than typical lame excuses on t' lack of more frequent posts recently... Which had been... kind of the point, actually... If it's such a big problem for me to get posts up daily, I fully realize I can switch over to a less frequent schedule, maybe even then getting the chance to juggle between this blog and the woefully underposted-at Things That Don't Even Come Back Around, alternating days with TTDECBA on Tuesday-Thursday-Saturdays? (Underposted-at, totally real vocabulary not made up in any way...) Have to keep up daily for now, though, for reasons I've explained, which does mean insane backlog rush, but maybe one the Hundred Things are posted I can change... Even I'm getting tired of self-absorbed (?) excuse posts, so I'd better make that soon.

   Daylight Savings, I'd been going to talk about Daylight Savings... and... forget it.

   The world is awesome, alright? I think it's great to live in a world where exciting news is happening every day. You can subscribe to an e-service that tells you the latest of what's going on in Orson Scott Card's mind at any given moment, now, you know that? They've cast the I am Not a Serial Killer movie that's a thing that's happening, and John Wayne Cleaver is being played by Max "'Max' in Where the Wild Things Are" Records and Old Man Crowley by Christopher "Christopher Lloyd" Lloyd. You can keep tabs on further announcements on Dan Wells's website, though for Pete's sake don't look too far into that if you don't want major spoilers from the book; my point is, yes, the world is big and awesome, and I can't keep away, and it's happening every day and I've got enough material every day to post probably-- but you notice that I'm telling you to keep tabs on it for yourself... Teach a man to fish, enrich his life, in one sense (isn't that what we're here for? shouldn't that be our primary motivation?); mostly, of course, it's because I've had bad experiences with trying to keep tabs on current events (mostly with that SWAT KATS revival thing a couple years back-- it's like trying to hold a snake that's thrashing in your hand; things keep happening...)

   So.

20 Years

   The earliest memory of mine which I can place a date on is November 20, 1994-- the day of my third birthday. I remember being very confused-- obviously I didn't know what a  birthday really was, which makes sense considering my last one had been a literal half-lifetime ago... I was still excited, though; I remember waking up and tottering around. Perhaps I could sense something in the air; after all, awesome plastic fireman hats don't just fall out of the sky at any minor occasion...

   Didn't give that much thought until yesterday. With that being my third birthday then and my age being 23 now, I've got two decades' worth of memory now swimming around in my nut. Frightening.

   Saw today on Netflix that they've got Jumanji, in a not entirely parenthetical tangent. Fantastic bit of cinema, that-- all so famously made and taking place in 1995 -- "What year is it?!", a half-crazed Alan Parrish (Robin Williams) sputters out. The answer is 1995. "'95...," Parrish marvels...

   Two stinking decades ago.

   That was the greatest movie as a kid-- still is now, of course, but this-- this was the must-see film, yeah? Remember how the AVON lady had a VHS copy, when it was finally released on video... had to beg Mom to purchase it off of her; we'd been so excited...

   But that was all twenty years ago now; it hadn't even occurred to me till I saw that there on Netflix this morning...

Main Characters

   Attended Mass today. My first time. It was for a funeral. It was mesmerizing. I still don't know what a Hail Mary is in football, but, daaang it's sweet in real life.

   After the funeral services, there was lunch. There was a guy there, who'd been at the funeral too... it was crazy; he looked just like Mitch Peleggi. You know who Mitch Peleggi is. Even if you've never heard his name, you'd know his face. You may know him as Walter Skinner from X Files, but you may also recognize him as Lt Caldwell from Stargate Atlantis, or the highway spree-killing UnSub in the classic Criminal Minds episode, "Normal," or... He's in a lot of stuff. He's very famous.

This guy.

   So, yeah, Mitch Pileggi. And maybe this guy was Mitch Pileggi; I don't know. Funny thing, that's probably incredibly illustrative of the way I view reality: I kept on looking over at him, expecting that since he's "played" in real life by a guy I can recognize, he must be an important character, and if anything happened in that scene he'd be a primary actor in it and not just an extra.

   I am being serious.

On Never Having to Do Another Background for Cerebus Ever Again

   I just wrote a 3 page paper and it weren't that hard, chugged out an outline and pasting that into the form it happened to be the perfect number of pages. I'm not intimidated, I'm not intimidated.

   Whew, big week for homework. I've got a 7-page essay due in two days, and... well, not much else. Seriously I think that's it. Any homework at all is an assault against my perfectly ordered kingdom of lollygagging! I guess. It's been coming for a while now, though, and we're so near to the end.

   I feel like... like Gerhard, at end of Cerebus. Dude did the backgrounds to David Sim's artwork, right, only by the end Sim had gone, kind of, famously, well anyway, and Gerhard had been by this point doing the backgrounds forever, and absolutely sick of it, and it had lost its wonder, and, Cerebus was coming to an end, and so Gerhard focused on that-- done by Christmas, done by Christmas. At Christmas time, I'll never have to do another background for Cerebus ever again. And that's what kept him going, and that, more or less, is the story.

   And that's how I feel with this paper. After this paper's done, the, paper, will, be, done. And I've been working on it, and slipping in my blogging, but, that's not what's important, so that's alright, but.

The Fine Line Between the Mainstream

   There's a built-in escape mechanism to the "hipster" subculture which I find absolutely charming. All this freaking indie crap sounds exactly the same, so there's obsolescence built in. It's great: "oh no, the mainstream's found the thing we like, making it cool! Fall back to any one of our seemingly identical indie bands!"

   That being said, I still think it's impossible for this to be the case every occasion-- gonna namedrop like I don't even care-- Fleet Foxes, Neutral Milk Hotel, those guys are all adorable enough not to care if the mainstream breaks in around you; identity is maintained (who names their band after Switzerland that's just weird enough always to be "edgy") you don't even have to bring up whether or not you discovered them when everyone else did. ...I don't think.

   But you don't know the extent of it from the inside. That make sense? No, of course not, that's a terrible way to phrase it. Let me give an example for you instead, then. I worked on Collapse, as an intern, right? Shoestring enough that it's not like anyone got paid, though; the official trailer had to be released through the director's son's YouTube channel instead of his own, seeing as how his own has maybe three or four subscribers and his son's has several thousands (which has more than doubled in the time between then and now.) The director's son, you see, (also playing the main character in the film (again, shoestring) so the move makes some sense) is apparently a fairly prominent YouTube reviewer of K-Pop music videos.

   And here's the, "extent from the inside," thing. Through that Twilght2Mnlght/Lukes of Hazard YouTube channel,  I may have known of Psy's Gagnam Style before it became such a huge hit in the states a few years back. It was interesting, but so were all the other K-Pop music videos and there wasn't much to distinguish any one thing-- references to it started cropping up in more and more places, and, I don't know. I don't know when it became a hit, and that's my entire point. From the inside, you don't know the extent of it. I had known of it, but I wasn't aware it was such a phenomenon because... because I had already known of it. When does the indiestream break off and the mainstream begin? The answers, they don't come easily...

More TED

   Unrelated, but moving on, anyway. Great! More TED talks! Truly ideas worth spreading. This one is by Scott McCloud, the man who by volume is responsible for more of the content on this blog than any other individual (as inventor of the 24 hour comic, you see, which related posts account for 16% of the bulk of this blog; almost a full sixth-- in total 158 of the 985 posts up at press time (including this one, which for the record I am counting as not being about 24 hour comics, though still directly dealing with Mr McCloud.)) If you've already read his Understanding Comics trilogy, there aren't many new ideas here, but if you haven't, you'd better buckle down to have your mind blown...

   If you have read those books anyway, I still recommend giving the video a play through nonetheless. You'll see why.

http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics

   Isn't he adorkable? This talk comes from, holy crap, this month, one decade ago (the website just says, filmed Feb 2005; doesn't have the precise date, so... who knows, it really might be from exactly a decade ago today).

   I told you the video was worth watching, anyway, even if you already know the basic material in it. Did you spot it? How could you have missed it? The man is a master of slideshows. Makes sense, actually, considering their affinity with the "comics" format. There's so much potential in the medium, I've always felt (and especially grew to appreciate on the mission for some reason.) It's not just for boring business presentations, the same way that Comics aren't just for pappy kids' stuff. Multimedia, real-time, performance art. It's used the way it is because it is ideal for directly transmitting a message-- it's because of its power that it's stuck in this ghetto of business meetings, but it can be so much more powerful than that, as hopefully we've gotten a taste of here. In short, I believe in slideshows the same way Scott McCloud believes in comics. (I also believe in comics the same way he believes in comics.)

   PowerPoints are ephemeral creatures, "real time" like I said, but comics is a print medium, capable of being visited and revisited at a moment's notice-- maybe I've gotten away from myself a little bit here, but both media's secret power lies in juxtaposition.

Mythology, pt 2: What? How?

   Bravely split off this post into its own entry, to avoid blogstrain/postfatigue on yesterday's post. This is it.

   In a theory that I invented just yesterday, which initially had nothing to do with anything but now realize would be beyond perfect to bring up here (though it may still be a bit rough around the edges), I, um, posit, that religion has two faces, like a coin does: remove one, the other ceases to be, because there's no such thing as a one-sided object. Both sides of the coin must support each other, each side explaining aspects of the other.

   One side of the coin is the mythological aspect of the cosmology: creation, eschatology, history, characters, the mechanisms of the universe. Stuff that can be observed, and therefore proved or disproved. The other face of religion is the part that dwells in the metaphysical, and it is the theology, the doctrine, the what who why how of God. Science, I think what it is, comes in and disproves mythological aspects, and then laughs and says it's disproved all of religion, rather than marred one face of it. Sometimes one or both sides of the coin may be misunderstood, mistrusted or even disliked, and changed, which completely alters the entire cosmology: easy variability. Good religion doesn't need that, and the differences between good and bad Science and good and bad Religion are one and the same.

   Back to "easy variability," then. Remember the Greek mythographers hypothetically B.S.ing their way through the Persephone myth back there? After an explanation like that, they'd probably laugh because their view on how seasons work is obviously the correct one since they've got science and observable reality on  their side, "proving" their story correct (which would be, um, correlation and causation swapped, or sommink.) Sometimes observable reality can be used to bolster false mythology, legitimizing it in one sense while actually making it falser. (An illustration in progress; Gunnerkrigg Court FTW!) It's the same (very, very awesome) process that leads to weird bits of pseudoscience like the Ptolemaic model of the solar system-- "oh, retrograde motion of the planets even though orbits are clearly circular and not at all elliptical? Well, then, it must be that the planets and Sun aren't actually revolving around the Earth but around weird invisible bits of Science that are themselves revolving around the Earth! Haha, genius." (...I wish I had the capability to make this stuff up. You want to know what's truly rad, though? The Tychonic system. Anyway.)

 

Mythology, pt 1: Why? Where?

   I've also been meaning to get up more TED talks...

   Quantum Physicist David Deutsch forces us, in the video below, to reexplain the way we explain things, and explains why we can't just say "a wizard did it." There's a principle he calls "easy variability" especially in regard to mythology, which I'd like to hang on for a bit-- if the Ancient Greeks found out that it's not the entire world that gets chilly in winter but just the Northern Hemisphere, with ours and the Southern Hemisphere's seasons swapped, they could very easily change the Persephone myth to fit the new reality to observed science.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation

   Saying "a wizard did it" is (also) called the God of the Gaps fallacy. Where does God operate in a universe that can be explained using science? Is there a place for Him? Some would say, the "gaps" of scientific knowledge, but even that doesn't work and in fact just might make the situation worse somehow. Orson Scott Card said somewhere, and you know that with that I'm totally gunna be paraphrasing but get a free pass to do so, "God" is unscientific; not because God's not real or anything, but because the moment you throw your hands up in the air and say, God must have done it, you stop making inquiries, and it's no longer science because you're no longer trying to figure out the how of anything.

   Where does that leave God or gods, then? (Where is my mythology that this post is ostensibly about?) Gets even more problematic when scientists (who are, after all, still people too) fill in the gaps where God had been hiding, then throw their hands up in the air in the other direction and say there is no God because there's no room in the gaps any more. (I personally find this a bizarre move, claiming no God from a scientific perspective, since that's a decision really left to the philosophers and metaphysicists, but...)

   Is mythology just a way to fill in the gaps? It may start out that way, but can it grow beyond that? Also, how annoying is it to have no other kinds of sentences than inquisitive? How am I going to end this post?

   A WIZARD JUMPS OUT AND WRITES A SATISFYING ENDING TO THIS POST, WITH JUST ENOUGH LOOSE ENDS FOR A SEQUEL HOOK.

   Oh.

   Thank you, wizard.