Compounding effects of a minor change

    Sometimes I think about how you can make the smallest adjustment, and the emergent effects are enormous.  Specifically, I was thinking about a change that could be made the the very first Star Wars film.  I must have watched it a million times over my life, it really was a top tier example of the 1970's sci-fi/fantasy aesthetic.  Of course, the way I look at these things changed over the course of my life, as they're supposed to, and I keep having thoughts run through my head.  

    Remember when they first meet Han? In that seedy bar? He was basically a trucker they hired to get them where they were going.  Shortly afterwards is his confrontation with the bounty hunter Greedo, and this is the scene where it occurs to me that the tiniest change could reverberate through the rest of the franchise. 

    What if Han had shot first?

 

    Think about it, how it would change the dynamic of the entire series.  This bounty hunter was going to deliver him to a likely death, if not kill him on his own, so it wouldn't be completely unjustified. If that had happened, you would immediately know that this guy is not to be fucked with.  A stone cold mercenary, who will absolutely kill you if he thinks you're a threat.  That would be a great character to balance our obvious shining good guys!

    Furthermore, it sets up a satisfying character arc; after disinterested mockery of anything force related, he bonds with Luke over their harrowing escape from the Death Star.  Unbridled praise for his performance in a fight, and when they get to the base at Yavin, he nonchalantly offers Luke a place on the ship.  He can't admit it, but he's warmed up to him! However we still see the mercenary, taking  his money and running after the job is done.  But what's this! He's back, to save the day! Looks like this stone cold mercenary has a heart of gold after all! What a great character arc that would have been!

    But what do I know, I'm no George Lucas, creative genius behind Jar Jar Binks and Dexter Jettster.

 

    It's a short one today, my current job is frying my brain and I'm not feeling up to full snarkiness. Here's the strips.

    I still have this mixture of panels I really like, and panels I really hate.  Also still having difficulties with interiors, I'm awful at decorating in real life, and it 100% translates into my drawing.

    I thought this one was a little bit of a step up, at least.

    Just the dumbest, most obvious jokes are my bread and butter.

    He really wanted to put the needle into his friend's butt cheek

    It's the best place to put them, really

    Bebop and Rocksteady are both types of music, so I thought this was just so fucking clever. I was really pleased with that bottom panel.

    I do love a good anti-climax.

    EXTREMELY fucked up the perspective on  this one.  

    The entire first part of the story more or less boils down to an afterthought.

    The return of the featureless void background.

     WELP!

Sometimes it's hard to be mad

 

    A while back, I was doing one of my old favourite timekillers; searching for videos of weirdos on the internet.  It's the kind of thing that's been around since the old, old internet.  Liveleak, Pain Olympics, there's never been a shortage of, frankly, insane things to be found online.  When I was a kid, this was all just completely without context; you're 14, a lot of the nuance of this sort of thing is lost on you.  These days, if you're paying attention,  you find out about things a long time before they start making traditional media cycles.  Off the top of my head, incels; they were a known quantity for years before you started seeing news panics about them being the next big terrorist threat. 

    Anyway, the video hole I had fallen down was candid footage of people getting caught intoxicated, on things that are embarrassing to get caught doing.  A big one was guys caught huffing paint, and at first I had that nostalgia for those old trash tv shows that would be on Fox or Spike TV, the at-the-time version of dashcam footage.  There were lots of these videos with lots of different people, and eventually it just had this hollow, pathetic feeling. The algorithm eventually brought me to people huffing cans of compressed air, the kind you use for blasting dust out of your computer.  It was the same kind of sad thing, and I couldn't help but think about the situations.  Most of these videos were in the same kind of dying town, the same kinds of places that got fucked in the opioid crisis. 

    The general vibe I always got from content of that nature on tv shows was usually an extremely judgemental one; look at these horrible pieces of shit.  They're bad people! The online content wasn't really all that much better, but at least it was usually just presented in it's raw form, without a narrator.  The judgemental nature of it gets to me a little now, I think. We all need to hold ourselves to standards of accountability, but think about what's going on when a situation like the opioid crisis is unfolding.  Nobody flipped a switch on thousands of people from "good" to "bad", the economy is dying and everyone is seeing increasing levels of crisis.  To quote Carlin AGAIN, "PEOPLE.  UNDER.  PRESSURE." The idea of just taking a person and unloading on them at their lowest is losing some appeal.  I feel like it's a cop-out to say it's all just a numbers game, but the fact of the matter is, it's a numbers game.  As things get worse, people get worse.

    And where this has landed me, unfortunately, is feeling bad for people that end up becoming lost in online delusion.  I watched a video by a Qanon guy, who was telling a story about how he joined the US military for the invasion of Afghanistan, and over the next few years realized a lot of the things he believed were lies.  Tracks so far, right? Then it starts sliding downhill into the usual "if that's a lie, EVERYTHING'S A LIE!" stuff like flat earth.  But man, if you were already a completely isolated weirdo, not only would this guy seem really nice, he'd probably chat with you if you commented on his videos! Since he's also an isolated weirdo! This ball of weirdos has been building for years, years longer than anyone called it Qanon.  That was just the name of the posting game that breached containment and ended up chain-lettering it's way through the global psyche.  

    Speaking of people who it's becoming hard to be mad at, what do you do about someone who undergoes a personality change after a brain injury? Like I know Hercules makes cringe posts on twitter all the time, but Sorbo had a pretty huge stroke a while back. Maybe he was like that before, I don't  know, but there's always this notion in my head about it.  Same thing with Roseanne, she got a pretty severe brain injury when she was young that altered her behavior. How much agency does a person have when you're talking about literal brain damage? 

    So this probably comes off as me suggesting that people who disagree have brain damage etc etc.  Unfortunately, there's probably nothing I can do about that. 

 

Speaking of brain damage, 

    Environment/sets/whatever you want to call them still aren't looking great or consistent, but I still feel like this is a bit of a step up.  As always, it'll be a lot easier to read that tiny ass text once I've got the white balloon in.   

There are still some line mistakes in this draft, at the time of writing this I've gone back over and corrected them.  What I consider mistakes, anyway.

You need your BIG hands when it's time to fire.

    I can tell that the perspective isn't right on that bottom panel, but I can't quite figure out why. 

    I liked how the getting shot panel turned out, they kind of look like they're dancing.

    I really messed up the lines here, I've been learning some things regarding the tools in the program I use and this was a little bit of a failed experiment, if not still a learning experience, at least.

    Well that's about as far as I've written this thing, right up to where things actually have to start happening.  What a great place to stop!

Blowing out the genre's back walls

 

    Nihil novi sub sole

    Have you tried to find anything new lately? I don't just mean the endless landscape of sequels, prequels, pre-sequels, reboots, pre-boots, se-boots, soft reboots,  re-imaginings or whatever the christ.  I don't even mean the endlessly iterating franchise machine, your marvels, your star treks, your pulsating discotheque of pew-pew shoot 'em ups where the bad guy threatens to destroy EVERYTHING with a giant blue laser unless you harness the power of friendship to punch him in the exact way that will defeat him.  

    What I'm talking about is something that has been hitting me kind of hard; music.  Now, this isn't a lamentation that the music that was popular when I was a teenager isn't hip anymore.  Truth be told, I wasn't all that into the pop music of the time, because those tender years for me occurred in the cursed 90s.  Only as an adult was I able to go back and appreciate some of the things that were happening then, and it sure as shit wasn't what white kids in Atlantic Canada were into.

    Back to my point - yes; there are still new bands happening, and they are still making new music.  And yes, there is some extremely good music being made here.  I hesitate to call a lot of it truly new, though.  What I'm getting hung up on is a period of about eighty years.  From about 1900 to 1980, there was this constant flourishing of new styles of music, based on and fueled by rapid technological achievements.  The electric guitar, the theremin, the synthesizer.   Isolated weirdos could experiment with these new devices and form communities based around making bleeps and bloops with them.  Some of these communities would even make stuff worth listening to! Over time they would develop, forming scenes and eventually spilling out into the greater world.  

    But then, as always, things changed.  For starters, there haven't been any novel technological developments.  There have been refinements and adjustments, sure, but it's going from a Model T to a 2003 Corolla; it's the same basic idea.  Even something like a vocaloid is just a few ideas mashed together.  

    Then there's the death of the isolated scene. Now we can see everything everyone is doing, at all times.  Any time someone takes inspiration and starts to take it in a new direction, the novelty is instantly metabolized into an existing structure, robbing it of the opportunity to develop. 

    Even the pop industry hasn't really changed in the last, what, 40 years? Though his name now echoes through the halls of infamy and shame, Michael Jackson is the template used to this day.  Well, maybe not Michael himself, but the basic philosophy.  They'll bolt on bits of whatever fad was really hot 2 years ago, maybe a dubstep drop or a chiptune riff, or, eugh, meme songs.

    I thought about this because every few months I need to find some new tunes, keep the library fresh.  About 2 years ago I came across the second Molchat Doma, album, Etazhi.  It's great, right up my alley, BUT! I honestly can't say it's anything *new*.  The kids these days sometimes called it "coldwave", but I know it by an older, more elegant name; post-punk.  That's right, a genre that got rolling in the late 70s, with bands like The Easy Cure (eventually The Cure), Warsaw (eventually Joy Division), Magazine, and many more.  Molchat Doma brings a certain Slavic depressiveness, and I really do love their work, but it isn't strictly new. 

    I just mentioned Coldwave, and "wave" is a term that's been driven into the ground this last decade.  The most recognizable is Vapourwave.  Vapourwave is a word that means "take a super chill synth song and slow it down".  There were some offshoots, my personal favourite being darkwave, which is a word that means "It sounds like John Carpenter wrote this in 1982".  You can see where I'm going with this.  Future Funk? Re-mixed disco, with anime.  

    Side anecdote; speaking of the early 80's and horror - One artist I found that struck me was Vashti Bunyan.  The songs I heard were extremely stark and pretty, to the point of almost being painful to listen to.  This took me down a rabbit hole of music that was technically very beautiful, but literally difficult to get though. I found another artist named Daisuke Tanabe who puts these incredibly abrasive textures into the sounds, to the point that I would warn against turning it up too much because it might actually damage your speakers.  The horror element here is that it gave me some insight into the Hellraiser series, where people reach such points of decadence that they have to experience horrible suffering to actually feel anything. 

    All these observations, they aren't just limited to big industry expressions.  Even memes, the folk art of the modern age, have stagnated in a big way.  What is a wojack, but a slightly better drawn rage face?  One of my favourite meme formats of this year, the Ghanan pallbearers, is structurally nearly identical to the "To be continued..." meme that sprang from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. 

    It seems like we're at a point of diminishing returns.  Something huge is going to have to change for anything truly novel, and I get the feeling that anything of that magnitude probably won't be good!

 

    Anyway, I feel like I've made some meaty progress here. I have the workflow of this down to a bit more of a defined process, and I just got through with the second draft of the next part of the story.  After this first page, which I was not at all satisfied with, I cranked out a bunch that I feel like are a real improvement.  I'm making strides over here!

    Still haven't done the second pass on the dialogue. Doesn't matter too much for this post, since there's still all kinds of leftover stuff obscuring everything, and everything is still subject to change anyway.

    I drew the first pass on this landscape shot years ago, specifically planning to use it here.  That's a long god damn time!

    These next few pages were a blast to draw.  I could do images of off-brand ninja turtles getting their shit rocked all day

    fwip

    Left out a few bits here that fuck up continuity, didn't put in the doors and there should be at least one body lying there.

    As dumb as it is, referencing ninja turtle villains by using the names DooWop and Rockabilly has me high fiving myself all day

    This was where I realized I might have made some advancements in understanding perspective.

I just so happened to choose dark orange scribbles for the stool she's on, it's not a poopy

    I set up a million things in the previous story but probably didn't reinforce them enough; either way it's time to soldier on.

 

    Well I acknowledge that I'm talking about there being nothing new while also making something that's a mishmash of fallout, mad max and fist of the north star. Maybe if I just keep kicking at that door I'll knock it down someday, or at the very least work the frame loose a little.

Win Ben Stein's Lion

 

     Have you ever actually tried to communicate with someone? It's borderline impossible.  Sometimes things fall out of a person's mouth, and leave me stunned.  Other times I'll say something I figure is completely innocuous, and the person hearing it assumes I said something completely unrelated.  To paraphrase some dead guy I'm not going to bother to look up, "Words are meager things."

    There's this notion that floats around among philosophical types; Wittgenstein's Lion.  The premise is as follows: If you met a lion who was completely fluent and able to speak in English, you still wouldn't be able to understand them.  The idea here is that the frame of reference a lion is coming from would be completely alien to you; their concept of what's important and what flows from what is utterly separate from yours.  

    Is that a little hard to understand? If it is, it sort of proves the point.  Think about it this way; look at Facebook comments.  Rambling, baseless insanity, for the most part.  These people are still trying to make some kind of point though, they just fail because they have no idea how to communicate clearly.  Let's take some big buzzwords that people have bizarre Pavlovian responses to.  How about the word "liberal"? The meaning of that word is going to be very different depending on the context it's being used in, as well as the personal context of whoever is using it.  FOR EXAMPLE! Here in Canada, the two meanings that immediately pop into mind are a) a member or supporter of the Liberal party, or b) a person who has chosen a side in the culture war, as generally on the side of "progressiveness".  Sometimes people mean both  at once.  The original meaning, however, merely refers to a person's preferred socio-economic system, which encompasses both people referred to as liberals, as well as their supposed enemies, the perfidious conservatives.  Basically, they agree on nearly everything, aside from how rude you should be while you go about your business. To this end the word has lost nearly all meaning, so much so that now people often use it to mean communist, which is literally the exact opposite of a liberal. To quote a major historical figure that I refuse to name (you can look it up), "Don't trust the liberals, they will betray you."

    Now, someone hearing me drop that quote could assume that means I'm a conservative, since their entire conception of reality has been hemmed in to these narrow definitions.  "He said he doesn't like liberals, so I'm clear to spew unpleasant racist shit at him" or "He doesn't like liberals, so I bet he's a huge racist and a homophobe."

    Or how about this; a few months back there was one of these exhausting social media circuit things.  A professor made some comment about how "If someone says 2+2=5, the first thing you should do is find out where they're coming from."  Insufferable *Logic and Reason*(tm) guys passed this around to generate click-based ad revenue, shrieking "OF COURSE 2+2=4, LIBERALS", but there was something to the guy's point;  find out where that person is coming from, because hey, there are other ways of counting besides base 10! What if the guy saying this was coming from a headspace where the default method of counting is base 3? He'd still be wrong, since 5 doesn't exist in base 3, but fuck you, you're wrong too! 

    The reason this is so frustrating to me is that it can require a tremendous amount of effort to make my actual thoughts on something clear.  Any so called "hot button issue" would need to be preceded by 45 minutes of me defining terms and historical contexts before I start actually describing how or what I think about anything in particular.  Who's going to sit through that? How many tiktoks could someone watch in that time? So I suppose the major lesson here is, I should probably just shut up.

    The flip side of this is, sometimes you understand someone's context so well that communication that looks meaningless to an outsider can do a huge amount of work.  Take, for example, the title of this post.  Yes, Wittgenstein sort of sounds like Win Ben Stein.  It popped into my head as a reference to another thought I had one time.  There's this comedian I sometimes watch on streams.  On an episode of the podcast he's a part of, they were fucking around with extremely stupid jokes, and when someone was talking about Michael Keaton, he started laughing and said "What if his name was Michael Penis?" Then, on a later stream, he made some reference to Win Ben Stein's Money.  Without thinking, I punched in "Win Ben Stein's Penis".  He saw this, repeated it, and laughed.  We were on the same wavelength, and in that moment, truly human.

 

    Well anyway, I've done the first pass on the next part of the story I've been working on.  Longtime sufferers of this blog might remember that the first pass is extremely simple; stick figures in basic poses, placeholder dialogue, and vague ideas of what the sets look like.  Barely even worth posting, if at all.  I've never let that stop me, though!

    That sure is a huge mess! I feel like I'm at least getting better at organizing this sort of thing.  Whether that translates into the final product being better remains to be seen, but I do feel like I've at least gotten much better at perspective.  I think next I need to work on making things less claustrophobic.  Anyone that can actually draw is probably screaming that I need to work on much more basic things like anatomy.  Too bad your frame of reference is so different, or else you might have actually gotten through to me!