I sure am tired of having to think about things

  
     Are you like me? Do you find the notion of thinking about something, even for a second, exhausting? Wouldn't it be easier if life could just shovel the ideological equivalent of nutrient paste directly into your brain, so you wouldn't have to bother yourself with such burdens as considering things and making decisions? For example, imagine you're part of the administration of a high school; you have a kid with that just absolutely kicks the shit out of another one, for no reason other than the infinitely complex power dynamics of a modern high school.  How do you handle this situation? Well, that can be difficult, so why not bypass all that thinking with a zero-tolerance policy? Now you can punish the offender for fighting, while also punishing the victim, since they were technically fighting too! Nice and easy!

     Of course, complaining about zero-tolerance policies is the kind of thing a hack stand-up comic would work into a bit 20 years ago, so that's not what I'm here about.  No, I'm here to once again complain about the blasted and pocked modern media landscape!

     You may have recently heard a news story that Warner Brothers entertainment will by relying on an algorithm to determine what material they will produce.  Wow, the future! Isn't it great to live in a time where entertainment is dictated by easily exploitable lines of code? Since this system is designed to give people exactly what they claim to want, it's guaranteed to generate quality content while producing a huge revenue stream!

     If I could drop the sarcasm for a moment, my big criticism of this doctrine is that the algorithm can't result in anything truly new; at best it can give you minor permutations of things you already know.  If a robot was in charge of extracting as much money as it could from you by offering you food you like, it would decide that 95% of the world should only ever eat chocolate, since that has the highest like/comment metrics.  At no point will it say "Throw some roasted chick peas at this gluttonous turd", because that's a risk, and we can't risk the money! This is a business! Meanwhile, maybe you would love those crunchy little bastards, but you'll never know, since the odds of being exposed to them are nearly zero.  Of course, maybe you would hate them too, but Christ, at least you would KNOW.

     Wow, Game of Thrones is a big hit! This is probably unrelated to the intriguing plot, the complex characters, and the general level of quality in the production.  Most likely, this means everyone wants medieval fantasy! Quick, crank out as much of it as you can!
  
     People have fond memories of the Star Wars movies from when they were kids? Well give them one EVERY YEAR, quality be damned! This is what the people want!
   
     Lost was an inexplicable hit? People must love worthless garbage!

    Actually, that one is true. Minor aside, I absolutely LOATHE the work of JJ Abrams.

     This isn't to say I have anything against trash entertainment; I think it's an important for there to be media out there that isn't pointlessly complicated.  Before it had come out, I assumed The Witcher series was going to be pretty bad.  Turns out, it was "bad", in the extremely fun way.  Entertaining schlock! It didn't take itself too seriously and had fun with a silly premise.  Poorly produced due to budget constraints, sure, but that honestly added to the charm.  I haven't seen The Mandalorian yet, but from all accounts it has something in common with a lot of media that's surprised me over the years, like The Witcher, or an older example, Dredd; somebody involved in the creation really CARED about getting it made, for reasons beyond milking money out of the system.  The joy that permeates things like this goes a long way to gloss over even glaring flaws, and while it isn't some looking-down-it's-nose high art concept, the fact that it engages you makes your brain work, even if you aren't aware of it.  Think about how much plot speculation happened with Game of Thrones fans.  Maybe people don't consider it to be "thinking" because they're having fun with it, but the fact that it's getting people to extrapolate where a plot could be heading based on presented clues shows that it engages people on an intellectual level. 

     Which brings me to the main point I'm trying to make here; I have no respect for the concept of "turning my brain off" with regards to entertainment.  The whole point of entertainment is to make you feel something, and if you've turned off the part of you responsible for handling that, you're wasting one of the best parts of being a person.  If I was a colder, more callous guy, I'd probably say "If you're looking to turn your brain off, try a fucking bullet", but uh...

    Well, I guess I don't know a more diplomatic way of saying that.  On to some trash entertainment!

      I got this batch out SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the other two.  It is slightly shorter, but I also figured out a few minor problems that were making everything way harder and shittier.  Mostly I discovered how to make the lines look less like trash, and how to do legible handwriting on a digital tablet. 

      This is why I don't rail against low-brow humour; I wrote a story where a fat man pees, and then falls over with a *BLOP*

      I keep forgetting the god damn pockets on the jackets.  Easy enough to fix but I miss it so much.

      Probably going to have to adjust some of the proportions a little during the final pass, keeping head sizes consistent is difficult for me, a man whose giant melon head contrasts normal people by a huge amount.

     It's going to be another week or two before I can continue working on this, because I started the final pass last night, and the plastic nib on my stylus decided this would be a perfect time to give up the ghost after all these years.  I'm currently waiting on a delivery of 20 of the little bastards, and in the meantime I've been getting re-acquainted with video editing software.  I had an idea for an extremely stupid joke floating around in my head for a while and decided to just make it. 

     I still have a lot to learn about this kind of thing, mostly related to the actual nuts and bolts of photography and colour theory, but in the meantime I can have a lot of fun making stupid scenarios where a guy *has* to say the n-word, however he is very reluctant to.

    Well, until next time

Cultural stagnation and The End of History

     "He's just another fighter!"

     "No he AIN'T just another fighter! This guy, is a WRECKING MACHINE! And he's hungry...hell, you ain't been hungry since you won that belt!"

     Remember that exchange from Rocky III? I do, because I'm from the 80s! Remember those? It's hard not to, since a huge part of western cultural output for the last 20 years has been obsessed with them!

     Nostalgia cycles are nothing new.  It's easy enough to market to someone based on "remember being young?"  The mid 70's through mid 80's looked back fondly on the 50's, with Happy Days and Back to the Future.  In the 90s we got "That 70s Show" of course.  They tried to jump the gun a little bit after that, you might remember "That 80s Show" which folded pretty fast.  I have to assume this was because it was terrible, I still remember snippets of an ad campaign that managed to completely misunderstand what everyone liked about the Foremans.  Eighties nostalgia took off proper a few years later, with the release of Vice City in 2002.

     So that's normal so far, right? Well, if the regular pattern had held, that trend would have died off around 2010.  It still plods along, however, increasingly tiresome long after putrefaction has set in. What's so special about the 80s? Why does it keep refusing to die, like so many of the movie monsters/slashers of the time?

     Well I have a theory! The quote I chose to open with isn't a coincidence.  In 1992, a book called "The End of History" postulated that the fall of the Soviet Union heralded the end of cultural struggle, that western liberalism (meaning the US and it's allies) was the clear victor, and from now on it was all going to be gravy.   With no military power posing a threat to us, we had to look for new conflicts on which to base our cultural output. Aliens, conspiracy, environmental disaster, any threat we could come up with that could conceivably threaten us as we stood atop the world. This was also the heyday of generation X, who correctly perceived "This is all bullshit and it sucks", but incorrectly decided "No point in trying to fix anything".

     As we wallowed in this smug complacency, we leaned into being the very thing that we needed someone else to be; a target that is very easy to hate, and must be overcome. Not only did our military hegemony subjugate most of the world, turning our new "friends" into insurgent populations, those of us here who recognize the atrocity of these situations were filled with a deep loathing for the things we do to maintain this order.

     One effect of this malaise was a worsening of extant problems.  Take for instance, school shootings.  In the United States, these have always existed.  There are news stories about them from the times where there would  have been flintlocks involved.  Insane violence is nothing new to people, no matter how shocking a particular instance might be. For example, one thing I think people don't fully consider with regard to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis is that the things they did weren't even unprecedented, genocide has been happening all throughout human history.  What was truly horrifying about it was the scale and efficiency.  So too was one of the most iconic malaise/nihilism events of the 90s, the Columbine High shooting. Not only was this setting the new pattern of extremes to come, it also fed the burgeoning and ever-ravenous media machine, desperate for something to sell.

     After a few years of this, some kind of big thing happened in the early 2000s, honestly I forgot. 

     In the aftermath of this big whatever, we had a new enemy! THE TERRORISTS! Not as easy a concept to grasp as THE COMMUNISTS, and the way we choose to fight them seems to keep creating more of them, but we indulged our barely repressed bloodlust and felt like it was time to show the rest of the world what's up.  So began the pointless and insane occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  The biggest, most unstoppable military force in the world was going to finally FREE these people, and they will bow and weep in contrition, throwing flowers at our feet.

     Any day now!

     So, when faced with the realities of this extremely difficult task, we've retreated to the last point where we felt like we could reach for the stars.  The 1980s! We had a concrete enemy, our big stupid action movies were awesome, synthesizers were kicking ass.  Ronnie Reg was the last president the US unanimously loved (for whatever shit-eating monstrous reasons), and everything was looking up. As our adventures in the middle east continue, we can at least take solace in pink and blue, with lazer synth sounds.

     Anyway, after 17 years of grinding and senseless loss of life, it sort of feels like maybe this invincible power is a little more, uh, vincible.  Other players in the game are getting increasingly brazen.

     And they're HUNGRY.


     As an aside to this, I feel like there's a lot to be said about "internet culture".  You can trace it back to USENET forums in the 80s, but it really started forming in the late 90s and experienced significant evolution up until, in my opinion, 2008, when the floodgates were opened.  The over-monetization that came in the wake of the first iPhone being released slowed it down, but internet culture is evolving in a parallel way across the entire world.  Maybe this is a stupid example, but check out the Russian meme scene sometime. You would think it would be pretty inscrutable, but as long as you have some way to translate cyrillic they're as relatable and understandable as one in english. There have been attempts at making this culture into something more mainstream and mass marketable, but every attempt at that thoroughly kills whatever it is they try to push. For instance, there was a wave of 90s nostalgia that came in the form of  A E S T H E T I C, but that was entirely ironic and unmarketable.

     Anyway after all that

     I tried to make the colours less eye-searing this time.  I also got extremely loose with certain design elements, because none of that was thought through and I was constantly having to go back and re-do parts I missed while improvising.

     

     Still sort of fucking up on perspective, but I think it's a little better than last time.

     Hope you like burnt orange!

     This one didn't turn out as well as I wanted.  The action isn't very well conveyed, the "whomp" doesn't really land well.

     

     I did kind of like this one

     

     Not extremely pleased with this one and the next, the drawings suffered because I rushed through the sketching phase.  This was pretty late in it and I was eager to move on to the lines, which are also still kind of shitty.  Trying some new brushes, they seem to be a little less jagged.

     Bill's face brought me completely around to feeling good again.

     The boys are tired, and so am I