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!

The Mouse

 

    I'm sure I mentioned previously, I've been dabbling in learning how to use video editing software.  I'm an online tutorial kind of guy, and the scene for those is extremely prolific.  I made one stab at a video essay kind of format about the fairly shitty but almost enjoyable Red Sonja; for a first project I think I pulled off some decent visual effects, but overall it came out a clunky and I knew I could do a better job almost immediately.  So, I followed it up by doing the same idea with the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie.  This went a lot better, I knew how to organize the workflow and was just generally more experienced with what I was doing, and afterward I was pleased with how far I had developed.  

    After finishing the work on a video project, there are 2 steps for getting it up where it can be seen; the project has to be rendered into a video format, and the time it can take for this is at least one quarter of hte final length of the video.  Then, the video has to be uploaded and analyzed by the Youtube algorithm.  I went through this, and got a message back.  It said the video couldn't be shown, since it contained material copyrighted by Disney.  There was a time stamp for the offending material, about fifteen seconds, so I thought "No problem, I'll just fix that and go through the process again."  So I did! An hour and a half later, the edit was made and the video was just finishing the scan process.  Surprise! There's another chunk triggering the algorithm.  

 

    What I learned here was that Youtube will only inform you of one of these at a time.  This was a little frustrating, because after this I repeated the process of editing, rendering and uploading maybe 15 times.  That's a lot of time! Suffice to say, I eventually gave up.  It's a little demoralizing to have gone through all this and not have anything to show for it.  I guess it isn't a loss exactly, I did improve my skill by a noticeable amount (at least I think so).  I was able to figure out why I was having so much trouble getting consistent audio, and more importantly, I figured out how to get generally better audio too.  There's a hard limit on that though, I don't exactly have the kind of setup needed to break through that ceiling.  

 

    Though all this I kept thinking about something I've talked about before, how media monopolies make everything worse.  Disney just keeps buying things, and they're so risk averse that everything they touch turns to, well maybe shit is too harsh, how about lead? The mass makes you feel like you're full, but consume too much of it and your brain turns to mush.  I get that I'm completely out of touch with whatever people like regarding mainstream entertainment.  I don't have the ability to put myself into the mind of someone who hears about a live action remake of Aladdin and gets excited.  We already saw Aladdin, with these same characters and this same story.  Why does Will Smith change  the deal suddenly? Yeah I loved the Fresh Prince too, but that was 25 years ago, you're supposed to move on and grow as a person.  Live action Mulan remake? Hell yeah man let me spend 30 dollars on top of a service that already costs a monthly fee for that! It's not like the economy is falling the fuck apart or anything!

 

    They've been losing a shitload of money since this all started too, but I have no illusions they'll suffer any actual losses.  At this point I figure they're big enough that they'll get the "Too big to fail" treatment and just get massive bailouts.    

 

    So anyway, I realized that it would be a good idea to figure out a new format for practice videos.  I still haven't landed on it, so in the meantime I went back to working on my magnum opus. 

 

     That's the end of part 1! I wanted, at the very least, to get to this point.  I originally wrote this like 2 years ago, and in making it since then I kept smashing into bad ideas that were mostly built in.  Now I feel like I can do a better job with the next part, and since it's original content, Mickey can't tell me shit.  

 

    I think one of the important things to focus on is whatever set design is called for comics., because god damn my interiors do not convey what I want them to.  As sloppy as the character design is, I'm actually kind of satisfied with it, because the goofiness keeps it grounded and prevents me from getting overly dramatic/serious with it.   I'm thinking Groo the Wanderer is about where I want to be tonally.

More like Fumble Winter

     In the old Norse sagas, there are references to Fimbulvinter; a winter that has lots of horrible shit going on.  This winter immediately precedes Ragnarok, aka the hugest, most kickass fight there could ever be.  This fight, against Leviathan, the world serpent, will destroy the world regardless of how it goes, because Leviathan is so god damn huge that there's no way it can't. The fatalistic nature of the Norse beliefs leads someone to decide "Well, it can't be prevented, so the only cool thing to do is get really good at kicking ass and put on an amazing show."  That's why the Valkyries would choose the most badass of the vepndrauthr (literally "guy killed by a weapon") to practice kicking ass all day in Valhalla.

     So as we come out of a winter full of incredibly bad tidings, it's a funny coincidence that the world is ending.  Not ending as in "we're all going to die", more like when the western Roman empire fell apart; the world we've understood for the last few generations is going to change big time.  It's easy to dismiss the popularity of things like flat earth, hollow moon, or whatever as just people being people.  And that's true, it is a way people behave, it's just that it gets way worse when people are scared.  People get scared because they don't have faith in the institutions that are supposed to keep them safe, and for several decades now we've seen the absolute gutting of those institutions in order to shovel money upwards as fast as we can. As life gets shittier and shittier for the vast majority of people, they wonder "Why the fuck would I support this?"  It's no coincidence that in this, the most scientifically advanced and literate time in human history, we're seeing a massive resurgence in mysticism and pagan beliefs.

    Anyway I don't want to dwell on this too long because it gets dark, and I think people have enough driving them up the fucking wall right now.  The new gods are dead, long live the old gods.

     Did you know that the simplest thing in the world, a rock, is kind of difficult to draw/paint? News to me!

     I like cussin, I like nappin, pretty good at both, not so much RAPPIN

     I painted this part pretty inconsistently, normally I just go with flat 2 or 3 tone colouring but I had an ulterior motive for this one.

     And it was literally that I just wanted to make his butt shiny, because a fat man with a shiny butt pulling his pants all the way down to pee is hilarious to me.

     I can shamelessly admit that "A fat man pees, and then falls over" is the greatest joke I've ever
written

     I'm relying on solid colour background voids a little too much, but at least the blue sky for this one is less abrasive than the predominant orange from the last one.

     I think my lines are getting less trash, but they aren't out of the woods yet.

     

     Coilguns are an actual thing but these ones have maybe a little scifi magic to make them more interesting

     Is the writing heavy-handed enough?

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