Reme Wasn't Built In A Day

Haruhi has taken a baffling turn. A month ago I made a note about how the current story had been unnecessarily stretched from a single episode's worth of material into two. Now it's been stretched to six episodes, and we have no confirmation that it'll stop there. At that time, I joked that it was stretched for the sake of fanservice. After three I became convinced that it was a troll orchestrated by the anime production company, KyoAni. By the time four or five episodes were confirmed, I thought it was the most brilliantly avant-garde dick move in the history of cartoons. I wanted them to keep on dragging it out.

I mentioned before that the plot dealt with an endless recursion of time. Every show does one of these episodes at some point, and I don't mind, because it's usually hilarious. You know the trope: one character remains inexplicably aware of the time loop, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Since they've seen it all before and they know what's going to happen, they exploit that knowledge for maximum comedy. That character does whatever the hell they want, because they realize that things will be reset soon enough. But Haruhi fucked it up. The narrator isn't aware of the time loop—aside from a little déjà vu. So what happens? He goes through the same motions. Every episode ends without a resolution. He makes the same stupid jokes; he complains about the same stupid things for fifteen thousand repetitions. Understand that this trope is only entertaining when memories carry over. Otherwise, you're watching the same thing on repeat. You can imagine how angry some fans would be getting.

The thing is, KyoAni aren't reusing footage or doing anything low-budget like that. They're reanimating those same scenes over and over again, from different angles. They're rerecording the same dialogue, with minute differences. Which maybe pisses some people off more than if they were just recycling everything. After all, their budget is not unlimited. Every episode that they painstakingly create of the same story everybody is tired of watching, well, that's one more episode of fresh material that will not be made. Which begs the question, why God, why? And that's essential in any perfect troll.

There's a rumor, though, that this is more than a troll. It's been said that the big sponsor has control over KyoAni, and the sponsors don't likely have the fan's interests at heart. The rumor goes that the sponsors basically said "Just stretch it out to six episodes; those sheeple otaku will watch it regardless, and we'll make all the dollars." They said this fully expecting recycled footage, thus allowing the company to sell the same number of DVDs at a much lower budget. They had to comply. But the way this rumor tells it, KyoAni reanimating every scene six times, or more, was an act of defiance; they weren't being parsimonious and insulting the fans the way the sponsors had intended, instead making the episodes at least somewhat tolerable. Now, I'm fine with the notion that this is an elaborate troll, because that's hilarious. But if this was some heads at KyoAni pissing on a bunch of money-hungry assholes with no creativity, then I have profound respect for them.

I saw the new Harry Potter with Keth and Chris. To be serious for a second, I think David Yates' stance as director is ideal. All of the Potter movies have had good qualities, especially the visuals; the sets, the casting, it all nails the scenes from the books as I envision them. But some of the movies—like the fourth one—play out like super-condensed versions of the books, so nothing gets the exposure it really needs. Yates instead chooses to cut a lot of subplots out entirely, reworking things so the important moments will have all the time they want. The fifth movie was really good about this because it had its own creative force not lifted from the books; it really pulled off a bunch of surreal nightmare moments well and cut out nonessential things. It really is the best way to do an adaptation. Look at Watchmen, which had its ending drastically altered, but in a way that maintained the feeling, and allowed several side-events to be cut. The sixth movie may have cut all sorts of shit, but what was left was done properly, and hilariously.

Plus I can now use a joke I came up with three years ago. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? Pshaw. More like Harry Potter and the Half Book Movie!

I got the serious stuff out of the way, so now let me just say that watching a movie with Keth is both the worst idea and the best idea. We spent the entire movie elbowing each other, hard, every time a character said something that could be construed as sexual innuendo. Somebody says "take out your wands"? That's an elbow. A Quidditch player has an obviously phallic broomstick between his legs? We fitfully elbow each other. Dumbledore puts his arm around Harry? Elbow. There's a wide shot of the Hogwarts express chugging through a canyon? Keth elbows me, and then whispers, "The train is a penis." Dumbledore says "I'm just curious"? Keth says "Bi-curious," and I spend the next five minutes trying not to laugh so hard that the whole theater can hear me. I felt sorry for the woman sitting to my left.

Artistic Pretensions

I filled my third sketchbook. Finally—the second one took me three or four months to fill, but this one took me almost a year and a half. Digital art was the most significant factor in how much slower this one went; I got my Wacom tablet about a year ago, and my sketchbook was forgotten. No big surprise there.

Looking through the three of them is an interesting progression of where my art has been from the time I turned 17 until now. I sucked at a lot of things... interestingly, the only thing I liked going that far back was some fluid body poses. It wasn't of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure caliber or anything, but it was decent.

Of course, there's a lot of stuff in the newest sketchbook that I think is bad, but some of the early stuff was criminal. My proportions were abysmal. My perspectives, boring. Background art was nonexistent (but this has only slightly changed). My faces were hideous, and those have improved the most. My first instinct is to say that my style has become less "anime", but that's not quite right. It's more that it has distanced itself from the uninitiated person's impression of what anime is supposed to look like. You know, simple, with exaggerated expressions (or, as I already said, hideous). Not to imply that the same style holds throughout, but you could say that it used to feel like one of those poorly drawn American cartoons that emulated Japanese style to cash in on the popularity of anime. And now it looks more like a rip-off of detailed seinen manga, like Yotsuba or Zetman, with a dash of something unequivocally non-Japanese. It's a step in the right direction.

I'm not planning to run out and get a new sketchbook tomorrow, but I've put some thought into where my focus should go in the next one. A lot of the things I've drawn in these books fall into the same categories. Sometimes I draw literal character sketches for some comic idea that will likely never get off the ground, and this is probably as close as my sketchbook drawings ever come to having direction. Or I'll do rough thumbnails for a specific hypothetical comic page. Oft-times I get bored and decide to "reinvent anatomy". In truth it's neither creative, nor emblematic of anything particularly great, to draw a guy with a mouth on his chest. Or backwards knees. Truly inventing a species or alien race, on the other hand, is neat, but I can barely draw existing animals.

The other thing you'll find in my sketchbooks is plagiarism. I'm saying that as bluntly as possible... if I see some drawing I like the look of, I'll copy it and try to get a feel for what I like about it. One page is a direct copy of a page from the Yotsuba manga, panel for panel, because I liked the look of the houses, and the rain in the streets. More often than not I'll note a source—my pages always have all sorts of stupid annotations—but the copying is generally a good reason for keeping my sketches to myself. It's not as if I'm trying to take credit for somebody else's work.

I want to buy black and white spray paint and get back to the stenciling effort. When I do, I want my next sketchbook to have a catalogue of my stencil designs sprayed inside. And some art made from other media, cut out and taped to the pages. Truthfully, I wanted to do this kind of stuff with my third sketchbook, but the thought never actualized. In the meantime, though, I think I'll gravitate back to some of my tablet projects.

On Information, and The End Of The World

In Hard Boiled Wonderland, the only Haruki Murakami novel that could even remotely be considered cyberpunk writing, my mind was blown by something called the Encyclopedia Wand.

The way I'd choose to introduce the concept is this: Let's say you want to write the first letter of your name on a toothpick. You don't have room to write letters; at most, you can poke it with a pen, or scratch a shallow notch on it with an X-Acto knife. The solution is to assign each letter a two digit numerical value... "A" becomes "01", "B" becomes "02", "Z" becomes "26". You then turn that into a decimal, so, Z is 0.26, and that's how far along the toothpick you carve your little mark. A measurement at this size is possible enough. With modern technology I could put my initials on there. ZW is a mark made 0.2623 into the toothpick.

If you're following along so far, and you're a smart fellow, this is where you'd say "But then roughly only a quarter of the toothpick's length is being utilized. Even at this small size, it's an inefficient system." And you'd be right... if we're spelling out single words on a toothpick, it'd be more practical to space out the digits we've allocated letters to. A could be 01, B could be 04, and counting. It still wouldn't use the entire toothpick—I think Z would be at 0.76—but you could mark the last 20 percent or so with a red marker or something to communicate which direction you should be measuring from. My initials would now be 0.7667 into the toothpick, which is slightly easier to measure; nothing is assigned to 0.7666 or 0.7668, so a person is allowed that amount of imprecision in two digits.

But now we move into theory. Suppose our technology could someday measure and mark with infinitesimal accuracy? Maybe I want to write a sentence on this toothpick, like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." If we give up the ability to distribute the values sparsely, but we can assign capital letters from 27 to 52 (so, most messages would end up within this percentage range). Spaces are 00. Come to think of it, you'd also have to assign the actual numbers 0-9, so that could be 53 to 62. Commas and periods, 63 and 64. We still have a lot of free space, but you'd have to assign all sorts of things; semicolons, exclamation marks, parentheses, brackets, em dashes... you only have 100 alloted symbols, but the suggestions are endless. "86" could be "begin font Arial" for all I care.

Unless you have a computer that will scan, measure, or print a spot on a toothpick specific to 88 decimal places, I wouldn't try to inscribe that lazy dog sentence. You'd probably want another three spaces after the message, or precisely 000000, to indicate the end of the inscription as well. I'd imagine it's simply not possible today beyond a couple letters—which is why I opened pragmatically, with my initials—but perhaps one day we will have this greater capability.

Now we come to the true "encyclopedia wand" I mentioned... which is where we say, why stop at one sentence? Why not put the contents of an entire fucking encyclopedia onto that toothpick? Or everything from every Wikipedia page? I'm assuming it would take billions of decimal places.

It's not practical, or even the most efficient toothpick system—if you can fit and detect one dot at that size, you could fit a code of how many dots spanning the entire toothpick, drastically lessening how precise the measurements would have to be—but still, if it doesn't shock and amaze you to conceptualize that all the information in the world could be compressed into a dot... not even a dot-sized microchip filled with extremely complex circuitry, and not a sequence, but just a dot... if the sheer magnitude of this doesn't fill you with fear and awe, then you're a more stoic person than I.

This honestly kept me up at night. It's realistically impossible, I know, but if measurement technology leapt forward into the infinitesimal after some overnight discovery, every modern form of data storage would be obsolescent. Just as long chunks of binary can translate into a jpg file, or a video format, so can a dot if it is in a very precise location on a stick. A fifteen gigabyte video game that takes months to download; that's a dot on a stick.

The subject of immortality also came up in this novel, with a very real application for the protagonist. A seemingly-infinite sequence of decimals, time subdivided for ages like in one of Zeno's paradoxes, maybe truly eternal, if the data of his consciousness can really be summarized as endlessly repeating decimals. I've mentioned wishing I could live forever, and working that pursuit into my NaNoWriMo in the sense of godhood, but Murakami's means of exploring that immortality are profound. I've been humbled by a great writer; outclassed in what I thought was my own subject. But more importantly here? A repeating decimal is still a limit to the data; in other words, it sounds like eternal cognition given to a limited number of experiences. A closed world, without death. As soon as I read that in the novel, I thought, as much as I'd love to live forever, if I were forced into this restricted sense of eternal action, I would put a gun to my head and pull the trigger before I was caught in that world.

And unsurprisingly, since Murakami is a great writer who understands what he's talking about and covers his bases accordingly, the protagonist was offered the very suggestion of suicide on the very next page. He chose to ignore that option.

The novel ends as the immortality begins; we don't see if he comes to regret his decision. At the end, he strives to shape his subconscious town, hoping that over time he will gain control over the world he has created, and maybe eventually force himself out of that circuit, that repeating decimal. I really, really strongly hope he made the right choice, for his own sake, but as Murakami is prone to doing, the novel is open-ended. This unanswered question, and how passionately I feel about it, is perhaps why this is my new favorite Murakami novel.

Moreover, I now realize that I can succinctly describe my two favorite immortality stories so close to the same way: Marathon, in which one must escape the closure, and Hard Boiled Wonderland, in which one must escape a literal enclosure.

To me, this is hilariously ironic.

First Down

Eyeshield 21 is over now, at 333 chapters, and that's a manga series I've loved since, what, middle school? Since before starting this blog. I still have an Eyeshield 21 character as my MSN display picture, for some stupid reason. Let's go with... "solidarity".

It's a manga about football, and it's fucking ridiculous. This alone is not something unique to Eyeshield in the world of sports manga, but it has a special kind of ridiculous. Much like Prince of Tennis, the athletes have super powers, and many of the people who are supposed to be in high school look like they could be thirty, but unlike Prince of Tennis, a tackle might be depicted as a person being eaten by a pterosaur, because the character randomly named his technique the "pterosaur tackle". Just to keep things interesting with some imaginative representation. It goes likewise for teams called The Giant Chainsaw-Weilding Badasses, or a move called "the Bruce Lee kicking the shit out of a guy with nunchucks, long-distance catch". I made those particular names up, but they aren't too out there. An important point with this is that the artist is also a lot more talented than the Prince of Tennis guy—not to completely pick on PoT, which is enjoyable in the right mindset—and his spreads are always wild.

It's also ridiculous in other ways. Let me put it this way. The president of the United States is an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike—coincidentally named Arnold—and Arnold does the coin toss for the protagonist's team's final game of the series. Now, sports manga often tend to... heavily overstate the importance of a single Japanese middle / high school sports team, but in this case the president's involvement is because they've gone on to represent the best of Japan's under-18 all-stars team, and the president's son is a member on the American team they're going up against. This son holds the world record for bench-pressing, and during their match, he gets stabbed by a roman soldier riding a dinosaur. You know... metaphorically.

Eyeshield is also, well... somewhat unpredictable. The main character's final challenge is to overcome the limitations of being small and Japanese, to beat his last rival, an American who represents "the natural abilities of a black person". At the end, he loses to the black guy, because sometimes all the hard work and passion in the universe cannot outrun the black man. I have to hand it to this manga, though, it can be both hilariously racist and brilliantly executed at the same time.

It's consistently hilarious, and it has the most fantastic and memorable characters, across several school teams. It deserves a proper send-off.

Carlsberg

Free beer is dangerous. It's pretty damn cool, but dangerous, and I've learned my lesson... probably. Now, I don't typically blog about my nights out—it comes across as trying to sell myself as the badass drinking guy, and more importantly, I'm afraid that all my stories will get back to my mother—but you could say that I owe this one.

We only had 11 people around when the Carlsberg beer was delivered to Mary's, although I think a couple more people showed up later; I was pretty out of it, so I don't fully remember who showed up, or when. At any rate, it wasn't a large crowd. What this means is that they only gave us 66 out of a possible 72 bottles of beer. Not that I'm complaining.

I can't say for sure how much alcohol I consumed—I brought stuff with me besides the Carlsberg, but I've also lost some 20 to 30 pounds recently and that might've lowered my tolerances—however, I do remember that I got drunk enough to invent two games: "Who wants twenty dollars", in which I give somebody twenty dollars—that's it—and the Bilbo game, in which I flash a playing card with Bilbo Baggins on it, say "You just got Bilbo'd", and that person has to take four drinks. I don't know, four seemed like a good number. Keep in mind that I was the only person with a Bilbo card, and people believed that they should honorably follow my improvised rules because I was Provider of Free Beer, so naturally I chose to exploit that.

For the record, I did end up having my twenty dollar bill returned to me later. I wouldn't have taken offense or anything if the "winner" had kept it—hey, I was the one who invented the game—but that was pretty cool of them.

Also, I threw up. So did Chris, actually, but he was smart enough to do it in the bathroom on his own terms. I did it mostly on the floor, and had to clean it up. It wasn't a lot; I certainly didn't set any personal records. But it was pure red, which was confusing. I thought it was blood, at first. Now I realize it was probably that bright red vodka stuff Chris and I had started with. The people of Carlsberg may take it to their credit that they are not solely responsible for the horrible turbulent deaths of our bodies.

The cool lady who delivered the beer also gave us some other stuff. I didn't really end up keeping anything other than a bottle opener card and the coolest thing; a case with Carlsberg poker chips, cards, and dice. I guess I should start playing Poker now, because it's a pretty spiffy set.

The night was fun, but the day after? Considerably less so. It was probably smart of Carlsberg/Matchstick to get us to sign waivers, because I felt like dying. As I was saying, free beer is a lot more dangerous than regular beer. Sure, it's not chemically different, but the difference is in one's... drinking philosophy. Or something like that.


someday, when ownicon is rich and famous, this picture will bring us ridicule.
Lastly, this is blog post #321. Woaahh. Dude.

What I Say

It occurs to me that I haven't done a post about art stuff in a long time. Years, actually. I don't tend to use my blog for that, but what the hell, right? I've got a bunch of doodles that haven't been used for anything. Might as well upload a few.


I drew this yesterday morning. It's me, complete with sketchy lines I never bothered to erase. I scribbled a bunch of fire for a background, and in the end I kinda thought it looked cooler without my crappy coloring layer, so you can rollover the image here to see that (once it loads).


This image came to me mysteriously, in a dream. It's from February; it's not finished and it never will be. What is Krah 17, you might ask? That actually wasn't a part of the dream. That was just the name of the original PSD file—krah 1 through krah 16 weren't already taken, but I do tend to make use of a very small pool of unoriginal words when I need to name something, and a few of my files have been krahs at one point or another in their development. In this case, it simply managed to make it into the image, once I lost sight of the dream I was representing, and what was supposed to be on that wall.


Drew this one this morning. It isn't of me, strictly speaking, but it might as well be. When I draw a nondescript young man, I need some kind of anchor for the facial characteristics, and that isn't something I google "man face" to find. So I often start with my own stuff to keep a realistic perspective, and then change a jawline or a nose or whatever by whim. Most people I draw who aren't specific real people tend to take on a couple of my features this way, which backfires when people keep asking me "Is that supposed to be you?" What I like about this drawing most is the fake fingerprints, like the faint blue at about the middle of the Ownicon cap's visor.


Another unfinished drawing from my "Eternally In Progress" art folder, of a fat, hairy, older-looking me in a Dr. Seuss hat going all Godzilla on the Toronto skyline in my giant uncoordinated ways. I don't remember why I decided to draw this, but it clearly wasn't made for Feel Good About Yourself Day. I don't really like the flat side-scroller angle I went with, so while I could revisit the idea, I don't think I'll come back to this particular drawing.