Variety Box

creative stuff

Thu, 24 May 2012 17:03:03 GMT

I wish people had told me these things, too. About drawing, about writing, everything.

[Text: "Nobody tells this to beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we do it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have that special thing we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure this out than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just gotta fight your way through."]

* I personally disagree with this specifically named one-week deadline-- people write at different speeds and my best-quality short stories really required around a month to produce (due to the amount of afk-thinky-time I need to put into writing)-- but the general idea is fine.

[Text: "What your hands can do will always be five years behind what your brain can come up with. This is perfectly normal, as it happens to everyone. Even industry professionals. It's a race you're never gonna win because you are a creative person, and so the limits of your mind will always be beyond the limits of your body. There is no cure for this, unfortunately, but the sooner you let this stop bothering you, the faster you can progress."]

I can really see myself getting better at photography, but the thing with photography is it takes me ten minutes to do a photoshoot. It takes me days to finish drawing a picture. It takes me weeks to write a short story. It takes me years to write a decent novella. Those things make me exhausted. And the reward of having completed anything seems so far off, and for so little satisfaction with what I've done. And so it's easy to keep snapping pictures even if they're not good enough, because it doesn't feel like a cesspool of pitiful, wasted effort that I can never be proud of. But devoting life-gutting amounts of time and energy to something that I never seem to be good at... well, I need to hear and know that I can do something worth being proud of even if it never looks good enough to me.

I kept sticking it out, and sticking it out, and meanwhile hearing all this negative stuff about how if writing is at all hard for you and not something you're just driven to do out of pure delight then you shouldn't be doing it at all, and spending years writing things that I can only see faults in at the end-- and the art, not liking to be someone who makes bad art and never being able to draw anything like what I want to see, never being happy with my pictures, not even being able to tell if I'm any good. I don't know. Photography is easy to improve because it hasn't required much dedication for me. But the others really have, and sometimes I feel like I've just given up because what I see is never good enough. And not as often with drawing, but more with writing, sometimes nothing that I find to read seems very original either, and then I wonder if I've just lost interest in writing and stories and what can be done with text? And at those times I'm probably just reading the wrong stuff (of course it's easier to see the "right" pictures due to the volume of pictures one can see in comparison with the volume of stories one can read), but it's demotivating in terms of feeling like this is what I should really do? I don't know.

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Cat Shots™

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:03:48 GMT

Cat Shots™

Posted here for a friend: the fictional game called Cat Shots™.

Photos from The Making of Cat Shots™

Well, we had this book, and... somehow it turned into an in-joke, but I don't remember why.

Photos from The Making of The Making of Cat Shots™

On the film set.

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I watched Mawaru Penguindrum recently...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:32:39 GMT

Just putting this here for later reference, since I'm not sure if anyone who follows me has seen it, but I'm sort of disappointed in the way they handled Sanetoshi's exposition at the end. By which I mean... the way they didn't handle it.

The last thing we really heard from him, exposition-wise, was that he wanted to destroy the world. But the thing is, bombs in the subway don't destroy the world. They might throw the technical infrastructure of society into a bit of brief chaos / slow functioning, but they don't actually deconstruct the way society pressures people (and so on-- the things Sanetoshi was complaining about), destroy it, or bring it down to the point where people are forced to think of/about/around alternatives. And I think that Sanetoshi is smart enough to realise that. So I was expecting to hear that his plan wasn't just "ha ha, bombs in the subway!" but rather something more complicated, something that was stopped by Momoka before we ever found out what it was.

(I briefly even thought that perhaps bombs in the subway had nothing to do with Sanetoshi's plan at all, but were brought about as the price of Momoka's fate transfer, which was something so huge that it required the price of not just her life but that of the people around her as well!)

As it turns out, none of this is addressed. So we're left to assume that it was, after all, "let's destroy the world by blowing up a subway train." Wow, that's really electrifying, Sanetoshi-san. I seriously expected a bit more than that...

Another thing that bothers me is that both because of the historical reference (1995 was the year of an actual nerve gas attack by terrorists in the Tokyo subways) and because nobody ever addressed it in the series, a lot of viewers are going to go on assuming that the Kiga group were terrorists. After all, that's what the police said in the show, and that was never questioned; furthermore, when people hear "bombs" nowadays, they automatically think "oh, of course, terrorism!" But when you actually think about it, they're not. Terrorists have a specific demand. They want something, and they try to scare everyone into giving it to them. The Kiga group, however, issued no demands and weren't even known to the police prior to the incident, and everyone was really surprised when the subway blew up. Furthermore, they didn't have any goals besides destroying the world. And that's not... really... a terrorist demand? It's just like, "Let's blow stuff up."

Well, I'm kind of disappointed that it all came down to, "The bad guys are blowing stuff up, for vague world-destroying reasons that don't make any sense because their actions wouldn't actually bring that about, and nobody is going to explain this because we can handwave it away and say 'it was terrorists' and everyone will pretty much accept that because they think that terrorists are inexplicable/don't need motives."

I was secretly hoping that Sanetoshi actually had some cool/positive plan, and that Momoka misunderstood it and tried to stop him, and the subway explosions were the unfortunate result of that failed/backfiring incident. And considering that we don't know what the world was like before Momoka changed it with her fate transfer, perhaps that once really was the case. But I wonder if anyone will even think about it this way? Because the ending of the series didn't suggest that we bother to think about it at all.

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Varney the Vampire

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:07:50 GMT

So I got around to reading Varney the Vampire, a long, rambling Victorian-era story that was initially serialised in chapters, and has a rather inconsistent and meandering plot.

But was it a good vampire book?

Er... sort of no. But it wasn't awful, either. Nor was it really consistently anything. It had its high points and low points? Most of which had nothing to do with each other. Wikipedia definitely has in mind the book I read, but... er... the part about Clara, and the suicide at Mt. Vesuvius, and the stories about being cursed with vampirism and becoming a Royalist, none of them were actually in the book I read. But the rest of it was. I wonder if I only read part of it, and I would not be entirely surprised if there are multiple definitive editions, or if some of these stories are spinoffs.

Most of the book is deadly serious and involves a lot of florid descriptions of ancient ruins and shrieking maidens with trailing long hair and gentlemen duelling. Especially the duelling. I have learnt more about duels from this book than I ever knew before: the importance of seconds, who has the right to name the time and place... I feel that an entire world of gentlemen and their duels has opened up before me, and now, should I ever be called to take part in a duel, I shall know what to do, and none shall hoodwink me by naming their own place when it should be my right. Anyway, in the middle of this deadly serious book about a worthy family and their honour, there's suddenly a hilarious graveyard scene full of townsfolk and gallows humour and people throwing bricks at each other.

The worthwhile thing to know, at least if one is collecting data about vampire books, is that it seems in some way the spiritual predecessor of Twilight's nice neighbourly family of vampires. Varney is a sympathetic character who has a horror of his own condition, and is often kinder and more merciful than many of the humans; both the narration and his actions go to some length to illustrate this. He's not at all frightening once you hear him speak, and he's a perfect gentleman at all times. While he is not a love interest and always described as ghastly unattractive, one can imagine that if there were any eligible women in the book, someone might have fallen for him. He is one step away from being the romantically attractive sort of vampire, and halfway through the book he ceases to be an antagonist, and turns into a second protagonist who stops bothering the heroes and is more of a nice neighbour who is harassed by angry mobs all the time.

Another thing I find curious is that we never discover whether Varney is actually a vampire; not even he really seems to know. He doesn't drink people's blood, but he comes back to life if he's hurt, and seems miraculously unhurt by deadly blows and shots sometimes. Initially he died and was brought back to life by dubious medical science, according to himself and most of the characters. The book begins without establishing whether he's a vampire except by word of gossip, and it turns out in the end that he's cultivated a reputation as one and believes himself to be one, but isn't really sure. I particularly liked this passage:

"Really, admiral, you do not really still cling to the idea that Sir Francis Varney is a vampyre."
"I really don't know; he clings to it himself, that's all I can say; and I think, under those circumstances, I might as well give him the benefit of his own proposition, and suppose that he is a vampyre."
"Really, uncle," said Charles Holland, "I did think you had discarded the notion."
"Did you? I have been thinking of it, and it ain't so desirable to be a vampyre, I am sure, that any one should pretend to it who is not; therefore, I take the fellow upon his own showing. He is a vampyre in his own opinion, and so I don't see, for the life of me, why he should not be in ours."

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past and present mystery stories

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:02:13 GMT

Murder mysteries are my "guilty pleasure"-- i.e. the books I enjoy just for fun, even when they aren't especially thought-provoking-- yet I find that the modern type don't appeal to me nearly as much as the Holmes-esque ones of the past. Too many of the modern mysteries seem intent on conveying a quaint atmosphere or indulging in the thematic surroundings, or getting the reader to be friends with the characters, and I'm not really interested in that, except insofar as their personalities impact the mystery itself. I don't want to read a mystery set in a bakery in order to enjoy the atmosphere of a bakery, nor do I want to read about a quaint small town and its colourful inhabitants. I just want to know who's acting evasive and what was found in the locked room. A mystery is a puzzle using the rules of one's environment, and that's what I want to hear about. I prefer the ones with minimal or obvious social details, and more concern with how any one got past without being seen. But these days mysteries seem to be more often character studies with a few crucial questions left until the end.

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Bad video game quotes, the 999 edition!

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:07:02 GMT

Last night, Ayulsa and I finished our playthrough of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The game got perfect 10 reviews from a lot of sites, and deserves much praise; aside from a few big plotholes, the story is wonderful. I completely enjoyed this game-- I couldn't put it down until I'd completed it with all endings. And I highly recommend it, with only the warning that it has very gory descriptions. But the translators... well... they think they can write much better than they can. Execrable purple prose.

So, since this was my second full all-ending run of the game, I was prepared this time with pen and notebook to write down some of the ~~best~~ worst quotes out of context. Some of it one has to experience in context of the game oneself, especially the sheer repetition, stating of the obvious, and lengthy metaphors incompatible with the situation. Not to mention the frequent comparing of gross corpses to food items. But then, there are phrases like these.

"The speaker went silent, and did not speak again."
(Yes, silence does imply that.)

"'Clover... are you all right?' The prince-- Snake's voice sounded oddly concerned."
(Someone's holding a knife to this person's throat. How is it odd that he's concerned?)

"The squeal of tortured metal made Junpei's teeth curl."
(Made... what?)

"He didn't give her a chance to say no. He put his hand on her shoulder, as if to shove her into the ground like a tentpole, turned, and walked toward the end of the divider."
(A tentpole. How... affectionate of him, towards the girl he likes.)

"The proper term was 'catwalk', Junpei thought, althought that didn't seem important."
(If it's not important, then either call it a catwalk in the narration or don't bother to tell us.)

"Yes, Junpei thought, his mind slowly returning. She had been killed. Someone had killed her."
(Indeed, that is the implication of having been killed.)

"A long, thin slit ran along the bottom of it. As he looked harder, he realised it was more of a slot than a slit, and that it was clearly meant to accommodate some electrical device."
(More of a slot than a slit. So call it a slot. asfjdklf.)

"On the left was a single short hallway that terminated almost immediately at a thick iron wall. Junpei doubted the wall could be moved."
(What kind of hallway were they envisioning?)

"She shook her head violently, and grabbed fistfulls [sic] of her own hair. Junpei could hear the sound of hair tearing."
(He has awesome hearing, if that's the thing he noticed.)

"Ace, slightly slower by virtue of his advanced age, had finally caught up to Junpei."
(Inability to keep up is a virtue?)

"There was a metal plaque bolted above the door. It read [Operating Room]. If it was to be believed, the room on the other side of the door was an [operating room]."
(I wasted how many seconds of my life watching that second sentence scroll...)

"Slowly she approached the operating table and looked, as intently as possible, from as far away as possible, at the thing."
(If she approached, then she wasn't as far away as possible.)

"Snake turned and looked at him."
(No. This character is blind.)

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Care Bears: actually kind of depressing, when you think about it.

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:48:55 GMT

Recently Ayulsa and I watched some old Care Bears movies that I've got practically memorised from when I was a young kid. Once upon a time I apparently had no taste in song lyrics, but the ones I could understand are permanently burnt into my brain anyway. And aside from discovering a latticework of plot holes that never bothered me when I was three, I've noticed a sad but ubiquitous theme in the major movies.

It's never said that the Care Bears never use magic, even when they do blatantly magical things like manifest giant helium balloons from their tummies. They use caring, not magic. Magic is evil. If you ever find a secret glowing book that whispers to you to use magic, don't! It'll make bad things happen for no reason, because that's what magic does. And you must never use magic to get what you want: you must earn it legitimately through talents you happen to be born with, or else through caring. (Which is allowed to do magical-looking things, so long as you don't actually call it magic.) Jeez, it's really kind of fear-mongering, the way magic is treated. So much for the exciting and charming fantasies for kids.

In the second movie, a clumsy little girl is granted the special ability to run fast, swim well, hike really far, turn graceful cartwheels, and so forth, because she made a magical deal with a powerful evil entity (who, to the movie's credit, is granted as much personhood as anyone else). Although the plot obviously aims to show that she doesn't need magic to be worthwhile and that the things she can do naturally are just as impressive as the show-offy skills she was granted via magic, there's no particular plot reason why she has to be turned back to normal at the end of the show. But nonetheless it feels like she does have to be put back to normal-- because that's how these stories go; all unfair advantages are reset in the end and the status quo is restored. Except, of course, for any personal insights gained along the way, everything has to be put exactly back in place. The story makes you feel as though it would be unfair if Christie got to keep her powers. But why? There's nothing inherently unfair about her magically becoming a great athlete. It only has to be changed because magic isn't allowed to have its way. We're all supposed to prefer a world where magical changes don't happen.

For a kids' story that's meant to be uplifting and cheerful, it's really kind of depressing. The Care Bears' job is ostensibly to keep everyone caring, but in truth it's to maintain the status quo. Because there's never any good or neutral magic, or even any evil magic that can work good changes as a side effect. The world is, by default, at its maximum state of caring, and anything that happens to it can only ever make the caring meter drop. Big changes in the world only ever cause bad things, so they must all be reverted in the end, even the harmless ones. And forget dreaming of magic, because it'll just get you into trouble and cause regret. Well, that sucks.

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