on the past

(august 13th 2008)

'lo. Hope the journey was without difficulty. Sleep well. Speak soon. Thanks for not letting me ruin what's ours entirely, tis the best thing you've fixed thus far x


n.

on proximity

or: connelly is the source of witt

i'm trying
i'm trying to
drink away the part of the day
that i cannot sleep away
(modest mouse)

fortunately, in the charred and smouldering remains of my life, work has been pressing somewhat and i've been able to do little more than stagger from desk to unconsciousness. the odd moments where i've had time to stop have been the worst, times when the loneliness comes sweeping in full force and i feel the betrayal of the lies again. i cannot tell if the feeling is any more dull now than it was the first time i felt it, fighting what i knew to be true with the faltering conviction that no-one could do ever do that to anyone else they claimed to care about. days like my birthday. and maybe i shouldn't say things like that, even though they are true, but i've always worn my heart on my sleeve and i have always, always, been honest. like i promised to. it's how i am, and i'll apologise for it every chance i get. i am sorry now for the things i was sorry for then. i'll say so as often as you'll let me. take that poem, from years ago. she kept reading my blog long after she stopped calling. and i said to her, i'd love you to be my friend, so please be my friend, and do what friends do.

my, she was a one.

but i digress. i mean to say that i've been watching films to try and distract myself from all of this. of course it's not possible, but here's as close as i got.


working in a lab is never this good

exhibit number one is this photo of jennifer connelly, here seen in the film hulk. that would be the film hulk, directed by ang lee, and if you're not expecting me to link to that video (again) then you really don't know me at all. hi; i like comedy. unfortunately, it's no longer on youtube. don't worry, i'll recite it for you sometime.

so the film itself wasn't bad, and it was a bit weird in some of the shots but not in a bad way, so fair enough. if your life ever falls apart and you've watched most of the other things in the library down the road, it will very well pass the time. for one, i am reassured that i find jennifer connelly terribly attractive because, well, i'm probably meant to. but good lord, is she attractive (or the character is, i should say). i felt the need to mention it to someone who was online at the time, and was told that they preferred jennifer garner, since we were "going with jennifers". and as much as this was good to know, the conversation was to become a more interesting one. there is an irony there, you won't know, since the person i was talking to was a long way away and excessively pretty, but it's been really engaging talking to her lately; had she been in the same room as me, i may not have been able to speak at all, so i would have been missing out.

the second of today's pictures is of alicia witt, who was featured in the second film i got from the library that day, 88 minutes. unfortunately there are no good stills of her from the film available, where she has short hair, so instead the picture is of her looking marginally less attractive in something else. oh yeah, that'd be for her ep whereon she's freaking amazing. ahem.


note the orange nail polish. ouch.

i've seen both these actresses before, connelly in dark city and witt in the sitcom cybill, the former of which is awesome and the latter not so much, but in both cases i had thought them quite lovely and then had forgotten about them. so the question i wanted to ask was regarding proximity, and how much exposure relates to relationships. speaking as someone who has been known to vote in the fhm '100 sexiest' poll, if only to be outraged at the absence of becky jago year upon year, it is clear that exposure is a heavy source of modulation in celebrity matters. but in real life?

i have often commented that context counts, and it seems to be no exception at this level. and this, to me, isn't surprising; people choose from what they are offered, to expect anything else is idealistic at best. so it was that i was introduced to this concept as the 'camping trip effect', as readers of my comics will already know. and at first glance the whole thing might seem shallow, but i wonder about it. the point of relationships is to feel cherished, loved, and surely a part of that is being held, taken into someone's arms, caressed. only someone who is nearby can offer that, and perhaps our subconscious reaction is to be attracted to that. no point having someone perfect that you never get to see, because you will certainly go unfulfilled.

that's not to say you can't have both, of course, and genuinely love someone for more than the fact that they are around to hang out with. and as i was told, proximity is important but "it's not a deal-breaker. and if it is a deal breaker, then the deal was meant to be broken." and this really is a thought about films in the end, but i guess what i'm saying is that you should look for the love that transcends distance, and then hope it's nearby. and if you're watching films with actresses as beautiful as these, but still thinking of someone less so whom you have not seen or head from in a long time, well then you're probably in love, or trouble, or both.

n.

on language and love

or: if music be the food of love, this flan is the music of disillusionment


i can measure things

i'm adrift; in the meantime i thought this article was very interesting and fitted neatly into the category of things-i-knew-but-never-had-any-sources-to-back-up-what-i-was-saying. check it out if you have a moment, it talks about how the necessity (?) of moving thought into expression feeds back into itself, such that thought is also shaped by the language(s) you know.

and then, if you go to the author's website, you'll find they're a professor of psychology at stanford but also inexplicably link to this love calculator. [aside: 91% woo! 92% when i spelled their name right]

the links to alice and eliza might also give you a moment's distraction [aside: i still love this comic]. and really, that's the most i hope for.

n.

on hurting from another time

i'll get your back
protect it from the morning light and cold
how could we be naked if we
shelter in each other's warmth
and hold?

i'm not sure you know; i was one
before you and now am only half.
we're a solo of two notes, a single
fried egg colour each, a pantomime giraffe.
i don't make sense alone.

so long since i felt you rest against me
the breadth of my double bed resents me
i'll get you back. take that
whichever way you like.

n.

on my second family

peculiar to the power of awesome

n.

on the 10 ways to impress women

or: binary jokes are either funny, or they're not.


extra points if you can guess what i named it

so i have a new computer; my old one, purely rational, was suffering somewhat. like me, old age was slowing it down and it was acquiring viruses. okay, forget that last part. but you get the idea. but i hate throwing stuff away, so i am devising plans that may or may not involve things that are above my capabilities. we shall see.

and so it was that i bought a new machine, and spent far more on it than a should have. but thanks to moore's law, it's way above my last one and cost substantially less. and also, it is an attractive red colour. woo!

because let's face it, things like colour do matter. i looked at any number of machines, and learned roughly what the various things did and how well people rated them, and in the end i was looking at a toshiba with good specs and decent reviews, but i knew it wasn't quite what i wanted. i wanted the red one. and sometimes you need consider how you will feel using something. so i downgraded, spent more money, and got the one that i wanted. and i could give you the rundown of the components, but yeah, it's red. woo!

tangent

at the end of the capoeira class, beth says to me 'the instructors are very attractive'. it had not gone unnoticed, i replied; by myself, true, but certainly not least by the guy next to me. when called upon to count in turn for the sit-ups, in 'any language we choose', he chose: 'one, one zero, one one...'.

i learned a while ago that binary is not the way to impress women. or that if it does work, then she's a keeper.

/tangent

so if it's of any interest to you, i spent an entire weekend uninstalling and installing and reinstalling a whole bunch of nonsense. lessons learned:

- ubuntu is cool, and the drivers for wireless cards are included, so sometimes it's better to try taking the card out and putting it back in again rather than spending about an hour learning about wireless card drivers and compatability issues and architectures.
- xp can probably be installed on a vaio, but it's not made easy for you, even with hardware drivers provided, since SATA drivers are a pain.
- vista is arse, and yet not quite as arse as sony software generally.

so i argued with my old machine, and i argued with the new one, and while i didn't prevail completely i at least now have a partially working system for doing the stuff that i used to do before. huzzah! and with one final touch, the transition is complete:


eye will never leave you

n.

on things of import

or: you cannot bring the luck of others

from the united states customs docuemnt 0504 (2006), list of prohibited things:

46. Obscene, Immoral or Seditious Matter and Lottery Tickets.

given that the list has at least forty-five other categories, doesn't it seem odd that lottery tickets were chosen to go here?

(interior, airport customs)
welcome to america. got any obscene material on you?
no, sir.
any lottery tickets?
um...
down on the ground! now!
(sound of taser. fade out)

n.

on being in love with a fictional character

or: why feminism can suck my balls


all at once i heard a tapping

that there, for those uninitiated, is sam carter. the sam carter. colonel sam carter, from the stargate program. she has her own wiki page, and i'm fairly sure other internet sites too. ahem.

now let me be clear about this: i am in love with sam carter. i am not one to let the small matter of her being fictional - or the fact that most of her love interests die in short order - disuade me in any way in the nature of my feelings. i'll return to that in another post, but first a note on stargate: stargate sg1 was a great show, but it was also notable for how well it transitioned from the original film, keeping essentially a perfect continuity apart from the genius stroke of recasting kurt russell with fucking macgyver, and you already know how i feel about him (yeah, i love jack o'neill too. turns out i have a lot of love to give). this was great move but also necessary to ensure the run of the show; you can't sustain a suicidal lead character for ten seasons.

sam is brilliant, reasonable, determined, passionate, and - as once ruefully mentioned by by then-girlfriend helen - "very capable". and with the help of amanda tapping in the role, she is rather cute too; adorable, even. she has short blonde hair, she knows how to handle a p-90, and she has blown up stars. literally. it is surely impossible not to love this woman.




and bearing all this in mind, let's go back to the pilot episode of sg1, children of the gods, in which sam first comes to the sgc and where she first speaks to jack. if you haven't seen it, you can watch the episode (in the us) on hulu. it's an interesting exchange:

o'neill: oh, here we go, another scientist. general, please.
carter: theoretical astrophysicist.
o'neill: which means...
hammond: which means she's smarter than you are, colonel, especially in matters relating to the stargate.
carter: colonel, i was studying the gate technology for two years before daniel jackson made it work and before you both went through. i should've gone through then. sir, you and your men might as well accept the fact that i am going through this time.
o'neill: doctor, i wouldn't get my hopes up...
carter: it is appropriate to refer to a person by their rank, not their salutation. you should call me captain, not doctor.
hammond: captain carter's assignment to this unit is not an option, it's an order.
carter: i'm an air force officer just like you are, colonel. and just because my reproductive organs are on the inside instead of the outside, doesn't mean i can't handle whatever you can handle.
o'neill: oh, this has nothing to do with you being a woman. i like women. i've just got a little problem with scientists.
carter: colonel i logged over 100 hours in enemy airspace during the gulf war; is that tough enough for you? or are going to have to arm-wrestle?


and this brings up a point that i've been meaning to write about for a long time. it was prompted in part by an article regarding battlestar galactica and its alleged chauvinist bias. that article is to be found here, and is just nonsense. i read it before i watched bsg, and re-reading it now it's plainly written by someone who had something they wanted to say and might as well have been writing about anything. the article is just plain wrong about facts of the show, trying to imply that female characters being cylons means that the show is delivering the message that girls can't cut it. if they're not human, how does that show anything about humans? also in the 'girls can't cut it' evidence folder is that one sacrifices herself to save a bunch of others. surely that's an honourable thing? how is that sending the message that girls aren't up to much? it also talks about rape, and attempts to suggest that the show's 'insidious' threats of rape 'directed only at women' means that the bsg world is not gender-blind. but having already stated that there is a surfeit of female characters that are cyclons, it's actually that the rape is directed against cyclons and the questions arising are actually about what it means to be human, not male/female. it also points out that rape of a prisoner is ordered by the (human female) admiral cain, but makes no comment on that.

i could go on; i won't, but leave it with the recommendation that you watch the embedded video in the article in the context of what is written and ask yourself this: if this is "orgasmic-sounding gasping", then don't you think someone's been doing it wrong?

second thing that came up was that the university of manchester, with whom i have a complex relationship, won university challenge this year, after their opponents, who scored many more points in the show, were found to have broken the rules. so there was a thing about that, but who knows, maybe it illustrated to manchester that there might be a benefit in following rules and procedures? we can hope. but the thing that caught my eye was this short piece and, if you can spare the time, the comments war that followed it. have a read. sadly, i was out of the country so didn't see the show nor any of the news coverage, but that doesn't mean that i can't read the article and note that there is no basis for what is being alleged. or, to be more accurate, none is presented. statements such as 'gail trimble shouldn't have to apologise for being clever' come from nowhere; has anyone asked her to? where's the citation?

the author relates a story where she was having an argument with a man and he resorted to ad hominem. now, anyone who does that is an idiot in my book, but the author declares this was an attempt to 'remind her she was a plaything, a sexual object'. how, i ask? it seems to me like he was just losing an argument; he attacked her character because he was losing. how does it have anything to do with being female?


back to sam

and that first exchange with jack; jack appeals to the general that he has to take a scientist on the team, but sam takes this to be related to her being female. why? he's already said it's because she's a scientist (and this is consistent with his character, we have no reason to doubt it). no, she already had that reproductive organs line worked out* because she came in ready for that attitude and when it wasn't there, she saw it anyway. actually, it is there, but it comes from the others, not jack, but she attacks him anyway.

[*we know this because in a later episode an alternate-world sam, never having joined the air force, practices that line before a meeting with sgc people, finds it corny, and says to herself 'who would say that'? i forget which episode, sorry.]

and this i what i find in a number of places, and i take solace in the fact that it probably is just a minority of people who tend to get heard because their views are outspoken. and these people tend to identify themselves as feminists. i wonder if that makes other feminists sad. i read a couple of self-identified feminist blogs, and while some of them frustrate me, i might recommend the unfortunately-named feministing as an interesting, informative, and thought-provoking read.

so here's the thing: if you go into a situation looking for an insult, or a bias, chances are you'll think you find it. if you are looking for a pattern, you'll see it. try it in the context of those songs-played-backwards; without knowing what the 'message' is supposed to be saying, you really won't hear it. but if you're looking for the pattern, it's clear. try it with michael shermer. it's a good talk, and if there's one line to quote form it, it has to be this one-line description of science, and how to avoid reaching conclusions from data that really don't support it: we have to count the misses as well as the hits.

and why 'misses', huh? sounds misogynist to me.

n.

on landmines

or: using the power of awesomeness for good


A Virtual Minefield from veggenmin.no.

this is really quite splendid; it's the implementation of a 'virtual minefield' that attempts to highlight that landmines are a very real problem even when you're not stepping on them, because you cannot forget for a second that you might step on one. it's a great campaign, not only because it's for a sensible and worthy cause but because the designers really tap into today's culture to hit with their message. it's awesomely clever. the only problem with it is that i tried to join up, and the links didn't work. so i went over to here instead, which probably wasn't the way the campaign was supposed to work, but i figure it's in keeping with the idea at least - i saw the film, thought it was cool, random landmine charity is helped out.

there is probably something to be said that i wasn't already supporting the landmine charity, since i did already know of them, and that it took this video to prompt me, but that's something to ponder separately. it just makes me happy that in the world where clever marketing/design ideas are more commonly found flogging phones or shoes, there's still someone out there using their influence on my weak will to point me in the right direction for a change.

n.

on thinking in fours

or: a better approach to what could have been said




i've had a few posts knocking around in my thoughts that, for one reason or another (but mainly that one reason), i haven't been able to start thinking about properly. i had originally thought to write a post titled on why feminism can suck my balls, but decided against it. but i may come to the subject at some point. and then i thought to write a series of posts called on the virtues of cheesecake, but again it didn't quite pan out.

so instead, i'm just going to write about a few things that i've been thinking about. original, i know. and the first is that of writing comics, something i have been trying to do with semi-regularity for a while now. quite often i don't have time to come up with ideas, sometimes i can't come up with ideas, and sometimes the hassle of scanning the damn things means that it hasn't been as regular as i'd like. that might be something to work on if i ever wanted to make something 'proper' out of it. and also, learning to draw.


i love comics, and i'll come back to that later

but for now i'll direct you to the comic that the panel above is taken from. read the comic, consider it a second, and then read on below.

now, the obvious joke here is the 'big shoes to fill line'; in fact, that's what came to my head first. i thought it was reasonably funny, and wondered how i might draw it. but thinking further, it's an obvious joke. there's no syncopation there, there's no beat. so it wasn't quite what i was looking for. and then, i figured, it was obvious enough that someone will have drawn it before (one example here), so that was no good either.

[aside: when meeting new people, never do a joke about their name, even a good-natured one. not because it won't be funny, but because they will almost certainly have heard it before and won't find it amusing. by extension, you come across as not funny. better that if they say their name and there's an obvious joke, do another joke right then that is unrelated, or don't do one at all.]

so i had the beginning of a joke, and i needed to shape it to something i thought was good enough. and by that, i mean in my style; i like broken rhythms and pauses and downbeats, and i wanted to make this idea into that sort of thing. so i decided that the punchline should go in the second panel, i could fit the lead into the first panel (though it is a little clumsy, without being able to clearly draw a clown as a stick man). the joke is seen and delivered in half the comic, so the rest has the appeal of being unknown. and hopefully, the payoff is original and gets a laugh.

but i'm not totally sure about it. usually i go through the rearranging process and end up with something that fits four panels and i know that's the way i want it. sometimes i'm not sure of the layout until i see it on the page, see the rhythm in how the words look. and sometimes there's a nagging feeling that i could've done better; there was a rephrasing or a rearrangement that would have been funnier. it's the same with the mouse-overs, though i try not to spend time on those. and you wouldn't believe the amount of writing i put into the hebrew one a short while ago, and being far from fluent in the language (as is demonstrated by the errors in the cartoon) i know there was probably a better way of doing it. but that's messing with the medium too, and the whole thing was making me upset so i decided to leave it as far as i got.


case study i: garfield

everybody knows garfield. garfield strips ran everywhere (and still do), and there was a animated cartoon and and whole load of merchandising including soft toys that needed 'fluffing'. but garfield is interesting because i have seen no less than three alternate takes on garfield, each of which i find funnier than the original strip. these all require (to some degree, but maybe not as much as you'd think) prior knowledge of the cast, so could not exist independently, but even so it is interesting.

firstly, the garfield randomiser takes three random panels and throws them together. it's hit and miss, but there are a surprising number of hits. (there is also a dinosaur comics randomiser, which you may find at your leisure).

secondly, removing garfield's "thoughts" creates a new strip that shows exactly what we would see: jon talking to a cat that makes no response because, well, he's a cat. there's a short piece on it and how the jokes fare here, and click through to see some strips. it's surprisingly funny.

and lastly, the phenomenon of garfield minus garfield entirely removes garfield and makes a superb strip about a guy called jon with issues. this last one doesn't strictly improve on garfield, but makes it something else entirely. something entirely more awesome.

[aside: garfield minus garfield is an example of one of those things you enthusiastically tell someone you love about and they say 'yeah, okay' and don't even look at it, and then many months later they tell you about this awesome thing that some guy they were talking to told them about and isn't it great, and then your heart shatters inside. just saying.]


case study ii: calvin and hobbes

it is difficult to talk about great comics without talking about calvin and hobbes, so instead i embrace the opportunity. calvin and hobbes is simply amazing, and like all the best things in life including a certain ex-girlfriend of mine, becomes more amazing on careful examination. take a calvin and hobbes strip. take any of them. for example, here is random one i selected from the first few pages of google image results (i wanted one of the four-panel strips):



so think about this strip for a second, and try to think of a way to make this joke funnier in either the artwork, or the layout, or the dialogue. removing hobbes' last panel dialogue won't do it, neither will removing calvin's too, even if you redraw the expressions. the punchline is the third panel, but the fourth is both a wind-down and a build-on. it's perfect! i've looked at these strips so often, and i've never found one i knew how to improve. the work is astonishing in what it achieves.


so i'll just keep trying

and draw whatever comes into my head; i'm almost up to one hundred now, and as silly as it sounds to say it about stick men, i think my drawing has got better. and i hope the humour has too; sadly i cannot say the same of life.

n.