So I have these voices in my head. I know I'm not alone; just about every artist I know has 'em. Hell, most people have them, I but I notice them most with the art thing. Sometimes I even listen to them, and much of the time it turns out to be a good thing I did. Some of the voices are former instructors, some are former employers, and some are former co-workers. Some of them are people I've never met. For example, when I'm animating I hear the voices of people like Preston Blair, Richard Williams, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. All these people clamor in my head and tell me where I'm going wrong. (They are always strangely silent about me ever being right.) They're doing their best to help, I know, even when they don't agree with one another. They usually ARE a help, when I can understand them and have the ability to do what they're telling me.
Lately, however, I've found myself not listening as much. Found myself telling them to sit down and shut the hell up, in fact. Ignoring them when they say I'm making things overly complex, that the composition is off balance, that a pose is goofy, stiff, or makes for a bad silhouette. Lately I've been deciding what I want to draw, and to hell with 'em if it's cliche or pastiche or fichu or any one of a dozen other foreign words.
Maybe this means my drawings are getting worse, that my skills are retrograding. I'm certainly not breaking any new ground or anything. Tell you what though: I'm having more fun. I remember a time when I would draw for hours at a time for the sheer hell of it, not as an assignment or as an exercise or practice, but for the joy of scratching a mark onto the surface of something. I kept a lot of my old drawings, and when I look back at them now they're pretty terrible. Derivative 90's comic book stuff for the most part, cringe-worthy things that the voices in my head snort at and will certainly never be posted here.
Man, did I have a good time drawing them though. And I won't find the fun again listening to the cranky buggers in my skull.
Hey, remember that Dungeons and Dragons cartoon that aired during the previous century? It looked kinda like this:
Well, it seemed cool when I was eight. That's a helluva DM, making Tiamat their first encounter. I watched this show a lot, and I couldn't now tell you the plot of a single episode. Be that as it may, I decided to draw Sheila the Thief...
...and ended up with something that looked almost ,but not entirely, unlike Sheila the Thief. One's drawings do get away from one, from time to time.
Why Sheila? Just one of the cartoon redheads I had a crush on when I was a lad, along with Daphne, Josie, Scarlett and the rest. I would add Pebbles to the list, but when I do that most people say "dude, gross", and the I have to say "No, man, Pebbles when she looked like THIS", and then they say "Well still, you're thirty-seven, why are you crushing on cartoons anyway? And what's with the whistle?", and then I have to say, "I wasn't thirty-seven THEN, you fool", and it all ends up a lot more trouble than it's worth.
********WARNING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS TALK STARTS HERE********
Speaking of Dungeons and Dragons (here we go!), I've started playing with some people in an Old School, Basic, Dwarf-is-a-class version of the game, and I think I finally get why so many people flew off the handle when 4th Ed. came out. Now I like 4th, it's my preferred version, but after seeing what the game used to be like, I can see why aficionados would feel that it was an insult of all they had known and loved. To me it seems kind of like American Football: a fine game, enjoyable, exciting and strategic. But don't take it to Europe and try to replace their version of football (We call it "soccer". And corn is "maize") with it, because that would be a good way to get a broken beer bottle in your teeth.
I've also been playing a bit of World of Warcraft (settle down people, just a trial account) and I can sure see why some people feel that 4th was ripping off that game. At least, on the surface. When you get down to it, most of the similarities between the two are only skin deep, and the joy of a living breathing DM is what makes all the difference. Plus in the long run, WOW (and all video game RPG's) had it's genesis in just being a digital version of table top RPG's, so you you could say that by DND ripping off WOW which ripped off DND, that 4th Ed is simply an inbred bastard child. That nobody loves. Hmm, kinda went against my point there.
Still awake? If so, then dig this: Yes, I would agree that 4th is more like a video game than previous versions of DND, simply because video games tend to have a structure and a set of rules that can be followed logically. 4th Ed seems to strive to do this too, with varying degrees of success. Previous versions of DND are more like the games we played in the school yard, with crazy rules that make very little coherent sense and that change on the fly. Don't get me wrong, that's a fun game to play too; and if that's the major thing you found fun about DND, then yes, 4th was bound to disappoint.
That was a pretty long digression for a 5 year old argument that hardly anyone cared about even when it was fresh. I hear they're working on 5th now, and hopefully that means I'll be able to get some 4th stuff on the cheap pretty soon.
********WARNING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS TALK ENDS HERE********
Every so often, we're reminded that we're just borrowing this land from creatures that were here long before any of us. By which I meant the banks, of course. Seriously, I didn't invite this giant rodent into my yard. It's a rodent, right?
Aaawww, it looks like you found a friend, Dash you lovable scamp! I hope you enjoy the searing pain of dozens of barbed quills in your muzzle and forelimbs!
Is there a thing in physics where the unidirectional nature of time is the consequence of specific forces acting on those objects and energies that exist in time? That is, gravity and inertia affect objects in three dimensions, so is our movement in the fourth defined by a similar temporal force? Is that why time gets all screwy at relativistic speeds, because our velocity is in someway interacting with those forces?
Do you ever ask yourself a question and consider looking up the answer, only to realize that you're not going to understand the answer anyway so you eat a cheese sandwich instead?
So, yeah, I barely touch this thing anymore huh? Barely post, and when I do it's scraps torn from notebooks. Still, been keeping up one post a month, even if it's a nonsensical cheesecake of...Jane Jetson in an Emma Frost outfit, I guess. Hell, I was gonna just let it slide this month, or maybe give up the ghost entirely, but old habits.
Gawd, I don't even...look here's a thing, just don't tell anyone I was here, OK?
Oh and Plato's "Ideal Society"? It sucks. I couldn't live there. Yeah yeah, Father of Western philosophy, ancient Greece was a different time, I get it, but man it scares the crap outta me. I'm only halfway through, maybe he turns it around at the end, "J K, guys, eugenics isn't really that cool and stop leaving out babies to die of exposure and telling 'noble lies' about it," but I doubt it. I've read Orwell, it all turns out terribly for everyone.
LARRY: So I found this piece of paper that I'd forgotten about, and I'd written this limerick on it that's pretty much meaningless except that it's all rhyming homophones:
There was a girl with a plait of great weight So she scarce could keep a straight gait She ne'er could wait But race through her gate She'd a lot on her plate, in that strait
So, I've started playing Pathfinder again, and inspired by the whole Game of Thrones thing, I decided my guy there needed a coat-of-arms like the Starks and the Lannisters and the rest of them. I think some good words would be "Over sea and Underdark", but I'm sure once the fever breaks it'll all be perfectly punctual apricot mittens.
