#these two are just sort of similar conceptually? however it seems to be implied the dca killed ppl while the puppet did the opposite

[biblically-accurate-dca]

day 19: dolls/puppets/ect.

it's a puppet themed dca!! or maybe it's actually a dca themed puppet?

[duhragonball]

Battle Tendency Liveblog: JJBA Ch. 71-76

Let the joy of love give you an answer

And I will hold you when you're lost Just walk on to the light 1938 Bizarre Summer Every road will lead us to a memory of

Great Days

When I started reading the Battle Tendency Manga, one of my goals was to find connections between Part 2 and the others, because I feel like Part 2 is sort of isolated from the rest.   You never hear anyone talk about the Pillar Men in Part 3 or 4, and Joseph Joestar never appears again, save for an entry on a genealogy seen in JoJolion.

But thematically, there’s a lot of connective tissue here.   I already pointed out the scene where Smokey steals Joseph’s wallet in his first appearance, echoing Joseph’s final appearance, where Josuke steals his wallet in Part 4.   And I already mentioned the Italian connection.    Hirohiko Araki’s love for Italy is pretty well-known in the fandom, but only two JoJo parts have the distinction of taking place on Italian soil: 2 and 5.

But there’s other, subtler connections.   Joseph’s Clacker Volley relies on angular momentum, much like the “Spin” techniques used in Part 7.    But then you also have this moment in Battle Tendency where Caesar explains Hamon to Joseph, and compares it to the way a discus thrower spins around to gain distance on his throw.   In the same vein, the fictional Ripple techniques used by all the good guys is just an extension of something natural.    Everyone gains energy from respiration and blood circulation, but Hamon users can amplify that many times over to do amazing things with that energy.    It’s very similar to the lessons Johnny Joestar learns about “Spin” in Part 7.   I never really thought “Spin” had much to do with Hamon, and conceptually they may not be related, but the way they’re presented to the audience is very similar.

More Part 5 connections, you ask?   Well how about a trip from Rome to Venice?  No assassins on the train this time, so Joseph doesn’t have to steal 100 cars to finish the journey.

And how about a meeting with a mysterious person wearing a strange disguise...

Who turns out to be a lady?  What’s weird about this is that when I went through JoJo in order back in 2017, I never noticed the Lisa Lisa/Trish connection.   There was just so much crazy stuff happening in Parts 3 and 4 that I forgot all about how Lisa Lisa debuted.  

So yeah, let’s get back to the main plot.   I mean, I was going to talk about some connections with Part 6, but I seem to be drawing a blank.   Joseph’s parents died when he was very little, so there’s no way for him to have a contentious reunion with an absent parent.    There’s no way for his mom or dad to reveal that they were looking out for him this whole time, but they couldn’t tell him how or why.    I mean, Lisa Lisa kind of reminds me of Jotaro.   They’re both stoic badasses who smoke cigarettes.   But that’s kind of a stretch.  

Anyway, Joseph convinced the Pillar Men to let him live for another month so that he could give them a better fight later on.   To hold him to that promise, they implanted poison rings in his body, which will kill him in exactly 33 days, unless he defeats the Pillar Men and receives the antidote.   Caesar realizes that they both need more training to face the Pillar Men again, so he takes Joseph to Venice to meet his Hamon Master, for more training.   That’s Lisa Lisa.

I’m confused as to why Lisa Lisa wasn’t brought in a long time ago.   The plot progression of Part 2 implies that she only heard about this crisis when Caesar contacted her for more training, but we’ll soon see that the Ripple Clan has known about the Pillar Men for thousands of years, just as the Pillar Men knew about them.  

Actually, now that I think about it, why didn’t Straizo recognize the Pillar Man in Mexico then?   You’d think he would have taken one look at the guy and said “Oh shit, these dudes are back,” and forgotten all about his dreams of becoming a vampire like Dio.  Maybe Straizo had just lost all perspective by then.  Well, we’ll see if that gets explained later.

Anyway, Lisa Lisa starts the training immediately, by putting a mask on Joseph to control his breathing, which is a vital component of Ripple/Hamon stuff.  One thing Caesar explained to Joseph before they left for Venice is that their Hamon powers were about equal.   The only reason Caesar’s seems stronger is because he’s learned to concentrate it into smaller points, like his fingertips.   Joseph, on the other hand, has to express his Hamon power through his entire hand, which reduces its effectiveness.   Caesar compares this to the spray of water from a water pistol.   The smaller the nozzle, the more powerful the stream.

As for Speedwagon, well he just flew back to New York.   Joseph forbade him from telling Erina about the bind he’s in, so Speedwagon simply tells her that he’s bumming around Italy for a month.  Meanwhile, Lisa wants the boys to climb the Hell Climb Pillar.

So the Ripple Clan has this island castle off the coast of Venice, which they built in 39AD to train their students.   This was after the Pillar Men wiped out most of their guys, so I guess they wanted to really ramp up their training for the future.   Lisa opens the front gate and the first step inside takes you into this big pit full of oil, and she just kicks them inside without a word.   Ha ha, Lisa Lisa is awesome!

So the object of the Hell Climb Pillar is just to climb out of the pit.   Except the only way to do that is by clinging to a sheer pillar in the center and ascending 24 meters (about 79 feet).  Oh, and there’s some sort of fountain built into the pillar that keeps it covered with oil at all times.   The only way to make this work is by using Hamon power to cling to the oil and work your way up.  

Caesar is familiar with this test, and he at least has a general idea of how to do it, but he’s never attempted it before, and he knows a lot of students have died in the attempt.   The first thing he figures out is that it’s such an exhausting process that if you fall off part way, you won’t have enough stamina to start over, so you really only get one try at this.  

He spends most of his climb, however, worrying about Joseph, because Joseph’s Hamon skills are so rudimentary that he doesn’t even know how to cling to the pillar in the first place.   Fortunately...

Hermit Purple?   In my Battle Tendency?  It’s more likely than you think.   Joseph tries ripping his shirt and fashioning a makeshift rope for himself, but Lisa cuts it with a dagger before he can even try to use it.    I’m somewhat skeptical that this would have worked anyway.   She may have only foiled his attempt for his own benefit.   Joseph might have wasted a lot of precious energy trying to use this trick before giving up and doing it correctly. 

So, after all other options are exhausted, Joseph finally follows directions.  He watches Caesar for a while, then realizes that Caesar has been clinging to the oil with his fingertips, and not his palms.   It looks precarious, but Joseph remembers what Caesar told him about the water pistol and figures out that this is an application of that concept.    So he quickly catches up to Caesar, only to discover that the pillar gets harder to climb around the 18 meter mark. 

Around that elevation, the Pillar “protrudes”.   I think that means that it gently widens as you go up, something you can’t really see until you’re already climbing up there.    So now you’re not climbing straight up any more at a 90-degree angle to the ground, you’re more like 95 or 100 degrees, making it that much more of a struggle to hold on.  

But things get even worse when Joseph discovers a small crack in the pillar.   It’s the only handhold on the entire pillar, so he figures he can get a firmer grip on that and rest a bit.   Big mistake, because it’s booby-trapped, and when he touches the crack, it turns on this high-pressure stream of oil at the 20-meter level.   Oil just spews out from all sides of the pillar, and the pressure is so intense that when Caesar sticks a pen into it the oil stream cuts it in half.  

Joseph thinks Caesar is angry at him for his blunder, but Caesar’s actually worried for Joseph’s safety.   He only knows one way to get past the oil stream, and he isn’t sure Joseph has the skill necessary to pull it off.    See, you can use Hamon to cling to the oil, but you can also use it to repel the oil, and protect yourself from the high-pressure stream.   But Caesar now has to use use both of those principles simultaneously.   He has to cling to the pillar while moving through the stream.   He ends up doing this mid-air jump thing, and it works, but now he has to haul ass to get to the top of the pillar.   It’s not just for his own sake, but Caesar feels that he has to convince Lisa Lisa to call off the test to save Joseph’s life.   He doesn’t know how to do the trick Caesar pulled off, and Joseph’s the kind of guy who might get desperate or frustrated enough to do something drastic and get himself killed.   But when he reaches the top, there’s no one around.

But he needn’t have worried, because Joseph’s drastic idea actually works.    He apparently can’t repel and cling at the same time like Caesar, so instead he just clings.   Instead of passing through the oil stream, he clings to it, sliding across the flow of oil to the edge of the current, then flipping over it, where the pressure is low enough that it won’t hurt him.   Then he bounces off the top side of the oil stream and clings to the outer wall of the pit.  

Everyone is impressed, except the walls of the pit are even harder to climb than the pillar, and Joseph can’t quite make it to the top.    Caesar saves him with just 10 cm to go.   

Joseph is still sore at Lisa Lisa for putting him through all of that, but she tosses him an upside-down glass of water and Joseph is surprised to find that he can hold the water inside the glass with his Hamon, something he couldn’t do back in Rome, when Caesar told him they needed to train.    So now Joseph’s finally on board with all of this, and Lisa introduces the boys to he assistants, Messina and Loggins.   They put Caesar and Joseph through a grueling three weeks of training montage, until finally...

...They go shopping!  Some guy with a pompodour tries to steal a necklace from Lisa, but she catches him and lets Joseph deal with the guy.   Joseph covers the dude in mustard and then he complains about her carrying around a bright red stone like that for pickpockets to see.    Wait... red stone?  Yeah, it’s the Red Stone of Aja.

On their way back home, Lisa explains the backstory of the Pillar Men.    They created the Stone Masks to improve themselves, and tested the technology on humans.    No one knows how the Stone Masks work, but the “bones” that jut out of them somehow bring out “latent power” in the human brain and it turns them into vampires. 

I never really considered that before, but I suppose the bony spikes in the masks are kind of analogous to the effect of being pierced by the arrows in Parts 4, 5, and 6.  Part 5 offers a partial explanation for the Stand Arrows by saying the heads of the arrows were carved from a meteorite found in Greenland, and there was an alien virus in the meteorite.   You get cut by this metal, and get sick from the virus, and you either recover with a Stand power or you die.   There was a text piece in Part 7 that tried to connect the Stand concept with Hamon, the Stone Masks, and “Spin”, suggesting that the latter three were attempts to achieve what Stands can do, and I guess that makes sense.    Maybe the Stone Masks were the Pillar Men attempting to invent whatever the alien meteor was supposed to do.   Except it’s not as advanced, so it can only do vampires instead of Stands.

Eventually, Kars’ experiments led him to the discovery of a particular stone that amplifies and focuses light.   He believed that if he could work that into his Stone Mask technology, then he could create a more powerful mask that would bring about greater improvements into his own body.   The problem was that he needed a bigger, more flawless stone than the ones that were available to him.   And that’s why they went to Rome to find one.   The 1st Century B.C. Ripple Clan couldn’t stop the Pillar Men, but they did manage to secure the stone they were looking for, and it’s been in their possession ever since.   Lisa Lisa holds it up to the sun and blows up part of her boat just to show off what it can do.

Joseph suggests that they just destroy the thing.    After all, it does them no good, and it means everything to their enemies, so why keep it around?   But there’s some legend that says it will be impossible to defeat the Pillar Men if the Red Stone of Aja is destroyed.

This seemed kind of hokey to me at first.   Lisa Lisa even admits that she doesn’t understand what that legend means, but she’s convinced that she has to protect the stone anyway.   But then I remembered Tonpetty, the leader of the Ripple Clan in Part 1.   He taught Will A. Zeppeli how to use Hamon, but warned him that it would lead to Will’s gruesome death.   Presumably, Tonpetty had some sort of gift of prophecy, and maybe it’s not far-fetched to think that others in the Ripple Clan had the same ability.   So maybe someone, a long time ago, foretold the ultimate fate of the Red Stone of Aja, and the Ripple Clan has been following that vague counsel ever since.

This might explain how the Ripple Clan knows so much about the Pillar Men in the first place.    It never made much sense to me how the Pillar Men would travel to Rome and this secret band of warriors would be there ready to oppose them.   It’s also kind of convenient that the Ripple Clan knows so much about the Pillar Men’s Stone Mask research.   I mean, the Pillar Men barely acknowledge humans as it is, so why would Kars deign to explain anything to them?   

Now that I think about it, this might be why the Ripple Clan turned to divination in the first place.   Their enemies were so mysterious and their motives so baffling that they may have had no choice but to consult fortune-tellers and psychics for insight.    And, one way or another, they managed to get some solid intel this way.   Kars really was doing R&D on Stone Masks.   He really did go to Rome in search of a “Super Aja”.    Will Zeppeli did die, as Tonpetti warned him.   Kars really did return in 1938, as the Aztec’s predicted.   And it really will be impossible to defeat the Pillar Men without the Red Stone of Aja.    Lisa doesn’t know how that works yet, but she knows it’s true.

But that’s not important right now.   For now, it’s time for Joseph and Caesar to complete their training by heading back to base for a final showdown with their instructors.   Joseph’s final test will be a battle with Loggins, so I assume Caesar has to take on Messina.   But when Joseph shows up for his test...

He finds two people on the battlefield.   One is Loggins, and the other guy is killing him.

And yeah, it’s Esidisi.  Who invited him?   Well, Joseph was going to fight him in a week or so anyway, so why put off tomorrow what you can do today?

[jawnkeets]

happy easter! how do i make the jump between young adult books and classic ones? i’ve read a few classic books (mainly for school) but i tend to read ya fiction. however i really want to study english at oxford and ik that i’m going to need to widen what i read. so do you have any tips on starting to read classics or can you recommend some classic books that are good/interesting? i really want to read more classic books AND enjoy them! thank you

hi! i’m so so sorry about taking so long to reply. in truth i didn’t know how to answer this at first! partly because i was trying to work out how i did it, and partly because if i made an advice post on this i didn’t want to snobbily imply that the time comes when we should all be moving on from YA lit, because i know it’s really important to a lot of people that follow me, and i don’t at all want to prescribe what people should read at all. but disclaimers aside, it’s a really good question.

1. i suppose i’d say that whilst it is a new start in some ways, in others it really can just be a further expansion and continuance of your interests! when i read young adult i loved spooky stuff, so the first thing i sought out was classic lit along those lines, particularly gothic and/ or late victorian literature. that way i didn’t have to force myself to be interested; i was already interested in the subject matter and then only had to gradually adjust to the language and pacing. then i found that the more i read, the more my tastes gradually changed and organically developed (e.g. ‘i really liked these particular philosophical questions/ moral issues raised by frankenstein as much as the spooky stuff i originally picked it up for, i think i’ll read some more romantic literature dealing with similar concerns'), and the more classic lit i read willingly and enjoyed genuinely. if you send a list of young adult genres etc u like i can do my best to recommend some classic lit for you to start with!

2. romanticiseeee itttt – watch dead poets society, share pretty pictures on tumblr, etc. you can give this up later (or not! up to u), but this has given so many people a sense of how exciting history, literature, philosophy, etc are. as i’ve said in my faq, don’t do this at the expense of actual learning, but rather use it to kindle a sense of excitement, like it’s something really important and life-changing (which it is!!). look at art, read the wikipedia pages of philosophers, get acquainted with greek myth, do it all (it doesn’t have to be in a systematic way, just follow what catches your eye and the links will form naturally)! i think schools get it wrong in separating subjects so firmly from one another – you’re delving into the past, into ways of feeling and thinking that in many ways are SO different to what we think now (though in some ways comfortingly similar). be open not just to enjoying this as a hobby, but to entering it. i felt pretentious at first and that i was faking it, but it really is a case of faking it til you make it (and passion is never fake, anyway). there’s no ��one way’ to read classic lit – i often thought i was missing something and was going to get ‘caught out’ as a phoney, but as long as you keep challenging yourself and throwing yourself into it the ideas and opinions you develop will be absolutely good enough, and you really will get out what you put in!

3. i was really fortunate to have a fantastic literature teacher who set up a weekly poetry club for a year or so; he picked poems that were ‘classic’ but very simple to understand. it was a wonderful way into classic lit as not just a stuffy thing to be adjusted to and slogged through to acquire a vague sense of achievement (why i didn’t read much of it before), but as vivid and alive – some of the poems had me reeling and i’d leave the classroom feeling things i’d never felt before and didn’t know how to name. ‘stopping by woods on a snowy evening’ and ‘the road not taken’ by robert frost were two i vividly remember, ‘high windows’ by philip larkin another, and also coleridge’s ‘rhyme of the ancient mariner’. read them aloud if you can! i’ve put together a poetry list, too, if you liked these (they’re all on there!) – skip the ones that don’t immediately speak to you, but hopefully a few will.

4. i was nervous about reading classic lit for ages, and was really put off properly starting, because when i read classic lit i sometimes just didn’t understand it. the actual words and the way sentences were constructed often baffled me, i had to go to the dictionary a gazillion times, i used sparknotes for every single scene in a shakespeare play. this is all fine, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise! rome wasn’t built in a day, and things only get easier. you’ll look back and be surprised how quickly you improve, even in a short space of time.

5. but i also felt there was something i just wasn’t getting not just in terms of literal understanding but because a lot of classic lit (like the poetry of keats, or hamlet, or the great gatsby, which i did for school and was my sort of ‘gateway novel’) was so beautiful and mysterious but conceptually so far beyond me or different to how i thought and functioned, or even if i sort of grasped it i didn’t have a clue what to say about it. rainer maria rilke’s letters to a young poet fixed that for me – it’s a beautiful piece of writing and seemed to answer so perfectly my mix of confusion and mute awe when reading classic lit:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

i hope this helps 💕 an exciting road ahead!!

[theorynexus]

Retrospective Analysis of Dirk:

After the initial thoughts I had this morning, following some light (re-)reading, I have come to various conclusions: The role that Dave Strider played in the Meat Epilogue was nearly identical to that that Dirk’s Bro (Alpha Dave Strider) played in the story---   DOOMed rebel fighting against the rise of another dictatorial Crocker.   I am sure that Dirk realized this, both considering the fact that this was an echo of Dave’s soul across the multiple instances of himself, and because he partially engineered this eventuality. Intriguingly enough, this might imply that Rose likely would have sided against Crocker (Jane) if her ascension had not incapacitated her and Dirk hadn’t been puppeteer-distracting her at the time (for reasons beyond her connection to Kanaya). More importantly, it helps establish an important further parallel:  Dirk acted as the puppetmaster in the shadows, essentially controlling the election and determining its outcome from the beginning.   Lord English remained the most important force in the Alpha Kids’ world and session in much the same manner, despite )(er Imperious Condescension’s attempted Rebellion. Both individuals were playing broader and longer games than the women they were manipulating to suit their purposes.  Though Dirk’s purposes have not yet been revealed to the fullest extent, Jane Crocker had a narrower perspective that failed to grasp the true nature of the battles going on and underestimated her “supporter” ‘s power and intentions. This relates to another way in which Dirk Strider and Caliborn/Lord English:  Both of them represent iterations/avatars/fulfillments of the idea of Calmasis---   both tricked a Calliope into losing a major confrontation by making her confuse an attack on one piece with that of another (a major short term/immediate objective--- an attack on a queen [in Dirk’s case, Jake English/the election] ---with an attack on the king [Alt!Calliope, who acted as essentially the commander of the forces opposed to him]); furthermore, and more importantly, both act as protagonists and antagonists to the story at the same time (villain and anti-hero).   Dirk presumably sees himself as working towards the perpetuation of reality by forcing more conflict into an otherwise ended story; or alternatively, sees himself striving for freedom in opposition to causality and enslavement to cosmic will (which would jive well with his Kamina-esque aesthetic).  Meanwhile, Caliborn/Lord English obviously served as the main villain of Homestuck, but were also the protagonists of their little side adventure and was trying to develop himself and expand his horizons despite his severe disadvantages, much the way the Kids and Trolls did. Dirk’s fulfillment of that role may have actually been why he downplayed the importance of Complacency of the Learned in his conversation with Rose just before he began to subsume her will in earnest. Of course, that is somewhat speculative, and hard to prove, one way or the other. ... Regardless, upon making these sorts of connections, I began to think about whether Dirk was intended to become a villain from the moment he was introduced, and/or relatively early on.  Andrew Hussie seems to have a habit of working out many plot details a great deal in advance (see the Alpha Kids being hinted at as early as Act 4 with Jake’s letter to John, Doc Scratch probably being intended to have been/contained at least an iteration of Dirk from the beginning [as shown via his comment to Rose that she ought to think of him as a kindly human uncle figure-- shoved in our face via a certain Truthsplosion]), so the idea didn’t seem all that farfetched. After all, as referenced in the above parenthetical reference, Doc Scratch shows that Dirk always had at least the potential for villainy in him, under the right circumstances. The first thing that jumped into my mind (other than the fact that Bro is a bit of a dick, I guess, and the early narrative of Act 6 emphasizes the fact that this is in fact the kid version of Bro quite a bit) was the fact that Dirk’s introductory period created clear parallels with two trolls of a highly corrupt moral character---  Vriska and Equius:   Beyond the obvious tendencies to manipul8 others and his willingness to “cheat” in certain ways (defeating Squarewave in a rap battle bit exploiting his weakness to liquid shorting him out, teleporting his head to Jake for the revive+kiss with the intent of forcing a start to their relationship that way, et cetera) Dirk is also pining for a Page who he attempts to force a redrom with (more effectively, in his case, at least in the short term), and whom he attempts to “groom” by pushing challenges that the Page is clearly not prepared to face his way (Brobot’s awkward difficulty settings parallel the FLARP encounters  Vriska gave Tavros).    That Vriska and Dirk’s first on-screen kills were both decapitations is probably a coincidence. As for Equius:  There is the wife beater that Dirk sometimes wears, the similarities between horses and musclebeasts, the fact that both build robots whom they then face off against in lethal combat, the fact that both wear shades and are initially blacked out upon introduction (though this latter matter is of less significance) the fact that both have dominating personalities and a secret kinky submissive side (albeit these play out in different ways for the two), the fact that Brobot and Aradiabot both take out their “hearts” and POUND POUND POUND them up dramatically (note: though this is a bit of a stretch, the parallel makes the affinity’s intention obvious), their willingness to lie and take extreme measures (Equius considers lying and double-crossing to be in a blue blood’s nature and/or their “superior” culture; Dirk outright tells Jane that one of three statements he is making is a lie, and the only one it could possibly be is that he believes that Roxy’s decision to blow up Jane’s computer as a way to scare Jane away from playing was too extreme [meaning that, since this was a lie, he is absolutely willing to go to such extremes to get the job done--- as shown later with his willingness to decapitate himself, publicly display the fact that he’d killed Hegemonic Brute, et cetera])... and most obviously+ominously, his declaration to Jane that while she was going to remain the group’s leader as far as everyone else was concerned, he was going to be the person controlling things from the shadows (which is a reversal of Equius’ demand that Aradia be the shadow leader for the Blue Team, but obviously calls him to mind via allusion/reference). Now, while a case can be made for either of these characters not being that bad, and I am personally someone who likes and feels for Vriska quite a lot, I will be the first to admit that she is the closest thing the trolls have to Caliborn or Dirk (Gamzee doesn’t count: he’s has a mental breakdown and is basically brainwashed by LE via Lil Cal; he’s not a planner or someone who went out of his way to embrace his “turn to the dark side” of his own volition--- if you can call it that, for Caliborn; you know what I mean).   As for Equius: he was highly violent and could have been quite the menace, if it weren’t for his moirail. He had a generally demented mentality.           Neither of these are the sorts of comparisons you want to be made with a character being painted as particularly heroic and good.  Next comes the fact that, as I have discussed previously, Dirk Strider and Caliborn/Lord English have been deeply entangled with one another’s fates.   Caliborn liked Dirk the best out of all of the Alpha Kids, it was ironically Dirk who ended up defeating him in the end (in both the form of soul trapping and via ARquius). However, it was also Dirk who provided Caliborn with the mechanical leg that allowed him to escape (and presumably have confidence in the idea of escape) from his SAW Room Death Trap binding with Calliope.  Presumably, either Dirk or AR must have figured that that was the intention behind the request/present, at some point. (I rather doubt it was something that Dirk knew the implications of at the time, but I wouldn’t necessarily rule out that possibility. He might not have cared, especially since that was years before the Alpha Kids began their session, and he/they might not have had much of a bond with Calliope, at that point. Not that he ever got all that close to her, generally.)  Note:  Caliborn’s favor toward Dirk does not necessarily suggest anything inherently wrong with Dirk, but it helps set him apart from the others. This is just another warning sign suggesting something “off” about him.      Dirk’s “I have failed,” before he went wandering off into the glitches and self-destructed in the [S] Game Over. version of the Alpha similarly can be interpreted as hinting at his God Complex/Megalomaniac tendencies.      It seems a logical extension of his general personality that he wouldn’t be able to settle down and enjoy a peaceful life in a “perfect” paradise planet (which is probably one of the reasons he decided to leave it). I suppose this is just another thing that wasn’t generally thought about as the community was so focused on the actual process of getting to the victory point, and what that would mean?   At the very least, I don’t remember any such considerations.  There were certainly warning signs. The biggest factor that convinces me that Dirk’s villainy was planned quite early on (and which thus supports to some extent the idea that Jake is meant to be his eventual foil) is that Dave, after seeing his Bro’s corpse, said, “I’m not a hero, my bro was.”   This was almost certainly made at a point where Dirk Strider was conceptually developed/invented already, definitely was at a point where Dave’s baggage surrounding heroism and its connection with how he felt toward his brother was in play, and most certainly was well after the audience could have seen that Bro was abusive and sortof a dirtbag. Thus, there was already some irony, there.  However, he also called John a hero in that same statement, so it clearly was not totally derogatory, and so the irony could be increased. It was, as shown by the fact that the Alpha Kids were not “Heroes” of their session, but Nobles. This was not enough.  Dirk has eventually turned into the anti-hero and villain of his own story.   Perhaps this might be enough; however, it wouldn’t quite feel fully “right” if he hadn’t been intended to have been so from the beginning-- and perhaps that’s actually why their group were called Nobles in the first place, not only because of the fact that they couldn’t complete their session without the others, but because not all of them were heroic at heart.  [Non-sequitur: I wonder if LE would have been anywhere near as dangerous, if not for Lil Hal’s capacity to make incredibly complicated calculations {needed for Furthest Ring travel, among other things, presumably}, and his capacity as Doc Scratch to pave the way for LE’s arrival. This would seem a very similar relationship to how Dirk facilitated Caliborn’s entry via the leg, in retrospect.] ... While the section immediately above isn’t as well-developed as I’d like-- mostly because I’m tired, distracted, and it’s been at least 3 hours since I started this post in the first place, and I want to at least get the last part that I thought of in before it leaves my memory.    I may add to/edit in more for this post, or post follow-up material later, when I remember more that might have slipped my mind on this subject/I think of more. Anyway!---    as I was considering all of this, a very intriguing thought popped into my head:    While I had initially assumed that it was simply to not rehash old material and/or that it was to keep us with John for the sake of narrative consistency, since I now know that it was Dirk who was narrating this segment of the story, and thus it was a narrator with bias and interest in the facts being related, it has occurred to me that it is actually quite odd for Dirk to omit some relation of the actual facts of the Caliborn’s Masterpiece encounter.   We are placed by his hand at a place even further removed from the reality of the battle than the clearly biased and somewhat embellished account that the Cherub gave of his own rise to power.        This strikes me as odd particularly given the fact that it is Dirk’s great moment of heroism, which might serve as a sort of counter-balance to much of his otherwise morally questionable deeds.         Given his egotism (and the fact that there would seem to be no OOC reason strong enough to justify such an omission on the author’s part, since this means that there is no faithful depiction of the battle shown to us in the story), this makes it seem as if Dirk chooses to not show the conclusion of this battle for some specific and tangible reason.  I would not suspect it to be out of embarrassment, a desire to conceal his identity longer, or plain trollishness (though the last of these strikes me as almost being fitting).  Rather, I wonder if there is something worth concealing in the end of this encounter.  Maybe the Alpha Kids actually lost, and Dirk’s placement of Cal into Lil Cal was an act of capitulation. Maybe Dirk otherwise willingly and knowingly created Lord English via the soul trap at the behest of ARquiusprite, or said sprite tricked him into doing so, claiming it was the only way to defeat their opponent (which it was) and omitting the consequences.     I do not know which of these, if any, is the correct answer, but Dirk being the one to choose to omit the details does, I shall repeat, seem extremely fishy to me, all things considered. ~~~ While I will not put a summary here, I would just like to say:   In retrospect, the Meat Epilogue has done more than the requisite “adding on to the story in appreciable ways and tying up loose ends,” but has served to add depth to an already incredibly deep story and caused me to reconsider and better understand characters and themes which I had not previously delved into so deeply before.    I wonder, now, if Dirk Strider and Lord English shall prove to have been even more deeply connected than it has seemed up to this point, once I have reached the end of the Candy Epilogue and thus will be allowed to properly investigate what’s going on at the beginning of Homestuck^2. Final thought:  Hmm. So much of his imagery speaks to him being a sort of twisted version of Kamina (embodiment of masculinity, warrior spirit, noble sacrifice, heroism [not being able to live up to those last two, and lampshading to some extent his frustration at that, in Epilogue Part 7]), but it also vaguely seems to me that he at least sees himself as being like Simon--- this is to say, leading the charge for freedom against the forces of determinism and the chains of repression that would hold back humanity (and/or himself). It’s a very striking thing, especially considering the fact that it is only Simon who takes the fight to space in a fancy ship, once what seems to have been the final villain was defeated and the real threat began to loom on the horizon.  I wonder how this contrast will develop in the future, and how noble his true ideals may in fact be. ~~~ Major Edit:  

What. The heck. How did I not remember this blatant nonsense?    Fricking... darn it.

[mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker]

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #16-18 Thoughts

Previous thoughts here. 

This arc is a mixed bag.

Previous arcs of RYV tended to give one of the family members more priority than the others. It wasn’t exactly that we’d have an MJ arc then a Peter arc then an Annie arc exactly, but which characters got more focus did shift around. The Venom arc for example was more MJ’s story with Peter playing support and Annie more in the background. The X-Men arc was more Annie’s arc with her parents splitting the second fiddle role.  The penultimate arc before the time skip was another more Annie centric storyline, actually probably the most Annie centric story since issue #3.

Houser’s opening arc put the spotlight on each family member culminating in Annie herself, but Annie was still being developed through Peter and MJ’s eyes in those issues. This made a lot of sense since she’d be the most important thing to either of them and we already know who Peter and MJ are. Even if they’re 8 years older that’s not going to amount to them being as significantly different as the now teenaged Annie whom we’d not yet met.

This arc is another Annie centric arc which initially seems like Peter is going to be an important backup player, sort of like how the Venom arc was MJ’s arc first and foremost but Peter still played an important role. This was indicated by us getting Peter and Annie’s thought captions in issue #16 and the story revolving around Peter working at Annie’s school.

Issue #17 drops Peter’s captions and point of view and the story becomes Annie’s totally now revolving around her two new friends abruptly introduced at the end of issue #16. Peter however had three poignant scenes in the book implying that going forward he would be an important character to the pay off the arc. This did not happen because issue #18 thrusts forward with the story about Annie and her new friends, now with Normie as an important player. Peter shows up but only as part of the ‘parental collective’ alongside MJ and gets just one scene with just him and Annie at the end of the book, which serves to simply reiterate the sentiments from the earlier scene with MJ and to payoff that Annie and him are more at ease about both being at Midtown High.

Now there are two ways of interpreting all this.

The optimistic and diplomatic way is that the arc is about Annie growing more independent via forming a new friendship group. Issue #16 nicely sets up that Annie, like many teenagers, is trying to find where she belongs in the high school jungle as she and her old friends have drifted apart as unfortunately happens as kids grow older. Her Dad’s continuously diminishing role across the issues as her relationships with her new friends (and old friend Normie, whom she reconnects with which is maybe pay off to what I just talked about) grows is symbolic of her becoming more independent as she grows up.

The more cynical view is that...this arc is just disjointed. That Houser wanted to set up the status quo of Peter at Midtown high and dedicated the first part of the arc to that but also had it half act as a transition into the meat of the arc, which is about Annie befriending Lacey and Reece...oh but Normie is also involved too.

Unfortunately I’m inclined to think the latter is more likely.

It almost feels like Houser was seeking to set up the general status quo for the family in her first arc running through issues #13-15, then was setting up Annie’s personal status quo with this arc.

Like imagine this was not a Spider-Man family title but a Spiderling title. You establish her school, her social situation, her Dad being a teacher, her older friend in Normie. The only thing you arguably don’t have set up here is her parents or the fact that they are superheroes but that’s because you’ve already read the previous issues. Heck issue #16 even has Annie swinging solo on the cover, almost like it could be the cover to a Spiderling solo book.

The focus upon Peter in issue #16 feels like I dunno...lip service to the fact that this supposed to be a team book and not an Annie solo book.  Feeling exacerbated as his presence diminishes as the arc goes on. It wouldn’t be that bad perhaps if the arc supplanted his presence with MJ’s but that doesn’t happen. MJ is a slightly more distant third fiddle in this arc.

Now conceptually having an arc so focused upon Annie isn’t all bad. If you looked at Houser’s run and the post time-skip era in isolation, dedicating a focus arc to her and her status quo makes a lot of sense. However considering the arc just before the time skip gave her the lion’s share of panel time and she’s also had a lot of play in the X-Men arc and Conway’s opening arc AND how Houser’s opening arc dedicated a lot of time to developing Annie...you see where I’m going with this.

She’s stealing too much lime light from Peter and MJ at this point, even if this arc was hypothetically afforded them more panel time.

But how does this connect with those two points I raised up top?

Connected with this is the issues raised from the time skip itself.

When the time skip was announced the big criticisms surrounding it mainly revolved around:

a)      The jump abandoned the status quo we’d been building for 12 issues b)      Making Annie a teen is derivative of Spider-Girl/Mayday Parker

Jameson and the Bugle are used organically for what little they show up. Jonah also looks noticeably aged, although that does raise the question of why nobody else does.

Annie is well characetrized and believable as a teenager who is both unreasonable about the cringe factor of her Dad teaching at her school and well over her head in getting mixed up with Lacey and Reece. Her growth in the story is also done well as she has to become more akin to a parent and grows to accept her Dad’s place at her school. Fundamentally Annie is played as a nice balance between trying to be responsible but tripped up by youthful arrogance and deep need for independence. Does that remind you of anyone Spider-Man fans?

·         Houser continues to play Peter Parker, out of touch Dad (complete with Dad jokes), believably

·         MJ as the mediator between Peter and Annie also feels very believable for the characters

·         The mugging scene was funny

·         Houser throws shade at Slott’s shitty Peter Parker paparazzi arc

·         Peter being a teacher again is lovely although it’s in a different field to what he was teaching in the JMS run. This is actually a good way of allowing something comfortingly familiar yet also unique for RYV, and is possibly set up for Houser to use going forward. Best of all it comes out of relatable financial problems that have been common to Spider-Man since day 1.

·         Annie adopting a tech role in the school drama club is an eloquent way of having her find something that’s both a reference to her mother and father’s passions

·         All of conversations between Peter and MJ and between Annie and her parents were done well...with one sort of exception but we will get there

·         Bringing Normie back into the picture, for all the problems I discussed, is an eloquent way of reinstating him into the post time-skip status quo and his reconnection with Annie brings things full circle from Annie’s other friends drifting away

·         The Normie flashbacks were adorable

I’ll get this out of the way...Mister Sinister. Let’s put aside how so far he’s done nothing in the book, his presence in a Spider title is just unwanted·         Peter, even in issue #16 where he is more present, feels rather...undermined. I’m trying to figure out a more political correct way of saying this besides ‘Peter is kind of a Beta here’ but off the top of my head I just can’t. It just doesn’t feel right when Peter is played as immature as his teenage daughter to the point where he ignores a crime in progress and is insulted along with his daughter by MJ, or where Annie is angrily telling him off when he’s in costume in school and he passively just agrees with it. This was something knocking around a little bit in the previous arc when Logan was telling him off in issue #13 too and was sort of there a little bit under Conway. Its never been as bad as here though, but I guess it’s a nitpick at the end of the day. Heck the MJ comedy bit was very funny for what it was.·         Stockman’s art isn’t bad and is pretty similar to Roche’s from the previous arc. But there is this unrefined quality to it. It’s not as good as his issue #5 art and of course such a major step down from Stegman. Also it dipped noticeably in issue #18·         The kids turning out to be if not bad then on the dangerous side was incredibly predictable·         The resolution was seriously not great. Reece having feelings for Lacey was not set up until the issue where it was going to become the key to resolving the plot, it should’ve been introduced earlier. In fact the entire Reece/Lacey plot shouldn’t have been brought up towards the end of issue #16 but played out throughout that issue. Similarly the end of the three issues randomly telling us that Lacey and Reece’s abilities had totally faded was trite and far too convenient. Throwing a line in earlier on, even the issue before, that the powers might be temporary would’ve alleviated things.·         Peter and MJ’s confronting Annie in part 3 was a nice scene but the ending where they just pat themselves on the back and say ‘we did good’ felt rote and not really true. A sign the arc was kind of falling apart a bit towards the end.

  Over all I’d give this arc a C-

[the-infinite-jukebox]

The Mars Volta - The Mars Volta (Album Review)

(Review #422, September 16th [2022]) It has been a full decade since The Mars Volta released their last studio album with 2012's Noctourniquet. The group behind classics like Frances the Mute and De-Loused in the Comatorium went mostly AWOL for a solid decade sans a couple of singles and bits of unreleased music coming to light. It was always going to be a difficult task to live up to the more iconic records in their discography. However, The Mars Volta's self-titled album is shockingly even more disappointing than it initially seemed destined to be.

As any extended period of time between two releases from the same act may promise, The Mars Volta sound extremely different hear than they did years ago. If anything, this self-titled record is the single most accessible things that The Mars Volta have done in their entire existence. The artsy pop rock aesthetics that they adapt to here will likely be unfamiliar to pre-established fans of the band. With this comes the inevitable question of whether or not The Mars Volta are capable of doing this style well. The answer is that they are, generally speaking, not. While they theoretically could have made something interesting due to their history as a fairly forward-thinking progressive rock band, they simply lack the necessary passion to really stand out from a number of younger alternative bands doing relatively similar music to much greater success. The point of The Mars Volta's latest studio album was to appeal to a larger audience, and it is painfully obvious. The experiments that they do take are mostly fruitless. The Latin influences displayed via Willy Quinones' drumming are too insignificant to play any sort of integral role. The semi-electronic style that is presented on "No Case Gain" is obnoxious above anything else, and the faux balladry on cuts like "Shore Story" add nothing to the listening experience beyond mild throwbacks to sounds that belong decades in the past. This isn't to imply that The Mars Volta are the risk-taking types on their self-titled album. However, it is to state that the handful of times they dip their toes into the pool, they accidentally slip, fall in, and drown. The album itself feels almost pathetically thin in nature. This is a descriptor that goes many ways. The mixing from Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez does little to allow the individual instrumentalists of The Mars Volta shine while still ensuring that Cedric Bixler-Zavala sounds muffled. Bixler-Zavala's lack of enthusiasm in his performance certainly doesn't help. Even conceptually, The Mars Volta's latest album feels about as thoughtless as it gets. There is an air of certainty of what the band want to do here. Unfortunately, they never fully flesh out many of the ideas they compose. These leads to an album of songs that, despite their obvious status as complete, feel unfinished. In conclusion, the Mars Volta's first album in 10 years fails to live up to even half of its many expectations. Sure, you could certainly argue that it was never going to live up to what people wanted it to be. After all, the Mars Volta are certainly a legendary band, and that is something that is undeniable. There is a lot of hype surrounding any talk about them releasing new music. With that in mind, the Mars Volta's self-titled studio album completely fails in virtually every regard, and does not at all sound like anything that a band like the Mars Volta should be pointing out this far into their career. Between adapting a new sonic aesthetic that just doesn't work out and a handful of weak, thin, and failed experimentations, the Mars Volta have managed to disappoint in just about every way that they possibly could have with their first album in quite some time.

Final Rating: 1.5/5 (Awful)

[delicatechaosduck]

What is Brand Identity? What's more, How to Create a Strong One for Your Business

Some place along your marking venture, you've presumably found the expression "brand personality" and raised an eyebrow or two. Possibly you got a cloudy image of what the term implies; perhaps you proceeded onward from it out and out. 

Furthermore, the regular human inclination in any case, we firmly advise against the subsequent choice, as incredible brand characters are the center part of any fruitful business. 

Making a solid brand character is the thing that diverts your organization from a heartless thought into a no nonsense substance, and it ought to be THE focal point of your marking endeavors. 

Notwithstanding, this normally makes one wonder: 

What is brand personality? 

A brand personality is basically the face your image shows to the world. It is the sole, steady message of your organization that is conveyed again and again, through a progression of visual components and reliable language. 

At the end of the day, your image character is the way your image – with its fundamental beliefs and mission – is communicated. “buy social logo“

Consider your own personality: How would you put yourself out there? 

Maybe you dress head to toe in dark, consistently. You lean toward wearing clear lines and catch out shirts, or possibly you're an example sort of fellow. An additional stud on your ligament. All around put tattoos, or unobtrusive features in your hair. 

The shared factor here is that individual self-articulation regularly comes from developed visual portrayals – ones that isolates you from others. This likewise remains constant for building up a brand character; you depict a picture of your organization that recognizes your image from rivals'.  “professional logo makers near me“

Looks aren't all that matters, however – the manner in which individuals talk additionally distinguishes them as novel. Anybody can disclose to you what character from "Companions" would almost certainly be caught saying "How you doin?" or which eminent supermodel is about the "smize." All of these viewpoints add to individuals' comprehension of what your identity is – and the equivalent goes for your image. 

Why center around brand character – what is its motivation? 

Your image character is where you and your clients meet. It's what causes your clients to remember you in a flash, and what causes them to get faithful. 

The general purpose of your marking endeavors is to make a particular picture in your clients' psyches when they think about your image. How your organization is seen is everything, and you engineer the insight you need your clients to have through the brand personality you assemble. “logo makers near me“

Likewise, making a brand character sets rules for your organization itself; it advises the substance you produce, the plan you use – even the sort of occasions you run. 

All things considered – how about we get to it!How to Create a Brand Identity 

Stage 1: Do an interior/outside review. 

Before you make a character that will associate with a group of people, you need to comprehend two things: Who you are, and who your crowd is. Appears to be coherent, correct?  “customlogos“`

To this end, answer the accompanying inquiries: 

Who are your ideal clients? What are their socioeconomics? 

What sort of language does your intended interest group use? 

What are your clients' trouble spots? 

How do your clients presently see your image? 

Which different brands do your clients like? 

What are the qualities that different you from different organizations? Your statement of purpose? 

What is your image character? 

What is your image voice? (What does it seem like when it "talks"?) 

What worth do you bring to your future clients? 

These inquiries don't just need to be replied through thoughtfulness. Make studies. Meet center gatherings. Dissect contenders. Utilize any assets accessible to discover who your clients are, what is most important to them, and how they need to be addressed. 

Then, at that point, survey your own qualities and shortcomings. On the off chance that you experience difficulty nailing down your own responses to the above questions (for example the interior piece of the review), have a go at making a Mind Map – a procedure that assists you with getting every one of your thoughts on paper in a coordinated manner. “business logos”

Put the primary thought of your business in the focal point of the page, and afterward draw "streets" that lead outward into different thoughts, similar to parts of the voice that you imagine for your image or an objective you need your business to accomplish. Record these thoughts surprisingly you; before the finish of this meeting to generate new ideas, you'll have a more clear image of what your image rely on and how to carry your qualities to fulfillment. 

Stage 2: Determine your image character. 

Another significant marking popular expression, your image character is the human component of your image personality. 

Where your image character incorporates the total discernment others have of your image, your image character is a significant angle that assists with developing said insight.  “buy company logo”

The most straightforward approach to imagine your image character is by envisioning a genuine individual addressing your image. What does he/she resemble? Sound like? How does the representative speak with others? Is it accurate to say that they are sharp and clever? Genuine and proficient? You may have addressed these inquiries in Step 1, however this present time is the opportunity to tissue it out (quip planned). 

When the picture of your image's character is obvious to you, record it. To be successful, your image character should be reliable – radiating similar tone and message across all types of advertising correspondence.  “buy business logo“

Stage 3: Build your image procedure. 

This is the "how" part of your image personality. How are you going to share your image story? 

Once more, consistency is pivotal in fostering a brand character that your clients will interface with. Hence, it's an ideal opportunity to make an arrangement for executing the thoughts you concocted in the conceptualizing of the over two stages. In particular, decide: 

Brand rules. These are the principles your organization will allude to while addressing yourselves across channels, to make a passionate association with your crowd, and later, brand acknowledgment. They incorporate a style guide, organization mission, and acknowledged symbolism. “buy logo design”

The channels that are best for your marking endeavors. Does your crowd run to one explicit online media network? At which occasions should your image be believed to situate yourselves as thought pioneers? 

Content system. This alludes to the sorts of substance your organization will make, just as the satisfactory brand voice or language that will be utilized across web journals, promoting materials, and so forth 

Your general image system should plan to make the experience that is exceptional to individuals utilizing your item. Whenever that is done… . 

Stage 4: Get innovative. 

Time to unite everything! 

Make the visual components of your image, as indicated by the brand system you've illustrated previously. At the point when you're planning, recollect that the entirety of the underneath components need to associate flawlessly – as though they were conceived together. “buy custom logo”

Zero in on the accompanying: 

Logo – Your logo isn't all that matters, yet it is the sole visual portrayal of your image character that will help clients to remember what your identity is. As such, a logo is the client's initial step inside the organization entryway. 

Slogan – This is an expression that goes with your logo and informs your crowd something concerning what your organization does.  “logos company“

Typography – These are the text styles that recount your image story. You'll probably have to pick a few textual styles that supplement one another; attempt to combine text styles that are particular enough that your crowd can separate between them, however that actually depict a similar mind-set. 

Shading Palette – The tones you decide for your image will have distinctive mental impacts on your crowd, and you need this to work in support of yourself. Consider the feelings you feel when taking a gander at various tones, and take a stab at utilizing shading mixes that summon the feelings you need related with your image. “buy a logo cheap”

Shapes – Are you about fresh, straight lines, or fun, round edges? 

Presto! Your image character authoritatively has a character, a voice, and a face – which are all prepared to recount your image story. 

Estimating Brand Identity Effectiveness 

Since your image character has taken full structure, you're prepared to send it out into nature. 

Nonetheless, you may figure out after some time that you're uncertain if your image procedure is working out, or if the voice you've picked is actually the right one for your message.  “custom logos for sale “

Examination is consistently key to any system, and it's imperative to quantify the achievement of your marking endeavors while your image is as yet youthful, with the goal that you can change your methodology if important. Therefore, you can generally examine the accompanying: 

Is it accurate to say that you are changing over new clients? Holding steadfast ones? 

What sorts of discussions are created around your image? 

Has your organization followed the brand style guide? 

Which posts of yours had great reach? Was there a particular mission that resounded with your adherents? 

As you answer these inquiries, make changes depending on the situation – however attempt to remain as steady as could really be expected, and obviously, on-message. All things considered, you wouldn't change your whole character in a day, correct? “ purchase a logo online “

[zenosanalytic]

Crimes Unto Heaven

 MMmmmmOk so

This is A Gag

to be clear(tbc, fyi)[1].

I don’t actually think the Hiveswap team is attempting to cover-up TERRIBLE ZODIAC CRIMES to protect themselves from the Star Police and avoid Astrajail or anything, and obvsl they can structure the EZ however they like since the Zodiac’s been Public Domain for 3000 years, and their Extended additions are their creations. And, while I don’t take it terribly seriously, it’s Fun! Which: Yay. But, I noticed some seeming-discrepancies when looking it over to write a “My Thoughts” response to @witchknights on the EZ, and the idea of running those down a wee bit and writing about them was Also Fun, so I’m Doing This o_o I’m Making This Happen(Requisite(TM)) o_o o_o

My original idea was to get superdetailed about it and explain everything, but then I started taking SCREENCAPS of The Star Grid(this is what I’m calling The Symbol List), and each individual Sign so I could group them all into their various CATEGORIES to illustrate my arguments(:| :|), and then I said to myself “ok this is ridiculous, you don’t have that kind of time, your screencapper can’t isolate fragments on the MSPA page for some reason, it doesn’t seem like you can save custom-sized/shaped selection tools in Paint3D, and you are beiNG RIDICULOUS!” so instead I’m going to just write up the basic patterns I noticed(which prob aren’t all the ones in there, given Hussie), their seeming-violations, and their possible implications, according to Me. You -Our Dear, Sweet, Dear, Dear, Sweet Readers- can imagine the visuals if you like, though, I have no problem with this I am Very Gracious[2] vuv

EZ Rules

Each sign-class has two associated suffixes(they’re also associated with the Aspect of the canon troll of that sign. Possible Sign Pun? Can mean Both??): one for Prospit, one for Derse. The List:

Aries(Time): -ries, D; -rist, P.

Taurus(Breath): -un, D; -us, P.

Gemini(Doom): -mini, D; -mino, P.

Cancer(Blood): -cen, D; -cer, P.

Leo(Heart): -o, D; -lo, P.

Virgo(Space): -ga, D; -go, P.

Libra(Mind): -za, D; -ra, P.

Scorpio(Light): -pia, D; -pio, P.

Sagittarius(Void): -ittarius, D; -ittanius, P.

Capricorn(Rage): -iborn, D; -icorn, P.

Aquarius(Hope): -rius, D; -nius, P.

Pisces(Life): -sci, D; -sces, D.

Now, a Neat thing you’ll notice is that these suffixes are exclusively arranged in top-left-to-bottom-right diagonal series across The Star Grid(I’ll symbolize it \ thusly). So Aries(Derse) is the topleftmost, then the second sign in Taurus is Taurist(Aries-Prospit), the third sign in Gemini is Gemries(Aries-Derse), etc, etc. This pattern holds true; you’ll only find those suffixes along a \ starting with their “parent” sign(the “True Sign”. I’ll call this the “Alpha Sign”, with the meaning First not the HS meaning, to avoid “True”’s connotations), or in another \ an appropriate period down(the period being how long it takes to work through the other sign-suffix \’s. So the Taurus suffixes are on the \ below the Aries, and the Gemini below the Taurus, etc, until it reaches the Aires again). Generally, the Derse-Prospit alternating holds true as well, and that has implications for the verticals and horizontals; to maintain this they’d have to alternate between Derse and Prospit and the horizontals do from Aries untIL-

-LIBRA! At the middle of the chart, at the Libra-line, the pattern breaks down. BUT! From Libra to Lipio along the vert the breakdown in alternating starts at the Libra signs; beginning with Libza it becomes much less predictable. The Arza-Libza \ is “regular” until Scorza, then regular again until Pira. The Arga-Liga \ becomes “irregular” at the Virgo-line(Lega, Virga instead of Virgo). The Aro-Libo \ becomes irregular at Leo. The Arcen-Licen \ becomes irregular at Cancer and is highly irregular from that point on. Like I said I’m not going to go through, find, and list all of the irregularities and I’m CERTAINLY NOT going to try and figure out if there’s a mathematical relation that defines the irregularities(if they are formulaic, or, as I suspect, the result of a non-mathematizable logic), but you get the idea. Periodicity’s Whack! It ain’t right!! I doubt this has any bigger implications beyond the HS Crew wanting to place the 12 canon trolls as the “True Signs” of each of the sign families -which only makes sense from an Earth-centric or Game-centric viewpoint; I mean, Troll culture would order the signs by some interior logic of its own if it wasn’t a narrative creation, and wouldn’t care about preserving the primacy of 12 unknowable nascent apotheokids at the end of history- and there are other bits of evidence that this is the case that raise other objections.

Another pattern in the EZ is that the last(Omega) Sign in each Sign Class shares the suffix(and Moon and Aspect) of the first(Alpha) sign in the next class. This makes a sort of sense if you conceive of them as a ring or continuum: The Omega Sign in each Sign-Class(or symbology, or alphabet) would be the one “closest” to the next sign-class, and so it displays this similarity in its naming until-

-LIBRA! AGAIN!! Or Virgo, depending on how you want to figure it. There is a regular, predictable pattern -Arus, Taurmini, Gemcer, Cano, Lego- until the Virgo|Libra Interface where Virgo ends with Virza and Libra begins with, well, the obvious :\  Though a larger pattern of Omega Signs having one of the two suffixes of the next Sign Class over holds true; just this smaller pattern of Alpha and Omega sharing a suffix breaks down. Both Libra and Scorpio(or Virgo and Libra) are irregular, then the pattern reemerges at Scorpittarius, only to break down again at the Aquarius|Pisces interface. The Pisces|Aries interface is also irregular.

Just to give you an idea of the sort of thinking this can make room for in the EZ, I’ll do a deeper dive on Libra, por ejemplo(though similar implications apply to Virgo, and other sign-classes). One possible implication, I’m sad to say, is that Lipia shouldn’t be the Libra Omega(thus Ultimate) sign, but rather Lipio, which actually makes some very good symbological sense as:

This is Lipio

This is Libra

To begin with, Lipio is a struck-through latin upsilon, which looks like(but is not related to) an upside-down Greek omega. Upsilon, the ancestor of our “u”, is the first letter in the latin word Ultimatus which means mostly the same thing as Greek Omega; both mean “the last, final, end”[3]. So making it the “ultimate”, or Omega, Libra Sign(which is an Omega-themed sign-class) would be a Funny Symbology Pun. Its design would visually reinforce this Omega postion through it’s “letter” being “reversed” in form to Libra’s. Libra is an Omega “balanced” over a line, symbolizing a balanced scale; A potential visual reversal of this would be an overturned scale, an “upside-down” Omega with the bar across it, rather than under. It would also create a nice bracketing of the sign-class, though sadly not a complete one since Libra and Lipio aren’t mirrored. Of course, if they were, then Lipio would be in a kind of balance with Libra, which would undermine it’s conceptual opposition to it, making it less symbolically satisfying. If you dig that sort of reading *looks away at sky, squint-frowns, and kicks dirt; entirely metaphorically*

I suppose you COULD equally say that Scorpia should be the Alpha sign for Scorpio, but that’d break the Derse/Prospit pattern and I refuse to play favorites u_u u_u u_u Replacing Libra with Libza is, of course, Right Out since that’d mess up the visual symbolism. Although...

Libza

Lipia

Crap -__- One is angular, one curvy; one is balanced, one unbalanced; one is open the other closed; they are in (at least)THREE symbolic and conceptual oppositions: these DO make good visually symbolic opposites |:T |:T AND it’d preserve both the Derse/Prospit alternating, AND AND the Omega-Alpha interface to Scorpio, AND AND AND switching Libra and Libza would make Terezi the Fulcrum of the Libra Sign-Class which would be VERY thematically and symbolically satisfying since, if you think about it, The Omega-Sign being most like the Sign-Class to the right implies the Alpha-Sign would be the sign most like the Sign-Class to the Left, logically making the Fulcrum Sign, that furthest from the ends, the “Most Signiest Sign” within each Sign-Class. ANDx4 the \ pattern would then break at Libra instead of Scorpio...

 Daisuki :| :| :|

....Though I now realize that would ruin a potential 8reak/Scorpio pun....

Moving On........

The other Big irregularity I found was the Pisces line. ALL it’s Derse signs/suffixes are in the top half of the line, and ALL its Prospit ones are in the bottom half. Pretty odd.

The only other thing I have to say is that I noticed, in a very cursory way, that some signs are visually similar to the sign-class they share a suffix with(a decent number of Aquarius-suffixes seem to be), and some don’t. It’d be Cool if they’d really committed to this, but I understand why they didn’t since such a level of detail is really stressful to maintain and also creatively restrictive. But, like, clearly Sagius:

should be a Leo-suffix(Sagio or Sagilo), and Camino

should be an Aquarius-suffix(Canrius or Cannius). I Mean: C L E A R L Y. Right??[4]

Anyway, those are the SHOCKING REVELATIONS of my RUTHLESS PEDANTRY that will surely bring down this WRETCHED HOUSE OF CARDS we’re all living in, No Doubt in an Noir-Sufficient-Fashion. If I find/think of any more examples of Dastardly Chaos Weighty with Meaning in our beloved fictional cosmology, I’ll let y’all know :p

[1]Also tbc(and because repeating it here would mark the third time I’ve written it, and I find such triplication aesthetically Pleasing nwn nwn), the EZ lacks my own, secretly created and never shared, fansigns, and so it’s obvsl an incomplete symbology, possibly recovered from a damaged husklet for pre-wrigglers yet unable to pull their own pants on umu

[2]I’ll still probably end up doing that at somepoint though, so there might be a bevisualed vers of this post in the future X| X| X|

[3]Fun Fact: the “extreme” meaning that our “ultimate” inherited from ultimatus may possibly have a connection to omega even though it lacks such an explicit meaning since omega literally means “big O”. Etymology is Fun for many reason, but this un-looked-for and unexpected explication of an anime pun, years after I had last watched an episode of the series in question, is one of the better ones I’ve encountered uwu uwu

[4]Though Camino is a Gemini suffix, so it’s satisfying in it’s own ways.

[simomonsiwritings]

POLLUTED SUNSETS | Simone Monsi, interview by Sara Benaglia and Mauro Zanchi

☞ This is the translation of an extended version of the interview Tramonti inquinati by Sara Benaglia and Mauro Zanchi, first published on La Balena Bianca (May 20th, 2019) and included in Metafotografia. Dentro e oltre il medium nell’arte contemporanea, exhibition catalogue, Skinnerboox, Jesi 2019 (Italian only). Courtesy the authors. Translated by Elena D’Angelo and Andrea Williamson. 📲 Read it on Tumblr !

MZ+SB: What do you mean when you use the word “photography” and what, for you, is an image? SM: Wow, this is a question that definitely takes us towards complex scenarios! What I can tell you is that I have always understood and appreciated photography because of its peculiar adherence to “reality”. And similarly, speaking of the term “image”, I cannot easily think of a univocal interpretation, but I am certainly interested in the relationship that images have with “truth”.

MZ+SB: Photography is also limited by its medium, which ties its production to a “classic” rectangular shape. How do you deal with this mandatory two-dimensionality? SM: Honestly, it has been years since I have thought of photography as a rectangular shape… My first visual memories are connected to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series, which aired on Italia1 (an Italian commercial television channel) at the beginning of the Nineties. Many other such visual memories followed. This is to say how much the two-dimensional approach to images influenced my way of “seeing”. When I think about it, I feel like today I still interpret my everyday reality through a two-dimensional lens. I do not think about two-dimensionality as a limit; it is my horizon, and the horizon is just an apparent limit.

MZ+SB: What do you mean by “relationship with truth”? I mean, in which sense can truth be produced in a “rectangular” way? SM: I often think about a quote that goes: “The image of the event is the event itself.” Think about 9/11 for instance – it seems impossible not to remember the iconic images portraying that day without reading them in the way they have been narrated by the media. And yet those same images can come to document different events if we analyze them through a different narration, or even more so, with no sound. I feel like this is the reason why alternative theories have so many followers. And this relationship is precisely what interests me – the one between images and the narration that is tied to them, and the way in which the same image can be a testimony to different truths, depending on the level of attention we give to them. I feel like we live in a world where the production of images is the basis for creating truth.

MZ+SB: You studied in England, right? What is the relationship between your work and English culture? SM: Correct, I attended the MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths after graduating from a BA in History of Art in Italy. During my two years in London, I barely scratched the surface of English culture. If we speak more specifically about my work though, I think that it could be positioned within a certain aesthetic movement of Western contemporary art, in which the author’s view is associated with a fairly synthetic formalization. This political view, despite being sublimated by the aesthetic of the work, still leaves many readable traces of itself. I’m thinking about Jeremy Deller, for example…

MZ+SB: Political views and images that produce reality… why sunsets? SM: My interest in photographs of sunsets took shape during my first year of college in London. It came from an intuition by anthropologist Michael Taussig, who refers to the “magic hour”: that moment during twilight when sunlight is naturally soft and warm; a moment particularly appreciated in photography. For Taussig, “magic hour” is a visual metaphor for humankind’s current moment of passage from an era in which human activities were in balance with the planet’s natural resources, towards the Anthropocene – a new geological era in which anthropogenic processes modify the biosphere to an irreversible point, and in which the very survival of humanity is threatened. However, because of its gravity, Taussig also sees this exceptional moment of “almost no return” as a chance for humanity to redeem itself; and a hoping for decisions that would shift human activities towards a necessary environmental sustainability. This hope would seem well placed, considering the immense popularity of hashtags such as #sunset, #sunsetlove and #sunsetporn on Instagram. As I was beginning to systematically collect images of sunsets, however, I had the feeling that they had become remarkably more “red” over the past few years. And I am not referring to the many Instagram filters that enhance color saturation. I am speaking of the actual sunset – the one we can see with our very own eyes, everyday. So, through a bit of research, it was not hard to figure out that the metal particulates in pollution and fumes from motor vehicles tend to reflect shades that go from pink, to orange, to red, when hit by sunlight. For me, this highlighted the fact that the most intensely colored sunsets – and possibly the most exciting ones – actually reveal a very high level of atmospheric pollution. This is how sunset photographs on social media became a defining element in many of my works. A visually appealing and emotionally engaging element that can be used as an entryway to a deeper debate on the realness of an image – one capable of unveiling the fragile balance between aesthetic beauty and the poisoning of the biosphere.

MZ+SB: There is an interesting story behind your work Can’t Wait For The Weather To Get Warmer (2018). Could you tell us about that? SM: Can’t Wait For The Weather To Get Warmer (2018) consists of six iPhone-sized fine art prints displayed on a steel structure, and is part of the discourse on sunset colors being indicators of atmospheric pollution. Looking through my collection of sunset photos taken from Instagram and Tumblr, I selected images that presented a common pattern in the shapes of clouds. Certain cloud formations are thought to be caused by the interaction of atmospheric water with electromagnetic fields (see clouds that form parallel and evenly spaced stripes…) I used these photographs as backgrounds for Instagram Stories advertising the fictional low-cost airline LF, which invites users to promptly book their flights, in order to increase temperatures as soon as possible! Although the name of the airline is fictional, the quotes are from a recent marketing campaign of an actual low-cost airline. This obviously caught my attention, considering that the metal particulate from fuels (not only from cars, but also airplanes) is known to have a strong impact on the greenhouse effect and therefore on global warming. So, was it a naïve marketing campaign or a reckless one? What we do know for sure is that the dispersion of such particulate matter in the atmosphere is not only causing rising temperatures, but also adds to the propagation of electromagnetic waves… and this is just the entrance to the “rabbit hole”.

MZ+SB: Would you consider your photography an “artificial photography” or a “natural photography”? Luigi Ghirri defined the two categories as follows: “The first, ‘artificial photography’, finds its place in a chain-like cultural production, forever repeating itself, trying to avoid stereotypes and is therefore reproduction. The second one enforces a suspension – a stop in the chain of reproduction, which is similar to the different moments of the natural gaze and its interaction with the outside world”. SM: My photography is found and borrowed. It is the photograph of a photograph, which reached me without me wanting it. It is like unwanted mail. I see the homepage of my Instagram profile just like a mailbox filled with unwanted letters. I believe that conceptually my photography was born with the supermarket flyers that are left in mailboxes. I think of it as a “natural photography” of an “artificial photography” raised to the power. 

MZ+SB: Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Flickr (2006) is a work which seems to resonate with your research. What is the relationship between production and the aesthetic of access? SM: I think Suns from Flickr is a great “appropriation work” where the artist’s action is fulfilled through the gathering and re-presentation of images. However, I have the feeling that on the internet, an eternity has passed since 2006… Today, the standard on our social media dashboards is to be immersed in infinite sequences of images grouped by type. They are the omnipresent background of our personal visual “echo chambers”… In my practice, in fact, I perceive the act of collecting images as a starting point for the creation of a background that later turns into a sort of skin for various “bodies” (two-dimensional and three-dimensional). Or these backgrounds could be experienced through visual filters, like digital interfaces, and associated to written texts. Twelve years ago, Penelope Umbrico was reflecting on the proliferation of online image archives; considering them to be a constantly developing collective action of unprecedented size. I think that today, the next step in analysing this phenomenon, would be to explore the psychological effects of this collective action on prosumers. Is such collective action implying the direct creation of a collective psychological situation? And if so, what rules does it follow? In the specific case of my use of sunset images, my intention is to take part in a collective psychological situation of appreciating twilight from a purely aesthetic point of view, which then becomes an attempt to systematically liberate twilight’s potential to convey issues of atmospheric pollution.

MZ+SB: The studio or art setting can remove everyday, banal materials from a purely domestic context. How do you choose the materials used in your work and why? What is the relationship between your materials and “domestic” consumption? SM: The materials I use in my works are often mass-produced and of common use. However, I do not use only physical materials, but also digital ones, like the Instagram interface, for example. So if we take into consideration this kind of “material” as well, there is no real selection – they naturally enter into my artistic practice thanks to their massive presence in everyday life. I am interested in the content gatherers and interfaces through which we can consult them- visual grids with which we sift through and understand online content. The need for a studio as a neutral environment comes exactly from the necessity to take out of context those elements whose formal characteristics could not be fully appreciate if they remained immersed in the visual chaos of our daily lives. A urinal in a museum becomes a uterus, doesn’t it? In the same way, a smile drawn on a balloon and left on the studio floor becomes a digital avatar filled with frustration and ready to burst. In this way, the relationship of the material (also thought of as an object) to its domestic environment is transformed by the artist’s action, so that the object’s hidden formal and evocative potentials are unveiled.

MZ+SB: What happens to a “warning” when it enters an artwork? I am thinking about the images of pink pollution. What happens in the art context when an image is shown in order to expose a problem or to highlight an emergency? SM: In my case, it doesn’t happen much, if at all. Honestly, I don’t see people worrying that much. Actually, I don’t see them worrying at all. Don’t get me wrong though – I don’t feel like our tendency to alienate ourselves from our problems, shun responsibilities, and make blind decisions, is related to a lack of compassion. Instead, I think alienation overpowers compassion because, even though everyone is tragically worried about the fate of humankind (both in spiritual and material terms), we are paralyzed by feelings of impotence and the apparent lack of possible alternatives. Obviously, I hope to plant a small seed of doubt within every person that comes into contact with my work; encouraging them to question why certain topics are taboo within general debate. I hope that one day, all those “seeds” will come together and move towards a common critical awareness. However, I often feel that most of the public isn’t even familiar with the grammar or language they would need to understand such a critique. The exchange of information is very slow, and most of the time is spent introducing basic concepts of a discourse that has potential to unfold in more complex ways. Despite finding it ever more difficult to trust my contemporary peers- something that causes me such intense pain that I have no words to describe it – I take comfort in the idea that within two generations, someone who may be wondering why the world evolved in the way it did, will be able to find documentation of my thoughts through my works. Finally seen in perspective, the works will be fully decoded. This way one day, when new gas and oil deposits are made accessible by melting that annoying layer of ice covering the poles, and when telepathy via Elon Musk’s Neuralink is fully implemented, someone will come across a testimony that helps them to reflect on these changes and their technological foundations. They will see that these foundations were put in place during an era of mass distraction and spiritual annihilation. It is a testimony to the idea that innovation (not only technological) is not a neutral force, but follows certain directions and objectives defined by superior and convergent interests.

MZ+SB: We are interested in investigating the relationship between the photographic medium and the artist’s creation of intimate space. In some way, could this relationship be understood as having a sculptural dimension, or a further space for consciousness? For you, is photography a sculpture (metaphysical and ultradimensional)? SM: Yes, your definition sounds appropriate to me: photography is a “sculptural dimension of consciousness”. A quick reflection gives me the feeling that my photographic images come from an intimate place that I would call “generative visual consciousness”. This is like a sort of process that draws images from the archive of my visual memory, and then filters and re-models their content into new images. However, your question also reminds me of another thought that I have been cultivating for a while, in which my actions and role as an artist are to be a sculptor of thoughts… In other words, I sense that an aspect of my artistic practice tends towards sculpting thoughts (other people’s? Yes, but also my own). Seen through this lens, photography certainly has a sculptural dimension for me: it is through images that I produce and sculpt thoughts. A metaphysical sculpture but not yet ultradimensional.

MZ+SB: Let’s imagine the idea of “beyond-photography”: an intimate structure that overcomes conceptual and ideological limitations, lying behind/inside/beyond photography. Who do you imagine transports or moves photography towards its beyond- using more than one medium at a time? This time-changing passage would investigate what photography was not able to show or summon by itself. How do you place yourself in relation to this new phase or possibility? SM: Well, if you ask me to imagine, I will let my imagination go. Forgive me, but from now on my reasoning might not be fully linear. First of all, I think of Mark Zuckerberg. There are public talks from a few years ago in which he said that Facebook’s final goal would be to enable telepathy between its users. I don’t know if we should forget about photography as a static image, but what I am thinking about is a photograph produced by binary-code impulses on a neural level. Concerning this, I have been imagining shooting images into people’s heads – projecting images into their minds – and in this sense, sculpting their thoughts. A while back, I heard someone saying that after WWII – I think it was in the US – there were experiments done with electromagnetic machines that allowed a person to learn a foreign language in their sleep. I honestly think this is quite an interesting rabbit hole to get into!

MZ+SB: What could be the operational-conceptual relationships and possible developments between photography and telepathy? SM: Well, I would bet my two cents on the following hypothesis: Since the atmosphere is full of metallic nanoparticles from motor vehicle exhaust, of which we breathe huge quantities that sediment over decades between the apex of the nasal septum and the cerebral cortex, it is possible that we could become transceivers of electricity – since metal is conductive. And if you consider thoughts as exchanges of electrical impulses between neurons, the telepathic scenario begins to take shape… In an environment filled with highly electrically conductive metal particulates, it would be possible to propagate and receive electromagnetic impulses directly from one cerebral cortex to another. At that point, perhaps photography will become outdated. However, if I think carefully about it, I feel like photography would survive through a shift onto a different support, as has happened before. Such a support could be made of neurons this time. I am thinking of “neural screenshots” which could be produced without the need for an external device. Our brains will be the new smartphones.

MZ+SB: What do you think of authorship concerning human-machine relationships? SM: If we look at this issue from the perspective of bio-tech systems, in which we may be capable of integrating image-producing devices within our bodies, the matter of machine authorship would be marginal. We would again be fully “human” (although slightly evolved, “augmented”). However, this is actually a debate that I have always considered rather boring. At this moment in history, when everyone seems to be part of a flock that thinks and does the same thing, the debate on authorship becomes quite uninteresting. In a world where people behave as if they were pre-programmed machines, I would provoke that I rather prefer machine authorship (assuming such a thing exists) to human authorship. At least it would have its own elements of originality, in a certain way…

MZ+SB: In an age of overproduction of images and artworks on social media and in general, how can an artist work with visual saturation in a constructive way? (Take for example Photography in Abundance by Erik Kessels, who in 2011, poured one and a half million photographs in the rooms of the FOAM museum in Amsterdam within 24 hours.) Is this surplus of images, in which we could easily drown, actually smoke in our eyes, hiding something that is purposefully hidden and kept out of sight? SM: Firstly, I believe artists should channel their energies towards making the public aware of the current situation – showing how the contemporary overabundance of images is neither natural, nor neutral. Our behaviour comes from a specific social model based on consumerism, which produces desire for products through images. I think a difference can be made by attaching useful content onto images.  Useful for what, though? This is where the social role of the artist comes into play – creating devices (objects and other things) that are not functional, but that help an individual’s spiritual growth.  And it is exactly one’s spiritual essence that suffers the most from the visual (and therefore emotional and mental) overcrowding; that is overwhelmed and kept “out of sight”. Let’s think for a second about the four fundamental units that make up our being: physical body, emotions, mind and spirit. Now think about how many times you happen to talk with other people of the first three, and how many times you talk about the last one. Bingo.

MZ+SB: Do you believe that the contemporary iconic flood is a consequence of capitalism? SM: I am sure of it. We have become the marketing managers of ourselves. Work and private life have melted together – fully turning us into emotional workers. But I do not feel that the daily non-stop self-branding activity is a marketing strategy only for one’s followers. Rather, it is marketing targeted towards ourselves. This flood of images follows a merely materialistic logic, producing an enormous emotional racket that makes us forget that our real essence belongs to another registry. On this matter, there is a sentence that I always like to recall: “Inner silence is the door to infinity”.

MZ+SB: Do you think a possible alternative for this time of iconic metastasis could be to step back from the creation of more images? SM: Yes, within the general debate, this is one of the possible solutions that has been considered. However, I think we should not stop creating. I would prefer to both produce less images, and to produce images with a much more refined quality. On top of this, I think that our own particular feeling of drowning (in images) is not dissimilar to that felt by all humans throughout time. Perhaps what really counts as the real and ultimate filter is time – selecting the images that will last and those that will be erased from future memory. The real question then, is not whether, or how, to change the world by creating (or not creating) images, but why we perceive this iconic metastasis as a condition of unease?

MZ+SB: Speed prevails over the decisive moment, quickness over refinement, transitory becoming over essential durability. Superficial immersion in the mediasphere prevails over the capacity to draw deeply from the archetypes of a universal memory. What new scenarios could be opened up by beyond-photography? SM: You are reminding me of this quote: “Shakti, see all space as if already absorbed in your own head in the brilliance.” This is the 60th of 112 ways, gathered in the text “Finding the center”, that Shiva enunciates when Devi questions him about the nature of divine reality and how to fully experience it. The scenario I aspire to, the ideal to pursue, is not material. The change of register is spiritual, towards what you call universal memory.

MZ+SB: Charlie Brooker, the creator of the British tv show Black Mirror, imagines scenarios and characters of a future reality, which presents issues related to current events and the challenges of new technologies. Various episodes include: machines that let you re-watch in real time past moments from your private life; relive memories; transfer an individual memory that is about to die onto a giant hard disk; transfer someone’s consciousness into another person’s brain; bring a loved one back to life, and many other things. A possible future outcome for photography has not been investigated. If Brooker had asked you to get involved in the writing of an episode on photography, how would you imagine a camera? SM: If they don’t have an episode on photography, it might be because the medium as we now know it, will become obsolete within the very near future. If we think about photography as it is normally conceived – namely, not as an artistic medium – I would say that the episode suggesting a possibility to re-watch past events through a memory implant represents a rather plausible technological outcome of our present. If so, I think we could say that the matter of documenting past events has been addressed rather satisfactorily by the series. What I imagine personally, would closely resemble that vision. It would be a whole different matter if we were to talk about photography as an artistic medium. In that case, it would be a matter of addressing the evolution of all artistic forms that have to do with vision, and the fruition or production and dissemination of images at large. It depends on how we want to imagine it. I like to think that everything will flow in front of our eyes, meaning “inside our eyes”. Screens will be contact lenses; membranes applied directly to our corneas. The next camera could be the blink of an eye. Click. Save picture? Yes. Archive it in the Cloud.

MZ+SB: What effect do you think the act of placing yourself in a collective psychological situation, has had on those experiencing your work? Have you had any feedback in relation to the rising awareness of pollution? According to your experience, are people who populate the contemporary art world (and who therefore feel at ease in the society of spectacle) merely interested in aesthetic and conceptual matters of ideas and intuitions- or have they actively moved something on a social and political level? SM: We don’t have to rush. The scale we use to measure the time it will take to implement certain changes is not the same as the one with which we measure our lives. Changes today are imperceptible, but within two generations we will understand everything better. I am committed to moving a tiny grain of sand everyday. And I can assure you, I see the grains are moving.

[tkilian]

Character Design Process

This fellow here is a bugbear, illustrated as part of my ongoing series of Dungeons & Dragons monster redesigns. I’ll be going through my design and painting process using this guy as my example.

When designing the monsters for this series, I have a few goals in mind. First, I want to capture the spirit of adventure and enthusiasm that D&D (and some videogame RPGS influenced by it) inspired in me as a kid. Essentially, I’m trying to capture my own nostalgia on the page. Second, I want to nudge these monsters in a more folklore- and history-inspired direction. To capture the feeling of folklore, I want each monster to represent a specific human emotion, often a fear of something. And third, I want the character to be recognizable as the D&D monster it’s based on while steering clear of the standardized, on-brand designs that have accumulated over the years in official products.

The first stage of any drawing is the concepting and sketch phase. These are most often done together, but for this particular project I generally do a lot of concepting first, then sketch once I’ve nailed down a solid idea.

The bugbear was a challenge to concept because unlike goblins, elves, ogres, and so on, it’s a creature that has very little presence outside of D&D. In folklore, it’s a generic term, similar to boogeyman. In D&D it’s a big, hairy, thuggish goblin. Conceptually, that puts them in competition with orcs (size and occasionally relationship to goblins), hobgoblins (size and militarism), and even ogres. That’s a lot of different creatures fighting for the same design space, and isn’t helped by D&D’s rather dry, taxonomic approach to monsters. I’ve tried to solve that with folkloric inspirations for the other creatures, but bugbear-as-boogeyman presents us with some special challenges - the more ethereal and supernatural-seeming the bugbear is, the less resemblance it bears to the D&D monster and the more it nudges into other monsters’ design space (ghosts, ghouls, etc). It’s also, and this is the tricky part, kind of a silly, dumb monster.

Some editions of D&D, including Paizo’s Pathfinder game, have made the bugbear a stealthy ambusher to go with the boogeyman angle. I like this solution, and decided to push it. The bugbear will be a creeper, a child-snatcher and hider-in-closets. However, I don’t want to go too dark with that idea or it could become a bad tonal fit for my fairytale-inflected setting. The bugbear should be simultaneously threatening and silly. Scary, but for a kid’s movie. I can use the square-headed, animalistic look of the D&D version, but skewed towards nocturnal hunters like cats and nocturnal lemurs. The bulk of this guy combined with the comical features of those animals should get me the feeling that I want.

I then hit on the idea for the toy necklaces, which is where the design started to jell. Necklaces of trophies from children’s nurseries implies a repeated pattern of behavior without being too gruesome, and conveys some information about the character. He’s a brute, but he’s also cowardly enough to think that what he’s doing is brave or noteworthy.  He’s probably not a guy who enjoys fighting things that can hit back, or he’d have more impressive trophies. He’s scary, but scared. That characterization gave me my pose and was my emotional through-line for the final drawing.

Here we have our bugbear drawing after digital touchups. I’ve masked the character out from the surrounding paper texture and reinforced the linework.

Next I work on the underpainting. The purpose of the underpainting is to accentuate the drawing’s value range and create some color variation when I layer color on top. I begin by using a desaturated blue for the shadows on a normal layer underneath the drawing, which is set to multiply.

After that, I go in with a layer of pale orange. Where the two overlap they push the shadows a bit more, and in the areas where they don’t I’ll get some notes of warm color.  

Once that’s done, I lay in areas of flat color on top of the drawing, using a clipping mask and multiply layers. For this piece I went ahead and did all of my fur rendering on a single layer, then laid in the colors for the armor, basinet, clothes, and so on in a separate layer

Large areas of metal like the breastplate here are a real challenge because they need to have a lot of color variation while remaining matte and dull. I created two separate textures by combining several photographs of rusty metal, then masked them out so they would just cover the armor. One texture is set to multiply and the other to overlay, each at around 45% opacity. Then I go in and paint some shadows and highlights on the armor, using a couple of low opacity multiply and overlay layers.

When I have all of my colors and any textures sorted out, the full figure gets a layer of white highlights painted in using Kyle Webster’s Oil Lush brush and an overlay layer. I lightened the neck fur using a screen layer as well. While at this stage the piece is only about halfway done, but it should look acceptable as a final image. If I’m not happy with something at this point, I need to fix it here before I go on to noodle and finesse little details.

Mostly what I do at this point is pushing values to emphasize the focal points, in this case the face followed by the necklaces and baby basket. I add highlights to the face and hands and darken the lower half of his body to create a little spotlight effect, work on the eyes, then make other small adjustments to the teeth, horns, and so on.  Here’s the final again:

[hotelbones]

Deconstructing Scores

Flux Scores

Semiotics

  Understanding Flux scores:

“They are people who are really trying to turn you on to the superlative activities you do everyday.” – Allison Knowles  https://vimeo.com/36770983

“What I want people to see is how really simply things can be done if you concentrate on that’s what what you’re doing.” – Allison Knowles

Event scores were the dominant Fluxus work, which particularly was distributed in Fluxus Boxes. One of the first of these boxes was George Brect’s Water Yam.

Dick Higgins called Fluxus scores “intermedia”, “a dialectic between media”. Intermedia is not media supported by other media, but rather media that is at the same time another media.

Dick Higgins also published scores called “Danger Music”. These scores imply both visual and audible elements. Some of them are dangerous and pretty much impossible, while some others are mundane.

“How an event score should be performed depends on its notation it uses and the degree of freedom that the score offers. While some scores are so free that one could think that a performer could do anything, this freedom often compels the performer to restrict and edit their work.” – Virginia Anderson

What details can be understood by analyzing all aspects of the score? Does the title give more context to the score than the text?

Some of these pieces attempt to transcend the objects into music and theater. As Allison Knowles does with her performances of her salad piece.

From Virginia Anderson’s analysis of scores, it seems that event scores aren’t meant for the performer to experience, but simply as an alternative to performance. I’ll look for alternative takes.

As I go deeper into learning about fluxus scores, it seems that while these may parallel games in a sense that there are instructions to follow, they are not actually games. These are in fact performances that have play-like elements. How am I making this distinction? With event scores it appears that none of them were meant to be performed by a person for the sake of performing them, but they were meant to be performed for others as music or theatre would. For this reason it isn’t exactly helpful to state that these are forms of games, but it may be valuable to view them through the lens of games instead.

This also may change with later scores.

George Brecht – “a deeply personal, infinitely complex and essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words can ever touch.” (Project in Multiple Dimensions)

An aesthetic form that Brecht theorized was that of the “Chance-Image”. Chance being based off the latin words taken from dice falling.

“The word ‘chance’ (with a Latin root relating to the falling of dice) can conveniently be taken to mean the cause, or systems of causes, responsible for a given effect is unknown or unlooked-for or, at least, that we are unable to completely specify it. Of course, in the real world, causes are also effects, and effects causes.” – Brecht Chance Imagery

An appeal of chance-imagery is to place the artist’s images to be equal with that of nature’s images as the mind is capable of infinite image formation. Thus making the artist’s work nothing special.

“Words only permit us to handle a unified reality by maneuvering arbitrarily excised chunks.” – Brecht Chance Imagery

“In the event, everyday actions are framed as minimalistic performances, or, occasionally, as imaginary and impossible experiments with everyday situations.”  - Hannah Higgins Fluxus Experience

Kotz and Ouzounian point out that part of the problem with Fluxus scores all being put into a single category is that their process becomes homogenized and Brecht’s work becomes known as performance.

In George Brecht’s notebooks he saw the idea of scores in other musical pieces and took note of them as study material: Anton Webern’s Symphony Op. 21 (1928), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI (1956), an unnamed composition by Christian Wolff for prepared piano (probably Duo II for Pianists), and Music of Changes (1951). Brecht saw the number of pitches as “events” in these pieces. In some ways this could be similar to looking at event scores as games.

“My life is devoted to research into ‘the structure of experience’” – Notebook entry January 1959

George Brecht saw a really really scientific view of the world. Looking at everything from the causal and physics level.

George Brecht’s first exhibition “Towards Events” is weirdly reminiscent of my own semi-exhibition I had inside of the Statens Museum for Kunst. Objects were accompanied by instructions to be performed. There is probably some interesting things to be found by comparing my Irrational Games exhibit to this one.

“Brecht’s model of the Event was arguably an attempt to realize such an enlightenment by pointing to the chanced form as an arbitrary subdivision of the ‘unified whole’ of the universe. An arrangement of an object or objects is a ‘performance’ of this whole in that it frames moments or subdivisions within it, i.e. ‘[gives] order (physically or conceptually) to a part of the continuum with which [a person] interacts’.” – Ouzounian

“Some Event scores illustrate this concept quite explicitly. Three Aqueous Events, for example, lists three momentary states that an aqueous ‘object’ may occupy over time: ice, water, steam.6 A realization of this score entails performing (arranging, observing, ordering) these objects/states and, through this performance, revealing their condition as arbitrary points within a continuous field, and indeed their existence within a continuous state of flux between these points. In making this observation, the performer ideally realizes, and more precisely experiences, his or her own place within this continuum. Such an experience entails a kind of transcendence in which any stable sense of self is at least momentarily undermined through its connection to this larger system of flux” – Ouzounian

“In this way, an Event score not only structures occurrences, but also experiences, ones that are ultimately transformative in nature.” – Ouzounian

These event scores seems to have come from George Brecht’s interest in the systems of a score interacting with the systems of the world. Or maybe more specifically, he was interested in designing a score so that the systems of the two became indistinguishable.

Something else to consider when using Event Scores as precedents, is a lot of it was response to the forms of art in the 60’s. If I am creating something that is relevant to the field of games, ideas and theory should be translated. Again, the idea that just because Event Scores have game-like elements, doesn’t mean we should take them as games.

 What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under conditions that a sort of screen intervenes. --Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

“Events are an extension of music” – Brecht interview by Irmeline Lebeer (1971)

“Arguing against the commonsense, mass-media idea of an event, Deleuze pinpoints two qualities which will be relevant in this context: "even a short or instantaneous event is something going on," "events always involve periods when nothing happens.” – Liz Kotz

 “The best Fluxus "composition" is a most non-personal, "ready-made" one like Brecht's "Exit"-it does not require any of us to perform it since it happens daily without any "special" performance of it. Thus our festivals will eliminate themselves (and our need to participate) when they become total readymades (like Brecht's exit)” – Maciunas in Fluxus etc./Addenda II

           Intervention I by Jennie Hahn and Cory Tamler

Intervention III

So looking at modern scores, how have they continued this practice, and why have they? These interventions above were created by Cory and Jennie to reframe humans and non-humans as characters and participants in a dialogue about the ecosystem.

Why scores though? It seems like these scores are more of a personal and accessible way for people to reframe their actions, body, and mind in relationship to the environment. In the same way that George Brecht’s Word Event triggers a multitude of thoughts related to the concept behind the word “exit”, In Kinship provokes thinking about communities, objects, and psychogeography. Also similar to something like Yoko Ono’s Watch Piece I these pieces ask the performer to do something that may be seemingly illogical, but upon performing reframes abstract concepts in a new way.

                      CAConrad – (SOMA)tic Poetry Exercise

Something about CAConrad’s work really puts me off. I think part of it feels like there is an air of trying to make work similar to Fluxus and also trying to maintain the artistic elements of poetry. For example, listening to Phillip Glass on the floor, feels like a very artsy thing to do. Which sounds stupid, but idk it just seems like a bit much. However, in contrast to that feeling what I find interesting about CAConrad’s work is the communication of a personal narrative through the score. This score isn’t just for the reader to see the world in a new way, but to understand CAConrad in a new way. Thinking about the score in this way, listening to Phillip Glass may be artsy, but that is because CAConrad is artsy and they want you to understand how they felt at this point in time. In this way it is fairly reminiscent of Mattie Bryce’s EAT.

[daylightarchives]

GUIDE TO ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER

As a fringe guy who’s always been more interested in experimentation and provocation than gratification of any sort, Oneohtrix Point Never (the alias of writer-producer-performer extraordinaire Daniel Lopatin) enjoys that intimidating “weirdo critical darling” status where the everyone from Pitchfork to Fantano to the pretentious bohemians of the wider blogosphere seem to love him, but the average listener (me, at one point, included) has no idea how he fits into the larger conversation surrounding electronic music or if he’d sound good tucked between other “ambient” and “vaporwave” artists on a playlist (hint: he wouldn’t). The point of this piece isn’t simply to ramble on about how profoundly difficult Oneohtrix Point Never is, though; I’m writing instead to make the argument that despite that aforementioned inaccessibility as an artist, the music of OPN is worth attempting to seriously listen to if you have even a passing interest in music as an art form, challenging art, or just plain interesting ideas. 

To sum it up, Oneohtrix Point Never began as an ambient act fascinated with ideas like nostalgia and cultural memory, especially with relation to idealistic visions of the future as computers became widely used in the ‘90s (think ‘90s educational videos, nature documentaries, commercials, etc). After some widely successful releases in that genre, Lopatin expanded the OPN aesthetic, inventing vaporwave and releasing album after dizzying album of plunderphonics, early computer nostalgia trips, and, most recently, a cinematic epic encompassing dance music, grunge, and apparently, a lot of philosophy. An album by album guide to the artistic output of Lopatin as OPN follows… feel free to skip around if one thing seems more interesting than another: the OPN discography is about as varied as they come, and even if one album sounds like the most boring thing you could possibly listen to, I guarantee the literal inverse exists somewhere else - Lopatin’s musical canon really is that diverse. In depth reviews in the full post!

RIFTS (2009)

For those of us who weren’t in Brooklyn while Lopatin established himself as a local legend in ambient and noise scenes through a prolific run of cassette only releases from 2007-09, Rifts serves as a convenient collection of OPN’s three breakout albums from that period: Betrayed in the Octagon (2007), Zones Without People (2009), and Russian Mind (2009). As 2+ hours of incredibly dense music, I’d call Rifts probably one of OPN’s most intimidating releases, unless you really dig ambient music. However, for all of its uninviting qualities, Rifts can be an incredibly impressive listen, full of synth lines that echo into oblivion, invocations of an imagined future, and huge soundscapes that evoke the majesty of early ambient classics like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. That ambient-genre tag might seem to imply that Rifts’ 27 tracks are homogenous and basically formless, but it’s surprisingly easy to tell when one album ends and another begins: Betrayed in the Octagon is droning and melancholic, Zones Without People has a noticeable sci-fi bent with laser beam sound effects and serene field recordings, and Russian Mind sounds legitimately as though it was created by a computer (especially the icy and kind of funny title track). Rifts is admittedly not for the feint of heart, but can be great as a long and intense synth odyssey thats just as easy to actively engage with as it is to totally get lost in.

RETURNAL (2010)

As OPN’s major label debut and probably Lopatin’s first record with serious philosophical underpinnings, Returnal can be tough to talk about because for all of the conceptual heft behind the record, it can at times sound like it belongs somewhere in that Rifts comp. Returnal is the last Oneohtrix Point Never that I’d comfortably call ambient, and even then, Lopatin really pushes the limits of that signifier: opener Nil Admirari is a total industrial noise freakout and utterly horrifying. To hear Lopatin describe it, it’s a portrait of a distinctly modern kind of sensory overload: “the mom’s sucked into CNN, freaking out about Code Orange terrorist shit, while the kid is in the other room playing Halo 3, inside that weird Mars environment, killing some James Cameron–type predator;” strip away the 2010isms of that line and you’re left with a pretty poignant image that might hit close to home. From there, the album glides effortlessly into the ambient territory Lopatin has already pretty well mastered for seven serene drone tracks that, to quote Noel Gardner, don't invoke a vast space so much as the concept of vastness itself. Though I’m by no means an ambient expert, this record is pretty massive within that community, and, if anything I’ve described here interests you, you should definitely check Returnal out.

CHUCK PERSON’S ECCOJAMS VOL. 1 (2010)

A major stylistic break from OPN’s back catalog and something of a manifesto for the rest of his career, Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 came into being innocuously enough as an anonymous youtube upload that Lopatin only retroactively took credit for (in the form of a remastered reissue) after it literally invented vaporwave. From this point forward in Lopatin’s career, the ambient soundscapes would be replaced by something distinctly more musical; namely, on this record and the next official Oneohtrix Point Never release, Replica, samples. The approach for Eccojams is deceptively simple: 15 tracks, and each one of them consists simply of one or sometimes two samples pulled from 80's easy listening hits or muzak slowed down to a narcotic tempo and pitch, then drenched in echo and effects. Per Loptain, the eccojam approach and idea was intended to be a way of reclaiming lost culture and bringing a DIY, memey edge to music long forgotten in the annals of commercial history. For all the heady philosophical stuff, the approach really took off, spawning a huge (now basically dead) movement of fellow artists making vaporwave, reinvigorating a probably ironic fascination for ‘90s culture online, and influencing artists like Clams Casino and Kanye West. To me, Eccojams really demonstrates just how thorough Lopatin’s understanding of internet culture and the philosophical underpinnings of nostalgia is - when was the last time you heard of someone intentionally and successfully inventing a meme, let alone someone this fringe? If you’ve ever used the word “aesthetic” ironically, you probably owe some of your sense of humor to this record and the space it’s carved out for itself at the strange intersection of music, philosophy, and internet culture.

REPLICA (2011)

Replica was also probably the closest thing to a mainstream moment Daniel Lopatin had ever had thus far in his career: coming off the heels of literally inventing a genre of music and touting yet another new musical approach, a much wider audience than before was now curious as to what Oneohtrix Point Never might come out with next. The album this newfound fanbase got was, characteristically, a crazy album even for OPN - even within its most accurate genre signifier, plunderphonics (sample based music that isn’t hip hop,) there really isn't anything even remotely similar. Built around a treasure trove of ‘80s commercials that Lopatin ordered by the boxful on VHS and dutifully sampled one-by-one, Replica is simultaneously really sprawling and kaleidoscopic but also very simple and minute. Songs like Andro and the title track are serene ambient pieces that are eventually swept up in these waves of massive synth lines and samples, and The Power of Persuasion and Sleep Dealer play almost like eccojams, endlessly looping, but with a renewed energy and intensity (Sleep Dealer, interestingly enough, is built entirely around a Wrigley’s gum commercial).  Elsewhere on the record, Lopatin triggers sample after manipulated sample in a dizzying way that eventually gives way to these blurred, beautiful pieces on tracks like Child Soldier (see if you can catch the M.I.A. sample,) the kinda hilarious grossout track Nassau, and Up. There really isn’t anything like this record in the OPN discography or anywhere else, and it also represents at least to me an interesting development on the idea of “vaporwave” as this act of cultural reappropration: if Eccojams saw Lopatin reimagining hits ingrained within the public memory, Replica sees him digging deeper into the American cultural psyche and attacking the history of our consumer culture even harder, playing mindless bits of sales-driven non entertainment on a loop and beckoning listeners to create their own meaning within that weird headspace. I think it’s a ton of fun.

R PLUS SEVEN (2013)

My personal favorite Oneohtrix Point Never record, R Plus Seven takes the idea of experimenting with culturally passé sounds a step further by occupying itself with some Rifts-era ideas - namely, early '90s tech fascination and the host of now considered “cheesy” sounds that came with it. Every single sound on R Plus Seven is totally clean, shiny, and metallic, seeming to exist in a totally sterile environment. Whereas the human voices found occasionally on past OPN records belonged to old samples and occasionally Lopatin himself, the voices here are all computer generated choir patches and individual voices. The songs of R Plus Seven seem almost engineered to sound of a piece with someone old cultural touchstone: Americans begins like a NatGeo nature doc before dissolving into a cacophony of wordless voices and bubbling synths, Problem Areas seems ready to soundtrack an educational video about math or computers, and every other track is peppered with pianos, horns, voices, and other instrumentation that sounds delightfully canned. The other major addition to the OPN sound on R Plus Seven is an increasing penchant for total stylistic left turns: motifs establish themselves and build only to be obliterated by an abrupt wall of noise followed by a totally new idea… Call it cheesy, but to me, the album almost evokes a computer recursively rewriting its own code, constantly stopping and starting and working in frenetic fits in between. Not once does any sort of human touch shine through on this album, but that doesn’t make the album dispassionate or desolate: it actually makes R Plus Seven easily the most fascinating OPN album to date, begging the listener to engage with it every time it evokes some cultural memory long delegated to being simply out of style. Lopatin is inviting is audience to engage with the basic building blocks of music and the culture that surrounds it on R Plus Seven, asking us why we value some sounds over others and displaying a total virtuosity in the realm of “computer music.” A must listen for anyone who wants to make music on a computer, or simply take a horrifying trip through a house of mirrors reflecting fascinating distortions of the culture they grew up in.

GARDEN OF DELETE (2015)

Easily the most visceral and rhythmic Oneohtrix Point Never record, and probably the closest Lopatin has ever come to a pure “pop” moment - take that as you will. Garden of Delete takes a total left turn away from cerebral, ambient experiments, and towards driving rhythms, extremely bright synths, heavy basslines, and vocals that seem simultaneously horrified and in awe of the state of the world as it exists; since it’s OPN, you can also expect a healthy dose of weird samples, extremely manipulated instrumental performances, and general fuckery with any of the cultural expectations a listener would bring to the table when approaching something resembling EDM. Songs like lead single Sticky Drama and closer No Good are the closest approximations of EDM that OPN has ever attempted, with throbbing, resonant bass hits and surprisingly melodic vocals giving away to total noise freakouts and, on Sticky Drama, samples from obscure vlogs on Youtube (yet another example of how OPN really effortlessly threads culture as everyone experiences it into something totally alien). Elsewhere, OPN brings a newfound intensity to tracks that, had they been wrote for earlier albums, would’ve simply been motifs: standout Freaky Eyes is a gothic epic that, after a few seconds of Kanye style chipmunk-soul, gives way to 8-bit video soundtrack bliss and horror movie soundtrack fodder, complete with digitized screaming. Elsewhere, Animals is an honest to god ballad with honest to god lyrics and a beautiful acoustic guitar part, and I Bite Through It is a fascinating exploration of syncopation and rhythm. With Garden of Delete, Oneohtrix Point Never shifted his conceptual focus onto the present and with that shift came a massive stylistic change towards frenetic, crazed intensity that I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted. Another interesting element of Garden of Delete is its sort of cinematic edge, evidence of Lopatin’s increasing prevalence as a film score composer and of his abilities to really build soundscapes around his music or tracks like Animals, SDFK, and Child of Rage. As a document of an omnivorous, Adderal-fueled flavor insanity that couldn't exist without the internet, Garden of Delete is further proof of Daniel Lopatin’s deep fascination and understanding of the world we live in, and of his unique ability to process it into music that’s equal parts unique, engaging, weird, and fun. Definitely not the best entry point to the OPN discography, but perhaps on of Lopatin’s best works.

If you like ambient music a lot, I’d probably recommend you start with Returnal. If you’re more interested in Lopatin’s late period craziness, I’d probably start with R Plus Seven or Replica and go from there. Hope this inspires anyone curious or intimidated by Oneohtrix Point Never’s huge discography to give his stuff a try - if you can’t already tell, I think it’s a worthwhile dive to take.

[caveartfair]

Why Do We Care How Long It Takes Artists to Make Their Work?

Loony, 2011. Joseph Barbieri Gallery NAGA

Invincible, 2018. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Jack Shainman Gallery

In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, quick brushstrokes swish into invented figures set against moody, abstract backgrounds. In Invincible (2018), for example, a shirtless boy—a fictional character, like all of Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects—sits in profile atop a red-and-black ledge. He writes on a white piece of paper with one hand, gripping his seat with the other. His upper body appears against a shadowy brown backdrop that’s lighter around the top of his head. The nubby canvas is visible beneath the paint, suggesting that the artist applied thin, brisk brushstrokes. The work is patchy but immediate; its sacrifice of a more worked-over surface allows for a vulnerable, naked appearance.

Indeed, Yiadom-Boakye frequently completes her canvases in a single day. According to Tamsen Greene, senior director at Jack Shainman Gallery, that’s partially a function of her “wet-on-wet” process: The artist applies oil paint to a canvas so quickly that no single layer of pigment can dry before the composition is complete. (This is changing, however; in her latest body of work, on view this month at Jack Shainman’s Chelsea location, Yiadom-Boakye began experimenting with other types of canvas that absorb her paint at different rates.)

4am Friday, 2015. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk" at Serpentine Gallery, London (2015)

Sleepwalker, 2016. Dana Schutz Free Arts NYC: Benefit Auction 2018

Greene mentioned that the artist’s speed has long fascinated collectors and the press. But that’s not the full story of her works—it can take multiple attempts for the artist to achieve her intentions for any one canvas. Instead of a single day, “you could say that a painting took three years to make, because [Yiadom-Boakye] made it over and over again, and discarded or changed it,” Greene said.

While Yiadom-Boakye’s all-in-one-sitting process has certainly contributed to her mystique, she’s hardly the only artist to complete works within 24 hours. Examining other instances of swift artmaking reveals more about our obsessions with time than anything else. We’re all racing against the clock to complete our own projects and live the lives we envision for ourselves. Artworks made in a single day can serve as symbols of such striving. Viewers’ preoccupations with how long it takes to make a painting—and their frequent skepticism at a brief process—also betrays how much we buy into the myth of artistic struggle: It’s easier to value intensive physical labor over conceptual rigor when an artist’s thought process can feel so intangible and impossible to grasp.

In truth, most cultural experiences deal with time. It might take you a week to read a novel. A play or film lasts around two hours. A song plays on the radio for about three minutes. It’s more difficult, however, to bracket the process of looking at a work of visual art. Unlike filmmakers or writers, painters and sculptors have little control over their audience’s attention spans. A sense of time isn’t embedded in their media, which offers visual artists a unique provocation or challenge.

OCT.13, 1970 / MAY 7, 1980 / NOV.22, 1990 / APR.16, 2000, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 , . On Kawara Simon Lee Gallery

In recent history, artists have complicated the experience of time in their works. Marcel Duchamp famously tried to wrangle a chronological dimension into his paintings with Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), in which he drew a mass of geometric, sepia-toned forms, layered to convey a woman’s downward movement. In the 1960s, Suellen Rocca painted gridded canvases that resemble comic strips, urging viewers to “read” the works as sequences of events that can’t be absorbed in a single, all-over glance. Contemporary painter Dana Schutz attempts to render everyday motions, like a sneeze or a shower, on canvas. Her subjects eject streams from their noses or tangle limbs under a faucet to convey not a single moment, but an event.

Before the advent of modernism in the 20th century, J.M.W. Turner wrangled his feelings about rapidity and modern technology in Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844), which partially abstracts a picture of a train rushing toward the viewer. The industrial revolution unfolding in Turner’s time emphasized labor and productivity in a way that still resonates with how we think about art: Capitalism continues to undergird our fixation with artistic productivity.

Yuji Agematsu, installation view of “Day by Day,” at The Power Station, 2018. Courtesy of The Power Station.

For artists who want to address ideas about time—both on and off the canvas—the one-artwork-per-day production schedule can be a fruitful basis for conceptual projects. On Kawara was the master of this disciplined approach. Each of the paintings in his “Today Series” (1966–2014) commemorates a single day and features a monochromatic background with, in a contrasting color, the date on which it was made. The style of the date (month, date, year) is organized according to Kawara’s physical location at the time of making: The language and format changes to reflect the artist’s international travels; his canvases made in Europe often feature the day before the month.

Kawara was so devoted to his stringent process that if he didn’t complete an artwork by the end of the day, he’d destroy it. Altogether, his series reflects almost 50 years of artmaking, a kind of autobiography wrought in precise brushstrokes. Kawara’s death in 2014 marked the end of the series, but looking back now, the repetitive project seems like a ritual that attempted—and failed—to stave off mortality.

Yuji Agematsu has undertaken a similar project with his miniature sculptures. Each day, the Brooklyn-based artist gathers trash, carefully depositing his findings into half of a cellophane wrapper from a cigarette carton. The intricate arrangements are both gritty and beautiful. Chewed gum, strands of hair, Q-tips, half-eaten lollipops, stones, price stickers, and more detritus stack into tiny assemblages. Agematsu often presents the works spaced out evenly on thin shelves set within glass vitrines. The rows and columns become a calendar of sorts; the containers from each day of scavenging are the same size, but their contents significantly diverge. While one work might be bright, busy, and filled to the brim,another could be whisperingly empty; every 24-hour period brings fresh—and foul—surprises.

Breaking Door, 2014. Josephine Halvorson Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Pink Ties, 2017. Josephine Halvorson Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

For painter Josephine Halvorson, who considers time to be her subject matter, a strict framework for completing her artworks is thematically apt. In a single day, she finishes canvases that depict finely rendered clock faces, distressed architectural exteriors, tree trunks marked with plastic ribbons to signal their imminent destruction, and more. Her paintings cryptically suggest that both man and nature are wearing down the objects that she depicts.

That’s not to say that Halvorson, like Yiadom-Boakye, conceives of her artworks in just a day. In the catalogue accompanying a 2015 exhibition of Halvorson’s work, filmmaker Wesley Miller discusses the artist’s unique planning and “editing” processes. He relays a story Halvorson told him about “stalking” a mural of a clock that she’d wanted to paint for weeks. On the appointed day, she piled her materials into a van, drove to the site, set up her easel and a shaded canopy, and painted for about eight-and-a-half hours straight. But Halvorson wasn’t happy with the result. She decided to return to the site to try again, implying that she was going to burn the first canvas, like the rest of the works she chooses to “edit” out of her oeuvre. All in all, it took her months to finish the painting.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, The Arrival, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Peanut Head, 2015. Nathaniel Mary Quinn Litvak Contemporary

There’s certainly something exhilarating and dramatic about such time constraints. Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn occasionally completes a collage in about 8 to 10 consecutive hours. He enjoys working with such immediacy, fluidity, and focus. “Your sense of confidence, enthusiasm, energy, belief in your talent, and innate abilities must be extraordinarily high or at their collective peak,” he recently wrote Artsy. “You must also have a deep sense of comfort with your fears, insecurities, and inadequacies. You completely submit to the materials. You’re not really thinking anymore, you’re just being.”

from Artsy News

[thousandmaths]

Quantum Computing and the Entanglement Frontier

This post is about the Gibbs Lecture at the 2017 Joint Meetings, given by John Preskill. He’s given similar talks before; this YouTube video appears to be essentially the same talk.

I feel like I need to make a disclaimer that I don’t actually understand quantum [fill in the blank]. I’m not sure why; I write about tons of stuff from talks that I don’t really understand... perhaps it’s just the history of misuse that the Q-word has suffered :/ In any case, I’d certainly welcome any thoughts/corrections from the physics fandom :)

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If you haven’t already read the relevant SMBC [comic], you may want to take a minute to chuckle through that.

...

[ it’s pretty good, isn’t it :D ]

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We can think of a qubit as a ball being either red or green (that’s the ‘bit’ part), which is stored inside a box having two doors (that’s the ‘qu’ part). This system has the following “miraculous” property: Let’s start by painting the ball and putting it in the box through one of the doors. If we later take it through the same door that we put it in, the ball will be the same color that it was when we painted it. But if we take it out through the other door, then the color will be completely random: 50% chance red, 50% chance green.

This idea turns out have tons of weird consequences, as you might imagine. One of the interesting ones is that you can’t make a “quantum copier”. Roughly speaking, this is because you would need to observe the ball through one of the doors to get the information, but which door should you choose? If you choose wrong, then you’ll get completely random information instead of the color of the ball that was put in.

These sorts of issues become rather serious if we want to create a quantum computer, because it’s rather easy for data to get corrupted. This happens all the time, even on classical computers. But we don’t notice it so much because classical computers encode information redundantly so that small malfunctions can be caught and reversed.

To be a little more concrete: the easiest “error-correcting code” is just to store three copies of any particular document. Then when you want to read the document, the computer checks all three. If one of the copies was corrupted, it will look different than the other two, and so we can read from one of the other copies and replace the corrupted version.

This scheme in particular, then, is totally impossible for quantum computers: you can’t have three copies of a document— you can’t even have three copies of a single qubit!

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So how to get around this? In word the answer is “entanglement”. In a few more words...

When there’s only one qubit around, its defining property is counterintuitive but not particularly useful. The real power of qubits over classical bits is what happens when we start to “entangle” them. 

In a 2-bit system, you’re supposed to have four possible outcomes. However, entanglement seems to throw this count off: if you have perfect information about the ball color in one box, and this is entangled with another ball in another box, then you should have perfect information about the other ball as well. So, seems like only two possible outcomes; your box’s outcome determines the other’s. Where is the extra information stored?

A useful way to conceptualize “where” that information is, is in the “relationship” between the two objects. As an analogy: if a classical book has all of its information written on the pages, a quantum book will have most of the pages blank, but the pages are interleaved with one another in complicated patters. To read the book, the interleavings are at least as important as the text on the pages. This means that you can understand what both parts of the system are doing individually without really understand what the entire system is doing— very different from the view in classical physics!

Preskill didn’t get into the details of quantum error correction, but basically: even though you can’t copy a qubit, you can encode the qubit’s information redundantly across five (very entangled) qubits. Basically, you take advantage of the fact that “knowing each part doesn’t imply knowing the whole thing” to keep the original qubit unobserved while checking for errors by observing the others.

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At this point, the talk goes a bit off the rails. I enjoyed the experience but it was a lot to take in. I’ll leave you with a couple of keywords: the big one is “topological quantum computing”, which claims to have some “theoretically practical” methods for preventing qubits from being prematurely observed. Under this heading, a few more:

“ER=EPR” which suggests that wormholes may be possible by using quantum entanglement.

“spacetime as an error-correcting code”; an initial attempt to merge the quantum with general relativity.

“de Sitter space” for a possible mathematical formalism of the universe’s spacetime.

[cryptofeedzposts]

The Many Facts Pointing to Ian Grigg Being Satoshi

Financial cryptographer. Cypherpunk. Inventor of Ricardian contracts and early utilizer of triple-entry accounting systems, which would later be exemplified in Bitcoin. Ian Grigg may have claimed that Satoshi was a team effort and is now dead, only living on in bitcoiners everywhere, but some seem to think it’s him. In this installment of “the many facts,” we’ll direct our attention to Grigg’s background, achievements, associations and direct claims to see which evidence possibly points to him as being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Also Read: The Many Facts Pointing to Shinichi Being Satoshi

Satoshi: A Cypherpunk Story

Nearly every popular Satoshi candidate has a background or at least association with the cypherpunk movement of the 1980s and 90s. This is for good reason. Hashed into Bitcoin’s genesis block is a message about bank bailouts. Cypherpunks are generally libertarian and anarchist-leaning individuals, set on unshackling the financial system and returning economic power to the everyday individual via crypto technology.

Grigg, in a very real sense, is no exception. A pioneer of triple-entry accounting systems as also conceptualized by lesser known accounting wizard Yuji Ijiri, Grigg invented what are known as Ricardian contracts and sought means by which to leverage cryptography in data verification and security for legal contracts — forerunning and related concepts to smart contracts and cryptocurrency. Grigg was an early cypherpunk, has an educational background in computer science and business, and is associated with personas like Craig Wright and ostensibly connected parties like Dave Kleiman. Grigg writes in his paper on Ricardian contracts:

Our innovation is to express an issued instrument as a contract, and to link that contract into every aspect of the payment system.

Griggian Grist for the Narrative

Triple-Entry Accounting

Looking back to the cypherpunk mailing list of the late 80s and 90s is always a good start, but there’s a concept that was being developed prior to and largely separate from cypherpunk exchanges about cryptocurrencies, and which is much more elemental. That of triple-entry accounting.

Throughout the history of money, keeping accurate records has been paramount and evolutionary. From the first systems of single-entry bookkeeping where recorded amounts of assets or goods held were single data points, to the later, double-entry system where the reason for a new amount must also be entered, increasingly accurate and trustworthy ledgers have been developed. Before any code can even be written, the concept has to exist. Grigg wrote in his 2005 paper “Triple-Entry Accounting“:

The digitally signed receipt, an innovation from financial cryptography, presents a challenge to classical double entry bookkeeping. Rather than compete, the two melded together form a stronger system. Expanding the usage of accounting into the wider domain of digital cash gives 3 local entries for each of 3 roles, the result of which I call triple entry accounting.

Prior to Grigg’s publication, way back in the 1980s, Japanese accounting researcher Yuji Ijiri had already come up with the idea and published a monograph on it, entitled “Momentum accounting and triple-entry bookkeeping,” but hadn’t found a way to apply it. Just over three years after Grigg published his paper on the topic, Bitcoin was born.

The Wright Associations and ‘Team Satoshi’

“Satoshi Nakamoto is dead, long live Satoshi,” Grigg writes on May 2, 2016 in a post to his Financial Cryptography website. Asserting that “Craig Wright has just outed himself as the leader of the Satoshi Nakamoto team. I confirm that this is true, both from direct knowledge and a base of evidence,” Ian Grigg set the crypto space on fire with equal parts excited speculation and derisive skepticism.

Claiming that the suspicious death of supposed Satoshi team member David Kleiman “played merry hell on the lives of those left in the team,” Grigg then goes on — as he previously had on Twitter — to detail how extortionists and hackers had targeted Wright, ostensibly leading to his move to reveal himself as Satoshi. While some may understandably view an association with the infamous CSW as very strong evidence that Grigg is definitely not Nakamoto — or even part of the “team” — it’s his strange words on Wright that give pause:

Yet, a warning to all. Satoshi was a vision … Which is why the team aspect is so important to understand … As you come to know Craig you will discover he is no legend, no God, no saviour. He’s just a guy, a prickly one at that, he’s a lot like those very difficult geek/nerd/blatherers that turn minor IT support into a social drama … Satoshi Nakamoto has died, yet long may Satoshi live. Now we really are Satoshi, now you all are. There is no longer any excuse, we each in every way are responsible for taking the vision forward.

Why would someone like Grigg feel the need to make such a clarification? One Redditor remarked on the topic: “Yes Grigg’s ‘testimony’ sort of remains a mystery without which the entire thing would be much easier to dismiss. Why does he, a true veteran of the scene, put his weight on behalf of Craig Wright and risk his reputation?” Some view Grigg’s actions as something only a truly concerned party would do.

Stylometry

Stylometry is a field of linguistics dealing with expressive style, and usually applied to writing. Many Satoshi candidates have been the stylometric focus of sleuthing aimed at uncovering Nakamoto’s real identity. Grigg has notably been pointed to by data scientist Michael Chon as the closest match when it comes to email correspondence.

Chon has previously noted that “Timothy C. May has the highest similarity score to the Bitcoin paper and Ian Grigg has the highest similarity score to Satoshi’s email exchanges. An unusual result is that Ian Grigg has a similarity score of .99996 to Satoshi’s email exchanges.”

Theories on Blockchain Governance

In an April 10, 2018 speech at the Internet of Agreements conference in London, Grigg detailed how compliance costs related to KYC and AML are driving traditional banking systems into the ground. The financial cryptographer with connections to Block.one and EOS stated: “I’ve got bad news: if you do the compounding, in seven years you won’t have a bank account, because all the banks will be out of money. If you compound 30% forward by 20%, in seven years all of the money is consumed on compliance.” Grigg goes on:

Does anybody know when compliance started? 1985 was the first time I ever heard about it. It couldn’t have started a year earlier, 1984. It literally started the year after 1984, and it’s been rolling ever since, and the problem is it hasn’t got a particularly good record. It’s been rolling forward, and the solution to failure has always been to double down.

Grigg points out the futility of the FATF and others “discovering that there are problems, running into banks, fining the hell out of them and doubling down on compliance, but what they’re not actually succeeding in doing is changing the problem.” His solution? Community creation governed by blockchain transparency and “skin in the game.”

In this presentation a voice is heard which is very focused on current, unsustainable banking practices (as Nakamoto was back in 2009), and calling for blockchain-based solutions to these same dilemmas, which would theoretically be available to anyone. Also noteworthy is that Grigg’s seminal contribution to fintech, Ricardian contracts, has no patent and is not subject to intellectual property restrictions. An available financial tool for anyone to use, like Bitcoin.

Counterpoint and Summary

It’s hard to tell whether a look at Ian Grigg makes the Satoshi mystery any less murky, or simply befuddles the understanding further. Here we have a cryptographer, deeply interested in broken banks and implementation of solutions therefore, who was an OG cypherpunk developing applications in triple-entry accounting. He even more notably claims to have inside info about the team of people who were collectively “Satoshi.”

Some big counter arguments exist. Biggest of all, perhaps, is that Grigg claimed his supposed assertion that he was a Satoshi team member was just poor wording. “Nope — I am not a member of the team,” he tweeted. He also seems to be very excited about the European Central Bank’s recent progress in developing a centralized, digital cash. Hardly something the creator of peer-to-peer, permissionless cash with potential to topple banks would likely be pumped about.

Still, if Satoshi really were a team effort, it might make sense that a fragmentation has happened, with individual members and their individual personalities splintering off in starkly different directions. After all, can anyone say with a straight face that any solo Beatle’s career was as good as the band itself? It’s also hard to imagine that the whole Financial Cryptography piece on his direct knowledge of the team, and implied involvement — including the since-edited statement “I confirm as member” — was merely the result of something being “badly written.” However one slices it, the world may never know, and the mystery marches on.

Who do you think is Satoshi? One person? Many? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images credits: Shutterstock, fair use.

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The post The Many Facts Pointing to Ian Grigg Being Satoshi appeared first on Bitcoin News.

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[preserving-ferretbrain]

The Best Post-Soviet Noir Superhero Comic Ever!

by Alasdair Czyrnyj

Monday, 19 April 2010 

Alasdair gushes about The Winter Men.~

I don't believe in superheroes. Let's get that straight right from the start. I have no problem conceptualizing a costumed vigilante or a human with supernatural powers; such things have been a staple of popular culture for generations now, and to reject them out of hand nowadays is absurd. My problem starts once you take those characters and imagine them as figures of omnipotence, as people who are always in command, always know the score, and always win in the end, and expect your audience to take them seriously.

I suppose this problem largely stems from the fact that the first superhero comic I seriously read was

Watchmen

. Say what you will about it, but to me it remains the best example of what happens when you take pulp archetypes, characters traditionally in command of their environments, and place them in the intractable, fractal-edged mess that is the real world. Existential despair is the mildest outcome; mass murder is not outside the realm of possibility. It's the reason why the two big mainstream comic universes are these weird places that have superficial similarities to our own, but swarming with Nazi scientists, psychotic CEOs, aliens, and alternate universes. It gives the superheroes something to fight that can be defeated and doesn't leave the bad taste of moral unease afterward.

Of course, rejecting the standard interpretation of superheroes has been old hat for nigh-on two decades. Of course, stories that go against the grain have their own particular problems. Most of the time, these stories just amp up the sex and ultraviolence while leaving various core aspects of superherodom (superheroes are beholden to nothing and no one, you can solve the world with your fists) unquestioned. (Case in point:

The Boys

.) There are a few good examinations, of course; from what I've heard of it, Alan Moore's run on

Miracleman

is a pretty good depiction of the superhero as a figure of terror and of the uncomfortable compromises that would be required to "save" the world, and Kurt Busiek's

Astro City

manages to rearrange and rethink well-worn tropes to create some genuinely moving stories.

Sometimes, though, reshuffling is not enough. To truly rethink the concept of the superhero, you need to leave the American heartland of superheroes altogether and travel somewhere else. To a place which has very different ideas about power and its limits. To a place that would interpret all-powerful humans far differently than European or American society would, and would have the technology and competence to enforce its interpretations.

To travel, in other words, to Russia.

This is the premise of

The Winter Men

, the barely-released critically acclaimed Wildstorm miniseries by Brett Lewis and artist Jean Paul Leon. It had one hell of a publication history; it first appeared way back in August 2005 advertising an eight-issue run, only to finally finish on its sixth issue in February 2009. It's a damned shame that this series received such shoddy treatment from Wildstorm, especially since

The Winter Men

is one of the best superhero series out there.

The story is set in Russia in late 2001, near the end of the twilight period between the collapse of the Russian banking industry in 1998 and the emergence of Putin's "sovereign democracy." In the opening pages, we are introduced to Kris Kalenov, our guide to this world, as is roused from the snowbank where he spent sleeping off the previous night's boozy activities. A former spetznaz, now a militiaman by title and poet by aspiration, his actual day job consists of managing disputes at the behest of Moscow's mayor between the various interests (business, foreign, domestic, civil, and otherwise) that inhabit the city. An encounter with an old army buddy lands him a dead-end case about an abducted girl who had just received a liver transplant from an unknown source. In short order, hints are dropped that other factors are interested in the fate of that little girl, and her connection to the recent seismic shifts in the balance of criminal power in Moscow. Veiled references are made to something called "winter," a word Kalenov is intimately familiar with and which the CIA (ostensibly in Moscow to assist the Russian authorities with the upheavals in the underworld) is nosing around in, despite their pig-ignorance of Russia in general. At the same time, old friends of Kalenov, ex-spetznaz buddies who also have a connection with "winter," begin to reappear in Kalenov's life too fast to be chalked up to mere coincidence. While Kalenov finds the girl in first few issues, it only serves to further deepen the mystery in Moscow, as well as ask questions about what, exactly, became of the Soviet superhero program, in particular one hero known only as The Hammer of the Revolution, a Captain America-type figure that disappeared decades ago under unclear circumstances.

I won't go any farther into the plot, simply because there's a lot of it to unpack and theorize about. Instead, I will withhold most spoilers and briefly explain what makes this comic great.

First of all,

The Winter Men

may be the Russianest comic I have ever read. The care to detail is obvious even in the basic technical details. Lewis' dialogue, by some minor miracle, manages to beautifully capture the odd cadences and subtle elaboration of Russian-translated English without drifting into Boris Badenov-type kludges or, God help us, Jonathan Safran Foer-type literary schmaltz. I don't know enough to judge whether all the slang is correct or not, but it reads far better that the efforts of most writers.

Additionally, the violence in the comic has a appropriate understatement. While modern American comics love their visceral blood and mutilation,

The Winter Men

takes a more restrained approach, with the occasional high-octane gun battle counterbalanced by the dull brutishness of two drunk friends brawling, or by simply implying violence between panels. While it may seem like a dodge, it actually fits in very well with the milieu. After all, in a society like post-communist Russia, where violence is often the easiest way to do things (or, more likely, the only method anyone has any patience for), pain and death are dealt out so often that the mind (and the comic) just tunes it out and relativizes it into utilitarian indifference.

The real achievement, however, is in Lewis' depiction of Russian society. As someone who spent most of his undergraduate career plowing through 20th century Russo-Soviet history, the one thing that has grown to irritate me more than anything is the way most Westerners think Russian society works. The implicit assumption is that Russian society is a pyramid, with a tsar/gensek/president at the top, a hierarchy supporting him, all of which oppresses a servile population, with all of society neatly divided into rulers and victims. The truth, one which Lewis faithfully portrays and weaves into the greater tapestry of the series, is that Russia is a series of networks, of people organized into cabals to defend certain interests (be they organized crime, soft drink distribution, city government, or what have you), all forever fighting and securing their own power bases, forever living in fear that someone more powerful will come after them. This is nothing new, of course; you can find something similar while reading Gogol, and that model pretty much sums up the state of the Soviet Union after Stalin died. In the end, much of the series, consists of Kalenov learning to read and navigate the various circles of official and unofficial Russian power, to understand the ultimate purpose of the upheavals.

Of course, some people like some networks better than others. There is a sort of dull nostalgia running through the book for the Soviet Union, though it is more wistful than motivational. Everyone knows the USSR will never come back, but there is a sort of vague sadness among the characters for that weird socialist empire, a sense of "it was not good, but it was ours, and now it's gone." Even Kalenov himself, never a socialist, comes across as a man who, unlike his army friends, never found himself a role he could play in the Yeltsinite world to replace his previous role as a spetznaz.

This finally brings us down to the big question: what about the Soviet superheroes? What about them? The answer which slowly emerges from snatches of conversation and the occasion infodump, is the height of irony and a slap in the face to most other so-called "realistic" superhero comics. In the Soviet Union of

The Winter Men

, superheroes were

irrelevant

. The great majority of them appeared as military projects in the later stages of the Soviet Union, consisting of either men flying around in big, clunky Iron Man suits (in a neat little nod to DC comics' continuity, the suits bear a close resemblance to the Rockets Red suits that serve as fodder for the JLA to smack around) or people with genetically modified organs. While some old propaganda early in the comic shows Soviet supermen tearing their way through the American hordes, their actual purpose is to counter the super-people being developed by another faction of the Soviet military-industrial complex, while those supermen that do serve in combat tend to die ingloriously. And the end of the day, despite being the only country on the planet with superpeople, there is little difference between the fictional Russia and the real one. Even the plot of the comic only deals with the metahuman aspect fleetingly for most of its run.

I won't say much about the ending save that it will almost certainly bring back memories of

Watchmen

. However, Lewis cleverly riffs on Moore's work rather than lifting it wholesale, with the end result feeling like a bizarre version of

Watchmen

set decades after the original where everyone save one very particular character is gone, and the battle is between a meticulous autocrat that dwells in a realm of pure decision and a child of the original heroes, fighting for reasons he doesn't bother to consciously understand. At the end of the day, there's no real closure, but as Kalenov himself says, "this is a Russian story."

The Winter Men

is not a flawless diamond. The noir storytelling does tend to get a little too convoluted for its own good, with revelations losing their impact because you don't recognize a certain background character from a previous book. The publishing history really hurts the narrative, with the third and final installments clearly reading like Lewis had to cram too much in at the last minute in order to tell his story.

Still, Lewis can be forgiven his compromises. There is much to love in

The Winter Men

, from the bombastic wordplay, to the clever composition of the panels, to the characters that breathe their native land, to superheroes that are as alien to us as the East is from the West. And to one, little line, near the end of the book, whispered by one dying man to another, that may be the only fitting epitaph to the Soviet experience any writer has come up with yet.

Read it. Now.Themes:

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Comics

~

bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit

~Comments (

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)

Arthur B

at 09:40 on 2010-04-19Is there a trade paperback compilation of this? I can't abide buying individual issues of comics.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 17:03 on 2010-04-19Yep, it finally came out at the beginning of this year.

Here you go.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 17:18 on 2010-04-24Oh, and fun fact: about a day after this was posted, I got an email message from Brett Lewis, the creator of

The Winter Men

asking to friend me on Facebook.

And, yes, I know that this is the year 2010, when stuff like this doesn't mean any sort of deeper connection has been made. But one the other hand...

BRETT LEWIS READ MY REVIEW! AND HE LIKED IT! AND IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! YAAAAAY!!!!!

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http://fightsandtights.blogspot.com/

at 01:44 on 2010-04-25Great review, Alasdair, I'll definitely have to check this out. Jena Paul Leon is a big selling point for me; he did some awesome work on the Black Widow: Deadly Origin mini that was recently released by Marvel, and he really seems to portray Soviet-era Russia quite well. Certainly adding this to my wishlist...

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Wardog

at 11:32 on 2010-04-25Belated birthday grats :) YAAAAAY!

I have to admit, when authors inadvertantly stumble across my reviews I always over-think and second guess myself into a pit of angst.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 17:10 on 2010-04-26

I have to admit, when authors inadvertantly stumble across my reviews I always over-think and second guess myself into a pit of angst.

I usually prefer to dive into that pit of angst before I start writing, when I read all the other reviews other people have written and wonder how the hell I can match the insights of all those clever and smart people whoe are better than me in every way and

isuckisuckisuck

.

Then I write the whole thing in a three-hour frenzy a week later.