#turn into an undiscoverable void

[random-xpressions]

Our generation has been fooled to think that fame and popularity is a drug we need but in reality to remain unnoticeable is the greatest of all powers, just like the invisible air, just like the unseen God...

Random Xpressions

[nepalsaysrawr]

Fake Screenshot Time: The Festival by HP Lovecraft

"Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membraneous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts."

Did this illustration many moons ago, then picked it up back again to finish it. Here's a rather festive illustration of a cultist riding a Byakhee, a la old tapes! I took lots of inspo from Dagmar Doubkova, the person who did Dressy Sally.

And here's the real illustration, sans effects. I could turn this into a greeting card someday.

Also fake backstory time:

In the 1970s-1980s, Danek Arts Studios, an obscure indie animation studio, had an idea to create an anthology series based on the works of HP Lovecraft, but due to the difficulty of adapting Lovecraft's stories, fallings out with the crew, and lack of funding, the series was benched, and the studio closed. One of the episodes, based on The Festival, had been produced, but was never aired. One such screenshot of the production exists, where the cultists ride the so-called "hybrid winged things" in the story a.k.a., the Byakhees, into the void of space, which was posted online by someone claiming to be the daughter of a former animator who worked there. According to her, the episode was done using paper cutouts and stop-motion.

[rescue-ram]

Thoughts on TTC and 17776, Part 1

It’s interesting getting through the back half of the Tim Tebow Chronicles, where you can see a lot of the ideas Jon Bois had that later developed into 17776.

The idea of “What if this is it, what happens when we run out of progress, what if there is nothing else out there but us and a barren void and the possibility of some unknowable undiscoverable spirit. What do we do.” And the answer being, play. Make something up. Just keep going.

Both pieces lean hard into the absurdism of sports. It seems like every year when there’s a big sporting event a lot of people turn out making comments or rewriting think pieces about “Why are we paying grown men in shiny shirts millions of dollars to throw a ball so right, this is just a distraction from [legitimately more important social issue du jour].“ 17776, of course, is really explicitly about this. When we’ve solved every social issue, everything is meaningless- so sports derive a new morning.

Football in the future will be even more central to our culture, even bigger, even more of a spectacle, even more crazy and look even more dangerous.

There was a subtle thing at the start of 17776 that I really liked- when we saw Nancy’s stat card. The top of the card looks like mostly like typical football stats, even if very high, almost exagerrated. Then when she returns from break, you can see that it isn’t Nancy that’s changed, but the game itself- the yards run are in the tens of thousands, the points are in the single digits and zeroes. There’s nothing left to invent or explore or discover, and all we can do is come up with new ways to pass the time, each one longer and more complex then the one before it.