Happiness Systems

Peggy
November 7, 2016

So regarding that earlier post about me being depressed: afterwards I thought, well, hello winter depression, it’s time to reassemble all the various systems I use to defend myself against you. They’d fallen apart.

Better snacking: I used to mostly snack on the Trader Joe’s “Tempting” trail mix. It had a picture of a couple of pensive cherubs on the label, and it was a tasty blend of peanuts, almonds, cashews, dried cherries, chocolate chips, and peanut butter chips. But then it vanished from the shelves. Recently it started showing up in this new form factor: a bag full of a bunch of little bags. But that just feels like it’s not gonna work with the way I use it; I kept a bag of it on the desk and dipped into it occasionally while working. So today I went down to TJ’s and got some dried cherries, some tiny peanut butter cups, some peanuts, and some almond/cashew/chocolate chips trail mix. Dumped it all into a ziploc bag, put it on my desk, and hell yeah I have my favorite work snacks back again.

I do not maintain that this is by any means the healthiest snack in the world. But I’ve been choosing far worse ways to satisfy that urge of “I am busy doing something and I want a tiny bit of energy-carrying food”; one or two handfuls of this will usually sate that urge without the lingering problems of “what do I do with the rest of this candy bar I guess I’ll eat it before it goes stale” or “did I just eat the whole fucking bag of corn puffs without thinking”.

(Feel free to mock me for thinking this elementary act of food assembly is worth noting. What can I say, I’m pretty useless in the kitchen.)

Better distraction: I’m following too many people on Twitter and that needs fixing. So I made a few “lists” on Twitter. Midway through I realized it sends out notifications of me adding people to these, and quickly made them private. I’m glad I found this out before the one with a snarky name got created.

So that’s better junk food for the body and the brain. More likely to give me a quick hit of whatever I’m picking them up for, more likely to satisfy that urge enough that I am no longer interested in it and can do something that makes me happy. Like drawing comics.

I think it’s also time to switch back to my smallest computer bag. It’s got barely enough room for the computer, a few essentials like my wallet, and not much more. Less weight means I’m more likely to make the choice to take the computer out with me, which means more likely to maybe take it out and sit down and draw. Which is a thing that fairly reliably makes me happier. (I’m really hoping that the forthcoming Wacom Mobile Studio will make drawing as casual as pulling out my sketchbook used to be; the Surface did that pretty well except for the part where it didn’t talk to Illustrator very well, and I found the time I’d spend drawing during any given day going up a lot without any effort.)

hello, depression

Peggy
November 7, 2016

This weekend, I felt like shit. Sore throat, runny nose, I had a cold. So I spent it on the beanbag chair playing video games. I’d been invited to a party but “getting on a bus with a head full of snot for a half hour so I could go sneeze on people who are gathering to try and have some fun” didn’t sound like a good idea for anyone involved.

I got a new one called “Ronin”. It’s a 2d game about a little ninja who runs through side-view office buildings killing lots of little security people on their way to kill the five people who apparently did something terrible to the ninja’s father. The unique selling point that differentiates this game from a zillion other games about agile little people running through side-view environments killing lots of people on their way to kill a few people who did something terrible is that combat happens largely in a turn-based fashion, rather than in realtime, so you get to be a super agile ninja with super reflexes who can leap through a hail of bullets to stab someone in the face. I spent a whole day playing it until like 3AM, and won it, then did a few levels of the New Game+ mode (which starts you with the full toolset of moves you had to unlock over the course of the game, and requires that you kill 100% of the security dudes without letting them raise the alarm, and kill 0% of the occasional non-combatants scattered throughout the levels) before it crashed and I put it down for an indefinite amount of time.

Then I played the recent remake of 2006’s “Ratchet and Clank” which was really amazingly pretty. And I kept on noticing that I could barely tell what was going on in the cutscenes because all the detail added in the course of spiffing up a decade-old PS2 game for the PS4 made every shot a little harder to parse compared to the original’s brightly-colored cartoon characters against contrasting backgrounds; there were multiple times in the first few levels where I felt like I could barely see what was going on because the various robots and aliens shooting at me were the same color as the background. And damn its plot is some convoluted bullshit that’s mostly an excuse to give you more goofy-looking targets to shoot with your goofy guns.

I played that until like 5AM. I’m not sure I enjoyed any of it. I feel no particular desire to replay the whole thing with its hundreds of side missions and things to collect, and yet I want nothing more than to go sit on the living room for another fifteen hours doing exactly that.

Today I got out of bed around 1PM. I’ve been up for about four hours and the fucking sun is already setting. Realizing that makes me feel doomed. (Switching off of daylight savings time isn’t helping this one bit.)

I miss drawing new comics but “printing Rita” still hangs over anything else in a big curtain of guilt. And pushing that forward is a constant churing pool of boredom and stress and guilt. I really hope that this is the last book I have to print myself. It probably isn’t. And that fills me with dread and misery and I just wanna crawl back into bed and sleep until the sun comes back.

Hello, seasonal depression. It’s been a while. I didn’t miss you one fucking bit. If the long-shot chance of Parallax becoming a thing happens, I am moving back to LA and I am never living this far north ever again if I can help it. I need more goddamn sun than Seattle provides, even with the help of my False God.

(I also realize that I have eaten pretty much nothing but junk food for the past few days and should probably eat something vaguely like real food. I should probably change my habits to eat more real food in general. I’d been working on that for a while but I’ve backslid.)

Fuzzy shading.

Peggy
November 5, 2016

A quick (~15min) doodle of Baron K from Parallax, mostly done to test out a shading method someone asked about on Reddit. The uniform is probably off-model, I didn’t bother pulling up the pitch bible.

I’m not sure about the Baron’s eyes here. I need to do some exploration of how to show expressions and keep his eyes looking like cute little beady mouse eyes. Does he look like he’s looking in a particular direction to you?

This is what I ended up with for the shading effect. Choose color, opacity amount, and blur/mezzotint settings to taste; if you make a Graphic Style and draw all your shading using that, you can tweak the appearance then do ‘redefine graphic style’ to apply it to the whole drawing.

And this is what it looks like if I turn off the blur and mezzotints. Just a bunch of shapes drawn with the pencil tool and occasional use of ‘draw inside’.

adulting

Peggy
October 31, 2016

PROBLEM: The ceiling is leaking.

SOLUTION: Call landlord. Put bowls under drips until we can get maintenance here.

PROBLEM: Leak water falls ~6ft and splashes mightily from the bowls, getting all over the kitchen counter.

SOLUTION: Nail twine to ceiling, crossing where the water oozes through, then dropping down to the bowl. Capillary action brings all the water down in a slower fashion.

PROBLEM: Diverting all water to one bowl makes it fill up way too fast.

SOLUTION: Tie a few more pieces of twine to the bit running across multiple drips, descending to the other bowls.

I feel like fucking MacGyver here.

Alba

Peggy
October 30, 2016

Ex-bunny kitty archivist who is two seconds away from calmly escorting your saucy ass outside if you give her any more shit.

This started as a headshot icon for the ex-with-benefits but grew a little.

Illustrator, about an hour.

in which I hurt myself for a day

Peggy
October 29, 2016

I’m evidently a glutton for punishment because here I am trying once more to get Illustrator working on a Surface 4 Pro. Check out this wonderful mountain of bullshit I had to climb to find out it still won’t work right:

Continue reading →

That Western obsession with WATCHING YOUR LIPS MOVE WHEN YOU TALK.

Peggy
October 26, 2016

A random thought.

One big thing I’ve noticed while watching all this Japanese animation lately is how frequently they’ll cut away from a person who’s speaking. You’ll hear their voice continue over a close-up of some other part of the scene or an over-the-shoulder shot of the person they’re talking to. And part of this is possibly attributable to budget; lipsync is a lot of work and that costs money. But it also feels like it gives a very different feel to the storytelling, one that lets its attention wander around the characters and take in the world they live in instead of focusing tightly on the characters.

It’s akin to what McCloud describes as an “aspect-to-aspect” panel transition in comics, where a series of panels examines facets of a moment without very much “happening” in terms of plot. And it’s probably worth noting that this was something you almost never saw in American comics until the generation who grew up loving imported manga started making comics.

But I don’t think I’ve seen this in American cartoons made by people who grew up on a ton of anime. And as I look at what it can do for the mood of a show, and its world, I begin to feel like American cartoons have an unhealthy obsession with watching people talk.

This is probably another consequence of the Disney “Illusion of Life” tradition, where you make your character designs as simple as possible so that you can focus on animating the shit out of them as much as possible. Act with your pencil, really get into the particular way this character takes off their glasses and cleans them as we watch them gather their thoughts to respond to something another character just said. Or watch a completely voiceless character have thoughts crawl across their expression. This is what happens in the Great Early Masterworks that American animators are exposed to during their education, and it’s something that they can’t seem to stop trying to do, even when they don’t have anywhere near the budget to animate their simple designs like they want to – when’s the last time you saw the Simpsons cut to something else while a character spoke? When’s the last time you saw this in a Western animated feature? You get voiceovers now and then, but it’s usually in the form of someone narrating a flashback. I can’t think of any examples of the camera wandering around the scene in the middle of a conversation.

(I probably mean “Western animators” when I say “American animators”; it feels like a lot of the European stuff I’ve seen is just as prone to keeping the camera on the speaker as American stuff.)

Anyway. Yet another thing I may try to deliberately break out of if anyone is ever stupid enough to pay me to direct a cartoon, or I’m crazy enough to try and do one on my own.

(I should also probably watch Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr Fox” again and think about the many ways that struck me as coming from well outside the tradition of “what an animated feature Should Be”. Because that, too, was definitely not put together the same way a feature designed by people weaned on Disney features is constructed. Arguably it’s just put together like every other damn Wes Anderson film, and it happens to star a bunch of stop-motion puppets instead of people. But still.)

Watching Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Peggy
October 25, 2016

The other night the XWB and I watched “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as part of my continuing program of going to Scarecrow and renting the next volume of some TV series, and some movie or another along with it. Both of which may be watched in Analytical Mode, though I haven't gotten anywhere near as analytical of Cowboy Bebop or the various movies we've watched as I did of Utena.

We'd both seen it before, of course. We were born in the 70s and raised male. Not having seen it would be amazing. But neither of us had watched it a zillion times. I think I'd only seen it once, probably on VHS or at a fourth-run theatre; I distinctly remember it being mentioned in a letter I got at summer camp as a movie my parents had seen and thought was probably too intense for my barely-ten-year-old self, so I know I didn't see it in its initial release.

I ate it up when I was a teen. It was super cool. It was probably one of the reasons I started affecting an increasingly-battered fedora for a while.

But now? I was most impressed by how little I cared about anything in the movie. Maybe this was partially because I vaguely remembered what was going to happen. But really, it was a movie so obsessed with the intricacies of its clever little plot, and its (wonderful) action sequences that it kinda forgot to really give us any reason to care about anyone. Dr. Jones is just running from one action set-piece to another for most of the movie. Except for the one part in the middle where he thinks Marion's been killed, and he sinks deep into an alcoholic fugue. That part was interesting. That part I completely forgot. But that's the part I was the most involved with when watching it as an adult; suddenly Indiana goes from being this action hero who laughs at danger to someone who's got a deep, deep well of misery inside that he can't cover right now, and he pretty clearly communicates that he really doesn't care if he lives or dies for a little while. Then he puts it away and goes off for more adventures, and Marion wasn't killed after all, and now they're both locked in a tomb filled with venomous snakes and and and *waves action figures furiously about while telling you about all the super cool heroic stuff Indiana did*.

The other thing that really struck me was how much it felt like it was five or six episodes of a serial pasted together. Which was pretty much what Spielberg and Lucas were trying to make, if I recall correctly; like Star Wars, Raiders is a shameless, lavish tribute to the cheesy action serials of the 50s that they grew up on. And a bit of a counter-reaction to all the artsy films of the 70s. Seen as that, the movie's lack of any inner life for its characters is not a flaw; it's exactly what it wanted to be. You see the last episode of one arc, followed by a four or five episode arc in its entirety.

Visually, it's impeccable. Everything is told clearly. There's some clever shots. There are never any shots that feel show-offy to me (though my threshold for that may be a lot higher than it would have been in the early 80s, after all the crazy CG I've seen). It is very clear and succinct visual storytelling. Admirably so, maybe even masterfully so, but the lack of any real emotional connection to the characters leaves me cold the same way Lucas' Star Wars prequels did. There's not much in the way of repeated imagery that gains significance, aside from the way the Nazis opening the Ark of the MacGuffin to only find sand deliberately echoes the way Indy sifts a little sand out of his bag before trying to swap it with an idol on a pressure plate in the opening sequence. His failure then is echoed by the seeming failure of the whole chase everyone's been on for this thing; it's just filled with sand… and then all hell breaks loose in a neat action scene that ends with this archaeological treasure being taken out of Indy's hands. By Evil Archaeologist in the opening sequence, by the US government in the ending.

And that's kind of interesting, now that I think about it. Despite the movie constantly telling us Indy is a super archaeologist hero, ultimately he kinda fails. He doesn't get the idol he's been chasing after for, oh, probably about 4-5 episodes before the start of the film. He doesn't get the ark he spends most of the film hunting. The most human moment he has is when he's failed to protect Marion. Whose arc of going from “someone Indy kinda took advantage of when she was the possibly-underage daughter of his old mentor” to “Indy's main squeeze” felt kinda creepy to me, to be honest. Indy as a failure speaks to me a lot more as a grownup who has doubts and past fuck-ups and has lost people she loved than it did to a teen with their life ahead of them.

I was kinda expecting it to be more problematic in terms of politics, really. But if you accept that Indy is basically a state-sanctioned graverobber then nothing else felt too terrible to me; the exotic locations were handled in a way that felt specific enough to me to not fall into total caricature. Also of course I may have been cutting it some slack for clearly being A Piece Of Pulp Trash and proud of it.

3/5, a solidly made goddamn piece of pulp trash that's proud of it. 5/5 if you're not in the mood for any fucking nuance and just wanna watch Harrison Ford get the shit kicked out of him while fighting with Nazis over stuff they both stole from the locals. It's really well-made but it just feels so empty somehow.

Your Memories On Facebook

Peggy
October 21, 2016

Every now and then Facebook's “surface an old post” feature makes me laugh.

But it's sure gonna be a ton of fun when it starts being around the anniversary of my mom's death. Especially since I tend to look at Facebook on the tablet's browser and the “show less like this” button doesn't work there. (Yes I could install the app. No I'm not going to.)

Watching Revulutionary Girl Utena: 15

Peggy
October 19, 2016

In which Utena turns into a car, and I’m surprised by it. Continue reading →