internet + etsy
Posted: August 12, 2013 Filed under: art, blogs, crass commercialism, douchebaggery, news, project, publishing | Tags: arts, blogging, gaming, illustration Leave a commentSomeone named Jack emailed me recently to ask why I wasn’t a part of the usual haunts and discussions out there on the web. He asked, “Was it something someone said?”
The short answer is, “No.”
The slightly longer answer is: I’m just not spending a lot of time online these days. I don’t know when and if that will change. I didn’t make any conscious choice at any single point and say, “That is the last fucking straw!” or whatever. I just dropped out of the google+ thing and stopped visiting all the forums and what-not because I just didn’t find the rewards equal to the time investment they required. I have not changed; I’m just less interested in having broader conversations with strangers on topics that don’t reflect what I am doing these days.
Some have suggested I create a ‘facebook artist page’ and I still haven’t decided if I need a ‘facebook artist page’ that is distinct from my ‘facebook page’ or not. I think I just use my facebook page for looking at pictures of kittens in sombreros and posting the occasional snarky comment and seeing pictures of other people’s kids or hearing about the marathons they are running or the meals they are eating; the point of a broader ‘strategic multimedia outreach’ has yet to become a reality for me.
I’m doing things (some of which don’t involve the internet) and working on some private commissions as well as some projects that are probably 2 or 3 years late and getting older.
If you have clicked on the etsy shop link on the right, you will find that there is nothing in the store (and there hasn’t been for some time). Etsy has been pretty good to me in the past but isn’t fitting into my current schemes very well — again, because of the time involved. If anyone has suggestions for a good way for an artist like me to sell original artwork that has been previously published in things like Goodman Games DCC adventures, please post or email.
If anyone wants to say hello, the best way is probably to just email me (at sbpoag(at)gmail(dot)com). After the 18th of August 2013 I will be out of the country for 2+ weeks. I will probably not have access to email in that time.
Arthix, the hydra and the concubine
Posted: August 11, 2013 Filed under: ideas, myths 3 CommentsThe hero Arthix promised the Lord of Thambar that he would nullify a particularly troublesome seven headed hydra that dwelt in the bottom of a well and guarded a giant diamond which the Lord coveted. Hundreds of heroes had tried and failed to defeat this hydra because it was in the habit of using all seven heads to look in all directions, thus sneaking up on the hydra was impossible. Arthix asked for the loan of seven of the Lord’s most desirable concubines. Greed for the diamond drove the king mad; he readily agreed.
Arthix took the seven concubines and chained them in a circle around the well, each one the exact same distance from the well and each one an equal distance from each other — like numbers on a dial. The hydra crawled up from the well with each head looking in a different direction as was its custom. Each head saw a writhing, shrieking, delicious concubine and each head strained to pull the beast towards that desired morsel, but each head was equally strong so the beast remained stationary as the concubines wailed and cried and each head pulled in a different direction with exactly the same force. While the hydra was preoccupied, Arthix snuck in, stole the diamond and ran off. One of the concubines managed to wriggle free of her chains, and, likewise, ran off. The head that had been eyeing her turned its attention to the next concubine in the circle… suddenly that concubine had two heads straining towards her and the hydra slowly pulled itself in her direction since the pull of the hydra’s heads was no longer equally distributed. The hydra devoured the unlucky concubine and then devoured the other five concubines in turn.
The escaped concubine followed Arthix back to his boat and begged him to take her with him. After they escaped the island together, she chopped off his head with his sword while he slept, threw his body overboard and sailed for the mainland.
The Lord of Thambar’s soldiers arrived and saw the bloody garments of the dead concubines on the ground and that the diamond was missing as a swollen bellied Hydra crawled back into the well for a nap. They rushed back to report these finding to the Lord of Thambar. When he learned that he had lost both the diamond and seven of his concubines, the Lord of Thambar was furious. The Lord of Thambar sent out his huntsmen to all the corners of the land to find the Hero Arthix and return with his head, but since none of them thought to check the bottom of the sea and everyone assumed all seven concubines had perished, the search came to nothing.
Meanwhile, the concubine sailed her ship to the busiest port on the mainland. She changed her name and used the proceeds from the sale of the diamond to live life on her own terms rather than having to be a concubine for the totally unlikeable Lord of Thambar.
And she lived happily ever after.
Too much cake (or watching “Pacific Rim” 2013)
Posted: August 4, 2013 Filed under: bitching, monsters, movies, reviews, Uncategorized 1 CommentAnnie indulged me by accompanying me to see “Pacific Rim” (the film by Guillermo Del Toro) at the theater the other night. Why I wanted to see Pacific Rim was simple: dinosaurs fighting robots. But when the film was over, I left the theater feeling overstuffed — as if I had eaten too much cake. Sometimes you get exactly what you think you want and you end up feeling kind of sick at the end.
Pacific Rim is a film by Guillermo Del Toro where giant monsters (known as ‘Kaiju’) periodically crawl up out of a fissure/portal to another world in the bottom of the pacific ocean and attack coastal cities, much like Godzilla did in 1954. In order to defend themselves, the humans construct giant robots called ‘Jaegers’ which are piloted by pairs of humans who need to establish some kind of ‘mind bond’ with one another. The humans discover that the kaiju are being sent by aliens who are intent on taking over the earth. The pace and ferocity of the kaiju attacks increase and a smaller number of robots and robot pilot teams have to fight harder than ever to stem the tide. Idras Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire), Ron Perleman (from just about anything) and that good looking guy who plays “Jacks” on Sons of Anarchy are in this movie along with a lot of other people.
Everything in ‘Pacific Rim’ is huge and loud and colorful and complicated. Hong Kong (where much of the action takes place) looks like the city from ‘Blade Runner’ with flashing billboards, lots of umbrellas and Asian people crowding around street vendors in narrow, dangerous streets. When the kaiju battle the robots, cargo ships get used as baseball bats, they knock over buildings like drunken men in a bar fight might knock over tables and chairs and the humans just need to scramble to get out of the way and hope the robot kills the kaiju before the city is completely destroyed. It is Greco-Roman wrestling and martial arts on a grand scale — each second of battle is accompanied by noisy, anarchic, glorious destruction.
I wanted to like it; I really did. I grew up on shows like ‘Ultraman’ and ‘Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot.’ I loved the ‘Kaiju’ movies where actors in rubber dinosaur suits stomped on cars, knocked over buildings, waded through the ocean like it was a kiddy pool and swatted planes out of the sky. So why was I underwhelmed by ‘Pacific Rim’?
I suspect the biggest part of the problem is that I am no longer 9 years old. As a young sprat, I probably had an inexhaustible appetite for seeing cities get destroyed and screaming commuters running away in fear as the army, once again tasked with the impossible job of fighting Godzilla, rolls in to get squashed and stomped on until the monster gets bored and wades off into the ocean to sleep beneath the waves for another couple of years. The ‘kaiju’ movies of the fifties, sixties and seventies did not benefit from modern digital imaging; everything was done with models. You could usually see the fishing line that the toy airplanes were strung from as they buzzed around Godzilla’s head like mosquitoes. The ‘tanks’ which fired countless artillery shells at the monsters were clearly toy models. When Godzilla grabbed a commuter train in his mouth like bulldog grabbing a string of sausages, you could see that it was a model train. They would then cut to a crowd of Japanese salary men and housewives shrieking in terror and running for their lives. Like many children, I had a fascination with things that were very large and very small. Much of my fascination with Godzilla was probably based on the fact that I knew exactly how the illusion was created, and, dammit, it looked like a lot of fun. What kid wouldn’t like a movie that looked like the adults had made it with toys, fireworks and elaborate models of tall buildings? As an adult, I can imagine that I might watch Godzilla movies with a certain amount of nostalgia, but I doubt I could muster up the same level of enthusiasm if I had been an adult when I first saw those films on TV so many years ago.
In ‘Pacific Rim,’ on the other hand, the elaborate (and often visually overwhelming) effects didn’t make me think that the film makers were playing with scale as much. If memory serves, when Ishiro Honda made ‘Godzilla’ in 1954, he frequently placed the camera at a low angle… the camera was down there with the toy tanks as they rolled up to fire at Godzilla. The camera then switched to Godzilla’s point of view where he looked down at these tiny, annoying vehicles that were shooting at him. Godzilla, like King Kong, was sometimes seen looking through windows at the tiny humans hiding inside. The director was always reminding us of the size of the monster. In ‘Pacific Rim,’ thanks to modern technology, the camera circles the action like a fly buzzing around the room. A lot is gained (the ship that one of the robots uses as a club really looks like a ship — it doesn’t look like a 1/72 scale model ship) and stuff is always exploding, flying around, shattering or getting squashed, but something in the experience of watching a film about a very large monster that makes humans insignificantly small and weak is lost — when the kaiju and the robots of ‘Pacific Rim’ wrestle and punch each other, the crumbling buildings and squishing cars seem much more incidental, like the furniture in a room that gets knocked around while two normal sized humans are fighting. Although ‘Pacific Rim’ has better special effects, I didn’t find myself as aware of the scale of the monsters and robots, perhaps because our vantage point is not moored to the human scale that Honda attempted to covey in his much less technically sophisticated 1954 film.
The ‘story’ isn’t much. The human robot pilots have conflicts with one another. Indifferent government bureaucrats have cut robot funding in order to funnel all of the money into some government contractor’s ‘Kaiju wall’ bamboozle project (and we see a Kaiju promptly burst through the wall in Sydney, Australia — clearly walls are not going to keep the Kaiju out). Idras Elba/Stringer Bell is slowly dieing because he was the pilot of one of the earliest Jaeger robots and was exposed to too much radiation. ‘Jacks’ from “Sons of Anarchy” (I don’t remember his real or his Pacific Rim name) redeems himself and falls in love with an Asian woman who helps him pilot one of the robots to victory. There is some badly explained and not entirely clear sub-plot where a scientist geek discovers that he can ‘mind meld’ with the brains of the kaiju much like the robot pilots ‘mind meld’ with each other in order to control their giant machines. Ron Perleman steals the show as a blackmarket dealer in kaiju body parts who dresses like a 19th century pimp with golden armored shoes and has a fondness for butterfly knives. Even though these actors were entertaining, none of the human part of the movie was interesting enough to make me want to care.
Everyone and his brother/sister has probably seen this already. If you haven’t, it is worth seeing on the big screen simply because, well, it is such a goddamn spectacle that would probably lose too much if viewed on the small screen at home. Del Toro spent a gajillion dollars making this thing; if you want the full effect of all that CGI, you will probably have to go to the theater. If you go, bring a child along; they will enjoy it much more than you will and perhaps you can catch a ‘contact high’ off of that child’s enthusiasm.
Hey, kids, either learn to write well or this monster will kill you…
Posted: August 3, 2013 Filed under: art, commissions, inspiration, portfolio 6 CommentsJust kidding. I’m working on a poster for a school writing program featuring a ‘dragon’ character (who is the school mascot) and was asked to provide and old-time D&D style lizard (red) breathing fire and waving a scroll and a quill pen around. The final poster will be a tall rectangle; the lower half will be bright yellow with bold text on the bottom telling the kids what they have to do or else the dragon will immolate them (“immolate” is a good vocabulary word, kids, and will appear on the next test). Other text will appear in the scroll and there will be a big headline in the black space on top that the kids will hopefully be able to read, etc.
It’s been a long haul to get to this point, but I’m pretty pleased with the result. The ‘sample images’ I was given to draw from included the old TSR “basic box” that I remember so fondly from my childhood. Hopefully the kids will like it.
‘The Croaking Fane’
Posted: August 1, 2013 Filed under: art, Goodman, monsters, publishing Leave a commentGoodman Games annouced that ‘The Croaking Fane’ by Michael Curtis is in stores as of 2 days ago. Link: http://www.goodman-games.com/5078preview.html
As usual, I contributed a couple of inky scrawls. The title page shows the usual group of player character mopes about to get donkey puched by some toad-goyles: