Category: blah blah

“You may question why we do not at once proceed to the finished, smooth, and round form. The answer is that in a drawing or painting, something of the individual procedure and structural quality should remain. When it is too much smoothed down and polished, it becomes entirely factual. The camera can do that.

“In a drawing, however, ‘finish’ is not necessarily art. It is the interpretation and process of individual conception that is art and has value. If you include all the literal facts and actualities, the result will be boring. It is your selection of relevant facts that will create interest.”

–Andrew Loomis, Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth, Chapter III

This book is a gold mine. If you have an interest in drawing, it’s a must have. That is all.

Just got a notification from Blogger.com that they will be shutting down ftp support for their blogs– which is how I have this site set up. I’ll get started on migrating to some other framework, but be aware that things may be a bit spotty for a while. The last thing I want to do is to actually have to code the site, so I’ll see what other prefab services are out there.

Game Retail is screwed up in so many ways. Buying used games works out if you’re interested in titles that sell well initially; games that have enough of a marketing push behind them to motivate a large number of buyers, in other words, mainstream games.

If you want a copy of Madden or Halo used, you’ll have plenty to choose from. But say you’re looking for a game that’s a little more unusual, or merely produced by a studio whose distributor failed to market their game well, if at all? Good luck trying to find one of those games 3 weeks after launch, new OR used. Shelf space is extremely valuable in game stores, and the vast majority of buyers aren’t the type of folks who keep track of previews, reviews and release dates. So the gamer who shows up to buy Call of Duty 2 may never have heard of Godhand, and will certainly never see the one copy sitting in the corner on the bottom shelf. If there’s a copy there at all.

Oh well, their loss, right? Except the result is a system that helps sell games that don’t need help selling, and shuts out all the others. The result in the long run is an industry where creativity and innovation are punished. This is not in my interests as a gamer who prefers new experiences to old ones with updated graphics. Additionally, the Madden and Halo buyers are already gamers. How do we encourage more, different people to take up gaming? There needs to be games that they want to play. Perhaps the mainstream gaming demographic is already saturated; we need different games to attract different demographics. If gaming as an industry doesn’t continue to find new, different consumers, it will remain socially marginalized and stigmatized.

Granted, gaming isn’t nearly the fringe activity it once was, but it still hasn’t gained the ubiquity of film, music or television. I look forward to one day being able to fill my game collection with the equivalent of, say, art house films, and never have to play a “mainstream hollywood blockbuster” ever again.

Games these days are much more mainstream than they used to be, but still have a long way to go before they match the kind of ubiquity and variety that you find in film, music, or television. Personally, I look forward to the day when I have the kind of variety of experience available when I game that I do when I listen to music or watch a dvd.

To that end, I think used video games are a good thing. I also think that pirating games is a good thing, though of course not necessarily to the designer.

I once was a penniless but avid gamer. Used games, and yes pirated games as well kept me a gamer, when my alternative was not gaming at all, or only gaming around Christmas and my birthday. Lots of folks pirate or buy used when they have the means to buy new, but I’d rather not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I want to see more people game, and more people try games that they may not be sure about– sure enough to pay full price new for. I want to see unusual games sell well, and they won’t until people put down their Madden or Halo and give it a try. Most folks don’t want to gamble their $60 on a game they don’t know they’ll like. (We’ve all seen the GameFly commercials, right?)

However, I have friends in the game industry. So buying used games feels a lot like stealing from them. Fortunately, I have a job, so I can afford to buy new, and I can afford to “vote with my dollar” to encourage designers to design and publishers to publish the kind of games I want to play.

So yes, buy used, even from a company as nasty as Wal-Mart. Pirate games if you have to. At least occasionally by a new game, to support your favorite developer. As long as more people play more games, our favorite hobby can only get better.

Postscript: Worrying about ecological effects of shipping & handling from Amazon is a moot point. After all, wasn’t the game you bought at Wal-Mart shipped to that store? If you’re wanting to reduce your footprint, downloading the game probably has less impact on the environment. There’s also less waste in terms of packaging. But of course, if you’re using electricity, you’re contributing to ecological harm (where does your electricity come from?)

Just read that R.L. Burnside (allmusic.com) died yesterday, after an extended stay in a hospital in Memphis. He recorded several blues albums for Fat Possum(one of the few record labels that I am conscious of, and partial to), and is to me one of the greatest bluesmen. His style of playing far removed from the strict 12-bar blues canon. Unlike many modern blues artists, his work was not a stale, immaculate preservation of the blues of a particular period of time, but rather, the blues incarnate, alive, raw, and kicking really, really hard.

R.L. Burnside was one of the first blues artists I paid close attention to, because Fat Possum was releasing hip hop and electronic remixes of Burnside’s music. Before Burnside, I knew nothing about the blues, thinking it an old and outdated form of music. But hearing how easily the blues blended with modern styles got me wondering.

Fat Possum’s gamble– to try to draw new listeners by mixing blues with popular styles– paid off, at least as far as I’m concerned. Soon I was submerged in the blues, and eschewing the remixed versions of Burnside’s songs for the originals because by being combined with modern music, as powerful as they were, they lost so much.

The remix albums are a good start, a smoother transition into a music that is so raw, powerful and personal. But by far his better work is that without drum machines and digital distortion. My current favorites are “Too Bad Jim” and the live album “Burnside on Burnside,” which is nothing short of phenomenal. It is worlds away from the “inside a glass case” museum-style blues which stems from the 60’s revival, and proof positive that the blues can be vibrant, current and relevant.

After all, like R.L. said himself, “the blues ain’t nothin’ but dance music.”

I just read Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. This is really an eye-opener for me, who so far have pieced Blues history together from various websites and cd inserts. The popular history of the Blues is quite different than what evidence suggests. The book has a lot of myth debunking, and at the same time, the author tries to be as upfront about his own ‘predispositions’– which are generally in line with popular history, and the romantic view of the bluesman as an outsider, or naive artist.

Throughout, the author reminds the reader of the danger of genres. The only purpose of genres is to make records easier to find in a record store. And yet we tend to apply them more universally, drawing arbitrary lines between artists and albums. Thus you end up with people arguing whether ‘Mississippi John Hurt’ is blues or country, rather than simply enjoying his music. We forget that we’ve arbitrarily and subjectively applied these labels, and treat them as if they were natural laws. We seem to do this more often than not, in most areas of our lives.

I’ve only been able to use 2 genres consistently and without confusion, and I wish to apply similar logic to other areas of my life as well.

My music collection is sorted thusly:
Genre 1: Music I like
Genre 2: Music I don’t like

Genre 1 I keep, Genre 2 I leave at the record store.

Works for me.

We’ve all been told at some point that two wrongs don’t make a right. Most of us have found proof of this in our lives as well. It makes sense. But the statement implies that at some point, some number of wrongs will, finally, equal a right. The question then becomes, “where is the threshold between rightness and wrongness?”

I don’t know where exactly the threshold lies. But I have seen proof that it is possible to cross over; to pile wrong atop wrong, one after the other, until the result– somehow– becomes right.

Last night I watched Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. It is not so much a movie as it is a careful experiment to discover the wrong-to-right transformation threshold. Everything about this movie is wrong. The acting, the dubbing, the sound & visual effects, the editing, the choice of film and soundtrack– everything. And the result? To put it mildly, I was thoroughly entertained. As bad films go, this one is really good– because they managed to cross over that threshold.

It takes an incredibly strong determination to fail in order to make a film like this succeed. I hope they make a sequel.

I saw Santa Claus today. An old man, with a big belly covered by a red shirt, long white hair and beard. He had a baseball cap on his head, and a bag slung over his shoulder. The sack wasn’t full of toys though. It was a large clear garbage bag, filled with soda cans. I saw him picking through a trash can in front of the mall downtown, as I was driving to work. Looking for more cans, I’m sure.