XXX

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.--- Ray Bradbury

[drunkenyear]

State of the Art: Still Struggling

It’s been another year. I looked back at my previous posts and it’s good to get perspective and see how far I’ve come. I still feel like I’m in a pretty rough place. I’m currently unemployed. I got hit on my motorcycle in July and am being hounded by the hospital for a 3k bill. I feel pretty lost. I have trouble getting up in the morning and doing things. I feel depressed and unsure of anything. I feel like I’m getting left behind and that I’m just not good enough. All that is true, but I’m also doing better in many ways over last year. Not being on the motorcycle is good in many ways because it’s less stressful and less hassle. The broken leg wasn’t good but it also forced me to take a timeout and refocus myself. I was running myself into the ground and I’ve decided to make a principled choice to not do that, to try and destress and refocus and attack things more systematically. I’m currently unemployed but I also was hired to work at Dell for 3 months before my accident. So I’ve got something decent on my resume now, and I’ve actually been working a fair amount of code stuff. Before that I had an actual designer position at another start up, which I left my old QA job for. I’m finally out of the min wage/analyst position and on to the real positions I want though it feels a few years later than I wish. I’m still figuring out my niche. I know more code than most designers but not as much code as a developer. I don’t have as much pure design work as many designers, and those jobs are more often given based on personal connections which I lack. I have always had this problem with being a jack of all trades, but I also feel like it’s my strength, I have a good deal of understanding of a lot of domains in a project and I think I have better critical thinking skills than average. If I had been born into a lot of money this wouldn’t be a problem but I wasn’t so it is. I feel like I’m stuck and I’m not sure what to do but I’m trying to focus myself on The Work and not let it get me too bogged down. Some other good things have happened is that I’ve finally got most of my old to do list cleared off. I’ve taken the down time after work and after getting hurt to mash my way through old stuff, and try and not add anything new to it. I’ve got half a dozen things I’d like to keep learning and play around with but I’ve been trying to focus on just doing what’s in front of me right now, and I think that’s been a pretty big load off my mind. I’ve sort of gone over into a new paradigm with my family. My sister started dating this guy who is very political. Very political and also very dishonest in the way he deals with people. First he banned me for disagreeing with him about some stuff on facebook. Then he re-added me and I’ve tried to discuss stuff with him in an honest and forward way. I’ve only ever challenged him on directly provable facts. I’ve never engaged with him on purely ideological grounds. I’ve tried to find common ground. But he lacks any integrity and has always copped out, and deleted our conversations when the heat became too much. When I went home for Christmas, I was committed to staying out of political discussions with him. He constantly needled the issue and tried to get a rise out of Rachel and I. The day before Christmas Eve, Rachel and I got in a debate with him, that ended with him calling her a retard, me getting angry, and him telling me to fuck off. He refused to apologize. I apologized for yelling. My dad saw my side of things. My mom refused to condemn his actions. The next day he proposed to my sister and she accepted. My family is basically dead to me at this point. I keep in contact with my parents, my dad more so than my mom, and the rest I am done with. I don’t feel like I’m the one who has changed either. I feel like it’s my family that has changed. My mom is the manager of a christian bookstore at my sister’s megachurch in Houston and some of the merchandise they carry there is so despicable I don’t understand why she allows it. Books of Prophecy that amount to supernaturalist snake oil and political conspiracy wing nut screeds. My faith may be different in some ways than what my parents believed growing up but on a fundamental level I still think I hold to the same essential values I was taught. This bullshit and political militancy is not at all what I believed growing up.  I feel in some ways like my parents have been taken from me by a cult. I don’t know what to do about that. In the same way that I feel myself pulling away from my family I also feel a need to be more honest about my political and philosophical beliefs. I have always occupied a weird space. The theist who hangs out with atheists, the moral realist who hangs out with nihilists. It’s a weird place to be. I’ve always felt out of sorts. The people who would superficially agree with my religious views do not agree with my political ones, and the people who would superficially agree with my political ones would not agree with my spiritual ones. All in all even those who agree, I don’t feel really agree often times. That’s one reason my relationship with Rachel has been so tough, is because she is probably the only person I’ve met who has that conflict like me. And so when we fight it hurts especially so, because it’s like the last person on earth being mad at you. But I have met a few more people who have similar conflicts. Mostly online but also in person and even within my own industry. I have kept quiet about my political views by and large on facebook because I did not want to encourage a greater rift with my family online, but that tie is basically dead at this point. I have kept pretty quiet about my spiritual beliefs because I don’t want people to assume I believe something that I don’t. But I see my politics and beliefs as connected, and I want to be more open about them, to process them and engage with them. To seem the integrated together in public as well as in private. I feel a bit like I’m coming out of the closet slowly, piece by piece, and part of that process has been leaving pieces behind. That’s a tough thing to do. I feel like I’ll be in a much better position to do this once I start working again too. I feel a great deal of shame being out of work, being on food stamps, using Unemployment Insurance. It feels like I just fit the stereotype that people like my sister’s fiancee rails against. That I’m the lazy entitled Millenial that every op-ed piece wants to skewer. I don’t think that though. I don’t want more than what is decent for a person to ask for. I am trying and have suffered through a great deal of hardship to achieve what I’m trying to achieve. It’s just that the weight of it is bearing down on me after so long, and I feel like giving up, and letting go. Then again maybe that’s part of what I need to do. I’m not good at letting go. Last year I said that I was learning to accept my failures, and I think I still am. Also I’m not applying for grad school this year again. I still feel like I need to buff up my portfolio. I guess one good thing is that I am constantly in a state of learning things, so I’m not stagnating but I also feel like I’m so far behind everyone else.

[drunkenyear]

State of the Art: Coming up for Air

It’s been awhile. Two years and a half since I last posted. I wrote last year but never posted it. Instead it languished on my hard drive in an unfinished state. I have spent this past year sloughing off my skin like a snake, leaving old things behind. There’s been a lot of hard questions and figuring stuff out. I think I’m finally getting a grip on things.

  10 months unemployed. A broken motorcycle. Multiple unpaid illegal internships, and minimum wage jobs later. This year took it’s toll and I feel like I’m finally pulling myself out of it’s morass.

  Let me share one of my worst moments.

  I was sick. Couldn’t keep anything in my system, in one end, out the other. Several days of this and I got a hemorrhoid. I was also attending a hackathon. It was pretty dev heavy and I spent most of my time being ignored by people. I felt very cast aside. Then I get a call from my min wage job. I was late for work. I had misread my schedule. So I had to excuse myself, humiliated in front of the people I wanted so badly to impress, got on my motorcycle, and drove through an hour of rush hour traffic to get to a job I hated and could barely pay the rent working. There was a moment where I contemplated ramming straight into the concrete barrier on the highway. It would be that easy. Just a quick turn of the wheel.

  But I chose life a long time ago, and it would take a good deal more than that to keep me down. This has been a year of me coming to terms with failure. My failure to get a job, for my film to get into any film festivals, for me to succeed to the level I thought I deserved and wanted. I am finally coming up for air and learning to accept my failure.

  Here’s how my year went. After working the various unpaid internships, I ran out of money and had to take a job. I got an awful job at an electronics store. One of the most depressing jobs I’ve ever had. They would basically take anyone with a pulse because the sales quotas were so strenuous and the management so poor that anyone who stuck around for longer than 3 months was either mentally ill, socially dysfunctional, empathetically deficient, or so desperate they had no other choice. One of co-workers threatened to punch me several times, and then complained to the manager when I asked him to do it. He was working there after having gotten arrested a couple of months ago for taking photographs of women in dressing rooms without their knowledge. Yeah... that was the kind of people I was working with. I worked this job for 2 months barely making enough to get by when I quit, thinking I had a paying internship or two lined up. They ended up passing in favor of getting some unpaid interns. With no other choice I got a job in a headshop.

  This job was not so bad in many ways. It was very freewheeling in some ways and there was a certain amount of respect and plain-spokenness that I appreciated in the work environment, but ultimately you were disposable and you knew it. This is the job I mentioned in my first story. They treated you like shit and paid like shit because they knew that they had pot heads lined up around the block waiting for a job where they could smoke weed all day. You were a bartender for meth heads and tokers. My co-workers were decent people who had not had good hands in life. An illness in the family, a teenage pregnancy, a wreck on the wrong day. It was a master course on failure and loss. It was also the first job I was ever fired from. Because I counted the money too slow. The day before I was fired I got an interview at my current job. That was my lifeline. It came almost too late, but it came.

  I’m working at a video game company as a QA analyst. It’s not what I really want to do but it’s a start. I like my co-workers and we at least have similar ambitions and interests and can work on projects together outside of work. I applied for a lateral move in the company for a UI position. The same thing I always hear. Good portfolio, you have talent, not enough years of experience. It feels like the ladder has been pulled up. I’ve even heard seasoned industry designers admit they couldn’t get a job into the modern job market, and they can only get it because of their resume, which they achieved in a day in which there weren’t as high barriers to entry.

I’ve been thinking about grad school. I forwent applying to it this year because I wanted to build up my portfolio and I hoped that with a bit more experience in the industry I would be able to leverage myself in my application for better aide or a fellowship. I feel like I have to go to grad school or something because I badly need more time to further hone my craft and I don't see myself being able to work my way up without the boost of dedicated study time and the built-in network of academia. It's taken me a long time to barely even scratch the surface of things here in Austin, and my experience here has mostly made me realize that Austin is not really the place for growth. It will never be able to compete with other centres of culture because it relies so heavily on unpaid labor, and the largest attractor for companies to the city is not quality talent but rather lower operating costs and rent. Moving to a whole new city though would be hard, and so I'm largely basing which grad program I want to get in, on what city it is in, and what kind of connections I want to make. I think taking two years to really think about things will end up paying off in the long run for my grad application but I also fear that I'm letting time slip through my hands too quickly, that I'm behind schedule.

  I didn’t get the art fellowship I applied for. I have a year to get ready to apply for grad schools and the grant again. I've felt powerless these last few months because so many of my plans have been beyond my control, but I think I finally have a plan. I’ve decided that I will focus on working hard on my portfolio, and if I don’t get in, I’ll look at self funding the Philippines documentary myself. I’m slowly saving up money. It’s a big risk to self fund this. I might be able to find some investors or crowdfund it, but I think it’s worth doing and I feel like at least it will give me some agency back. I also can’t really afford a post-bac program so if I’m not good enough to get into the grad program I want, then taking a year to focus full time on my work in the Philippines wouldn’t be a bad start, and it's still cheaper than going to a post-bac program here in America. If nothing else, I don't want to get to 30 and feel like I played things safe out of fear.

I've met someone. She's pretty cool. I don't think I've ever fallen in love with someone so hard and fast. I don't want to put too much pressure on the relationship, neither of us know exactly where we will be in the future, but we care about the same things, have a similar background, temperament, interests, etc. We drive each other a little crazy sometimes, because we're so similar but I also care about her a lot and she's very dear to me. The relationship started like an atom bomb. We're starting to level out, get our bearings. There are so many things about being in a relationship that I never understood. It is a constant miracle to me that she is a separate person, a separate mind and body, with her own heartbeat, and history. There's an intellectual and emotional totality that I experience with her that I haven't with friends or family. I love her a lot.

  In many ways my life right now is a complete turnaround from what it was a just a few months ago. I have a girlfriend, a full time job (though no benefits), and a pretty regular social life. I still champ at the bit though for more creative work, and the feeling that my potential is not being validated or grown. I still feel harried by dozens of different little to-dos and projects and side concerns, frazzled out to the point of being in a daze every morning and night. Things are getting better though. I'm slowly figuring stuff out. I have to keep my eye on the ball and not get distracted. I'm very stubborn so there's that. Sometimes I wonder I think I need to lower my expectations, reel myself into a more realistic level. Mostly I think I need to stop thinking about all these hypotheticals and just focus on The Work. I'm relatively happy right now. That's going to have to be enough.

[drunkenyear]

State of the Art: A Pang

(This was originally written December 2013 as part of my yearly update journal but I did not publish it because I was too depressed to finish it. I finally went back and finished editing it, and I have another update following it)

Hello world. I am a failure. I write this broadcast to you more than a year after my last update. I intended to write it six months ago but we see how that turned out now didn't we?

Wild Ruse did not get into SXSW. Sixteen film festivals have been entered, and two rejections have been received. Fourteen more to go. And a little more, since there's a couple I'm planning on entering when we get closer to the entry date.

What was Wild Ruse? As I mentioned in my last piece of writing, I was planning on directing a short film in the spring. I did. Wild Ruse was the result of four all nighter script writing sessions plus many many rewrites. Five months of production. Many hours spent in the middle of nowhere shooting film in the bitter cold, getting nearly arrested by cops Twice! Also an arduous 4 month long post production process in which I edited film, painstakingly pieced together fragments of misrecorded dialogue, and innovated a host new post production techniques. Doing all of this outside of any official program at my school and actually having to actively hide the project from the head of our department lest we attract undue ire. That was Wild Ruse. I poured my heart and soul into Wild Ruse and it feels like my hands came back empty.

They're not empty. I learned a lot, and I feel as if I have a much better understanding of storytelling and art than I did before. I made something I'm proud of despite it's many flaws, and I'm hoping it leads to something good. There's no make or break, there's always room to keep going. I'm just focusing on making things and to keep putting ground behind me.

A confession. Last spring, over the course of making the film, I took my university up on an offer. Each year they give you twelve free therapy sessions. Twelve, enough to last me until the end of the year. So I tried five months of therapy. I did this because I'd been worried about having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. An egomaniac is someone who has an outsized esteem. This is something I've often been accused of and it's very hard to deal with because it's the exact opposite of how I feel. I on the other hand always feel as if my heart is an open wound. I both feel smarter than everyone else, and the constant doubt that I'm just too stupid to realize that I'm not. NPD is this lethal combination of gasoline and fire. A deep sense of entitlement linked with the spark of doubt that brings it all crashing down.

My therapist did not agree with me about the NPD and I disagreed with him which ironically is probably the most narcissistic thing you can do, ho hum hmmm. Overall it was a good experience. It's very interesting to relate biographical information, not to a friend, or a family member, but to a professional. There's a different sort of objectivity there, and overall I found the process to be useful to my development as a person and a writer, particularly in my approach to writing characters.

Perhaps related to NPD is my inability to write a good main character. I have a strong need to strike a perfect balance, on a personal level. To be neither extreme, to always seek truth and balance. Unfortunately the effect this has on writing a main character is to write someone is utterly bland and uninteresting. A Mary Sue. An aside: It's not my opinion that  a perfect human requires imperfections. I think that's a semantic piece of bullshit that often gets touted but doesn't actually make sense. If we define an interesting well rounded person as good, and perfection is the most good, then by definition a perfect person would be well rounded and interesting. Freckles are not an imperfection! Freckles are sexy. What makes us unique as people is our ability to describe perfection in an infinite facets. Any way point being.... I am not a perfect person, and so in my narcisstic way of writing a perfect Mary Sue protagonists, I write the most boring and banal protagonists.

But this time... I didn't. Well I did and didn't. I wrote a fairly standard protagnist for Wild Ruse but I finally hit on a pathos with the side character, the foil. I feel like I finally made a character who had struggle, perhaps because I've started coming to grips with my own struggles and weaknesses.

Red is a thief. You don't know the plot to Wild Ruse but here it is. A cop, named Damien, hires a thief, named Red, to help him steal the soul of a gangster. It's a surrealist heist film, sort of Tarantino meets David Lynch. Well Red is a thief and he's really the one with the struggle in the film.

See about two years ago I was diagnosed with a learning disability and ADHD. I'd gone through twenty two years of my life without getting the diagnosis, but here I was. It really makes sense. I am horrible at learning languages. That's apparently what my disability is in. I have difficulty with word processing. Particularly verbal speech processing. Considering how much I mispronounce words in the English language, much less a foreign language it's not exactly surprising. My dad lost his job twenty years ago because he couldn't learn Japanese.

While in London I'd also listened to Radio Lab and Freakanomics podcast a lot and I'd been wrestling with concepts of human nature and genetics. Criminal activity is highly correlated with IQ and IQ is highly correlated with genetics. Even in twin studies it is confirmed that a lower IQ child raised in an upper class family will fail to do as well as his genetically richer adopted siblings. Sure they'll probably graduate high school in higher rates, but they'll not do much more than that. That's not to boil an immensely complicated quantification problem down to a reductionist core. There's complications of course between education and class, but genetics play a huge role in what a person becomes, not just on a economic level but more importantly on a seemingly moral level.

Is a bad person born bad? Is our present written in stone the day our DNA hits the ground? This isn't nature versus nurture. Nurture is just a prolonged result of deterministic wrestling. Everything comes down to nature. But at that point, we seem to find ourselves like a reverse Prometheus. Fire, the light of Science reveals that we are bound by the chains of the gods and fate, our free will taken from us, never ours in the first place.

I've had a few drinks so I'm waxing poetic here. Post Rock tends to do that to you, you know? The point here is this struggle become very real to me in my new diagnosis. My brain is broken. Its not a gift.  I've learned how to cope with it, in ways that is helpful to my overall development as an artist and person, but Rain Man is a myth we tell ourselves to feel better about injustice in nature. Sometimes things break. They can't be fixed.

Red struggles with this. Is he capable of change? Is he defined by his nature, or is it beyond his ability to define? Where is the animal in the human nature? Is there really any difference to begin with. That's a struggle, and I feel like I was finally able to write that in Wild Ruse.

Wild Ruse did not get into SXSW but I learned what I needed to learn and I'm pressing forward. The answer Wild Ruse gave to that question about nature was Doesn't matter. Keep going: I'm going to keep going. Perhaps my brain is broken and I don't realize my own outsized esteem but I know the only way to prove this is by failing so I will keep failing until I die.

You know the concept of failure is very valuable in video games especially if you've ever played a rogue-like game or super meatboy. Here's an update on that plan. I've become very soured on the idea of video game development. I still feel that it overall holds the most possible potential for experimentation and utilization of my talents but I have made very little headway into the prospect. I moved to Austin Tx. It is my home state. It's also a great hub for music and film. More importantly it's a pretty great hub for game development. I haven't made much headway. The development community is sort of cliqueish and not very focused on the sorts of games that I really would be interested in working on. I am decidedly not a gamer bro, and the vibe I get is very different here than what I was expecting. It seems most professional outfits are focused on making games for profit, often times at great expense to the artistic qualities of the piece. Then the people who are concerned with the artistic aspects of games are more cool little experiments but with very little hope of making any kind of real profit.

I've gone to a bunch of video game industry networking things and gone in for a few interviews but I've not made much progress. The industry meet ups are really fun, and I'd go to them even if I wasn't looking for a job. I got to try an Oculus Rift a couple of times! It's super cool, and I can't wait for the consumer version to come out. I've shown people my portfolio and stuff and I've gotten lots of positive feedback. The interviews have been less positive though I wouldn't call them bad. The issue is that a lot of these jobs bring you in and they looking for as budget. They're usually not looking to pay you a market value wage, which is sort of disappointing and devaluing of how I see my work contributing to a project. Additionally these kinds of projects tend to be focused on games that I'm not as interested in working on. Candy Crush clones and social games that use Skinner Boxes to drain their customers of their money in an underhanded manner. Additionally my portfolio isn't marketed straight at the game industry market so sometimes it's kind of a hard sell. I apply for a job in UI and the reaction from the interviewer is "hmmmm... I don't see much UI work on your website". Well I went to school for fine art and film, so there's not a lot there, but the principles of design carry over across specific sub fields. How hard is it to create a menu button for a social game app? It's not that complicated. Additionally, my website is a good example of UI design, so why shouldn't that count for something at least? I understand that an HR person who does not have any training in design may not have the toolset to judge the design skills of a person or extrapolate out from there, and that they have to make good hiring decisions based on the  facts they see in front of them, but it is a little disheartening. It's also a little confusing. How did anybody get jobs in the games industry 20 years ago? Sure programmers have a pretty direct line in, but if you look at the artists and writers who work in the games industry it's weird how varied their backgrounds were. Ken Levine, the guy who directed Bioshock Infinite, was just some dude who went to school for drama and then spent about 7 years working in computer repair before answering an ad in a videogame magazine. It seems the bar to entry in the industry used to be a whole lot lower, but since then the ladder has been pulled up from behind, and what with so many specialized 2 year video game art programs springing up all over the country, getting an entry level position is much more difficult. I think I'm smart, and I have good ideas, and I have a lot of skills to execute them. I'm not as finely trained for specific video game toolsets (I've never used bug tracking software like JIRA for instance, a requirement for a lot of jobs I've applied to) but I think I provide additional perspectives and a more well rounded approach to video game aesthetics, and if nothing else I think that my work demonstrates drive, determination, and resourcefulness. I'm pretty much self taught, my schooling was in fine art, and all the digital design and illustration stuff is work I've done on my own. Wild Ruse was a massively ambitious project that I organized and executed without school credit etc. Even if I don't know a particular specialized skill set, I think that I offer the intelligence and drive needed to learn it.

And of course as already said, I also completely understand why that wouldn't be the most convincing thing to tell a risk-averse HR manager, but it still feels discouraging to feel like you have the capability to succeed and do great work, but that no one is willing to give you the chance to do this.

This also hits on something I struggled a lot with the production of Wild Ruse. My work does not seem to capture people, it just seems to return void, like shouting in an empty room. Wild Ruse was a massive project and it was an uphill battle the whole way. A majority of the production was my direct responsibility. It was hard to get crew to show up on time, or even answer their emailsl. I had to cancel two shoots because crew cancelled last minute, even though I'd given them a shoot schedule a month and a half beforehand. I had many people make promises that they would help with this or that, only to flake out at the end. It felt like no one really gave a fuck about the project, and by extension no one gave a fuck about me. I had to carry the project, I had to push it along because if I didn't do everything myself, no one would. It feels like I'm paddling alone in the ocean, trying to get to land, but my arms aren't strong enough to get me there. Determinism is not the belief that your fate is out of your hands. It is the belief that your fate is in your hands, but that your hands are too weak.

I would hope that I could rely on others for mutual support but that doesn't seem to be the facts on the table. I have to turn inward, I have to rely on myself. I'm still open and looking for work, and I'm trying to keep myself open hearted to the possibilities, but I also know that at the end of the day I've got to answer for myself and my motivations have to come from within, otherwise things aren't going to get very far. Whether it's praise and popularity, or money and professional recognition, these things are passing and external, and I must focus on the intrinsic motivation for my work.

Things aren't all bad either. Like I said, I'm remaining open to the future and I'm doubling down on my work my work ethic and resolve, and I've already got some interesting projects in the making that could end up being really awesome.

So first in the short term I might be helping making a documentary here in Austin about the local hip-hop scene which will hopefully be sponsored by Red Bull. That would be really cool. If nothing else I'm having fun meeting people and getting to mingle in the local art/film scene here in Austin.

The second thing is a grant I put together for a foreign art exchange fellowship. Basically I'm taking the painting series I did last year, Agon, the one focused on cockfighting, and I'm taking it to the Philippines where I will continue it, and also document my artistic project as part of a documentary film on cockfighting culture. It's a pretty high concept project, and I believe it has a lot of potential to be interesting and unique. I don't hear back until May on that though, so in the meantime I'm trying to keep myself busy.

Oh yeah, I also got a job as a graphic designer at a venture capital accelerator. It's not a lot of work, or pay, but it's very chill and I'm looking forward to the experiences I'll be gaining from it. That sort of transitions into some thoughts on future goals.

So last time I wrote, I said that my plan was to become a Creative Director in the video game industry or something like that. The path there is not so clear, and I've also rethought that some. The essential kernel is there. I would like to work in the creative field in some kind of director/writer position. I don't want to just have a consistent career as an illustrator or designer, I want to be involved in the large narrative and aesthetic direction of a project. I have a tendency to leans towards video games in so far as I think there's a lot of interesting possibilities there, but I've also realized that due to my particular skill set and educational background film is actually more achievable. While I don't have a single completed game in my portfolio, I do have a film and some music videos, and while Wild Ruse didn't get into SXSW, I do think it's fairly impressive and may yet lead to something more. My thinking last year is that I would simply get a grunt level job as a designer/illustrator and work my way up to project head, but I'm not so sure about that. Instead I'm thinking I'm going to have to do things myself.

Joining the venture capital accelerator has been interesting because I've always found the kind of attitude and approach in venture capital to be in line with my own mode of thinking. I got into some discussions with a friend of mine who works on the business side of venture capital when I had the idea of starting my own studio. Now it wouldn't be venture capital, because venture capital is a model based upon rapidly innovating new ideas and then selling them off for a profit, and what I would like to do is more focused on building a company with long term growth value. The barriers I'm finding are that the people with money either won't hire me, or they don't want to do the kind of work that I'd like to do, or I can't do any projects that I'd like to do myself because I lack the funds to properly hire the talent needed (a huge problem with Wild Ruse which had barely any budget and relied heavily on volunteers). But if I could get investors or something like that, I think I could make a project that could do something pretty awesome.

I'm not entirely sure of this, but working at this venture capital accelerator means that I have access to education and other resources that could help me get this off the ground. This is a broad idea, but creating some kind of media production company might be exactly what I'm looking to do. I believe that I have the ability to execute larger projects on budget and on time, and if I can learn more, and start getting a plan to support and fund that, then maybe this will be the solution for what I'm looking for.

In the mean time I've got to focus on work and continuing to educate and train myself. I've got to keep making myself smarter, and more deft in handling the projects at hand. There's the long view, and then there's the next 20 feet of road illuminated in the headlights and that's the thing that I have to focus on.

Sort of related to that. I moved back to Texas, I moved to Austin. I hoped that doing so would also help on the dating side of things. So far things have been pretty dry. I've had very little luck. I'm in a weird place where all the girls my age or younger are in college, still students, and often times not sure what they want to do with their lives. While I on the other hand haven't yet done anything successfully with my life yet, but I do know decidedly what I want to do with my life. I feel so distant from that student mindset. I want something more mature, someone who has a vision for their own life and feels like their own person. So right now I'm not really focusing much on the dating stuff. Instead I'm trying to focus on my work, on myself, on making myself better and looking to the long term benefits. I'm also trying to remain open and to not close myself off, and to be also open to learning new lessons in relational and social facets of myself. The overall focus though is definitely on my work though, and I'm not too worried about that as I do have time to figure stuff out. The only thing that has kept me going was my new found resolve as an artist. The Work never returns empty. I can spend 5 hours with a person only to have them blow me off at the last minute when I really need them. But if I spend 5 hours working on a painting, no matter what I will have made progress. I can produce a video and no one can pay attention but I will have learned something new about my craft. The Work is the only thing I have and nothing can take it away. that kept me going. But lately it’s been wearing thin. I finished the film in November and I’ve been looking for a job since July and I’m still unemployed. My money is running out. I feel constantly on the knifes edge of being completely destitute. My parents are in no position to help either. Things are hard all around. I can’t even get a job as a telemarketer. I really wanted to avoid retail and stuff but I think I’m going to have to do that. Unfortunately right now I can’t even do that because some jackoff tried stealing my motorcycle and it’s been in the repair shop for 3 weeks. No transportation, and therefore a great deal of difficulty with getting to interviews. Even before that I was having difficulties with the clutch. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I’m starting to get desperate. And that’s the vicious cycle that is created. I’m desperate, scared, and hurt. Festering with bitterness. I’m unconfident. And it makes it hard to get up, makes it hard to get out of bed each day. Makes it hard to present myself well in interviews. Instead I feel unconfident and unable to do anything.

[drunkenyear]

Some thoughts on Comedy

I am not a funny person. I would even hazard to say that I'm deeply unfunny. I am a bit of a bore. My idea of a good conversation is discussing how self driving cars are going to change commute schedules. I'm rarely invited to parties.  In contrast to this though, I am fascinated strongly with comedians and their craft. I'm very interested in "what makes a thing funny" which is probably the least funny thing you can do. [Insert famous E.B. White quote about frogs here].  A friend of mine, of similar temperament, recently sent me this [this video] which has Stephen Fry discussing the difference between American and British humor. I had recently been reading a bit about the [Benign Violation Theory] which is an attempt at creating a universal theory of humor. The two bits clicked together and we had an interesting conversation which I feel like posting here: Me- 

 The basic gist is that the essential heart of all humor is 2 parts. 1) A violation of a social/moral/linguistic/logical norm and 2) a recognition of the violation as being benign.  So tickling, one of the most primal forms of laughter: It doesn't make you laugh if you touch yourself. There's no violation. And it's not funny if a stranger in a trenchcoat touches you, because that's not benign. Tickling spots are located near important arteries, or sensitive areas that are open to attack. In the past it's been posited that tickling is an adaptive method to teach young animals/babies how to defend themselves, how to guard. Humor springs out of that basic instinct, and grows to cover not just bodily norms, but also social and philosophical ones.  And I tend to be a serious person. I'm very guarded and defensive. I was picked on a lot as a kid. I have trouble making a joke or taking a joke. But I do appreciate comedians and their craft a lot. I think I'm learning what funny means finally, a little bit of a late bloomer.  And that ties into the british and american humor thing well. British humor is sharply aware of the violations in the world. Perhaps it's the more advanced state of philosophical education/nihilism/existentialist/secular post Enlightenment despair over there, or maybe it's the more diverse and constant jostling of national sensibilities in an overcrowded European continent but the violation always seems to come up first. The logical violations of Monty Python, the social failings of The Office, they start out on edge. And then the British comic makes those things benign, Their failings, our failings, are things we can laugh about. Maybe we're all socially incompetent office works, or knights in a confusing and capriciously confusing universe, but at least you can laugh at yourself! While on the other hand, the American comic is one who we aspire to be, who we fantasize we are. They're so slick, nothing is a threat. They flaunt social norms with impunity, they skip school, hijack German Parade floats, crash cars, bang guitars, trick hunter into shooting ducks, and waggle their eyebrows without ever seeing any consequences.  S- I found the article enlightening on the topic and the insights on evolution. I believe they also posited that laughing was one way that humans learned differentiate between real and false threats such as whether wind was blowing or whether a predator was crouching in a nearby bush.

I think I share many of the same sentiments as you growing up very serious and with a stringent sense of purpose that I don't think was pushed on me but was sort of "expected." 

 I did take life very seriously and a bit too much so I think, looking back. I probably stepped on a few toes in the process. I did have spurts of compulsiveness though. One time there was meeting time for advising with admins at the Academy or something of that nature and I thought it would be funny to put a piece of paper to the admin hall entrance that said "estimated wait 1 hr. 45 min from this point in line." Apparently, they didn't find it quite that funny (except C).

However, I do find myself becoming irreverent in my old age.

Me- I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that both of us had fairly conservative religious backgrounds growing up too. Maybe I only speak for myself here, I don't want to presume too much of course. And even then it's weird to say "conservative" with my parents as they are in many ways weird hippies. I guess I'd say I grew up in a very "sincere and ernest" religious background. Anyway the religious side of things I think contributed greatly to my seriousness as moral violations were rarely benign. And love/kindness was of the upmost importance to my parents. Poking fun at other people was not okay; it was seen as cruel.  And it is cruel sometimes. I do find a lot of humor, perhaps then American humor to be very negative and hurtful. I'm still not a fan of racist jokes, or put downs. But I've also started getting a little more wiggle room. I think I like the BVT theory because it seems to outline the issue that makes these wiggles understandable to me. Put downs are okay, when they are with friends you trust and who know they are respected and cared for. But put downs to the weird kid with the funny voice isn't. The essential principle of respect for people is maintained, but now it's not such a unyielding inflexible law. Maybe humor can not only be benign but helpful, as using humor can make it more easy to broach sensitive or dangerous subjects. Laughing at the wind in the bush can put your fellow cavemen at ease. It can help people to relax and open up.  And I think I've also had a similar spurts of compulsiveness. I was growing up very strongly morally personally focused. Being "good" was important. But being the kind of naturally rowdy, ADHD, Oppositional Personality Disorder kind of kid, I was also sort of a natural troublemaker. And not because I wanted to be bad, but because I just had a bug in me that caused a little chaos. I've always been rather partial to pranks. (also that sign idea sounds pretty funny hahaha) S-

I like the reflection and it does resonate.

Louis CK is just painfully funny. You want not to laugh sometimes but cannot help it! 

I thought it was funny. Anyway I think I presumed too easily that I know people well enough to do those sorts of things without fearing any consequence (the Academy is supposed to be a family right?). I treat people as if I've known them much longer than I have maybe. Me- Very true. I also found the Academy to be sort of like family. It was the first time really that I felt that in an academic setting. We were all in it together. Us versus the world. 

[drunkenyear]

Some thoughts on patriotism

So I was talking to a fellow New Yorker about how much Texans brag about being from Texas. I'm a Texan. We were in a forum that shares and creates "polandball" comics. If you don't know what that is... it's sort of strange to explain. It's basically comics about the world, with personified versions of countries. Anyway I like checking out these forums because they're very international and you get into some cool conversations about the world and different cultures.  Anyway so this New Yorker was complaining to me about Texans bragging, which I understand his feelings on that. I shared my thoughts on patriotism with him, something I've done before, and thought I'd just post it up here for the heck of it too. Here it goes:

 I think of it in a friendly way though. Patriotism has gotten a bad name in the last hundred years, and for good reason. But I like to think of it in the way that one of my favorite writers G.K. Chesterton put it (admittedly speaking more on the subject of existential hope versus despair):

"My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot."

The way I see it, loving your family doesn't mean ignoring their faults, nor does it mean that it's somehow mutually exclusive to other people loving their own families. I sort of see it this way. People who say "America is #1!" are really piss poor patriots, because what kind of patriot loves his country because it's the best? Who loves their father because he is a millionaire? A pretty shitty son, that's who. But a person who loves their country (or state, or region, or clan (they're all just extensions of the family line)) because it's *their* country, or state, or family, purely in and of itself, display a certain kind of virtue that is good, I think. I love my family, and because I love my family I want other people to love their families too.

That's one thing I like about polandball. I think it reminds me of a kind of extended family reunion. It's a bunch of cousins getting together and making fun of their mutual aunts and uncles.

[drunkenyear]

What is at the heart of class struggle?

An interesting thought occurred to me today. While in America we more often focus on racial and sexual discrimination, socioeconomic, or class discrimination is probably the more powerful negative force in our society.  In fact, many other forms of discrimination are not only tied up with class struggle, but may in fact at their root be a specific cultural manifestation of it.  Donald Glover, actor on Community talked about in a podcast episode of Jesse Thorn's Bullseye about how the negative stereotypes around blacks are largely an issue of class rather than of actual issues of race. Race got tied up in it because how slavery institutionalized a class distinction of people based upon their ancestry.  And of course, I'm not saying here this is true across the board, racists aren't just engaging in class warfare, human prejudice can't be boiled down to a single variable.  But in an interesting twist, I was thinking "what perpetuates class struggle?" We live in a society that often lionizes the working class, and yet people still turn up their nose at things associated with that.  It seems a large part of it is tied up with gender issues. Being poor, makes you a poor provider. Men who seem poor are less sexually desired. Therefore, no one wants to seem poor. Same goes for women too, though maybe with some different angles.  It's just a thought, no real conclusion here, more just some ramblings on how gender and class are connected in a way that I didn't usually connect. In a way, gender expectations drive the class expectations. And visa versa. 

[drunkenyear]

Ad Blockers are taking over. What happens to the free content on the internet?

Just read an article about ad blockers being on the rise. 40% increase just this year. 22 % of users are ad blocking. Which means by 2017 almost 100% of people will be blocking ads. Pretty much all of the major websites on the internet are free and supported by ads. A little bit after the next presidental election though, it's going to be very hard for people to keep making money. I wonder what's going to happen then? I personally use ad-blocker but try to unblock all the websites I use that are not obnoxious and obviously need that for income. Even then, I wonder how useful advertising can be, since I natural tune out most of what I see. Our generation has gotten pretty good at disregarding ads (uh... well not in all cases. People still buy a lot of dumb stuff, but still). Netflix has completely replaced TV for me. I bought Spotify premium to get rid of ads. Maybe the internet is trending towards a subscription model? I have a feeling all media will be.  A little extra thought on this as it relates to tumblr. Tumblr was recently bought by Yahoo. Tumblr was a venture capital funded company. Yahoo bought them because they thought they could make money off of them, but how? Tumblr doesn't really run ads. That's the whole reason I chose them. So how does it make money? Buying tumblr themes isn't going to offset that.  Reddit hasn't made a profit since it's inception, it's still running off of venture capital. What happens when those funds run out?

[drunkenyear]

On the subject of "Fake Geeks", Cultural Appropriation, and Country Music Fans

I was talking with a friend, about the recent resignation by a writer at Bioware due to death threats and harassment from fans.  We were discussing why this kind of vitriol seems more common in gamer circles than in the wider sphere of sub cultures. In talking about it, it made me think of a recent conversation I'd had on the subject of country music, and some thoughts I'd been putting together about cultural appropriation and evolution.  Why are gamers so especially defensive about fake geeks?

I think it's a feeling of defensiveness due to a strongly self identified cultural label. This is coming from an American perspective but I relate it to how  I see this in country music and rap music in America, at least in the kinds which are associated with the rural/urban poor respectively. country music fans, see themselves as the last hold outs against the big rich city slickers. They wax poetic on "redneck values" and write songs about "what it means to be a real country boy". There's a celebration of ignorance, a vilification of modernity or anything that seems to be new or from outside the culture. I think it's largely a defensive mechanism for a cultural group that feels insecure and powerless. Less and less country music stations and labels exist every day. It's a music that's largely vilified in the mainstream media, always portrayed as being representative of uncool yokels who fuck cows and marry their sisters. Country music fans feel defensive because every year it seems to them that their culture is under attack. 

Geek culture on the other hand has a same but opposite problem in that it fears attack because it's becoming more mainstream. People feel threatened, because they worry their culture is going to disappear through assimilation. There's parallels between fears of cultural appropriation and outrage over "fake geeks". It's the same idea really.  A cultural minority is overtaken by a cultural majority. You might dress up as a stereotypical Native American chief or pocket protector nerd for Halloween and the feelings of outrage are similarly grounded. 

The fears of a country music artist are largely unfounded I think. Sure country isn't dominating the charts the way it did in the 50s but that sense of loss is largely an illusion, because the issue is not that country music is less popular so much as there are just more and more kinds of music to listen to. Culture isn't a zero sum game. 50% of the pie may go down to 25%, but the fact is, we have a much bigger pie than we did in the 50s. Additionally, there are still plenty of successful country artists, and the ones who do well and continue to do well are often the ones who are secure in themselves. You don't hear Johnny Cash whining about how "there ain't no room for a country boy in this world no more". Lots of alt-country band exist and do quite well, partially because they're not so caught up in calling themselves country. William Elliot Whitmore is an excellent musician on the largely punk ANTI label, and while he looks more like a farmer from Appalachia (albeit with tattooed arms) than a hard nosed gutter punk, he does pretty good in those venues. Murder by Death  does pretty good too with the indie and alt rock crowd. (a skinhead tried to choke me at one of their concerts. not a nice guy!) Oh yeah and the pop infused Mumford and Son/Taylor Swift are hardly doing poorly in the charts either!

Any way the point is, I think the fears of geek culture over "fake geeks" is largely blown out of proportion. People treat culture as a zero sum game, where one subculture dominates another, but in fact what happens is more like the formation of creole languages. You lose some of the old, but you get so much more new stuff  back. Culture isn't static, it grows. So I don't think people should worry because we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.  Addendum: The indie scene tends to get this better than most, because they're naturally at the fringes, and they already draw off of multiple kind of mediums rather than just "Mario+Final Fantasy+Halo". Scott Pilgrim is a great example of that. Its a comic book, which heavily references video games, but also indie music, movies, and fashion. The comic gets turned into a movie which gets turned into a game. Jim Guthrie was a nominated for a Juno award before he ever even announced Swords and Sworcery and was an accomplished singer songwriter. 

[drunkenyear]

Another old rant (On the subject of the changing nature of art)

NOTE: Cleaning out my HDD I found this old essay I wrote, and I don't think I posted it.  I haven't gone over it extensively to do any more edits or updates, but I figured I'd post it anyway. 

What is an Artist: The Changing Nature of  the Internet and what it means to be a Creator.

                  I had a realization the other day and its about an ongoing debate I’ve been having with some friends

  I’m a staunch anti-consumerist. That isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a defense mechanism. I grew up in the middle of Nowhere. And believe me, you probably have no conception of what I mean. The nearest movie theatre, book store, comic shop, record store are a 1.5 hour drive on open highway going 70 miles an hour. We have 0 TV stations. We have three radio stations. Post-grunge hard rock, heavy slow hip-hop, and Mariachi music. Oh yeah and a Contemporary Christian Music station but that hardly counts. I mostly put on the Mariachi music because they sound really fucking excited during the commercials. Don’t know what they’re trying to sell but I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.

                With Nowhere to go and Nothing to do, I had to go into art because otherwise my mind would have melted from the boredom. Additionally my parents weren’t really rich enough to buy stuff anyway. The only other option was spending a night walking around Wal-Mart looking at *stuff*. Not a whole lot of fun.

  Like I said, I’m a staunch anti-consumerist but I have a 2 friends in which I’m engaged in a weird kind of circular debate. One of my friends is also anti-consumerist in philosophy. He has very strong consumerist tendencies. Reformed otaku of sorts you can think. Yes, he has a life sized Jack Skellington doll and Star Wars action figures. Since growing up though he’s put a lot of that stuff behind him. Despite wanting to make comics, don’t even start talking to him about Comic Con or else you’ll get doused in a gasoline can of contempt.

  My other friend is a consumerist whore. He practically owns the entire library of Steam and I’ve never seen him complete a single game. It’s a thing he does you know? At the same time he’s one of the best editors I know.

  Awhile back I wrote an article about consumerism. Basically I said there were four levels of how people interact with media. Consumers, Connoisseurs, Critics, and Creators. To me, the first three are different shades of dangerous pitfalls. There are various problems with being those kinds of people and I stand by that original assertion. However, I also think that maybe that post was over simplified

  First the issue is that not everyone can be a Creator in the traditional sense. Some people have to be plumbers, and garbage men, and teachers etc etc. I mean not everyone can make a living doodling pictures or writing music. I think the issue then is not “creation” per se but a desire to achieve mastery in one’s field. I come from a long line of teachers, and as a result that’s been a path I’ve dabbled in. Teaching isn’t easy. Despite the fact that most teachers are just immature students who were too afraid to leave the jail house, teaching is an actual skill which must be built up. It’s not something you can do *skillfully*. Unfortunately current public school and university systems discourage these kinds of teachers due to money and political reasons. Those who can’t do, teach has become the mantra of the school system by default.

  However this is not necessarily true, and does not have to be the state of things. Teaching , plumbing, etc can be demonstrations of skill. And here is where we get to my second point.

  The definition of what makes an Artist needs to change. Now I don’t totally agree with everything this guy says (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PktUzdnBqWI) but there’s this excellent TED video that discusses the evolutionary basis for art. The gist of his argument is that Art was a way for humans to display in an abstract sense Skill. Those who could make fancy statues could make good arrowheads and therefore had a survival advantage.

  Of course, I think that this is a little overly simplistic but I think it is a good framework to hang our understanding of Art on. Just as I would say we can explain things like Attraction and Compatibility through evolutionary explanations doesn’t mean that I think it really gets at the heart of Love.

  Here’s where the New Definition of being a Creator becomes important because we can see that people ought to strive to become skillful in what they enjoy or do. This comes out of a philosophy of Virtue Ethics and theosis but I think it’s a broadly held belief.

  If we understand Art in this way and Creator in this way, then what makes an Artist? I don’t think we can merely say that a Plumber is an Artist because while his job is just as good and important it’s a process of fixing things. I think therefore that in most cases the best way to define Artist is simply “A Creator who Communicates”

  I’ve recently been talking with some programmers about game development and one of the things I’ve realized is that *programmers are artists*. If a guy is fiddling with code to make sure the jump mechanics feel just right (http://kotaku.com/5558166/in-praise-of-sticky-friction) or that the pace of the background scroll is correct, then he is an artist, because he is sculpting the players experience in much the same way an editor of film sculpts the performances of an actor.

  So how does this all relate to my two friends and our ongoing discussion of consumerism?

  The issue is that we are currently operating on an outmoded or soon to be outmoded paradigm. The original definition of an artist was based upon A Single Painter. Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello, Splinter, etc etc. These guys had assistants. They would carve out huge blocks of marbles for them, and then the Master would go up and put the finishing touches on it. They would paint large areas of painting, but then only the master would get the credit for painting in the eyes. These were collective efforts but we primarily remember singular painters. We do this because the economic system of the time was a feudal/aristocratic one in which a few owned the majority of the resources and the rest of the people were owned as part of the land. That’s why you have this huge emphasis on the individual during the Enlightenment, and a huge importance is placed on the platonic Genius.

  Then the industrial revolution came and with that we get massive factories of assembly line workers overseen by a factory boss. This is the system that film was built in. It’s the strict lines of creator and workers with distinct lines drawn between different factories and different studios. Intellectual property becomes an issue here. Well intellectual property goes back further than the Model T, but it is a product of the industrial revolution and all the innovation that happened in that time. Previous to that time if you were an artist you didn’t have intellectual property. You made pictures. You were defined by your skills not by your ideas. Afterall everyone was basically painting the same things. Greek shit and Jesus, and that’s about it. (And in Asia is wasn’t much different though the development of IP in Japan is both interesting and something I know almost nothing about).

  Then we’ve entered into a service industry model and that’s  quickly transitioning into another model altogether with the invention of the Internet. See now the lines between artists and consumer is getting blurred, just like the difference between Creator and Consumer is blurred.

  An artist releases a song, and within no time someone’s come out with a remix. Hey that’s nothing new really. Sampling has been done since the 70s. But its’ not just music. It’s random vlogs of people talking, and the news being autotuned, and people doing parodies, mash-ups, revivals and fan made reboots. I’ll take two case studies to explain my point.

  The first is hipsters. Oh fuck yeah I know, this topic has been hammered to death, mostly because the people who are mostly like to hate and talk about hipsters are hipsters and if there’s one thing that a Liberal Arts college education can help you do, it’s write articles that no one wants to read.

  Stay with me here though. See the history of modern hipsters is based in the DIY movement of the 80s. The alt rock music scene had just come out of the apocalypse of the 70s, in which the happy hopes and dreams of the hippies had been crushed and ground up into the Corporate Machine. Rock and Roll had been commoditized. That’s when you get Disco and Kiss and other such things. The hardcore punks after seeing this crap go down in the 70s didn’t want any of that shit, so you get a group of people who on principle refuse to accept label deals. You on principle don’t want to get famous and will do the most alienating hardcore and weird ass acts just to keep the mainstream away. And that’s when the first hipster joke “You probably don’t know them” was born.

  This transitioned into the 90s in which the alt rock machine itself was eventually bought up by Music Execs. The smash out success of Nirvana’s Nevermind was that death knell. Ever since then alt rock, then indie rock has progressively been assimilated into the culture at large. By 1994 you had a “grunge themed” Vogue magazine and since then its been largely just a weird struggle find a way of sublimating that success.

  The whole ethos behind DIY culture was that anyone could do it. That’s why punk sucks so much (and why I love it), because it’s stripped down, raw, and passionate. You didn’t need to be Ziggy Stardust with ace guitar skills. You just needed a shitty guitar to bang on.

  Now this was always an issue with punk going back to the Sex Pistols, but it became more of an issue as the DIY culture was further assimilated into the culture. This issue was that as time went on, more and more people hopped on the band wagon. More and more people ceased to be active participants in the music and became instead “consumers” in that classical Industrial sense.

  And that brings me back to Hipsters and Tumblr. See as this divide widened more and more people became consumers but with the DIY roots you had more and more people not creating through making music or art but by the *way* they consumed. This is the birth of the hipster. Someone with a careful and obsessive eye for fashion and culture and the way they present themselves. They become the canvas and what they wear is an attempt at some kind of expression.

                You see this same kind of pride in the way that people on tumblr post and reblog. Its kind of insane. You see remarks from people, taking pride in their ability to curate an online blog. They’ll say things like “bingo. I hit 200 followers” or “oh darn, I’ve lost followers since I posted that funny video about butts.”. To me, as an artist who grew up in the middle of nowhere, with no hipsters, fashion, or style, no malls or stores other than Wal-mart, this is extremely confusing at first.

  “Wait? You’re proud of… you ability to select funny cat pictures?”

  But see this is an outgrowth of the changing way people relate to media. They feel like they’re no longer able to create things so they don’t. But they curate them, which is to them a valuable skill. As we shift from a Industrial paradigm of economics to a Service industry of economics, the taste and skill to choose becomes what people value, not the creation itself.

  Ooooh… That could be pretty gloomy right? I mean afterall, I’ve just spelt out some doomsayer prophecy about how our society is changing and in a way that seems to decrease the value of those who create art.

  But that’s not what I’m getting at. See there’s something new on the horizon. Lets turn to my second case study.

  There’s this excellent Gamesustra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6591/minecraft_intellectual_property_.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraFeatureArticles+%28Gamasutra+Feature+Articles%29&utm_content=Google+Reader) which gives an example of how the difference between Artist and Consumers is breaking down. The example here is Minecraft. It’s a game that you can pretty much build anything you want out of blocks. Look I’m not going to explain it to you, if you don’t know what it is yet just look up a youtube video or something.

  The point is, that Notch, the fellow who made the game is constantly in a process of making and finishing the game and in that process he constantly takes advice from his users. He interegrates stuff that they want and actually takes suggestions players make. There isn’t a PR rep in the way. There’s not this invisible wall between artist and creator. Despite the legal complexities of taking ideas from users (something that’s a huge no-no in the game dev world), he has a single page with all his legal info put out in plain English. Crazy! Insane! Simple.

  And that’s what Minecraft is about. It’s about creation. The game is a huge sandbox that has the most open creation tools of almost any game out there. And that’s where this shifting understanding of IP is coming. As the Internet brings us closer together, and increases the rapid transit of ideas between people, it’s also breaking down definitions of IP. People are realizing that most of the time the idea isn’t really important. It’s execution and luck. Ideas are dime a dozen and we’re quickly realizing that our old system of “This is my idea! Don’t take it!” isn’t working and can’t work in a world with rapid communication. Ideas don’t form in a vacuum. I’ve always said, “All Art is Fan Art” and it’s true, because where ever you go in art you’ll find that at their root, the artist is copying, remixing, reinventing and paying homage to some other piece or idea. All the old paintings were just pictures from the Bible and Greek myth. Somehow I’m betting there was some slash fic in there too. 

[drunkenyear]

Contemporary Art as a Game (Artsy Haunted Houses)

NOTE: So I had to rebuild my computer this week and in the process of transferring my HDDs I found this old draft I wrote last Summer. I took this idea and went on to do an art installation which you can check out [here]. It's probably a little outdated and I imagine my views have changed, but I think it's interesting example oh how my thoughts have evolved over the past year. 

Let me tell you about a very strange and weird experience I recently had, and how it gave me an interesting insight.

                Last week, I went to a contemporary art show. It had a focus on performance art. I have my fair share of issues with contemporary art. I consider myself often at odds with it, and especially performance art. I even had a friend unfriend me once for a facebook status likening performance art to video games. Read on though and you may be surprised by this thought.

                I wandered in, a man dressed like a ramshackle Katamari Damacy sat on a throne next to the door and muttered nonsense to himself. This itself was only whimsical, vaguely harmless, like something beyond the looking glass, but nothing that could harm you. I walked upstairs to the main event.

                There was a room. Three women painted white, dressed in white, poured white sugar lines on the ground from a white gasoline can. One directed, one poured, and one cleaned up the mess. Surrounded by the was a girl, all in cased in plaster. I’d actually heard about this from the person who invited me. This girl incased her whole body in plaster, like being buried alive, and slowly broke out of it. The image of a butterfly coming out of its cocoon came to mind. I think often times, people grow numb to the crazy weird fascinating world around them. In order for this to happen, the caterpillar’s body basically liquefies. I guess bugs don’t exactly experience consciousness, but I have trouble understanding what it would be like to remain a thinking being while your body dissipates and reforms. By the way did you know that the last stage of the life cycle, the butterfly is called “imago”, the latin plural being “imagines”?

                Anyway, next to all this was a fellow in a crushed blue velvet suit with a slicked back pompadour,  playing a white piano and reciting nonsense poetry like some kind of late night jazz singer. If you got to close to him, or looked at him to long, he would stop playing and stare at you and smile. His eye contact was uncomfortable. You had the urge to look away, to ignore it happening. Look away and walk away. Everyone was clustered on the edges of the room, backs to the wall, watching, probably hoping that the jazz singer wouldn’t look at them.

                It felt uncanny, like being in a David Lynch film. Steady repeating of senseless motion with a little weird American kitsch thrown in the corner for good measure. It got stranger still though. One strange, long haired, Japanese man just walked into the middle of the room past the sleeping guy in the kiddie pool (oh yeah, I forgot about that guy, he didn’t move much), right past the white sugar lines and stood there. There was a sudden rapid motion from one of the ladies in white. The other two dashed to his side. The one with the gasoline can laid a line down in front of him, ringing him back in, and hurriedly the other with the broom swept away the line that was behind him. He was back outside the perimeter. What had seemed to been senseless clock work had a rhyme and reason. It had rules.

                Like a game.

                Video games have had trouble being called Art. One major charge laid against them has been that they’re interactive. They’re not guided experiences like a movie or a poem, or painting.

                I decided to test my theory that these were the rules that this game operated on. I steeled my courage, tried not to look at the smiling jazz man and walked, exposed in the whiteness, into the center of the room. The white ladies swarmed around me and did their duty. The line was swept from behind me and a new line was in front of me. I felt a bit like I was on the edge of the apocalypse.

                I took another step, crossing that line again. They came back, bustling around me without saying a word. I was winning the game.

Art isn’t interactive. Here though is performance art, and it’s also interactive. Remember that friend who got mad at me? My sarcastic insight has been that a performance piece I had seen a different night was basically just a shitty parlor game that wasn’t much fun. 

                Video games can be competitive like sports, but they’re also explorations. Explorations of mechanics, rules, understanding “how things work”. Contemporary art could probably learn something from game design. The weird conceptualizing of contemporary art could be utilized with the more structured “experience” design ideas of video game designers. That would be interesting.

                  Here was the second insight. After this weird little game experience, I walked down stairs (The elevator was mostly empty but occupied by a girl dressed as a cheap clown hooker playing 80s UK club music. Most people took the stairs). I headed towards the bathroom. There. In the corner was person. They wore some shapeless white clothes, a torn white hood with a face drawn on it. Behind them  was a recorder. A voice spoke, distorted, slow, low, like a kid with Down’s Syndrome being possessed by the devil. She just stared. Every few minutes she would take a sponge, soak it in vinegar and drop in a glass fish bowl filled with baking soda and it would sizzle like bacon, and foam up. It smelled awful. Vinegar smells so bad. It was pure uncanny creep out.                 The Uncanny is a huge thing in contemporary art circles. The Uncanny, as used in art circles, is a strange thing made familiar, or a familiar thing made strange. The whole Uncanny Valley thing, which many gamers are familiar with, is very much in line with this. Contemporary art doesn’t like making pretty things because that’s uncool now. At least the uncanny shit is awesome though.

                I had two insights then, going to unload the rest of my cautious nervous bowels.

  Smell is fucking important for these kinds of in body experiences. The really creepy thing that cinched it was the smell of vinegar. The smell of death thick in my nose.

Halloween houses could learn from this.

  You know those corny-ass haunted houses? They turn out all the lights and get some guy to rev a chain-saw in the background. They’re really goofy. It is kind of freaky having a man waving a chain saw running at you, but they aren’t really that scary. Often just stupid.

        That girl didn’t chase me. She didn’t say anything or even move. She just stood there, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen in real life. I was in a bright hallway surrounded by people. By myself? I’d have peed my pants.                 I mentioned David Lynch earlier. He’s the master of the uncanny. Could you imagine a haunted house like Eraserhead? If you haven’t seen it, check this out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK-2_OsBe0s&feature=related)  I want a Silent Hill like horror experience. A haunted house like that would be next level shit man. Wanna help me make one?

[smashedwords]

Why I Use Cheap Paint (or why you should take a bath in pudding)

I use cheap paint. I use paint so cheap that when showing it to a friend, I get a furrowed brow and comment that not even their children fingerpaint with such cheap stuff. This isn’t just student grade paint, this is the kind of paint so cheap that it has brand names more similar to budget roach motels than dead impressionist painters. “Maxi"…"Econo"…"Cheap ass motherfucker".

I know the line I’m always given. “If you care about your work, show you care about it by the materials you buy". This is the same line of thinking that pays the child support. I’d much rather put my time in to a painting than my money, and measuring dedication by dollar signs always seems to be a bit of a mistake.

 An additional difficulty here is that cheap paint handles wonky. This is true. However, I think that the most creative work is the ones created through limitation, and if one has to pick one’s limitations, they might as well be cost effective ones. Work with infinite possibility often goes nowhere because of mental laxness or frigidity. Faced with too much choice, and you’ll either pick the easiest most boring option, or you’ll not pick at all for fear you’ll pick the wrong thing.

Furthermore, let’s be realistic here, my work at this point in my life isn’t worth much. Very few people are going to pay the 2,ooo dollars and upwards that a large painting deserves. Smaller work might be a tad more marketable, but also a lot less fun to make. The purpose of my work now is to be disposable. It’s a vehicle to get me someplace as an artist, and everything else is just a bonus.

2o years from now I probably won’t be able to even remember my work today, but I’ll still have the skills it bought me. Buying cheap materials makes it easier to acquire those skills because you don’t worry about “wasting" painting or canvas. You get the work done. Everything is meant to be consumed, like a high score streak in Pac-Man, it’s a rush trying to get through an entire quart before noon. Going through a lot of cheap paint has the kind of luscious appeal that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pizza has, the luxuriously dripping cheese sloughs off your brush and gooshes generously on to the canvas. Hmmm… perhaps cheese is the wrong metaphor here to use. It’s more like really smooth frozen yogurt. Or perhaps really thick pudding. It’s like taking a full body soak in a tub of pudding. Get down in there, immerse yourself up to your neck, feel the warm squish in between your thighs as your entire body is covered in thick slick pudding…hmm.. The point is, what I’m saying here is, using cheap paint is like taking a bath in pudding. You should try it.

[smashedwords]

It's the Taxman, Mr. Doctor

A smart friend I respect sent me a link about the tax rate on the “above average" income bracket and I felt compelled to write up a bunch of stuff that I figured was actually worth sharing here.  I am by nature pretty libertarian, but it’s hard to argue [with all the numbers being tossed around about income inequality. ]  The economy has recovered but jobs haven’t. What’s up with that? I don’t think it’s a conspiracy against the working class. I think it’s just the capitalists no longer need the workers. Technology replaces people. We’re either going to adapt to a post-capitalism world, or else we become satisfied with a breed of Morlocks in the underclass. (in this case represented by Reality TV attention whores. HG Well didn’t know how bad things would actually get).   Also it’s honestly hard for me to buy the whole “the rich are taxed too much by the government" line. I hear this a lot when I go home and check up with my doctor. He spends most of the meeting railing on about how Obama is the worst thing ever and how he’s taxing the poor little rich people.  Lets ignore the fact that my doc works like 2 days a week (booohooooo) Let’s look at the real issue here. My doc isn’t anti government. He’s pro government. The only reason he has a job is because of the government. I don’t have a medical degree, and yes looking up random crap on Web MD isn’t exactly the safest thing, but in the large majority of cases it’s probably “good enough". Take two aspirin and call me in the morning, amirite? Most day-to-day diagnosis is smart guesswork, prescribing something that won’t screw you up too much, and seeing if it works. Medicine is a “practice". It’s trail and error, with really smart people manning the helm. Considering the new diagnosis software systems that they’re working on, and considering that doctor’s have such poor records that simple things like “checklists" vastly improve their survival rates, I think I’m mostly okay figuring out stuff myself nowadays. I probably would have appreciated your expertise more if I were sick with syphilis on the Yukon trail, or if I was currently dying of a rare blood disease, but I’m not. I just want my drugs. My doc is pro government despite his rhetoric. Listen here. It’s real simple. Job protection. The only reason I’m even there is because I need a refill on my amphetamine. My adderall, yeah? In a real libertarian society anyone would be able to buy or use whatever the hell drug they want to. The real libertarian dream looks more like the black market than the stock market.  Maybe a truly unfettered medical system would be complete chaos. Maybe it would suck profoundly, and we’d all end up crazy misinformed hypochondriacs shooting up dope to kill the cancer. Or maybe the system would just be much much cheaper. (I once had a doctor compare the cheapness of the vetrinarian medical practice to the human medical practice. Which didn’t really work when I pointed out that in the case of the DoggyKat doctor, euthanasia was a common prescription for disease) But the point is my doc doesn’t really want the small government he claims he wants. He doesn’t because it gives him job security.  This is even true of lawyers, another popular rich rat fink punching bag. A rich lawyer may talk a good game about wanting to deregulate things, but he’s profiting off the system. Why does he even have a job? Why are lawyers so expensive? Because to get the job as Lawyer you gotta get into the system, you gotta bust through all the expensive hoops, to get the certification, which is required by the system to ensure that you’re not some snake oil salesmen  Simply put, lawyers get paid the big bucks because their job is protected by regulation from fakers, and this regulation means that only the smart, persistent, and often already rich make it into the system. Quality control means you get smart people, and Smart People are low in supply, high in demand. Hence the price. Lawyers and Doctors are the 100% All Natural Hormone and Cage Free Gourmet Organic Eggs of the Labor Market. Furthermore, the entire reason you need such Smart People is because the legal system is so complex and multifaceted that it takes a LSAT ace to translate the guacamole.  So don’t tell me about how you want less regulation. Your very survival depends on regulation. (and maybe you do in fact want, or think you want, but trust me you really don’t. And perhaps furthermore you think you’re not a hypocrite but a saint who works even against his own self interests. Perhaps you are, I’ll give you that, but I highly doubt it in the majority of cases. I think like most people you’re probably just doing what you think is right, but have been equally duped by the system here) Compare this system to artists. Artists get shit respect, because half of them are flaky idiots. 95% of people who graduate with a degree in art don’t go on to continue making art a mere 5 years after they graduate. Imagine if Chemistry majors or Legal Studies majors had that kind of retention rate. There would be a riot! But there’s not. Because there’s a system in place here to make sure the good eggs get through, and the bad eggs go to the waste bin. See the thing people don’t get is that Art Is Hard. It’s really fucking hard. Creative majors are easy. It’s easy to graduate, but the hard part is actually making a living. So how do you define the hardness of a discipline? By how easy it is scrape past with a B, or how hard it is to actually succeed? If you define how hard something is by the grades, you’ve already bought into the system… What’s up doc?

[smashedwords]

Rethinking Privilege

                First I know that this topic is probably not one that everyone is going to be familiar with. It’s really more the kind of thing you hear about on college campuses than in everyday life. Lets start with a basic definition of privilege: “a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most.” In most cases where this term is used in current settings its referring to a political and sociological idea. White Privilege. Heterosexual Privilege. Male Privilege. The idea that being a part of a group (these groups mentioned in particular) automatically gives you a higher status in society, and by default pushing down people who are not in these groups.

                This is not going where you think it is. Trust me. Hahaha, I’m not here to deny privilege. I’ll give you an honest disclosure. I’m in all three of those groups. I’m not going to be this guy:

                Privilege Denying Dude, as he is called, satirizes a hypothetical WASPy dude who denies his privileged place in society. It makes some good points. Lets take a look at another one

                Yeah totally. Sure. Those guys deserved it because the years of oppression they doled out… wait… what? No. No no no. Are we really saying that people deserve to be lynched because of past societal transgressions? This isn’t quite the same thing as a war crime trial. The difficulty with societal oppression is that it’s a passive thing, and it’s really hard to explicate people’s responsibility. So taking justice and anger into your own hands probably ends up hurting many innocent people, and even in the case of the guilty, can we really say the punishment fits the crime, that people don’t deserve a fair trial, and a chance to defend themselves? Are we really going to put our hopes of racial justice on this kind of sentiment?

                The problems with our current concept of Privilege aren’t just here in online overreactions and the insipid meme-wars that get tossed back and forth. The problem goes deep than that. I’m going to use my life as an example.

                Yeah. I’m white, hetero*, and male. This is all true but rather than sticking labels on me, let me tell you my story. (*technically I think the normal orientation system is too simplistic, but I’ll speak on a functional level here)

                I didn’t exactly grow up poor. I grew up “lower middle class”. I didn’t starve to death, but things weren’t easy growing up. My dad spent a year and a half unemployed. We racked up huge amounts of debt. I remember plenty of Christmases feeling guilty for asking for the Pokemon game or something else. I remember helping my dad cook an econo meal and feeling happy that he was home with me but scared that he would never get a job. John Cheese writes an excellent article, each point I can relate to, like talking to a friend I knew in gradeschool. I was lucky even so.

Further on top of all this, I grew up in The Sticks. There were no economic opportunities for anyone under 25, except for McD’s and moving away to work on an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean.

                My town has a poverty rate 28.4%  The per capita income is 12,000 a year. We weren’t that bad off compared to a lot of the kids I grew up with. I still have friends who live with their grandmothers. Their parents left them a long time ago, and last I heard they were stealing prescription pain killers and wasting away.

                Most of these kids didn’t have internet. Still don’t. Barely an education. With laws like No Child Left Behind, my high school (the only high school) was graduating students who could barely read.

                Look, I’m lucky. I grew up with all this shit and even so I was able to get out. I was given a scholarship to a pre-college program, that helped me to then go on to a real college up in Boston. That’s exposed me to something new though. People who have had things I never did.

                I go to class with rich kids who think nothing of flying back home cross country for a three day break. I once spent a month sleeping in a closet with a Uhaul blanket so that I wouldn’t have to fly back home and cost my parents the extra $290 dollars which they couldn’t afford. This past summer I was homeless so that I could save up enough money to pay for a down payment on my apartment. These kids went to private schools and public schools so swank they made the  private schools look plebian. They had the best of the best education. They learned psychology and advanced calculus while my school was struggling to get kids to attend class and not beat the shit out of each other in the hallways(or the police officers. I will never understood why that one guy thought that was a good idea). Almost everything I learned in highschool, I taught myself using the internet. These kids grew up right next to the World’s Biggest Museum, and the Center of World Culture. I grew up in a small town 1.5 hours away from the nearest movie theatre, coffee shop, mall, or bookstore. The kids have rich parents, with rich friends, and open internships, and connections that snake through the best in the business. My dad worked in a hardware store, and my mom taught English. Neither of them have many friends except each other, which they are fine with.

                I AM SO PRIVILEGED. I’m not being sarcastic here. I am. I have two intelligent and caring parents. I had genes  that predisposed me to creativity and intelligence. I had parents who read to me at night, and were willing to listen to me when I was scared or feeling sad.

                Yeah, I was a fat asthmatic kid allergic to the air, with an undiagnosed brain disorder. I was different, and weird, with two weirdo anti-social parents. I had a lot of things other people didn’t have.

                This is the problem with our labels of Privilege. Privilege isn’t just race, or gender, or other social constructs. Privilege is having opportunities that other people don’t have. A lot of people I grew up with had a lot less than me. A lot of kids I go to school with have a lot less than me. They may be a lot richer but I know their families and the shit they’re dealing with there. Some of them have clinical depression, or drinking problems, insecurities that go a mile long.

                The people who are most well versed in these ideas, the people who went to high-end colleges, are often times people who themselves have forms of unrecognized Privilege. This post however isn’t about pointing the finger back at them.

                See that’s the problem is about pointing fingers. It’s human nature to be envious, to be jealous, and coveting what other people have. The thing about human nature, is we don’t define ourselves by what we are, but by what we aren’t. People don’t want a hero. They just want a villain to hate. At the end of the day, its them that gets the headlines. We want someone to hate. We want something which is Other than us, that we can fight against.

                It’s hardwired into our monkey brains, squirrelled away in the deep dark part at the base of your neck, the hindbrain, the primal self. That’s what speaking. The issues that Privilege bring up are legit, but far far too often this concept is used as a weapon. It’s a way of labeling people, of compartmentalizing them and making it easier to deal with them.

                So there’s a guy who’s being an asshole, and saying a lot of dumb things about race. This hurts deep, not necessarily because he’s speaking about you, though he may be, but because as a human being you perceive a threat. It’s a threat you feel powerless to change. You can argue with him but he’s probably not going to listen. This is cognitive dissonance. A gap between the way you perceive the world, and the way that others perceive it.

                So you slap a label on him. White. Racist. Misogynist, Feminist„ Misandrist  Asshole, Bitch, Piece’O Shit.

                That makes you feel safe right? If we can’t literally fight these people, rip out their throats in the middle of the street like our stone age brain wants us to, then at least we can label them, make them safe, don’t have to deal with them then. You don’t have to deal with that asshole on the internet because he’s just a privileged asshole right? Or she’s feminist cunt? Or they’re stupid niggers, or rednecks, or kooks, crazies, elitists, or just plain illogical idiots.

                We’re all privileged in some way. We all have some advantage that others don’t and the American Myth that everyone is on the same level playing field is a farce. Luck has so much to do with people’s success. Luck of birth, luck of genetics, luck of country, time, and place. We all share in a responsibility to do good, and yet our abilities in those areas differ not just in a quantitative ability but in a qualitative ability. Not merely in how much good we can do, but also in how we can go about doing it.

                It’s time we start all fessing up and recognizing our privileges. Then after that brief ceremony, let’s get on with life. Each of us have individual struggles, and drawing more lines in the sand, slapping on more labels, isn’t going to heal any wounds.  Note: After writing this nearly a year ago, I stumbled across a useful concept for dealing with this. Kyriarchy, a new term coined by feminist writer Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. You can read more about it [here]

[drunkenyear]

Originally switched over to a different writing blog but decided to switch back to this one. 

[drunkenyear]

The Hate High Score

You know  something weird about Pac-Man? Besides the fact that the entire thing is a psychotic abstract horror of gobbling yellow heads consuming and being consumed by ghosts. That’s beside the point. It was the 80s and pretty much all video games were attempted adaptions of Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.

                The game repeats after the first 8 levels because most people didn’t care/couldn’t afford to go any further than that.  

If you liked the game, you actually played the game, you might shoot for the High Score. There are people who’ve perfected it. They make me feel both utterly inferior and confused. You’re better than me… at Pac-Man.  I feel conflicted. On one hand,  you’ve truly mastered something. You’re one of the best in the world, in a league of maybe 10 hardcore obsessive and skilled people. On the other it’s Pac-Man and I don’t care.

Back to my point, if you get a high enough score, the High Score will just roll back over to zero. Due to some kind of memory error, like an alcoholic slamming his alarm clock before he rolls back over to the darkest corner of the room where the bright noon light won’t fry his eyeballs.

Then the game kills itself and crashes.

All this lead up is really just an analogy for how I hate people. I have the High Score for hating people. “People" say hate is a bad thing, and they’re right. But I hate “People" so fuck em.

My heart is this seething temper tantrum of inconsolable anger that at some point flipped over like the Pac-Man High Score. At some point this sour  bile of malevolence just turned into a sweet acid lemonade with ice cubes misting the edges of the glass.

What I mean is this. People Do Terrible Things. Like everyone. I’m sorry. You think you are a nice person but I’m sure in some way you’re pretty shitty. You don’t know but neither do I. That’s part of the problem.

Maybe you’re a racist who beats up your sister’s boyfriend because he’s black. On the other hand, maybe you aren’t a member of the KKK but you might also hate  poor white people (AKA white trash) because they’re poor, and not educated. (They’re own fault right?) Or maybe you just support the systemic injustices that oppress all sorts of other kinds of people. 

Maybe you’re one of those fat people from Wal-Mart who take all the power scooters. Maybe you’re a pseudo-intellectual jackass who when challenged to act out on your beliefs its revealed… you’re just a hypocrite who knows big words.  

Or maybe you’re just a pre-law major.

The point is everyone is terrible. You either explode and kill everything and everyone around you or somehow, miraculously, it evens out.

Get enough hate and maybe we can learn to forgive.

Stay with me here.

Sure go after the murderers, rapists, and snobs. Crush the corrupt politicians and child molesting priests (and the normal child molesters actually). I’ll be on the front line with you.

See the thing is everyone is human, and I hate you all. You may not be killing thousands of people or whatever but if you are that asshole who throws up at my party all over the floor, I’m probably going to hate you just as much. At some point, hatred hits a singularity and trying to measure it out gets trick.

At some point Humanity’s Sins becomes so huge, that trying to pile up blame becomes pointless. I know what you do, because I do it too. You see someone you hate. Someone particular to your brand of prejudice and you say “Well. At least I’m not that guy.”

Maybe he’s a Republican presidential nominee, or a third world dictator. The point is, you look at that guy to assuaged your own guilt, because that makes things easier. They’re bad guys and good guys, and we’re all good guys, and they’re all bad guys. Them, the other guys who we hate. They’re weird, and perverse and terrible. They outlaw gay marriage, and kill unborn babies, and all those other things you hate.

Even by your own standards you probably don’t measure up. Good enough is not good enough. It’s just your brain writing excuses, so you can cheat on your wife or buy 20 different pairs of shoes.

The people you hate, they’re people! Sick and twisted and stupid, just like you. They’re not your real enemy. We’re all just a bunch of scared little kids stuck on an island shooting arrows at each other. The last thing the world needs is your hate walled up with excuses and self-righteousness.

Remember Pac-Man? The whole analogy that started this stupid misguided rant? It’s like that. Let your hate High-Score roll over. Let it hit that electric 0 at the end of the bar. Let the machine fizz and hiss, and crash and burn in a fragged out self-destruction. Let it go up in smoke, and let it go. 

[drunkenyear]

Why Replicators May Never Be -or- Why post-scarcity already happened and you didn't know it.

I was reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" tonight, and there’s a bit in there about how the androids take books from libraries on earth and smuggle them to the space colonies on Mars in order to make a bunch of money. Philip K Dick could imagine space travel being fixed by technology, and this technology would solve issues of getting to Mars, but he didn’t expect the issue of getting books to Mars to be solved much simpler by things like the internet or e-books.  But the thing people often miss is that technological problems are often solved in much more elegant but unexpected ways. Philip K Dick of course wasn’t trying to predict the future. He was trying to tell a story about human nature and relationships. 

The replicator is probably not the way food problems will be solved. Or problems in general. 3D printing might becoming common place, and it certainly looks like it will these past couple of years, but it will not solve all problems of commerce. If you go back 60 years, you’ll hear the modernists exclaiming how mass production was going to do the exact same thing. George Jetson only worked 8 hours a week, because with daily luxuries so cheap, why would anyone work more? Then people figured out that mass manufactured objects sometimes suck and the standard for what is “good enough" changes as more resources become available. A simple toy is just not good enough for a kid who as seen a walking talking animatronic teddy bear. In many ways we already have a post scarcity society. This fellow made a toaster from scratch. and it cost him 60,000 and 6 months. That same toaster can be bought for about 10 quid at your nearest appliance shop. If that’s not practically post-scarcity, I don’t know what is.  Hybrid car owners use just as much gas as their carbon-fuel buffet attack squad brethren because they can afford it. Better gas mileage simply means they will travel farther for the same amount of gas.  If you go back 100 years, the richest of the rich didn’t have nearly the technology at their hands that even the poorest of the poor have today(applies to industrial countries only). If you go back even 15 years, the luxury car phones of Wall Street big wigs looks pitiful next to the cheapest smartphone. Post-scarcity doesn’t become a reality because human nature is built on consumption to it’s highest point. In a scarce world, you eat as much as you can because you don’t know when your next meal is. There are now more people dying from obesity than malnutrition globally. The issues of food scarcity aren’t technological, they’re political and social.  Money makes people happier, up to to a point. That point is around 70,000 dollars a year, or middle class. This obviously wasn’t the tipping point 50 years ago, so what changes? People’s perceptions. Barring real issues of safety and health (and those are legitimate issues for many people), a lot of discomfort with “poverty" is social perception. It feels bad to be making less money than someone else, especially if you think you’re smarter, or a better person. If you perceive someone as a peer and they do better than you, it makes you feel bad, and in democratic society, everyone is a peer, even if they aren’t really. As big a shitheads as many CEOs are, they’re in the 77-98 percentile of IQ scores. They’re rich for a reason. So the issue here isn’t really that there is a certain level of wealth that people need to achieve, but rather a perception of their own wealth and achievement. If you grew up on a farm, surrounded by farmers, you probably didn’t feel to bad about becoming a farmer. It’s partially through the bombardment of modern media and fantasy laden success stories that bend people away from that. This of course has both good and bad effects.  The point I’m trying to make here is that a technological gizmo isn’t what is going to give us a post-scarcity world or fix all our problems or ease our social ills. We’re already in a post-scarcity world in many ways but it isn’t going to change the age old desire to consume. 

[drunkenyear]

Here's my art year in review. A lot of work made, a lot of progress, and fun. It was a good year. 

[drunkenyear]

Suffocate:Swim

Also titled as: Biting off more than I can chew. Then chewing it.  I wanted to write another life update for a while but haven't been able to because I've been so busy. Usually I write out these things every 6 months but there's enough life to have filled up so many more of these than one. Since then a lot of life has happened.  I came home from my study abroad in the UK, which was a great and life changing experience, as every day is. It was precisely what I needed at that stage in my life. I like London. I'd like to go back someday, perhaps even live there. I describe it to people as "my perfect city" when telling them about my trip. Still a lot more cities that I want to see too. My professor mentioned that I should consider doing post-grad work there, which might be pretty cool. I've already decided against doing post-grad for now, because I want to get out, get a job, pay off my debt quickly and experience some real life outside of academia.  I've got an ambitious plan post-graduation. I want to pay off my student debt in 3 years. I think it's possible too. I currently live on around 15,000 a year give or take. Students are supposed to pay off their debt in 10 years, by paying 10% of their projected salary every year. But why do that, when I can just get it over with now? Getting a job with 30,000 a year post graduation is pretty reasonable (provide of course you get a job in this economy, but even so college grads only have a 6.3% unemployment rate (though many more are underemployed)). 3 Years, let's say 10,000 a year, easily pays off the debt. The reason for wanting to get out so quickly is simple. I'm pretty happy the way I am. I have more books, video games, and other media than I know what to do with. I don't buy expensive clothes. I don't mind living in a small house, or "sketchy" neighborhood (A. I grew up in a pretty ghetto podunk town and B. I'm an idiot who considers it local flavor). The sooner I get out of debt, the sooner I am free with no strings attached to wander where I want.  Additionally I'm aware of the trap that mo' money brings. Mo' problems. I have a friend whose parents make a combined amount over 200,000. That puts her in a pretty high percentage (not quite the hated 1% but close). Even so, her parents have money problems, because they spend what they make. As salaries go up, most people's expenses go up. Yet if I'm happy at 15,000 why spend more unless I have to? Sure some conveniences would be nice but while I'm in debt, I don't see the point in increasing that. Buying a house means getting a loan, means incurring more debt, means staying shackled longer. What happens if I lose my job, or the economy goes to further shit? If you have a home loan or a car loan, you're bound to the ground. If I decided to pick up my bags and move to another country, I couldn't because I've got obligations which have to be filled. I'm young, and so for now I'll remain free.  Plus, I'm thinking about saving up my excess money and perhaps investing it. If I get enough passive income this way, then I'll be freer to work on whatever projects I want. I still have a lot of research to do on that, but it's a different shift in thinking for me. The much maligned (and perhaps rightly so) book "Poor Dad Rich Dad" brought this shift to light for me. While a good bit of the book is kind of business-guru nonsense, I still found it useful. I was first referenced to it by the writer of Extreme Early Retirement, a blog by a guy who retired when he was 30. He does so by savvy investing, living only on 7,000 a year, and of course having a blog that attracts thousands of readers for ad money. Ever notice how self-help gurus have success primarily as people telling people how to succeed? Hahaha, despite this dig, the guy actually does have a lot of practical advice, and it helped create this shift in my thinking on finances.  Another book I read that helped a lot was Art and Fear. If you haven't read it, do. Just do, okay? There's no better single piece of advice I could give a fellow artist.  This summer was… interesting to say the least. I got back from the UK and I could only stick around for 6 days before having to fly back out to Boston to buy my first vehicle (a moped), work a job at my Uni's media lab, and take do a workshop that I got a school grant to take. Oh yeah and I was homeless.  I basically landed, the next day bought my moped, and then the next day had to figure out how to drive all the way into Boston from my suburban school to MassArt, battling my bad sense of direction and the terrible terrible Boston roads. In under a week I busted my front tire, probably on one of the many shoddy bumpy roads that twist and turn through Boston's schizophrenic motorways. All doing this while homeless, squatting in the Pottery Club studio on my campus, and making food in the Employee Lounge at my work.  There are many stories from this little escapades that I could tell, but I'll save that for another time, perhaps if you find me at a party and give me a drink, I'll tell you. Otherwise I'm going to spare you guys those except for this single one, dare I say, a miracle?  I hate calling anything a miracle because it's stupid, and lame, and usually an excuse for not understanding how Physics work. Also most of the time it's not a miracle. Your baby being born is not a miracle. I'm sorry, I know how you feel about your squirming sack of DNA(and I empathize because I actually like kids, but yah know), but it happens all the time, every day, and it doesn't break any natural laws of the universe.  But this was a pretty fortuitous happening in my life.   The first night I got back, I couldn't get into my planned place of residence, the Student Center because my card did not work on any of the doors. This was because I had been away for study abroad and after 6 months any card not used, deactivates. That's why I was sleeping in the Pottery Studio for the first couple of days. Anyway when I called security and asked them to reinstate my card, they did, but made one little mistake. They gave me a golden key. For some reason, I discovered only a few days after they did this, purely by chance in fact, that my card key now opened All Doors. Literally, they gave me 24/7 access to ALL the BUILDINGS ON CAMPUS. Barring any room with a real deal physical lock, I had access. Any card key capable door was ripe for the picking, including admin buildings, and considering my Uni has a very lax policy on security cams, I basically had free reign. You'd be surprised by how many clubs have expired food in their club fridges over the summer. (I drank a coke that expired in 2008. It tasted fine btw) Woah yeah? Anyway this lasted about a month and then I was caught. When I explained that I was only doing this because I was poor, did not have enough money for an apartment, and that my mom had been without a job for a while and would be without one what seemed to be probably the near future, they were very nice and gave me a dorm room for the final 2 weeks (which they were renting out for twice the monthly cost of any house surrounding the area. Many of the rooms were empty, proving that my university loves wasting money more than I thought) before the apartment I was moving into for the Fall and Spring semester opened up. (it's nice. It's cheap and so close to my studio that I can walk between building and not lose wifi connection for my internet radio.) So in the end it worked out fine, barring a little mental scarring from feeling like I was on the run for 4 weeks and all the stress that came with that. Let me tell you, I am much less apt to romanticize hoboes and gypsies now. But seriously, it was an interesting experience, one that gave me greater sympathy for the psychology of real homelessness (because lets face it, what I did was child's play compared to what a lot of other people go through everyday), gave me some interesting stories, and saved me some money.  The moped would later that summer bust a battery and short a spark plug, both of which I replaced all by myself, which I'm proud of. Also the workshop I did was an awesome figure sculpting class, very intense and I enjoyed it very much. I think I actually have a greater natural talent for sculpting than I do for painting. School started back up, and life returned to a new kind of normal. I live off campus and I know none of my roommates so I'm basically alone all the time. Even though I'm back in the States, I have a similar isolation that I did in London, much of my friendships being carried out in late night chat conversations. But this is also partially self imposed. I realized while in London that A) I like being alone more than I thought B)I had a lot of toxic relationships I needed to get rid of and C)I need to focus on my work. Social relationships in college won't last much past this year. Better to start uprooting things sooner rather than later.  I do still have a certain amount of social interaction but it's more purposeful and I like it that way. Part of that is that I'm trying out online dating. It's kind of nice, I get to get away from the social groups of my Uni and meet new people. I haven't gone on many dates so far but it's been a good learning experience. That's how I'm primarily looking at it, as a way of building up social skill and as a tool of self-reflection on who I want to get into a relationship with in the first place. If nothing else, I've been happy to find there are more people who share my particular set of idiosyncratic values and beliefs than I thought possible. Also the more I get rejected, the easier it is to brave the next possibility of it. Maybe I'll eventually work up the courage to ask a girl out in person for once. Maybe, but probably not for now. Too busy.  Studio work has been good. Before going to study abroad, I built a bunch of stretched canvases from scrap material lying around the fine art department and as a result I have more canvases to work on than I have time for. Seriously, I produced a lot of work this semester and I STILL have canvases to work on next semester. Once I get done with those I'll return to paper probably.  Also, while I do have liberal arts classes again this semester, I didn't have very many and so I could focus on my work. Next semester in fact I only have a PE class and an intro computer science class to distract me from my work in the studio. (and the PE class is actually welcome as I have let my body atrophy since London in such a way that I am actually embarrassed a little).  In addition to this, I also directed 2 music videos this semester, and I'll be directing a short film in spring. Despite the fact that I came to the realization in London that I don't actually want to work in film, I want to work in video games, I'm doing these projects because I promised myself I would 2 years ago and so I have to do it. Also I'm hoping that my experience as a director will translate well in my interest into working as a Creative Director etc for whatever job I happen to get in the future.  Oh yeah, over the summer I got to have lunch with a cousin I don't know very well who was in Boston to attend a graphic design convention. He actually works as a Creative Director and also had a spare pass to the convention so we met up for lunch and went to the convention where I picked his brain on the his career and life. That was really interesting, it was really amazing seeing things from a new perspective, seeing the hugeness of the possibilities in the industry and how feasible a job like being a Creative Director really is.  I also made a portfolio website and designed some business cards. When I was in London I became involved with MolyJam and through that I starting going to the London Indies meet ups, where independent and hobbyist game developers, artists, and hackers get together once a month in a London pub to drink and discuss their projects. When I came back to Boston I wanted to start going to the Boston Indies, and have  a card and website ready even though I wasn't really planning on staying in Boston post-graduation and I also currently wasn't in the position to accept new jobs or projects. Boston Indies has a very different vibe but it's also been good, and I look at it as practice for real networking when I graduate. Sort of in the same way that I am looking at OKC as a test run to build up familiarity and skills. I've gone to several of their events and stuff and I've been familiarizing myself with the nature of the scene.  One thing that has been really informative for this process has been watching the documentary for the Double Fine Adventure game unfold. If you don't know, the studio Double Fine, led by Tim Schaffer, adventure game veteran and creator of such games as Psychonauts and Grim Fandango, put out a record breaking Kickstarter that raised over 3 million dollars to make an old school graphic point-and-click adventure game. In addition to making a game, each month they put out a short documentary about the development process. It has been an awesome piece of inspiration for me. It helped me really concretize the fact that what I really want to do in the games industry is work as a Creative Director, to do something like Tim, to be the idea guy, designer, writer, and overall head. Of course a veteran of the industry could probably say I'm getting too big for my britches, and I'm fully aware that no one starts as a Creative Director and that you have to work your way up to that position, but it's an end goal for me to work towards and that's good. I remember, when I first thought about going into film, watching the behind the scenes footage for Lord of the Rings that I always felt conflicted about what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a conceptual artist! I wanted to make cool ideas and paint epic pictures, but at the same time I kind of wanted to be like Peter Jackson, who had the vision and the meta-idea that tied it all together. I'm a very DIY person by nature, and the idea of asking other people to make pictures for me seemed lame. I wanted to be able to produce my own work. Perhaps it has been my introduction to contemporary Conceptual Art, my own coming to grips that I will probably never be quite the virtuoso in all things I care about, or realizing that my strengths really lie in my ability to synthesize and aggregate information. Of course I'm not giving up executing art, just like Jackson still grabs the camera occasionally, but I've come to a more concrete understanding of what I want to do, and even some real life examples to model my goal off of.  My experience as Director this past semester has been useful for understanding this. Maybe it's delusions of grandeur but I feel like the role fits well. I think I have a pretty good ability to spot the character and size up people accurately. I'm a synergistic thinker in general. I feel that I'm also pretty good at seeing how about of different disparate parts can come together to make a whole. I've avoided ever being in a position of authority until now because I don't want to be an egomaniac making power grabs, and yet most of the times when I'm in a group work, I always end up feeling "Aaaagh! Will you guys just listen to me and do what I say! This current path is dumb!" This thought process probably just shows that I'm a well contained egomaniac. Even so, as I have come into a position of being in charge, it just feels right and I feel very comfortable making choices for the direction of the project.  Directing itself has been a really weird learning experience. Up till now, my entire time in school I've been kept to a standard of my own behavior. If I messed up on a test, then I got a bad grade. Even in group assignments everyone was a peer and got their own individual grade. No one was in charge. Everyone ultimately answered to the Teacher. Now as Director, I'm in charge. I'm not just responsible for my own actions. If one of my grips screws something up, I've got to take care of it. If my camera assistant is late all the time, I actually have to discipline him (but since my project is volunteer based that really just consists of talking them down and telling they can't work with us anymore). If someone messes up then I have to answer for their mistakes. I have this new power and new burden. It's just kind of weird. I'm the sort of person who avoids being in charge because I don't like the idea of imposing my will on another person, forcing them to do something. And yet I'm finding that…people often want good guidance on what to do. At least new people who want to learn from you and stuff. Like I said, I tend to be a very DIY person and so I usually just teach myself stuff but I'm also finding that a lot of people want someone to help teach them stuff too, which I'm pretty good at. Anyway with great power comes great responsibility and I'm trying to learn how to properly use it.  Speaking of which, this is the other thing I've really been trying to focus on this year: Finishing. Really committing and following through. See I'm an aspirational Da Vinci, a hopeful polymath, and I want to do pretty much… everything? If you've followed my previous process of in years past, you'll see I've skipped around a bit, each venture linked in a larger thematic web and yet still a bit scattered. Figuring out what I wanted to do post grad, and seeing the chance to focus on video games as an avenue has been helpful. Video games first of all allows for me to focus will still not completely cutting off all other interests. It is truly the most multi-media and diverse medium out there so that's nice. Now I got that, I gotta focus. I've got to follow the bit all the way to the end. I can't let up on the last 10% because it olds. It's not that I've quit things in the past because I got bored, but there's the continued sustained pursuit of the work. Not just completing a polished painting, but completing a series of paintings that interrelate. Not just write one essay that is good, rather sustaining that through a series of essays. That is the difference between a blog post and a book after all. I am thankful because I got a professor this year who really dogs on me about this, and I need that. Committing to a longer project like the film stuff has helped, because it's not enough to have a clever idea, you've also got to deal with all the common place and boring stuff and really execute it to the end.  That's another thing I'm working on is toning down the amount of self-analysis and abstract thinking that bounces around in my head. Or rather, I'm not reducing that kind of thinking, I'm turning up the heat on my concrete execution. Ideas are fun but they have to be done. Don't sit around and talk about a cool idea, make it. Make it, fail, make it again. Instead of thinking about a painting, saying "that's a dumb idea. What should I do?" I'll just make the dumb idea, get it out of my system and then move on to a good idea that I could only discover by making the bad idea. There are no shortcuts, and a perfect draft can't be written in your head.  I'm feeling that I'm up to a tight wall. I'm making this short film, and it's huge and complex with a lot of people who are helping out with it and giving funding to it and if it doesn't work then I'll look like a huge idiot. Good, that's how I work best. I've got to push myself in so deep that I'll suffocate or swim because otherwise my natural tendency will be to just fritter around on too many projects.  Immediately following filming of the short film will be an art installation that I'm applying for a grant right now. The idea is to bring together my fine art and video game interest. It's kind of like a video game in real life? Or maybe you could just say it's an interactive art gallery? Or another way of saying it is that it's a piece of alternative theater? This is also a huge multiperson project that I've got to execute on. It's weird, and not the kind of thing that's been done very much, so selling the idea is going to be tough, and I've had some dust ups and doubts with the Dean in charge of approving it. I think I can do it… I hope? There have been a lot of times I've felt that maybe I'm biting off more than I can chew, and even a little panic attack begins rising in my chest. I think I've got this though. I think we can do this.  And then…. Post production on the film, and then I graduate and go on to… whatever. My plan right now is to apply to as many creative industry jobs as possible and take whatever I can get. Also I applied for a Fullbright teaching job in Indonesia (which I doubt I'll get) and I'm right now applying for an art fellowship in the Philippines (which I severely hope I get). The eventual plan is to work my way up to Creative Director or whatever, and get to a point where I can start managing my own projects. The good thing about a lot of these entry level jobs, is they have high turnover so I'll be able to bounce around America for a couple of more years. Then maybe grab a post grad program if I need or spend some time back in London. I'll continue working on my fine art/illustration stuff, on my writing (I really think I need to wait for more life experience before I write a novel) etc, but career will be focused on the directing aspect more. We'll see how that all goes. In the end the real goal is to just continue working and supporting myself somehow in the creative field and not end up dead or dying.