Sirius no Densetsu / Legend of Sirius
1981

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
occasionally subtle
No title available

Kiana Khansmith
NASA
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Not today Justin
i don't do bad sauce passes
almost home
Cosmic Funnies
Xuebing Du
Misplaced Lens Cap

izzy's playlists!
noise dept.
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

blake kathryn

Product Placement
Show & Tell
No title available
Three Goblin Art

seen from Netherlands

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seen from Malaysia
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@nairobidhobi
Sirius no Densetsu / Legend of Sirius
1981
Last Jedi, First Try
Some spoilers follow
There were so many ways to phone in The Last Jedi, after Episode VII changed so little it might have been a remake.
Han was Han, just grayer. Leia was Leia, just older and divorced. The Empire was the Empire, just with a new name and a bigger Death Star. A trench was there and got run.
Episode VIII does some things we expect, but doesn’t just pay lip service to formula. It brings us a strategist Leia, a waif of a sacrificial war hero, a powerful Jedi coming into her own who is not just the next young link in Star Wars’ Merovingian dynasty.
And it brings a changed Luke, more Miyamoto Musashi than Ben Kenobi redux. Old, bitter, wise, powerful, funny, giving zero fucks about the being The Chosen One, just wanting the world would get on with it, not only not trying to fix the world but hoping that the world would stop expecting Luke to fix it. He’s a different person than the one we knew, but we can recognize him.
It changed things. Just a bit. Just enough to make them feel fresh. Just enough to give me some hope for the series.
Congratulations, Mr Johnson. After Blade Runner 2049, you are the only filmmaker who has yet to disappoint me.
I disliked both The Last Jedi and Bladerunner 2049 the first time I saw them and then did a 180 after the second viewing. I think this was partly due to the fact that Bladerunner and Star Wars were both such huge parts of my adolescence and childhood, respectively. I’d like to talk more about this, but Tumblr is on the fritz tonight.
Talk more!
I’ve yet to say all I want to about this movie.
Having a conversation would be better than standing at a cliff, talking to the sea, hoping it echoes back.
There’s something difficult about seeing a childhood hero as helpless and bitter.
During the first viewing, I thought, “Oh, they’re deconstructing the hero’s journey motif, which has socio-political implications since the hero’s journey is an ultra-individualistic narrative. That’s great, but they’ve gone way too far in taking down this character.”
I felt that it was completely out of character for Luke, the guy who wouldn’t kill the second worst murderer in the galaxy because he saw good in him, to try and kill his own nephew. The whole “ Abraham and Isaac” reference was interesting but again, I felt like it was a betrayal of a beloved character to shoehorn in a lecture about the downsides of hero worship.
And yet… During the second viewing, I realized two things: Luke’s actions were every bit as heroic as in any of the other films. If anything, to see everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve sacrificed for destroyed, and then to go out and still fight because it is the right thing to do, is amazing. Secondly, it is not strange for Luke, seeing the potential for the complete negation of everything everyone has fought for, to be willing in a moment of weakness to trade one life for billions.
“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”
Miles Davis’ line is too charitable a view on J.J. Abrams. His movie was little more than the regurgitated result of a Markov chain fed on Star Wars movies and script structure. But Rian Johnson’s follow-up managed to force-pull decent themes out of Abrams’ vague hints.
Looking back, one of the things that angered me the most about The Force Awakens was Han.
I was well under 10 years old when I first encountered Star Wars. Han’s rebelliousness had a visceral appeal. He did what he wanted, cared only for his friends and his own well-being.
Luke was searching for structure - of course he’d find the way of an ascetic warrior-monk appealing. He was the one with the raw innate power, and the journey, and the Messiah thing. He was The Hero.
But Han was free.
I’ve changed in those 30-something years. Several times over. I’d never articulated this before The Force Awakens, couldn’t have told you if you asked me, but I wanted something new. I didn’t want someone to microwave my childhood expectations and hearing the metal tray clank as they throw it in front of me.
I wanted to see what these people had been up to. If I’ve changed this much even in 10 years and just a few countries, what could have happened to Han and Leia and Luke when the universe is their oyster?
Nothing. No changes but getting older and having shitty kids. Not even the dress code. Han wasn’t even free anymore - he was shackled to his old self by a writer who couldn’t conceive of change, who thought Han still pining for the muscle car of his youth would pass for nostalgic.
God forbid Abrams scared the money by trying something new. Being a magpie has paid off so far, why start creating for himself?
The Last Jedi delivered.
I didn’t want Luke to be old and bitter, but after The Force Awakens, I’d be too. There was no other way to follow up the disjointed notes Abrams had played.
Of course Luke had cut himself from the force. It was the only explanation for why he wouldn’t sense, from across the galaxy, that his friends were in trouble.
Of course Luke wasn’t going to be the father figure who’d fit in the too-neat hole the last movie had left. That’d have been sleep-walkingly easy.
Of course Luke could have stopped Darth Tantrum at any point. The only person capable of preventing that was Luke himself.
Of course Luke didn’t want to get involved. He tried, once, and made things worse.
Of course it was going to end this way, red on white, death everywhere, with two suns in the sunset. Someone capable of showing up mid-session and making music out of Abrams’ tone-deaf scale practice would play the instruments for all they’re worth, then bash them on the stage until they are little but splinters, before the robotical starting act comes back for the close.
Here, have a cymbal. Markov-chain that.
Writing, Neil Gaiman, and Kon Satoshi
I almost gave up writing altogether after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
I didn’t read it as it was coming out in comics, but later, when it was published in collected volumes.
It was too perfect. Too complete. It seemed like it had sprung fully-formed from Gaiman’s head, and he had to spend years waiting for artists to catch up.
It was overwhelming. Unattainable.
I wasn’t reading the book’s post-scripts, though, because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers. I wanted to experience the material, not the author dissecting it.
I did read them on a second pass. There’s a story on Dream Country, the third volume, about a writer keeping a muse captive so she can give him ideas. It’s a piece with characters that tie into Morpheus’ past and who will come up again, woven into the larger narrative. The book also contains a post-script on how the story came about, where Gaiman states it was at first about a succubus, before moving on to talk about his process for working with the artist.
My eyes kept moving forward, brain storing words from the original script, but my consciousness had taken a step back.
Wait, back up, what was that character again? Who? Calliope. Originally a succubus, replies brain, let me keep going here.
Yes, stupid me. I had assumed Sandman had been gestating inside Gaiman from the start, waiting for an opportunity for the entire story to burst out. He didn’t transcribe a long epic he had already come up with. He wasn’t born with the tale. He worked at it for years, sometimes throwing away material and replacing it with things that fit better. Like a normal human being.
I keep making the same mistake. I wrote about a similar mental bug when talking about Kon Satoshi and Dream Fossil.
We only see the finished product. We don’t see the author sitting down at the typewriting and bleeding.
It’s all work. Some people have more potential and have it easier, others have to work harder at it, but in the end it’s only work. If you want a chance to get better at it, you should treat it as such.
I can’t see Sandman, really. All I can see is the patches and the solutions and the hacks, the places where the art wasn’t what I hoped for or expected, or where the writing fell short of the thing in my head. It’s long enough ago that I still wonder why I was so insistent that DC simply dump “Three Septembers and a January” because it was bad enough that simply publishing it would ruin Sandman. (Sensibly, Tom Peyer, who was editing while Karen Berger was off having a sudden baby, ignored me, or made pacifying noises that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I believed. These days it’s one of my favourite episodes.)
But yes. It’s all work, and it’s all about the work. I used to write four pages of SANDMAN a day on a good day, which was about eight pages of script, although I’d usually write the last six pages in one swoop being grumpy that I didn’t have enough pages and throwing things away so we’d end on page 24. (Although once, in Game of You, I simply miscounted and wrote a 25 page comic accidentally, so we only did 23 pages the next month to make up for it.) By the end of Sandman I was writing two pages a day on a good day…
Forgotten masterpiece: “Taps” by Alex Toth from BOP #1 (“America’s first and only music comix magazine”), published by Kitchen Sink Press, 1982.
Alex Toth’s rarely seen “Rolling Stone” story.
Any advice on how to maintain discipline and focus on writing? I know my passion is there, but it is hard sticking to a schedule.
Just decide that you are the kind of person that gets a certain amount of pages written a day. and be that person.
remind yourself that there are many writers sitting at their computers right now and they are going to end up living your dream life because they sat down to write and you didn’t.
remind yourself that you may get hit by a bus tomorrow and wouldn’t it have been nice to write something on your last day.
remind yourself how lucky you are that you have the capacity for creativity and freedom to express yourself and what a waste it would be not to.
Preview of “The Dam Keeper” comic-book. By Robert Kondo & Dice Tsutsumi (September 26th - First Second Books)
Lost in Space, Jack Coggins
THOTH, infinite knowledge egyptian god.
Jimi Hendrix por Moebius
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Hiroshi Yoshida (吉田博) (1876–1950, Japan)
Marine scenes
Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th century Japanese painter and print-maker. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style of ukiyo-e woodblock printing, and is noted especially for his excellent landscape prints. Yoshida travelled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style, including the Taj Mahal, the Swiss Alps, the Grand Canyon, and other National Parks in the United States.
David Roberts (1796–1864, Scotland)
Picturesque Sketches in Spain Taken During ye Years 1832 & 1833
David Roberts was a Scottish landscape painter, known for a prolific series of detailed lithograph prints of Egypt and the Near East that he produced from sketches he made during long tours of the region (1838–1840). These and his large oil paintings of similar subjects made him a prominent Orientalist painter. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 1841.
2010s cartoon morals: Consent is vital to a healthy relationship, gender roles can be restrictive, sometimes good people make mistakes due to their troubled environment, there may be struggles in life, but it is only through these struggles that we can grow and become stronger as people
1990s cartoon morals: Morality and genuine emotion are for chumps, mask your growing insecurity and fear behind a thin layer of snark, pop culture references, and empty anti-establishment humor that serves those in power more than those without
1980s cartoon morals: Friendship is good or some shit, buy new Triple Action Transforming Friendship with Bushido Bomb Accessories at your nearest Toys 'R Us
Don’t give up. Literally anyone can give up. Be the other person. But at the same time, step back and honestly assess who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish and make sure you’re doing that. And if not, change course, but don’t stop.
Brian Michael Bendis (via comicquotations)
To work as hard as possible, and then, when you think you’re done, to work just a little bit harder. To know that if it feels “right” it may actually be completely wrong, and that if it feels “wrong” it may be completely right. There’s no governing principle to any of this except that strange instinct and feeling within yourself that you simply have to learn to trust, but which is always unreliably changing. To create something for people who have not been born yet. To pay attention to how it actually feels to be alive, to the lies you tell yourself and others. Not to overreach—but also not to get too comfortable with your own work. To avoid giving in to either self-doubt or self-confidence, depending on your leaning, and especially to resist giving over your opinion of yourself to others—which means not to seek fame or recognition, which can restrain rather than open your possibility for artistic development. With all this in mind, not to expect anything and to be grateful for any true, non-exploitative opportunity that presents itself, however modest. And to understand that being able to say “I don’t know what to do with my life” is an incredible privilege that 99% of the rest of the world will never enjoy.
Chris Ware for Rookie Magazine, “Work Hard & Be Kind: An Interview with Chris Ware” (via universityandme)