more about indiscreet of mana. Or I suppose anything about it because it appears that the image links were broken the whole time!
I do not like “fan-art” as a genre. I do not like what it has done to people, and to the economy of artistic recognition. People find out they get disproportionately more encouragement just copying stuff that is already popular than thinking for themselves, and then forget how to think, or never learn to do it at all.
This was even before tumblr and my first attempts at conventions; at the few art events I attended, there would always be some dork who only drew disney characters and I didn’t understand why that was fair, nor how that was particularly interesting to the “artists.”
I made a considerable list of copyrighted characters that I COULD draw if I ever felt the need to copy someone else which would be more interesting to me, since nobody else ever draws them. It would not make me a more creative person, but it would provide some dissent in the fanart miasma. Much of my life has concerned itself with dissenting in areas where I cannot possibly make a real difference. It is silly, but it is an important silliness to me.
I even “know” the main artist/designer of Gobliins and Woodruff + the Schnibble, Pierre Gilhodes, perhaps my most significant living artistic influence, in facebook, but I don’t speak French and have never attempted to communicate with the person, and drawing his old dumb characters would be the perfect way to get his attention if I am going to be drawing other people’s old dumb characters anyway. So how did I come to make a scene from a property I have seen countless derivations of?
I had started this on April 6 2017, apparently the same day my father was hospitalized, when I was also, already, sicker than I recall ever having been, which I suppose could account for my unusual change in subject matter, and I put it away when, in a clearer state of mind, I wasn’t really sure why I was drawing it. But more recently I was looking for some drawing I could finish to place on the internet in a desperate grasp at attention, while my ongoing project on-goes without my having anything coherent to show for it. I saw this and forgot why I had STOPPED drawing it, suddenly taken by the idea of getting easy approval via one of the rare things I like that is still popular. Forgetting that the people who make it still popular are not actually as numerous or influential as they seem, and that I still need to get over the barrier of my having drawn it.
Yet inexplicably the final appears sparse and incomplete to me, and only now do I see the intense perspective flaws. This is why most of my drawings have flat perspectives and flagrantly unrealistic backgrounds. It is harder to see when those have gone horribly wrong and easier to fix when I do notice! I spent a number of hours trying to fix this after the stuff that was important was already set in place and somewhat unremarkable.
Additionally, I didn’t realize that the chubbier child, Elliott with two Ts, was supposed to have an overbite until I had already committed to most of that, and it never looked quite right again after the point where I “fixed” that.
As I sought the non-existent source artwork, I inadvertently learned of a 3d Secret of Mana “remake” and I have to say that is completely and wholly unnecessary, especially after Sword of Mana, the remake of SOM’s predecessor Final Fantasy Adventure, and perhaps my single most complained-about video game, though not necessarily in public. I wish the Square people would remake something that didn’t quite work, like Sword of Mana Secret of Evermore, or localize something that was never released in the US at all, like Romancing Saga or even Seiken Densetsu 3. Or better yet remake every mana game AFTER secret of mana, because as best as I can tell, none of them worked. Or betterer yet stop messing with old games and make a new game that uses a similar interface and graphical style, and acknowledge it is a ripoff but that the 1990s aesthetics have validity, and that without the data storage and processing limits of the 16-bit systems you can do better things with the style than were previously possible.
I kept this part out of the first post because once I mentioned sword of mana I realized I had eh over 1100 screenshots with mostly annoyed comments on them, and wondered what and how much I should say about it here now to sum up my gripes, but didn’t have the desire to deal with that at the last update.
But I don’t want to deal with it now, either, since Sword of Mana fills me with a passionate, disdaining ennui.
and fixating on specifics endlessly means I miss the point and spend ages getting nothing of importance done!
I checked and could not find any drawings, official or otherwise, of the two kids who let the Secret of Mana hero just fall down the waterfall, then run off and tell nobody, and are ANGRY when he survives. With friends like that, I am not surprised he starts slaughtering little yellow legless rabbit-things the first chance he gets.
I made this a bigger job than it needed to be, for something so stupid, and I screwed up much of it, but it is good practice, I have to hope. I am not terribly fond of it but I don’t have the energy to create and post something better, and the last brief entry I posted due to a lack of energy apparently didn’t work at all so this is here to distract from that. I meant to get into detail about what I screwed up in this picture, why I drew it to begin with and also show the basest sketch of it but somehow the topic turned into other Mana series games, namely Sword of Mana, which always leads to angry run-on sentences and precisely the sort of thing I am incapable of writing at the moment in a way that is the slightest bit amusing, so I will cross that bridge when I come to it and hopefully not be disappointed by the adventure that ensues once I fall off of it.
Why does the father of sword and sorcery look like the father of tommy guns and bootlegging?
The answer being the hat.
oh beets, there is that gosh darn honey mace again.
Going back a bit more beyond last week’s very important matter, there was a point in history during which the Honey Nut Cheerio Bee threatened to dump a jar actually labeled “honey” on to the cereal. Which also never happened even one time but I assure you it is closer to the truth than the dumb magic wand. I presume the wand was substituted because contemporary people believe they are more “sophisticated” than the people who came before them. Honey out of a jar? Like no way broseph, that’s PROCESSED FAKE GMO CORPORATE NON-ORGANIC honey! I only eat fake processed gmo corporate non-organic honey on my cereal when the corporation shows me a picture of that honey coming out of some stupid slimy striped thing on a stick.
Personally, I am more concerned about where those nuts are coming from. And where they are going, I suppose, since it isn’t into the bowl.
Grape gimpity the bee looks like it is in a cult. The wand touched the bee’s tiny insect hivemind and shorted it out.
Now that it has cracked, psychologically, it has fled society, leaving the cursed staff behind to corrupt a new generation. I would be concerned for the bee’s safety if I did not typically want it to die.
alright, it has returned and now it thinks it is batman. good work. And the stupid wand is back in business!
Looking closer it becomes apparent that Bee does not wear the full costume, so it must have some inkling that it is not batman. Although if its queen has been murdered that would explain its sudden lack of purpose and need of a new identity. A queenless hive will only produce male bees, who do not do any work, and this signifies the upcoming collapse and death of the colony. For a long time the honey nut cheerio bee believed its spokesperson job constituted work, which made it confused as to whether it was male or female. The Bat-Man persona may be an indication not of insanity, as I initially suspected, but of acceptance of its nature and purpose at last. Nonetheless that wand is stupid and has NO purpose.
Although, although: what IS a male bee’s “purpose?” None but to mate and die immediately afterward, with its endophallus action being so powerful as to paralyze the male bee and throw it backward, with no guarantee the queen was even able to receive the ejected fluid. Perhaps the wand has nothing to do with honey, but is a means to artificially inseminate queen bees with no harm brought to the initiator. Though the bee may be overconfident, choosing specifically NOT the clothe the one pertinent region of its body. Almost as if daring people to attack and attempt to make the bee mate with them. And beyond man, to bat-man specifically, it may be the case that Bee, knowing male bees lack stinging apparatuses, has equipped itself with compensatory measures, but preferring not to kill foes outright, and scare them into not attacking at all if possible. Though it may have gone too far in imitating Bat-Man since the cape is certain to, if not get tangled in the wings, certainly prevent them from working.
What is important is the bee is dangerous.
This picture is not technically relevant but I placed it in my folder for non sequitur website images in September 2006 and I do not think it is ever going to be totally relevant to anything.
On a side note, apart from my very important and focused discussion with myself, General Mills hired TWO artists of whom I am meant to have heard, judging by there being a pair of signatures beside it, to draw the bee for this box, and yet they, two people, with a corporate review board scrutinizing the job it at ever step, positioned the glove reaching out to strangle me so that one of the bee’s eyes is partially obscured, making the facial expression look screwy, even beyond the insane open-mouthed faces of agony I have already come to associate with modern incarnations of old cereal mascots. This is NOT an aesthetically functional art job. Apart from that, the detail level is about the same as the usual non-signatured bee so I am not totally sure why they bothered, apart from to make me feel compelled to write about it almost a year later, to keep me from writing about something much more significant and uplifting,
like winning the heart of the one you love through your barnyard vocalizations.
This picture is a LIE. that is NOT who makes these, and the honey nut cheerios wand is NOT employed in the process.
The assembly line of workers who make the Lindor lumps probably look more like this, if we assume it is not entirely machine automated.
But since you brought it up, this this this THING, this striped lump on a stick, is ALSO a lie. Who, that buys honey cereal, even knows what that honey rod is SUPPOSED to do? It may “bee” beyond our ability to understand.
Honey Nut Chex is slightly more honest about it. The magic wand exists but it is just lying on the table unused, making a mess. It looks as if it has been murdered.
I have additionally observed that generic store brand honey cereals are only allowed to use the magic honey wand if the multinational brand doesn’t want it. Assuming my web host’s recent unannounced, extortionesque demand that I pay an extra $40 annually to obtain a “security certificate” for a totally invented, unsupplied non-reason and firefox’s subsequent sabotaging of my site’s functions has not damaged my ability to display the images, seen here are Food Lion Honey & Nut Tasteeos and Stop & Shop Honey Crunchin’ Oats. They can’t call it BUNCHES, but they MUST say something that rhymes with bunches, or else people will notice the ugly generic store brand label.
Also I acknowledge that the latter picture is from 2008 and that Stop & Shop has a much better store brand logo now, as can be seen on this page about Shop Rite, which, admittedly, makes every aspect of Stop & Shop appear superior. Firefox thinks it needs to prevent me from logging in and viewers from commenting to keep this website from being relevant, but that was never a risk.
That of course assumes “relevant” is a word that has an identifiable meaning. The one expert on what is relevant to me does not disclose the criteria nor the option to even know what has NOT been deemed relevant so that I may gain insight into the system or check its accuracy, only that this is so very important that material may be visibly not in ANY order. And then they are put into a different order after they have been seen, so that a specific one will be hard to see on purpose a second time. The people in charge maintain order by PREVENTING order. The fact that I know my next post is also going to be about honey nut cheerios suddenly seems uncommonly disciplined and of great magnitude. Yes I suddenly feel very important and well prepared to face the year ahead.
That will be all. Good day.