The job is yet incomplete but I believe I will be concluding book 3 at page 2-35. On the website I have that section as ending with 2-39, but then that only leaves 22 pages for the next book. This change leaves it with 26 which still seems low but there is at least one, possibly two new pages that I will insert to show the gwakpazirs/”urkel spheres” again and also the kaklabesk creature which I made such a problem for myself over trying to explain on the most recent new pages despite it only having appeared on one page prior then. But if it is on TWO earlier pages, THEN my time was well spent! Some of the gnome pages are too bunched up, also, so I can definitely push that up to 30 pages. With the remaining pages I can make some origami pterodactyls.
2-55 is particularly messy, even if as a work of spatially-efficient visual art I was particularly pleased with that when I first constructed it. That was the first page were there were conspicuously non-rectangular panels. But I suppose rectangles are preferable to wrecked angles. The dope getting beaten up is worth presenting in a coherent manner.
I included that picture just in case once i DO sort that out I forget to return to this and correct the link. Right now my right arm hurts because I tried way too hard to scrub a toilet today and I want to minimize excess fiddling on this website entry but I must think about my legacy. Fortunately I do not use a leg to scrub toilets.
Additionally I notice a shift in the artwork at 2-30ish, especially once namitz and elpse leave the hospitarium, to a lot more cross-hatching, although somewhat more orderly than earlier stabs at it, though with duller coloring. I was surprised that the last few I have been working over required surprisingly little art editing, compared to the previous two books anyway, beyond the difficulties I already alluded to. The editing at THIS point is tedious but not difficult. I seemed to reach a level of stability roundabout 2-21 in which I had just enough real ink and inexplicably coherent backgrounds despite a large amount of straight lines and inorganic details that don’t change between panels, and then I lost it again once nemitz started wandering around screwing things up. And so to edit further pages will require a different “rhythm” than i had developed. Nemitz thought it could stop me, but stopping me there allows me to continue elsewhere! I would thank nemitz but I would never thank nemitz.
These are all magazines I saw at the same store, Big Y in north branford connecticut, on the same day, august 14 2019. except for one that I had a pre-existing but unposted complaint about that this reminded me of.
Robin Williams five years later: still dead, still having his death exploited by people with no lives. Pardon me, too soon? I admit I only saw this magazine a week ago.
Is ten years too soon to say that Patrick Swayze had as much impact on my life as I did on his?
Hey how about 1999? Remember when one person got dead that year? Someone who was only famous because his father was also dead?
or how about the time that- what? I didn’t even know Farrah Fawcett was dead. I suppose this does serve a purpose. However you aren’t doing a very good job remembering “the Beloved Charlie’s Angels Star” if you forget that she quit that show after one season and spent the rest of her life trying to not be remembered as its star. Also: this and the one before it have both been placed beside the same issue of
National Examiner, ALSO obsessed with a death that happened ages ago but I forgive them for that because The Tabloids never stopped touching themselves while thinking about Diana’s death for a minute. That’s the closest they come to journalistic integrity. Call it monogamy if you want.
and just over to the right: Hey Daniel Ratcliff isn’t doing any more Harry Potter movies. Seems like a good time to put him on the cover in that costume and run a story on this like it’s new.
hey remember when you could only watch tv shows when tv channels said you could? Wasn’t that great? Do you remember when you couldn’t even find out what programs were going to be broadcast and when unless you bought a separate little book just for that? No probably not since studies have shown I am the oldest person on the internet.
if you are like me (as I already established you aren’t) you barely remember the early 1990s and never sought out any of these idiots on purpose but saw them on your television incessantly anyway so that perhaps you believed they appeared on the same program called 9021OJ in which every one of those bleached smiling scumbags in that pile get murdered. These magazines are here and separate to set you straight and possibly no other reason.
I actually did like the Naked Gun Movies in which Mr. J appeared, and since I do remember that, no magazines are necessary.
speaking of no reason, why celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of these movies when it is also the thirtieth anniversary of movies from 1989 and more importantly the twenty-fifth anniversary of movies from 1994 and yet more importantly totally pointless? Unless the critics are actually being CRITICAL of movies that made loads of money and have inarguable legacies there is nothing new to say here and they could just reprint what they probably ran ten years ago. maybe they did. George Orwell’s concept of 1984 society using thought control to keep people in their places greatly over-estimated how much effort that would require.
i tried to watch indiana jones and the temple of doom, just incidentally, a few weeks ago. It is a really stupid movie! Loaded with stereotypes, improbable mercy from adversaries shown none and Harrison Ford making even less effort to be likeable than Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, without two partners of equal rank to balance that out. But i appreciate that it gets fight to the point and doesn’t waste time trying to pretend it is a smart movie. I sure wouldn’t want to read a magazine article about it NOW.
hey how about some dead bands? Look it is even in their name! And by gamera they are GRATEFUL to be mentioned at all. You know the only thing I like better than hearing music from the same singers and same instruments for hours simply because somebody else told me the band is great-filled is READING about it.
how about some dead decades? the 1960s: the only time anything ever happened. That was a decade that changed a nation. How many of them can claim that? That is why so many countries seem like they are stuck in other centuries; only one of them can change every ten years, and luckily this one got its one chance five of that ago.
magazines tend to agree on this. they will place 90% of the greatest songs OF ALL TIME, that being all sound created by all beings in the history of the universe, all of which having been heard and equally evaluated, into this decade* via
The Man’s 500 most acceptable mainstream vocal English-language songs of the middle scrap of one century issue. What a shock that the one their magazine is named after tops the list and a band with the same name dominates it otherwise. They would have me believe “the times” are “a-changin'” when their musical taste was chiseled into granite around the same time my mother was born (presumably a coincidence). Luckily Rolling Stone Magazine is not generally stocked by the checkout aisles as Big Y World Class Markets or else I would have to write a version of this web page once a month rather than every two months.
*that figure was a cynical guess; statistically it is apparently only 40%, but the closer you get to the top of the list the closer it comes to that, with 9 of the top 10 coming out within a 12 year period that includes the 1960s.
History Channel Magazine ALREADY had a Beatles issue THIS YEAR. Do you know how much history there IS? All the history in HISTORY. And the magazine named after it can’t find enough in five months to not have to go into reruns.
i suppose in a media format that is dying out you stay in business by reminding people of times when more people bought magazines. Because when those times actually do a-change, expectations a-do as well, which a-is not good for business. Achoo! This may seem to contradict the adage of those who forget the past being doomed to repeat it, but consider that this may itself be the doom prescribed. This is what we get for for getting.
Oh this is too much. I need to think about something else.
Dead civilizations! My favorite!
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addendoy: i had to take the pictures in the store somewhat hurriedly so the details were not all clear and I did not realize that the lower two sections are showing different pictures. Some dorky band and touching a rock in space are evidently not just more important, but substantially so than the civil rights movement and one of United Statia’s worst wars. I could definitely claim there was a racial angle to this if I could do so without screwing it up.
this is the dominant project of the moment. Trying to make awkward comic strip pages from ten years ago look slightly less awkward by surgically extracting as much of the rigidity, bad mouse-done “ink”work and bad anatomy out of them as is feasible by some arbitrary point that is likely still too late to get new books printed by when I want to have them. My anatomical rendering skill and general awareness are still terrible but I am considerably less likely now to commit to a weird guess. This example shows some unusually bad dialog flow, which is why I chose it, even though it is not one of the problems I cited. This is also a problem! There is no sense in mentioning it twice!
Ostensibly it should not be that hard but there are a few hundred drawings in here, if i estimate 13 panels per page and 30 pages it comes to 390 which is likely a bit low. Also I “have” to separate the panel boundaries and word baubles –in the event it isn’t necessary to rewrite the text entirely, which is frequently the case with elpse, or redraw the bauble shape, which I do for pog and nemitz since I decided that less serious characters have less serious bauble shapes after this point– to maximize my ability to correct awkwardness on them, which is also a bigger job than it would be to a reasonable person. In 2009 I obsessive compulsively used hard black for all outlines and more shading than was called for, so getting the components separated is tedious but necessary for reasons too tedious for me to explain. what it amounts to is that I have a heirarchy of sicknesses and in order to live with the chief sickness I must endure some less prodigious sicknesses that both necessitate that I do strange needless work and that I do the work very strangely, to a needless degree. A long time ago I was proud of the fact that I could arrange and complete these things all on one digital layer. Also of using pure black for all outlines and text. Now I definitely wish I had not been so insistent on those things!
Why did i think it was a good idea to use solid line shading on skin? I imagined it would blend into a smooth grey but in the end it looks like a bunch of scratches. It looks good on wood. I felt so empowered to be using real ink from real pens at that I thought it could solve all of my problems! It looks better than my bad mouse pretend ink but then I kept adding more and more of it so it was still a mess. page 20 has some particularly bad examples but I have not gotten to altering that one yet! But I “need” to make a website update today so this is that.
Did I have a broken video here for the past 5 days? I thought I switched it to one hosted on my own space but I must not have saved that. Whoooooopth.
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A person identified as pinderhooks recently alerted me to this. Somebody uploaded the full film without permission from the copyright holder Pulse Distribution and I then likewise edited it without permission from that person.
“Hercules” is a low budget cartoon from 1997,that probably has only about a standard tv time slot’s worth of animation which is stretched, sometimes painfully so, out to 48 minutes so it can occupy an hour block and present itself as a feature film instead. I assure you, the cutting room floor was EMPTY. Everything they had went in here and it still wasn’t enough. Consequently its most striking feature is the profoundly horrid editing; at points there is up to 12 seconds of no/barely any motion before something happens. It has a look like it is animated by the company which did robert smigel’s “saturday tv funhouse” cartoons with assistance from the cdi-Zelda gang for closeups. The only indication that you are seeing the film as intended and not an insulting edit like this one is that the music keeps playing and playing and playing unbroken. I really should have had the sound muted while making this since that dorky trumpet fanfare is haunting me now
I watched it once and had the terrible idea to cut out and assemble all the stupidest parts. Completely on a whim when I have obligations stacked higher than the person who storyboarded this I decided to spend several days making a cheap movie that nobody cares about look even cheaper and less worthy of interest. I initially endeavored to maintain the spirit of the original cut when altering the film but when it came out to over ten minutes, nearly a quarter of the full film’s running time, I wondered if it would even come across that I didn’t extend the length of those scenes myself, and in the event of such a perception, why had i chosen the most boring parts to do that in? Somebody thinking sensibly could probably get this under nine minutes but every time i go looking for stuff to cut out i remember another thing from my initial viewing that might be worth squeezing in there. Somebody wishing to only show everything important and not waste time could probably get it to five minutes.
At times the film resembles a bad stage play, in which actors struggle to remember their lines or read off of cue cards. I wonder if the dialog was recorded live, like an old popeye cartoon, with the actors watching the cartoon and waiting for the right time to say lines, but with a considerably lower production budget and no ad-libbing. At one point you can even hear a character, the boss hydra head, start to say “oh shut up” while the character is off-screen, then seemingly realize it, and wait for the scene to change to complete the line. It is not in this edit; eventually I considered that the significance of that would not come across due to all of my deliberately bad editing.
There are a few moments which could be seen as vulgar and uncharacteristic of what I usually produce but once they suggested themselves to it seemed pointless to not use them. They are vague and might not be apparent anyhow.
I do not actually hate the film, even if Hercules himself is dull and conspicuously beardless, since the primary marketing strategy for this sort of product was to get their product mistaken for the disney version, even if the actual content is quite different, and that second fact works in its favor, I think. Apart from calling every character by their Greek names except for Hercules, but that convention predated Disney’s version. Eurystheus’ voice amuses me. There are numerous bits of weird animation and dialog that I like just as they Are. The film is broken and confused, and I relate to that. It screws up and skews the myths but not to the banal extent that disney did. Hercules, as a “hero” who murdered hundreds of people, including his first wife Megara and their children, and had considerably more male lovers than female, chief among them Iolaus, his companion in this film and nephew (and also recipient of Megara as a re-gift-wife in versions of the story in which Hercules only kills their children and not her), is never going to be a g-rated 1990s role model for children. Hercules’ murderous fit of madness is actually alluded to in this film but you only see a ruined city and it is said that only one person was killed, and that person is not even really dead.
Everything i know about the disney version is from contemporary advertisements for it and a description of Danny Devito’s character that I read on a burger king cup around that time (as with the nuggets, Burger King didn’t bother to not give the cartoon-branded products to regular customers) and what I read on wikipedia just now, but I know it depicts Zeus as monogamous and Hera as Hercules’ biological, non-hating mother. Zeus’ infidelity to Hera and Hera’s utter hatred for Hercules is at the very core of the Hercules story. And making Hades the easy bad guy dumps all nuance of just what the god of the underworld is. He isn’t Satan: he does not buy souls, he doesn’t trick people, He isn’t evil, he just happens to preside over the dead. The Greeks had this idea millenia before mopey nerds started obsessing over the idea of misunderstood sad monsters. Mopey nerds who of course only consider the disney versions of anything so they think this concept is new. Hades does covet the souls he has and takes revenge when people try to cheat death but all the gods are covetous and vengeful. Anyway Hades does not appear in this Hercules film so that is unimportant.