I’ve begun making the preparations for Chapter 5 – I’ve been ‘walking’ around the 3D model of the town I prepared last year and taking shots in preparation. Working into one of these images with Photoshop gives me a rough layout to work up on the drawing board.
I played Dear Esther around two years ago, I think. Possibly more. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played and definitely the best mod.
The game involves no running, shooting, stabbing, driving, flying, blowing up or indeed down, no stomping, belching, inventorying, levelling up or in fact any concrete goals of any kind, save one: explore. You play a character visiting an island in the outer Hebrides. You explore the island. There are buildings and strange landmarks to visit. As you journey around the island, music is played (the music is beautiful, as far as I’m concerned, and worth the price of admission alone) along with a voice over recalling, perhaps, a car crash. Things aren’t quite clear; someone, certainly, is absent, and sorely missed.
The mod was so successful that, when the original team decided to re-develop it – expanding the soundtrack into full orchestration, re-building the island in high-resolution – Valve, the makers of Half-Life, decided to give it a full release via Steam, their digital distribution network.
It’s out in February – I honestly haven’t been this excited about a game ever. It’s given to be absolutely beautiful.
Earlier today (and, in fact, yesterday too – but ‘today’ gives the whole episode a pleasing unity, so I’ll stick with it), I had an exchange with someone on Twitter about evolution. Their viewpoint could be summed up as, broadly speaking, religious. Here’s a little of the exchange which led up to this post what you’re reading now.
End of the week, and it’s been a busy one.
I’m in a play that’s on in about a week – A Christmas Carol, and I’m playing Marley’s Ghost, which means I essentially get to be as scary as possible while covered in more chains than a fetishist’s pushbike, which we all know is what Christmas is really all about.
I’ve also been writing a short story – 5,000 words in, and I’ve reached a point where I’m uncertain as to whether I’m really going places, or wandering hopelessly off the point in the pursuit of pretty lights.
I also finished off a short comic, a four-pager, based on a lucid dream I had about a month or so ago. One of the most intense, vividly-rendered dreams I’ve ever had, in fact. I’ll let the comic tell the story (it’s posted on The Boy with Nails for Eyes‘ Facebook page, and in a revised form on my shockingly neglected Flikr page). In the fullness of time, I’ll sort out a proper home for it.
Here, I wanted to show some of the stages the artwork went through as the comic was being put together. I suppose what follows does contain spoilers, but that the point of the comic wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to capture an experience. In that, I guess it is to more narrative-driven comics what poetry is to prose. In any case, spoilers are spoilers; I doubt they’ll spoil the experience of reading, but now’s the last chance not to.
Guanoman said it pretty well on Twitter the other day:
Much as I find the man repugnant in every way, I can’t help but think the reaction to Clarkson has been a massive own goal.
Clarkson is a bit of a wally. This is putting my feelings mildly as, who knows, my mother might read this one day.
It is a fact little known (so little known in fact that it’s practically entirely made-up) that exposure to strange, Lovecraftian chemicals when huffing from tailpipes in his youth caused the death of little men in Clarkson’s head. These little men were the ones that guarded the borders of Clarkson’s brain, where they demanded the border papers of Clarkson’s thoughts. You see, the thought’s in Clarkson’s brain are all so immediately depressed by their surroundings – the sky made of ancient, belt-horizoned denim, the clouds made of Stig helmets, the endless, endless tarmac – that immediately upon their conception they gather at the borders, desperate to escape. Unfortunately, the only way out of Clarkson’s brain, it seems, is via Clarkson’s mouth.
This is my theory as to why the man talks so much drivel.
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(This here will bring you up to speed as to why I feel I must write to Jason.)
Dear Jason – may I call you Jason? No? Oh…
Dear Arsenugget – may I call you ‘Arsenugget’? Goodo.
You are campaigning for student election at LSE. Well done. It’s good to participate in the political process.
One of your campaign pledges was to ‘slash the wages of cleaners at your university’. Hmm. Not so sure about that one, Candidate Arsenugget, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
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I’ve been taking a break from The Boy with Nails for Eyes for a few weeks, and I intend to do nothing more on it for a few weeks more, while I work on a few other, shorter projects. So I’ve got most of Chapter 4 planned out, and I’ve started a few preparatory sketches (at root doing anything seems to be a way of avoiding doing something else).
The image that the sketch above is a plan for will be large panorama showing the central street-plaza of the unnamed town. In the distance (low-level spoiler alert) can be seen the Bunker, where much of the later action will take place, and to the right can be seen the Bridge.
The image will be the biggest of the comic so far, four sheets of A3, so one metre eighteen centimetres long, or thereabouts (that’s over three foot ten inches in the old money). I’m hoping this will be an eyeball kick in the next chapter, which I’m also thinking will be pretty much without text (I’d write ‘silent’, but there will be music).
More images as they arrive – I intend a longer post next showing progressive images for one of the shorter projects I mentioned – but then, I’ve made promises about posts before…
In today’s Guardian, an article was published entitled ‘Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood‘. It was written by Rick Moody, whom I presume to be the American novelist and short story writer (the Graun doesn’t provide any details in the byline). In the article Moody discusses the current output of mainstream Hollywood cinema using Miller’s comics, and the films which have followed them, as his focal point – decrying them as ‘cryptofascistic’.
Frank Miller is something of a talking point these days, mainly stemming from his blog tirade against the Occupy movement, which hardly needs to be rehashed. Basically, he doesn’t like it. He calls the individuals within the movement “louts, thieves, and rapists”, and deems them traitorous “pond scum” in the face of America’s “war against a ruthless enemy”, that is, the forces of militant Islam. (The ones that, despite the death of their most prominent figurehead, countless drone strikes and often Benny Hill levels of incompetence, are still out to get you, your grannie and the contents of your biscuit barrel.)
I was frustrated by Moody’s essay. He made sweeping generalisations. He dressed up mundane points in needless, arch academia-speak. He didn’t actually explore the subject matter he was discussing – Miller’s comics, or Hollywood cinema – in any great depth; he made his points in the way that a stone creates ripples on the water it skims across.
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Writing in yesterday’s Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill highlighted an apparent hypocrisy surrounding the recent, unsuccessful campaign to prevent the execution in Georgia of Troy Davis.
The article is short, and makes its point pithily. Here’s what Brendan had to say:
Yesterday in America, two men were executed, but you will probably only have heard of one of them: Troy Davis, who was killed in the state of Georgia for the murder of a police officer. The other executed man, Lawrence Brewer, put to death in the state of Texas for murdering a black man in 1998, has barely featured in the news at all. Unlike Davis, he did not win the backing of Amnesty International and its trendy supporters.
There follows a little fluff about the lack of activity on Twitter about Brewer in comparison to Davis, by which O’Neill implies a criticism of online activism especially. He soon returns to his central argument:
But if you are opposed to the death penalty on principle, as many of the Troy Davis campaigners claimed to be, then you should be just as outraged by the execution of Brewer as you were by the execution of Davis.
Once again, Twitter comes in for some flack: “Even James Byrd Jr’s son asked for the state of Texas to show mercy to his father’s killer, but no army of bleeding-heart Twitterers backed him up.”
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John Gray’s latest article for the BBC’s A Point of View – Can religion tell us more than science? – begins with an account of the conversion of novelist Grahame Greene:
[Father Trollope, Greene's converter] was a convert who became a priest and led a highly ascetic life, and Greene didn’t warm to him very much, at least to begin with.
Yet the writer came to feel that in dealing with his instructor he was faced with “the challenge of an inexplicable goodness”. It was this impression – rather than any of the arguments the devout Father presented to the writer for the existence of God – that eventually led to Greene’s conversion.
The arguments that were patiently rehearsed by Father Trollope faded from his memory, and Greene had no interest in retrieving them. “I cannot be bothered to remember,” he writes. “I accept.”
I am struck by the fact that this is an argument from authority – there is no actual content to the story that seeks to convince beyond the status of its protagonist, Greene. The great novelist, Gray seems to say, is impressed sufficiently by his interlocutor’s benevolence that he is willing to abandon – indeed, can’t even be bothered to invoke – rational argument. So why shouldn’t you be? Huh? You and your tenacious need for justification. You reek of effort. What’s wrong with you?
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