A Random Anecdote About Perspective

Once upon a time, when the Syfy Channel could spell, they had a show called Trailer Park. As the name implies, they showed old sci-fi and horror movie trailers, typically from the 1950's and 60's. At the end of each episode they'd have some commentary from one of a rotation of guest speakers. His job was to offer a sobering perspective or witty insight into what we'd just seen on the show. I think it was an episode about apocalyptic movies where he offered this little story about a physicist giving a lecture on the sun. 

My memory is a little fuzzy, but here's the best I can do at retelling it. 

A physicist was giving a lecture on the makeup of the sun. At one point, he explained that in 5 billion years, the sun would expand to a red giant, possibly consuming the earth in the process, if not at least making life intolerable for whatever would survive. He was interrupted by someone in the audience who seemed rather panicked when they asked, "How soon!?" Thinking he'd maybe given out the wrong number, he restated, "5 billion years." The audience member breathed a sigh of relief and explained, "I'm sorry, I thought you said 5 MILLION years." 

A Long Overdue State of the Scroll

I think I'm experiencing a touch of the writer's block when it comes to my Blogger page. I've written plenty elsewhere, be it WordPress or Quora or even DeviantART and Instagram. Here, though, I have about a dozen or so drafts that I get very far in and then... well, it just sits there. I have my reasons for leaving various drafts in the bin, but I can't deny the possibility it simply boils down to a lack of motivation. It's got nothing to do with engagement or Search Engine Optimizations or whatever metrics people judge their online presence by. As a wise-ass man once said,

"I'm no leader. 

I do what I have to do. 

Sometimes, people come with me."

Gratitude is something I think about a lot, and let the record show I have no shortage of it. If you’ve been with me from the start, whether you’re new, or if even if you briefly visited but moved on to other things, please know I appreciate you. Though it’s only text and images on a screen, but you’re in more or less full control of what content you allow into your private headspace, the sanctity of your mind. So, my being part of that if only in a very cursory fashion is a legitimate honor.

I keep wrestling with the idea of posting my art here as I once did. Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll bother, not even with my Inktober posts. My overall goal is to get back to the once-monthly-at-minimum model, more akin to a magazine than anything more immediate and reactionary. I’ve mentioned my WordPress page, which I once regarded as a kind of aftershow, using entries here as jumping-off points for tangents. It’s changed from that and is now a wholly separate entity except for the name. There’s still some common DNA such as an emphasis on skepticism and critical thinking, but applies it to broader socio-political topics. Here, we generally like to have fun. I may get angry or passionate about something here, but with very few exceptions, it’s all in good fun.

I am fundamentally a humanist. Believe it or not, my occasional expression of cynicism, pessimism, or anything that could be regarded as misanthropic or anti-social (in the proper clinical sense, not in the “It sounds like introverted, therefore it must also mean the same thing” sense too many people make and need to stop), my reasoning and motivation behind it is that I want people to do better. I know people can do better, and we don’t need acts of terrorism, hurricanes, floods, and pandemics to drive us towards it. You’re not always going to get it right. You’re going to screw up. We all do, we all have, and we all will. What separates us is what we do afterwards.

I’ve messed up. I failed to keep up with my own schedule. It’s probably not even the first time I’ve done so for this site. So, what am I going to do? I’m going to keep going. I’m going to keep posting here. Thank you all for sticking with me.

Goodnight, and good luck.

Five Cards in Two Days (Motivation Lesson)

Fell into a bit of a depressive slump thanks to some annoying car troubles that left me feeling really unmotivated. I was feeling kind of down anyway, so this really didn't help. Anyway, as I've made five of these things in two days (held off because I wanted to get a traditional hole punch instead of relying on my blade to make the notches) and uploaded them all to my other sites just now, the next five entries will only be the embedded videos and the photos. There are no real "in progress" shots to speak of, apart mainly from the one where my Slice blade broke at the tip while working on one of the cards. I'll have to think of something else if I want square holes in future cards. 

End of June

I really hate this mindset I’ve been in these past few weeks where I simply don’t feel like working on anything. I’ve hammered out a few small pieces the last few days, but I spent far too much time on them. There’s no shortage of projects; that’s thankfully never been an issue for me. I don’t think it’s a motivation issue as I like to think that source is equally inexhaustible. I get a satisfactory level of feedback on my work and I’m nothing if not appreciative of it. Lately though, I’ve felt tense and angsty, irritable and drained, and all around deflated. Maybe it’s merely this month, as June and October (for some odd reason) tend to be very hectic months for me, but I don’t like having these “down & draining" periods those months or any other time. It’s easy to break a routine, especially a productive one, and end up with what I’ve heard wrestlers call Ring Rot, essentially falling out of practice and having to start from the bottom all over again.
As I said in my post about Trigger Warnings, I do not suffer from depression. I am depressed at times, but nothing I’d call manic or even debilitating. Then again, I’m not a therapist. Maybe I’ve been unconsciously self-medicating a condition I don’t fully understand.
Maybe my art, my “therapy" as I’ve called it for years, isn’t working anymore.
Maybe I’m realizing that, in the grand scheme of things, I have no idea what I want.
Maybe I simply need to take a break.
I don’t know.
I should get some sleep. I’ve got a big day tomorrow I’m looking forward to, and hopefully things will start to look up after that.

Month of Meh

For as much as I put the URL for my Blogger page out there in my work, it may well be the site I neglect updating the most (with the possible exception of my Gamespot profile, but that doesn't quite count). I'd debated simply posting some of my recent artwork, which hasn't been anything terribly good since I'm focused on writing right now. I even resorted to digging up something I'd made years ago which was left in a drawer until recently.

The problem is that a lot of my work is a bit scattered because I'm slowly transitioning to a new computer. This means I'm officially back to using Windows, specifically 7. Protip: if you're in the market for a new computer, especially a laptop, make office supply stores like Staples and OfficeMax priorities as they clearance things out all the time, making for some very good deals. I had considered going with 8, but I just couldn't get past the tile interface. I'll get a Windows Phone before I bother with the OS on a full PC. In fact, I'm working on putting together a bootable USB drive that will let me run Linux Mint on the laptop if I ever want to use my more familiar version of GIMP. The Windows edition has some serious drawbacks, mostly with regards to the text tool. Adding signatures and watermarks to my images should not be this tedious. In the grand scheme of things, about the only upshots Windows 7 gives me is access to Skype as well as the full and proper use of my new scanner. Other than that, unless I get back into editing videos, Mint was perfectly serviceable. Still, it's nice knowing I have genuine options and don't have to rely entirely on freeware to get things done. There's nothing wrong with freeware, mind, except that there's absolutely no real QA and upgrades and fixes depend almost entirely on the whims of volunteers. Some have donation options which could conceivably be a way of getting needed changes made, but it's ultimately a free service and therefore no one really has a right to complain.
Speaking of taking things for granted, I found out about a most curious phenomena called crossed letters. It's also called cross-hatching, but it's not referring to the sketching technique of using repeating and crossed lines to create shading. What it is, simply, is a means of saving on paper by turning the sheet 90 degrees and carrying on writing. The idea is that paper was not only expensive, but postage wasn't much better, so people made the most out of what they had and resorted to making their letters look a little something like this:

It's not the best example; most of the samples I found online were in cursive, which seems to work a little better than print (ironic considering how inefficient cursive actually gets when you try to make it legible). Still, it's said that with time your brain works out what it's supposed to focus on and you learn to adapt to the weird presentation. It's a neat little experiment worth trying sometime. It's like using a quill/dip/fountain pen or learning a simple magic trick or speed dating; something everyone should try at least once, if only for the character-building.

On a dour note, things around the place have been a bit strained. Tensions are high, and while discussions were had, they didn't leave much all that resolved. Let me put it this way: I know being disabled is a difficult condition, and it's important for others to be sensitive to it. However, there's a point where being "considerate" amounts to walking on eggshells and living a kind of  "nurse's sleep" that you not only feel trapped in, but are practically told you're supposed to lie back and accept because... there's really no good reason given, the closest to "sort of reasonable" being "if you've never experienced (blank), then you won't understand." which is kind of like saying only people with cancer have any business doing cancer research.
It makes me think of why I absolutely hate certain movies. Requiem for a Dream, for instance, commits what I consider the cardinal sin of narrative by trying to make me feel sorry for people whom I not only don't care about, but really want to get their respective wake-up calls. In short, a bunch of druggies try to "make it big" so take giant risks that either cost them their lives, their self-respect, and/or their freedom. The idea is that I'm supposed to scoff at these people, only for a naysayer to ask, "Well, haven't you ever had a dream? Didn't you make stupid decisions?" and instill in me a great epiphany that moves me to tears. Trouble is, relating to something doesn't mean you automatically approve of it. To put it another way, the stupid things I may have done, aren't things I deserve sympathy for, and probably wouldn't want it. To quote Star Trek V, a movie I sometimes feel gets erroneously mistreated, I need my pain. I've inadvertently sabotaged my own life at times, but not only do I not want a second chance to undo those screw-ups, I don't want people to feel sorry for me for them. Sometimes things really are black and white, right and wrong. Circumstances may count for many things, but it's not always a free pass.
What I'm saying is, I don't have to stick my hand in a fire to know it's hot, but that doesn't mean I can't warn people who want to see for themselves what all the fuss is about. As for sympathizing with those who get burned, well: How sorry can you really feel for an alcoholic? Sure, they've clearly gone through some awful hardships that have driven them to find solace in the contents of a highball glass, but at the end of the day, no one's force-feeding them the stuff, and you can only commiserate so much before you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, pick a path, and stick to it. That's more or less where I'm at, and one of those paths involves leaving someone to face the same challenge, and I never like to walk away from problems.

Good night, and good luck.