Don't Steal my robot cutlery idea too, Steve Wozniak!

This week's picture incorporates some of my fondest hopes and visions of the future, and illustrates what I feel will be a major theme of 21st century history: the mechanization of food.     Specifically the picture very nicely illustrates my idea of a computer keyboard made of edible keys floating in a bowl of milk. 

This would completely revolutionize the science and industry of computing, which is quite frankly in a bit of a funk since Apple took over and re-made the cell phone into a direct marketing device. We need a new computer revolution!  There are also robots in the picture. I am 100% in favor of robots and pray for them to take over every day. Take my job and my last shreds of self respect, you beautiful mechanical bastards!   It wouldn't bother me if they took over the government at all. What difference would it make?  What could they possibly do that the humans currently in charge haven't already done? Could they really be as greedy and power-hungry?  They may be indifferent to human needs, but what would difference would it make?  

So I drew robots with heads. What's the point of robots without a head or a face?  I think I've read something about an Uncanny valley of robots whose overly lifelike faces will elicit repulsion in humans who see them, but I believe this reflex will wear out and disappear in humans who watch presidential debates. 

The table arrangements I can not so easily explain or defend. I may have been hungry when I drew this, I think I wanted to make a little town or something. So I gave each dish or water pitcher its own little driveway, and drew a few little cars with food on them. Maybe they're butter balls. I gave the cutlery faces because they're the people of the little town, and this is another field of robotics that begs for deeper exploration and investment; robot cutlery that can set itself and sing  you a song or even dance a little, like Angela Landsberry in Beauty and the Beast. The spoon faces would be like a smartphone screen, that would sense what food was on them and talk to you about it. Maybe they could even crawl up your shirt and shovel the food in for you, in response to verbal commands. Truly this picture could be used as a sort of blueprint for the future of food and robotics

I was just clearing my throat

Already the graphic producing process which I developed with the idea of a relentlessly productive content machine has begun to hit snags and coughs and stoppages, and I can sense little contractions along my shoulder hunching muscles, the onset of the full shoulder tensing that accompanies the delivery of a failure. 

I would class this week's picture as a cough. It's a demonstration of my hanging Christmas tree idea, an idea that I've cuddled myself to sleep with many a night, with visions of sales in the millions and a company run from my basement and entire mornings in my bathrobe. 

So I finally drew a picture of the idea: 

The happy dream is ended, my wife showed me several photos posted to odious online forums, showing off several variations of the idea as actually constructed by smug crafty people in their smug little workshops. 

I added some little guys with drone heads to the picture, but found them insipid, so I tried to depict a swarm source for the drones. I enjoy swarm source scenes in movies, but I completely failed the swarm source drawing. My kids kept asking me what it was and I didn't tell them because I was eating my heart and the taste was bitter, bitter!

That's a reference to a poem. The narrator comes across a man-beast eating his heart and he says that. I don't know the poets name. But I did try to quote it to my kid as a joke because my illness is to do that whether the joke is funny or not and whether the other person gets it. My kid liked the joke and the picture including the swarm source or said so at least. 

If I were to color this picture I would make it incredibly dark and gloomy except for the one guy's face who would represent me. His face would be glowing from the lights of the tree, and the viewer would be confused, because the actual tree lights would be dim and feeble, so where is this glow?

It is the glow of ignorance and self deception. It burns warm and cozy no matter what people say. And I would be there to tell the viewer that and I would see the realization in their eyes, of the incredible true depth to the picture, and I would hear the little pop as I blew their mind, and I would take this home to cuddle with. 

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Except to Pass

This week's picture is a scene from a graphic novel project I've been kicking around for a while. The novel would cover an investigation by a fictional detective in a futuristic landscape which would resemble the desolate landscapes of all those dreary post apocalyptic  sci fi movies like Star Wars which relentlessly portray the future as taking place in the desert because it's cheap to film there. And the people and aliens and spaceships and buildings look grimy and steal and lie like love-able street urchins because it's cheap to hire them. As you can see from the picture, my graphic novel will resemble those hateful post apocalyptic sci fi movies almost exactly, because I have no idea how to draw it any different. 

The two characters depicted in the picture are beautiful women who have mutant powers and hang out in a van in a riverside park. I have not finished the picture and probably never will without the aid of computers. I meant the window in the upper right to be looking out onto the trees and bushes at the edge of the parking lot. I believe I drew the tree fairly well, but experienced a total failure at the curb and gutter, which dominate the lower left corner of the window. I failed at the gutter because I have not practiced drawing actual curbs and gutters and because my left brain meddles with all my pictures like an insufferable backseat driver who periodically lunges forward and grabs at the steering wheel if my right brain shows any weakness or hesitation in the middle of a drawing project. Ideally, the analytical left brain should perform navigation while the right brain drives. If the right brain has a problem drawing a gutter, the left brain should say; "pull over and let me navigate. Do not stop in the road. Okay, there's a real gutter outside, let's go look at it. We'll use it as a model. All the real artists do that."

But my hemispheres draw like we've got a hotel to get to and pulling over is not an option, so my drawings tell a tale of discord and strife, they record a ferocious struggle at all the spots where a real artist uses their training in perspective and composition, but where my pen trails off in confusion until the left brain lunges forward and slaps the right brain's hands away and seizes control and downshifts and executes a five year old's version of a gutter with lots of mistakes and heavily emphasized redrawn lines and incomprehensible proportions and then gets bored and lets the flustered right brain take over and shakily continue the mangled picture in an atmosphere of sad denial and dreamy defeat. And the hotel is booked except for a room where the so-called second queen is a hide a bed in the couch and the bathtub doesn't have a working shower head and the bathroom fan roars like a jet engine whenever anyone needs to get up and use the bathroom, and the kids cartoons playing on the large and loud and dominating TV make it impossible to read and there's no time to draw, and the next day is all driving through the post apocalyptic wasteland to another hotel

New year, new resolution, new project, old story

I've begun a new project and completely scrapped any projects previously discussed on this blog. Good riddance!  They were all worthless ego trips. This new project is monumental in scope: To keep a weekly journal, for the whole year, detailing my daily successes and failures with my main New Years resolution; To spend at least 30 minutes each day reading about computer languages. I just altered the resolution as I wrote it, to make it easier and more realistic and to maintain positivity, but I'm not going to say how I altered it because it's in the past now and to be a billionaire you have to be positive and triumphant all the time and keep moving and keep your teeth razor sharp just in case. 

In addition to monitoring my ongoing success in achieving this daily goal I will illustrate that success with a picture, actually two pictures per week, as the sketchbook I purchased for sooooper cheap has fifty pages and I can do a picture on each side. So why am I reading about computer languages? Because I desperately need to rejuvenate the hagenart site and business with some pepped up action on the web page, something spicy and powerful, a computer game. To create intense computer games I will absolutely require total knowledge of all computer languages and specs, and to gain that knowledge I must study, and to study I must have motivation, and to have motivation I must doodle. 

Here's my first semi-weekly doodle, actually begun at the end of last year when I first got the idea:

It's a picture of me as a superhero. I'm a little embarrassed by it, it feels naked, even though the superior figure is fully clothed. It feels as if I've bared too much of my inner soul, mostly the part about a neighbor's dog (on the next street over), which is a repellent beast that barks all the time. I met it twice, both interactions were unpleasant; the first time it frightened my kid chasing a stick thrown by her by the idiot owner, second time it was actually running loose in the street, barking in a creepy senile way at every person outside.  Also the picture is not very good (except for the dog), and I didn't actually achieve the first week's goal. Huge disappointment.  As the horse in Animal Farm says; "I will work harder."  (Don't read that book, it's an incredible bummer). 

Whither My Wilderness?

I had to take a rotten picture of the drawing I've chosen for this entry, even though I have a fairly good scan of the picture, because Apple sucks! The syncing didn't go well, or I messed up the syncing, and since I'm a customer that means they messed it up, or maybe Microsoft messed it up. Those guys. Never trust a company with publicly traded stocks, for complicated reasons that I won't go into because I wouldnt have any idea of how to draw a picture illustrating the situation. But now that I say that I've already got something in mind. 

Anyway, I wanted to use this picture, because I wanted a picture of a cabin and for some reason in my memory it was a cabin, but as the Reader can see, it is not really a cabin:

I was kind of envisioning the scene as taking place in a ski resort type of village, an alpine village, but my general inability to draw, which is a grievous failing for someone who wants to be an artist, hindered the vibe of that alpine village from emerging. 

I wanted a cabin because I have just finished reading One Man's Wilderness, a book taken from the journal of Dick Proenecke (spelling?), a guy who built a cabin in Alaska and lived in it mostly alone for a large portion of his life. Kind of like a non-fiction version of Walden. In his journal Proenecke goes on about the difference between building something completely on your own with your own hands, and the difference in the feeling you have about your work when it's all yours, and I felt a deep sympathy with what he was doing, and I felt like I understood his desire to go live by himself in the wilderness, I felt it would appeal to me to do the same, except of course that if I tried to do the same thing I would quickly die, and I recognized that whereas Proenecke could build a cabin and outhouse out of trees he cut down himself, and use a gun to kill a ram for food, and fix everything himself, I would be able to draw some awkward pictures of the wilderness  before I froze or starved. And I came to the realization that my cabin in the wilderness, where I go to escape the world, will have to be in my mind, inadequately rendered on paper. 

So I came up with the idea of emulating Proenecke with my own Cabin in the Wilderness Project, PWC, which will take inspiration from Proenecke and source materials from photos of actual wilderness cabins, and also these drawings of houses which I drew under the direction of my offspring

Playmobil uber Lego part III; Peaceful Coexistence within our grasp

I didn't intend to make the Lego Playmobil post a trilogy, and I did have an extremely serious post in mind to do instead of this post which I am actually writing, but I could not resist the opportunity to illustrate a point which I made earlier and might have undermined with my own irresistible instinct to absolute honesty; that is my posting of photos of some kid art done by my child with Legos in a post which trumpeted the creative nature of Playmobil toys as superior to Legos. I believe I sufficiently explained why those photos did not undermine my point, but just to emphatically underline the explanation of the non- undermining photos I have taken some photos of a piece done with Playmobil:

I won't pretend to understand what's going on here in terms of the larger themes explored in the piece, but I am convinced that any intellect powered by even an average amount of neurocomputing circuits could quickly and easily grasp that the creative medium employed here compares favorably to the medium utilized in the pieces depicted in the previous post, in terms of expressive possibilities and lack of predetermined content. 

I originally discovered the work in late evening under dim lighting, but refrained from capturing the piece at that time due to its association and unpleasantly reactive nature with some sinister and anxiety-producing connotations in my own mind, and I was forced to flee the room. There has been some political ferment in the house of late due to some recent unpopular parental decisions, and I am well aware of the artistic themes presaging the Jacquerie in medieval France. I think the reader will agree that the daylight softens the impact of the piece, and the gentle spirit of reasonableness and cooperation, inherent in the English Parliamentary system for instance, seems to sing happily from the scalped but firmly attached heads on the smiling people to the carefully curated accessories arranged with the respectful care of a smithsonian exhibit, clearly denoting a peaceful surrendering of some symbolic powers in return for a long and dignified armistice. 

I will not trouble the reader with the uncanny transformation of the overall message effected by the dimming of direct light

More on Modding; Prevercursive Canonization

Just to continue some thoughts from the previous blog, something I rarely am able to do, I discovered a whole other level of "modding" the other day; the concept of "canon" as it relates to fan fiction. I knew about canonical text as it relates to religious discussion about scripture; different scholars representing different sects arguing over which ancient texts "belong" in the bible or as scripture , i.e., are divinely inspired.  But in the world of fan fiction, as far as I've been able to tell, "canon" means that a story from a particular story's universe has been published with the approval of the story's author or holder of the legal rights to the story, as indicating a continuation of the story. 

So a piece of fan fiction might be published on the web, but could not be sold to anyone or be charged for viewing without the approval of the copyright owner. I think. That's my vague kind of understanding of it. But the copyright holder could suddenly choose a piece of fan fiction and approve it as part of the official storyline, and publish works with characters and plots that refer to the events in the "canonized" story as having happened in their universe. But it seems that in the eyes of the fans, the legal copyright holder is not considered as authoritative, with regard to canon, as the original author.  The word "author" comes from "authority" after all. Or the reverse, but my point holds true either way. With The Lord of the Rings, for instance, a work I myself was once quite excited about, people were attentively judging the eponymous movies for their adherence to the original books. I would count myself among these people, who regarded the original books, by Tolkien, as "Canon," although I did not use that exact word. And I watched the movies with a highly critical eye as to their agreement with the books. I would never have considered the movies to be "canon", unless Tolkien himself had written and directed them. I always viewed the movies as a lesser work, to be judged as they agreed with the books, which I now realize is a quasi-religious attitude. I've actually seen movies based on other books, movies that have been given enthusiastic approval by the author of the book them self, that I myself have intensely disliked as much as I loved the book. I would say that this seems to indicate that print holds greater authority over the human subconscious, except that I've experienced the opposite effect, with The Shining for instance, where the movie felt like the canon, and the book, which was the original and parent work, read to me like an inferior novelization.   This might be a tribute to Stanly Kubrick's artistry, or it might merely be more simply and disappointingly attributed to my having seen the movie first. 

Which makes me wonder what someone's attitude would be if they happened to read the omnipresent fan fiction for a certain universe before they read the canon. You can do this easily on the Internet. I've read and seen many comic panels and illustrations that I didn't even realize were fan fictions because I knew nothing about the original comics. Deadpool for instance. I've never read the canon at all, and the same for all the satirical or fan fiction works based on the manga comics.  I'd expect to find the canon markedly superior, of course, except for incredibly rare instances where a gifted person may have the economic freedom and the inclination to devote huge amounts of time to a fan fiction work. But why would they, except as a form of perverse exaggerated humility?  Such a person would be a creative, but the opposite of an "author."  A sub-author. An under-author. The written version of an inker. A "wrinker": One who insists on composing fan fiction only, for no money even though they have the talent to create excellent original work of their own. 

But there's a lower level; someone who mods only the work of unpublished authors. Perverse in reverse, you could say, or "preverse", to use a wording from "Doctor Strangelove" that I've finally found a use for. Preverse, as in Prevert: One who insists on modding only unpublished work. But I'm thinking that maybe Prevert applies more to someone like myself, someone who mods only their own, unpublished work, which is more the reverse of humility, in a kind of endless recursive loop. Preverse, as in; "I find your work preversely solipsistic, especially when you took everything wrong with the original and made it worse."

I guess the whole concept of canon fascinates me because it reveals the hierarchical and religious instinct in the human brain. I understand copyright as a way to protect work and motivate creativity, but only the hierarchical mind could conceive canon and take it seriously. Why did I judge the LOTR movies on the books, really?  So what if the original author wrote them?  Why couldn't someone make the original better? 

What if someone took everything I've posted to the Internet and re-worked it to make high art?  Well, that would be insulting and I'd have to sue them, even while acknowledging their genius. But I'll probably lighten up about it after I've died. 

This seems to be a ridiculously solipsistic and empty post itself, but I had to work hard to overcome autocorrect while coining the new words. Perhaps Autocorrect is the true preversion.