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NIGHT PRIOR:

"Everything is falling apart. One of my snow tires is apparently leaking hard, my computer has stopped working, and I'm still unemployed and nearly totally broke. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA--"

THIS MORNING:

"Fixed the tire, the power supply apparently has an internal breaker that it threw so it's working after all, and I'm still unemployed and nearly totally broke. Ehhhhhhhhhhhh--"

I'll take any small victory I bloody well can.

I watched "The Box" the other night. I could talk for hours about it, but the shortest and funniest comment I can make about it was that it was weird enough for my taste. :3

Hey, the PSP Persona is out. Anybody have it? Or has read a bunch of reviews of it? How is it?

Speaking of vidya games, I think the best Castlevania was Symphony of the Night. I can't put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe it was because Alucard could do so much crazy stuff: he could use a lot of equipment (much of which had special abilities of their own), he could transform, and he has these crazy ass button-combination spells. The bosses were rather free-form, so you didn't have to do these little dances that earlier and later games in the franchise make you do. Duck, attack, walk a smidge to the right, attack, OH CRAP JUMP DOUBLE JUMP DUCK attck, duck, attack, walk a smidge to the left. You know, that kind of thing. Nope, there was very little of that. Sure, it meant that the game can be a cakewalk to some gamers, but it doesn't make it any less fun.

I think a lot of the games with the same format as SotN are kind of writhing in the shadow, though. It's been going downhill, too. Tales of Ecclesia was simply awful, in terms of gameplay. It has That One Boss several times: you have to learn to do the dances, like I mentioned above, for each of them. I do not know what the designers were thinking. To wash it down, I slogged around in Dracula X Chronicles to unlock SotN -- YES I JUST SAID UNLOCK KONAMI IS FILLED WITH CRAZY BASTARDS okay okay take a breath -- and play it again just to wash it down. To make it worse, they're falling the name formula from Symphony of the Night, so they're always something like "Castlevania: Something of the Something" or "Castlevania: [Song type] of [Thing]" Circle of the Moon. Harmony of Dissonance. Aria of Sorrow. Dawn of Sorrow (direct sequel). Portrait of Ruin. Tales of Ecclesia. I look forward to "Castlevania: Mambo of Regret" and "Castlevania: Shuffle of the Doomed".

Most fans of the series agree with me on all of this, but a lot of us just keep forkin' over the money. (I've stopped, pretty much. Pretty much.) Maybe therin lies the problem.

SIGH.

In other news, I read a book titled The Ten-Cent Plague. It's essentially about the rise of the American comic medium (starting with newspaper comics, naturally) and ends with the great purge in the fifties. That's right, the purge. It's one of the most depressing works of non-fiction I've read, and I read a lot of those. It may be particularly soul-crushing because the artists, industry, and what it could have developed into is close to me, my interest and my heart.

American comics had several genres before It happened. There was the crime stories, which to my understanding, sounded a lot like a more graphic Law And Order without the court scenes and a little shallower. There was the superheroes, yeah, but they weren't really that popular. There was the horror/suspense genre, which was basically the crime stories with occasional supernatural stuff. Surprisingly, romance was another big seller. As each year went by, another genre developed, right up until the city, state, and congressional laws buried any sort of freedom in the medium. It was a battle in the culture war that the good guys lost, and our culture suffered for it.

If the comics medium remained unmolested, it would be a different America, and I think a different world. Every kid read these things, the numbers that Hajdu (the author) provides are shocking. The audience for every single title produced -- and there was a lot of those, too! -- was measurable in the millions, plus all the passing-around each book got, just like modern trade paperback graphic novels. (I think my stack of The Invisibles was read by, like, eight people.) As that audience aged, they would keep reading, and join the industry, which was already a noticed phenomenon in the fifties: they read comics when they were young in the forties or late thirties. It was growing. More genres, more complexity, more variety, and different tastes.

What would have happened is that America would have her own manga, that looks a lot like what the Japanese developed, and everyone would read it. It wouldn't be for kids, because it grew with them, and the battery of laws and censorship would stop it from being locked in this weird fifties oppressive morality and codes and... you see the problem, right?

We would be living the world that Scott McCloud and friends dream of, what people like me fight for.

God damn it.

Things that have changed since last time:
OH YEAH NOTHING.

At least I'm getting plenty of time to draw and stuff. Actually, since I'm on toni--WHAT THE--
( Read more... )

MASS TREBLE: My only Internet connection is dial-up via the family computer, which runs(?) Vista. It BSODs a lot. I found where it's doing the error dumps! Finally! Let's read yesterday's.

WINDOWS: Can't. Don't recognize the file type.

MASS TROUBLE: Ha ha! Oh, Windows.

WINDORS: Search the web for the appropriate program?

MASS TRUFFLE: Naturally.

WINDONKS: ...There is no appropriate application for ".DMP"s.

MASK TRINKLE: Ha Ha HA! Oh, Windows.

I'm slowly scraping back together my sentiments of self-worth. The Internet situation here is thoroughly poor, so it hasn't been easy keeping up on you guys, much less getting the chance to say much myself. I really miss everyone. It might be a few more months before I'm totally 'here' in terms of contactive-ness...itude.

Yeah.

For those just tuning into this channel, I'm a twenty-something sub-par artist/cartoonist who just graduated from an Alaskan college, and tried to move to Boston this summer to get closer to places where I could finish up my education, in the desperate hope that I could be an illustrator or something. It didn't work out, and now I'm... living with my dad again, which is poison to somebody who prizes their independence. Now I have to get another lousy job in an increasingly long line of lousy jobs in a place that is bereft of even lousy jobs. Get some popcorn. This is going to get even worse before the end.

eeeeeEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHCK!

Are all short indy-games about death? Or is it just the ones I've been seeing lately?

The main Google ad in Gmail is trying to sell me "Snake Bite First Aid Kits".

"You don't waste your time on people with whom you completely disagree."
-Congressman Barney Frank during this interview

Ack.

Ack ack ack ack ack ack.

Ack ack.

How to begin.

Okay, a lot of you only slightly know who I am, so I'll give you the long version.

Back in May, a long time friend and room mate and I packed up to leave for the East Coast, all the way from our home in Alaska. He was going to stay with the parents in South Carolina for the summer before going to Canada for his graduate studies. I was moving to Boston. I searched madly for an apartment until I believed I had one. On the day before we were scheduled to leave, my apartment cancelled on me. I decided I was already neck-deep at that point, and we left anyway: my friend's parents extended the offer of crash space for the summer, so I could try to get a place in Boston in South Carolina.

I sat here with a laptop for a few weeks, desperately doing the same thing I was doing up with Alaska. It wasn't working. I took a trip to Boston and spent a few days with the awesome otter3, and that was cool, and I believe it sort of helped matters, but it didn't end up producing any lodging.

After returning to South Carolina, and trying again for a little while, I ascertained the dimensions of the essential problem. I tried regardless until yesterday afternoon, when I knew that I just wasn't going to win this one and had to go to damage control.

That means that I'm going to be flying my dumb ass back to Alaska. Back to crash with my father until I can get back on my feet in Anchorage. (At least I won't be in Fairbanks at the end of this.)

LONG STORY SHORT: I've failed. I'm declaring bostonquest a failure. This has to be the single dumbest thing I've ever done in my life, and will doubtlessly remain so for years. Well, there's that and the whole art degree thing, but that's a dumb thing I'm kind of proud of, and it's a work in progress anyhow so there. :P

If anybody thinks less of me, or thinks, "damn what a loser", well, I'd agree. I'm a bit of a fuck-up.

But at least I tried, didn't I? That's more than what most ever do.

Besides...

There's always hope for bostonquest2011. Or bostonquest2012. Or maybe some other opportunity will come up, I don't know, and none it would ever compare to the awesomeness of marsquest2021 and I'd take that over bostonquest20XX anyday. Sure, I've screwed up another summer, I've wasted another three months of my life. That's okay. I'm sick of what-ifs and regret and worry. Life goes on.

One of the suckier things about this is that I'm going to be kind of lonely in Anchorage. KEVIN! We should hang out now and then!

Finally, easily rendered fashion.

Indy Day
Once again
Do all your shopping
At--*EXPLOSION*

Hey, future me: you were staying with Chris and his folks during the summer of this posting. I hope we're look back on this from better times.

Also, visitors from the future: how many times have you seen this page? I wonder how many of you I've known for a long time, and how many of you are new. I hope(d) I'm treating you well, either way.

Governor Palin no more. Now she's going to be just regular ol' Palin. I can hardly believe it. People are theorizing it's because of a scandal that, if it broke, would completely ruin her, but I'm wondering if it's more complicated than that.

In any case, hold onto your butts, people, because Alaska isn't done yet. You haven't met Sean Parnell. Within a month, he'll be the governor. Oh, no. This nightmare clown circus will never end.

Paul McCartney was asked if he ever compared his works that he now does with what he did when he was with The Beatles. He said that the only reason he can still write songs is that he stops himself from doing that. If he finished something and said things like, "Well, it's not Eleanor Rigby", he would no longer be able to write anything.

A young performer refuses the romantic attentions of her hermetic vocal trainer.

Thought experiment. You want an apple.

So you go to the store. There are a variety of apples there. They all taste kind of similar, some slightly more to your taste than others, but there's a lot of each. Some of the types of apples are known to go bad really quick, and otherwise they're pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the mess of apples.

So, why would anybody go for one of the risky apples?

If you grasp this metaphor, you can see why, with well over a hundred emails and several dozen phone calls, I've not secured a place in Boston. I'm a risky apple, and that risk is easily avoidable: I don't have employment there. I cannot unless I have a place there. You see how cyclical that thing is.

This cannot be done playing it straight, as it were. I'm going to need some black magic. I don't know what that is yet. If I don't succeed in this, I'll be homeless, without a vehicle, and without any sort of support. I will have gone from a fully functioning member of society to a transient because of a quirk in a housing market. (I wouldn't be the only one. Exactly this has happened to many thousands of people, and it's going to get worse.)

"You are all idiots" is a distinctly unhelpful attitude to hold when dealing with potential room-mates and landlords. It leaves me increasingly frustrated while actually decreasing my enthusiasm, which I think will increase the amount of time necessary to actually land a place. Regardless. Here we are. }:[

After Phase Three (the actual moving-get-situated part), I'm going to need new pair of boots.