A Little Quarrel

He who quarrels with himself will never lack for a dispute.

That doodle above is an illustration of a fight I had with myself. I thought I made some good points early on. But in the end I became frustrated and shamefully resorted to name calling. Eventually I had to just agree to disagree with myself.

My red pen finally ran out of ink. Anyway, I'm working on more substantial things, but this will have to tide me over for a bit.

Short Stories are the Best Stories

I was going to post this later, but I didn't want the previous post to be the first thing on my blog for very long. Even though I only linked to a trailer, and even thought I don't think we should be afraid to explore topics (especially in stories), there are some things I don't necessarily want to dwell on either.

I don't know if I really believe that short stories are better than all other stories in some absolute sense, but I really do appreciate short stories. Perhaps it is the focus? (Not to keep harping on that.)

Anyway, I found a cute short story that I would like to share. I hope you enjoy it. Notice how much is not said in this story. Of course, this time the author expects you to already know what he is referring to. It's useful to have a shared context with your audience.

Focus in Stories

I was reading this post about elements of story. In particular, how much you can leave unstated while telling a story. I consider this a variation of focus (something the writers of Spider-Man 3 should have really worked on). For many of our media today like movies, TV, and other short form story telling, focus must be nearly relentless. Decide what your story is about and strip away everything that doesn't serve to tell it.

Of course, leaving some things suggested or mysterious can also be a powerful way of drawing an audience in. Your brain will latch on to the mystery and mull it over. So, it's not just about focus. But mystery in a story can only take you so far. I admit that whole TV series have been based entirely on mysteries (e.g. X-Files, The Pretender, Lost, etc.). In the end, if all you have is mystery with no forward progress, the story is likely to be unsatisfying because, well, there isn't a story. All you have is a fictionalized mystery.

Anyway, I realize I'm being vague. Maybe I'll expand more on that some other time should I ever feel sufficiently proficient in story telling. What I really want to point to is this trailer for "Day Night Day Night" linked to in the aforementioned post. It's just a trailer, but it suggests the movie has a relentless and intense focus and probably hasn't bothered to explain the whole context.

One thing about leaving something unstated is that sometimes it's not meant to really be mysterious. Sometimes the story writer knows you will readily fill in your own experiences or fears. In fact, leaving something unstated can actually make it more powerful because of that. You don't know what it is, but you can't help but fill in the blank with your own personal demons.

P.S. Honestly, the trailer made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Considering the nature of the film, I don't know if I'll want to see it when it does arrive. Horror movies don't scare me. They just turn my stomach, and I usually don't bother watching them. But movies like what "Day Night Day Night" seems to be like can be very unsettling. They're the stuff of my nightmares. Imaginary monsters don't scare me. What people are capable of doing scares me. Having said that, I would probably see it given the chance. I don't believe we should be afraid to examine these sorts of topics. That gives them more power over us than they deserve.

Steve Canyon

In the days before TV dominated all media, a newspaper's comics pages used to have a pretty good representation of genres. It wasn't all a gag a day or the occasional long form drama. Among other things, there was also adventure comics. Well the adventure is back, baby! Sorta.

The adventure I'm referring to is not actually on the printed comics page. A site called Humorous Maximus is "reprinting" the Steve Canyon series a day at a time as it originally appeared. They started reprinting the series sometime in January of this year. Apparently the starting date was the 50th anniversary of the original beginning of Steve Canyon. You can get more information about the long running comic here.

I'm not familiar with the comic myself. I know that Steve Canyon was well known and well regarded in its time. I've read a little bit of the series that they've revealed on the site, and I've enjoyed what I've seen. Considering the limitations of the comics form, Caniff seems to have done an excellent job moving the story forward without losing the thread. His drawing and inking style is effective as well, but I have to wonder if people actually ever talked like his characters do. The dialogue seems highly exaggerated, but it is entertaining. Anyway, if you like such things, don't miss it.

Madame Tutli Putli

If you're interested in stop motion animation, you should check out this trailer for a recently completed short film called "Madame Tutli Putli".



I found the trailer from this post on the Drawn! blog. There's more information on the official Madame Tutli Putli site.

If you watched the trailer, you may have noticed something striking about the character. The thing that stood out for me were the eyes. They looked too human. Sure enough if you look here you'll see that they have combined real actors with the stop motion animation. Pretty cool. That will really add an extra element of life to the animation.

I don't know if the story is going to be any good, but too bad films like this (especially ones five years in the making) get very little distribution outside of film festival circles and the occasional DVD. I wish they'd show short films prior to the main feature when you go to the movies, but apparently cramming more advertising and trailers is more profitable. Too bad. Short films can be quite wonderful, but we don't have many venues for them.

P.S. This is off topic, but since we're talking about advertising: Anybody notice that DVDs increasingly have more advertising sections that lock you out and prevent you from skipping them? That's a nice way to treat your paying customers. This makes me wonder who owns my DVD player (I know I shouldn't be so naive). This particular feature (and its abuse) is part of what has led me to mostly stop buying DVDs. It's also part of the reason why I'm not going to bother to upgrade to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. I don't like being treated like a chump. I hope someday I get to meet some of the people who either made the decision to incorporate this control lockout feature into the DVD spec or who decided to use it. I will heap scorn and insults on them. I will try to refrain from kicking them in the balls. ;-)

A Boy and His Stone

I'm continuing my stone carving education by taking a power tools class. I'll be using an angle grinder primarily. I just had my first class today. Using the angle grinder is definitely different from using just hammer and chisel. For one thing, you can remove material much more quickly. About as quickly as using a cold knife on cold butter. Which is pretty fast if you think about the fact that the butter in this case is actually stone. It works quickly enough that I need to plan more carefully. The other aspect is just the fact that the broad spinning disk is just different, dang it, from using a variety of pointy chisels.

Anyway, I had a couple of spare stones to work with. I had intended to use them as experimental pieces. So, I'm not even sure how good the stones actually are. I chose this one just because it is so interesting.


After initially toying with some other ideas, I've decided that it will be a fish. Probably modeled after a koi. I've always liked koi. They have an aspect of grace and peace about them. The gray stone won't do the koi's color justice, but that's alright. I'm going for form. I don't know if I'll be able to pull off the graceful curve I'm looking for (not to mention the fins), but we'll see. And besides, as the fortune in the cookie says:


I live my life by these fortunes.

This is me at the end of the first day. Can you believe that shirt started out black? Oh... Alright, alright... I'm lying. It was beige to start with, but it is holding about a pound of stone dust in its fibers.


As you can see, we are practicing proper safety procedures in this class: safety goggles, respirator, and ear plugs. That bench I'm leaning against was designed (and mostly built) by one of the previous students who is skilled in carpentry. It's a good little bench. We built several of them, and I have one just like it that I use at home.

Mountain Views

I thought I'd push that ugly picture of my van's dash out of the main page of my blog. This is a picture of what I see when I step out my front door today. It's a hazy day. So, it's not the best picture. But I guess I can see why people like it here. This really wasn't the reason I came here. Having grown up in the mountain states, I tend to take all this grandeur for granted. My loss.


I have to say that I was disappointed with sunsets when I moved here (that mountain is to the west of me). It's hard to compete with the sunsets of New Mexico. Especially the sunlight filtered through a gypsum haze (Yo, Alamo, what's up?!). However, the place I currently live has given me unencumbered views of that mountain, and I've learned that there is more to a sunset than pretty colors. Given the right cloud cover, that mountain produces dramatic scenes. I'll try to capture one before the summer is out.

What the heck. Here's another doodle in ArtRage. I hadn't intended to draw a werewolf. I simply started by drawing a stick form (which you can still see), and somehow the werewolf came to mind. I'm trying to carve out more time for this sort of thing.


Now I need to try my hand at finishing some of these. My doodle's tend to look better than my finished jobs. Oh well. Practice make perfect, and the cool thing with all this digital technology is that it is so easy to save these images and use them as reference. In the bad ol' days, I had to use a light table which tended to limit what I could render on to only what I could shine a light through. And forget about the despair involved in spilling ink all over a piece. Anyway, enough about the dark ages.