Nicolas Cage and The Descent Into Madness

· May 30, 2020 · Uncategorized · No Comments

Obligatory attention to the fact that I haven’t posted in what is close to a millennia.

Okay, since that is now over with, lets get to it.

Since the end of last year I decided to start a quest to watch every movie that has Nicolas Cage in it (This does exclude documentaries).

So far this has been an absolute joyride. Nicolas Cage is accused of overacting (what some would consider to be bad acting), and it is absolutely true. In most of the movies he is in he is absolutely electrifying to watch.

I would argue that he isn’t a bad actor and recently he has been in a lot of direct to DVD movies that wouldn’t have even been glanced at had he not been a part of them.

I just wanted to go through some quick synopses of some of the movies that I have seen so far.

Color Out Of Space (2019)

Color Out Of Space is a book by HP Lovecraft and it features one simple concept. What if an alien invaded a secluded farmstead? What if that alien really had no intentions or purpose and was just a color?

The movie is full of a bright purple and is an absolute thrill to watch. Nicolas Cage very quickly loses his sanity along with the rest of his family.

Kill Chain (2019)

I had the pleasure of watching this in 4k in my living room. Did that enhance the experience at all? Probably not.

Kill Chain does the classic trope of starting the movie near the end and then flashing back to how it all began. Nic Cage didn’t have the movies full screen time, but he did have the climactic end to it. The movie is just a bunch of hits all tied together (quite literally a Kill Chain).

Guarding Tess (1994)

Guarding Tess follows Nic Cage as the secret service bodyguard to a former first lady. He is mentally abused by her until he wants to leave and then decides to stay because of Stockholm syndrome. I’m dumbing the plot down a lot, but this synopsis holds a lot of weight.

Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

You Don't Say? | Know Your Meme

The best way to describe Vampire’s Kiss is if somebody gave Christian Bale’s American Psycho a smaller budget and then proceeded to tell the screenwriters to “sprinkle in a couple of jokes.”

It was a fantastic movie to watch, but in the “Wow what am I watching?” sort of way.

Amos and Andrew (1993)

The premise of this movie is that a wealthy black man (played by Samuel L. Jackson) moves into a nice home and while he is getting moved in his bigoted white neighbors think he is a robber (since they didn’t know their old neighbors moved out).

What ensues is the police shooting at him while he is in his home, and then realizing their mistake and in an attempt to save face send a criminal (Nicolas Cage) in so that they can shift the blame. It is… a movie.

I don’t know if this movie aged well because in some ways it still seems relevant or aged poorly because it is almost distasteful how jokey they are about the subject while it is still such a hot topic today.

And finally…

Rage (2014)

*Spoiler warning if you don’t want to read ahead*

Nicolas Cage’s daughter gets… taken. With no Liam Neeson in sight Nicolas Cage fills the role….

And then his daughter dies.

So Nicolas Cage starts falling into a more John Wick/Equalizer role and starts dismantling the local mafias and gangs. Every single person that might have had any incentive at all to kidnap and kill his daughter.

And for the big finale, it is revealed she is killed because his daughter and her friends had found his guns and decided to disobey the rules of gun safety and accidentally shot and killed the daughter.

For an action hero, you really need to lock up your guns.

I have seen plenty of more Nicolas Cage movies and I still have a lot more to watch. I just wanted to update the blog as well as talk about the fun to watch Nicolas Cage movies that I have been watching.

Obligatory sentence that I will try to post more often.

You are beautiful and I hope you have a good week.

VGHS, Yu-Gi-Oh and the Games With No Rules

· June 3, 2019 · Content · , , · No Comments

Hello all who read this blog, you beautiful, beautiful people.

I probably have said this before on this blog, but I read manga and watch anime. I also watch YouTube and enjoy the variety of content that is available.

Well, I was reading Yu-Gi-Oh the other day, and aside from it being more psychotic than the anime, I also realized that Yu-Gi-Oh truly gets a bad rap for a reason that I think is a little unfair.

Yu-Gi-Oh is very impressive because it not only has an anime, a manga, multiple video games, and large amounts of merchandising, but it also has an entire card game that is still relevant and highly structured.

This is where the problem lies. The Yu-Gi-Oh Manga started in 1997 and the card game started in 1999. The anime (not counting the questionable and spooky season 0) started in 2001, and 2002 for America.

By the time young kiddos started watching reruns on Saturday mornings the trading card game had been solidified. The rules are now known by every youngster in the land.

So when the show starts introducing the card game it becomes apparent that every character in the show has no clue what the actual rules are.

And it drives people crazy. Rules of the official card game being broken left and right. Somehow the zones that people play in affect the card abilities. Some cards can now be shrouded by darkness with other cards revealing them.

This is the most nonsensical amount of blatant rule breaking that could ever be in a show.

And it makes most people angry.

But most people don’t understand that the actual plot came way before the card game.

I’ve talked about shifting my frame of reference on this blog before, and I brought up how much I love Banjo and Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. I feel like this works the same way.

Once I realized that the manga was just trying to tell a story through a story within the story that took the form of a card game I realized that it was doing a very good job of it.

The card game doesn’t exist as a card game in the Yu-Gi-Oh universe it exists as a medium for the story to propagate through.

Another notable example of this is a web-series on YouTube called VGHS, by far one of my favorite web-series of all time.

It follows the story of a FPS gamer boy named Brian D who, by random fluke, gets his way into VGHS, the prestigious Video Game High School.

What’s great about VGHS is that they never describe the game more than what is needed for the plot to advance.

One could argue that the scenes where they are being depicted “in the game” are too lifelike when you consider that they are canonically just wielding a mouse and keyboard. You would probably win that argument.

But that’s the great part about VGHS, there isn’t an FPS like the game they are describing. They aren’t saying we play Call of Duty like this. They are saying we have a game that is similar enough to Call of Duty for all of our audience to recognize, but with enough expressiveness and flexibility to move a dramatic plot through.

Every game shown in VGHS doesn’t exist to follow rules, because it never makes strict rules that could be broken.

The same thing with Yu-Gi-Oh, they first show a card game, and then they have a couple of rules to setup the premise, which they follow! The rest of the story is exactly that, a weird fluff meant to move a plot.

Yu-Gi-Oh didn’t mean to break rules, they just wanted a card game that people could relate to and understand while still having an emotional investment in.

Endeavor: Projector

· December 19, 2018 · Content · , · No Comments

I have been half completing most of my personal projects because of school and work duties. I have recently completed one project though, and that would be a projector screen.

To start off: I bought a projector. And to clarify, I bought two. And to be technical, my friend and I both chipped in for those two projectors.

Our school, like many other schools, organizations, and businesses had a surplus auction (I think it is a continuously ongoing auction) and they sell things on there ranging from medical equipment to desk chairs, and pretty much everything in between.

I was looking through it and although I don’t have a need for furniture or medical equipment I found the electronic stuff of interest. This included the computers that they had and some projectors.

The good computers were getting auctioned up to their reasonably standard price, and the bad computers were being sold by the tens. What in the world would I have done with 20 desktop computers that would struggle to run Excel? So I passed on the computers.

But the projectors caught my eye. Good projectors cost hundreds of dollars, to have a reasonable throw range, a reasonable brightness, clarity, and quietness (believe it or not some cheap projectors hum like motors). At this auction though, they were selling classroom grade projectors for ~$50 each. So my friend and I chipped in and got two for ~$100. And it was one of the best purchases of my life.

This bad boy can project a 110 inch screen across our living room with crystal clarity. Sure, I’ll admit it doesn’t have an HDMI port, but it has a DVI port and a great resolution (nothing an HDMI to DVI adapter can’t fix). Aside from that though, this has all sorts of inputs and adjustments, and is capable of even adjusting the screen if we projected at our wall from an angle.

We projected it onto our wall for a couple of weeks, and that turned out alright, but we knew we could do better. I started thinking about how to build a projector screen. Now, I live in university owned housing so I’m not allowed to put any holes in the wall, which means I had to build a stand to our screen as well.

So I went to Home Depot (not a sponsor), bought 8 8 foot boards, construction screws, and then stopped by Walmart and bought a single bed sheet.

The construction was simple. It was to be 8 feet high, 8 feet (plus) wide, and an about 5 foot high screen. I have a power drill, I have a staple gun, and I have a living room floor which can contain this monstrosity.

Getting to work was rather easy, mainly due to the fact that I decided to use construction screws for this project (and hopefully for all future projects). If you don’t know the difference, construction screws have a hex head, are super durable, get a ton of torque, and are almost incapable of stripping. I didn’t have to drill a single guide hole for this thing, truly just plug and play.

The first night I worked on it I built the projector screen (8×5 feet) which left 2 posts dangled downwards supporting the whole thing. It sat as the interim projector screen design until I could think up a good foot design for the stand, and had enough time to construct it… This took a couple of weeks (at least 3 or 4).

Finally school ended and I had time and energy and creativity to complete it. I went back out to Home Depot bought one more 8 foot board, and had them chop it into 1 foot boards, and then went home and assembled the rest.

Here is the final result.

While assembling the feet, I also extended the screen down another foot or so, since we knew we could fit a little more of the up/down projection on an 8 foot screen. It turned out pretty well.

The total cost for this sweet home theater setup (if you exclude the price of the tools):

  • 8 foot boards * 9 ~ $27
  • Box of construction screws ~ $5
  • Projector – $50
  • Bed Sheet – $10

Total Price: ~ $92

For a 105 inch screen and the ability to fulfill 8th grade me’s dream of playing Guitar Hero on a big projector screen, this was a pretty worthwhile and fun project to complete.

Space Capitalism

· May 6, 2018 · Content · · No Comments

My friends and I play plenty of board games and we come across some really fun and unique ones.

Some of my recommendations consist of:

Settlers of Catan, it’s a classic game of trading resources.

catan.png

Splendor, a deck building game involving become the best jeweler around.

splendor.png

Betrayal at House on the Hill, a world building game where all of the players explore a haunted house.

Betrayal_gallery_1_0.jpg

 

All of these games are super fun because they take really simple elements and stack them on top of each other to create a complex strategy environment. The learning curve on these games aren’t steep. You can pick them up really fast.

Catan is probably the hardest one to understand the first time you play, but that’s mostly due to the freedom given to the players, and the edge cases that don’t appear in the general rules.

Today though, we aren’t talking about any of these popular, well thought out games. We’re talking about a game that my friends and I found in a Half-Price Books one time.

It’s called Trailblazer.

trail.jpg

Trailblazer was a part of a series of games that came out in the 80’s by a company called Metagaming.

What Metagaming would do is release a rule book and board (which was mainly a grid) and then have the players be in charge of maintaining the board and game conditions.

From what I’ve gathered Trailblazer was one of the less popular ones.

Trailblazer defines itself as “A game of space exploration and economic exploitation based on supply and demand.”

On the back of the box, they state “Libertarians will love it.”

If those two sentences don’t have you sold I don’t know what will.

The crazy part is that the rules are actually really good at making a game that simulates free market economics. If that were the only part of the game, it would have me pretty well entertained.

The tough part is that free market economics isn’t exactly easy to simulate.

The game requires that the players fly around the galaxy looking for more planets to exploit and trade with. These planets aren’t on the map in the beginning and when the players find them they have to:

  1. Draw what planet class it is.
  2. Roll for every resource it produces. (3-5ish)
  3. Roll for every resource it consumes. (3-5ish)
  4. Roll for all of the demand modifiers of those resources that it consumes. (3-5ish)
  5. Keep track of all of these stats.

That’s just to find a planet.

During the buy phase every player has the opportunity to bid for any resource that is available on any planet they have a ship or a factor at. Which means there could be tens of planets all with 3-5ish resources each, all of which have to be bid on individually.

Everybody has a ship log for every ship they have, a warehouse log for every factor they have. The game has a board that has to be managed, a star chart has to be logged for all the stats of all of the planets that are found. Anytime goods are sold on a planet, the demand modifier has to be altered for that good.

None of this is automated.

And so after reading the rules, my friends and I have decided not to play.

Free market economics makes for a fun game, but I have no desire to manage multiple spreadsheets for a game that could take “4 hours to days per game.”

 

I’m a Huge Fraud

· April 18, 2018 · Xylophone · , , , · No Comments

I really hope that title, although true, doesn’t get taken out of context later in my life. I’m a huge fraud, but given some context I think we can all get a good laugh out of it.

Last year in the middle of the summer I started my YouTube channel Xylo-A-Day to ensure that I would essentially practice everyday.

Every day I upload content to that channel.

Every day I lie to the public.

There are 287 videos posted at the time of writing this blog that are all complete and utter lies.

It’s not a xylophone, it’s a marimba (specifically, a Musser M31).

I know, I know. I apologize.

But here’s the thing, I didn’t realize that it was a marimba. And I know that sounds a little far-fetched, considering that I have been playing mallet instruments since middle school but let me explain myself.

The high school where I learned to play used Yamaha instruments not Musser.

Here is a Yamaha Marimba:

Image result for Yamaha marimba

Here is a Musser M31 Marimba (The instrument I have):

Image result for musser m31

And here is a Yamaha xylophone:

Image result for yamaha xylophone

At this point you are either in two fields:

  • Maxwell, the difference is so obvious! Look at the resonators!
  • Those are different instruments?

And as a person who has had 6 years of mallet instrument experience by the time I got out of high school, I’m ashamed to say that somehow after a year of playing on a marimba I’m just now realizing that it is a marimba.

All throughout my time playing mallet instruments I was always a little upset when people would call every mallet instrument a xylophone. I’ve become my own worst nightmare. For a year, I’ve been running a channel on the premise that it is in fact a xylophone.

Hindsight is 20/20. Now that I look at it I can’t believe I ever thought it was a xylophone. But I understand what led me to that assumption.

Here is list of all of the blunders that led me to believe for a whole year that I’ve been playing a xylophone:

  • When I was told about it in the first place, I was told it was a xylophone.
  • Bar Width, I didn’t know marimbas could have fixed width bars.
    • A Yamaha Marimba increases bar width and length the lower the pitch gets.
    • A Yamaha Xylophone has a fixed width and the bar itself gets longer.
    • A Musser M31 marimba has a fixed width bar and the bar itself gets longer.
  • When I got it I completely spaced on the fact that resonators are not supposed to be that long for a xylophone. That one is fully on me.
  • It isn’t in great condition. It’s not necessarily in bad condition, but the lower frequencies cause the resonators to rattle a lot, so I prefer not to play them. This meant I mainly played and heard the higher end of the marimba, which is more xylophone-ey than marimba-ey.
  • In the euphoria of receiving a mallet instrument I played it without question, which means that up until last Sunday I never looked actually looked up the model of the instrument. That one is fully on me as well.

So does this mean that I am going to name change Xylo-A-Day? Am I going to change it to Marimba-a-Day?

Nope.

My plans with the channel is to one day have a variety of mallet instruments, so Xylo-A-Day is here to stay. I still really want to play a vibraphone on the channel and whenever I get one and upload those videos I wouldn’t change my name to Vibra-A-Day.

At the very least, I plan to reflect from here on out that it is in fact a marimba and not a xylophone. You can still expect me to put xylophone tags everywhere since most people don’t know what a marimba is anyways.

And last but not least thanks to Cris the Experience for making me question everything that I hold dear.

Screen Shot 2018-04-17 at 9.46.56 PM.png

I Made Another Video of Decent Quality

· April 9, 2018 · Xylophone · , , · No Comments

Yesterday, I made another quality video. It involved the Zelda Chest Opening Theme, dry ice, and a cooler.

This semester I tasked myself with uploading at least 5 quality videos amidst the never-ending onslaught of daily videos, which mainly consist of only <30 second folk songs. I’ve only uploaded a few that I thought of high enough quality to check off my to-do list, one of which was the GameCube Startup Theme.

From that video I learned a few things. I learned I could edit my videos just slightly more than usual and come up with profoundly greater looking videos. The GameCube Startup Theme only consisted of me playing one riff and then overlaying the GameCube startup video. It was short and sweet and it looked alright, so I decided to upload it to Reddit to see if I could get any exposure for the channel. Most of the time I submit to subs that can be associated with the videos:

  1. Zelda theme week on /r/Zelda
  2. Super Mario Bros on /r/Mario
  3. Sound of Silence on /r/ArrestedDevelopment

I couldn’t submit to /r/gaming though because at the time I didn’t comment enough to pass the threshold created by the sub to post. So I was left with /r/YouTubeHaiku, which specializes in short YouTube videos.

And it was a jackpot, in terms of my channel at least.

Most of my videos on my channel average at around 5 to 6 views after a few days after uploads, unless I advertise it on the Twitter or post it to an appropriate subreddit, which then can vary the results from 40 – 100ish views.

The GameCube Startup Theme garnered 1000 views in a single day, brought my view count to 4000, making that video account for about 25% of all the views on my channel… which had well over a hundred videos.

So there it was, the flash in the pan. The lightning in a bottle. The fluke. I couldn’t think of anything else to upload that would be of such short length and such high quality. Until a week ago when I came up with the idea of using the Zelda Chest Opening Theme.

It was an iconic sounding riff, it had an iconic animation associated with it, and I could put a little gag at the end, all of which are needed for a successful video. I now even knew of a place that would be highly accepting of my video.

To give credit where credit is due I got the sheet music from NinSheetMusic.org they are super awesome and as the name implies, have sheet music for Nintendo games.

The next step was recreating the iconic animation, which in my mind consists of Link reaching into a semi-mysterious glowing chest and then pulling out the item that he found. Then I needed the parts:

  1. Link – Myself
  2. Semi-mysterious – A fog effect created by dry ice
  3. Glowing – A phone flashlight
  4. Chest – The cooler I bought along with the dry ice
  5. Item – A piece of paper that says ‘consider subscribing’

This was the result.

The rig inside the cooler was pretty funny itself. It consisted of a block of dry ice leaned towards the door, on the side of cooler closest to the camera. I would pour hot water on it to create the fog effect which then created the issue of the dry ice now becoming ever so slightly wet.

This meant that the paper could not be put directly on the dry ice or it would get wet. My solution was to place a block on top of the dry ice to create a flat surface after I poured the water on it. This created a dry surface that a paper could be placed on then easily found in fog.

Then I needed light. I had a flashlight but it wasn’t strong enough so I needed to use my phone’s light. This turned out to be risky because I couldn’t just put my phone on the bottom of the cooler due to the hot water. My solution was to place my phone on a small coffee cup, which I then placed into the cooler after pouring in the water.

With all those elements put together I was able to create the video, which upon looking at the stats, is getting pretty successful. I’ve almost doubled my subscribers so far thanks to the gag at the end and it has also garnered at least a thousand views.

I can’t make any promises, but I’m hoping to try to release a semi-quality video every week or so (something that is of considerable length i.e. >minute) and a quality video (something of good editing) every month or so. I’m also hoping to have a Metroid Theme Week, much like the Zelda theme week of a semester ago.

I’m excited to see where the future takes Xylo-A-Day!

Filing Away Another Post

· March 26, 2018 · Content · , , , · No Comments

Computers.

It’s the 21st century, computers are all around us, and explaining them can yield to some pretty interesting blog content.

If you have used a computer you’ve used or at the very least heard of a file, and you have probably seen many different file extensions (.png, .wav, .docx, .txt).

“What makes them different?” You might ask.

Formats.

To a computer a file looks exactly like any other file. Strings of binary, rows upon rows of 0’s and 1’s. A computer has no notion of a, b, c, unless we tell them something like 001 is a 010 is b and 100 is c. So that’s what we do. And to make it more readable we turn 8 bits (each digit in binary) into a more compressed byte (which is 2 digits in hex). This is turning 10001010 (base-2) into 8a (base-16).

This means that different files are just different ways of reading those bytes. Some files have strict formatting rules and some have no rules at all.

There are essentially two different kinds of files, even though all files are really just bytes. Human-readable and binary. Binary files are files that aren’t really intended on being read by humans, while human-readable is exactly what it sounds like.

.txt files are human-readable, if you open one up and readily convert the bytes to characters without following any formatting rules then you’ll get a file that you should be able to read.

.csv files are also human-readable but have a common formatting they have commas separating all of the variables. These are common for spreadsheets.

stuff,stuff,stuff
a,b,c
1,2,3

On the opposite end, things like .docx, the document used to hold your Microsoft Word document, is binary. It sounds confusing, but .docx is capable of holding pictures and formatting and colors and so many things that a conventional .txt couldn’t hold.

Another binary file could be something like .png which can display cool images given the proper program to read it, but also looks like this when you open it in a hex editor.Screen Shot 2018-03-26 at 3.17.23 PM.png

The right side shows what the byte values on the left look like as character, and is what it will look like if you try to open a .png in a text editor (like notepad). If you didn’t have a program to interpret it (like paint) you wouldn’t be able to get an image.

A couple of thing are worth noting here though. Notice “IHDR” on the first line?Screen Shot 2018-03-26 at 3.17.23 PM.png

That indicates to a .png reader that it is the first chunk of the .png. It has to be there and all the future data is interpreted based off of that chunk.

On the flip-side “IEND” indicates the last chunk of the .png. This lets the .png reader know to stop reading the file, since it won’t get anymore information about the image.

Screen Shot 2018-03-26 at 3.24.34 PM.png

This means that you could shove a ton of data at the end of a .png file and it won’t be read. For example: The entire Bee Movie Script.

LOL_BEE_MOVIE_SCRIPT.png

While retaining a completely normal .png image of Barry from the Bee Movie, you can actually put the entire Bee Movie Script by Script-o-rama.com on the end of it. That said, if you download that image right now it won’t have it on there, because the image reader for WordPress actually will chop it all off after only reading what is needed for the image.

If you did decide to open up a text editor and try it yourself, it would look something like this, and the image would look exactly the same, when you opened it up.

Screen Shot 2018-03-26 at 3.28.52 PM.png

Printmaking Excuses

· February 28, 2018 · Content · , , , · No Comments

I am sorry that I didn’t post last week. I have one excuse and it isn’t a good one. I wanted to wait until Saturday to post because the D&D sessions I have been running would be over and then I would be able to write about those.

The problem was that I got really busy Saturday and then I was also trying to think back to the sessions to see if any of the content was extraordinary. It wasn’t really. There were funny parts but nothing I could make an entire blog post about.

Although, one of the least foreseen and most interesting parts of the sessions was a part where I added a bandit encounter.

Now I’ve been playing D&D for almost a year now and I don’t think our party has ever fought just a random group of bandits. We’ve never had to face the moral dilemma of killing someone vs. sparing their life with the chance that they might keep their bandit ways.

A day or so before one of the sessions began I added a bandit encounter and it became one of the more pivotal parts of our campaign. I did not intend for this. In the middle of the fight our rogue convinced the bandits to stop fighting and we could spare their lives. It worked.

There were two bandits left. Our barbarian immediately dispatched one of them right after they surrendered. Kind of cold blooded, but in his defense he was raging at the moment and he’s a stupid barbarian.

Now there is only one left and one of the party members decides to interrogate him. Then after the interrogation he decides to shoot an eldritch blast at him. No questions, no hesitation, no resistance, no justification, just murder of a now defenseless bandit.

So after what was supposed to be a meaningless bandit encounter our “good” party had to come to terms with the fact that they are evil, or letting evil get away with it.

That was the only truly significant snippet from the campaign.

Aside from that, a couple of weeks ago I made a new print.

20180216_005257

I made this print with the idea that the phrase that you can find everywhere “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” was always a little too aggressive. It might as well just be “excuse my bad behavior I haven’t had coffee.”

Since when has lack of coffee ever excused anyone from anything serious? In what cases would that phrase ever be fine?

“Sorry for yelling at you, I haven’t had my coffee.”

“Sorry for speeding officer, I haven’t had my coffee.”

“Yes I do plead guilty for premeditated murder but in my defense I hadn’t had my coffee.”

And it became such a terrible excuse that I just had to print it.

So I made the block and I wanted to print it on bloodstained paper, to help point out how aggressive really is. So I got some red food coloring, and colored some water and put it on the paper.

All in all, the process to make the print was much more fun than a lot of the other prints that I’ve made, my only complaint with it is that the “blood” really just looks like Kool-Aid.

That’s all I really have to say for the rest of this blog post. I intend to host more sessions of D&D sometime in the future and I intend to make more prints. If I do either of those I’ll make sure that I keep the blog up to date.

Sorry I didn’t make a blog post last week, I hadn’t had my coffee.

Print-Making the Grade

· October 22, 2017 · Content · , · No Comments

When I first went to college, I wasn’t exactly the visual artistic type. Aside from the doodles that everyone draws in the margins of their notebooks, I didn’t draw much. I didn’t paint. I didn’t create visual art like that. In high school I was artistic, I was in band and played music, I just wasn’t visually artistic.

In college I had to take a fine arts credit, since I decided not to be a part of the band. I had to actually take a fine arts class, all of which are deduced down to music appreciation, jazz appreciation, and art appreciation. Going against all of my musical learning that began in the 6th grade, I decided to do art appreciation.

The format of the class was awesome. It consisted of being in a giant lecture hall of about 100-200 students and having a PowerPoint full of art that we would just discuss. Sure there were a couple of quizzes and stuff, but all in all it was just sitting and discussing a ton of different pieces of art.

And then I learned about printmaking.

Printmaking, in a generic sense, is the process of making a block (or some template medium) that you run through an inking process and then transfer to paper. Unlike other mediums you can just keep reproducing the image as well (at least until the block is worn). The trickiest part of most forms of printing is that you have to do everything mirrored, so when you place your block onto the paper it prints the correct direction. I have a couple of pictures with the blocks in them down below to help you understand what I mean.

So upon learning of this awesome form of art I went out and bought a beginner lino-cut printing set. This consisted of a couple blocks of linoleum, some ink, and a couple of chisels that are used to cut out the linoleum.

The result of my first actually decent print was a printing of the gnome child meme. Meme right here for comparison.
Image result for gnome child

I since come to the realization that I inked the block pretty badly on that one. After that I produced a couple of other things, and the only other one that I really liked was a pointy-hat confused bearded guy (I should just make that the title of the picture).

Then, for a good laugh (which is the reason I create most things) I made a print of a printer. Neat.

 

The next significant thing I made was a garlic bread print, where there was a hot piece of garlic bread and kanji (hopefully saying garlic bread, I got it from google translate so it’s questionable). It had been so long since I produced the last print that I struggled to get the inking right, and after printing off a ton of them, I was able to get a cool looking gradient. So without further ado.

And just recently, inspired by a dumb internet meme (another main source of inspiration), I made a print of Steve Harvey that summarizes most episodes of Family Feud.

And that is all I have. If I create any new prints that I think are funny, or a significant improvement in quality, then I’ll probably post them here.

Until I post again, have a great week!

Bearly a Post

· October 5, 2017 · Content, Meta · , , , · No Comments

You know how two weeks ago I said that I was really stressed and there was a lot on my plate and after about two weeks it will be alright? Well, turns out that is exactly what happened. I have been self-actualizing my butt off the past few days. I might even be able to produce some extra content this week (like livestreaming gameplay) which is exciting since I usually don’t have a ton of free time.

Last week was Zelda theme week, and it was a lot of fun to play all of my favorite childhood Zelda songs. It was really stressful to produce, but quite rewarding having people come check out the videos. If you want to check them out here is a link (no pun intended) to a playlist of the entire theme week. I hope to do more theme weeks and more themed content in the future. If I can muster up 7 spooky songs, I’ll play them leading up to Halloween.

That is just a meta sidenote though. Here is the real content.

One (summer?) afternoon my brother and I were hanging out and we wanted to go see a movie. There wasn’t anything we wanted to see in the normal movie theater, so we checked out the dollar theater. Now I don’t actually remember what that theater was called, but the reason we called it the dollar theater is because they showed month or so old movies for about a dollar (maybe two).

We arrived and there wasn’t anything there that really grabbed our attention. A whole bunch of (what we thought were) mediocre movies. We were there though. We parked. We weren’t going back. We were dedicated to this movie-going cause.

So we pick Paddington, it was the least worst looking movie out of the bunch. We didn’t know what to expect, we never read any Paddington growing up, neither of us looked up any plot or read any reviews, and the trailer made it just seem like a cheesy bear comedy.

I now define my life as pre-Paddington and post-Paddington.

It is a cheesy bear comedy. But really it is a lighthearted, family-friendly movie where a polite and tragically displaced bear gets adopted by a slightly dysfunctional family. And through the magic that is children’s movies, every family problem is resolved by putting a wild animal into the household.

Aside from the stock plot that I described above this movie has a lot going for it. It has subtle humor, it has over the top humor, it has fun family moments, and unbearable puns to boot. On top of the family being dysfunctional there is also an arc where a taxidermist tries to hunt the bear throughout the town of London (and fails miserably every time), giving the movie some good action.

What takes this movie from great to transcendent though is the underlying arc throughout the entire movie.

Paddington is a bear. In London. Who can talk. And wears people clothes.

Throughout the entire movie they forget about this fact. If I saw a bear walking around in people clothes I would be utterly shocked. The movie doesn’t do that though, it knows that if it had to constantly explain itself then there wouldn’t be any time for actual plot. Instead what we get from the movie are scenes where they make fun of the fact that everyone so nonchalantly accepts this bear.

Although that shock and awe factor doesn’t exist, there still is an underlying theme of Paddington trying to fit into human society. The whole concept of “I want to be a real boy” exists in so many movies and this one isn’t an exception. Throughout the whole movie they do a great job at making him wear people clothes, making him more understanding of human society, and making his character more human.

Let’s review. What do we have so far:

  1. A movie that is genuinely fun and entertaining.
  2. A movie that has moral lessons in it.
  3. A movie that doesn’t take itself seriously in just the right places.
  4. A movie where the main character is learning to fit in.

And so the movie is wrapping up. Hooray, the taxidermist’s plans are foiled, the family is functional and happy, and Paddington feels like he is an actual human-equivalent member of society.

And then the final scene comes to a close and Paddington is reflecting on the adventure. The whole movie is supporting the idea that Paddington might as well be human.

Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in. I think she must be right – because although I don’t look like anyone else, I really do feel at home.

And there it is, the most heartwarming thing you have ever heard (but in this case I guess it’s read). He is a bear and yet he could still fit in, anyone can feel at home, anyone can belong to society. Paddington’s adventure can finally be replaced with a small boy and you would see no difference from here on out. And that’s the end of Padd-

Except it isn’t. There is one more line in the movie.

I’ll never be like other people, but that’s alright, because I’m a bear. A bear called Paddington.

The entire movie they don’t point it out, they try to make him more human, they end it with him being the equivalent of a functional human member of society. And finally as everything wraps up they slap you with one last zinger.

HE IS A BEAR

They have an entire movie to point out the absurdity of this bear getting along with society, and throughout it they decide to hold back that punch, instead dropping little crumbs of reality here and there. And then the end comes and they make, not just anyone, but the main character say how utterly absurd the entire plot of this movie is.

This is the reason why Paddington is one of my most favorite movies of all time.

 

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