Soho News
General Musings
Current happenings
I have to be honest, I have not been in the news that much lately, but really, why bother.
The USA is still war mongering, and all the talks are a sham to manipulate markets for profit.
I think everyone in my circle knows this so there isnt much discussion about the more globl politics.
More of a focus on local wins, which is nice but ya know, local work can only do so much.
I have my belives about what it would take to change anything to the better from this point in history, and it would involve a lot of strive, to put it that way.
but whatever.
As of writing this I have gotten my hands on a copy of the movie Project Hail Mary, I am actually looking forward to watching it, Gosling is a fun actor, and from what ive seen its a neat scifi.
More thoughts on it later (probably just scroll down)
Stonishment
As of writing this, I have biked around 60km from where I live to where I grew up, to my parents.
It was a nice ride, I mainly followed a channel so there were basically no changes in elevation, just following it along the trail with my bike.
I recnently had the pleasure of attending a multi-day sminar about sustainability, it was hosted by the theological institute for biology and was way more focused on philosophy than I expected.
One point in it was always the experience of astonishment, and how we rush past things without experiencing them.
It felt like the people leading it were preaching to the choir, I do this a lot and I think it comes with being a artist.
Observation and respect for what you perceive is a skill that you lear as much as writing, so in that sense the seminar only served as much purpose to me to give me ointers as to what philosophers to read.
(Walter Benjamin obviously duh)
But I have been struggling with my art a lot and I think there ia a lot I can learn.
In my previous bog post I talked a bit about how the post ww1 expressionists and absurdists thought going into ww1 that it would elevate their art trough the experience they collected there.
And I find reason to be logical, experience feeds art, that why when you make fiction you need to takein fiction, though with my recent falling out with the type of storytelling art I liked to make,
I have yet to find something to stop me from meandering, I am getting more happy with my comic work, but I think a lot of it is a rushjob and thus not upto my standard, but I also don't really want to
spend more time on them, thank you adhd or whatever disease I have.
Either way, the bike ride was a nice way to collect my thoughts on it, just loggin out and experiencing the landscape, there was a lot of it on that route.
It takes a bit to get to the industrial hellscape where I grew up from where I lived and there is a lot of agriculture between.
The wheat is growing right now but not ripened, so its this really pretty shades of light green-yellow, with the wind billowing through the bigger fields.
The channel I followed kept the temps a bit lower than the surrounding landscape, so the opresive sun and 30 degrees celsius werent as bad.
I took my time with it and took breaks, my legs are not feeling bad at all, I did train for it a bit though.
Either way it was neat being alone for long stretches of time, just away from it all with only nature to keep me company, it didnt make me want to incorporate the scees I saw into my art,
but I think there is something to it that I want capture, the sort of aloneness with your thought, the serenity and calmness on a hot summer day.
In a way I am describing Nichijou, the manga less so much than the anime, which had these very nice calm breaks between the hectic comedy as a contrast.
Maybe I want to make a nichijou, probably not, then again adhd is one hell of a motherfucker and id have to learn to cope working on longer comics.
So for now I am wrecking my brain over a way to capture what I want in small doodles that arent nessecarily landscapes.
Project Hail Mary
It was good, funny and emotional movie, Gosling as a actor has grown on me a bit, he is pretty good. I'dont have that much to say about it other that it was competent and a nice story about the humanity of people.
It was maybe a bit too fast paced, they should have either cute some scenes and extended some others or slapped on a extra 30 minutes for the even 3 hours and extended some scenes that way.
Media Preferenes and love for crust
ok so recently in a conversation with a good mutual about the visual fidelity of media, I let it slip, that I prefer low quality over high quality rips, especially when it comes to older media that generally predates digital
production. Now I acknowledge that this is pretty irrational, but I want to explore why I hold the preference, since it expresses itself a lot in my art, I love to add a good crust after.
And ofcourse it would be easy to just go "Oh its because of ~aesthetics~" but I think thats only partly true.
Now here I have to out myself as a fucking GenZ or whatever and say, I was boorn in the early 2000s,
by the time I could form any concious thougt about media, VHS was phased out in favor of DVDs, Casettes were
phased out in favor of CDs, the only medium with some of those physical characteristics, were the vinyls of
fairytales my moher and grandma had.
So that means most of my life I grew up with those formats that you can plop in a drive and get a great quality
without much disturbance, and then obviously when I was a teenager you could get a lot of stuff online.
And here I want to distinuish between two differnet kinds of "crust":
Physical Crust, aka VHS artefacting, Film Scratches or Grain.
Digital Crust, Artefacting in lossy formats like jpg's, downscaled video, and generally just digital file degredation.
Both have a lot in common, there is something alluring to me when it comes to random chance or degrading materials
affecting someones work, in paintings it might express itself as a cracking firnis, for example, which gives
a old painting a desert like texture and shows its age (though often those cracking coats of laquer are applied far later, boy someone other than the painter, because they would freshen up the glow of the painting).
ther eis something interesting to seeing the fleeting nature of a work, maybe aweinspiring, nothing is permanent yada yada etc etc.
A lot of artists get into their head that their work can survive longer than them, make people remember you, and I
would lie if i didnt say I felt somewhat similar, there is something nice to remembrance.
And those artefacts are a reminder of the impossibility maybe.
though why would I apply them myself then?
I am not sure, but maybe like with the caretaker, a piece of music that degrades over time, a intentional reminder of that mortality is a nice contrast to my otherwise trivial work.
There is a certain humor to pretending my work is discovered in that crusted over form, maybe digitized from a physical medium for some sort of archive. Something that is much older than it actually is.
I think at this point I dropped the distinction between the two forms of crust.
So how does this apply to media I appreciate? (most recently the "You're Under Arrest" anime of which I got a rather lower quality version when high quality ones exist)
And one aspect of that certainly is my lazyness, I wanna watch it now and not wait for a long downoad of like 60GB, so the 10GB download is more alluring.
But I think there is also something to it that a lot of media was made with degradation in mind.
The Youtuber Noodle has a good video on it with reards to pixel art (INSERT LINKT TO THE VIDEO HERE (if you can read this send me a pestering mail to insert the link)), in which he talks about how low resolution CRTs would blur the pixels to create the illusion that the pixealart was blurred with much higher fidelity gradients.
And there is precedent of that sort of thing happening with shows too, famously Star Trek, bos TOS and TNGs higher quality remasters show carpet seams or screens covered with black cardboard to "turn them off". This is the sort of thing that lower resolutions would cover up.
So I think there is some value to experiencing those things in that way. NOW heres the problem, I do not do that, I experience them in a arbitrary lower quality than the high quality rip, so not as intended on a crt or whatever.
(though with commercial products like shows there is often the question if there was any certain way these were supposed to be experienced).
Either way, I should probably watch the higher quality rips, especially when it comes to anime, to appreciate the physicality of the artform better, but as stated lazy -W-
Lastly there is the question how that applies to my art, I think the "covering up" of "mistakes" is one aspect.
There are plights plagueing digital artists, like the fill tool not filling corners because you didnt calibrate it right, or forgetting to erase a line, these human imperfections we all know and love.
A filter that crusts over the image can hide those, and in the end the imagination can do a lot of lifting to create details that arent there, so the strategic covering of the image in artefacting both hides "mistakes" and allows the imagination of the viewer to take over to some degree.
D E L T A R U N E
Oh my Deltarune.
What a lovely game this is, Chapter 5 came and went about a week or so ago and I have to say it may be my favorite of them all.
I am a big Chapter 2 fan, the silly antics are really what do it for me in this series and obviously the whole lore aspect is also fun to think about and speculate. But this chapter really hit the nail on the head.
From Suicidal Cowboys to Mad Cat Hatsune Miku, the characters were amazing and once again showcased what Toby Fox is great at, inventing insane little guys.
The development the main cast got this chapter was also really great, the girlies got to eat with this one and the ending broke me and I am worried how the next chapters will continue!
The gameplay was really nice too, you could really feel that Toby Fox was into competitive Melee at one point lol, from the jump and run segments to the fights, everything was peak
And then there is obviosuly the weird route and the most normal NPC, undertale onion eater, and I dont know what to make of that yet, the weird route is very overtly double suicide, but there are some elements that hint that they maybe wrong-warped out of the map to some other place lol. It would fit into Noelles character.
I also think the aborted weird route will be important, especially if you abort in chapter 4 or 5, Noelle seems to be a changed character from the normal route. But either way we will have to see in chapter 6 or 7 how that goes. And man I am so excited for those.
I thought it couldnt be done but Tricky Tony does it every time. What a passion project.
Commissions
Some pngTuber comms
Some Creature Designs
Some Robot Designs
Various Arts
