Every Saturday night I get together with pals and watch some bad movie and make fun of it. Thing is, unless you're a professional comedian like the guys at MST3K, riffing is not going to keep your mind from wandering away from a cinematic turd.
That's why I took to drawing Fran from Final Fantasy 12 on my Samsung tablet.
I don't like much about using a phone or a tablet to do things that are much easier in other mediums, and drawing on device glass is certainly one of those dislikes. No tooth to it. Like ice skating.
They say that the point of doing something hard is that eventually it becomes easier. Like exercise. People who say that don't have their lower half failing, looking at life wheelchair within the next decade or so. But this is just me being bitter about getting old.
I can see that saying being true here with the Frans. There is a lot more control even though the line quality is somewhere close to a quick sketch in a sketchbook than finished art.
While it's hard to point at directly, every success builds upon what you're capable of doing normally.
Turns out having limitations makes you find ways to do what you were planning to do anyway. Even if it's just to spite those limits.
I'll keep doing these Frans for as long as it remains more entertaining than the Godfrey Ho movies in front of me. Making art on glass holds no interest to me given everything I don't like about it at least the option is there.
I was back home in Canada in the early Aughts because, once again, I got screwed by a sleazy South Korean employer. It was the wild west days before the Korean government put their foot down on everyone in 2008 and mine was just one of a thousand similar hard luck stories.
Not wanting to throw in the towel on living in a place that was actually paying me a living wage...
Sorry Nova Scotia. You have always massively sucked in this regard.
...I spent a lot of that down time looking for ways to get to Japan instead. I found out that shitbag lying criminal EFL chain NOVA was running a job fair in my hometown. I dusted off my suit and went in to enjoy a long lecture about how awesome the company was to work for.
If you follow the link above you'll know that this was all a lie. No one but their teachers knew at the time.
I already had some experience running a class at the time so I wasn't some fresh-faced kid whos balls only recently dropped. I didn't have enough experience to know that this was exactly who they wanted to hire. That wasn't me. So they pulled what I later found out was a very old trick;
The interviewer, pretending to be a student, asked me a question about something that no kid would ask and any adult would just open their Japanese-English dictionary to find out. It was meant to trip me up and leave me sputtering, and it worked.
Confession: You can easily trip me up. All you got to do is come in from an angle that has little to do with the reality of a situation. Then I'll be stuck in a loop of trying to figure out what the fuck sort of game you're playing.
Basically I'm too busy determining the size and shape of your bullshit to call you on it. I'm really glad the block button exists.
I was rejected, of course. Dodged a bullet. But it left me sour. I found out when I finally was working in Japan that Nova were always like that. Poor guy I knew, handsome, fluent, got caught up in Nova's well-earned collapse. He was a polyglot so he went to China the following month, already speaking the language.
Some people just got it.
Gunsan, South Korea. 2016?
OVER A DECADE LATER...
I was standing in a science lab in a small elementary school in South Korea. Before me were three of the school's teachers who were confident enough in their English to judge our demo lessons and pretend to be the students. Next to them was the principal and... I can't help myself sorry... Super Nintendo Chalmers. (sorry!)
To my right was my boss and my partner teacher who despised me and I despised her right back. A story for later. To the left were the business owner and teacher of the EFL chain we were competing with for the contract to teach English in Gunsan elementary schools.
They had just finished their demo lesson. It was a real quality presentation too. Power point, toys, flashcards, wowzers! It was real TV, man! How was I gonna compete with that? I barely prepared anything. I had a whiteboard and three coloured markers.
I did wear a nice cardigan over a button shirt. I just hoped they didn't notice that my black trousers were actually jeans.
Sounds like I was doomed? Nah. We won the contract and I got all the teachers of the school saying good things about me. Now how did I pull that off?
I used my five minutes to teach them how to say who they were and where
they came from using easy to remember drawings and memetic hand
gestures. I engaged with them directly. As if they were kids fresh in the class who only knew English via early morning TV. I talked to them. The competition talked at them. That shit works in university, not with kids.
Most importantly: The Korean teachers took acting like like a legit student seriously. Asking questions a kid would ask. Not the questions a shitbag lying criminal EFL corpo would because they wanted to hire some pretty young thing instead of someone who knew their shit.
There have always been gatekeepers. And even if there weren't any to begin with, they quickly arose.
Hip-hop, for example. If you could rhyme over your buddy's beatboxing, you were a rapper. Congrats. You can start a career on that.
Hey! Look! It's Biz Markie!
(Man, YouTube integration with Blogger sucks. I guess AlphaGoogTube didn't think they could mine enough data from this.)
As hip-hop became big business the gatekeepers kept out anyone who didn't talk about their guns. What if you wanted to rap about your delicious breakfast? Didn't matter. The white audience paying all the money wanted to hear about black people shooting each other. Can you rap about a drug deal gone wrong? No? Fuck off.
Gate closes.
Comics had the publishers as the gatekeepers. Not just Marvel and DC. Fantagraphics and the artier publishers too. Heck, even the Japanese industry after Goku Spirit Bombed Shueisha into the biggest publisher on the planet.
Can you draw Spider-Man? No? Fuck off. Can you draw a punk rock cheese wedge? No? Fuck off. Can you draw a pointy-haired muscle man with a power scale? No? 消えろ.
Fuck off with this fun hobby shit, loser.
Then the internet arrived. It was a weird place filled with passionate weird people and it was relatively small. Word of mouth worked like magic. You could hang out your shingle and there was a very good chance folks would come. You wanted to be seen for your ideas and creations and now you are seen.
YOU HAVE BEEN SEEN. FUCK YOU RIGHT BACK, GATEKEEPERS!
Then people started making money from it. They didn't have the name for their method of making money just yet. We'd later know it as The Parasocial Relationship. All they knew is that it worked.
The cherry on the top was that, if you were petty and manipulative enough, you could use that relationship as a weapon against people who displease you. It's a gun so effective that it's still in use today.
Moneyed classes saw this and realized they can make a shitonne of money by promising everyone their own parasocial relationships. They can make money from it and punish their enemies! Who can resist that? All they wanted in return was all of your personal information and that you watch this nice advertisement they made for you.
That parasocial relationship isn't just as addictive and mind-altering as the blue meth is. It's also mandatory if you want today's gates opened up for you. Can use your parasocial relationship to deliver people to have their lives invaded and turned into a sales pitch? No? Fuck off.
Sadly, most folks don't want to fuck off. They want the blue meth. Considering the world we live in, they're right to do so. You can't walk away from Omelas when everywhere is Omelas.
Here's a fun sketch of Fran to take your mind off of your neo-serfdom.
I have been hearing whispers that there is a growing resentment from towards their only options being the gates or the blue meth. That a lot of folks are preferring to simply walk away from the online world like it was Omelas rather than make that choice.
No idea if it's a real social change or just newsblogger horseshit, but I often have a similar urge and there are many days I wish I would just listen to it. There's no place for me to hang out my shingle anymore like there was in 2002 and no one will be reading this unless an algorithm tells them to do so.
Yeah.
But.
Is that right though? I'm blogging right now. Blogging is dead last I heard. Xitter killed it.
The gate is attached to a fence and fenced in spaces are finite by nature. Reasonably there should be more outside of it. That's something to consider.
I have been. I just haven't figured out the best dirt road to tramp down yet.
