your neighbor’s bowl
i have to admit to a new compulsion that i’m trying to get under control. not as much of OCD, and it’s not recognized by the medical health organization but here goes…. i scroll through articles and videos to get to the comment section. sometimes i do it first! it’s a sickness. it’s not something i want to do, who would? it’s not the kind of thing that will make you happy, but sometimes, in a moment of pure optimism, i hope to see a positive comment. maybe 2 in a row. or at least just not a shitty one, where someone seems like they have accepted the challenge ‘how much anger can i pour into a paragraph?’
i’m actually quite cynical…… i mean, for a guy who writes and draws a comic for strangers with no expectations. but in the heart of every cynic is a guy who’s just lowered his expectations cause he wants to be surprised. i’ll let you know when i get there. even so, i was pretty pleased to find that someone had posted streams of cartoons on youtube. probably not legally, but whatever. free cartoons! it’s nice to have on in the background, while you work, and it’s just brings me a smile per minute rate of 1:2. but the videos open up with the comment section, live and streaming along side it, a river of bile coursing upwards. because while it seems that 99% of everyone is happy to sit back, and enjoy some rerun animation, the remaining people are fully investing in trying to ruin your time.
it’s been a long few days for my american friends. you guys have had a rough go of it lately, and no matter where you feel like you fit in on the spectrum, the defining moments have been coming fast and furious. i imagine a lot of people have been making some profound personal discoveries lately, and i hope they’re for the better. as a canadian, and absorbing it all from over a border, i feel tired. i can only imagine how you all feel. at some point, polite discourse died, and dropping n-bombs on youtube was born.
when i first started Black and Blue, i got some good advice from a few veterans. ‘don’t talk politics’. and that is some good advice, and i intend to stick with it. but this isn’t politics, this is about basic courtesy. all i’ll say, is i’m gonna try to watch more cartoons with the comments section off, and that goes doubly for the news.
Thanks for your kind concern. We’ll muddle through like always I suppose.
In the meantime, I just got done with an interactive visual novel about robots called Subsurface Circular. Made me think of you.
never heard of it. is it moody and slow and has fedoras? haha
i was playing a telltale style game about a robot a bit back. didn’t grab me. i think it’s tricky to make robots seem relateable enough to want to carry through a story about them. that’s the trick, i suppose.
It’s a robot detective on a subway system for AI only. He’s just on his way back to Management when a manufacturing bot seeks his help out of desperation. A string of disappearances among the mechanical population has finally struck close to home and his buddy vanished without a trace. Detective AIs have high intelligence and specialized deductive software for cracking cases and he needs you to get to the bottom of things.
The game’s setting is real intimate, taking place at various stops along the rail as passengers get on and off and you interrogate your fellow robots for clues.
I’m a huge fan of robot sci Fi…part of why I’m here. I like your approach. Give synthetic beings personality but makes them more than people in a metal suit. They are distinctly not human, and they have a whole set of different problems than their meatier fellows. Subsurface Circular manages to create a big impactful world while stuck in a passenger car. Hell, it’s under ten bucks I’d buy it for you today if you wanted. I think it’s that good and worth sharing.
it’s an interesting premise. i found it on steam for 6 bucks, so i took the plunge. thanks for the offer though. if anything, it just made your endorsement iron clad. i’ll let you know what i think when i have more time with it. thanks!
and thanks for the props on my take of AI. i think that most writers get hung up on making personality points out of the differences between artificial life and organic life, and they mistakenly become plot points. but i think in a future where AI was common, pointing out all those differences would be almost like someone who classlessly makes racist jokes in 2017, and passing up the interest in getting to know someone on a deeper level cause you got hung up on the colour of their skin, or cause they have wires instead of nerves.
You’re welcome, boss. I do hope you enjoy the game. I couldn’t help but visualize the city above the subway in shades of black and blue.
I think sci fi goes in two different directions these days. Either everything is explained to the audience, or nothing is and the audience intuits how the world works in the context of what the characters do. There seems to be an art to both styles as I have run into some duds. Some are pure technobabble and in the other I can’t for the life of me figure out what is happening.
I feel like you’ve got a real handle the latter method. That idea of normality in the situation lends itself well to suspension of disbelief. We don’t know what the dream radios are or what kind of power cells Vergil uses. We just know they work. It’s up to our imagination to speculate.
it’s a lot of fun so far. i like things that are heavy on story, and make you want to pay more attention. games are light on that these days, i find. that, or the things you need to pay attention to are meta strategies, where doing anything different gets you yelled at by teens. ah well, that’s the interweb for ya.
and i think you’re right. you don’t want to just drop exposition buckets on people’s heads, but it seems to be the easiest way to get people’s attention, or to at least not lose them. but that’s a little clumsy. i’m still figuring my way through world building, but i try to ask myself constantly ‘is there a more organic way to share this information’. and there usually is.
Heh…not long after I posted this, my hometown is embroiled in battle over confederate statues. I wish there was some meaning or real cause behind the violence, but I guess it’s good enough to drag down monuments just to get your name on the news.
when i see that kind of thing, i imagine it’s a convenient excuse to turn what could have been a civil debate on regional identity into something ugly, because that’s where we are lately. i hope it works out for your town.
i don’t know. people should just read more comics, and if you have an opinion that doesn’t fit on a tshirt or a bumper sticker, leave it home.
That’s beautiful. THAT belongs on a T-shirt or bumper sticker!
Haha, I should patent it before some rips me off.
As one of your American neighbors, I appreciate the well-wishes. It is indeed exhausting just watching humans pointlessly hate one another.