Praiser? I Hardly Know Her!

I was watching this video with Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais about religion, thoroughly enjoying being a preached-to choir, when Mr Gervais made a comment about agnosticism in regards to mythical creatures, as well as the existence of multiple different organised religions*. This gave me pause as I thought about how I really felt, and I ended up coming to some conclusions that I'd like to share here.
 Maybe I'm wrong here, but this is how I generally interpret the word agnostic: "Since there's no way of gaining any evidence either way, and believing in it does no harm, it's just not worth discussing or debating. To each their own." The only thing I really feel this way about** is the idea of something spiritual existing somewhere in the universe that we couldn't ever really feasibly find out about, nor would it have anything to do with our little speck of dirt. Something I will always debate and argue against at every turn, however, is religion itself. Organised religions, I believe across the board, preach ideas of sacrality and worship that I feel ultimately result in nothing more valuable than violence and hate.
 I was thinking about that Aussie radio DJ prank call involving the royal family that ended up driving the woman involved to suicide. I couldn't understand how being taken in by a harmless prank could cause a person that much mental anguish, but then I had a thought: she let down the Queen. This is obviously just a theory and entirely speculation, but what if she was raised in an environment where everyone just revered the royal family and the ground they walk on? That isn't really a religious example, but it's the same idea, and I really feel strongly that conditioning people to hold something sacred (like a book, for example) or worship someone on a pedestal like they are somehow higher or more important than anyone else, on a basic human level, whether it be a god, the Queen, the Pope or Tom Hanks, is terribly counter-productive to humanity. People do terrible things in the name of their god.
 And of course, this all starts at a criminally young age, or else it would have no staying power in the mind. Parents indoctrinate their children (and that is what it is) into whatever faith happens to be popular in the household when they're too young to even understand what thinking for one's self is, and by the time they've become rational, critically thinking adults, some people just never stop to look back questioningly on something that simply has been in their entire lives.

*To kind of respond to what Ricky Gervais said about agnostics, it's really just the one thing I mentioned that I feel that way about, and I'm certainly not walking around saying "Well maybe some made-made religions could be true I don't know!" (If you could read that last sentence in that voice you use when you're telling a story and you want someone to sound stupid, that would be great.) And I don't believe in auras, psychics, ghosts, goblins or Santa Claus for two reasons. One: they, too, were invented by people, and two: we can and have scoured the Earth and found nothing substantial.

**I'm not agnostic about Heaven, but I do think the basic idea is harmless and even beneficial***. I have no doubt that the simple belief in being able to meet your deceased loved ones again is what gets a lot of people through some of the tougher times. But even that can get twisted into a tool for manipulation when you start subscribing to a holy text. "Don't do this or you won't go to Heaven, blow up this and be eternally rewarded," etc. Not good times.

***This is a thing I made up today about the idea of Heaven.

My Writing Process

As I've been going through the initial writing process for Since It's V Day, I found it interesting to note how monumentally helpful a simple thing like a text editing program can be. I can't imagine the headache involved in trying to organise scenes written on paper, after you've jotted them down in the order they came to you. So I thought I'd detail here how I go about writing a story and why the easy functionality of WordPad is a fucking godsend.
 Basically what it comes down to is the ability to get the basic plot events marked down with several blank lines inbetween so I can easly insert content in its chronological place as it's formulated. Using this method I can begin to fill out the document with more detailed plot points and scenes, small bits of dialogue, character moments, descriptions and notes. It also helps to easily signify where I still have gaps in the sequence of events that require filling in.
 Now rather than set time aside for dedicated writing sessions, I'll usually just go about my day and, as I said in my last post, when an idea is new and exciting, it tends to fill my mind at every silent moment. This makes it easier for ideas for scenes and such to come more naturally as I mull over the plot, and I can simply insert them into the document as I go.
 Once I feel like I've got enough material, I'll begin stitching the scenes together, figuring out how they'll flow into each other, etc. Then, once most of the events and dialogue are written out, I'll go back to the top and begin systematically figuring out how each sequence will break down into comic panels, and begin producing the pages as I go. This is also how I wrote Two Guys Walk Into the Internet....

Since It's V Day

Something incredible has happened. Something amazing that I never imagined would happen to me, or rather, I often imagined would never happen to me. I... have had an idea. Yes, an idea. Phenomenal. But, as I say, it was a kind of idea I never thought possible. Not an idea for a joke, but rather something... else.
 I woke up at about 9pm last night, and for whatever reason, just lied in bed for a while, letting my mind wander. The tapestry of a small story began to weave itself into existence without permission. I considered it carefully, molding and refining it, and before long I knew I had to get up and write it down. Being new and intriguing, it filled my mind at every silence, and so ideas begat ideas, the story began to grow, and my excitement mounted.
 I've now just spent all night and day typing notes, thinking about characters and designs, and sketching out storyboards for a climactic scene towards the end of the story. A purely dramatic story is, once again, something I never even dreamed of attempting in all my days, so this will be completely untested water for me. Maybe I'll suck at it and it'll be terrible. But I'm not gonna find out by thinking about it.
 I'm making this post to mark down in the history books the day this project was birthed and pre-production began. I'll be quite interested to see how many superhero reboots have happened by the time this thing is done. This is a story called Since It's V Day.

Toby

                        

3x22: Through the Looking Glass

28. Screenshot Comic #1

A few years ago on IMDb's Lost board there was a little fad for a while where someone would make a comic strip template out of Lost screenshots and a bunch of people would take it and insert their hilarious captions. The dialogue for this first one jumped out at me pretty much as soon as I saw it, except for the third panel, which took a while to figure out, but I'm pretty happy with how it ended up. I'm glad I thought of something that actually uses Ben's pose, instead of just ignoring it and telling the story through dialogue.
 Also, the M&M's are peanut.

An Ode to Time Well Spent

There might be too much stuff on the internet. I've been finding that I don't write, draw, or even play games nearly as much as I'd like, and yet I still can't keep up with all the web content I want to. So these are the sites and serieses that I just can't fit in anymore. Maybe in twenty years I'll return to this post and see where all these great sites are at or ended up, but for now, there's just not enough time (well, for some kids, that is).

Cinemassacre
http://cinemassacre.com/
Ctrl+Alt+Del
http://www.cad-comic.com/
Explosm
http://www.explosm.net/
Irregular Webcomic!
http://irregularwebcomic.net/
That Guy With The Glasses
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/
Weebl's Stuff
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/
Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series
http://www.yugiohtheabridgedseries.com/
GamesRadar
http://www.gamesradar.com/uk/
Knox's Korner/The Benfer
http://thebenfer.com/
Hi, I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC
http://www.youtube.com/user/ItsJustSomeRandomGuy
How It Should Have Ended
http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/
MS Paint Adventures
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/
Red vs. Blue
http://www.youtube.com/show/redvsblue?s=1
Zero Punctuation
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, Minecraftia

Block with Greatness

My first night in Minecraft was spent by the soft, warm light of cooking sand, squatted in a hand-forged hole in the side of a hill. Over the coming days, this hill was slowly leveled and in its place sprung up a home of most stirdy brick. Already, life was quite comfortable, and I knew the next thing I wanted to do was start a large building project, as was the style at the time.

Lollipop Lane

I chose this subject because, it being a symbol of something I have great passion for, I figured I'd be less likely to become disenchanted and abandon the build. Plus, I could do a bunch of fun quotes and stuff.

"That should do it."

A perfectly cromulent quote.

The first step was to decide on a place to set up and turn it into a large area of flat grassland, and what better construction site than my own front yard? As I set to work steam rolling the neighbourhood, I found I suddenly had a lot of mind-numbingly repetitive time to contemplate the future. I figured I was gonna need a lot of wool down the line to dye pink, so I started making a habit of punching every white sheep I could see, as well as brown and light gray ones for the roof and driveway, respectively.

A Car Hole

Most of the land I wanted to clear out consisted of hills that didn't stray too far from sea level, but there was one mountain, which I sliced down the middle, completely mining away one half, and making a huge natural staircase from the other.

"My doctor says I have the wrists of an 80-year-old."

Soon enough it was time to place blocks. Taking in my hand more stacks of white wool than was probably ever necessary, I set to work, using the screencap included above as a reference image.

"Lisa's window is the next one."

Naturally, a lot of time at this point was spent standing around thinking, plotting and planning, placing blocks and taking them back again, seeing how things looked and staring at empty spaces to try and figure out the best possible design. This was definitely the most fun part of the project, by far the most involving, and is pretty much what makes any Minecraft build worth doing. Hence the Creative mode eventually making it into the full game.

"That's okay, the box is empty."

Once it was all done up in white wool the house looked a lot like one of Doc Brown's unpainted models. The only difference being that I had all the time in the world to paint it. And painting it meant lots of roses. Also bonemeal.

Bare Backside

At first I was going exploring for roses and using bonemeal to make pink dye, but before long, version 1.6 came about and suddenly I could grow my own roses where ever I pleased. And with that, Skeleton hunting by night became a long-term quest, while my days were spend scrounging up some clay, frying up some cactus, and keeping on the lookout for those brown and gray sheep.

"Remember, you can always find east by staring directly at the sun."

Once I got some pink dye going, I started taking out the white wall blocks and pinking them up, but then I realised I could get up to 4 wool from a single piece of dye by colouring and shearing sheep. So most of the white wool I'd already gathered ended up going in the incinerator.

The incinerator (on the right).

Eventually the only thing left to colour was the roof. By this point about 1% of the job had been done using brown sheep, but I was going to need a better method. Unfortunately, there wasn't one around, so I decided to put the build on hold until a more efficient method of gathering brown wool was implemented, whether it be wool regrowth on sheep, animal breeding, or a way of farming cocoa beans.

"We need some more vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream!"

A little while later, 1.9 prerelease 2 became available, and as it turned out, sheep breeding was the way of the future. However, it turned out all sheep were born with white wool, so it was back to waiting, for the moment. It wasn't until the sixth 1.9 prerelease that I was delighted to hear that baby sheep had been updated to inherit the wool colour of one of their parents.

The Simpsons' House in Minecraft

I immediately started trying to round up a pair of brown sheep, which didn't take as long as I was expecting. Miraculously enough, two spawned together around the back of the Simpsons house. Since I was still in 1.8, I couldn't use wheat to lead them around, so I quickly captured them in a ring of fence and then, with some difficulty (those passive mobs are wily buggers), funnelled them into a pen closer to my home.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

And so MineCon went down in Vegas, and at last the official release of Minecraft was here. I started a wheat farm and set to work breeding up a storm. The end was in sight now, but I soon learned that wheat grows very slowly. And here I thought my days of Skeleton hunting were over.

And that's the end of the story.

"Just don't look! Just don't look!"

Always the Last to Know (About My Own Affair)

More than the frustrating car chases, the poorly thought out interrogation system, or having to comb every inch of the environment waiting for the music to chime, the thing that annoyed me the most about L.A. Noire was the fact that Cole Phelps cheated on his wife and didn't tell me.
 I strongly believe that video games have the greatest potential for storytelling of any medium today, except, perhaps, for novels. With settings and themes as varied as any other medium, and little to no limits or guidelines on things like length, stories in video games can range from the latest wartime FPS to the most twisty-turny, convoluted JRPG you can think of.
 Now here's the part that's relevant to L.A. Noire. If you're going to tell your story through a video game, you need to take into account a very unique narrative element that you won't find anywhere else: the fact that you are the protagonist. From Pac-Man to Skyrim, video games are about assuming a role. Whether the main character is an empty shell for the player to occupy (Gordon Freeman) or a fleshed out individual with their own personality (Niko Bellic), the protagonist is always embodied by the player. It is for this reason that you ought to be privy to all your character's actions from the time the game starts onwards. Unfortunately, Team Bondi seems to disagree.
 In any other medium, the main character is their own entity separate from the audience. They are free to partake in events offscreen that may be revealed at a later time, usually lending to a twist. But since a video game actively places you in the lead role, withholding information that your character learns after the game starts is like keeping a secret from yourself.
 Even if a game's story is extremely linear and I have no control over my character's plot-related actions, I still want to be there when they happen, and to know why I'm doing them. I have no idea why Cole had an affair. Had he fallen out of love with his wife? Did he find some reason not to trust her any longer? Or was he simply smitten by Elsa? Maybe if they had shown that Cole and his wife were becoming distant or something, I would have at least understood where he was coming from.
 The other thing that I wanted answered was how long the affair had been going on for. Did it only happen once? Or had it been going on since that first time Cole visited the jazz club by himself? This leads me to the cutscene where Cole shows up at Elsa's home. I suppose it was designed as a hint at what was going on, but I certainly didn't think it would go where it did, especially since there had been no indication that Cole would ever want to betray his wife.
 Basically, as I've said, the last thing I want to see in a video game's story is ambiguity or omission of my player character's actions. I think this story would have worked better if it were anything but a video game.

We're Gonna Skip and Hold Hands

27. Big Brother

Why is there reality TV? Jersey Shore of all things has just started showing on 7mate. The promos boast hot tub promiscuity and general trashiness. Somehow I don't think this is what they had in mind when television was being invented. Part of me wants to talk at length about reality shows and why I do and don't like Big Brother, but another, more reasonable part just wants to say that The Mole is awesome and then never think on the subject again. So I will. The Mole is awesome.
 About the strip: I'm really happy with how the staging turned out. The view of the action is from the PoV of the diary room camera, which allows for some interesting shots of the character as he moves around in a static frame. This along with the BB watermark in the corner sets up the final panel, which is inspired by all those wonderful Simpsons stand by cards, particularly this one.
 The more I think about this premise, the more absurd it seems. Somehow this guy has made it onto Big Brother without ever realising he would be constantly filmed. Also, the diary room camera is the only one in the entire house that isn't hidden in any way, so it doesn't even make sense that he takes a little while to notice it. However, one thing's for sure: Greg is not loving himself sick.

Make It Up as We Go Along

25. IMDb's Lost Board

Back when Lost was still going on, I used to spend a huge amount of time on IMDb browsing the show's message board. As is the case with most forums, it didn't take long for an extremely tight-knit clique to form, and with it came a veritable laundry list of in-jokes and memes. One day I went to the (dead as it'll ever be) Via Domus board on GameFAQs and started posting a bunch of those memes in a thread. As of today, the thread is 338 posts long and locked because I ended up forgetting to bump it often enough.
 Why this ever became a Masterpiece, I don't know. It certainly doesn't meet my current quality standards, but I'm not about to go and change the numbers on all the ones after it, so here it is. In an attempt to compensate, I'm including the next Masterpiece in this same post.

26. LOST is Lost

These two Masterpieces kind of go hand in hand, anyway; this one is also inspired by the Lost board on IMDb. I suspect that the particular thread I ripped this dialogue from might have just been someone trolling, but people say similarly stupid things pretty much constantly on this here innernet of ours, and it still captured everything I was looking for. It even had that horribly tortured pun I've come to loathe so much.