Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Not that you asked, but . . .
My master plan to turn myself into a web comic mogul (AKA Midlife Crisis v2.0) proceeds apace. First thing I did was find a way to pick up Manga Studios Debut 4.0 for free. This is a relatively inexpensive (especially if you get it FREE) program optimized for black and white comics, but also color compatible. But the Debut package is pretty limited graphics-wise; gradients, for example, are severely restricted. So I downloaded GIMP 2.6, a powerful (and FREE) graphics manipulation/creation program which works on my Vista computer, unlike my old friend Paint Shop Pro, which crashed me big time.
Thus far total expenditure about forty dollars to Cafe Press for a birthday present to Karen (that’s how I got Manga Studios Debut for free). To establish a basic vocabulary, I went back to Scott McCloud‘s excellent Understanding Comics, a book I’ve owned for years but have never read cover to cover. Oh, it’s good. I also popped for an Idiot’s Guide to Manga Studios for Dummies, or some such, and DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. These have not yet arrived.
But it’s not a true midlife crisis until you’ve spent a bit of money, and I must interrupt myself by saying that my midlife crises are far cheaper than the average male’s midlife crises, which typically involve Harley Davidsons and Porsche Targas and seven-figure divorce settlements. Nope, none of that for me. Not even the Porsche. So I didn’t feel too bad dropping a couple hundred on the Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet. And I am proud to report that all of my programs are talking to one another, I haven’t crashed my computer, and I’m dutifully working through all the online manuals, and soon I will be producing ART! Or at least comics.
Okay, I’m off to buy a few tarantulas for Karen’s birthday! (Online, that is.)
D.
What am I getting myself into . . .
So I volunteered for this “Hippocrates Circle” thing . . . it’s an activity for junior high school kids who are interested in medical careers. They’re going to tour our facility, and there will be demos or stations. In pulmonary, the kids will get to check their peak flows (how fast can you exhale?) In ortho, someone will have to break an arm or something, because they’ll be demonstrating casting. And I’ll be scoping my throat for the greater good.
It’s not the first time I’ve scoped myself for educational purposes, but today I learned something new. Something disturbing. These thirty kids? They’re coming through my station in six groups of five.
“Oh, well,” I said, trying to put the best face on things. “Once I’m numb, I’m numb, so six scopes can’t be that much worse than one.”
One of the other docs at the meeting suggested I volunteer for a Foley catheter demo. “Once you’re numb, you’re numb.” And from there, it wasn’t too far a leap for another doc to suggest that the general surgeons warm up their sigmoidoscopes.
The things I’ll do for kids.
D.
What’s this then, an actual idea?
I can feel the muse stretching her arms. She might turn over and go back to sleep, but for the moment, for this evening, she’s been a lean brown bear rising from her cave, grunting at snow, wondering if she might pilfer some poor campers’ freeze-dried lasagna. Not sure what the lasagna is in this metaphor. Other people’s ideas, maybe? Yeah. And my own.
Here’s how it came to me. Karen’s been heavy into anime (and to a lesser degree manga) for some time now, and Jake is into his own favorite medium — web comics, and in particular, the web comics over at MS Paint Adventures. He’s been hyping Homestuck to his parents for some time now, and cajoled his mother into reading. And now I’m into it, too.
It took me a while. Homestuck takes a good long while to sink its hooks into the reader — the author has little concept of narrative drive. You have to stick it out until nearly the end of Act One before getting the sense that hey, maybe the author really does have a plan here, maybe this is a story worth spending time with, maybe, in fact, I’m experiencing a medium far different from anything else out there.
Okay, so maybe that last is hyperbolic. Still, Homestuck strikes me as being quite other. It’s a spoof on text adventures, and in its inception it was interactive, inasmuch as some of the content was reader-generated. According to Jake, the author had an idea where he was going, and so he likely accepted reader-generated suggestions that were either consistent with his story arc or at least not damaging to it.
But back to me. Remember my SF trilogy, the one I got blocked on while editing, which is when I started writing that romance — oh, ages ago? It’s always seemed to me that The Brakan Correspondent (or reconceived as the trilogy, Nest, Flight, and Shrike) would work far better as a graphic novel than as a novel. Ideas like that wither fast, though, especially when (A) my artistic talents are limited — not to mention my time, and (B) I could hardly invest that kind of effort into something that would likely face an even steeper climb to publication than a novel.
What about a web comic, though? Updated a little bit every day. With quite a bit less requirement for high quality artwork (with most web comics, it’s the story and not the art work that draws people in).
The art work is still the greatest barrier for me. I’m not talentless, and I suspect I would get better as time goes on, but the whole thing seems daunting. On the minus side, I’d be looking at a Herculean task. On the plus side, I could stretch it out over many months (if not longer) and I could just maybe attract a whole new batch of readers. And really, readers are what it’s all about, since I still think it’s a fine story that deserves more readers.
Yes, it has occurred to me that I could set the novel up as a PDF and give it away for free as an ebook, but I feel it still needs a good edit before reaching even that stage. And it’s editing that blocked me in the first place. If I reinvented the task in this new and different form, a form which apparently pleases the muse since I can feel her inside my head saying yes yes yes, then I could edit on the fly. Who knows, maybe a whole new story would spin out of the work.
I’ll sleep on it. The muse has gotten hot and bothered before, only to return to her cave, so I’m not gonna run out and buy Photoshop (or some other graphic software) any time soon.
Speaking of which — any suggestions on drawing software?
BTW, I finished Kraken tonight. Great book . . . I’ll try to muster up a review sometime soon.
D.
Memory angel
One of the neat ideas China Mieville spins in Kraken is that of memory angels, supernatural beings brought into existence by long-in-the-tooth objects. Museums spawn memory angels, and they in turn guard their museums, sometimes with deadly force.
Not sure if my blog has enough personal history to spawn its own memory angel, but I do think that if I developed movie-amnesia* tomorrow, I could recover most of what I needed to know by re-reading this blog. Case in point: tonight, after watching the first half of David Lynch’s Eraserhead**, I searched my blog for references to Eraserhead and found this old Thirteen about my sophomore year in college. Rereading it, I’d be hard pressed to write a better reminiscence of that year.
Sometimes I think that the purpose of this blog was memoir. Memoir was and is its reason for being. In worried fantasies of my premature death, I see this as a way part of me can live on for my wife and son. And when I exhausted those memories***, the drive to write daily dissipated.
Back to Eraserhead, a movie I think I have to see once per decade to discover whether it’s any less creepy. Nope. Here’s the Lady in the Radiator singing “In Heaven,” a short song that has been covered by scads of bands including Devo, Bauhaus, and the Pixies.
Yes, I know what Eraserhead means. I suspect anyone would — the symbolism is none too subtle. But like David Lynch, I’m not telling.
D.
*You know — something that happens only in movies: I’m fine, neurologically, except that my memories are zapped.
**Forty-five minutes being about all Karen could stand . . .
***No. Of course not. But the safer memories, the better memories are all here.
The latest catch phrase
In the past, I’ve bemoaned the fact that administrators have their own argot, an English made blithering by its narrow vocabulary and restrictive metaphors. Last decade’s catch phrase was drilling down, an Oedipal image that could mean “analyze the data,” “study the problem,” “talk to the relevant parties to find out what the hell happened,” and probably half a dozen other concepts. In a phenomenon well known to anyone familiar with corporate board meetings, The Boss would use “drilling down” in a sentence, and then everyone else in the room would have to drill down on something or another. It got tedious.
Today, I found out this decade’s catch phrase. I was down in Pasadena for our big chief’s meeting and our regional business meeting, quite literally an all-day affair involving lots of talking, some not-very-good food, and a medley of egos. (To be fair, the egos were calm today. The bull elephants saw no need to slam chests.) And in the midst of this, everyone was leveraging.
Leveraging, I gather, can mean “use our collective might to force the powers that be to do our will,” “use our numbers and organizational status to do some pretty awesome research,” or “cajole, wheedle, and bully.” Our regional chief said “leveraging” and suddenly all the chiefs had to “leverage” something. God forbid any chief’s car got a flat and he had to leverage his car to put on the spare. He would have been tossed out of the meeting for the sin of literalism.
Leverage this.
That said, it was a productive meeting. Minimum of bullshit, a good solid working meeting, which is what we surgeons are good at when we’re at our best. I learned a few things, which is always nice. And I got to have dinner with my sis tonight, which is nice, too.
By the way, I am about 3/5 of the way through Mieville’s Kraken, and I have to say that this is the book American Gods wanted to be, and then some. Maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I think not. (More like, I’m comparing British fantasist with British fantasist.) Kraken is consistently funny, innovative, exciting, engaging. So good, in fact, that I’m starting to think that just maybe I should give Mieville’s earlier work a second chance.
D.