Who knew?

This is an almost cripplingly depressing piece of Japanese performance art about a robot. It isn’t a sad robot in the way that Sad Robot is a sad robot, but it is certainly enough to make you do that wistful sigh before you click the x and start watching porn again.

This is not work safe, but you shouldn’t be at work anyway and should be out frolicking in the fields free of commercialization and the evil overlords in polo shirts and bad ties that control your life. But, just in case you are at work, this AIDS awareness spot (you know, just in case you weren’t aware it existed or anything) contains a whole lot of naughty parts. It is also decidedly awesome.

Sometimes I wish writers still used quills and parchment. Acting frustrated over a blank word document just isn’t as dramatic an image. You end up looking less like an artist struggling with his vision and more like a dude who is slightly uncomfortable with his game of spider solitaire. I say this because the last two weeks have been brutal for my creativity. At first it was because I was sick, but now I feel like being sick somehow burnt out the part of my brain that converts ideas to words. There is nothing more frustrating to me than having ideas but not being happy with how they are being conveyed. One of the reasons I picked up video game journalism was because I needed a creative outlet for when my mind wouldn’t let me get any writing done and, as the moderate success I’ve had with that whole deal shows, it has been a pretty good formula. Recently however, I have found myself with an increasingly strong desire to do more with what little talent I actually possess. Yet I haven’t been happy with a single thing I’ve put to text in a month. I seemed to accidentally disengage the part of me that does video game journalism from the part of me that wants to make word-art. This isn’t to say I don’t like writing about games, I love it, and I still think my reviews and style are creative and original within the industry, but it is no longer filling my artistic coffers. I need to write- really write- more. I have pages upon pages of ideas I think are fantastic, and I have even more swirling around in my brain, but I just have no motivation/muse/morale and am having the hardest time getting things down.

My brain is weird though. When I’m in a creative lull like this and the artistic process isn’t coming easy to me, I get incredibly jealous of people with artistic ability they can convey in more visually and aurally pleasing ways. Painters, musicians, photographers, et al. Maybe it is just because I’m a basket case about my writing, with my hangups and superstitions and all, but I get jealous because in typical “grass is always greener” fashion it just seems easier for musicians or performance artists to get feedback on their work. Which, in turn, makes it easier to create it. It isn’t necessarily a confidence thing, I know my writing is good, but it just seems more frustrating for a writer. Hell, I’ve had people even say that I can’t call myself an artist because artists “draw or paint” which just struck me as so offensive. I always feel an artist is someone with a desire to create, regardless of what medium they use. I understand where those people come from though, because a painter or a musician can make art that appeals to people at a base level. A good painter creates a painting that people can look at and discuss easily. A performance artist puts themselves into a piece and people can view it and be moved by it. A musician plays a song and people hear it and acknowledge it. They do this with amazing visuals or pleasing audio. What I do looks like a bank statement no matter what. The only people that see beauty in words are other writers.

That is why I wish we used parchment and quill pens still. That was the only time a writers plight could be made a visual and easily understandable thing. If I visit a friend who plays an instrument and they are having a hard time doing something, it is noticeable. You can commiserate easily. Same with an “real” artist who like draws or paints. Go to their house during a creatively frustrating time and see crumpled sketches, half-finished canvas, and eraser shavings sprinkled on their desk like snow. Back in the day it would be the same thing with a writer. The mental image of a struggling writer with paper strewn about and their head hanging in their hands is a powerful one, and one that kind of gets lost nowadays. When I get frustrated with my writing what do I do? I hit backspace a bunch of times or open up a new word document. There simply isn’t enough dramatics there for me. I know it sounds kind of ridiculous, but it goes back to that comment about writers “not being real artists” that bothered me so much.

Luckily my jealousy of other artists is only a superficial jealousy. Because the irony is that I find people who do express their vision and do it uncompromisingly to be the most stabelizing thing during times like this. It seems that anytime I have trouble creating I tend to find inspiration in other artists. I can kind of track my creative periods by this. For example, when I finished my first still unpublished novel I did it during a time when I got into the incredibly underrated Ryan Armand’s comics- especially minus which you may have seen me talk about here before. I use inspiration here in a different sense then usually expected though. The novel I finished during that creative high point didn’t reflect his work at all. It was just the sheer fact that someone as talented as him was doing what he wanted and making a living by following his creative vision. You can always tell the difference between somebody that does something because they want to make money doing it, and somebody who does something whether or not they make money doing it at all. It is that latter category that helps give me inspiration. So I’ve found that usually when my respect for an artist reaches its peak is when I’m most motivated and find it easiest to focus on conveying things. The positive of this is that I’ve recently rediscovered Amanda Fucking Palmer. I say rediscovered because I think it is a prerequisite that every artsy current/ex-goth kid in the North East have at least a passing enjoyment of The Dresden Dolls. But after they went on their hiatus, I kind of put them out of memory. Then last year I got a copy of Who Killed Amanda Palmer and never really gave it more than a cursory listen, it was enjoyable but didn’t really register for various inexplicable reasons. Now that I’m in a creative lull, however, I had been churning through my Neil Gaiman collection (another thing I do when I am lacking motivation/inspiration/focus) and checked to see if anything new was coming down the pipeline. This lead me to reading something about him getting engaged to Miss Amanda Palmer. I figured, hey, if my authorial idol, one of the most brilliant writers in existence, fell in love with the broad the least I could do is listen to her album again.

So as I warm up and realize what a creative powerhouse she is, and more importantly how dedicated to her art she is, maybe a switch will go off in my head like it did when I first discovered minus or the first time I picked up a Sandman comic and decided that was what I wanted to do with my life. If so I guess I’ll send her a fruit basket.

Sometimes the internet creates something that wholly justifies this little experiment. People can point to the internet as the decline of western civilization or whatever nonsense technophobes are spouting about MySpace or Twitter right now, but if it weren’t for this bizarre free exchange of ideas open to all men and women regardless of gender, race, religion, or what have you, things as brilliant as this wouldn’t be created.

I recently made a post over at Ripten wherein I reviewed the deplorable tragedy that was Rogue Warrior in the form of a Shakespearean soliloquy, and it went well. I have been trumped, however, and trumped hard and deep into the ground never to be seen again. Because an absolute artistic genius has taken the ENTIRE script of The Big Lewbowski and Shakespeared it to the wall of our collective amazement.

I present to you…

“Two Gentlemen of Lebowski”

I hope I’m not the only person to find the fact Modern Warfare 2 is censored in Japan to be hilarious. The things they choose to censor and not censor are a bit randomI watch a lot of anime, most likely because I’m a socially awkward internet geek who writes about video games and wants to try and shop this novel around about a android from the future who fights crime for the government, but is also a pop-star who has a lot of rough sex, but because of watching that much anime I can tell one thing; Japan is awesome. I’m pretty sure they have an entire district in Osaka dedicated to forced Cthulu sex.

While groping girls on the subway and blurring out perfectly good vaginas is fine, showing people get shot in an airport is where they draw the line. Kind of silly, but who am I to judge. Instead of judging, I will just post a video that I think really represents the good wholesome values of Japan. The ying to Modern Warfare 2’s evil no good dirty yang. This is a little art film by the name of “Kite.” It didn’t really catch on over this side of the pond, I can’t imagine why, as it is really a heartwarming tale about a girl trying to find her place in this crazy, messed up world we live in.

Oh and some heads explode.

Oh, and I hope you like high school girl rape.

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Flairs always brings the surreal when it comes to music videos, Better Than Prince was just bizarre and awesome, but it looks like it has just been topped. This is so NSFW that it words do not even do justice to telling you how NSFW it actually is. Unless you are like me and don’t put pants on for your job, in which case it is probably SFYPB (safe for your parents basement).

You all know Becky and I are working on a webcomic. It isn’t going to be super heavy or anything because, well, we don’t feel like doing something super heavy for our first publicly viewable collaboration. Instead we decided we wanted to put the final nail in the coffin for ham-fisted zombie sociopolitical commentary. One of the things I’ve caught myself doing in preparation is going back and reading comics of artists and writers who I admire and trying to absorb their creativity and drive through osmosis. This has lead to me rediscovering some stuff I completely forgot about, and has also greatly destroyed my productivity because I have to go back and read every single one of them.

One such comic is/was minus. I really am hard pressed to think of a comic I enjoyed more both as an art style and just in general. Ryan Armand is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% the most underrated webcomic creator to ever get an Eisner Nomination. Re-reading this stuff again is just such a breath of awesome air. It is also pretty humbling since I would actually punch myself half to death if I thought it could make me this talented. Luckily, I know that isn’t how it works. The only way to become more talented is to hit yourself with a sock full of half-brick, and I only have whole-bricks. So you will just have to deal with my averageness.

You can, however, click below and go read minus. which will show you how things are supposed to be done.