Ten minutes after…
Posted on November 1st, 2009 in making things, outbound links
…that last post, Jamais said: "Oh, well all right, then."
Bit drunk with power, me. Muahaha and also ha.
Copyright © 2009 Ariana Osborne • Powered by Wordpress
Posted on November 1st, 2009 in making things, outbound links
…that last post, Jamais said: "Oh, well all right, then."
Bit drunk with power, me. Muahaha and also ha.
Wednesday November, 25 2009 04:16 PM PST
Wil Wheaton has a message for your dreams tonight:
Wednesday November, 25 2009 03:04 PM PST
Here are today’s stats for the fabulous urban fantasy adventure about a neurotic vampire/thief and her wealthy blind client, now with Bonus! Cuban drag queen and military intrigue — and yes, I’m making an early day of it:
Project: Bloodshot
New Words Written: 2594 (not great, not bad)
Present Total Word Count: 83,005 words
Goal: 95,000 words by December 12
Things Accomplished in Fiction: Argued extensively with a seeing-eye ghoul.
Things Accomplished in Real Life: Day-job work; went to the University Book Store and signed their stock as well as a few mail-order books; did more last-minute Thanksgiving shopping; beat head against wall.
Reason for Stopping: The apartment is not clean and people are coming over tomorrow. I need to change the litterbox, sort out food prep arrangements, vacuum and mop the (filthy) floors, and maybe even do some laundry, we’ll see.
Wednesday November, 25 2009 01:00 PM PST
Wednesday November, 25 2009 11:56 AM PST
I, uh, had trouble coming up with a title for this post. Sorry about that.
So season Three of The Guild wrapped up this week, and if the feedback I'm getting via Twitter and e-mail is any indication, we can make a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
Felicia has a post at her blog where she talks in a spoileriffic way about her creative process and the choices she made for this season.
So the episodes. Two Guilds. Fifteen Actors. 20 Extras. What a nightmare, who thought of this storyline anyway?!?! Well, for episode 11 it is the finest frenzy we?ve ever done. I was determined to give everyone a grace note in one of these episodes, and I think everyone got wrapped up pretty well. There were, frankly, too many storylines going on this season, but out of necessity I made them work, because I couldn?t think of any other way to do the season. I think for season 4 there will be a more streamlined story on my writing part, but due to the chaotic nature of this season?s storyline I?m really happy with how it turned out.
Don't read it if you haven't watched all the way to the end, but if you have, I think it'll entertain you to the max, for sure.
Speaking of entertaining things ... here's the episode 9-12 gag reel!
Felicia points out that you can watch all of Season Three at Bing Video, which is kind of a big deal because it means that Bing is finally useful for something. Mark this day in history, kids.
And Felicia, if you see this: Kick ass, dude. Once again, you owned it.
Warning: Assume that there will be Guild Spoilers? in the comments.
Wednesday November, 25 2009 08:26 AM PST
Wednesday November, 25 2009 06:00 AM PST
All my creative energy is currently spoken for, so let's into The Vault and pull out an old post about that time I auditioned for On The Road.
When I wrote this, I was waiting to find out if I'd been cast in I, Robot. I'd had a sensational audition that got great feedback from the casting director, only to find out that the director (who I recall was annoyed at my mentioning the audition on my blog) "didn't respond" to my tapes. It was pretty heartbreaking, and without more specific information, I wondered for weeks if I sabotaged my chances to work on the film by excitedly blogging about the experience, or if I really did just suck out loud and fooled the casting director and myself, but not the director. I'll never know, and I haven't even thought about it until about an hour or so ago, but just reading those posts has stirred up a lot of turmoil that I wish I'd left alone and locked away in a room on the other side of the house.
Anyway, this is a story that says as much about kindness and professionalism as it does about staying focused and doing your best. It contains, I hope, an important lesson that isn't just for actors...
This project has been around for almost ten years. The first time around, sometime in 1992 or so, I auditioned to play Neil Cassidy. I read a scene straight out of Dharma Bums.
I was manic about preparing for the audition: I was already familiar with most of the Beat Generation, and was a huge fan of Burroughs, but I'd never read Kerouac. I wanted to have a good sense of his style, so I could bring his character to life faithfully, so I furiously read "On the Road," and skimmed through "Dharma Bums." I was already a jazz geek, but I took the opportunity to fill several gaps in my collection, so I could listen to Charlie Parker and Chet Baker while I learned my scenes. I worked with an acting coach - at great expense - to develop body language and dialect. I bought clothes from a thrift shop, and went through lots of different hairstyles until I got the correct look.
A little over a week later the audition came. I drove myself to this old church on Highland where they have auditions from time to time, listening to Bird the whole way. I walked into a large empty courtyard, filled with fountains, birds, and a beautiful garden. Only the sign-in sheet betrayed the presence of Hollywood. I sat down, focused and ready to go get this job.
While I was waiting, Emilio Estevez arrived.
Wow, I thought, I'm at the same audition as Emilio Estevez, and I'm about to meet the man who is responsible for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now!
I totally forgot why I was there, and became a drooling fan boy.
Emilio Estevez said hello to me, one professional to another, and I said, "Hey."
There was a pause, and I heard myself say, "I want to tell you how much I like your work. Repo Man is one of my favorite movies of all time, and Breakfast Club is a classic."
He went one better:"Wil, Stand By Me is a classic, and I love your work too. It's really nice to meet you."
I hadn't told him my name, yet.
The casting assistant came out, and looked at the two of us. Emilio was on the "A" list. I was on my way to the "C" list, having been off TNG for a few years, and still waiting to properly follow-up Stand By Me. She said, "Emilio, would you like to come in now?"
He looked at her, and said, "Wil was here before me. It's his turn."
She told him that it wasn't a problem. They were ready for him.
"Well, if you're ready for me, you're ready for Wil, and he was here first." He crossed his legs, and looked at his script.
I was stunned. He didn't need to stand up for me, and it really didn't matter to me who went first, but I thanked him and went in.
The room was large and very dark. Like the rest of the church, it was mission-style, with high, open-beamed ceilings and terra cotta tiles on the floor. Coppola was sitting behind his massive beard, a flimsy card table between us.
I approached him, and extended my hand. He didn't take it, so I sat down.
"You don't mind if I film you, do you?" he asked rhetorically, showing a palm-sized video camera, already in his hand.
"No, of course not."
He asked me to slate my name, and begin the scene. I did, and proceeded to give the worst audition of my life.
I'd forgotten why I was there, and was a drooling fan boy. I didn't want to read this scene, I just wanted to talk about Apocalypse Now, and Rumblefish. I wanted to ask him about Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, and James Caan.
All these thoughts flooded my head while I stumbled through the scene. My Inner Voice, that internal critic/director/coach that all actors have, was screaming at me that I was doing horribly. I didn't listen, instead hearing Robert Duvall shout, "Charlie don't surf!" It screamed louder, telling me to stop and start over, but I was too busy watching John Cazale get on that boat, knowing that he was going to get whacked.
Before I knew it, I was done, and Coppola was thanking me for coming in. We both knew that I'd blown it. We both knew that I'd wasted everyone's time. I knew that I'd wasted a lot of time and money on my preparation. I'd had my one chance in front of Francis Ford Coppola - one of my favorite filmmakers in the history of cinema - and I had completely blown it. I walked out, head hung low.
I passed Emilio Estevez, who asked me how it went. I shrugged, and told him to break a leg.
I drove home in silence, hating myself, Chet Baker wondering how deep is the ocean?
Wednesday November, 25 2009 04:18 AM PST
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Ta-dah! No reviews yet, but there’s a five page preview for you to digest. In short - Ares takes his team off on their first mission. Hi-jinks and adventures ensue!
It’s not the full total of comics pages appearing this week. The final issue of JMS’ Thor run comes out - THOR: GIANT SIZE FINALE. It’s apparently got a six page preview of the first issue of my run in it, which hits next week. 604 apparently has an enormous gatefold sleeve, which looks pretty damn nifty actually.
Oh - as a break from the war and chaos, I direct you at a friends of mine’s parents Sri Lankan humanitarian work, which could do with your support. Go nose.
Tuesday November, 24 2009 10:28 PM PST
I give you stats for the dirigible/pony-express story with zombies, the Goodnight-Loving trail, and a 19-year-old Union veteran who’s stuck with a mechanical foot.
Tuesday November, 24 2009 08:29 PM PST
Nathan of An Un-canny Ontology, responding to the same posts by Levi Bryant that I cited in my Tumblr workblog, asks the question: “What exactly happens during translation? What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?” After mulling over this question for some time, Nathan concludes “that objects predict, expect, or anticipate other objects – they recognize potential.”
Now, I am not sure that this is the right answer — or, at the very least, I would argue that it isn’t all of the answer. Nathan makes this claim because, for instance, “for leafs [sic] to translate photons of light into complex sugars, they must recognize the photons of light as photons of light.” I suppose this is true in a sense: leaves will not — cannot — translate just anything into complex sugars. But I don’t see why “recognition” has to be the precondition. If anything, I’d say that the leaf’s “recognition” of the photon is a consequence of, rather than a precondition for, its “translation” of light into sugar. Re-cognition, and indeed any form of cognition, always comes afterwards; it is the error of cogntivists (which we human beings, unavoidably misunderstanding ourselves, tend to be much of the time) to think that cognition is a ground of action, when actually it is a result of action.
I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly. (Whitehead’s actual entities are a bit like Leibniz’s monads, but actual entities touch each other directly, as monads do not. Cf. also Gabriel Tarde, who posits monads that — unlike Leibniz’s — interact with one another directly).
Levi puts it this way:
One of Harman?s core claims is that objects withdraw from one another or never directly encounter one another. This is the Kantian moment in Harman?s ontology. Where Kant holds that we never have direct access to the thing-in-itself, emphasizing the relationship between mind and thing-in-itself, Harman generalizes this thesis to all relations between things, regardless of whether or not humans are involved. This is precisely why Harman?s ontology, despite being an ontological realism is also an epistemological anti-realism. In my own ontology, I refer to this general feature of things with the concept of ?translation?. As Gadamer (and Quine) taught us, every translation is a transformation. (from this post)
I largely agree with this (as I’ve said before, here and here). I think that it is precisely right to generalize what Kant says about the mind’s encounter with external reality to all interactions between/among objects. However: unlike Levi, I am unwilling to equate Kant’s argument for the cognitive inaccessibility to the thing-in-itself with the thesis that “objects never directly encounter one another.” This is because contact or encounter cannot be reduced to cognitive access. In Kant’s account, we are affected by things-in-themselves, even though we can never know them. This is indeed the source of one of the most-remarked problems with Kant’s thought: he seems to be saying that, in some sense, things-in-themselves cause our perceptions of them, even though he explicitly says that causality is merely phenomenal (i.e. merely produced by the way our minds organize our sensations). There are two ways to resolve this dilemma. One is Hegel’s and Zizek’s way, which absolutizes Mind or Spirit or Subject, by saying that even the inaccessibility of things-in-themselves is in fact posited by the Mind in the first place. Obviously, I find this undesirable. The other alternative — or, more precisely, the move in the opposite direction — consists in distinguishing the way things affect other things from “causality” understood as a Transcendental Category (i.e. roughly, as a form of cognition). Causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that the mind is non-cognitively affected by things-in-themselves. Or — to make the speculative realist generalization — causality, as a cognitive category, isn’t adequate to describe the way that an object affects, or is affected by, another object.This is one way of describing Whitehead’s distinction between “causal efficacy” (what I am calling non-cognitive affectivity) and “presentational immediacy” (which, for Whitehead, means the type of causal connection discussed by Hume and by Kant).
So I agree with Levi and Graham that an object never cognitively grasps any other object in its entirety. (This is what Levi calls epistemological anti-realism). But I disagree with their move of equating this cognitive inaccessibility with the claim that objects never directly encounter one another. My non-vicarious version of ontological realism consists in claiming that objects do directly encounter (or affect) one another — only they do so non-cognitively. This is precisely why our ontology can be realist, even when our epistemology is confessedly anti-realist. The translation that happens in every encounter between objects — i.e. when, in Whitehead’s terms, one object prehends another object — is a direct, but non-cognitive, encounter (in Whitehead’s terms, it is a process of feeling, in which an “actual entity” determines itself by making a “decision” about how it will feel that which moves it to feel. An object functions for another object, Whitehead says, as a “lure for feeling”).
[I know that Levi and Graham won't agree with my account here, and probably Nathan won't either. But none of this would have come clear to me -- to the extent that it has come clear -- if not for my puzzling over what they wrote].
Tuesday November, 24 2009 04:21 PM PST
I had a few people asking when I had grown a sexy fringe in the backmatter to PG2.5. I hadn’t, alas. The days of fringes are long behind me. It was my good friend, the splendid uberlady Jill Stafford, as pictured here. Due to me being momentarily shit, we didn’t caption her up. Man! What were we thinking(Answer: LET’S GET THIS TO THE PRINTERS ASAP). Pah! Anyway - our model was Jill Stafford, who was wearing the still-available-photo-T-shirt and does art like this…
Tuesday November, 24 2009 12:52 PM PST
Whenever I write about and link to my brother's photography, the positive feedback is just overwhelming. It seems that people all over the world love his work just as much as I do, and as a big brother that makes me put my hands on my hips and smile like a goon.
If you haven't seen them before, here are a few of his pictures, from Jer's Flickr thingy (click to embiggen):
On his website, Jeremy says:
I'd have to say that my father was my biggest influence for photography. While I was growing up it seemed like he always had a camera in one hand pointing it at us kids. But looking at his boxes of photos in recent years I noticed that he also had lots of photos of pine cones, rusty nails in boards, fence posts, etc. He didn't just capture wonderful moments of our childhood, he also captured the beauty of the world around us that we probably never noticed back then.
I got my first digital camera only a few years ago but I quickly fell in love with the artistic value in photography. I love to get outdoors with my camera. Having the camera makes me slow down more than I would otherwise and look at my surroundings a bit more closely in different ways. The one thing I love about photography more than any other aspect is the ability to capture that one single moment the way I saw it. I hope you like what I saw in those moments.
I hope this doesn't sound too paternal, but I just love it that Jeremy is carrying on the Wheaton Photographic Tradition?. I am as proud of him as I am happy for him*.
Jeremy lives in Montana, which means I don't get to see him ... well, ever. I miss him a lot, so I talk to him as often as I can, which is pretty easy since we live in the future and everything.
For at least a year, we've been talking about collaborating on a book together, where he'd take pictures and I'd write prose to go with them, but we've both been too busy with our jobs and families and dogs to actually work on it. Last week, though, I was able to convince him to get excited and make some things on his own with his pictures, which he put into a CafePress store. I think they're lovely, and I thought that some of you, out there in Internetland, may agree.
And if you see this post, Jer: I love you and I miss you.
*(That's a lot.)
Tuesday November, 24 2009 11:03 AM PST
This is a little bit of gallows humor that I whipped up and sent to Scott Kurtz and my friends at Penny Arcade when we all knew that Aeofel was dead, but couldn't tell anyone else in the world.
It seems pretty stupid and clunky now, but at the time, it was as hilarious as it was cathartic to me.
(Oh, and just to clarify for anyone who doesn't know: This is an image that was meme'd a little while ago. It was originally from a webcomic called Bigger Cheeses [thanks to reader phuzz for the link] I didn't do the art; I just filled in the word balloons. Hey, it's like I'm a Marvel writer in the 70s!)
Tuesday November, 24 2009 09:34 AM PST
Tuesday November, 24 2009 09:01 AM PST
According to Forbidden Planet International, the collected IGNITION CITY will be out in February 2010, and apparently it’ll look like this:
Tuesday November, 24 2009 09:00 AM PST
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