In the past month, sales are up! I suspect that due to The Force Awakens, my Imperial Navy Admiral T-shirt/Polo design is getting some extra attention. But at the same time, the "There are Four Lights" T-shirt has also had more sales than usual too.
As one of my many artsy sidelines, I've been tinkering over the last few years with some T-shirt designs on Spreadshirt. It's actually a rather interesting challenge to create fair use/dealing designs that still manage to play with pop culture memes and make me some pocket money too.
In the past month, sales are up! I suspect that due to The Force Awakens, my Imperial Navy Admiral T-shirt/Polo design is getting some extra attention. But at the same time, the "There are Four Lights" T-shirt has also had more sales than usual too.
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My essay "Blasto Sacer: Mass Effect as an Allegorithm of Sovereign Exception" is now up on First Person Scholar. The idea for it came from a course I started teaching last year which deals with, among other things, Giorgio Agamben's work on the ancient Roman legal concept of the homo sacer. In short, the piece deals with the philosophical implications of giving government agents a "license to kill," and how the contradictions of sanctioned rule-breaking is reflected in video games that allow players similar agency. (It had originally been scheduled for publication last week, but had been bumped to make room for a reaction to the ongoing "gamergate" controversy.)
In other news, I'll be presenting a public lecture on spatial narrative in the Metroid series this Friday. The details are in the poster below: all are welcome! My second update of the day (see here for #1) is the posting of a new piece I've been working on, called "Hogtown: A Satire of Rob Ford's Toronto." It's an imitation of Juvenal's Third Satire, in which the poet listens to a friend who's leaving Rome, fed up with the poverty, corruption, and physical dangers of the big city. Ever since I took a class on Juvenal as an undergrad, in which I translated Satire III and also compared it to Samuel Johnson's famous imitation, "London," I thought that it was ripe for another update. Originally, the obvious choice would have been to model it on Manhattan (the modern equivalent, as John Lennon once pointed out, of Ancient Rome). However, I never had the time or inclination to work on that project. But things have changed! The huge, international scandal(s) that have catapulted Rob Ford and Toronto into the spotlight for the past year, and not for the better, gave me a wealth of material suitable for mockery with the righteous indignation that is required by the genre. And, since it's rather time-sensitive, it gave me added motivation to finish before Ford inevitably leaves public office, one way or another. I'm also planning on putting together an EPUB version later on, as an experiment with that platform -- tentative cover art pictured above. Perhaps, time and interest permitting, it can have Juvenal and Johnson's poems included, as well as notes on the allusions, and so on. It's been quite some time since I last updated the website: that's what a year and a half of dissertation writing will do to you. But, in the spirit of "better late than never," I'm just getting around to uploading some new material. First up, I've posted drafts of the talks I delivered at the 83rd Annual Congress of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, aka Congress 2014, held this year at Brock University. Since this is my last year of departmental funding for these things, and since I have a backlog of material from the last two years, I presented three papers to three different scholarly associations:
Follow the links for text and slideshow images. I know that, thanks to scheduling conflicts, some interested parties missed the talks. My article "Unraveling Braid: Puzzle Games and Storytelling in the Imperative Mood" has finally been published, fourteen months after I first wrote it. (The shorter version I presented, with pictures, at the Canadian Game Studies Association last May is here.) It appears in the December 2012 issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. However, it pains me to note that, despite my pointing it out to the copy editor, there are a number of typos in the abstract -- the titles Braid (a video game) and Life A User's Manual (a novel) are not italicized, and a screw-up with spacing changed the phrase "This technique signals how ..." into the unintelligible "This technique signal show ..." There were even more such errors in the first proofs I was given, so at least some got fixed. Of course, the text file I sent them didn't have any errors in the first place ... It's especially annoying because, thanks to Sage's (the academic publisher's) paywall, the abstract is the only publicly-accessible part of the paper, and it's the first indicator to researchers whether the article is worth reading. Not only that, but it's such an easy fix that I was able to correct the pdf version myself with Adobe Acrobat in about a minute. So if anyone wants a corrected copy of the paper, let me know and I'll send it along just to spite 'em. An update on my dissertation work: one of my chapters is on David Simon's acclaimed TV series The Wire, and I've been doing some background on his previous works leading up to the magnum opus. I'd already read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets many years ago, and I'm currently making my way through The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the follow-up co-written with Ed Burns.
The Corner spawned a 2000 HBO miniseries which was in many ways a prelude to The Wire. But among the advantages of going back to the original book -- such as finding incidents, dialogue, and general observations which didn't make it into the adaptation of The Corner, but instead found their way into The Wire's various seasons -- is its inclusion of a detailed map of the West Baltimore "corners" circa 1993. I've been dabbling with making (via Ortelius) a better version (work in progress above), since the only digital version I could find (see below) was pretty low-res, and couldn't be manipulated in ways that might come in handy later. (Also, making my own version of city maps helps sidestep some annoying copyright troubles with Google maps etc. were the dissertation ever published.) This is a bit of a dry run for a more ambitious map of locations from The Wire, as well as adapting some Batman and Zelda video game maps, since one of the recurring themes of the project will be the spatial aspects of new media epics. The Complete Guide to Figure Drawing for Comics and Graphic Novels: Do Clothes Make the (Super)Man?9/13/2012 I've got a two-page "guest artist" spread in The Complete Guide to Figure Drawing for Graphic Novels by Daniel Cooney, out this month from Barron's Educational Series. I just got my complementary copy in the mail the other day, and it looks great. While any recommendation that I give would be biased, I will say that the book strikes a nice balance between the needs of those wanting to draw superhero-style comics and those wanting to draw, well, everything else. Daniel spends a fair amount of one chapter, for instance, explaining how to draw the hang and folds of various common clothes -- suit jackets, skirts, that sort of thing -- which struck me as something I hadn't seen much of in how-to comics manuals. The reason, of course, is that superhero comics usually focus on anatomy, and the clothes are usually of the skin-tight spandex variety. In fact, often artists don't even draw outfits that could exist in real life -- they'd have to be painted on. Mainstream comics have rightfully gotten some grief for this over the years, though there seems little evidence of things changing. A few months back, my two-word entry for The Economist's regular caption competition was used for the title of an article on Kim Dotcom's bust and the FBI shutdown of file-sharing site Megaupload. Well, now I've won the latest competition outright, bringing my grand total of words written for TE to eleven! This week's contest asked readers "to provide a pithy caption for a photo accompanying an article in our Business section. Both parties contesting America's presidential election are pouring money into tasteful, fair-minded campaign ads such as this one, showing an actor who looks like Paul Ryan tossing grandma off a cliff." My winning entry (posted under my TE online handle Vectorly) was: "Look, Grandma! You Can See Willie Horton from here!" For those who don't know (including some befuddled TE readers who posted after the results were announced), Willie Horton was a convicted murderer who, after being released from prison as part of a furlough program in Massachusetts in 1986, committed more violent crimes before being recaptured. When the then-governer of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, ran for President as the Democratic nominee in 1988, a TV ad attacking Dukakis over the incident was run by supporters of George H. W. Bush. Media historians and industry operators still cite the Willie Horton ad as a milestone in negative campaigning (as well as race-baiting, as Horton was black and his mug shot was featured prominently in the ad). It is also considered one of the deciding factors in the election of Bush, Sr., who was never particularly popular with voters and had a problem with "the image thing." Apollo Shat: Some Thoughts on Atlas Shrugged II, and Why Robert Heinlein Kicks Ayn Rand's Ass9/4/2012 When I got a screener copy of Atlas Shrugged, Part I (2011), some months back, I didn't get around to blogging about it because it was just plain bad: B-movie cheapness with no real improvement on the absurdities of the source novel. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, to which Atlas Shrugged is often compared in jesting reference to its defective, naive worldview, the filmmakers clearly lacked the wit to do a "faithful" adaptation that nevertheless fixed some of the sillier plot lines. So while its lean, 90-minute running time made for some surreal viewing, Atlas Shrugged didn't quite get to the campiness of, say, The Room, and thereby warrant mention on that front.
And yet, with the nomination of Paul Ryan, self-professed Ayn Rand buff, for Vice-President of the United States, Rand's Objectivism is back in the news. What no one seems to have noticed is that the VP pick is a big boost for the producers of Atlas Shrugged, Part II, scheduled for release this October. Anyone can read between the lines and see that the Atlas Shrugged series was in trouble: the sequel will have (with the exception of the producers who hold the rights) a completely new cast and crew. Good luck with that. But instead of beating up on Atlas Shrugged (aspects of which you can read about here, here, and here), I want to consider why the novel's worldview is so seductive to young, naive minds in the same way that LOTR often is. If you don't know the old joke already, it goes something like this: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, concerns hobbits." As Fan Expo Canada 2012 enters its last day, I thought I'd make a shout-out to the various artists, artisans, and hucksters who exhibit at the show. Lots of big companies come to Fan Expo only to replicate their chain stores without any discount or exclusive offers (e.g., EB Games) or just waste their copious floor space (the way Ubisoft has this year). But often forgotten are the little booths set up by local artists, which often demonstrate more creativity and pluck than the big boys. One of the most impressive such booths was selling a card game called The Aberrant Apothecary, as well as other sundries (custom potion vials and the like). Artist Stephen Sauer explained some of the rules to us of the game he had designed and illustrated while sitting at perhaps the most thematically unified set-up at the Expo: the whole thing was an assemblage of fold-out shelves and planks made to look like an ol'-timey traveling shopkeeper's kit. Those looking for more badass artifacts might be impressed by the custom sculptures by Spawning Pool Studios. The kits there might have been pricey, but they had a lot more personality than the off-the-shelf sculpture superhero models sold at the nearby comic-shop retailers, which were in some cases not much cheaper. |
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