dubiouslog

Today I saw VG again after all these months. I was looking forward to this day with excitement. I’m very happy to be with him again.
However, this is not what this entry is about.

After he left in train, I was to take the subway home. I was getting down the stairs when, about ten metres away from me, I saw a man tripping on an elderly beggar. The latter fell over and since he looked rather fragile I thought he could have gotten something broken, but then the man who tripped on him refused to help him and began yelling all sorts of obscenities, basically calling the beggar a human scum and a waste of existence. The thing went on for at least a few minutes, then the elder tried to defend himself saying he would have called the police or something, at which the other replied threatening him; then he went away.

As for me, I was frozen there for the whole time. I would have really said something to that horrible person, but what if he turned violent? I was feeling weak for all the walking and the hot weather, and that man was twice my size. I feel a bit angry for not being able to do anything useful, but I keep telling myself that after all it’s not my fault if I wasn’t feeling good; were I in my usual shape, I would have had nothing to fear. I expected someone else to defend the beggar, but all the other people kept walking like nothing was happening - if something, they were speeding up. No one else seemed to care.

And this may feel like a rhetorical question, but seriously: what’s wrong with people? Seriously.

How is it possible that a man who can make this
can also make these?

They’re the ugliest official artworks I’ve ever seen. All those unflattering angles and ugly colors. Aipom and Smeargle look like someone’s tickling their butts. Teddiursa just barfed. Delibird is now a nazi. And don’t let me start about Tyrogue and Miltank. Beautiful Pokémon such as Skarmory or Scizor got completely botched up. What bothers me most is that this was the 1999 artwork for Porygon2. Now.

Why.

30+ IN CONTEMPORARY ART HISTORY FUCK YEAH. Especially because much of this success was determined by me making a large painting inspired from the work of Francis Bacon. The teacher was so impressed he even gave me a free book. So apparently my childish and anatomically impossible drawings are worth a 30+ and a free book. In your ass. :>

Even though I shouldn’t be taking such people too seriously, maybe I should really try and write down my views on art, especially as to why I deliberately choose to draw roughly and mostly ignoring anatomy. It’s not like I’m not able to make beautiful realistic drawings, you know. I just found a bunch of old stuff including a self-portrait I drew at fifteen and man, it does look nice. I’ll be scanning all that old stuff from 2004-2005 - those drawings that got lost with the HD failure and some which went lost ages before that (including the Sneasel pic who graced the very first layout of Angeltower Page). I’m also rescanning my old Pokémon comic whose pages seem to be currently located in the dark side of the interwebs - I even found some unpublished pages, so you may be in for a surprise.

And talking about comics, I’d really like to make another Pokémon comic. I’ve already been planning it out. It will be a comic divided in three or four short episodes each one focusing on a different aspect of the relationship between Pokémon and people.
The first one will take place before Pokémon and people became two different species and it will be about a little girl and his grampa. The old man discovers he can keep his niece’s life energy in a ball he created out of an Apricorn, so they play together with this toy - except that, with the passing of time, the old man becomes more and more scared of his child outgrowing their game, and ends up becoming eerily obsessive…
The second one will take place in the present and will be about a Trainer and a Fearow who fall in love for each other, thus compromising the whole training system and posing some interesting question on their relationship.
The third one will be about a “real world” girl playing Pokémon and getting emotionally attached to the creatures.
I do seem to have a predilection for real weird stuff. In case you were asking. :P

Also, I just got approved for the making of the Fearow fanlisting! Yeah Fearow. It took me a whole ten years to understand its greatness |D Sneasel is sticking to the position of favorite Pokémon ever, then Mewtwo, Porygon-Z and Fearow in no particular order. The fanlisting’s name will be Soaring Dread and it will feature an illustration of mine in the layout. I PROMISE IT’S GOING TO LOOK NICE

As for the new Hall of Changes layout I changed idea three times, then got what looks like my best layout ever. It looks so awesome that I cannot believe it was me to create it. It will feature Samus and the Orion Nebula! What can possibly go wrong? :D

Anyway, this post was really about…ME SINGING KAZE TO ISSHO NI. DUN DUN DUUUN. I would have posted Niji ga Umareta Hi too but the laptop mic wouldn’t record the high-pitched scream at the end which was supposed to show my leet singing skillz. Hahaha. As you will have understood by now, the recording is quite low-quality, but I’m so awesome so it should not be a problem. SARCASM.
Here’s the recording. My voice does sound weird in places but that’s because by the “ikutsomono deai, ikutsumono wakare” I was crying like a baby. Kaze to Issho Ni always gets to me. :<

Let me end this entry with my latest weird dream. Involving me saving a beautiful woman with long fair hair by a number of weird situations throughout some really colorful and detailed worlds. And having hot sex with her afterwards. Ten times. And because this dream was half-lucid, I could make her boobs larger whenever I wanted to. My dreams are, indeed, better than yours. Live with it. XD

After months of development, Advanced Blanket is finally up. Say hello to Miranda (look for her full artwork in there, I’m not posting it here too).

YOU CAN’T IMAGINE HOW ACCOMPLISHED I FEEL RIGHT NOW.

Stuff is going on, but there’s not much to be said right now. I’m working on Blind Dreaming’s new index, Advanced Blanked’s layout (which is apparently turning out very fine), a fanlisting for weasels, stuff for Dark Claws, some new artworks and an animation exam. I’ll let you see later.

In the meanwhile, some interesting stuff. I have just discovered about the existence of fractal music; check this out. I’ve searched the web for more but any site I’ve found is either long dead or has midi files which I can’t listen to, so if you happen to be interested in this kind of stuff you’ll have to google it yourself.

The same person who composed that piece I’ve linked to also runs a very interesting webcomic called Dreaming of Eden. Top-notch stuff, if you ask me; sounds a lot like Mewtwo in Myuutsuu no Gyakushuu. Listen to that piece of fractal music while reading this webcomic, it will all make more sense. Too bad it seems to be discontinued.

About a month ago, I had a talk with VG about these alleged “western mangaka”, which are people from America or Europe who want to become manga artists even if they’re not Japanese. Now, this could seem like a choice of life like any other, and I’d like to make clear that I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to become mangaka if they want to; what I’m questioning is the whole line of thought behind this choice.

As one might expect, most of these people have been reading manga since their childhood or youth, liked a few select series and then wanted to emulate their favorite authors by drawing with their style. This clearly explains why these “artists” seldom to never come to develop their own style.
One could say it’s just their way to give credit to that particular artist, much like fan art, but fan artists are not going to get a living from their creations as long as they keep working on derivative art. These other ones have as their greatest aspiration to get paid for their work, and when they do they’re stealing someone else’s talent.

On this same line, I think that the whole western mangaka business is about stealing Japanese culture. In Japan, manga is not a recent fad; the first examples of manga can be traced back to the 19th century with Hokusai. As of now, manga is an essential part of their culture; think that the first examples of pizza are almost contemporary to Hokusai’s manga to get an idea of how important can 150 years be. But while pizza began spreading worldwide in the late 19th century, modern manga began to be translated and sold outside of Japan only about thirty years ago. Not only that, but manga is also strictly tied to Japanese culture and traditions, thus making impossible for westerners to make “real” manga as they lack the necessary references to appeal to the public in the first place. Then, if they only want to use a manga-like drawing style to make comics to be sold in America and Europe, they should reflect more about their choice.

For example, some weeks ago I saw the first number of this new comic drew by an Italian girl. It had this manga-like style with dull lineart and ugly drawings, and this cover which was made of a badly digital-colored picture with the title in Monotype Corsiva. As you can imagine, the fact someone actually thought of publishing her work felt like an insultment to me. Not only it had as much quality as a thirteen-years-old’s first attempt with comics, it was almost as if she was using a random manga style to be as hip and trendy as possible.

What I’m saying could work with anything, of course. If some Russian wrote a great comic and everybody started to emulate him it would really be the same, but since here we’re talking about manga, here’s it.
The worst thing is that these western mangaka could actually be decent comic artists if they bothered to think about their work and developed their own style, but no, they want to live in someone else’s shadow and in another culture’s shadow, unable to understand that what they’re actually doing is nothing short of insulting their pet authors.

Will post new artworks later.

Guess what me and VG have been doing today

THIS IS A MAJOR WIN FOR US.
well actually it was mostly him doing all the hard work like cooking the rice and rolling the sushi but hey. not like he would’ve let me do the important stuff anyway.
Also, if you think making sushi is easy, think again. Sushi makes Sachertorte look like a beginner’s recipe. Preparing rice alone takes two hours. ANYWAY!

OVERSIZED SUSHI ROLLS with smoked salmon and avocado! and didn’t they look good. they tasted fine too, though smoked salmon didn’t go very well with soy sauce. not that we were going to buy a whole salmon only for these, lol. we were using some pre-packaged fish used for tapas and we had already used all of the tuna and trout.

Second batch of rolls, with smoked halibut and avocado. In the middle, my goofy attempts to make some use of the remaining halibut. These tasted exceptionally good, though some of them didn’t look perfect because of me overstuffing the roll. B:

TO SUM IT UP, THIS WAS GOOD. VERY VERY GOOD. I WANT MOAR.

so I got a new hard disk and decided to install Ubuntu as my main OS, leaving Windows XP just in the case. Want to see what I got after setting everything up?

how more awesome than this a desktop can get? answer: NOT MUCH.

Also, getting back to your computer and finding this wtf-inducing thing in your mail is just mindblowing, as well as taking this test and getting this result, knowing that’s actually the truth. what.

Yesterday I was also thinking: does the perception of déjà vu change over time? Because I feel like my déjà vus are becoming a lot less vivid over time. When I was a child I had some déjà vus which were so strong that I remember the precise circumstances in which they happened even now, there was that one that happened on a Monday while cutting a steak and I went all OMG OMG THIS JUST CANNOT BE A DÉJÀ VU IT’S SO REAL and my dad was all ow ow calm down
The one I had yesterday was but a faint feeling, though :O

I’ll be posting new artworks later, along with a (long-winded) rant about manga and anime spawned from a talk I had with VG about a week ago.

Hard disk is broken, and the only way to get my data back would be paying a boat of money. So I’ll have to buy a new one and in the meanwhile use VG’s computer.

Luckily most of my data was on my domains so I already got back the important stuff, but I lost forever the large versions of my computer-colored drawings, a review for that videogame site I’m going to open, the fansubs in progress and all those logs and stuff from ages ago, and we’re talking about 2003 here. How wonderful. Luckily, the last thing I did with my laptop was sending a copy of the exam I was writing to Cercatesori, it would have been a lot worse if that didn’t happen, but anyway. The loss of the review still bugs me very much. My only hope is that Cercatesori has got the log in which I sent him its first part, but I’ll anyway have to write the second part all over again.
I may have a backup from 2007 somewhere at my parents’ which would allow me to get back most of the old stuff, but I’ll have to wait until April to know. I could also find someone who’ll get the data back from the hard disk for a lower price, but I don’t know.

Thanks goodness that I wasn’t working on a layout or something like that, that would have seriously sucked.

About the fansub, while doing the translations for Myuutsuu no Gyakushuu I’ve discovered some very interesting things. Now I don’t really have the time to write everything down, but to sum it up the translated scripts you can find on the web have some major differences from the actual script, so if my intention was to only do the Italian fansub because I thought the ones the English ones other people made were already enough, now I’m willing to do the fansub in both Italian and English. Denise, I’m looking at you. :)

now I only have to wait for that hard disk, dammit.

I found a hi-res version of the Japanese Myuutsuu no Gyakushuu. Guess what that means?

I CAN FANSUB IT
YES YES YESSSS

and I’m at a good point with that too, but as my Japanese is not that good I don’t know what to do with some sequences. Is there someone out there who knows enough Japanese to write down some parts of the script for me? Do you know someone who could be of help? Please let me know and ask around because this is very important. Also because once I’ll be finished with the English sub I’ll fansub the whole movie in Italian and I’m sure there’s people here who don’t want me to give up with this project.

Also, I updated Dark Claws with the two Sneasel pics I posted some time ago and Blue’s devamped Sneasel sprite.