I Bought This for Nine Dollars
Jan. 18th, 2003 05:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_aeonsI've also been all about the worldbuilding neuroses lately. This is almost entirely because I've been doing a lot of worldbuilding and am neurotic. I haven't been publically neurotic about much else because I haven't been doing many other things about which I am neurotic.
My computer is pretty much working again, and....
Hold on a second. I have to share. I appear to be watching (in the sense that I forgot to turn the TV off, time has moved on without me, and I just glanced incuriously at the screen) a Girls Gone Wild infomercial. Not commercial. Infomercial. Now, this is revolting. Eight seconds of Girls Gone Wild promotional footage during the occasional commercial break is bad enough, and the infomercial in question appears to have been directed by a hyperactive gerbil. Something aside from the whole 'revolting' thing has been bothering me for a while, though.
What the fuck is Snoop Dogg doing there? Who let him have a camera?
Snoop Dogg has no sense of humor and less charisma than Kevin Costner (remember when he played a corpse?). He can't act. His music is mind-numbing. I'll allow as how he has better rhythm than Eminem, but that's like saying he's blacker than Eminem. It's not difficult. He dresses like a blind man in a pimp's closet and, well, he's a woofer.
Does anyone think people buy Girls Gone Wild and its ilk for any reason that does not somehow involve masturbation? No? Shut up,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
keeps, you don't count. No one else? I thought not. Now, is it just me, or is Snoop Dogg likely to be a mood-ruining element for most members of the target demographic?
I know that significant portions of the straight male population, at least, appear to have some preternatural ability to tune out the presence of really, really fugly men in the media they're whacking off to. I've seen Ron Jeremy. He looks like an evil gnome. (Hell, I've seen Tal [don't follow that link. I mean it this time], who not only looks like an evil gnome but cannot fall back on the old 'beauty is only skin deep' defense — I don't dispute that, but since when is porn about anything but epidermis? — by dint of being socially and ethically deformed. And a writer bad enough to stand out in a genre of bad writers.) But Snoop Dogg is totally extraneous. Most flavors of hardcore pornography require a penis at some point and that penis is usually going to be attached to someone, but there's no such vital role in the drunk-women-shaking-their-breasts-at-the-camera-in-public genre. What the hell is he doing there?
Anyway, my computer is pretty much working again, thanks to Keeps, who gave me Spiderman candy. (These are not related thoughts, I'm just very amused.) I'm still waiting on some replacements, and I'm still acclimating to WinXP Pro, but at least it's less annoying than Home, and it's NT-based, which means I get to use some software I couldn't before. So I get to exercise all those artistic urges that have been hammering loudly on the inside of my head for the last couple of months, since my natural media supplies are ... uh ... they're still in the store, let's put it that way.
Up 'til now, I have not ... been known ... for my backgrounds. So when I woke up yesterday (it's still Friday) with a profound urge to paint an improbably-colored sky with clouds in, I had no fucking idea what I was doing. Actually, that's not true. I knew I was looking for photo reference. I painted the sky while I pillaged Corbis for photos of clouds. Then I went to bed, came back to it, and painted the sky again, because it wasn't working. That wasn't so bad, actually; I enjoy blending to an unseemly degree. Does that make me a sociopath?
Sketching the clouds was tricky, because did I mention I didn't know what I was doing?. Shading them was basically all blending, so I got a great, I might go so far as to say inappropriately so, deal of pleasure from it. I was going for realism, but I found myself getting a sort of storybook surrealist quality instead, and went with that. Or maybe I just can't paint clouds. I don't know. You tell me.
I started on the left and got, I think, perceptibly better towards the right — that cloud on the bottom right is my favorite, despite the tendency of the one above it to look like soft-serve ice cream. Some of the edges are way too sharp — what can I say? They looked softer at four times this resolution. Too much contrast in places, too. Ruins the mood. Don't say 'What mood?'. I'm going to scrap these and start over from the sky tomorrow, because the scale is all wrong, but I don't feel nearly as discouraged by the prospect as I probably should.
That's it for me. Bed.
My computer is pretty much working again, and....
Hold on a second. I have to share. I appear to be watching (in the sense that I forgot to turn the TV off, time has moved on without me, and I just glanced incuriously at the screen) a Girls Gone Wild infomercial. Not commercial. Infomercial. Now, this is revolting. Eight seconds of Girls Gone Wild promotional footage during the occasional commercial break is bad enough, and the infomercial in question appears to have been directed by a hyperactive gerbil. Something aside from the whole 'revolting' thing has been bothering me for a while, though.
What the fuck is Snoop Dogg doing there? Who let him have a camera?
Snoop Dogg has no sense of humor and less charisma than Kevin Costner (remember when he played a corpse?). He can't act. His music is mind-numbing. I'll allow as how he has better rhythm than Eminem, but that's like saying he's blacker than Eminem. It's not difficult. He dresses like a blind man in a pimp's closet and, well, he's a woofer.
Does anyone think people buy Girls Gone Wild and its ilk for any reason that does not somehow involve masturbation? No? Shut up,
keeps, you don't count. No one else? I thought not. Now, is it just me, or is Snoop Dogg likely to be a mood-ruining element for most members of the target demographic?I know that significant portions of the straight male population, at least, appear to have some preternatural ability to tune out the presence of really, really fugly men in the media they're whacking off to. I've seen Ron Jeremy. He looks like an evil gnome. (Hell, I've seen Tal [don't follow that link. I mean it this time], who not only looks like an evil gnome but cannot fall back on the old 'beauty is only skin deep' defense — I don't dispute that, but since when is porn about anything but epidermis? — by dint of being socially and ethically deformed. And a writer bad enough to stand out in a genre of bad writers.) But Snoop Dogg is totally extraneous. Most flavors of hardcore pornography require a penis at some point and that penis is usually going to be attached to someone, but there's no such vital role in the drunk-women-shaking-their-breasts-at-the-camera-in-public genre. What the hell is he doing there?
Anyway, my computer is pretty much working again, thanks to Keeps, who gave me Spiderman candy. (These are not related thoughts, I'm just very amused.) I'm still waiting on some replacements, and I'm still acclimating to WinXP Pro, but at least it's less annoying than Home, and it's NT-based, which means I get to use some software I couldn't before. So I get to exercise all those artistic urges that have been hammering loudly on the inside of my head for the last couple of months, since my natural media supplies are ... uh ... they're still in the store, let's put it that way.
Up 'til now, I have not ... been known ... for my backgrounds. So when I woke up yesterday (it's still Friday) with a profound urge to paint an improbably-colored sky with clouds in, I had no fucking idea what I was doing. Actually, that's not true. I knew I was looking for photo reference. I painted the sky while I pillaged Corbis for photos of clouds. Then I went to bed, came back to it, and painted the sky again, because it wasn't working. That wasn't so bad, actually; I enjoy blending to an unseemly degree. Does that make me a sociopath?
Sketching the clouds was tricky, because did I mention I didn't know what I was doing?. Shading them was basically all blending, so I got a great, I might go so far as to say inappropriately so, deal of pleasure from it. I was going for realism, but I found myself getting a sort of storybook surrealist quality instead, and went with that. Or maybe I just can't paint clouds. I don't know. You tell me.
I started on the left and got, I think, perceptibly better towards the right — that cloud on the bottom right is my favorite, despite the tendency of the one above it to look like soft-serve ice cream. Some of the edges are way too sharp — what can I say? They looked softer at four times this resolution. Too much contrast in places, too. Ruins the mood. Don't say 'What mood?'. I'm going to scrap these and start over from the sky tomorrow, because the scale is all wrong, but I don't feel nearly as discouraged by the prospect as I probably should.
That's it for me. Bed.
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Date: 2003-01-18 11:03 am (UTC)As for Snoop Dogg, everyone knows he's the golden-haired child of the eroticism industry; his eloquence and subtlety take what would have been mere pornography into the realm of art, and make it enjoyable for the whole family. Why, by his light alone, he could...bring...Girls Gone Wild...up to...
I always have trouble with clouds too. They look so simple in reality, but then every algorithm I come up with fails spectacularly to look realistic. Sometimes they're good anyways, but it's never realistic. Stupid lack of talent.