slay the phobes
welcome back! i’ve noticed a slump in readership over the holiday break. but i’m starting to notice some of you trickling back. presumably you’re all snowed in, and desperate for entertainment now, recovering from your new year’s hangovers.
story time! so, when i was a young man, i had a commodore 64. if you didn’t know how old i was, you can do the math now cause i think i locked myself into a bracket with that one. i also had a mo..zzztttt……krk..krk..kr……eeeeeeeeep… modem. by comparison, the song that took your iphone 3 seconds to download would have taken about a month back in the day. i’m exaggerating, but not by that much. BUT, a paragraph of text was still pretty fast to share, relatively, so BBSes were born. sort of like reddit, but with petty losers with nothing better to do but shout opinions into…. yeah, ok, so just like reddit. i joke.
in a way, i got a taste of the internet before a lot of other people did, cause i was one of the nerds on the ground floor. you’d think i’d have learned before anyone that getting in an argument with someone on the web was foolhardy, but i learn the hard way. so, why do i share this? ok, well, when my parents became aware that the modem was actually making calls (based on local numbers i gave it) they smashed the landline outlet in the basement, where the computer was. their thinking was that they couldn’t be sure they weren’t being billed secret charges i was accruing in my cpu adventures. ‘war games’ with mathew broderick taught kids that computers had reach and ability, but they taught parents to be scared of the very wires in their homes.
i think this was one of the earliest moments i can remember being offended by technophobic behavior. it’s not the healthy respect we should have for science, but the caveman drive to snuff out new things, rather than try to understand them. explaining something till your blue in the face to someone who doesn’t care to learn might be fitting karma for someone who delighted in torturing teachers as much as i did, but at the time, it just seemed ridiculous. so, to combat ridiculousness, i stayed home from school as much i could, lugged each component to the kitchen table, and enjoyed a brief hour of connectivity as much as i could, with my machine sitting in butter and toast crumbs. totally not ridiculous….
don’t get me wrong, this is about people being scared of technology, not religion or politics, and while people might scapegoat the latter to support their dread of the former, i’m not about to tell people they can’t believe in god cause ‘progress’. well, not yet. and i’m not really a techno ‘phile’. E3 doesn’t make my pants any tighter, and i don’t upgrade my tech more than the average (if slightly obsessed with new toys) person would. i just think there’s something undeniable to be said for furthering knowledge. medieval times might seem quaint if you long for the plague, and the old things do root us in history, but we tend to cherry pick the things we find charming of times gone past. like gowns and balls, and not lead cosmetics and dying during childbirth at age 14.
so, it’s with this, that i come full circle to my point, which is that i see something that worries me about how religion, and especially politics these days, seeming on an agenda to backtrack us. sometimes these things are invoked simultaneously to railroad people away from… well, rational thought. again, have all the god and politics you want, but keep your chocolate out of my peanut butter. stem cell research, climate change research, clean renewable energy…. all these things could be further along than they are, but people with profits and prophets needed the pointdexters to slow down, cause quite frankly, they didn’t want to look at the phone bill when they were assured there would be no extra charges. they’ve been scared. and it seems, right now, the scared people, the ‘money is the bottom line’ people, they’re in charge.
maybe it all evens out. when they get Alzheimer’s they won’t remember that the world wasn’t always a polluted shithole half submerged under melted icecaps.
who saw ‘blade runner 2409’?
i have to say, i was pleasantly surprised with this sequel. they let the original cool long enough, and vaulted off the original storyline as opposed to meandering around it, that it felt new, and original, in it’s own way. didn’t feel as populated though, or as dirty, but that could be just to add to the feeling of loneliness that is the blade runner brand. something about the original just felt like a thin layer of oil and water and filth were on everything.
but to my earlier point, i think i’ve noticed an unfortunate trend in science fiction, where dystopias and post apocalyptic futures are brought about by the hubris of science driven people. a vial was dropped, or a killer robot was built, and it’s up to some meathead with a gun to set it right in 90 to 120 minutes.
for the life of me, i can’t think of any sci-fi movies where the world was built on a rewarding curiosity, and punishing ignorance. maybe it just seems reasonable to us, or maybe it’s just an easy way to kick off a plot. there’s an irony in being sci fi fans, watching movie where scientist are constantly dropping the ball.
my only really gripe with the movie, and it’s a small one, is that i don’t think it stands on it’s own. i can’t be sure, but i think it assumes you saw the original. maybe, maybe not, but it was the same issue people told me they had with empire strikes back. that it seemed like a 2nd episode, and not a full movie unto itself. it’s a hard thing to argue. i’d be curious to hear the impressions of someone who hadn’t seen bladerunner, but saw the new one.
and finally, (i know, this post got long) some art! i want to thank my patreon peeps, my preeps, if you will, for getting on board. it’s not been a crazy ammount of money, but it’s been the kind of money that made it easier to justify upgrading my photoshop, and getting a few tutorials. all expenditures which i’ve put right back into my craft. the faith you’ve put in me, has made it all the more important to buckle down, and show results. thanks again, i won’t let you down!
What’s this comment on the character list, “which, now that i’ve done it, i can see why it was well needed.”
Ah, come on! Half the fun was rifling through the pages, trying to find out who did what to whom for how long and possibly why!
haha, well, yeah, i suppose for some people that might be fun. but the feel i wanted to give people, if they binged read this, was a full season of a hit netflix show. we’re up to like episode 3 or 4. and if you were spending 1 afternoon on it, it might feel that way. but for alot of people, they’re losing track. i get that, and i don’t want people to give up feeling lost. once i started darwing all the characters of any significance, i started to realize how big this got, in a way that having the plots and scripts couldn’t illustrate.
Trope: science kills the world. Actually, the reason Blade Runner is a distopia is because of a war, and then something bad happened after the first movie. Solar flare? Maybe. They didn’t explain it. (Utopia: literally, a place that isn’t here. Distopia: since it’s the opposite of utopia, that means that it’s right outside my door. Ah, nuts!)
The first microcomputer I touched was the Commodore PET 2001-N, with the full keyboard. School computer, and it had a tape drive with it. Later, I landed a part-time job in high school writing COBOL, and I bought a VIC-20. In the Army I bought a C-128, and after I got out, I bought a modem. Yeah, I remember the hours I spent on that keyboard. The floppies did their grrdrdrkkk sounds, etc. The modem beeps and whistles. Me whistling at modems.
Now the power of a C64 is eclipsed by the CPU in an 8-pin DIP. I think Genocide Man may have gotten AIs right: they go insane within minutes of booting up. They analyze the world and the human condition, and just lose it.
Remember, though, the news reports the screamers, not the quiet people. There are a lot of people shaking their heads in wonder and horrified astonishment.
My favorite saying: The barbarians are here, sitting on the living room couch. (Yes, I made that up to describe the idiocracy.) If you want to train the children well, read them fairy stories, and give them good toys. There used to be a series of stores around here called Thinker Toys. They carried toys designed to get children to think about their play and learn. Lots of wooden things, and tactile learning.
How did I learn? I read science fiction, lots of it. Yeah, a bunch of fantasy stuff too, but the good stuff was Asimov and Bradbury and Lem. So get kids interested in good fiction. Anything else rots their brains.
you might be right. the first bladerunner, i can’t remember what turned the world to crap. i guess in my memory, i just assumed it was science run wild.
maybe i’m as victim to it as anyone. i do think science makes a better scapegoat than anything else, because, at it’s core, science is the understanding of things. the opposite is tryin to buck a system that boasts to not understand anything?
wait, you’re BRIAN! from he BBS!!! kidding. but, yeah. toys that push thought one way or the other. lego does that. or DID that. you know what i’m getting at.
You keep drawing and writing, and I’ll keep looking and reading in more than rapt attention. Thank you.
no no, thank you!
*starts the slow clap* You said a truthful and poetic mouthful my friend. And now my writer’s brain (I keep it in a dusty jar in the kitchen cupboard) has been challenged to write a sci-fi story meeting those criteria. I LOVE this pic! I don’t know if it’s meant to be an ant kid, but my mind went to ant kid. When I am financially sound enough to get new ink I really may need to commission you to create some creepy little sleeves for me!
creepy sleeves? well, i DO know creepy…. thanks@ glad you like it. i’ m doing more tutorial and things, and trying to hone my chops.
and if you write something with that crirmteria, let me know. I can’t imagine what form it might take, but I’d be curious to find out!
I wonder if it’s possible. Do you think Idiocracy fulfills the criteria? Not a lot of sci-fi content, but a future where stupidity and complacency brings about the downfall instead of science…I don’t know if I can beat that. I did think of a Speed sort of scenario where you have to keep the synapses firing at a certain rate to stay alive. Pump children full of big ideas to save the species, maybe hallucinogens at night to guarantee active dreams? The resolution is a given though. With that much knowledge someone would obviously come up with a cure quickly. Gotta think on it some more.
haha, that’s very good. yes, idiocracy might fulfill that criteria. then again, it was a comedy, so we’ll give it an asterisk.
I think it’s just easier to write a cold uncaring world brought to you by science, and saved by the red hot boner of Dirk Savem. it’s laziness. a complicated backstory would be trouble to sell.
I’ve had ideas of protagonists with plan, but initiating a science base plan, it can come off as superior and unrelatable.
odd, no?