5/12/2015
I have been working on completing the Sakuya arc. At least, it has become apparent to me that Sakuya seems to be having a personality arc at the moment. After talking about the technical details, I'd like to go in to the motivations behind it. Each piece of the trilogy deals with a different aspect of elements that tend to cluster together in personalities that I've encountered who have had at least one of the traits. Namely: introversion, aromanticism/asexuality, and asociality.
The first of the trilogy went in to detail about Sakuya's introversion. I mainlywanted to emphasize and explore the concept that some have that introversion per se is necessarily bad, and is something that can be changed, as opposed to the notion that one might be born with it and it's merely trying to find a way to live with oneself in the environment they happen to be in. Myself, I rather hate reading some sort of heavy-handed Galilean dialog, but that's what it came out as. Patchouli acts as the foil to Sakuya to help her come to terms with it.
The second part of the trilogy went in to aromanticism. More than anything, I wanted to break the stereotype that aromantic or asexual people are somehow necessarily nonempathetic or are in some way just broken misanthropes. There are a lot of people, it seems, that almost chastise someone for being asexual. The oft-repeated quip that many young adults get of, "So when are you getting married/having kids?" is rather indicative of this. The story did not go too much in to this except at the very beginning, and it might be interesting to bring about some sort of conflict that does this in the future...(writes this in ideas notes file).
And the third, which is in the works, deals with asociality. Or what exactly one does when they are alone, and how they cope with...being with people when they are that way. It--like a lot of the later MariAli stories or the latest story tends to get in to the weird existential ambedo end of things for which I am rather fond. However, I feel like this is one of the benefits of asociality.
In actuality, of course, the stories were really about me in some sense. I hate to so explicitly Mary Sue like this, but often the best things to write about are those things that deal with yourself in some fashion. And all three are really some sort of argument that "This is O.K.." Maybe it would give others comfort who have such tendencies to hear such a message and to understand it, but I can likewise understand if there would be some sort of disagreement with it. After all, we do live in an incredibly social world. And there are consequences to having such personality traits. I'm not going to say or argue whether they are good or bad. I just want to try to give some sort of understanding as to why they occur.
4/16/2015
Well, it seems appropriate to mention that a new story is up!. And, also, maybe, to talk about it a bit.
As I mentioned there, it is an experimental piece that was motivated after watching the film "Slacker" (not to be confused with "Slackers"), which you can maybe see (depending on how long Youtube keeps it up), over here. One important aspect of that film is its interesting narrative style, and, alright, that is a creative little "gimmick" that hopefully I was able to incorporate, but was that really the reason for why the film was so interesting? I use writing as a personal exegesis, or an explanation and introspective tool. So, from both the writing and the film now, what can I say I learned? What was my psyche, in some sense, trying to grasp at, I wonder?
My mother likes to 'people watch' when she is at airports. She'll daze off and watch people jumping about to and fro. Families eating together, people hauling a mountain of suitcases with them. Others meandering slowly. And she wonders about each of their lives. What their purpose is at the moment, and what their goals are in general. And there is a sort of pleasant feeling that comes with that sondering, I suppose. In a certain sense, it may just be an exploration of the emotion of 'sonder'.
Well, the musical choice should be another hint. In some regards, I've felt like I've been wandering without much direction. And, that comes at the behest of some personal situation. Perhaps it's an exploration of the benefits of that? Well, the musical choice is, I feel, very similar to the musical direction used a lot in the game '.flow'. And .flow (which, by the way, I just found out to my excitement actually has its own category on fanfiction.net, however, well...maybe I will talk about that in a later post...) is very much just a game about exploration. Yes, it's gruesome and has a disheartening attire on it, but for some reason I felt especially calm playing it. And the greatest joy in playing it was the simple element of exploration.
I suppose the linking theme here, at least for me, is that it's an exporation of the benefits of exploration that come with directionlessness.
4/10/2015
One thing I openly whined about, but secretly loved, about playing the tuba was that basslines are not extremely complex. You just play a flat whole note forever. There was an episode of Life with Louie about it, and they fucking nailed my boredom during band.
Of course, the impossibly amazing upside was that me and a friend sat in the back where the teacher couldn't hear us, shooting shit and generally screwing around for an extra hour every day.
Nonetheless, I gained an appreciation for bass sounds, and I noted that complex bass lines are extremely rare. You do have moving bass lines, which I've talked about before, but a typical moving bass line in jazz is a quarter note at a time and slow moving enough that you have enough time to get bored to add trills on everything. Most of the time, you can't even hear the bass line (unless they fuck up), which I've found lamentable.
Needless to say, I wanted to show you all my top favorite bass lines.
The best bass player I have ever heard is John Entwiste from The Who. Play close attention to the bass line, it's really more of a parlor trick he's playing so ridiculously fast:
McCartney was also a really good player himself
(skip to 0:50 to see what I'm talking about!)
Btw, if you want to know what I mean by "We play trills when we get bored"
(skip to 2:30 it's only supposed to be a three-note repeating melody)
But of course, I save the best for last.
What brought this about? I just get sick of "drum pounding" basslines in techno from time to time...
4/07/2015
I saw the movie "Slacker" the other day, and it reminds me of people watching.
My mother has this fascination with, when she is bored at the airport, just sitting on one of the benches and watching people. Just looking at them pass by, almost as if it were some sort of meditative act. And, I don't know, that movie felt quite the same way. Peaceful, meditative, like some sort Ulyssesian stream of consciousness.
Moreover, it makes me kind of wonder as to the...what exactly the purpose of what I'm doing? I've reached a point in my life where to a certain extent I feel like I have accomplished what it was that I wanted to do, and now I don't know what to do from here.
Well, in any case, on the story front, as usual, I'm writing what is immediately in my mind and trying to see how something "Slacker"ish would be like. And, as usual, I'm trying to incorporate those pseudo-existentialist themes that I really quite feel like are too far out of my reach to justifiably use in any meaningful or in any kind of sense that it makes it look like I know what I am doing.
4/03/2015
I would like to write a story that continues the train of thought presented in:
and
By, naturally, making a story exploring an asocial Sakuya, which would rely upon the development of heavily using closed space. However, some part of me...well, I suppose writing these sort of thoughts out in a blog format, or even thinking that anything I say or write deserves this and a forum, is already quite prententious enough. Nonetheless, this certainly feels sort of "look, I wrote 'dark' poetry"-edgy-teenager kind of thing. And, there's a reason why I kept it at aromanticism as opposed to explicitly asexuality. And that is...I really don't like to delve in to such themes explicitly. I guess that's kind of immature? But then again, I feel like the media out there is already hypersexualized that creating any form of media that is not like that, and still lightly manages to approach such topics is kind of a niche category that I haven't really seen many other things fill.
Also, as the title of this post suggests, it would fill out a nice trilogy all along the same theme for Sakuya.
The other idea would not eb so much focusing on the asocial complex. But more just focusing on...trying to describe a trance, I suppose. I've been listening to a lot of what gets labeled in Youtube as "Ambient Glitch," and that kind of music lends itself so readily to just listening and spacing off while you worry furiously over what in the world you're supposed to be doing...like in life...in general, but in a very nonplus and nonchalant manner. And I don't know about anyone reading this, but there's a very specific kind of feeling that I get when I am in that kind of mood. Kind of like an even more existential Guy from The Big Lebowski.
However, capturing that feeling and being able to accurately describe that, I feel like I fail at such attempts at doing this. I tried to do something like that After reading about Sartre's chesnut root, but in retrospect I feel like I failed. There's a level of constant revision and redescription of the same phenomenon from different angles that is necessary, when at the same time it feels like my ability is limited to quickly saying one single angle like a small child.
Which, incidentally, is why I tend to stick to the "short story collection" genre. I'm very much influenced by Borges in this regard, but I feel it has more to do with my impatience and lack of ability to attract unrestrained and focused attention to such a singular item than I have the ability to. I suppose in a certain sense this is not a bad thing, that whole quote from Twain about writing shorter if possible comes to mind, but I don't think it's possible to describe the complexity of a picture in the most well-written sentence.
4/02/2015
By far, my most common daydream has got to be imagining introducing various music to people of the past.
3/22/2015
So, this is...really more of a general blog that I put together using some other code I found here on neocities. Why neocities? Because I remember the hayday of crappy geocities websites, and I wanted to bring it back, what with the amazing color scheme here and Kibo-esque intro page. Tl;dr, I just want to be a little bit silly.
The goal here is to just express my writing thoughts, plans, but more importantly other ideas and interests I have at the moment (since those are what most likely leads to such ideas). Although, don't mistake me for anything grandeous, I know I'm not a good enough writer to account for any of this, but anyways...
Also, I wouldn't mind shooting the shit with you all. =U.