04.23.2010 - Terrence Marks:

You Say it First has been going through some minor remodeling lately. As you can see, the Twitter feed is back up. There's a bar separating the comic section from the news section. Like most webpage changes, it involved making a lot of adjustments, seeing that they didn't work, and changing them back. (The news/blog is two columns of uncertain and varying length. I'd like to fill that blank space with stuff, but it's a different amount of space every time, and automatically calculating which column would be inaccurate and difficult).

I've also made some adjustments to the RSS feed, so that the news and blog entries will show up separately. There were some issues with the previous system. There are, I'm sure, different issues with the new system, but that's life.

Relatedly, I realize that I don't really have a title for my blog. It's currently "Terrence Says", which was put in as a description (so you don't think it's news). It didn't really need a title until I updated the RSS feed, and had to create a tag for it. I was going to call it "Stupid Stuff", after one of my favorite AE Houseman poems, Terence, this is stupid stuff.

It's a clever reference. For a lapsed highbrow like myself, it's perfect. Except if you've never heard of the poem, it looks really bad. It's like naming your karate school "Marshall Arts". Your friends know that your name is Joe Marshall and it's clever. Everyone else just thinks you can't spell.

So I need to come up with something that doesn't look like I'm calling myself stupid. It's a tough job.

04.19.2010 - Terrence Marks:

So, are video games art?

Roger Ebert (still) says no. But they might be, eventually. But not in any of our lifetimes. Now, this is a medium that has gone from Space Invaders to LittleBigPlanet in 30 years. When I first started playing video games, it would slow down if there were too many items on the screen. I've gone from games where the story only appears on the side of the arcade cabinet to games with real-time cutscenes and fully integrated stories. I don't feel comfortable predicting the future of gaming.

The reaction to this is (still) a mixture of outrage and dismissal. Why? Why does it matter to me whether or not video games are art? Why does it matter to me whether or not Roger Ebert says so?

To deal with those questions in reverse order: Roger Ebert is a very good movie critic. He is insightful, writes very well, and I believe he's right more often than he's wrong. I'm sure we disagree on some things - I say that Up is the best movie ever made. He'd probably go with one of those "safe" picks like 2001 or Citizen Kane.

He knows about art. I'm less certain that he knows about video games; he seems to have played around ten of them. I'm not certain that I could speak definitively about movies after seeing ten, even if they were the ten best movies of all time. A genre either builds on or subverts expectations created by previous works in the genre. I'm also of the opinion that, perhaps, he has played the wrong ten.

On the other hand, this totally reminds me of when I tried to convince my English teacher that Pink Floyd lyrics were too poetry*. I forget how that one ended: either they weren't poetry for reasons I couldn't understand or, less likely, that they were poetry but not relevant to the course curriculum. To me, art has always been something defined by other people. Something that is declared "worthy of attention" for reasons I either don't understand or don't agree with, the implication being that the other things I devote my attention to are less worthy. I suppose I'm overreacting a bit. I work in webcomics, which get even less respect than newspaper comics, which get even less respect than comic books, which don't get much respect at all.

Why does it matter if games are art or not?

Well, there I was thinking that maybe I should stop listening to the hippy-dippy nonsense** I usually listen to and get some real music. I went to the library, took out some John Coltrane albums, and listened.

Three albums later, I realized that I didn't enjoy a minute of it, and couldn't tell brilliant free jazz apart from random noise. I tried. I wanted to wear a beret and tell people that I really dug jazz***. It was art, as defined by the relevant art-defining authorities. It meant absolutely nothing to me.

So I went back home, put on a Monkees album, and never looked back. I'm sure people think that if I listened to the right jazz albums, I'd get it. It's not that I don't care for art. I don't care about art. When I tried to put all the good songs on my playlist, it was impossible. When I tried to put the songs I liked, it was easy.

Now, Ebert cites wikipedia's definition of art. For various reasons****, I do not feel that it is an appropriate resource to define so nebulous. I cite my own work - art is what gets assigned to precocious tenth-graders so they can misunderstand it. By that definition, video games are not art. Tenth graders will find and understand video games without help.

By that definition, pre-calculus is also art. This was not my intention, but is tolerable and does not invalidate the definition. Pythagoras would say that it strengthens it*****.

Also, my uncle John would, when he was teaching Computers, would send students to my website in the hopes that they might learn something from it. Hopefully they did, but I won't speculate as to what. This means that Unlike Minerva is also art. Does that invalidate my definition? Of course not. Or not very much, I hope.

Are videogames art? Is art necessarily great? Ebert says no (because if there the player influences the game, that lessens the statement made by the artist. If the player does not influence the game, it is not a game), and yes, to these questions. I say yes (because subjective interpretation is all we've got; how you perceive any art is influenced by your perspective; games can merely make that explicit.), no (because that would mean that it's my fault for not liking Coltrane [or any other designated artist], rather than me making a valid decision to reject a work whose difficulty exceeds its reward).

Do videogames have to be art? Not to be enjoyable, they don't have to be. I think that Super Smash Bros. Melee is a well-crafted fighting game, but I'm not sure it communicates anything beyond "Damn, this is awesome". But I think some of them - Grim Fandango for instance - definitely are art.

So, where am I going with this? Every time Ebert does this, people list a variety of games that are art - Ico, Planetfall, Mother 3, and a number of other games I haven't played. So I'm going to play them. I'm going to make a list of the games that are, for artistic or other reasons, essential and, for as long as it takes, play through them. Maybe they are art. Maybe they aren't. But

I want you to help me make that list. Not the good games. Not, perhaps, the great games. The masterpieces. Games that it would be an injustice if nobody got to play them again.

*: Phil Ochs lyrics? Totally poetry. If I had "Tape from California", I would've won that argument. Take that, My-tenth-grade-English-teacher-whose-name-I-probably-should-remember.

**: I'm not just saying that Pink Floyd is hippy-dippy nonsense. It's just that that genre was seriously over-represented in my music collection at the time. Still is. But I like it, and I try not to give anyone guff if they like things different.
But seriously, listen to "It Would Be So Nice" and tell me the label doesn't fit.

***: Not all the time. Just once. Maybe for Halloween. But I wanted to be able to talk the talk if someone called me on it. The Soft Machine, Volume 2 is precisely as free as I care for my jazz to be. I can't predict it, but I understand it. It makes sense to me. It is, as they say over at Writing Excuses, "surprising but inevitable"

****: I don't believe the people moderating wikipedia are any more entitled to define art than I am. Possibly less so. Too lazy to provide proper links here. I mean, I have five footnotes.

*****: Yes, here I am putting a reference to Pythagoras and Ancient Greek mathematical mysticism in an essay about rejecting cultural shibboleths. I think even putting the word "shibboleth" in here invalidates my argument a little. I'd say something about being large and containing multitudes, but that'd just ruin it.

04.10.2010 - Terrence Marks:

I've mentioned Mitsuru Adachi before. Cross Game, his most recent manga, is licensed in the US. This is cool.

He's very popular in Japan, but the only manga that got officially translated was two volumes of Short Program, a collection of short stories. They've also been out of print for several years.

I haven't read Cross Game. It's a lighthearted story that centers around high school romance and sports, much like his other mangas, Nine, Touch, H2, Rough, Katsu, and Slow Step. He's been working in that field for a long while and has gotten very good in it. (I mentioned short stories earlier - those aren't them. He's had about a dozen major series, depending on how you count).

I recently finished reading Touch, one of his earlier series. It is slow and deliberate. All his work is like that, but Touch is moreso. The storytelling is extremely decompressed - at 20 pages a week, he's allowed to be. It reminds me of Debussy, in that it's not about the individual notes, but about how the collections of notes interact with each other. It's a story where the default unit of storytelling is not the panel or the page, but the chapter.

I explain that poorly, I suppose. I enjoyed it, but felt the secondary characters were underused.

Anyhow, I read all 5000 pages in the last few weeks. When I write You Say it First, the first draft of each comic takes up about two pages of glances, counter-glances, establishing shots, and pauses. Then I cut it down to five panels, and, finally, to three.

Also, he makes sideburns look awesome, but that's neither here nor there.

I enjoyed it. I liked his manga, Rough, more, but he did that a decade later and it's good that he gets even better. Rough is one of the best mangas I've read

What I'm trying to say is that I intend to buy it when it comes out in October and if you like You Say it First, you'll probably like it.

04.08.2010 - Terrence Marks:

So what happened? Internet outage. When I write about it, it's angry and not very funny. Maybe I'll explain more later. But I was going through some fansubbed anime this morning, killing time before Verizon showed up. I realize that some of it will be to my liking and most of it won't, so I put it on double-speed. I read fast enough and I may as well get the bad ones out of the way quickly.

And I come across a most unusual one. It started out normal enough; three sisters doing unremarkably domestic things.

Then it got weird.
Two of them are trying to decide what to cook and they say...
"Let go of me!
I've lied to you
I don't care what you say, the world
I saw a student kissing a teacher today
And in other news...
the loincloth festival has begun today.
attendance is expected to be high"

Now, you're thinking: in context, it probably makes sense.

You're wrong. It comes out of nowhere, without any relation to the onscreen action or previous dialogue.

Also: the loincloth festival is real. But that's another story that you don't have to know right now.

As I was saying, maybe they're quoting some anime that I haven't heard of. Maybe it's a really important scene that everyone in Japan - or at least in their target audience - would recognize. If we're talking about banking and I say that Old Man Potter wants to shut down the savings & loan, you know what I mean if you've seen It's A Wonderful Life. Otherwise, I'm talking nonsense.

They talk a bit more, start cooking, squabble over what to make and who should make it, and five minutes later they repeat it again:

"Let go of me!
I've lied to you
I don't care what you say, the world
I saw a student kissing a teacher today
And in other news...
the loincloth festival has begun today.
attendance is expected to be high"

Is one of them quoting that bit of surrealism back at the other? Does that exchange mean something profound that I don't get?

Anyhow, they eat. There's a commercial break. The third sister is home and they're all watching a TV program; a teacher kisses a student. She says "Let go of me"
He replies "I've lied to you. I don't care what you say, the world". The younger sister says she saw a student kissing a teacher today.

One of the sisters changes the channel. "And in other news," the reporter says, "the loincloth festival has begun today. Attendance is expected to be high".

And it all ties together. Why were they quoting tonight's newscast before it airs? That's a pretty good hook, isn't it? It went from surreal to mysterious. Three ordinary sisters, doing ordinary domestic things, who had become unstuck in time. They don't go on adventures. They don't save the world. They don't solve mysteries or hunt criminals of the past. It's like Lucky Star (without the anime references) meets Dr. Who (without the bad guys and monsters). Or Seinfeld (without the jokes) meets Slaughterhouse Five (without, umm, well, anything that actually shows up in Slaughterhouse Five)

It felt like The King In Yellow - the first act was very banal and a bit confusing, but it's just setting you up so the horror of the second act can really blow your mind.

So I go back and watch the last scene at normal speed to see if they quote it exactly: it's not there. Just the discussion about pancakes. I go back to the first quoting: not there either. They're just talking about getting food delivered.

The series was suddenly a lot less interesting. I think that the subtitles ran faster than the visuals since I was watching at double-speed. Why did it do that? Yeah, that's a good question, but a lot less compelling.

PS. Dear Japan: Could you please make an anime like the one I thought I was watching? It'd be really awesome. Honest. Thank you

04.07.2010 - Isabel Marks:

For the last couple of weeks, I've been fighting a nasty cold that I believe has turned into an infection. I mention this because on Monday night/ going on Tuesday I decided to take it easy and sleep to try and get over things sooner, and missed the update. The next day, otherwise known as Tuesday afternoon to the rest of the world, the Internet decided to go out on us. Terrence tried to fix it, but in the end we had to call our ISP for service. Service they were supposed to have delivered on Wednesday late morning, but didn't bother trying to contact us (as they were asked to) when they tried to come in and were accosted by the stupid completely useless parking security gate the apartment has that doesn't keep bad people out, only the lazy ones. Anyway... if you're reading this it's either late Wednesday and I managed (with the help of Terrence, more than likely) to get our old modem working in my computer and am on dial up, this is 1 am on Thursday and Terrence on his own got the dialup working or this is Thursday late morning/ afternoon and they got our Internet working and the technician found our apartment despite.

Sorry for the rant... anyhow if you're reading this- both Namir Deiter and You Say it First are up and ready to read, and even if we don't have Internet Thursday night, there should an update. Stuff for .net SHOULD be updated, but not all of it might be there. I'm still working on the comics for that site and the wallpapers still need to be inked... and commentary files haven't even been made. Sorry about that folks. I really appreciate your patience throughout all this. I really didn't want to take any breaks, I was just feeling miserable on Monday. I'm still sick and will probably be sicker tomorrow from all the stress the stupidity of our ISP put us through today. Please enjoy and spread the word about the updates!

Oh, and we might not be available for a day or so and will definitely be slow to reply to emails and things, even slower than usual. Sorry about that. ;___;

Edit: It's the next day. We had to get our own modem and fix it ourselves. The technician left a note on the door but didn't knock.

04.06.2010 - Terrence Marks:

I beat Homeworld the other night. I was surprised. Not by the story, but by how good the Yes song at the end was. I mean "Homeworld" (the song) sounds like 1973 Yes and 1983 Yes got together and collaborated. I kinda gave up on them after Big Generator. And Tales from Topographic Oceans. And Tormato. And maybe Jon & Vangelis. But this brought me back in.

The game was very good as well. Nice blend of strategy and tactics. You can steal your enemies' ships (which is [a] totally cheap and [b] very effective). The plot involved a lot of "Initiating Hyperspace Jump"
"Hyperspace Travel interrupted. Destroy the enemy's hyperspace inhibitors to go to the next level".

I suppose that's kind of necessary; if you can go from point A to point B without stopping anywhere in between, why wouldn't you? If Mario had a hyperspace jump device that took him straight to Bowser in World 8-4, he'd take it. Save everyone some time. Anyhow, I enjoyed the game and the song.

04.01.2010 - Terrence Marks:

Happy April Fools Day, everyone!

Now, it's not that we've been doing this since before April Fools Day was cool, but I organized the first webcomics swap back in 1999. I was a sophomore in college. I didn't, technically, have a webcomic when I started organizing it - Unlike Minerva's launch date got moved up a couple weeks so that I'd have a webcomic in time for the event.
What I did have was a clever plan: do something that syndicated cartoonists had done a few years before, except it's on the Internet and I'm in charge.
Like I said, I was a sophomore.

I got a bunch of cartoonists together - it's not everyone who was anyone back in webcomics in 1999, but it's awfully close - and got them to do this. It was the first time more than three online cartoonists did anything together, as far as I know.

Naturally, I hosted it on my school account and made absolutely no plans for the page to go away when, for example, I graduated. Then my hard drive crashed. I don't have a copy of the page. Archive.org's wayback machine just has a page with a bunch of broken images.

Like I said, I was a sophomore.

I'm sorry the site was lost. I was very impressed by the amount of work that the other cartoonists put into it. I felt like...like Kermit.

No, seriously.

You know how in The Muppet Movie, he says it'd be neat if he went to Hollywood, and if everyone else wanted to come along and share the same dream, they could help each other do it? Like that. Except with a lot less wrangling, more talented participants, and nobody trying to steal my legs. Seriously, if you were part of that in any way, thank you.

I'll probably rebuild the site eventually, but that's another story for another day. For today, we've got special comics, and I ask you readers: are the characters more anthropomorphic or less anthropomorphic like this? Discuss your answer with each other and get back to me.