#very little editing here…. stream of consciousness type meta…..

[charliebot-art]

alright fine you twisted my arm i watched the murderbot show

obligatory acknowledgment that we’re only like 3 episodes in and also im not saying anything that hasn’t already been said. but its my blog so

pros:

-i really liked that opening. do you think they’ll ever make merch? i would absolutely kill for a little muderbot doll like that Q_Q

-yippee yay muderbot yay!! *runs around whipping it around in my mouth like a dog with its favorite chewtoy* yay muderbot yippee!!!!

-the set design is rly cool, and i rly like the outfits! the casting is pretty good, i rly like the actor they got for Mensah, shes good

-Ratthi yelling over the comm was really funny. solid ratthi moment

-gurathins nail polish

-muderbot being smooth down there like a ken doll

-i liked the murderbot gore, especially the part where the “cubicle” (tho its not rly a cubicle anymore, i guess this has better camera angles) patched it up

-i also like mbs internal snark, its funny and in character and keeps the show pretty firmly in mbs head

cons:

-im sad theres no overse or volescu, but more than that im frustrated they decided to remove them AND change pin-lee and arada’s personalities as much as they did. like, i understand objectively that they didn’t want to have a crowded cast and focus on more key players, and they can always be brought in later, its just frustrating

-did not really appreciate the gawky attitude towards the “hippies”, or the poly relationship, or the it/its pronouns, or they way they made arada into the “um actually” animal rights activist lisa simpson of the group. not that i expected apple to handle any of these subjects respectfully but its still. frustrating.

-i get what theyre going for with the restructuring of murderbots timeline, like how they have it to have just recently borked its governor module and therefore a lot more fumbling and panicked, but its also frustrating because it smoothes over some of the really compelling parts of murderbots personality! for instance, the part where its going into the deltfall facility, even though it knows its dangerous, even though mensah tells it not to, it cant really justify why its doing this to the audience. the only explanation is a kind of half-assed “i had to get curious�� but it doesnt act curious. in the books, it goes into deltfall because it wants to kill the other secunits. this is the thing i think is really missing from tv!mb, where is the blood thirst?? (granted it does have its little murder fantasy in the first episode, but it drops that pretty quickly and it never gets brought up again) tv!mb is missing one of the most compelling elements of book!mbs personality: the broiling undercurrent of depression/rage. thats the thing that justifies it staying with the company, thats the thing that justifies it going after secunits it doesnt have to go after, thats the thing that justifies it putting up with everything its put up with. its also part of just what makes murderbot a murderbot, like, it calls itself that for a reason!

-i dont particularly care for the drawing out of muderbot and gurathins cat fight. feels pointless, and gurathin is honestly being just a little bit too mean, without the justification. im sure well get tragic backstory about how gurathin saw his parents get murdered by secunits (maybe they’ll even be some of the people mb killed in its flashback??? putting money on that now) but its just awkward more than anything

-all of this on top of the knowledge that were going to soon be getting that annoying corprim girl joining the gang is just like, not filling me with hope! theyre going to bring her back from deltfall, arent they? shes going to be the sole survivor. god if she fucks with mensahs bad ass mining drill moment …………………

-im completely on the fence about how theyre handling mensah. on one hand, i like that theyre touching on some of her later development; her struggling with pressures of leadership and ptsd, her lack of consideration for her own comfort or safety in favor of other peoples, her cutting off her friends and family from the reality of her struggles, thats all good! but it feels a bit early, knowing that she hasn’t been through all of the things she will later on. idk shrug. its not bad or anything. just interesting.

anyhoooo thats all ive got for now. not terribly surprised, not terribly impressed, but it also could be a lot worse. solid 5/10 so far.

[whnvr]

Brain Drain

Ah yes, here we go. The very first Brain Drain. According to Julia Cameron I have to fill up roughly three pages or 1500 words in order to meet my daily requirement. I suppose I will simply just start typing, in fact, I refuse to even look at the screen - instead opting to gaze intently down at my keyboard. I have to say this feels a little unnatural. How many words is that? Ah, 74. Oh dear.

It should be said I'm still unsure as to the format I want this to take. The Artist's Way suggestion is as a stream of consciousness, which is what I'm doing now, but I am also considering doing a sort of blend between that method with academic writing. Ie: doing blocks of the Brain Drain at different times of day alongside my usual work and then taking the time to cite, reference, format, and edit my ideas. It's slightly counter to the original purpose of the Morning Pages but I may actually get more benefit from it this way as it will allow me to understand and explore my ideas in greater detail. Plus, what are these things for if not to be innovated upon?

The Morning Pages, or 'Brain Drain', are typically supposed to be done in a solid block before any other of the days' work. Instead, I may ensure the three pages/1500 words are done and published before I go to bed. However, I don't mind doing a stream of consciousness today just to get the ball rolling.

I guess the point of the Brain Drain is to get all of my cluttered thoughts out of my head and get in touch with the 'me' that is decidedly more creative, and absolutely less critical. I suppose taking the pulse or 'measure' of my day would be a good place to start? Today I feel a little listless. I still feel as though I have a lot that I need to do to get this journal up and running, and that this is halting me from moving on to anything else.

I'm essentially starting this journal because I've been doing so many things in the last couple of weeks that it has become impossible to keep track of it all, generating this sort of anxiety of a future wherein I'll have to look back on everything I've done for some university project but the steps of how I got there will be lost. Now that I have a format in which to record my work I feel the pressure to go back and document everything that I've been doing.

Should I do that, or should I just press forward and allow my work to naturally sort itself out as I'm doing it? I'm leaning toward the latter.

It's decided then, I will continue onward as though my imaginary journal audience has been listening in the entire time.

Next steps then. I suppose I should focus my energies on learning Unreal Engine from the ground up. I want to become proficient in that program in order to move my art-style and experiences into a realtime format that can then be explored and made via the burgeoning medium of virtual reality. I need some 'case study' examples of the work that I want to produce and learning Unreal as an artistic tool is my current obstacle to doing this. In which case, I will need to locate a good, artist's-oriented course on the subject.

I suppose I have three general concepts I'm pursuing at the moment. The first is this journalling documentation system that will eventually become an app, the second is an AI-driven 'personal butler' life management system that I've drafted up as a companion app for 'journlr', and the third is the creation of a new workflow for myself for VR worldbuilding. The first two were born out of me needing those exact services for my work but being unable to find any out there (so why not just make them myself! hah). I plan on going into detail on them another time. The third is my immediate focus and something I will go into more detail here.

Workflow is important. I am a very 'systems & procedure' oriented artist. The work itself, final output, tweaking, and set-dressing are far less important to me than how I set up my work environment in the first place. For music, I have created an environment, pipeline, toolset, and framework to work within that are my asset libraries, procedural sound generation/processing tools, procedural AI writing & editing tools, and arrangement techniques. These create an initial working bed for me to then operate within as a songwriter, producer, artist, and sound engineer.

However, I don't yet have such workflows for visual art. The good news is that I do have one in mind.

Video games, though decidedly an art form, are only recently starting to seem less strange within the academic 'art world'. For me, they are exceedingly important. I am not particularly a 'gamer' and I prefer to spend my time playing in creativity, however, being a child of the early 2000s video games can't help but form an intrinsic part of my life and artistic DNA. For my younger self, this was truest of 'Sandbox Games'.

Animesh Jha, MA Video Game Development & Visual Effects at Simon Fraser university defines a Sandbox Game as: "an unrestricted or exploration-based environment in which the player gets to create his version of fun", of which the popular block-building game 'Minecraft' is probably the most titular example. He also goes on to refer to it by the term "Emergent Gameplay" which is the notion of content discovered by the users that weren't explicitly planned or determined by the system's creators. (1)

The idea and potential of Emergent Gameplay as an art medium excites me. It is my inner child-creative's dream that all my creative practices eventually resemble 'emergent gameplay'. What could be more fun? The work for me then as an artist is in setting up these creative systems. In essence, I'm looking to build a virtual playground or 'sandbox' for myself that I can then create works within.

In order to talk about my plans for this methodology, I must first talk about one of the pieces of software that most inspired it, as well as one of the artists who have used it to its fullest potential. The little-publicized, niche, but much-loved, literal-definition-of-a sandbox game 'Garry's Mod' and one of it's most prominent creatives: Michael 'Vioxtar' Efraim.

Garry's Mod (or GMod for short) is a game produced by developer Garry Newman as a third-party modification for Valve's Source game engine in 2004 published by Valve themselves. The game functions on the premise of the ability to essentially spawn game assets (characters, props, settings, buildings, and miscellaneous) from Valve's revolutionary, narrative-driven game Half-Life (a game I will be talking more about at some point as it represents a singular, life-changing source of inspiration for me in terms of art direction & word building) and being able to manipulate those objects in a physics-driven, 3D environment. (2)

What the players were to then do with it was up to them. Michael Efraim is one such player, working with hundreds to thousands of Half-Life 2 game assets in order to build complex and expressive 3D imagery in an art practice he calls 'scenebuilding' with a pointed focus on the meta worldbuilding of stories that take place within his own art program. (3)

"Over time I began gravitating towards building my own universe within the realm of Garry’s Mod: a reimagination of the Garry’s Mod Sandbox gamemode. I started asking myself questions: 'What would it be like if there was a world out there populated by players with working Physguns, Gravguns, and Toolguns, and the ability to spawn whatever they pleased?'" - Michael Efraim on worldbuilding. (3)

Another concept I have gravitated towards recently is kitbashing, the act of taking pre-existing modelbuilding kits and combining them into something new, a classic example of which was the use of kitbashing to do essentially all of the prop, architecture, and vehicle designs within the original Star Wars trilogy. (4)

In lieu of this, for my own virtual playground, I'm eventually looking to put together an asset library of props, characters, buildings, furnishings, flora, fauna, and procedural texturing systems for Unreal Engine alongside a virtual reality toolset that will allow me to play around with these components and create my artwork from within the virtual space, creating not just art but a brand new art framework that encourages art as an emergent gameplay environment.

For the time being however, I will be focusing on learning the base toolset, developing a traditional non-vr workflow, and building out a tentative asset library with the aim of recreating the piece 'Out of Map Bounds' by Michael Efraim as my first test, benchmark, and case-study for this approach.

^ Out of Bounds, by Michael Efraim Eventually, it is my hope that I will be able to use these frameworks as a basis for incorporating my own 'whnvr' abstract, constructivist art style into these worlds along with my music, and then to be able to create everything from directly within virtual reality.