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An old animation I did about Mikey confronting Draxum in his sad empty capri sun era! Totally forgot about it in my folders lol

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What the hell is going on with Day Ten Thousand:

Day Ten Thousand was weird enough that I felt like it deserved directors commentary, even though I’ve stopped explaining myself mostly except when I do.

Here’s a disclaimer before we begin: don’t read too much into it. I've noticed our culture wants to explain young womens’ art as some sort of public confessional booth and our current culture has a fetish for the autobiographical. Fuck that. I didn’t write three different POVs and three interlocking nonlinear narratives about the nature of storytelling as a psychic technology to be told that my writing isn’t a calculated Craft with a capital C. Now whether it is good Craft is a decision for you, not for me. 

Anyway. 

Day Ten Thousand is a satire of an Isabel story by way of Vonnegut pastiche. We’ll come back to this. 

I called Day Ten Thousand “psychoanalysis bait” on twitter so I shall put all my cards on the table so that your psychoanalysis is at least accurate. Note that these are only my cards, because other people deserve their privacy. I guess you could probably Google all of this but like, jeez. Don’t.

I had a pretty regular time in college except for the tangential deaths. 

When I was twenty, I was the opinion editor for my university newspaper and a girl who was a friend of a friend killed herself by walking in front of a subway. There was then a sort of a small suicide bubble which was a little bit public because we were an Ivy, and one of my opinion columnists was kinda suicidal, and I, without any training, ended up in charge of writing a front page editorial about the mental health crisis on campus on account of the dead kids, etc, and talk to administration about the dead kids. 

I hate talking about dead kids. Don’t ask me about it, or about the reporting. I don’t want to talk about it. 

The whole thing sucked shit and it’s why I’m a lawyer now and not a reporter. 

If this was a story that would be the only fact, but this is reality so I have to mention that a couple years later a guy I knew got literally hate crimed and murdered in a forest. I found out about that because I saw his friend crying in public and didn’t stop to ask what was wrong. Later I heard about this in the news, and realized my acquaintance had been Literally Fucking Murdered. A few months ago I had been arguing with him in the literary magazine editors meeting about whether a poem was good or not. I think he won that argument. Then he was murdered for being gay. 

These were my introductions to the specific emotion of “sometimes people die and you don’t feel like you get to feel bad about their deaths and you still think about it a couple times a month seven years later.” 

You can probably guess where the subject material of this story came from.

Day Ten Thousand was a story about inevitable deaths, and the difference between a death in a story and a death in reality, and about…the way a death marks a narrative and a real life and how it becomes fictionalized over time. I also saw a clean way to finally do my deep time / far future story, which was something I had been thinking about on and off for a couple of years (the original version was about a shaman in the deep-time era who has a vision about having to do a murder re: preserving genetic material for the future, but it never really gelled in a way that made sense). 

I had also been wanting to write something a little metafictional, because I felt like I was writing the same story over and over (if you’ve noticed my stuff getting weirder, that’s why. I was on a bit of an experimentalist kick late last year and early this year). 

So it’s a satire of an Isabel story. I’m self-aware enough to note my obvious recurring motifs: time travel, dead people, grief, people who have a weird relationship to each other, a third-act twist, the tendency to punctuate with in-universe facts to imply emotion, to tell x in order to show y, egregious and blatant use of the second person. And then there’s the stuff that you wouldn’t know, but I do: I dislike writing in the first person, I wanted to do something nonlinear, I think a lot about stories about stories, about the idea of a story as a technology, I find myself dropped into recursive fate-like thought patterns. So a lot of this story is both my self-deprecating poking fun at myself and my habits, and also my thesis statement about…what is the point of fiction if not to make sense of the past and the future, I suppose.

The reason it is a Vonnegut pastiche is because I like Vonnegut a lot and I was trying to do something Slaughterhouse-5-ish with drastically less fucked source material. Sorry Kurt. 

There are three stories happening in Day Ten Thousand, and a secret fourth story. Each story is a suicide loop. The protagonist is trying to break a specific loop by telling a story. This story is about accepting what you have to, and changing what you can. This is a story about letting go and also not letting go. The emotional range of each narrative affects the other psychically, because by changing the vibe of the metanarrative, the individual narratives are allowed to change. 

The story in the archaic is a story that is being told postmortem, it is all hypotheticals based on fact. The story in the future is a singular narrative happening in real time until it isn't. And the story in the present is a guy telling the story about the future, which requires him to tell the story about the past as well, and mostly what Dave is doing here is avoiding the question, but it reflects how Dave thinks about the girl dying in front of the train. 

Does that make sense? No? That’s fair. That’s a postmortem explanation of what actually happened. What actually happened is that I rewrote Day Ten Thousand six times, each time more frustrating than the last, each time with the neutral-ish narrator taking up more and more air. And over time the narrator became a participant, and that’s what created the secret fourth story between “you” and the narrator. 

I had thought there were only three loops that needed to be escaped - the past (archaic, pinned story), and the future (space station, mutable fact), and that the present (the narrator’s world) was something that was static (pinned fact). After all, the girl’s already dead. She’s already stepped in front of the train. 

But the narrator isn’t doing so hot. The narrator is also Dave. And the narrator is telling the story to someone. Somewhere between version one and version six, I realized the only version of this story that makes sense is the one where the story is a conversation, and that you and I, as the narrator and the person at the other end, were also in a loop. 

So. That's whats happening.

I’m not sure if I love the ending. But I rewrote it six times and this one felt as final as it is going to get. I am done reinventing the fucking wheel. You know how it is with spaghetti. Promise I’ll write you something normal next time, I think I’ve gotten the avant- garde out of my system for a few months. 

And hey, I know I said all cards on the table but people deserve their privacy and that includes the kid i used to be when I was twenty, sitting in the shitty little windowless opinion column office, writing about suicide. 

Anyway. Day Ten Thousand is about stuff and things. Themes. So it goes. 

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you later. 

If that was too depressing for you, here are some fun facts: 

The main character is Dave after 2001: A Space Odyssey because I had wanted to make a “I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that” joke, but I couldn’t shove it in :( 

I just thought that phlebotomist was a funny word but I also fucked myself because I misspelled it every time. 

I reread half of Slaughterhouse Five to write this but then my copy got returned to the library automatically so I didn’t finish it. (yes, I’ve read it before, like three times)  

I took one single evolutionary anthropology course in college and it shows.  

I did end up looking at the wikipedia page for “the wheel” for this and then wondering exactly what I was doing with my life. 

About half the facts in this are real, and I read a couple of papers for a couple of things in it (that I promptly then ignored), but the rockets-rome-horse’s ass thing is specifically a story that my friend Max H. likes to tell. 

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A new challenger approaches

I got inspired to draw Mikey doing some cool crap and looking sick hopefully I did that lol

(close ups under the cut)

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More, turtle tots.

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Can you guys see this

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drew a bit more!! wanted to try colour palette stuff :)) it was fun

dw, i'm far from being done drawing rottmnt eheheh i still love these sillies

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I noticed some parallels, and decided to spend hours and way more effort than necessary turning them into a drawing! Because of course I did

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Full art:

Art by Soybean

Art by @tangledinink

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Art by Soybean

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Previously, and finally…

part 7

LAST PART YIPPEEEE

That’s why it’s so long lmao

Just fyi, I read all of your comments and reblogs while blushing and kicking my feet lmao, so thank you all!!! This was a lot of fun lmao

Previous / the end.

First

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“My name is Donatello Hamato…and this is my job.”

NEW RISE CONTENT IN THIS DAY AND AGE??? Alive future Donnie and Raph??? We feast!!! I keep thinking his overalls look like waders and I got the idea that his job is to collect/study kraang matter so he’s the resident dirty job guy, and he HATES it. Also complementary bad future kendratello, she’s works with him 😘

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“We wanted to make it clear that Tashi was in charge,” says Guadagnino. “And that she knew in advance what was underneath [the two men’s friendship], and she pulled it out in order to manipulate and hold them, but also to release them and herself.” It’s a scene that sets the erotic energy that powers the rest of the movie. “The only person that brings out that real fire from both Art and Tashi is Patrick.” Says Zendaya. “And it drives them fucking crazy.” — challengers cast for empire magazine

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to me, this is cinema

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Rise leo human version