It has now been over three months since i visited the city of Manchester. What once was a vivid memory has been obscured by the fog of ever-ticking time. But there is unfinished business to be dealt with — so let me sing to you, dear reader, of Affleck’s Palace.
Cottonopolis’ pop- and counter-culture mecca found its place in a bourgeois defunct department store; its hollowed husk has been stuffed beyond recognition with dozens of stores over four floors, from fashion to cassettes to Hatsune Miku–themed fizzy pop.
It’s an absolutely disorienting place to get your head around. The meme up in Newcastle is that the Grainger Market is an Escherian nightmare where nothing is ever where it was last time, but Affleck’s is a whole other level (three of them, in fact). Stairs lead to more stairs which lead to corridors which somehow lead back to the same stairs. It took me five goes to find the cassette tape store, and when i did, it was closed for a fag break. It’s the sort of place where a non-specifically foreign woman who you never see again sells you a cursed trinket that brings ruin to your family.
I can only tolerate hippie shit in small doses, and, thankfully, this little bath-bomb dispensary was the perfect small dose. Incense sticks? Tie-dye decorations? Sure, why not.
This shop claims to be Europe’s largest LGBT specialty store, which i’m sure is true, if only because half of Europe has the same attitude towards gay and trans people as a moderate Westboro Baptist.
And if counter-culture isn’t your thing, there’s enough stalls hawking Disney merchandise to keep you occupied. (I clapped when i saw the thing i know!!!)
I hardly even remember getting in or out of the building, which leaves me at a loss for how to end this post. Maybe it’s more of a feeling than a real place — you just wake up one day, teleported inside, and have to complete a vision quest to buy a cone of rose-flavoured ice cream to find out how to leave.
![Meme captioned "Holy shit!! Is that a motherfucking [Newcastle upon Tyne] reference???" surrounded by various things which almost look like things from Newcastle](/garden/media/holyshitreference.jpg)
I had a religious experience yesterday.
It’s a common metaphor. A playful exaggeration of what happens when something goes beyond a mere dopamine hit and passes into complete shamanic bliss.
If most of the people in the crowd there with me had said that, they wouldn’t have meant it literally. They’re atheists. Christians. Muslims. “Spiritual, but not religious”. Either they see no point in all this God-bothering, or their spiritual needs are well accounted for.
As for your correspondent? Well, loud, boisterious ecstasy is
exactly the type of old-time religion i’m after. Hundreds of sweating, screaming, beautiful humans,
swimming in the sea of each other, without a care in the world, freed, just for a moment, from the
stresses of their mundane daily life1 — and all led by a charismatic
preacher front man. What else could you call such a thing?
When you’re a shy bairn who follows a dead religion, you take what you can get.
Also… about halfway through the show, the band put up a big caption on the side screens saying “guest starring Harry Styles”2 (greeted with rapturous applause). They then proceeded to bring out Lewis “iwageddicannaustibeisumwunyuluuuuuuh” Capaldi instead (greeted with considerably less rapturous applause), and have him sing the absolute holy grail of 1975 concerts: “Antichrist”, a song from their very first EP which the band have steadfastly refused to ever play live. Masterful trolling.
Welcome, one and all, to the 2798th annual Horny Awards! Every year since humans figured out how to count them, the Satyrs’ Forest has presented hand-made, custom trophies to the best works of the year that was. It’s an astoundingly long-lasting tradition, and definitely not something i made up just now.
2022 was one of the years ever. Things, i’m told, occurred. People were born; people were taxed; people died. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released several albums. It will go down in the history books as “the year between 2021 and 2023”. On with our show.
Our first category marks all the wonderful movies that were made in this past year — which is quite a lot, so my apologies to all those films who i either didn’t mention or didn’t have time to see!
There can only be one winner, but i’ll start off with a lightning round of honourable mentions. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was like being locked inside a room with an insane person for two and a half hours, and i loved every ridiculous, extravagant, kinetic minute of it. Tom George’s See How They Run and Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery were brilliant and funny throwback mysteries which really needed more time and appreciation in the cinema. And i dearly hope David Letich’s Bullet Train becomes the new Fast and Furious — 2Bullet2Train! Bullet Train 3: This Time it’s a Plane! Bullet ISS! The possibilities are endless.
An especially honourable mention goes to Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, a tender horror romance which almost made it to the main list before i realised that i hadn’t actually all that much to say on it. It’s a metaphor for something, i tell ya hwat…
It could have done with less of the hot-dog fingers, but anyone who would leave our first “official” runner-up off of their year-end list is a heartless bastard. On paper, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a recipe for everything everywhere to go totally wrong: a riff on The Matrix with a tenth of the budget, directors whose last work was a movie where Daniel Radcliffe farts a lot, and a sense of humour firmly dated to Reddit circa 2012. Yet it pulls it off.
This is a movie where people beat each other up with dildos, where a hallway of people literally explodes into colour and light, and where the equivalent of the Death Star is an everything bagel. It is also one of the only movies to have made me bawl like a baby in the cinema. Everything Everywhere is an anti-cynical, anti-nihilistic manifesto for our time. Yes, nothing matters! and yes, you might not write the next great American novel or paint a masterpiece! but the world has so much joy and beauty, so many minuscule details that you pass by every day, so for goodness’ sake, even if you’re just doing laundry and taxes, take your time to enjoy the little things in life.
I need to go hug my mum.
Blockbusters aren’t what they used to be, are they? Ever since Endgame, Marvel have been running on autopilot, releasing a steady stream of snarky CGI sludge made more out of obligation than passion. They don’t even work as escapism anymore — the fantastical isn’t fantastic when every billion-dollar release is set in a world of superheroes and sci-fi.
Like Everything Everywhere, our other runner-up is a prime example of a movie that just shouldn’t work. It’s a sequel to a 40-year-old film so mediocre i turned it off halfway through, made as a cynical cash-grab recruitment ad for the navy, with a topic and plot designed to appeal exclusively to Your Dad.1 Yet, through sheer dumb luck, Paramount hit the jackpot on Top Gun: Maverick.
Obviously, Tom Cruise is an absolute charisma magnet and the best part of every movie he’s ever been in. But that seductive Scientologist smile only goes so far (just look at The Mummy), and that’s where our director comes in. Joseph Kosinski doesn’t have a particularly long track record; it would be easy to mistake him for a typical director-for-hire. His dialogue scenes don’t stand out from the pack, and he’s not particularly creative with the camera, but that doesn’t matter. What he excels at is spectacle.
2010’s Tron: Legacy is a profoundly middling film in terms of its plot and characters, but it gained a cult following thanks to the delicious combination of Daft Punk’s killer score with Mr Kosinski’s brilliant visuals and action. He took that computerised world of bits and bytes and gave it stakes, weight, and a sense of scale, where a Marvel hack would have told the VFX guy to just press render and go with whatever comes out.
So you take a director whose most known work is a spectacular CG effects-fest and a lead actor famous for his insistence on doing all of his own stunts, and what do you get? The best blockbuster film of the decade, that’s what. The original Top Gun’s plane scenes drag and drag with no real purpose; in Maverick, every flight has something at stake, with non-stop action — but the film still knows when to pull back and take a breather to give its characters heart. My icy, cynical heart knew that i was being manipulated every step of the way, knew that every pull of the strings was planned out in advance, knew that this film was made for money and nothing else… but i’ll be damned if i didn’t start crying at that Val Kilmer cameo.
Go and see Top Gun: Maverick on the biggest screen you can, whether that’s a 1080p computer monitor or an Imax cinema. You won’t regret it.
Our two runners-up were films that i would recommend to anyone, anywhere, of any age, and at any time. They have something for everyone. First place, on the other hand…
If you believe the lame-stream media, our winning film was the result of arthouse horror hero Robert Eggers being given a blank check by Universal to make a big period action movie. This is false. It was created by scientists in a lab in Durham to appeal to me and me specifically. (You can tell because i was the only person who actually went out and watched it.)
Based on the Norse legend behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Northman is an epic following Large Scandinavian Man as the viking Amleth, son of a deposed king, on his journey to avenge his father with the power of Odin and testosterone2 on his side.
When i call Amleth a viking, i do not mean that all-too-common sanitised Hollywood depiction of a 20th-century Christian in pagan clothing. No; his society and its ways are portrayed as they were, warts and all, regardless of what the audience might feel about it. The vikings of this film keep slaves, burn down houses, consult witches (memorably played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and Björk, in decreasing order of screentime), mock Jesus, and pray to Gods as a fact of life. (The film never particularly demeans them for the latter three, which i found a welcome reprieve from paganism’s usual relegation to the villains of horror schlock.) The only concession to modern mores is the absence of polygamy, because splashing people with period blood and cutting off heads is okay but good heavens a second wife?????
Mr Eggers and his crew schlepped all the way to Iceland for filming and made good bloody use of it. Whether its long shots are focused on nature’s rolling fields and bursting volcanoes or humanity’s flame-lit funerals and grimy oarsmen, the result is consistently one of the most beautiful things of the year.
It’s not for everyone. It’s long, and those just there for the action will find themselves asking when they’re going to get to the fireworks factory. It’s gory. It’s grim. But it’s definitely for me.
Hey, did you like the Matrix sequels? Do you want to watch a three-hour-long film where every character is played by the same six actors? No? Well, too bad, because the best film i watched in 2022 that wasn’t released that year was the Wachowski sisters’3 Cloud Atlas.4
There was a point, about 60% of the way through this three-hour-long movie, where i started to wonder if it was all worth it. I’d seen Tom Hanks attempting a Cockney accent, Hugo Weaving in unconvincing Asian prosthetics, and a lot of people saying “tru-tru” a lot of times. Surely it was impossible to tie this all together into a satisfying conclusion.
I started having flashbacks to The Matrix Resurrections, an endlessly creative film plagued by its own self-obsessions and Lana Wachowski’s inability to not put the first thing that came into her head into the script. Was this going to be the same? Are the sisters trapped in an endless cycle of almost-but-not-quite?
And then there was a point, about 90% of the way through, where i started crying. They’d squared the circle, tied all six stories up into a neat bow; an epic told on the scale of centuries, where actors cross boundaries of time, nationality, race, and gender; a film that would be their magnum opus were it not for the long shadow of The Matrix. I don’t know how they did it, but they did — and thus nudged their record of hits against misses slightly to the positive side.
2022 was a good year for bad movies. Moonfall was the peak of so-bad-it’s-good Emmerichian excess. Morbius morbed all across the internet. And the usual Marvel schlock was even shlockier than usual. But nobody thought those films would be any good anyway — it’s hard to be disappointed when you don’t have any expectations in the first place.
So, by God, was i disappointed in Nope. From Jordan Peele, critics’ favourite rising star, this sci-fi Hollywood horror brims with so many creative ideas and metaphors that they all boil over and don’t go anywhere. I can only imagine that a quarter of the script got sucked up into a UFO and they decided to just keep shooting. There are so many great ideas in this film, and it’s a darned shame they wound up such an anticlimax.
I don’t actually watch much television; i’ve always found it hard to get invested for the “long haul”. Ben Stiller’s Severance, made for Apple’s floundering streaming service, is a slow burner, the sort of thing i despise — but its slowness is methodical, carefully drip-feeding you bits of information whilst never wasting its time on fluff and filler.
It’s strange. It’s puzzling. It’s brilliant. And the final episode is some of the best TV i’ve ever seen. If i could, i’d sever myself — just to watch it all over again.
It’s The 1975.
Well, no point in dragging that out. They may not be the best band in the world, but they are my favourite band in the world; their eclectic pop-rock sensibilities are what got me into music, and i’ll always appreciate them for that.
This isn’t just a sentimental pick. Being Funny in a Foreign Language sees the band trim away the fat and bloat of their previous works and hold back on the eclectic experimentation of the Music for Cars era, settling on a distilled, refined version of the sound that defined their first record. There are no bloated instrumentals, no experimental noodlings; just, as their international tour proudly suggests, The 1975 At Their Very Best.
No album came close to blowing them out of the water — because i’m a soppish fanboy — but to whet your appetite, here are some more of my favourite songs of 2022. (In no particular order.)
It was with some trepidation that i typed the word “Pagan” into RateYourMusic’s charts function, knowing the reputation that explicitly religious music has. The words “Christian rock” have always been accented with a sneer, and the most well-known Pagan musician of the modern age is an unrepentant church-burning neo-nazi.
Right at the top, after i’d filtered out all of the metal (apologies, metalheads; it just isn’t my bag), sat XTC’s Apple Venus Volume One. You won’t find it on streaming — frontman Andy Partridge has few kind words for the likes of Spotify — but i made do with a pirate Youtube playlist until i tracked down a physical copy at the shops.
Apple Venus is the group’s penultimate album, and even knowing nothing about them, I could tell. It drips with aching sincerity, the kind that dips into corny pastiche, in that particular way that only happens when a band who have spent their whole career dripping with snark and cynicism realise that they’re getting too old for this shit.
And that’s all i wrote.
Some other favourite old songs i discovered this year:
I’ve been getting into post-rock recently, and there are a few albums which seem to be near and dear to fans’ hearts. Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun, a surprisingly accessible masterclass. Godspeed You Blank Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists, the best soundtrack for a movie that never existed. Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, a bit too jazzy for my tastes. A few more that i’ve yet to listen to.
Then there’s The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.
Explosions in the Sky’s third album is widely beloved. It tops lists with the big guns. It often shows up on genre “starter pack” lists. There is a teensy, tiny problem with this: it’s shite.
Well, alright, i thought, two tracks in. Maybe it picks up by the end? Everyone is raving about that closing track, “Your Hand in Mine” — and then that was shite too!
This is music for a car commercial. It is the Imagine Dragons of post-rock. It’s the sort of music a TV network might play as inspirational backing for their Paralympic coverage. It is sappy, insipid, and uninspired dross of the purest and vilest sort, and it boggles the mind to think how it ever got the reputation it now has. See me after class.
Just one game found its home amongst my digital shelves this years, and i have yet to find the opportunity to complete it. Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn wins by acclimation — so far it’s stylish, intriguing, and fun to solve, but again, i’ve not finished it! We’ll see if it sticks the landing.
Homestuck isn’t very good. It has an undeniably appealing cast of characters and charmingly naïve art — you don’t get millions of fans without doing something right — that are sadly weighed down by its author’s baffling decision, faced with all the sprawling multi-media possibilities of the web, to tell its story entirely in walls of unreadable monospaced text.
Wired Sound for Wired People isn’t my thing. It has undeniably mastered a medium: its flickering pink pixels and eerie soundscapes build an unmistakable mix of intrigue and unease, beckoning you to follow it down the rabbit hole. But it lacks a message to go with it — there’s no story to speak of, just a collage of strange and trippy scenes.
So what if someone were to combine the best bits of both, and undo their shortcomings? Idiosyncratic, eerie audiovisuals, with relatable dramatis personæ, and a compelling story which uses the power of hypertext to its fullest?
Enter Corru.observer. Linked to me by someone whose homepage i’d complimented — with no other comment than that it was a friend’s “personal site” — Corru puts you in the seat of an archæologist(?) some decades(?) in the future(?), trying to piece together the memories of an alie… i’ll let you find out the rest. There’s only an “episode” and a half out right now, and i can’t wait to see where it goes.
2022 was not short of epically un-short videos. Internet Historian put together a fully animated retelling of the story of Floyd Collins, a 1920s farmer who found himself stuck upside down in a treacherously narrow cave. It clocks in at an hour and ten minutes. Kevin from Defunctland’s weirdly emotional investigation into the Disney Channel theme runs an hour and a half. Stuart Brown’s Xcom retrospective? 1:40.
But in the age of Tiktok and Vine, it pays to be succinct. Our winner by no means reaches the six-second nirvana of those two platforms, but at 25 minutes, it would fit comfortably into a half-hour broadcast slot on telly — not bad on a site increasingly dominated by 7-hour videos about people watching sitcoms for children.
That winner is Michael Stevens’s video on the origin of selfies. In it brief runtime, it answers every question i never knew i had about the selfie, while spinning in a number of fascinating tangents and eyebrow-raising questions (in the typical Vsauce house style). It even got me to renovate the gallery just to add that photo by Anastasia. Cheese!
I perused many places during my walks out and about this year, but none so consistently provided me with so many new sights as the Ouseburn, a small but mighty stream which winds its way in the east of Newcastle from suburbs to leafy woods to industry to hipster vegan cafés. Every time i thought i’d seen it all, the Ouseburn revealed a new cranny, some quirky establishment or warp in the city’s fabric, something different to explore.
Affleck’s Palace is the beating heart of Mancunian counterculture; a labyrinthine maze of shops which across their three floors sell everything from rose ice cream to bath bombs to incense to Hatsune Miku–themed fizzy drinks… and i can’t tell you any more than that, because i haven’t finished my post about it yet!
Really, though — Affleck’s has it all and more, and i’ll be sure to stop by next time i go down south.
Day in, day out, we are flooded with the latest news of disasters and terrors from around the globe. It gets the views, it gets the hits, and it gets the clicks; it’s no wonder journos love to accentuate the negative.
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award is an antidote to doom and gloom, honouring the best thing that happened in 2022. It was a late entry, but it could hardly be anything other than…
…The National Ignition Facility, the U.S. government lab who reported that, for the first time, they’d gotten more energy out than they put in via fusion power. There are hiccups, of course; the facility’s magnets guzzled dozens of times more power than the reactor itself. But every stepping stone has its imperfections, and this is the first great step to a truly prosperous future — where energy is too cheap to meter, where power is so abundant that there will be hardly a grain of economic sense in the idea of tapping any more of Gæa’s precious little black gold.
Happy belated new year, everyone. And as always — may it be better than the last!
I found out that Mark Toney’s1, in Newcastle, serves Dutch-style apple pie, and it immediately gave me flashbacks to my childhood like the critic in Ratatouille. I honestly started crying. Delicious stuff. …Sorry, what’s that?
Apologies for the interruption; my legal team have informed me that i have to actually put links in my link roundups. Who knew‽
The blue people from Avatar are hot, and i’m tired of pretending they’re not.
Editor’s Note: Xanthe has not yet seen either Avatar film.
I’ve been hammering away at a big ol’ 2022 recap post, trying to get it ready before it’s irrelevant. It seemed cruel to leave you all with nowt over the new year, though, so i thought i might send you some photos from a recent evening walk.
Ashington1 is a poor erstwhile mining town at the very tip-top of the local conurbation, Newcastle’s last gasp before coal and collieries give way to princes and pastures. It takes pride in two things: one, its mining history, and two, the fact that two Ashingtonians delivered England the world cup in a final remembered by ever fewer people.
This is the Queen Elizabeth II Country Park — not to be confused with the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park down in that London — a marvellous regeneration project which has turned a spoil heap into a lovely lake complete with a Premier Inn. That purple light off in the distance is the Woodhorn Colliery Museum, a whistle-stop tour of Northumberland’s mining history which apparently fancies itself the Blackpool of the North.2
And that’s all i wrote. Tune in next time for either another bashed-together filler postcard (by Gods, am i going to have to make Blyth sound appealing next?), or the first annual Horny Awards™. We’ll see how far the Procrastination Monster lets me progress. :-)
Today i learned that the Marshall Islands have almost no copyright laws. Since the U.S. handles most of their foreign affairs for them, they’ve slipped through the cracks of international treaties: per Wikimedia Commons, the only restriction is that you can’t directly copy/rip/transfer/sell/publicly perform another citizen’s work and try to make money off of it. (Which i think is quite sensible — even as someone who opposes the whole idea of copyright as a nasty intrusion of people’s freedom of speech — so long as we live in a capitalist society.)
Good on you, Ṃajeḷ. Now if only they had decent internet…
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and good tidings to everyone else — my gift to you is one last sack full of links to send off the year. Mx Tynehorne’s Link Roundup®™ will return in 2023.
Our final submission of the season comes from one Ræl H. Bishop, a dear friend of mine. Thank you so much for all the entries this year — it’s a lovely thing to have a tradition continue, especially when i’d worried you’d all forgotten i existed. And as always, please leave all your comments on the main site.
This past summer, I lived in a big coastal city. After two months, things took a turn for the worse and I had to move out. I found the city plastic and frustrating anyways. During my time there, I would go to the beach quite often. But not to swim or make sand castles. In the mornings, I’d walk with a book and a bottle of water and watch the sun dance over the horizon. In the evening, I’d find a vacant spot and watch the cargo ships sail over an increasingly indigo skyscape. It was very cathartic. I feel it’s the same feeling all cathedrals, mosques, and mandirs try to cultivate: a sense of awe and serenity that lets our minds meld and our troubles wash away.
I have a very beach-y metaphor for your consideration. The emotions we experience in our lives are like waves lapping onto a shoreline. All emotions are found in these waves. We get caught up in waves of anger, of depression, of pride and lust, of sorrow and shame, greed and jealousy, euphoria and ecstasy. They are strong, powerful waves. We all stand on these shores, but most folks spend their lives getting tossed and turned by these waves, smashed into the undercurrent and washed up to repeat the process the next day. What we need to do in the face of these waves is not to get knocked over by them, but to hold steadfast and let the waves pass. We observe the waves as they emerge, not “pushing back” and not “falling in”, but noting as they come and noting as they pass. The waves leave, and more take their place, but they’re all transient nonetheless.
I’ve tried taking this notion to heart since I realized it. I hope you can find use of this. The next time you’re caught in a slump, or a fit of rage, or in some all-consuming obsession, just remember that it’s another wave approaching from the distance. You have the power, the strength, the will to keep standing in its wake.
You are not these waves, these fleeting emotions. You are yourself. γνῶθι σεαυτόν. तत्त्वमसि.
Today’s post(s) come to us, in no particular order, from three different people, because like buses, good things come in threes. As always, please leave your comments on the main site.
i met Him in the woods and He told me to hold my chin up His
skin black as ash shining
hunt-drunk
blood in the snow, He gave me a bow fitted for me and said to shoot
i said what for, to shoot what, i don’t want to hurt a creature
and He said the cycle of life requires death, if you reap then you will sow, to kill a cræture is
to give it back.
i said alright but i was scared and He said what if the other hunters come not my Hunters the other ones
man-shaped and hunting crætures like you
and i shot
the arrow fell through the shadow, spilling, and i said to protect i would do anything
and He said now you understand what this is for. and He said daughter, your destructive anger
can construct mountains and miracles. don’t listen to those as say death and life and rot and growth are anything different from each other. look at the berries grow through the snow. it kills the snow, the snow feeds them, they are not beautiful in this way without the snow.
i said, i understand i am an arrow and a Hunter and i am not yours i am my own and i protect
and like this is how my i became an I
two months later i called for Him
with my head in a bush
because the other ones had taken away my I again
and he said take it back and this time He gave me a knife
and I stole nothing
but I held the knife and sat with Him and remembered that i am I.
Listen to Hanif Aburraqib who says
“I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.”
and go lightly but know yourself Leave a comment
know true, feel feind
creer, pensar
concocer,
enamorar;
se
estou na miña lengua perdide
non coa morriña, ni pobo.
pobre.
lellos turn, so they wanted
perdéronmenós
beg, simple:
¿ Leave a comment
I’m a poet of the future
poet by mission
With pen in hand
I let any dick hard
Strong Viagra is my verse
Fills souls with lust
blowjob by passion
To all subverse
morals
I open the gates of hell
Like a lady’s legs
For I am invited to both
May this verse last forever:
I feel sorry for those who love
destined for sadness.
Today’s post comes to us from one Ariel, of the Library Phantasmagoria. I highly recommend looking at the version on the main site, because it’s done up with its own custom styling, per request of the author — and that you direct any comments there for the sake of consistency. Anyway. The post.
I’ve been slowly taking up drawing as a hobby. I wouldn’t consider myself a very artistic person. In school, I was more math and science oriented. Now I work in computer security. But I want to share some of what I’ve learned.
One of the first things I learned when I started is that using a pencil is hard. When you write, you can have some variation in the angles and curves of your letters while still maintaining “good form”. An “E” still looks like an “E” whether you write it with curves or corners or one stroke or three or squared-off or angled. Contrast this with something like drawing a circle or a 3D box. Even a small variance in curve or angle will turn your perfect drawing into something that looks wrong.
There are tricks you can learn to making more accurate circles or boxes. For example, the lines going out from the corner closest to the viewer on a box need to have obtuse angles between them. If an angle is perfectly 90°, then the viewer will have to be looking at a side straight-on. If the angles are acute, then the box will look skewed. Drawing boxes doesn’t get easier just by knowing the rules, though.
Even though I’ve come up with how every angle and line relates to every other angle and line, I still draw skewed boxes. My hand just doesn’t know how to control the pencil properly. The solution is simple: the knowledge must be applied - a lot. That’s the idea behind Draw a Box’s lessons. (No, this is not an advertisement for DaB.) I think that’s the idea behind a lot of art lessons. Hell, it’s probably the idea behind most things you can learn.
A long time ago, I was browsing a forum thread on a fairly unpleasant website. The forum thread had something to do with programming, and someone was asking about learning programming. I don’t remember the programming language in question, the person in question, or anything else. But I do mostly remember the response.
It was a well-formatted, but very sarcastic paragraph about the “greatest developers”. These “greatest developers” would spend years studying the fundamentals of the language. They learn the nuances of the compiler. They learn the most efficient algorithms for every problem. They read books and watch tutorials and browse forums until they understand the language better than the people that created it. And so on and so fourth. But one line from the paragraph summarizes the idea and stands out most in my mind: "The greatest developers go years without writing a single line of code." (And in case it wasn’t clear, the post was satire.)
I don’t think I appreciated that line at the time, but I find myself thinking about it more and more lately.
I’m one of those people with a tendency to “learn” more than I practice something. I’ll watch hours-long YouTube videos on obscure topics, and my favourite podcast(s) came from the How Stuff Works group: Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, etc. I’ve read books on the history of tea, the book index, and capital punishment in France. It’s knowledge that can’t really be applied in my life, or is only applicable to hyper-specific niches. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this - it’s a form of entertainment for me.
Yet, learning as enjoyment and learning to apply are two different things. Returning to the art topic: I’ve spent more time watching the Draftsman Podcast, browsing r/artistlounge, and similar activities than putting pencil to paper. I - like many in my position - justify it as time spent learning, and there is value in learning from others. (“Don’t reinvent the wheel,” as they say.) But that time is really more entertainment-learning than applied-learning. It’d be better spent putting pencil to paper and improving. Using the pencil is hard, though, because it means having to face failure when the boxes don’t look right despite my best effort.
I don’t have any good words on failure or dealing with it. That’s another thing I’m still learning. But I don’t want to end on a sour note, so I want to highlight another thing I’ve learned through art: how to see it.
I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but hear me out.
I’m going to be using a digital painting by the artist “WLOP” as an example. It’s titled “Civilization3” and you can find it on his DeviantArt. (I’m avoiding posting it here directly because I’m unsure of his re-upload policy.) The art is of a girl playing a magical steampunk-esque violin with lots of floating gears. I think it’s a really pretty piece, and I’d probably be able to know it was one of WLOP’s at a glance (even if it didn’t have a big watermark saying so).
There’s a few things about the painting that I wouldn’t have noticed before I started learning art. For example, look at the part of the violin furthest from the girl. It’s only a few simple strokes and even has some bits randomly floating off to the side. The more you look, the more you notice things like that. The gear under her chin has misshapen teeth. The leaf pattern on her dress is just bean-shapes and circles with a few thin lines running through it.
I don’t say this to make fun of or insult the piece. It’s actually an amazing trick that I hope to be able to emulate one day! But it’s something that I wouldn’t have noticed before I started learning to make art instead of just looking at it. (I also apologize to the artists to whom I’m probably stating the obvious.) WLOP focused on the areas that most people would unconsciously notice the most flaws with (the face and hands) and let the viewer’s mind fill in the detail for the less important parts (the pattern on the dress).
Here’s another one to look at: Breathe by Yuumei. It’s another portrait. This time it’s a girl wearing a respirator of sorts with roses where the filters should be. One of the first things you’ll notice is the clear brushwork-iness of it and the lines again. But this one I point out for the colour. At first glance, she’s wearing a tan coat, but notice the left side: it’s blue. So is part of her hair and face. (Also, if you go back to WLOP’s image, you’ll notice the character’s hair is actually a bit green. Especially in the back.) Before learning a bit about colour, I’d probably have defaulted to a black or grey for shading.
I’m happy that I’ve learned to see things this way. It’s like I’ve learned a secret to unlocking a hidden part of the world.