Saturday, December 26, 2015

Comic & Colloquy

Christmas comic. Denouement/sequel to those Breakup Comics from earlier this year. Hair of the holiday dog that bit you.

http://comicsovereasy.net/078/
Click for the full comic!

This comic strip was brought to you by a new tablet donated anonymously from the frozen Midwest, and by the letter zi.


I really should have mentioned this sooner: a few months ago, Jon over at Mystery House Comics in beautiful sunny Boise asked me a few questions about comics, video games, The Zeroes, and other stuff. If you're hungry for a special platter of pickings fresh from me braincase, dinner's on.

Mystery House Interview Part 1
Mystery House Interview Part 2

Friday, December 11, 2015

Upgrade Now (Recommended)

Have I mentioned I'm really into Serial Experiments Lain? Well. I finally watched Serial Experiments Lain for the first time in September and I'm really into Serial Experiments Lain. (You can be too! The good people at Funimation have put the the whole series up on YouTube.) Doubtless it was a contributor to my late preoccupation with Dr. Marshall "Electricity Makes Possible An Amplification Of Human Consciousness On A World Scale" McLuhan.

I recently persuaded my roommate to run through the show with me, so we've been watching an episode every other night or so. From what I can tell, he seems to be into it. (He's not very emotive, so you have to watch and listen to him carefully.) For my part, I'm relieved that Lain holds up to a second viewing. It's definitely less bewildering and wrenching than it was the first time through, but I've been having a good time twigging all the stuff I initially missed because I couldn't have known to look for it. (The show doesn't really begin cluing you in on what's actually happening until episode nine or maybe ten out of thirteen).

There's other stuff I've noticed too, and that isn't necessarily related to Lain's abstruse plot or its psycho-theological-technobabblical-existentialist textures. Take Lain Iwakura's inscrutable tech enthusiast father. My having a somewhat better idea of his relationship to Lain brought a modicum of clarity to his early exchanges with her, which are mostly one-sided speeches about computers and connectivity:
You're in junior high now. Your friends are leaving you in the dust, right? I keep telling you that you should use a better machine.

You know, Lain, in this world, whether it's here in the real world or in the Wired, people connect to each other, and that's how societies function.

Even a girl like you can make friends right off the bat, Lain. There's nothing to be afraid of. I wonder why your mother can't understand that...?

You can't keep using that children's Navi forever. For communication you need a powerful system that will mature alongside your relationships with people. Understand, Lain?

Friday, December 4, 2015

Nocturnal Dream Missions

Vincent van Gogh, Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône

I have recurring dreams.

A lot of them are or have been of an archetypical strain: I'm well-acquainted with the teeth-falling-out dream (thank god it's been a few years since its last visit) and the back-in-highschool-somehow(-and-sometimes-naked) dream (which has also been on the wane, but the frequency of the the wait-I-think-I'm-late-for-work-oh-god-where-do-I-work dream is proportionately increasing). But a few of the reels on rotation in my covert theater are much more particular, and I'd like to take some notes here on two of them (I've had them both in as many nights), as much for the sake of just jotting them down for myself as to see if any passing armchair cyberpsychoanalysts might want to take a whack at interpreting them.