Jory Griffis

I have gotten to the point where after spending more than 90 minutes on the internet I start literally crying.

My goal is somewhere around 30, maybe 25. No more e-jokes for me!
 

Here's some funny pictures, in the hope that I may someday make amends.

so here is a comprehensive list/review of the Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli films I've seen.

• Castle of CaglioGood Movie
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Bad Movie
• Grave of the Good Movie
• My Neighbor Great Movie
• Kiki's Okay Movie Service
• Porco RossOkay Movie
• Princess MononOkay Movie
• Spirited A Bad Movie
• Howl's Moving Terrible Movie
• PonyOkay Movie

or, Mediocre Art and The People Who Love It?

For a while now I've been frustrated and depressed in ways I have a lot of difficulty expressing. A number of years ago I was frustrated and depressed in a way that ended up being conducive of some of the best "Art" I've ever made, but the combination of feelings I've had lately has pretty much perfectly crushed any ability or desire to make things. The traditional logic in that kind of situation is to attempt to "work out" those feelings in your art, which I did with my printmaking a few years back, but any attempt to do so now results in drawings of people sitting around looking frustrated and cursing.



This also happens if I try to come up with "scripts" or whatever for comics, which is why the second half of the comics I did last semester was mostly just people complaining about things. One night at work, though, I came up with what I felt was a pretty effective visual metaphor for some of these feelings, so I decided to work it out for one of a number of small pieces I made for a final. I was halfway engaged in the idea but not even slightly in the thought of actually executing it, so in the end I felt it was a pretty total failure.



It wasn't the most shameful thing I presented that day, but it's pretty bad. The people in my class--especially Mille, the instructor--seemed to really love it, though. Mille said it was a really successful and "emotionally charged" piece, which came to me as a big surprise, and said I should make it into postcards and send them places in order to "get my name out there".

The response to that crappy painting could indicate one of two things: either I am just that great an artist, or much more accurately, I was just that miserable when I drew it. It's a depressing notion.

[♥]

It's not uncommon for a piece of media to take a turn that makes me reconsider having ever supported it. My past is littered with "favorite shows" that went at least a season too long, video game developers that have stuck with bad moves, bands that have long outlasted their limited potential. Occasionally, though, new models of creator-driven media, though they can be powerful motivators for the creation of art, allow artists to create mass media that can be objectionable in ways that probably would never have been possible even a decade ago. Given some thought, these kinds of situations can turn from a "fluke" to an exposure of genuine prejudice, and it's disconcerting to imagine the memetic impact some media can have on its impressionable fans. Over the last few days, a number of causally-unrelated events have left me considering very carefully the kind of media I consume and which artists I should support with my meager purchasing dollar.

Since December I've had a lot of mixed feelings about dear old Tim and Eric, whose Chrimbus Special left a really bad taste in my mouth. Not because it wasn't funny (it wasn't) but because of the "Chrimbus Carol" bits, where an easy joke from all the way back in Season 1 of Awesome Show finished its years-long trek along the razor's edge of bad taste and down into the mire of awful, disorientingly hateful crap (look it up on Adult Swim Video or something if you want, but don't waste your time.) Tim and Eric are still incredibly insightful and funny as hell, but I lost some of my faith in them and their ever-increasingly malicious style of comedy here.

I also found myself considering the future of my beloved Venture Bros., given that Season 4's roller coaster traversal of the mediocre-to-awful spectrum was capped off with an hour-long cavalcade of homophobia and misogyny. In large part "Operation P.R.O.M." was a pretty great episode, but elements were just shitty enough that they made my blood run cold, including a long sequence of a bunch of stereotypically id-driven gay men (all voice acted by three straight men) passionately discussing bizarre sex acts, and leading up to an ending that was in such shockingly bad taste that it snuck up on me when I tried to sleep and stuck with me for days: an army of women--trained killers--drugged helpless, accidentally turned into giant mutant flies, and killed. I mean, it wasn't the most offensive hour of television I've ever seen, but it definitely ain't the kind of show I want to watch. The night that it aired, I bitched about it on The Mantis-Eye Experiment, my Venture Bros. fansite of choice, and this comment thread took place. Since then I've wondered whether or not I'll give the show yet another chance in whatever form it takes next.

Last night, having thought about all of this during work, I returned home and checked a few webcomics I haven't looked at in a number of days, which got me thinking about Penny Arcade's Dickwolves situation. I had been aware of their douchebaggery on the subject but had mostly shrugged it off as their being a few bloated, privileged, white nerd-boys, but their newest demi-apologies were callously blithe and childishly indignant on a level I thought neither of them was capable of. Some Googling exposed a lot more of this kind of behavior that had been going on behind the scenes for months, and while I'm not going to explain too much here (it's all detailed very exhaustively in this timeline,) it's become a one-sided discussion of rape culture in which PA's behavior has been just reprehensible. I'm not sure what to do with my old flames Tim and Eric and The Venture Bros., but I am definitely finished with Penny Arcade.

It actually feels a bit sad: PA really hasn't been funny in years, but I loved them back in the day, and they've remained like old friends from way back that I've been more than happy to keep around. Whenever they've found opposition in some nebulous evil--American Greetings, Jack Thompson, Tim Buckley--they've responded in an endearingly blunt, devil-may-care (etc.) kind of way. They've always been snide, crass white boys, but they've generally remained a positive force. Now that they're responding in the exact same way to a situation in which they are clearly in the wrong about something very, very important, they're making it obvious that they've just been plain old assholes all along.

Driving home from work last night, I heard a report on BBC World News about the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster and the disaster's repercussions on the world's outlook on space travel. It reminded me of an abandoned comic of mine from a few years back, and in lieu of actually making something new to post I've decided to scan it in and present it here, in shame.





Yow, some of what's here is really embarrassing--the first three pages are just awful and the figures range from "crappy" to "fucking terrible"--but there are some things that I think work fairly well, especially the backgrounds. Most of the dialogue is really bad, too; the characters are obviously just stilted avatars for limp philosophical notions, and that's a problem I still have today, though I think I'm getting better. The very next page was going to leave the poorly-constructed sci-fi fantasy and return to the poorly-constructed real world, where it was going to stay for most of the remainder of the story. These pages are all I managed to finish before deciding it was going in a really weak direction and that I was aiming way, way too high (especially in terms of page counts.)

This was a story about the inevitability of wasted potential, which I guess seems a little ironic now. Though they're used here in a pretty childish and literal way, some of the metaphors I wanted to play out are still pretty interesting to me. I actually recycled the themes and characters of this story into a computer game that would have invisibly left the narrative crux of the story--Rick trying not to be such an asshole--in the player's hands based on small decisions they made throughout the game. When, in turn, I abandoned that, I again recycled some of it into the story I'm sort-of working on now. The new story has some of the same characters and settings but deals with some pretty different themes. Maybe you'll get to see its conclusion some day! Prediction: you won't.

     Following the inevitable, federally-mandated closure of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, the powers-that-be on Broadway will dig deeper and deeper into pop culture's back catalog in search of musical opportunities. Amongst a wash of charmless Idle-led Monty Python revivals and tactless 70s and 80s TV adaptations (CHiPs:Live! will turn out to be particularly profitable,) the works of legendary comedian Mel Brooks will return to the stage in light of the enormous success of The Producers in 2001 and the not-inconsiderable success of Young Frankenstein in 2007. The first of these productions, Blazing Saddles, will have a mixed but largely negative critical reception. The thoughtless deluge of plays that will follow will all be critically lambasted but will prove to be just as hugely lucrative as their forebears. Surprising almost no one, History of the World Part 1 will come to be known as Pestilence, Robin Hood: Men in Tights as War, and Spaceballs: The Musical as both Famine and Death. The late-2012 premiere of Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Singing, though it will barely escape cancellation as a result of the terrible rash of worldwide violence and destruction known as Armageddon, will be attended by Lucifer himself, and will be met with relatively positive reviews.

Here's a bad quickie.



I mentioned I was writing an essay about Heavy Rain, A VIDYA GAME I DON'T WIKE VEWY WELL. Well, the further I got into it the more pointless and self-absorbed it seemed, even as an exercise, so I'm not going to finish it. It'd be a waste to throw it all out, though, so below the cut is the illustration I did for the essay and the text that accompanies it.

( Heavy Rain spoilers below! Like you care. )

  Here's a quickie for ya.

In June of last year, around the height of the buzz surrounding Toy Story 3, I got alarmingly used to being called heartless.

( More of this kind of crap below the cut. )