Awesome people

I can never get over how the office I work in is filled with awesome people with very diverse skillsets...

We have graphic designers, programmers, sound guys (that's me, hehe, but I'm not alone!), historians, linguists, bad film experts, good film experts, AutoCAD-proficient designers, comedians, exotic culture scholars, fencers, musicians, martial artists, photographers, people with MBAs, people with other diplomas, people with quirks, people with hobbies and what have you... And I'm hardly even mentionning those that have left us in the past year. Geeks all around.

And our office tasks have nothing or nearly nothing to do with these specialisations.

What do we have in common?

We're smart, ressourceful people who display broad communication skills, analytical thinking and a desire for efficient collaboration. We may not be working in our chosen fields, but we're living with the times.

Pretty impressive for a bunch of desk-clerks, huh?

Regardless of what I think of my job or salary, I love interacting with these people. You can have any kind of conversation, from light banter to deep philosophical discussion and even highly technical detail. I'm fucking proud to be here.

When they say that variety is the spice of life, they mean it. Total homogeneity creates the most dull working environments. I've worked in places where you were limited to 2 or 3 topics of conversation, and the slightest mention of anything else was met with raised eyebrows, passive disinterest and occasional ridicule. Those were the places where I have worked the least amount of time: the shortest stint of which was initially supposed to be my dream job!

But I obviously speak for myself. The aforementionned diversity and exchange is not always what people look for in a workplace. Some may enjoy near-anonymity: punch-in, punch-out, no chitchat, no social interaction, no questions asked, thank you. And their coworkers expect the same from them. The idea being that you should be able to share the same general mindset and work ethic as your colleagues.

You want to be left alone? Don't seek a supersocial workplace. Are you a social animal looking for interesting conversations between tasks? Seek a place without cubicles and populated by some friendly, casual people.

It goes to show that -who- you work with is more important than the actual work you do.

On progression, variety and "seed genres"

"You spin me right 'round"

Music changes. A lot. Right under our very noses. It morphs and spawns and grows and multiplies. As I say often: music is a meme, and a particularly virulent one, at that.

I personnally love this fact, but it seems a lot of people resent it when their favourite artists "change" their sound. Musicians can come under fire from their fanbase for "selling out", "branching out", "going this or that way". But the only truth in such affairs is that musicians are supposed to be creative individuals. As far as I am concerned, if you refuse to accept this kind of natural progression, you might just be into this band or artist for the wrong reasons.

The proverbial "When it changed" is not a finality, it is a stepping stone.

Allow me to editorialize: If your comfort zone is too small to encompass the full spectrum of available music, then you're getting less bang for your buck. I'd encourage anyone to ask around their entourage and try to find out why they like the music they like. Where's the hook, why bother, why is it interesting? It's one of the best ways to connect with new music without feeling lost or disconnected.

I'm not here to sermon anyone into thinking the way I do. It's just an honest proposition. Listen to more and you'll learn to like things you'd never thought you'd appreciate. Discovering new music is a very stimulating form of mental gymnastics.

Musicians strive to create that special something that will sound fresh, new, and unique enough to be their popular identifier once broadcasted. It's nothing new, and it's also what record labels have been actively seeking for decades. "Who's going to be the next [insert previous groundbreaking artist here]?"

New sound

The number one gateway to establishing a new sound is new technology. Would rock'n'roll have evolved from its folk and jazz roots without the advent of the electric guitar and accessible amplification systems? Would Emerson Lake and Palmer have sounded the same without their iconic wall-of-Moog modular synth station? Would we have witnessed the birth of Acid House without the Roland TB-303's glurpy-durp sound? Would a rocker like Billy Idol have been capable of creating a concept album like Cyberpunk without access to the early ProTools systems? No. No, and no again.

Point in case: Consider the waves upon waves of music spawned at the advent of MIDI back in the 80s. Or even closer yet, the recent slew of songs with Antares Autotune-enhanced vocals as their point of focus.

I could go on and on but you get the idea: New means -> new experimentation -> new material -> new genres.

Another very popular method is creating a hybrid. Crossover carries the near-guarantee that you will explore new grounds with your music, bridging the gap between the old and the new. If you like something but find it could do more, mix it up and see the result. A little from collumn A, a little from collumn B.

And sometimes, a fluke is simply a fluke. A few years ago I was composing an electronic track and near the end, I added what you could nowadays call a slower, 2-step/dubstep beat, completely unaware of what it was. I have a tendency to 'layer things up', particularly with my beats, and it was just a way to create a heavy emphasis on the 1st and 3rd beats of the bar (in this case a low, booming kick and a 'chucky' 80's-style reverbed-up snare). It's not called two-step, buuuuut.... "a rose by any other name", right? I didn't know this beat by name (except maybe uh... "slow heavy support half-time backbeat"), but I was tapping into the pool of composition possibilities regardless of its label. In essence: a rythmn is a rythmn is rythmn.

*
* *

Okay, so I've poured the first part of my brain mélange into the sink. Now onto the main topic:

"Versions 1.0 and 2.0"

Believe it or not, a lot of well-known music we hear today stems from another lesser-known genre from which its component elements are derived: essentially, a 'prototype' of itself. Just one step behind in the musical family tree, there is always a not-quite-so-famous-anymore bigger brother who taught lil' bro the ropes. Generally, the older of the two genres will have waned in popularity a bit, leaving the newer to expand where it tapered off.

The examples come in copious amounts: 50's Rock'n'Roll has Swing... Heavy Metal has Psychadelic Rock... Hip Hop has Funk/Soul... Trance has Acid House... Drum'n'Bass has Oldschool Jungle... House has Disco... Dubstep has 2step Garage... Grunge has Punk and New Wave... Nu-Metal has Neothrash... Reggae has early Ska...

And so on and so on.

Often enough, the 'seed genre' (as I've come to think of it) will declines for the duration of its offshoot's rise in popularity. Then as the new subgenre matures and begins to hit its own peak, the parent genre starts to make a comeback. It's an age-old play on offer-and-demand: What we've had for too long, we discard. What we no longer have, we request. Basically a huge sine wave.

I'd venture as far as to compare the passage of a new subgenre of music into its own genre to the establishment of a colony. People A send a few representatives of their nation off to a new land, they gain insight from their newfound surroundings and necessary isolation, and begin to transform into a new culture: People B... All this within a few generations. Easy parralel to trace, really.

Over the decades, crossover, remix, dubbing and mashup have all helped spawn countless musical styles by revisiting known tropes and refreshing them through varying adaptations. This is appropriate because the same way a remix of a song is a new version of it, a subgenre is often a 'remix' of its parent genre.

(For those wondering: a 'cover' is a song played anew through different instruments while a 'remix' or 'dub' uses the original song material and plays with its constituent parts)

This information age means ideas travel fast and there are no secrets. It's only a matter of time before someone discovers your stuff, likes it, and decides to take it in a whole other direction, lengthening the lifespan of your idea and creating a new plateau for other offshoots to develop. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

You will notice a lot of "back to basics" movements spawning here and there, focusing on different past genres, generally in the form of an hommage to the long lost pioneers of what has become "in" today: the same way old clothing styles come back in fashions 20-30 years later.

Music parenting: Adopt a beat today and raise them in your image. ;)

Cheers, Avian out.

These dubs are made for steppin'

And like a steppin razor don't you touch their sides: they're dangerous. Dangerous.

It's been a while eh?

Well, the barely-suffused office angst has faded and I'm here to talk about something quite pleasant, for a change of pace.

Over the past 10 years or so I’ve become progressively enthralled with all forms of electronic music. The hard adolescent edge of my punk and metal years having dulled a bit, I turned to other styles for the sake of variety and freshness. And quite a journey it’s been: From the abrasive textures of industrial/noise, the hopeful melancholy of EBM, to the simple, organic visceral joy of house and expressive, uplifting trance, tribal-yet-robotic Detroit techno, groovy, empowering hip hop and landing most recently upon my shores with the infectious energy of breakbeat and its many many many descendants.

Recently I’ve been slowly but surely discovering the expanding world of dubstep.

Let me say I’ve been bitten by the bug. Hard. My blood pulses to the 2step beat of a deep drum and tingles with the scattered triplety-syncopated high-hats and tiny shuffled percussion-cells of the dubstep beast-thing. It’s a wonderful feeling. I want more of this substance.

And…

I’m a sucker for wobbly bass. (Whoop-whoop-wob-wob-wob-bwa-bwa-bwa but I digress) Okay, so it’s a bit overused, it still sounds killer if it’s well done. LFOs need some love too.

Nowadays, dubstep is actually an umbrella term covering a very diverse range of styles. The genre is more than old enough for its participants to branch out and create some wildly innovative tracks while remaining in the same broad category. For a genre that originated with the practice of producing weird b-sides/remix/redubs of more successful garage and drum&bass tracks, it’s surely come a long way since.

I already have a bunch of favourites.

Distance bears its name well. It’s very ambient, very cool. The music has that dark, urban, jazzy kind of Blade Runner feel that just won’t let go until you actually begin to feel the acid rain falling on your head as the neon signs glow and you’re looking for Rachel. It’s great. It’s profound. It tugs at the heartstrings.

Kode9 and the SpaceApe make one hell of a duo. I remember seeing them live at the Mutek festival in Montréal one year (I was volunteering for them at the end of my sound studies) and didn’t even know what they did was dubstep. The announcers simply referred to their act as ‘spoken word’… sheesh. Hearing them on album now is a much different animal than it was back then in a live setting, but the mood is very poignant still. The music is dope and the lyrics are playfully deep.

Burial’s approach has me completely amazed. Unlike just about everyone else in the electronic music world, he works (nearly) entirely in Soundforge, which means no generic synth programming and without a sequencer. It’s all collaged together in some sort of weird witch's brew that doesn’t cease to surprise the listener. As a result, the music is beautiful, haunted, minimal but by no means reduced. The mix is straight, and the appearance of a lack of polish only serves to enhance the sounds themselves. The ‘no sequencer’ thing is very refreshing. I imagine this guy would have a legion mashup artists lining up at his door for tips & tricks if only this single fact were more advertised.

Pendulum, a personal drum & bass classic, has begun its first forays into the shadowy world of dubstep. So far so good. While the examples available are never exactly what I would call ‘full-on dubstep’, the elements they mesh into their music are recognizable and add a new interesting. dimension to some of the best tracks on their latest offering, Immersion. Since crossover is the mainstay appeal of Pendulum’s music, I say these new dubstep-inspired ideas are on par for the course.

***

Dubstep is usually played in the 136-142-bpm range, though as is often the case, this rule is easily broken. Not too long ago, I was reading about the emergence of the Funky scene in London (at least that’s what it’s called now, you know how that goes) which is a bit of an evolution on the whole thing, but dropping things down to a smooth ~130-bpm and incorporating latin beats. It sounds attractive and I definitely have to check that out.

Electronic music is very often a very ‘live your music’ experience, enjoying spur-of-the-moment developments and necessitating a local scene to flourish (think Detroit techno, Goa Trance or UK Garage as easy-to-grok examples). I am not much of a club-goer, and therefore can rarely be considered an early adopter of any specific genre. When interesting musical news reach me, the wave is usually passed and the particular scenes of interest have moved on to new sonic adventures. Not that I’m phased by all that, it just means my patience is rewarded with each listen, and there’s always something else coming up.

In this sense, music is a meme which spawns divers offspring of divers colours. It just keeps growing and spreading. I love it.

Mountains out of molehills

As is customary with any other previous company I’ve ever worked for, this current job never ceases to find new ways to irritate me and contradict my sense of ethics. After all, that’s the nature of the corporate world: it’s made of FAIL... convoluted pathways crisscrossing wildly across innumerable levels, stairwells and obnoxiously slow elevators of FAIL.

The corporate world is a world of backstabbing, finger-pointing and blame-transferring. It’s a disgusting cess-pool of hypocrisy, me-first, not-in-my-backyard, gotta-look-good that I can’t in any shape or form dissociate from its sister world of politics. Some people think these two universes are far apart, but honestly, I see no difference here. This machine feeds on bullshit. That machine feeds on bullshit. They were born and raised from the same mother: Greed.

Fail... Fail... FAIL, motherfuckers.

Idiotic clients are nothing new. We deal with those all the time. In a single week, we have to put up with a great deal or irate small-fry fools. We get union representatives trying to get their word out about how they’re pissed off against something or any other hypocritical shit-talking, we get pushy born-again-christians with silly regressive agendas to push, no money to do it and no idea of what the newswire is, we get penniless individuals-with-a-cause who complain about wire distribution prices when we inform them, and hell, we even get douchebag record producers with zero business etiquette, bad phone manners and a horrible sense of nitpicking over useless shit (I’m looking at you, Mr Mysterio, you shameful, shameful grease stain on the music industry’s apron, you) to name a few.

Those are just examples of what we can get. And hell, we’re not even the Sales Department, so imagine the kind of retards and fuck-ups that go knocking on their door.

One of my co-workers got into serious trouble recently because of a client. She’s one of the really efficient ones with an incredibly clean record. Compared to her, I’m the king of screwup-topia. Yet one slight little mistake from her snowballed and came back to bite us all in the ass, not that it should have, and not that it’s entirely her fault. I’ll explain:

To put things into perspective, my employer is a wire company that receives news releases from clients, which formats them in an ugly 10pt Courrier New font (which incidentally does not allow for bold italics and underlined text… any formatting at all, in fact) and then redistributes them to various specialized networks worldwide so the news media can read’em’n’weep and/or ignore them (which I could never fault them for doing, because this shit induces massive snore-dom). In other words, we will ruin your well-prepared, well-presented Word documents... for a price.

One of our big things is quarterly financial earnings distribution (news directly from the Kingdom of Boredom) which gets sent to a bunch of analysts who actually know what to do with the data. We have some clients that almost only use our services for financial distributions. Some can be high-profile but most can be high-maintenance.

We do boring-ass work, because we can’t even profess to remotely enjoy the contents of the documents we send. It’s very technical, though (lots of distribution details to keep track of, all of which are absolutely necessary) and we have to be very alert not to let anything past our scrutiny. But we’re also human. We like to cut corners because our favourite shortcuts make us efficient in our work and they give us a better turnaround time, which everybody loves to boast about (we have a really fast turnaround, thanks for asking). But some of these “non-regulation” techniques can manifest as an increased possibility of making mistakes. I guess that’s how it goes when you’re not 100% by-the-book. (and by-the-book usually means wasting time and effort on things that could be done faster and with less effort... fuck...)

Client X send us his boring overly-long financial document. My colleague formats it. She makes a small copy-paste mistake in a column header that mixes up the years 2009 and 2010. It’s a tiny thing so it goes completely unnoticed as we proof-read the bore-fest, unnoticed again as the client proof-reads the approval copy he receives and again as we do a final check-up before distribution. At this point Client X doesn’t know a thing. We don’t know a thing. If we did, we could fix it in a jiffy and no one would care, especially not the media who receive it. This sort of thing can happen and we have procedures in place designed to help smooth it over while distributing the correct information. We do have safety nets, you know. That’s why we’re #1 in the country.

They approve the copy. We distribute. Time passes.

Turns out some analyst somewhere cared hard enough to notice, thought it made the data confusing, decided to make a fuss and gave a call to Client X. Client goes in a panic and calls us, BUT…

Instead of behaving like a normal person and calling the actual Montréal team that worked on his press release and who can easily fix the mistake... he acts like a chimpanzee on crack cocaine and calls our CEO…

What the fuck?

Our CEO?

Our distant, uncaring shrew of a leader, whose job description consists of something along the lines of "look good, stall all development on the software tools that bring the bread and butter, smile for the cameras, rake in the prestige cash and cut more jobs as we drive this skeleton-staffed operation into bankruptcy."?

That CEO?? Mrs "Embrace Change"?

Listen buddy... She’s hundreds of miles away from where the actual work was done, is totally in the dark as to the specifics of our job (I’ll bet my ass she’s never even looked at any of the software we use) and has zero knowledge of the daily technical challenges her casually-dressed workforce can face in the office. Opening Excel must feel like hardcore hacking to her... How can she be equipped to handle that kind of case? Short answer: she cannot.

When something goes wrong with your news release, you contact us directly. You know, the people that sent it out and know how this stuff works? If it was a big fuckup, we escalate to our team leads, if it was a big-ger fuckup, they escalate to sales and regional management for some quick damage control, but it rarely gets there. We usually fix things rapidly enough before any foreseeable damage can even occur.

But instead of doing things the right way, Client X pulls a total Wilson and does everything backasswards. He goes to complain to our head-honcho, who shits down on a few heads until it trickles down to us. By that time, the thing has gained so much momentum it’s completely bewildering…

And thus begins the witchhunt.

So now we’re in "crisis management mode", our team leads are taken away from the news centre, having to sit through meetings instead of being with us. We get warnings against screwing-up in case it happens, because you know, this shit must be contagious, oh man oh man… Everybody’s in a riot over sweet fucking nothing and the working atmosphere (required to actually, you know... not make more mistakes due to unwanted stress?) is completely shattered. It’s an open-heart surgery without anesthetic.

My colleague gets the actual "you fucked up" talk from her own team-lead. Then the same spiel from the superior right above… and then she gets an email going through the same points over again in case she forgot... Motherfucker! I can empathize because I’ve been there myself (remember I’m already Mr King Screwup here.)

And then we hear that our main competitor is really putting some pressure on Client X to negociate their new wire distribution contract with them instead. Fucking hell…

So the bottom line is: What could have easily been fixed and kept hush-hush got blown out of proportion by a panicked middle-management-type who got mad with power… classless, inconsiderate motherfucker that he is. Hey big-shot! Want to actually feel important? Start acting with some composed professionalism for a change.

Talk about mishandling information… How serious was the mistake. Not very, all things considered. A little date confusion never killed anyone. That’s right: Did anyone die? No? No one died? Ohhhh... Okay, well then I guess you’re just a total asshole then.

Mountains out of molehills, I swear…

. . .

Which brings me back to an observation I once made about humanity.

When one member of a group screws up, we have a bad habit of responding by:

* First, isolating that person and totally preventing him/her from redeeming his/herself

* Second, making everybody else in the group pay for the individual’s mistake, just so they can hate him/her better

Somehow it’s the accepted standard….
But where is the logic in that? No one is treated fairly and everybody ends up frustrated.

"Meh"

It's funny how I only blog when I'm really enthusiastic (or really angry) about a given topic.

Which makes me wonder how many steady writers actually feel like writing ALL THE TIME, or if they develop a "get-it-done" mentality to get over the creeping feeling of apathy. Don't they have those same in-betwen moments? Those dry-spells? The dreaded 'white page' syndrome?

I see steady writers blogging about everything and nothing, even a short burst of meaningless ideas or just sharing some links... but always on time. How do you develop that kind of momentum?

What about the need to have something worthwhile to write about. Y'know like... ummm... "not having anything to write about", which is still something to write about.

Or am I just lazy? Might be that too ;)

Catch you when I'm wordier.

"Case of the Mondays" Monday Bitchfest Special

My work ethos is under siege...

It's been a while since I could say I was in trouble with my boss. In fact, I can't exactly recall ever being in 'trouble'. In all previous instances, any 'trouble' was mainly various flavours of 'gentlemanly disagreements', so to speak. But recently things got a little more serious. Serious enough that they had to mention less-than-offhand the thinly-veiled threat of 'disciplinary measures'. In geekier terms: the dreaded banhammer.

I'm guessing the main reason for this is that I'm too casual about everything.

My mindset when I punch in is mainly “Do your work. Don’t show up late. Be nice to colleagues. Endeavour to not daydream too much.” But the Creed also includes some other commandments: “Don’t ever let work get between you and a friend. Don’t bring work home. Don’t let work get in the way of work. Don’t take criticism too personally”.

Just to be clear: this is not my career. There are two reasons that keep me in this job: money and my teammates. I like my salary and schedule well enough (fits the lifestyle) and most of my co-workers are friends I already knew before getting here. This is where my loyalties begin and end in regard to this line of work.

Which means I have no true commitment to the company. Additionally, I always had trouble pushing a product or service I wouldn't use myself, so we're off on a strange footing. The fact that I'm not at all passionate about this work also translates in being detached from it, which means inevitably my mind will wander during my shift. I just can't get 'involved' in the work the same way I would in a more creative job (which is actually a euphemism for ‘interesting but unstable, uncertain, underpaying and resolutely untenable job’).

Errors are common occurrence in an office environment. Most of them are recorded and fixed as soon as they are found out. Where I work, this process is appropriately dubbed 'quality control' and is an essential part of the company's business model. Precision is the main selling point, the care of which falls to we, the operators', hands. Beyond that, there can be the occasional slip up that we don't have time to fix before the clients notice and come calling. That's when the company's reputation suffers.

I'm more than okay with all this. In fact, I support it. When we discover a problem, we fix it instead of denying it. It's great. I'm proud of working for a company that doesn't play ostrich with its own flaws.

I'm a really fast worker. I'm talking Speedy Gonzalez fast here. I clear out more work orders in a week than anyone else in the office. But that also means they can get... well... botched in the process… Sometimes…. Okay. more than 'sometimes', but less than 'often'. The exact figure stands between 8% and 9% errors out of hundreds of work orders per month. Most of these mistakes are corrected before the documents even go live.

I already have my team-lead to go over those with me when they happen. But when work-related issues are deemed important enough to be escalated to a higher level of management, it blows everything out of proportion.

And I don’t mind being told I made a mistake. That’s how you learn. What I have trouble absorbing is the “Hah! Gotcha!” overtones that come out of people’s mouths sometimes. It’s insulting, and it carries the subtle message that they’ll never tire of reminding you about that ‘one time’.

An honest mistake is an honest mistake.

Even a downright stupid one (in my case essentially a copy-paste mistake. I was so hell-bent on obtaining a certain information for the dossier I was working on that I completely forgot to include this other important information, which led to the client noticing said missing information. Emphasis on the client noticing part, because otherwise no one would have made a big deal of it. I would have simply been asked to correct it myself, something I am entirely for - your fuck-up, you fix it).

But corporations are soulless entities. They do not forgive. They do not forget. They do not know empathy. They do not have a sense of humour. They do not know how to deal with employees like me that happen to be human beings first and professionnals second.

But work is serious business.

When you fuck up one task hard enough, all the other trivial things which you thought were perfectly... well... trivial... tend to surface up and bite you in the ass. Meaningless things like forgetting a few minor details here and there, or a harmless and obscure in-joke written by hand in the margins of an old work order. These things, no matter how idiotic and insignificant at the time, have a way of sneaking up on you later on when they suddenly become important. It’s what we get for working in the digital age: not much escapes scrutiny. Stuff that even you forget you did may appear again on someone else’s radar. It’s like the system itself accumulates frustrations and things it can hold against you when you finally push the Wrong Button. Past that particular threshold, be prepared for a shit-storm of little ‘misses’ regardless of your more numerous ‘hits’.

I have no problem ‘fessing up for my mistakes and working to eradicate them. Aiming for the brass ring of “not going to do it again” should be enough of a burden to bear, because this is a performance-heavy job and I need my mental real estate. But being slammed just this once more for the very same issue that was already addressed a week ago sounds like overkill, and only contributes to make me more jaded and depressed about my work. Can’t I just concentrate on not screwing up again instead? I’d love to be able to concentrate, but someone’s trying to guilt-trip me and sadly, it’s kind of working…

Now the hard part.

This is really rough to bring up because I know it will make me sound like a chauvinistic motherfucker (which, you guessed right, I am obviously NOT and do not wish to be associated with). I can just imagine the snipers taking aim, but I have to say my piece.

From my experience (read: from my experience), women in a position of authority have a hard time staying emotionally neutral about it. If you make a work-related mistake, instead of getting an "Uh, okay, so what happened and how can we fix it?", the message they send often is "what the fuck is wrong with you?". If you’re male, the fact that they respond with their emotions (no matter how they try to mask it professionally - which actually shows their level of dedication) will still make it sound to you like a direct attack on your person. I try to not let it show too much, but I'm a deeply-emotional person (they say still waters run deep) and that makes me vulnerable to this kind of assault. That and a propensity for doing everything by-the-book which, sadly, really gets on my nerves (I’ve always postulated that if you always refer to procedure, it only means you can’t think on your feet, but that’s for another debate, and this trait might only contribute to widen the gap between my brand of thinking and the corporate world’s brand of thinking).

My direct superior, (let’s call her A.) is actually very good at suppressing this phenomenon. She's very fair with any and all of her colleagues, and always looking to improve the workflow without sacrificing anyone's sanity. I am insanely glad for that fact. A’s own superior, C., however, is more of a panic-prone, gotta-look-good, middle-management type. Preserving the sacro-sanct Reputation means everything in her job, and I can understand her position well: when nearly the only feedback you get from the office is bad news, it must be kind of nerve-wracking. Also, having to report said bad news upstairs must feel like shoveling shit. So okay, I get it. My little mistake snowballed and made you work twice over. No need to rub my nose in it out of spite. All I should be concerned with is the details of my mistake and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again. And when I’ve gone over that with my direct superior, I sure as fuck don’t need a second lecture from someone else who just got the memo.

I just don’t get how big deals can be made out of little nothings. The moral of the story is probably: never fuck up, no matter how slightly. Also, become a robot. Robots can’t be blamed for their behavior, only their programmers. They also have this cool dance that they do.

"Okay with Earth Day"

Eh oui.. j'ai mon ascendant hippy. Je suis un environnementaliste de salon.

C'est-à-dire que je préfère voir la race humaine en harmonie avec son monde: Ni à son service, ni l'exploitant salement. En harmonie veut dire pour moi que nous trouvons les moyens d'occuper la terre et bien y vivre, sans la détruire ni la surprotéger. Jamais vous ne me verrez à une manif', mais jamais vous ne me verrez polluer alors que j'ai des alternatives.

En fait, cette bonne vielle terre se fiche bien de nous. Elle va survivre bien longtemps à l'espèce humaine. Laissons de côté notre nombrilisme d'homo sapiens capitalensis et pensons-y une fois de temps à autre: La terre ne tourne pas autour de l'Humanité.

Je n'aime pas voir les gens prier aveuglément à l'autel de l'environnementalisme. Ça crée des fous-de-Gaia dangereux comme ces horreurs que Greenpeace (passe de cash) et PETA (autre passe de cash), véritables cultes de l'hypocrisie, du "holier-than-thou", dict(ta)teurs de conduite et abuseurs de confiance.

À mon humble avis, ce qui est important pour l'espèce humain présentement est d'améliorer, protéger et partager notre qualité de vie. Ça veut dire trouver des moyens de mieux distribuer les ressources naturelles déjà disponibles, et de s'assurer une continuité en les renouvellant. Au diable vos guerres et vos prises de bec, tant qu'il y a à manger et un toit au dessus de nos têtes.

Autrefois, l'environnementalisme était une cause. Aujourd'hui, c'est une étiquette aussi inutile que les sacro-saintes marques de vêtement (brand names) que vous arborez si fièrement dans la rue en devenant le babillard d'un autre.

Earth... Hour?? HOUR??????

Quand on me propose de participer l'Heure de la Terre, je deviens enragé. Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas, on demande de couper à zéro l'utilisation de courant pendant une heure par année. Euhhh... wtfQUOI? Selon moi, cette idée est comparable à mettre un vulgaire plaster sur une lacération de 3 pied de long. Pire encore, comme on s'attaque à la consommation d'électricité (le dernier de nos soucis, vraiment), ledit plaster est carrément posé à côté de la plaie...

C'est le genre de mesure temporaire qui fait un pied-de-nez à la véritable cause. Une 'patch' inefficace qui constitue à oublier qu'on a un réel travail à faire si on veut changer quelque chose. C'est comme "becquer-bobo" sur une personne qui souffre du cancer...

Et pour ses pratiquants, eh bien ils achètent une indulgence à l'Église Verte qui est prète à leur pardonner leurs péchés pour une bagatelle. C'est une action qui n'aura servi strictement à RIEN. Allez en paix, comme ils disent...

Je travaille pour une boite qui diffuse des communiqués de presse. On reçoit des compagnies, des ministères, syndicats et particuliers tout plein de nouvelles aussi insipides les unes que les autres et il est de notre devoir de les transférer aux journalistes blasés qui les liront. Si vous saviez seulement le nombre de communiqués vaniteux envoyés par des compagnies et organismes qui se disent 'vert' et qui ne font que parler de leur produits habituels mais cette dans un langage 'vert', ou de leurs 'actions concrètes' qui n'ont aucun impact réel à-part bien sur la récolte de capital politique faux-écolo... vous seriez comme moi découragés de lire toute cette hypocrisie crasse.

Et qui parle d'hypocrisie dit:

Les voitures hybrides...

Quand je vois un de ces véhicules, j'ai le gout d'y mettre le feu. Les voitures dites 'hybrides' sont la pire insulte de l'industrie automobile qui prétend développer une nouvelle voiture du futur, 'meilleure et améliorée' alors que la vraie technologie propre est releguée aux oubliettes en attendant de "voir si le marché est vraiment vraiment prêt pour la voiture électrique".

Mais il l'a TOUJOURS été...

Dans l'ombre, on crée des moteurs électriques de plus en plus viables depuis plus de 100 ans et la voiture électrique n'est pas un rêve distant mais une réalité bien possible... et pourtant, on se contente depuis plus d'un siècle de son petit cousin attardé, la voiture à essence...

Entretemps, on développe des demi-mesures ridicules qui n'ont pour but que de soutirer quelques dinars de plus de la bourse de tous et chacun, question d'étirer la sauce pour l'industrie en place. L'argent parle toujours plus fort que la raison.

Want to 'go green' for real? So stop pussyfooting about it and get to work, you lazy fucks!

*ahem* pardonnez mon gaélique...
Quand je suis plein de café, je réagis plus fort....


Y'a toutes ces choses, mais malgré tout... je suis 'Okay' avec Earth Day

Pourquoi? Parce que le Jour de la Terre est une célébration plutôt respectable qui se perpétue depuis 40 ans et qui amène beaucoup de nouvelles idées, de discussions, de projets et de mouvements pour la conscientisation - bref, de la science pratique. Tout le monde y met du sien et au moins ce n'est heureusement pas uniquement un geste ridiculement futile comme Earth Hour.


C'est 2010, hein? Et bien en 2010 On veut du progrès. Le Jour de la Terre me semble une bonne occasion de proposer des solutions valables. Mes yeux et oreilles veulent être impressionnés. Showtime, les écolos.

Emergalv cheapass poetry Wednesday

Her eyes a-piercin’
and circled with blue
Crouch’d in the weeds a-waitin’
o’er the man she’d run through.

Her backbone of stern stuff,
her spear marred with gore,
Her skin look’d as rough
as the leathers she wore.

- Rennald d’Ricvall
From The Southerlands

Lecture!

La lecture! Il faut bien en parler, puisqu’elle fait partie intégrante de ma vie depuis que je suis tout jeune (eh oui cette époque a bel et bien existé).

Comme avec tout le reste, mes goûts sont très variés. À différentes époques, j’ai alterné J.D. Salinger (paix ait son âme), Tom Clancy, Weiss & Hickmans, J.K. Rowlings, J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Bernard Weber, William Gibson et G.R.R. Martens et une foule d’autres autheur(e)s, cette liste étant de toute évidence non-exhaustive.

Beaucoup d’excellents livres disparaissent de la circulation, écrasés sous le poids des ‘New-York Times best-sellers’ el-cheapo du mois (fuuuuuuuuuck). C’est dans les brocantes de livres et les friperies, quelques années après leur publication, qu’on trouve les perles rares, les récits oubliés, les vielles éditions (au couvertures souvent plus attrayantes que leurs ré-éditions plus récentes). Je refuse encore de m’acheter les nouveaux formats de Dune, quitte à patienter et me fier au pur hasard pour trouver de vielles éditions. Dans les années 70-80, on faisait avec les moyens du bord, mais on savait faire de la jolie reliure ;)

Certains romans me tombent entre les mains d’une manière totalement inatendue. Je me souviens à l’époque du CÉGEP d’avoir pioché Kindred Spirits (le premier et seul bon volume du Dragonlance Meetings Sextet) pour 69¢ dans un magasin de l’Armée du Salut à Brossard, le tout sur un coup de tête et parce que je n’avais rien à lire au moment de l’achat. Ce coup de tête s’est avéré un bon choix, qui m’a poussé à lire la série au complet par pure curiosité.

Je pourrais dire la même chose pour All Quiet on the Eastern Front (Erich Maria Remarque) et Jarhead (Anthony Swofford), dont j’avais vu les adaptations cinématographiques mais que je ne trouvais pas en étagère. J’ai trouvé les deux à 4.99$ dans un Village des Valeurs, tous deux en excellent état. Il va sans dire que j’ai dévoré les deux dans les semaines suivant mon achat.

C’est dans une brocante de livres nouvellement ouverte à Longueuil que je suis tombé à la fois sur Candideet Cyrano de Bergerac. Idem côté voracité littéraire: je me suis farci ces classiques en moins de temps qu'il suffirait à Cyrano de faire sa tirade du nez.

Quelques mois plus tard, comble de bonheur, je trouve par hasard l’ironiquement excellent Molvania : a land untouched by modern dentistry par Jetlag Travel Guides et ma première copie du The Zombie Survival Guide de Max Brooks. J’ignore quel genre de personne dérangée peut être amenée à se départir d’aussi bons livres, mais je saute sur l’aubaine anyways.

Etc, etc, etc...

À y penser, je dirais facilement que mes meilleures lectures ont été des découvertes impromptues, comme si les livres avaient choisi leur moment pour aparaître sur mon radar. Le fait même qu’elles soient des trouvailles totalement inattendues doit allumer une ampoule à l’intérieur de ma tête qui mèle l’opportunité à la curiosité.

À l’inverse, si j’achète un livre que je prévoyais déjà acheter depuis un bout de temps, ou si je le reçois en cadeau, il risque de se faire oublier dans un coin poussiéreux de ma bibliothèque pendant quelques temps alors que mes lectures dites ‘soudaines’ lui volent constamment la priorité. Étrange, non?

Alors comme avec les rencontres, c’est l’impromptu et le spontanné qui l’emporte.

Allez savoir…

Mercy

Hi everybody and welcome to another edition of The Quiet Alpha. It's been nearly two weeks since our last installment, and what a crazy two weeks they've been! But I'm going to share something today that is a bit out of the ordinary. This is the first in a series of semi-related short stories that will be posted to this blag as the weeks go by and I'm too lazy or distracted to come up with more up-to-date rants.

I present to you:

Mercy

Vohanna looked at the young man. He was sitting down with his back propped against the tree stump, only half-conscious. Bruised but otherwise unharmed, the youth had been taken down early in the fight. Milewe had made sure to drag any weapons away from him, with the exception of a single round shield, the use of which she would make clear to him soon enough.
The Saesar came up behind Milewe and kneeled beside her before the survivor. "Ask him if he knows why we spared him", she offered.
Milewe was about to begin translating when Mucha walked over, shock all but painted on her face. "You speak the language of these swine?", she spat out fiercely.
Vohanna shook her head sadly, rising to meet Mucha at eye level. "We weren't always at war, sora..."
If she still objected, this nevertheless seemed to placate her, or at least let her know there would be no further question of Vohanna’s authority. As she relented, Milewe turned gently to the young Nagled warrior and adressed him in his tongue.
“Mulak-mi anmmah a y?” she attempted, her accented rendering of the foreign tongue making her feel clumsy. Know you the reason why you were shown mercy?
The juvenile only stared at her, his face a mixture of revulsion, fear, and… total incomprehension. She repeated, more slowly, and this time, understanding registered on his features, though the look of hostility remained the same. It was to be expected
“Loa”, he said through clenched teeth. No
“Doesn’t understand, does he?” asked Vohanna, strenly, her hands busy with the cleaning of her spearhead. Judging by her ugly grin, Mucha seemed to relish the idea.
“No he doesn’t.”, confirmed Milewe, pausing to think of her next sentence. “Vi abu”, she motionned to the dead laying all around them. “Palla… a y goa malaat a en. Mulak?” Look around. You must return them to the earth, understand?
She waited. Again, no answer. “Mulak a la?” Do you understand me?
She poked him in the chest, hoping for a reaction, and pointed to the shield laying on the floor, making scooping moves with both hands. “A y goa malaat a en. Dig, damn you”
A single tear welled up in his eye and rolled down his aquiline nose. He lifted his arm to brush it away but the gesture died and his hand fell back to his thigh.
“Naam” he croaked, his skin taut against his cheekbones, defeat marking his every slight movement. Yes
“He gets it.”, said Milewe, finally. She nodded to him pitifully and got up. Vohanna handed her interpretor’s long bow back and gave the order to move out.
The trio left him to get a grip on himself, and dissapeared in the tall grasses where their sisters awaited them.

Billy Idol - Cyberpunk (1993)

I had nothing else to talk about today so I am going with one of my favourite pet peeves with the online community.


Bad press, good karma.

When you listen to Billy Idol's Cyberpunk, you're not really tapping into a musical genre per se: Rather, you are listening to history.

It was one of few commercial rock albums of its time to rely that much on digital means of production. As such, it was panned by more traditionnal rock media as being 'less than genuine', and you'd be hard-pressed to find a mainstream take on this piece that didn't explicitly imply a well-ingrained fear that digital audio workstations with software synths would one day replace instruments and programmers would replace musicians. Being early adopters of the technology working outside of the usual electronic music sphere, Idol and his entourage were pioneers.

Nowadays, when we lay the money down to go see a cyberpunk, postcyberpunk or cyberpunk-inspired work of fiction on the big screen, we can almost always, without question, expect to hear a soundtrack of either electronic, industrial or techno music. Well, it wasn't always this way. There was a time when you could feel 'cyberpunk enough' while listening to rock, dub, jazz, rap, classical music and just about anything that made you think. It was that blessed era that allowed for a variety of styles and the avoidance of an established cliché. It was during those times that, against all (if any) expectation, an already-sucessful, blonde british pop-rock artist decided he wanted to try something different. And try he did.

1993's Cyberpunk has a little something for everyone, granted you have a diverse taste in music. You'll hear straight rock, pop, psychadelic rock, electronica, techno, televised news stories recordings, quotes from movies, gospel and even the kind of new-age relaxation recordings you put on at night to convince yourself you're a perfectly sane human being (just keep telling yourself that, chombatta). This kind of progressive, all-inclusive music collage is a great sign of wide cultural awareness. Coming from a well-known radio-rock musician, this was quite a feat. (In fact, my only personnal gripe is the near-total absence of hip-hop influence, which was already well into crossing over with rock/metal in the early 90s. But, hey, you can only ask for so much.)

As far as concept albums go, Cyberpunk doesn’t as much tell a straigt beginning-to-end story as show you a different time in a different place. It’s an open window on a near-future urban world not too different to our own, just like the books, just like the movies.

It seems to me that, sometimes, reviewers have trouble understanding that an album is more often than not much more than the sum of its parts. In this case, they miss the mark entirely. Cyberpunk attracted a flurry of media attention, oftentimes curious but, sadly, most of it negative. On both sides of the fence, came voices crying foul. The most prominent, oft-cited reason for this is what both the media and internet community interpreted as an attempt to 'cash-in' on an 'emerging trend'. Far from being exclusive to cyberculture, this response is a typical knee-jerk reaction of any cultural group meeting the next generation of enthusiasts, combined with the fear of losing the privileged position as trendsetters. Less hostile, more welcoming members, of course, offered that he was genuinely interested in the themes and ideas of cyberculture and cyberdelic aesthetics. These more compromising voices, were however, drowned out by the naysayers.

If I may offer a little insight, Billy Idol was really on to something. He may have been criticized by both the cyberpunk and rock audiences for attempting to blindly associate himself with the name 'cyberpunk', but he in fact, knowingly or not, perhaps even naïvely, landed himself in the shoes of a Sprawl character wading through a sea of uncertain, possibly dangerous neon-glowing wonders both appealing and terrifying.

Classic cyberpunk fiction often portrays young, inexperienced individuals dabbling in technologies they hardly understand, but which captivates them and is readily available. This naïve fascination often leads to wild experimentation, unexpected accidents, radical changes of personnal lifestyles and the spontaneous birth of new sub cultures. These characters may not know much, initially, but they have the means, and they try their damnedest. This promethean gift to the 'modern primitives' of the cyberpunk world is what fuels most of its science-fiction and ensures the continuous melodrama of man and machine. Analogous to this young cybergeneration, Idol stumbled upon something he liked and could become greatly excited about, despite being tech-illiterate*. Thus, he immediately found himself in a role not unlike that of our young tech-amateurs described above. As a result he is branded as both a newbie and a sellout. Tragic indeed. But you don't get more 'cyberpunk' than being in that specifically uncomfortable position.

* Just a footnote, but does anyone remember the oft-cited anecdote how William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a Hermes 2000 typewriter? Yeah, I thought I'd mention it.

Musicians let different input sources inspire them. They are not documentary writers, nor are they news reporters or ivory-tower academics. They interpret concepts through their senses, first and foremost. What-you-hear-is-what-you-get.

The same reviewers often place too much emphasis on the business aspect of an artist's body of work. How well did it do? How did fans react? Did it attract a new fanbase? Did it pay for the next album? Did it open new opportunities for the artist? The fact of the matter remains that the album was a whim, an experiment, an envy, a 10-month labour of love, not a career move. No one twisted Mr. Idol's arm and said "well Billy, here's how you tap into this market". He asked around, got some gear setup, sat down with his bandmates and got informed on how to use it creatively.

The cyberpunk genre is characterized by cultural cross-pollinisation, with new subcultures birthed at the drop of a hat, and old, obsolete ideas rapidly replaced. With this mindset, everything is possible and more traditional conventions break down. How can anyone complain about a breach of rules that do not even exist?

Thus, Idol did not embrace a musical style: he embraced an approach.

Is it a good listen? That depends on your tastes. Is it inspired? Definitely. Does it sound like anything else that came out at that time? Nope. Was it genius? Perhaps even not, but it has its controversial place in the hazy spectrum of the 90s ProTools boom, and in cyberpunk history.

Shock the system, baby.

Thursday Gear Porn Extravaganza

Once in a while, I can't help but keel over and drool all over myself in awe of a piece of equipment which has caught my attention. Introducing the sleek, sexy and flexible MKH-800 TWIN. Hubba hubba.

A lot of mics work with selectable polarity patterns, which is an indispensable tool when you have a very specific tone/application in mind. You want to hear only one side of the room? Go cardioid (and place it accordingly, yo). You want to capture dialog for film, go up-close and personnal with your talent's mouth with a hyper-cardioid mic (you know you want to). You like a good room tone to harmonize your song mix? Omni and figure-8 are your friends. And if you're feeling kind of kinky, try a MS-style setup using a mix of figure-8 and directional. Anything goes, but you're usually limited by each microphone's available patterns (most will have one or two, maybe three). And what you capture going to tape is usually limited to what you decided to leave out when you picked your polar pattern. Anything short of omnidirectionnal will necessarily cut something out and leave you to work with it.

I've worked with the regular MKH 800 in-studio and let me tell you, it's one heck of a flat mic. Except for that alpha-plus-plus gentle peak starting at 6kHz, all frequencies are born equal when passing through the 800. End-result is moderately 'brighter', but that's actually a great asset when you're recording voiceover. Everything else is just crystal clear say-it-like-it-is, nearly-uncoloured audio.

And I mean... just look at this response curve... Yum :Þ



I'll fess up to my little Sennheiser fetish, but you have to admit this stuff is teh sex.

The thing with expensive high-end mics usually is that they tend to be highly specialized (ever use a Telefunken M12 on a bass drum? So what if it can handle the SPL? How about you save it for the overheads instead, kthxbye). At this kind of price tag, you'll want to have a few justifiable reasons to own each one. But the TWIN completely destroys that notion as it offers incredible flexibility.

Instead of featuring a built-in selector, the TWIN sends a stereo signal to your DAW, then you control it by simply muting, fading, panning, inverting the phase and whatnot. This means you can re-create polar patterns AFTER recording, and still keep your unmodified signal ready to use if you ever change your mind and want to go back without having to record again. It's almost like cheating, only not. This approach allows you to fake all the known patterns in the book and everything in between...

...and all that from a single high-quality RF condenser mic.

I'm sold.

This marks a change in mentalities, really: a move to the 'real' digital era with a lot more interaction between your gear and software. You have a shorter, stockier mic without switches or buttons on the body ( = better overall capsule insulation. Sure you can call me paranoid.) that works just perfectly if you know what to do it. And it's hella forgiving to use: when you have access to just about any tweak needed software-side, the only thing left to worry about is mic placement (don't get lazy on this).

Quick! Before you lose interest!

Cute, right? If only we were so forgiving of humans when they do the same :P

I’m ready to hork up the ugly truth and say it like it is: I’m lazy.

We all are, in a way: We shy away from effort, we don’t always volunteer for everything, we procrastinate, etc… And that’s fine. Only, sometimes, it can create some inner conflict if you're in denial about it. Let's be honest for a minute.

Laziness is not a problem if you don’t have any particular ambitions, but I happen to have a lot of interests. I mean a LOT. (The capital letters and italics should hint at just how much.) If I spend a long enough period time not pursuing any of my own goals, it’s probably because I’m busy helping others with theirs. The biggest problem is that block of time between these two modes.

When that 'block' happens, I switch to auto pilot and blindly go out of my way to begin new things or to foolishly say yes to everyone else… and that usually transforms a free schedule into a Calendar from Hell.

Le Calendrier Infernal means many things:

• Firstly, events you promise to attend will conflict with each other, or if they don’t, it’ll be the time spent moving from one place to the other that will run short.
  
• Secondly, you’ll slip in and out of focus as more and more things solicit your attention.
  
• Third..ly, you’ll forget things because you were so hyped about something else.
  
• Fourth…(-ly?) you’ll begin to hate your day job for stealing all your precious precious time, and resent having to sleep at night.
  
• Lastly, anything that was already on hiatus may rear its fugly hear and come bite you in the arse, begging for attention. You may even find yourself trying to find new things to do just to avoid your earlier engagements. And then you build a precedent for ‘creative procrastination’ which, while fascinating, might be a really bad habit.

So okay I’m lazy. I only feel really 'lazy' when I have a thousand things to do and I'm not doing them. But, but but… right before I had a thousand things to do, I wasn’t really lazy yet, was I? No! I was idle. And that’s far worse!

What makes me lazy? My interests.

Wait, what? The reason for Avian’s trouble in pursuing his interests are in fact the very same interests?

Ah, but it’s the truth. I have too many interests and not enough true passions (You know, the all-encompassing kind that could destroy your couple?). Some passing interests motivate me to work on new things, some others cause me to procrastinate and abandon them. Mainly though, other people’s projects (which I almost unerringly find interesting) interfere with my personnal things, and those personnal things draw me away from my promises to others. Oh the drama! Now I know what my computer feels like when I run over 9000 applications at once.

Managing your time is almost always a question of balancing what you want and what you need.

Whew…

But after all this, even when you succeed in getting everything done (or mostly everything done), even when you know other people appreciate you and what you can offer them, you still have to hang your ego on the rack and get things back into perspective.

Here’s my main man Fred Gallagher on humility and the willingness to improve yourself:

I would never call myself an artist. I'm not. 'Artist' is a gift word. I can't recall who the poet was (I believe it was Frost) who reacted to a student who called himself a 'Poet'. Frost reacted to this by saying you can't call yourself a poet, it's a gift word - it's something that other people have to bestow upon you. The same goes for artist. And even if people say that you are an artist, you have to be at a point that you are willing to accept that term. Me? I'm not quite there yet.

So slap that moniker on someone all you want, a person has got to feel worthy of the praise he/she receives before feeling it.

Funny how some of my art teachers (thankfully not all) back in college totally disagreed with this. They offered instead that artists were born, not made, and that technical skill was only an accessory to the ‘real thing’ (which you obviously can’t develop on your own, right?). Also according to them, thinking critically about art was just another way of acquiring ‘technique’. When you put it this way, Art itself (capital A, yeah) begins to sound like this untouchable divinity. That’s dangerous. It means you can't explore it without thinking you aren't qualified to do so. It means you can’t make any progress without feeling like a hack who could never hope to rival The Greats.

Sorry to disagree, but I don’t compete with the past. I compete with me.

Speaking of the past, the ancient greeks had a word: “techne”, which they used to describe both the art and craftsmanship. To me, they are nearly indistinguishable. If you do something well enough to get hired for it or innovative enough to influence the generations to come: it’s Art. If you push the envelope, develop new techniques or if you create new concepts: it’s Art. Nuff said.

Ian McConville has dealt with similar frustrations during his college days. I can empathize.

His own teachers postulated that ideas were more important than technique. That vision lends itself well to the field of art history. It’s also useful if you’re aiming to become an art critic. But when you want to be the creator, it’s counterproductive to think in these terms. It undermines your progression because it contradicts the age-old ‘practice makes perfect’ maxim.

Art is a convoluted process, and things are never that clear-cut when you get down to it. In this whole debate, the truth is probably somewhere in between the different worldviews, but a fellow’s entitled to his opinionated opinions, right?.

Avian out.

And now for something completely different... NOT!

"One of these days I might be tempted to ressurect Sato just for the fun of drawing her"

- Me, yesterday

Look at me being all eager and stuff :P

Some things just can't leave you. I've been trying to shake off the manga influence from my drawings for some years now, but I think it's just stuck with me for so long that it's going to stay forever unless I get post-hypnotic suggestion to the contrary. Regardless of what I try to do, all my characters are going to have huge heads and eyes hehe...

Wish the pose was more dynamic. Satoshi doesn't look like she's going to throw that basketball at all, just going to hold onto it for an hour or two.

And the hands, my god the hands. I think I'm going to set my house on fire right now, thanks.

10 years of ‘hmmm… mmmaybe’

Just a little throwback to my previous ranticle on Nostalgia. I wanted to share the main webcomic ideas that germinated in my head for the past 10 years, and why they failed to materialize.

* * *

Betwen 2000-2002 ‘Phantom Reality’ was the lame working title of a little hardly-feasible hardly interesting story about Arakawa Satoshi, a young japanese martial artist in her mid-twenties and Takeshi, the guy she loves... and their unwilling involvement in the events leading to the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway (yeah, serious business).

The Characters and story:
The hook was definitely the main character. Sato started as a random chick hastily sketched in my notebook, wearing a hakama and sporting a ponytail so ridiculously huge that you could have used it as a body pillow or a small emergency raft (She also swung a pair of nunchucks… wtf?). I let her to sit there for a while but she came back in so many of my other sketches that I gave her a name and story. She had mastered jiu-jistu, iai-jutsu, kenpo, wing chun kung-fu and aikido (yeah, I was just piling it on). Since she had dedicated much of her life to the martial arts since childhood, her studies suffered immensely. Sato was a strange gal. Highly profficient but socially awkward and withdrawn, so… bit of a geeky MMA dreamgirl.

Takeshi, was her aikido sparring opponent and the guy she was slowly warming to. He shared her interest in martial arts, but was nowhere near her level of skill. Also, he was slightly less confident and carried his own brand of social awkwardness, most of which was based on the blundering scared-of-women japanese youth stereotype. There was going to be a push-pull romantic tension until the story’s ending.

Kimi was the cute-friend-from-way-back-when who supported Sato through her studies. Think a blond-bleached ganguro but without the fake tan and ugly makeup as well as some actual smarts despite the look. She was the annoyingly-genki anime-fan with good-grades stereotype.

Miko was a singer (bit of a cross between Tarja Turunen and a generic j-pop idol) whose role in the story I had yet to decide. In fact she was just a character I thought ‘hmmm’ gotta find a way to include her… Fail. :P

Now, Takahashi Genzai was the guy who started the whole mess. He was also a martial artist (no shit!) in his late 40s, with a shadowy background in the JSDF and some unstated dirty deeds. Genzai had mob connections and was contracted by a third party to assist the Aum Shinrikyo sect in their attack. He was slowly grooming Takeshi to be his replacement if anything happened to him. His employers get a hold of Takeshi and get him involved as a means of leverage to ensure Genzai’s collaboration. Of course, Sato gets in the way before Takeshi gets seriously hurt.

Piling on useless details, PR’s plot was setup thus : Sato would lead her normal life, go to school everyday, socialize (awkwardly) with the other characters, the usual college-student rigamarole. But once in a while she would get a daydream about some serious events happening in her alternate reality, which took place in edo-era japan (hence the stupid-sounding title). Those daydreams would reveal upcoming events to her (meeting with Genzai, conflict with a dangerous religious group, stopping a friend from getting involved with them, etc..) The comic was to be laid out online-manga-style with no gag/punchline. I was really into manga at that particular time and the humor was at all not my goal. I even thought of posting them in chapters instead of single pages (which makes for a horrible business model, if you think about it).

Main inspirations :
The terrorist attack itself, chinese astrology, Rurouni Kenshin, Megatokyo, 3x3 Eyes, Jackie Chan movies, The Rock (for the poison gas) and even Metal Gear Solid.

Why it failed to happen :
It was a broken horsecart with the horses pulling in over 87 directions. That and the title was lame. The characters were hard to grok and at the same time too stereotypical to even get emotionally attached to. Sato was a tomboy, Kimi was an epic-level schoolgirl. Miko was a horrible ripoff of Priss Asagiri with little in the way of actual personnality, not to mention I hadn’t even found a use for her character. Takeshi was bland and old Genzai was…. Nah he was kind of cool… in a Mifune Toshiro kind of way… Ok I’ll shut up now… :S

But the final nail in its coffin was that it was ridicullously noobish. It was an amateurish take on a subject I hardly understood. (This was also before wikipedia got big and became a valid ressource. My research would have been facilitated with easier access to a wide variety of proper reading materials.) Truth be told, I just needed a historical event to act as a ‘timeline anchor’ that would give a sense of time and place to my story, not to forget some much needed credibility (which it obviously didn’t have on its own). But writing valid fiction about something extremely serious like a terrorist attack perpetrated by obscure groups for motives you hardly understand is a) pretentious and b) a complete lack of respect for the people directly concerned (Japanese citizens as a whole, the victims, etc etc etc….). So it just died in its infancy.

One of these days I might be tempted to ressurect Sato just for the fun of drawing her, but I wouldn’t exactly consider going ahead with this loose-thread story.

The upside :
PR gave me a host of characters designs to draw, draw, draw and draw again in the vain hopes that they would one day devellop into something potable. Additionally, the focus on martial arts and hand-to-hand combat gave me the impetus to learn how to draw aggressive characters in motion. It also turned my french, english and humanities cegep classes into doodling workshops *snicker*.

Moving on!

The chronicles of Emergalv is a fantasy world I’ve been working on since 2002 or so. It has taken many forms over the years since its original inception, but it began as a webcomic idea. And the world is gigantic. Just like PR, it started with a single sketch of a female character with cool warpaint on her face (I’m not making myself sound very serious, eh?).

The Characters and story:
I had originally planned it to be a family feud in my best tolkien-meets-shakespeare style, but I found the personnal story of the character Gresha, was more interesting. It was about her royal family’s eradication at the hands of a rival claimant to the throne, her dangerous exile to the southern lands and subsequent adoption by its people the Noerban (think Paul Atreides amongst the Fremen, only… said Fremen are all amazon-like chicks. Can anyone say ‘one-track-minded’ ?).

What was at first a simplistic revenge story evolved into a world of its own with varied cultures, political agendas, plot twists and the neverending conflicts both petty and large-scale. Early enough in the process I decided not to head down the ‘old road’ and eliminated all non-humans from the story. I thought, no elves, no dwarves, no magic, no bullshit. Not that I don’t enjoy classic tolkienesque fiction off and on, but I thought I’d create something more to my liking : A dark, gritty medieval world with some unique elements (like unexplained supernatural events that stayed unexplained) and of course some thinly-veiled references to our own History. It made for an interesting setting, and I spent more time actually writing for it than actually drawing characters.

When offered to dee-emm for an AD&D game with some of my friends (some of whom had never even tried tabletop roleplaying) I was at a loss to pick any one setting that I thought I could use well. Which left me to use what I had already written up as a test of its quality. My audience didn’t know what to expect, and they seemed to like it, so I was satisfied with that. I even found ways to throw in some NPCs that were originally supposed to be characters in the strip, like the mighty Vohanna of Clervol and the lord Ulrich the Restless (hehe).

Main inspirations :
Errant story, Emerald Winter, generic D&D, A Song of Ice and Fire, Warhammer, Morrowind and the art of Kristen ‘Merekat’ Perry, Larry Elmore and Boris Vallejo.

Why it failed to happen :
After experimenting with a few storyboards, I started feeling that, as a medium, a manga-style comic strip lended itself poorly to a world of this scope. At last, I completely scrapped the ‘comic’ idea and concentrated on the roleplaying sessions with my gaming group. When the game was left on hiatus and the group later dissolved (and my breakup with one of the players and the departure of another to Japan might have contributed, but hey, we had some fun) I left things as they were and moved on to other things. There was some significant overlap between the ‘webcomic idea’ phase and the roleplaying sessions. When the games stopped and the time came to actually get back to drawing a comic, I found my interest had shifted and I was no longer ‘in the mood’ to create a webcomic about it.

The upside :
I got a kickass series of non-generic D&D sessions out of it, as well as some awesome human cultures to use in my fiction writing. I’d say I got much further than PR. I have a lot of writing and graphics under my belt that is Emergalv material just waiting to be used (characters, timelines, maps, descriptions, etc). One day, I might just write a roleplay setting (fluff only sans gaming system) and publish it online as a PDF.

***

At some point I began writing out some scripts for a comic project called Given time and Cough Syrup. It was about a local metal band trying to get together and have some practices. Jokes would be based on looking for a band name, band disagreements, song lyrics, composition trouble, eclectic musical genres, and general metal fandom in general.

The Characters and story :
I didn’t even have a single sketch prepared, but you know what metalheads look like. :P
While the comic would have some noticeable story elements, the whole idea was to make it a gigantic farce, so no drama, no tragedy, just light humour poking fun at the things we metalheads love.

Main inspirations :
a defunct webcomic called Nova Next Exit, Metalocalypse, Questionnable Content, Nothing Nice to Say and my own love of the metal genre and experience starting punk/metal bands.

Why it failed to happen :
I felt that I would run out of joke material too soon and would need a good comic writer to help me with the humour. With only 2-3 scripts written, I didn’t really get into the project and moved on to other things before I could find someone willing.

The upside : Err… cheap laughs at 3:00 in the morning while writing my scripts?

Deux types de relations

Y’a quelques années, je travaillais chez Audio Z. Si je mets de côté un instant mes préjugés par rapport au monde de la pub, faut avouer que c’était un endroit plutôt cool où travailler. Sans parler de mes collègues de travail (en somme du monde génial), on y rencontrait toute une variété de gens venant de styles de vie différents. Des zen, des stressés, des gens bien assis sur leurs succès passés, des débutants qui étaient prêts à tout pour percer, des gens talentueux, des ‘vrais’ qui se la jouaient ‘fake’, des ‘fakes’ qui se la jouaient ‘vrai’, du monde cultivé comme des ignares, en veux-tu, en v’la. C’était de toute beauté.

Il y avait un producteur, un de nos clients réguliers, un type brillant dont le nom m’échappe malheureusement, qui parlait de différentes relations un midi et qui nous a présenté une idée qui m’est toujours restée depuis.

Il parlait de deux types de relations humaines : horizontales et verticales.

La relation horizontale, c’est un peu comme une ‘phase’. Un truc passager ou épisodique. On y entre au même ‘niveau’ qu’on en sort. On sait exactement à quoi s’attendre. Exemple : Vous avez des amis avec qui vous partagez un passe-temps. Vous les voyez presque uniquement pour ledit passe-temps et ça s’arrète là. Autre exemple: Vous avez un chum/une blonde que vous voyez les fins de semaine pour sortir. Nul besoin d’approfondir la relation. Même que ça pourrait tout ruiner.

L’horizontale ne demande pas nécessairement d’efforts. C’est facile d’y projeter son égo et de fonctionner sur un mode « a beau mentir qui vient de loin » parce que ceci ne fait que rendre l’expérience appréciable.


La relation verticale est un peu plus complèxe. C’est une relation à long terme dans laquelle on tente d’empiler les expériences et d'y trouver une progression. C’est la relation dans laquelle on grimpe les marches en espérant ne pas les débouler. Comme une maison, il faut de bonnes fondations, sans quoi, elle s’écroule au moment le moins opportun. Faut pas bruler d’étapes dans une verticale. C’est la relation dans laquelle "un et un font trois".

Les frictions peuvent desfois servir de test à savoir si la relation verticale est encore valide. Si on surmonte l’obstacle sans faire trop d’abnégation, les deux personnes grandissent ensemble. Si ça casse, la chute est douloureuse et la rémission peut être longue. Les vielles amitiés et les grandes histoires d’Amour sont des exemples parfaits de relations verticales.


Dans la vie en général, je ne suis ni partisan de l’une ou de l’autre. On vit ce qu’on doit vivre à différents moments avec différentes personnes.

Aussi me me suis-je posé la question et la réponse est venue d’elle-même : Oui, il est parfaitement possible de vivre deux types de relations avec la même personne, faire un genre de ‘transfert’ et passer d’un mode à l’autre. Mais c’est rare, tout de même. Souvent, c’est une question de savoir à quelle stade de notre vie on se trouve, et si un tel transfert est une idée saine.

Desfois, je croise des gens merveilleux que j’ai à peine le temps de connaître parce que la vie va trop vite. Mais souvent, ce qui se passe est que ces ‘prospects’ me semblent tellement génials que c’en est presque intimidant de commencer à zéro. C’est la preuve qu’ils valent la peine d’être connus. Encore faut-il être patient.

Partout on croise des gens qui voudrait bien d’une relation verticale mais arrivent seulement à former des relations horizontales. C’est une question d’attitude. Pour arriver à se rendre intéressants, beaucoup subliment leurs personnalité profonde (côté sérieux?) pour ne présenter que la pointe de l’iceberg (côté givré). Ça marche mais, c’est souvent de courte durée.

Une fois trop engagé dans un mode, on perd ses 'compétences' avec l’autre. Quand on plane trop sur les horizontales, on finit par trouver sa vie vide de sens et ses amitiés peu profondes. C’est comme dans l’expression "Quelqu’un qui est l’ami de tout le monde n’est l’ami d’aucun." À l’inverse, si on cherche partout des verticales, on se sent rejeté par les autres, alors tout ce qu’ils voudraient, c’est simplement d’avoir du plaisir avec nous sans engagement. (Et jouer les pots-de-colle, ça te change en ddddd-drama queeeeeen!)

C’est un jet de balancement. Faut choisir avec qui on intéragit, et de quelle manière.

A handful of Lifetime Classics washed down with a glass of Nostlagia

Advisory : This rant contains dangerous levels of name-dropping.

Wow... this is 2010, huh? And March already, too?

So much can change in ten years…

It may or may not have had anything to do with the ‘turn of the millenium’ but 2001 was a big change for me. It was my last year of high school, my last year in the air cadets, the year my first girlfriend and I amicably parted, my last few school band concerts playing the tympani, getting my first part-time job, putting my drums together with my father (we really had a blast building the kit from the ground up, sanding wood and installing hardware – the whole nine yards) and saving up for a new computer (my current aging Omoikane box), discovering music in droves and playing my classics Illusion of Gaia and Chrono Trigger from beginning to end (and again and again - I was really into old emulated SNES titles back then). That was when I started acquiring a wardrobe of my own chosing (my highschool years had mostly been spent in uniform). Oh, and right before beginning to college, I got myself a sweet bowler hat. God, I loved that hat.

And coffee… That’s one love story that just won’t end.

But the biggest change was my introduction to the world of webcomics.

Of course, as with everhting with me, nothing has a precise date as to ‘when it all started’. Early in 2000, I was really into drawing and I searched online for ressources, inspiration and tutorials to help me progress. This research yielded a lot of good drawing sites, but my love at the time was the now-defunct Impromanga.org. I was a big fan of the story called ‘Pennywise’, which was a stereotypical manga plot about some random pilot guy who crash-lands on some random planet entirely populated with nothing but – you guessed it – women. The beauty of Impromanga was that each story was created by one author and then passed on to other people who stood in queue to continue the story. Everyone did 4-12 pages depending on their time, creativity and gumption. It’s was like a mix of improvisational theatre and comic book, and it can lead to some pretty hilarious adventures. The best block of pages in the manga was drawn by webcomic superstar Josh Lesnick (he went as Kunislayershoujo, if I recall) who really turned the story around. Sadly, it wasn’t long before the site went down (the owner cited server costs as the main reason for the close). Soon after this little summer interlude, I lost track.

Later in the year when a friend of mine (hey, Simon, how you doing?) showed me 8bit Theatre. We were both gigantic FF1 fans back then (I still am, too) and I got a huge kick out of Brian Clevinger’s clever use of the oldschool sprites. The comic was hilarious and I read it religiously for a while.

After reading the archives and getting to the latest strip, I found that waiting for the next installment would kind of dull. If I had to turn this into a routine, I would lose interest fast. (Reading webcomic archives in long sittings is a trend that has continued for me to this day. I absorb the mood and story much better that way.) What got me out of this ‘comic blues’ was the links on 8bit Theatre that led to other webcomics. At that time, I wasn’t even aware of the existance of this burgeoning online comic scene that was just gaining momentum. Imagine my surprise when stood before the ‘holy gates of webcomica’, mouth agape eyes full of wonder about the possibilities (yeah and I still had leftover traces of acne so it can’t have been a pretty sight).

The links on 8bit led me to a bunch of sprite-based flash animation series, as well as another sprite comic called Life of Wily, and then the mighty hand-drawn webcomic RPG World, by Ian J, a humoristic take on console RPGs which I devoured with gusto. But I didn’t lose any time making new discoveries because RPG World had a bunch of links of its own. From this stepping stone, I started reading Real Life by Greg Dean, Exploitation Now by the infamous Michael Poe, Penny Arcade, and Winter, by Lemuel ‘Hot Soup’ Pew.

In turn I link-hopped a great deal. Penny Arcade showed me the path to both the legendary MacHall, by art guru Ian McConville & writer extraordinnaire Matt Boyd (now they do Three Panel Soul, which is pretty sweet too) as well as Lethal Doses, another little piece of wonder signé Hot Soup (Can anyone say 'brickshot!). Both Winter and RPG World linked me to Avalon, by Josh Philips and the venerable Polymer City Chronicles, by Chris Morrison. RPG World, ever the Keenspot nexus of links, made me curious about what became one of my all-time favourites, Wendy, where I reacquainted myself with the unique art style and absurdist humour of prolific drawster Josh Lesnick, to this day one of my favourite webcomic artists (I’m just rather sad that he’s pulled Wendy off the net - again). You should check out his other work : Cutewendy was a fun trip, and Girly is quite something, and has been running for 7 years and counting. There was also Kung Fool! by the ‘Crazy Kimchi’ man himself Hyung Sun Kim (another amazing wacko who has greatly influenced me) and I sometimes dallied with other titles like Queen of Wands, by, Aerie (Hell, I hear it even has a sequel now!), Something Positive R. K. Milholland and even Elf Life, by Carson Fire.

And then of course there was Megatokyo.



I joined up at strip #244 (Beach Landing) thanks to a link from Real Life. It was really telling in the way that the quality of Fred Gallagher’s artwork jumped at me. The first frame was just this establishing shot of tokyo harbour, with some tetrahedral shapes stacked in a kind of barricade. Then you have Dom shooting his way out of a beached container marked ‘Sega’ and meeting Ed outside (any such encounter generally entails an unavoidable mexican standdown). From that moment on, I just knew I was reading something special. The absurd-yet-believable scene was just the kind of story fix I needed.

Suspension of disbelief is a great part of that comic. MT just bursts at the seams with ‘wait… what?’ moments. You have two slacker-gamers stuck in tokyo, two japanese seiyuu (voice actresses), ninj4s, rent-a-zilla services, enough L33TSP34K to make your eyes bleed, a tokyo police force charged with scheduling and controlling disasters (also, their officers ride in mechas), violent enforcement of video game corporations’ competitive policies, robot-girls that are in fact accessories for playstation dating games, obsessive otaku (rivaling factions of them, even!), magical girls, an obscure raver/goth underground, cyberworld confrontations, intense psychological drama aaaaaand zombies… yes zombies (thought they were going to be left out? C’mon!).

It’s grandly absurd, and it somehow all fits together.

Though he worked previously as an architect, today, Megatokyo is Fred Gallagher’s bread and butter. A married man, he works from his home in Ann Harbour MI with his wife Sarah, and the father of a young boy, Jack. The comic, which still to this day appears free of charge on the main website, has brought him all over the world to appear at conventions and to university classrooms as a guest speaker on art and creation. The list goes on and clearly this is nothing so sneeze at.

Fred’s success story is only made stronger by the fact that initially, he didn’t even have the immediate desire to start an online strip, preferring to work on and off on a project of his own (Warmth). It took Rodney Caston’s insistant urging to get ideas moving and created what would later become the Megatokyo we know and love.

At the time of its inception, Megatokyo also embraced and embodied that observable transition from the common ‘joke-a-day’comic format, which focused on the punchlines of single installments, and the manga-inspired story-driven approach, which really emphasized continuity while retaining the comic relief. Even though it didn’t invent the concept (Polymer City Chronicles predates it by a long while) it was the widely-read proof to many aspiring webcomic authors that they could reconcile newspaper-funnies and deep storytelling in a very internets-like ‘hey we can make this work’ fashion. Megatokyo has, willingly or not, popularized this methodology and paved the way for a lot of people. Like many things that are great, it is more than the sum of its parts.

Webcomics differ from traditional comics in the level of interaction between authors, their collaborators and fans. Online, because of the speed of things, you can have this real sense of an evolving community. In 2004, I met Fred and Sarah at Anime Central and got my books 1-3 signed (waaaaaiiii~), which was one of the coolest moments of my decade. I cosplayed the l33t ninj4 Junpei from the comic, and met with fellow fans. If truth be told, I was never as much a die-hard fan of anime and manga as any of my college-era friends: Megatokyo was the sole motivating factor that made me attend Anime Central.

Turns out Megatokyo is turning 10 this august and I’m almost weeping with joy for Fred and Rodney. But instead of shedding tears, I think I’ll celebrate by splurging on MT merch’ and spending some time re-reading my favourite moments in the comic.



In recent years, my interest in webcomics has waxed and waned a bit, but I discovered a few good titles, like Errant Story, penned by the aforementionned elder god of all things slimy, Poe, Angels2200 by Peter Haynes (also a kiwi filmmaker, you should check out his stuff), Questionnable Content, by Jean Jacques, the on-hiatus Loserz, by Eric Schoenek, Alpha Shade, a really pro-quality story-driven comic by Chris and Joe Brudlos with a very engaging plot (I really do wish they could update more frequently) and breathtaking artwork. Hell, I even jumped on the Ctrl-Alt-Delete bandwagon, albeit belatedly. Truth is, the way things are going, we will never really run out of webcomics, which is great. As long as the internet exists, this medium will thrive.

I have my own characters that I would love to revisit. Those of you who knew the good old days of MadVladArt.cjb.net (Back when gratuitiously I posted just about everything I drew, even horrid deformed gouge-your-eyes-out oddities) might remember some of the recurring character concepts that I was so obsessed about : Arakawa Satoshi (the kickass martial artist chick and main character of a barly fleshed-out webcomic idea) and Gresha (my Ultima Online character on Teiravon, a free roleplaying shard. She helped spawn a rather complete RPG setting which I created for my college-era AD&D games and fiction writing – Yes, it’s Emergalv. You will be able to read some short stories on this site eventually). Yes, you might have noticed that I like women a lot, even though my female characters often behaved like sexy tomboys. :P

So for ten years, I’ve been juggling with the idea of starting my own stories as well. Not that I really ever acted on all that goodwill. One might say life got in the way, or I was just too lazy, or that I tried to entertain too many hobbies at once. But once in a while, I look at my old sketchpads and wonder if I could still do it. I mean, it’s not like a domain name and hosting is really expensive anymore. And it’s not like I don’t have the interest. I just keep wondering if my drawing skill is ever going to be at the level I want it to be when I start a strip.

But all in all it’s fun to reminisce. And ten years sounds like a big deal, when you think about it. Where were you ten years ago?

Now, I’m not one who lives in the past because he’s afraid to move forward, nor am I the type of guy who’ll suddenly exclaim "Oh god I feel old now" when I see younger people have fun. I tend to think that my life experience is comparable to a snowball rolling down a hill, picking up more and more as it goes.

The thing is, when you ‘move on’ with your life, you don’t necessarily disconnect from your past experiences. You always bring something of it with you to help with the journey. Some people call that « baggage » or a « ball-and-chain » in a really derogatory way. It’s like saying you didn’t really grow up. But I really can’t force myself to believe that any of that time was ever wasted. No matter what I’m up to now, it’s always going to be due in part to the things I used to do and enjoy (and may return to from time to time). Point-in-case, the last strip for MacHall, which summarizes this feeling pretty well.

Nearly ten years down the line and I am sitting in an office working in a field I had no idea back then even existed. I sit here, 25 going 26 and reminisce about my past joys and how they’ve influenced everything from that one single time a friend showed me something cool. I guess to summarize it all, you could simply say ‘what goes around comes around’.