Muddy Waters Seem Deep
“He who knows that he is profound strives for clarity; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd strives for obscurity. For the crowd thinks everything profound of which it cannot see the bottom; it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Today is the first day of Autumn
My Summer was long and beachless. I told a friend a few months ago that time had slowed down for me because so much had changed. He didn’t understand what I meant. I’ve found that when you move, change jobs, change jobs again, and learn a new city, a new commute, and gain new friends and colleagues; your brain undergoes a sort of metamorphosis. The reason why the halcyon salad days of our youth seemed so plentiful and expansive is because everything is new to a child. The mind gathers in novelty at a breakneck pace and the data is written to our neural hard drives moment to moment.
The same is true for the adult mind, but we become so used to it. The more routine the mind becomes in accepting input, the more sameness in our lives, the faster that time seems to accelerate.
There’s been a lot of novelty in my life this summer.
For one, I painted this minifigure, the one I’m using as the featured image of this blog post. I’ve never painted a minifigure before. I have a lot of friends that are into D&D and 40K, but the closest I’ve ever come to this sort of artwork is glazing kiln fired sculptures back in college. I find it quite enjoyable. It’s so tiny - every brushstroke is super impactful. Every brushstroke can completely ruin your day… It looks really great in person, in the real world at 2 inches tall, but blown up in that picture you can see every little splatter of paint I couldn’t quite correct.
The figure itself I bought on Etsy a year or two ago. It’s Oni-Link from Majora’s Mask, one of my all time favorite video games. It’s the final form that child Link takes at the very end, but only if you collect all the other masks. If you do, there’s a secret conversation you can have with one of the children on the moon where they’ll give you the Fierce Deity mask. This mask will transform little kid Link into a giant 7 foot tall version of himself, clad in black armor with a white tunic, glowing white eyes, and long white hair. Instead of the small one handed blade you’ve had the whole game, you’ll now have a dual-handed double helix sword that shoots energy beams with every swing. All of the bosses in the game become trivial using this mask. It’s the single greatest powerup of all time.
I posted this on Twitter and asked the artist that designed Oni-Link for his approval. He hearted me.
Takaya Imamura hearted me guys… I can die happy now.
In Buddhism, Fierce Deities are enraged gods. Good examples of them are found in Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli movies, which are often sources of inspiration for The Legend of Zelda games. Whether it be the woodland deer god that goes on a rampage against the deforesters in Princess Mononoke, or the meandering No Face anomaly becoming a greed-filled glutton at the Aburaya Bathhouse in Spirited Away; both are spirits that have been angered by the faults of Humanity at large.
Traditionally, they come about to destroy obstacles inhibiting the path to enlightenment.
They transform negative forces into wisdom and compassion.
“We philosophers are not at liberty to separate soul and body, as the people separate them; and we are still less at liberty to separate soul and spirit. We are not thinking frogs, we are not objectifying and registering apparatuses with cold entrails,—our thoughts must be continually born to us out of our pain, and we must, motherlike, share with them all that we have in us of blood, heart, ardour, joy, passion, pang, conscience, fate and fatality. Life—that means for us to transform constantly into light and flame all that we are, and also all that we meet with; we cannot possibly do otherwise.”
- Again with the Nietzsche
I’ve really stepped away from the world.
Not that I was ever really in it. I used to watch TV a lot, especially when I was a kid. I never watch it now. The only exception is an occasional football game. I never watch movies anymore. I finally saw the new Superman, but only because it was on HBO and I just happened to have a few days left of a subscription. That’s the first new movie I’ve seen probably since the Mario movie 2 years ago. I go out sometimes, but it’s only to watch things that people my age or older would understand: like going to see Garbage play their last North American tour - if only to see Butch Vig in the flesh and mark it off my bucket list.
This is all to say I have no idea what Six Seven means and I’m scared.
I genuinely just don’t care anymore. I think that’s part of being in your forties. The reason why the target demographic for marketers is 18-34 is because those are the most gullible consumers. I once bought a car, for instance, because I saw it in a OK Go video. I was 28. Somewhere, a guy like Don Draper wiped the cocaine from his nose and yelled “headshot!” from his New York high-rise when he heard that one.
I’m not so sure that what I’m experiencing is apathy per se so much as it might be considered empathy. It’s not so much that I don’t care, it’s that caring takes so much out of me and I’ve developed defensive mechanisms.
For instance, I used to be a podcast fiend. They were the source, and oft muse, of my curiosities and artistic ambitions. I’d gobble up The Joe Rogan Experience, The Portal with Eric Weinstein, and Behind the Bastards with Robert Evans just to name a few.
Now, I simply can’t.
Joe Rogan has become a right wing moron. Eric Weinstein is a pseudoscientific shill. And, as much as I love Robert Evans for turning me onto Knowledge Fight, no one on Earth can seemingly pass the liberal purity test, the circular firing squad — not everyone can be a bastard.
This blog entry’s title was inspired by the incoherent ramblings of Jordan Peterson’s performance on that godforsaken Jubilee video. If you’re not familiar, it’s a silly debate show where the premise was “1 Christian vs 20 Atheists,” but Jordan Peterson is such a contrarian post modern lateralist that he objected to being called a Christian at all. So now the video is labeled “Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists.”
Oh. My. God. I hate it. So much.
People want to speak with the air of superiority, the air of expertise, but they don’t want to be nailed down on any point - no priors! - they’re like intellectual rubber, and you’re the glue: what you say bounces off of me and sticks to you! It’s exhausting. Just try to make sense of this exchange.
Good luck!
This is everywhere in modern intellectual circles. This is everywhere in our current political climate. This is everywhere in the media. This is everywhere in academia. This is everywhere, well, everywhere.
“The crowd regards everything profound as if it were ill-lit: it cannot see the bottom, and is gratified to feel awe in place of understanding. The crowd is ashamed to admit that it cannot see: hence it pretends to be profound, and praises what is unclear as deep. These are the situations in which the crowd joins the charlatans and the mystagogues.”
“They muddy the water to make it seem deep.”
- You know who again
So this is why I retreat into my man cave and paint Zelda minifigures. Me and my wife and my cats and my car and my silly little pile of nerdy bullshit: until the end of time. You can keep your modernity, we’re all full up over here.
Here’s what Page 68 looked like after the initial sketch. It takes me forever to draw this thing, but the sketch typically goes pretty fast. It’s all on one layer with a light opacity coarse brush. Then I start the process of making clean black inks for the whole thing. That takes a while, but the real time sink is the painting. There’s about 5 to 10 layers of paint that go on top of this before I call it done; and as I’ve stated a million times before, trying to do all that while maintaining a full time IT job and some semblance of sanity and a social life is pretty tough.
I had a guy comment a few years ago that I should just draw it in monochrome. While I agree that would speed up the process, I strongly stand by the importance of color in FLOLAS. It’ll make more sense as the story develops further. I simply cannot imagine telling this story without the vibrance and the glow.
The good news is that I seem to be in a far more stable groove than I was over the spring and summer. I’m working a lot and I have a clean new setup that makes productivity a little easier for me. I should get back to my usual page per month soon, and maybe even pick up the pace a bit. I think 77 Pages total is sounding about right for Song One. Seventy Seven… It’s got a nice ring to it.
Until then: peace and love friends.
Stay offline. Tis a silly place.
