What's on your mind?

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Posted

Actually, that makes me really curious to read some foreign fiction. I need to find some good stuff.

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Posted

Or even just travel books, written by good observers. I've been considering looking into travel novels. I have one book I've been meaning to read which starts off in a stopped train in the snow sometime around the turn of the 19-20th century. At least I think that was the time. It set a good atmosphere. English murder mystery novel, Mystery in White. Picked up for the sake of the nice cover.

pheonix561 likes this

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Posted

Yeah, I was reading a travel book written by Alexandra David Neel awhile ago, she snuck into tibet when foreigners weren't allowed in, met two different dahli lamas within her life time, and basically did a bunch of awesome stuff. I remember at one point in the book she mentions off hand that she and her traveling companions were held up somewhere because they were starving in the woods somewhere during an awful winter, and she had to separate with a whip two guys who were fighting with knives over a piece of bread. Like, she just mentioned it off-hand in a throwaway paragraph between stuff she was talking about. What a bamf.

Sadly I didn't have the opportunity to read the whole book, because I was reading a pdf online and it wasn't a complete version, so I'd like to find a full copy of the book someday and read it again. "Magic and Mystery in Tibet," I believe it was called.

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Posted

Some things I was thinking about, in regards to scenes in painting.

Last year in my introduction art course, we did a 'contextual studies' module; aka art history. For it we would learn about a period of art history, and choose one painting from that period to write about that week. One week, I chose William Hogarth, because I was charmed by his Marriage a-la-mode series of paintings. Through him I learned about early examples of sequential art, of which this series was one. I liked how much character he could fit into a scene with minimal details. Just by the way the characters's designs and composition, you could extract a whole story out of a single painting. I'd never really encountered that, so it was fascinating. I'd never thought to consider the intentions of a painting so deeply before.

And then, thinking about scenes, I can't help but think of Katamari Damacy's level designs. They're scenes in themselves, frozen in a time loop while character models move back and forth, or stay on the spot with some idle animation. It doesn't give much illusion of time passing. Everything in the level is as if it's happening in one prolonged moment, and you're allowed to move through it and explore all it's components. Like bears queueing up at a vending machine, a mother spinning his son around above her head, cats in scuba gear fishing underwater. Lots of nice details, just as subtle but in the open as the details of Hogarth's paintings.

Scenes on television and in comics are developed in a similar way, with cutaways. I can imagine that, in an adaptation of the Hogarth painting I covered; the first of the Marriage a-la-mode series, the camera would cut mid-conversation to the rich man's gouty leg, or to the groom-to-be's distant indifferent glances away from the table, or the bride-to-be listening intently to a sly-looking man whispering in her ear. In that way, I guess you can consider the subtleties of a stationary scene to be like cutaway shots in television and film. They offer some detail which isn't entirely necessary to your understanding of the plot, but which offers depth which makes it all the more satisfying to pay close attention.

Those cutaways are what I like in manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, and in shows by Masaaki Yuasa. I mention those two because those are the ones I was reading/watching when I started to notice cutaway shots. Cutaway shots and strong, consistent symbolism which doesn't force the viewer's involvement. Just things to add more depth to a scene. I'm going to continue finding more media that uses this. Graphics on news stories, setting build-up in novels, and of course in other comics, shows, and movies. I like that I feel like I'm finally getting an eye for detail, where before my viewing of things seemed shallower.

Vio Milanor likes this

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Posted (edited)

There was a car crash outside my flat tonight. I live 3 floors up, and I heard a crash. Nobody died, or even got hurt. Just two cars at angles to one another, and glass on the road. As I sat up to look out, I became aware of how visible I'd be with the light behind me, and so I went through to the unlit living room, to watch the people scurrying about to make calls and assess the situation. There wasn't a lot to see.

Living on the corner of a street, I can see the windows of the flats next to me, and at their windows I could see other people silhouetted in the darkness of their living rooms, hiding their voyeurism like me. Their faces were all so dark they appeared featureless; pale fleshy blobs in the windows.

So naturally that sounds spooky, and so naturally it warrants a cliche ghost story pitch. Something along the lines of: "There's a narrow street on the edge of town where nobody lives. The buildings are all empty, and the rooms are never rented out, because nobody bought them. Because of the narrow street, crashes are relatively frequent, and speed restrictions on the outskirts mean some of these accidents are fatal. The local housing authority are very bad at their jobs, and they never addressed the poor design, because they're corrupt you see. Witnesses on the scene have reported that, whenever someone dies on the street outside, pale figures can be seen in the window, watching. And jacking off."

Classic story.

Edited by Werewolf (see edit history)
pheonix561 likes this

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Posted

95% of Thomas Ligotti's stories start with "on the outskirts of town..."

Teto likes this

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Posted

I'm just wondering why everything in the world sucks.

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