Latest upload :D Comments appreciated :*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSXmyDTzLnY

I've got a subscriber!! Yay!!
Okay, it's the General, but it feels so good. A whole subscriber! :D

First few videos...

Intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eajm2Ar6wrs

#1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC9HbZFThNM

#2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8UPDgmsVCM

Slowly building myself a YouTube Channel... From scratch.

Made myself a YouTube persona: Minerva in July.
Now the rest...

All the city church bells ringing full blast for the second time today, hoping to scatter the hail clouds. Mordor weather - in fact I had the opportunity to stand in the middle of a parking lot and see what majestic horrors roll around in the sky: a fleeting ring of a milky cloud at full speed while all around us cumuli twisted in purple, grey and green, closing in on the city to create a cell. For now it looks like it got blown over, because if it rips, it seems to break trees. Twice a day.

Am getting closer to creating YouTube content. I could open with "Dumb fucking space ship design in American movies..."

Too small for the world, too big for the pond

Whenever I see or read something that's been exhibited, I use myself as the Litmus test: is it something I couldn't do? Something in all my years I've never done? Is it so good I stand mesmerised before it and marvel at how talented people are? It happens enough to make me proud of my species, but ... what if it is something so sub par, grotesquely unoriginal and so painfully average I am embarrassed for whose-ever cock got sucked into sponsoring it?

It breaks my heart every single time I see what sorts of products win contests, and not just popularity contests. I’ve recently, two or so days ago, won a minute voucher for a shop, which inspired me to go and try for all different kinds of competitions and games, mostly literary and photography… Drej also got into the exhibition selection with one of her photographs, which gave me courage to come out of my shell even more. I never got even close back in the day when I really tried. Maybe, after all this time, I’m better at what I do, I'm good enough?

Then I started checking out what competitions and invitations circle or have just expired around these parts... I saw what sort of things get into the winners circles.

And I started to cry.

Never in a thousand years do I stand a chance to get included with the things I try to do. I am not even talented enough to understand HOW. HOW?? I can’t stop crying. Forget quality of the product. Forget originality ENTIRELY. Forget what it takes to achieve the result. Forget any kind of rules, education or conscious effort. Forget superiority aimed at and above average achieved. That is for deluded snobs.

And I KNOW that I live in a pond where the willingness to create alone is laudable, I know that. Thank the muses someone is creating something. But the things that get exhibited as ‘critics’ choice’ in the end?

Crying still. I’ve watched a dozen puppies howling videos and had coffee and I’m crying still. I feel like one of those mothers who rather murders her baby rather than expose it to the hopeless world – I am considering murdering my camera with my pen and bury them both.

You can write the most original, witty, cool short story and you will lose to a housewife writing about her dog in a language fit for someone with a primary school education. You can draw an elegant, expressive think piece and you will lose to a schoolgirl sketching a baaaaad copy of a portrait of Angelina Jolie. You can choose your best photo of the last 30 years of perfecting your style to come close to your biggest idols, and you will lose to a photo of a hot girl in a nightie kissing a horse or a church hill in morning mist…

I stand not a chance in a thousand years. I know that now, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. It breaks my heart.  

New Pirelli calendar is out and this time they are going for (old) white actresses (plus a token African and an Asian somewhere..)

I never thought these should be considered good photos, because if famous hot chicks weren't on them, it would be just some well lit studio shot of a hot chick... Notice, however, that the focus is never on the eyes - where it absolutely always should be.. It's never there. And that is a good trick, actually. It removes the attention from their wrinkles and imperfections and chases the viewer's eye all around the close-up. So you do get the portrait of a famous old hot chick - so close you really shouldn't be looking at her - and at the same time you don't. Well done.

This year's credit goes to Peter Lindbergh, who made a career out of portraying hot women. How does that even work? Is that what i should do and just shut up about it?

Now I know I can only listen to 80's greatest hits for about three songs before a seizure..

Future fiction and realistic fantasy

Because they were rare back in the day, when Harry Potter hit hard (after three books, because nobody knew what the fuck that is until the fourt or so) and the TLDR Fellowship of the Ring came out and there was nothing hotter than lean blonde elves (even my mother knows who Orlando Bloom is and she’s stopped thinking blondes are hot with Lawrence Olivier), kick-ass witty dwarves (only reason to play Alliance side) and secretive, torn-inside heroes (okay, those were kind of the norm even before, but Mortensen's Aragorn sealed the deal) - suddenly you were no longer special needs for reading children's books above the age of nine, pretty much all of what came down on the market early was deemed excellent. Twilight saga, Pullman's Golden Compass, Nix's Sabriel, ANYTHING Pratchett scrapped from the bottom of the barrel... Yes, those have been around for a long time, but nobody admitted to reading comics (even if it was Gaiman), watching Anime (even if it was Miyazaki) or reaching for any kind of science fiction other than Isaac Asimov ... maybe Gibson, maybe, maybe Douglas Adams, but he was basically a Monty Python anyway. 

Those things were rare and they were great. They weren't marketable, they appealed to a thin stack of pencils of nerds who practiced becoming future Nabokovs by means of Star wars or Labyrinth fan fiction and who thought some day, porn, some day I will understand the meaning of you!

Well, times changed. Lord of the Rings was followed by a torrent of movies that attempted to incorporate elements of magic (even some interesting Russian stuff), and is still rolling in the likes of Game of Thrones, where audience will sit agape at teen titties and huge CGI battles, as long as there's a good, deep dialogue thrown in once every four or five episodes. Characters don't even have to do much, just stand in imposing costume and wear resting bitch faces and the nerds and nerd on-line magazine critics will be just fine interpreting the costume, down to the jewelry worn by extras.

Manga and Anime are in such demand these days, their quality is watered down on every level: story, illustration and details. I LOVE Anime, and would read manga if I could get my hands on it, but even I am desperate for at least one exceptional show per year. Is all I ask. One that I won't be TOLD is excellent and highest ranked, but one which I will be able to find memorable on my own. I've seen SO MANY shows and always will, but they are starting to blend together. Comics, western version, which are slightly harder to produce, are slightly more fortunate in this aspect: there has been an up in some superlative content - Wytches, say, and Saga and personally I am very fond of Flight, the Watchmen and I Roved Out.

And yet, looking back now, on the likes or Eragon, Inkblood and shit like that…. Those were fucking retarded. I tried, I tried really hard to fangirl, because it genuinely is my genre and there are things within that genre that will transcend your LIFE… But man. Take a look at that shit again. It’s fucking embarrassing. There are movies in the past with magical realism elements considered bad that are freakishly brilliant by comparison to what we find acceptable today. Enough with the posh realistic fiction, I beg of you. Make one a year, maybe two, and keep those astounding. One big, one indi. Not fifty, the opening act of which is the fucking Mummy. Which makes the Brendan Fucking Fraser version seem okay.

There is a huge HUGE divide between a good idea sold to a rich studio and a movie made for people who actually know what the genre is about. Hint: it is not about hot chicks and space battles. It is not ONLY about hot chicks and space battles. That’s like only eating dessert for the rest of your life.

It changes nothing

AGORA is the last, the final 'short' story in the second Goose chapter - the one which I knew I wanted to close with, but didn't know what I wanted it to be. I had elements from the Good Nazi, in which Kay & Co. help a stationed German solve a murder in a remote mountain French village; I knew I wanted to include the story of a woman who started a whole civilisation by paving a circular yard in the middle of nowhere to inspire an agora, a marketplace for the local villagers... And I knew I wanted to close with The Orc and Kay spending a month travelling through various coastal landscapes, gravitating towards a mountain where he finally figures out the whole point of his actions.

Merging these... layers ... melted into a story of Kay and the Orc following the map left behind by the missing ranger Tovelyn, to come upon a village where a small girl has been killed. They are asked to help find the wrongdoer, which they do, but also find that there is an underlying dark magic in the soil, being awakened by the Orc's recent actions and spilling from the ancient ruins of the old marketplace. They use Kay's parlour trick to scroll down the time line, to travel a thousand years back  to find the source of darkness and see if that will change anything. (Kay knows it won't, but he needs to know for sure.) They dow well, magic is removed, in present time the murder has still occurred for different reasons, if in a roundabout way still connected to the Agora. The Orc asks to travel further to the very origin of the mosaic to kill the woman, later they manage to find a peaceful solution and simply talk her out of starting it all. Again, of course, it changes nothing. The Orc goes home to finish his war once and for all and Kay makes sure that, curse-erased from memory, Tovelyn will not be forgotten. 

GLOW

Though I hoped it was going to be more comedic and less melodramatic, this is a good show. The 80s vibe is mesmerizing, I am so glad the 80s are making a comeback (said no-one yet so far). It slows down significantly after the second episode - you can see the makers pitched a 10-episode story, but only had enough ideas for three plus finale, so it goes into character back-stories instead of any actual wrestling early on. That said, the script is great and the acting is exceptional. Even the cartoonish characters like the young dumb producer and the big wrestling girl's wrestling dad are wonderful. And of course it is easy to thoroughly marvel at the three leads: the A-level loser with her endless amount of hope; the upcoming and ever more recognisable ice queen, and the old DePalna-wanna-be/has-been director. Even if it was just the three of them, this would be a watchable show, but it would be all the poorer without the 'stereotype starlets' ensemble. And this was still the time when you could make a joke about the Isl*m*c te*+orist*..

The kid apologises

The kid tried to make things okay and was really doing all the chores the last few days, on his own initiative, though articulating 'I am sorry I fucked up' still came hard and only after G told him to thank me.

I said: "I will always have your back and will always save you and will always be on your side - EXCEPT when your side and my beau's side are separate. If you make my boo boo that scared again, I will fucking kill you myself."

Teenagers. You can't live with them and it's illegal to beat the crap out of them on regular/educational basis.

Tew haut :/

Fuck I’m tired. I haven’t been doing anything – ANYTHING –but it’s so hot we mostly just sleep all the time. It’s one of those disgusting, terrible heats, not like a desert heat or a long day in the mountains in summer heats. All the concrete, the streets, buildings, parking lots, walls, roofs and glass have heated up, creating a suffocating incubator that is impossible to overcome. Little by little we survive, under fans, in cold bath-tubs, but it’s just so hot. Yesterday we went to an Eco restaurant far in the hills and for all intents and purposes it was delicious, the food was great (and said to be expensive, which bothered us, though we were not told in detail), but it was just so hot. 35 people and one AC didn’t go well together, so when one of the courses was late, the mood was terrible. And the proprietor of the establishment insisted on serving all of the food himself instead of, knowing how many we will be, hiring two students or something, so all of the cooks and him were purple and dripping sweat while we sat hungry. That bit was a mess. Besides that, it was okay. Long story short, we did nothing all day but sit and wait and still I am so exhausted today I can barely bring myself to walk the dog (who is also melting.) We’re off to the river where she can swim and cool off. Fuck it’s hot. And, of course, because of all the AC and fans, ‘tis be the season of oily ears, stuffed noses, sore shoulders and mild headache. Fun times.

Moved most of my graphic illustration to the new blog I set aside a while ago. Prophetically :D

Won't be anything you won't see here, but it will be mostly just the graphics stuff...

http://artsyoubliette.blogspot.si/

And I think I will start using the moniker 'Minerva' for stuff relating internet for a while.

Had another good fidelity dream. Probably from all the excitement, I mixed a memory of a man I used to be attracted to and one of the authoritative medics from last night (“You can’t be sleeping now, you’re talking to me. Come, talk to me. Tell me stuff. It’s rude not to talk to me, you don’t want to be rude, do you? Wake up…”into a scenario in which the man from my past and I meet by chance at some event or some resort. G is there, but preoccupied, so the two of us walk back to the resort and we talk. The man explains how he’s happily in love and his life if good, is perfect. We get to a small station, like a beauty salon kiosk ran by four Filipino ladyboys, whom I am happy to meet, because back on the boat I was very friendly with the trans beauticians and they were all so very pretty, coolest dancers and I took a ton of pics for and of them. The guy and I are left alone for a spell as the four run an errand. The guy begins to admit he was so messed up after our hook-up years ago, he even considered joining a monastery. I mock him plenty, but encourage his honesty. The ego engorged almost as much as my genitals, horny as hell, somehow we start to rub, he loses it, admits he thinks about me all the time, we start to take our clothes of and just as he thinks this is happening, just as he is about to penetrate, the thought occurs to me: how far I can take this before it’s too far and G will get upset?.... er… ye, this would be that point. So, I move away and stop the whole blueballs situation before it happens. The beauticians return and I get a mani-pedi.

                Even in my dreams, even totally turned on, even naked and ready to go, I will stay faithful to the thought of insulting G. My cunt makes excuses like there’s no tomorrow every time, often even reminding me this is a dream, but the heart always shuts it up: if it was a fucking moon or a magic bubble or a submarine under fire, we are staying faithful to our beau.

                :D