The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Another Time, Another Place

When I orginally applied for college, I wanted to be an architect. I focused on going to the University of Oregon, because it was the only place in state to get that degree. The observant reader will note that I go to Oregon State University these days - in fact I never went to U of O for more than the abysmal summer term where I destroyed my life with Latin. So what changed? Two things - I can't draw, and I hate Eugene. So at the comparative last minute, I switched and went to OSU as a business major. See, the art one's important - you need mad art skillz to be an architect, and I haven't got them.

So where's all this coming from? I was reading Megatokyo again. The whole thing. That's twice in a week. No excuse, except that I identify far too much with Piro the character. I identify with Largo, too, but I'm not the same sort of "L3+z b|0w $|-||+ up!" gamer that he is. Piro, on the other hand, could well be me, except I haven't got quite the same attachment to female characters. Anyway. Go read. It's worth it. Whir especially'd get a kick out of it, I'm sure.

For those of you having trouble figuring out where the one idea came out of the other, consider that the real Piro, the guy what draws the comic, really is an architect. And he really can draw. And while reading, I got to thinking about the architect thing seriously for the first time in a while, along with a few other things. My future career, such as it is, has always been bound up with creativity in some way - my years in business seem more and more to me to have been a horrible delusion, and my somewhat abortive desire to be an army officer, while somewhat the opposite of creative, has a lot more to do with doing something I feel should be done than anything. Architect and history teacher were the two really serious ones. I sort of miss not going all out for the first, but that may be because the second has reached a fairly grueling stage. I tire of papers.

But seriously, I really CANNOT draw for shit. Sort of like I have absolutely no creative talent for music. I'm sort of sad about the both, since I'm a rabid consumer and appreciator of music, and I do appreciate art, though anyone looking at my room might dispute that. For whatever reason, though, I've a certain talent with the written word. Maybe because I read more than just about anyone I know. I'm not sure. In any case, my writings are pretty well appreciated. Too, people appreciate my humor most of the time. That one mystifies me, but it's been made abundantly clear. It is rather gratifying to know that I was successful in escaping the utterly humorless bastard self-image I had as a teenager. Maybe I never was. I don't know.

My other gift creatively happens to be with world creation. I think this one comes from my training as a historian - maybe not, as I was creating semi-decent worlds in high school, but certainly the training has helped me. And that's where the "Damn. I didn't know you could make stick figures look THAT bad" l33t art skillz come in. Much of what I see in my head can't be adequately described in the written word. I can't adequately describe to you what, say, Tharavel looks like to me, because I don't have the tools. That's extremely frustrating sometimes, and it puts me in awe of things like Morrowind, worlds with such depth and clarity of vision and breathtaking reality. Putting that in perspective with the architect thing, one of my amusements has always been to draw out the buildings of the worlds I create. There was a year, once, in which I plotted out a pretty vast castle. Took me the whole year. I lost it in a moment of stupidity upgrading my computer. The point, though, I guess, is that I always had very complete images in my mind of what these places looked like, but could never show them in anything but a pathetic 2d image of the real thing. Frustrating, like I said.

Anyway. If there was a point behind that little digression, other than to show you all what goes in my mind half the time, it's lost on me. The soul-searching of a visual artist trapped in a non-visual world? Dunno.

Of slightly more immediate importance, Boardwalk downstairs is freaking out of Cherry Coke, and the freaking fountain pop machine freaking ran out of it, too. So I'm drinking Barq's. Gaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrr.

And I only got 3 hours of sleep, but you knew that anyway.

Posted by Dwip at December 2, 2003 9:44 AM