Derik Badman's Journal

2021-03-02 07:56

I think I decided in the shower this morning that I'm going to make a new minicomic. Something small and simple just to do something and to familiarize myself with the tools. My copies of Abode products stopped working a few Mac updates ago so it will be all Gimp and Krita for me. I don't exactly know what I will do or how or when, but I guess the time has come around again to try my hand at comics making and see what is generated. Does writing it here mean it will happen? No. I wrote the other day I was going to stop playing video games until something new came out and I almost immediately turned around on that and went back to Assassin's Creed Vahalla for a DLC and to explore the map more.

Mordew is coming along. Over 300 pages in (out of... almost 600 I guess) and I'm still waiting for the turning point. I can just tell at some point the protagonist's view of the world will get upended and there will be some important revelation. I can kind of see lurking behind the events of the plot. I could tell from pretty early on that would be the case, and I'm still waiting for that moment. So far my biggest complaint about the book is that the protagonist is a young teen boy who is not particularly interesting. He has no particular defining traits other than having some kind of hereditary magic power (that is vague and unclear) and having an issue with anger.

Watched Mati Diop's Snow Canon on Criterion the other day. The short film is about a relationship between a teen girl staying in a house in the alps with a housekeeper/sitter (who is a younger woman (twenties maybe)). There's an element of fantasy in the beginning, I think, the girl is IMing (or some kind of computer chat) with her friend who is on vacation somewhere and says that she is in the house with a cute guy who is the sitter. We see the guy and the girl sitting next to him. And the texts to the friend make some comments but then... she's like "there's a housekeeper" and the guy never appears again. I think we are just seeing the girl's fiction that she is sending to her friend. her friend too sends her messages about some American guy she makes out with and you get the distinct possibility they are both just telling each other stories. The girl and the housekeeper end up getting closer when the housekeeper is broken up with over the phone by someone (I don't think we ever get a sense if it's a boyfriend or girlfriend). In the end they end up kissing just as the housekeeper is about to leave, and not in that European one cheek then the next way... And you wonder... if the person on the phone was a woman, was the girl making up a fiction about a guy to hide her true interest in women? There are no answers, but it was an enjoyable short film. Still need to watch Diop's other short "Atlantiques" which is somehow related to Atlantics which I really liked.