Something something

anyway my friends and I dive at night and it’s really cool to watch someone from above because they look like a celestial being in the water, glowing blue underwater.

I’ve started making my friends also choose one ridiculous thing they’d want to have if they were like absolutely bonkers rich. One of those rich people things that would be reported about in tabloids and it would be so superfluous it would nauseate the masses.

Personally I’d have someone wash my hair and choose my outfit every morning. I truly think the height of luxury is having someone to do ur hair and makeup. My friend would have an owlery.

mmmmaybe?

Stop-Motion Moana

“We can rebuild her… We have the technology… We know the way!”

A few months ago I ripped apart a Moana doll and made it into a stop-motion puppet using a kinetic armature kit.  

The walk cycle above was the first thing I animated with this puppet, and was just a throw-away practice test with no green screen. I had never done a walk cycle in stop-motion before and soon discovered how difficult animating a straight-ahead cycle within a localized space with no retakes could be.

I showed the cycle to my dad while he was holding my Moana puppet in his hand and he seemed more impressed with this crappy test than the actual animation I did on the movie! I think the combination of him holding the puppet, and then seeing it come to life on the video before him was what blew him away. I guess that’s the appeal and magic of stop-motion. :)

Here’s a second test I animated for fun:

I read that it’s best to have the foot joints nice and tight to hold the weight of the puppet, and have the arms looser.  It’s amazing how much weight those toe and foot ball-joints could hold for the falling poses:

I don’t really think that’s a defining characteristic of fantasy. I would say that Lord of the Rings doesn’t really have systematized magic, and neither really do the Kushiel books.

But they do have magic that gives the impression that it follows some sort of fundamental causality, even if it isn’t really systematized. And I don’t really get the appeal of reading books where that’s not true, because without that sort of logical causality, the plot can’t be plotful.

Tolkien’s causal magic is on the same continuum as any systematized magic; Tolkien just (wisely) has a light touch in some areas as a worldbuilder to preserve a sense of mystery. Yet his sense of mystery, with magic as with the cats of Queen Beruthiel, is not the sense that the thing is unknowable, just that it happens presently to be unknown. He explicitly describes the “magic” in his books as a rational Art, not incomprehensible mysticism. It’s just that none of the Artists who are responsible for things like the Rings or the Palantiri are available to explain how they work. That’s very different from a girl who floats off into the sky one day for no reason, the rain that pours down over Macondo for four years, eleven months, and two days, or the trail of blood that seeks a specific person out through the streets flowing at right angles. There, there is no sense of an underlying but unglimpsed order or orderer; rather, the sense is that the world sometimes simply operates according to principles always and forever inaccessible to either the reader or the novel’s inhabitants. There is arguably a little of that around the edges in things like Arthur Machen or HP Lovecraft’s work–but only arguable. I still put Lovecraft and Machen in the same category as Tolkien, although of course there are other features of their work that more closely ally them to fantasy than to magical realism.

For the rest, I don’t want to be tellign people that they’re having fun wrong, but I really don’t understand how people can stand literature without a “sense of an underlying but unglimpsed order or orderer.” That sense is necessary to me for the plot to have stakes.

Well, hence my frustration, I think most of them are drawing it wrong! But then, the publishing categories of “fantasy” and “magical realism” are completely separate, so at least the bookstores are getting it right. (And publishing categories–as distinct from genre–I think can actually be a tool for understanding how audiences treat works, which can be indicative of fundamental differences or lack thereof that are overlooked when classifying literature. Not always: Never Let Me Go is treated as a Serious Novel rather than as straight-up science fiction out of pure snootiness, despite dealing with classic SF tropes and themes, and if you don’t find it in the SF section, it may be just because they want to make sure the people who like The Remains of the Day can find the rest of Ishiguro’s books. But no bookstore much bothers to separate the bulk of its fantasy from the bulk of its SF, and there’s a reason for that!)

I think the order behind the plots of writers like Marquez or Murakami is the order which is necessary to adequately explore the topics at hand. While I love books which have the satisfaction of a tightly-knit plot and a thoroughly schematized world, we don’t always live life that way, and some people more than others prefer to spend their time, either personally or professionally, in domains of thought characterized by overlapping, carefully-ordered logical schema. Magical realism works in a different way that I find equally or more satisfying: often, it seems as though the author has conceived of an emotion they want to convey, and works backward from that emotion to determine what has to happen to produce it. This is a very powerful tool if you want to communicate a very specific feeling to a receptive audience, and Marquez leverages it really well for, for instance, the atrocities committed by American fruit companies in Latin America, and Murakami for the alienation or the trauma of his protagonists in modern Japan. Thus I tend to find an emotional richness in magical realism that I cannot reliably discover in the more systematizing kind of SF&F, though obviously I can think of plenty SF&F where that is in fact present.

But I don’t really understand how people have an emotional reaction to a world that doesn’t make internal logical sense (at least locally), other than “irritation that anyone expects me to take this literature seriously”.

I acknowledge that they do, but I don’t understand it.

Probably the best comment I’ve read on this comes from a @balioc post that I finally found. Basically, he argues that the point of magical realism is to reflect individual/social reality, while ignoring the physical/socialogical underpinnings.

Magical realism models individual personal narrative directly. It doesn’t talk about the broader effects of technology or society or politics, in the same way that conventional fantasy doesn’t talk about covalent bonds or superstrings. It just asks you to think about life as you ordinarily perceive it, with your ordinary everyday consciousness, not trying to encompass abstractions. And then it changes the rules. With magic….

It makes no bloody sense, if you’re modeling the universe techno-sociopolitically. The Arcadians, if they are anything like actual humans, would ruthlessly exploit these features of their terrain in all sorts of weird ways; before long, Arcadia would bear no resemblance whatsoever to a friendly little shopping arcade. But who the hell cares? Our techno-sociopolitical models aren’t anywhere near granular enough to produce effects like that. And they’re good effects.

And to me, that sort of stuff is just frustratingly nonsensical and non-stimulating. Because when you set out rules like that, my first instict is to look at the edge cases, and then try to exploit them. (My first instinct with everything is to look at the edge cases; this is one of the professional hazards of being a mathematician).

So a world where people don’t try to nail down the details of how and why something works, and understand the edge case behavior, and then exploit it, doesn’t resonate with me. And a world where I can’t make the pieces fit together into a coherent sociological whole will never be compelling to me. So the charms of magical realism are almost completely lost on me.