Platypus of Truth

  The pageant of Hannibal rises to the level of Greek Tragedy. It is Art for the Middle Class. I'm having fun with my pastels now as my homages to this micdropping series continues.

 

 

 A lighter note for season 3...

  Wendigo's Daughter 

 And we add pen...

 Poor Wendigo. No Abigail. No Will. No Kidneys...

 The Goofy Movie, Dead Poet's Society, The Haunting of Hill House, Midsommar, The Thin Red Line.

 Sketches for a Batman idea. Second features Oscar Wilde, Lady Gaga, and Robert Mapplethorpe as references 

 

  A little more time to expand this one

  Loved The Lays of Beleriand since 7th grade

  Ball point pen and artist's loft colored pencils on junk mail.

  Spare moments add up.

 A little more work put in during spare moments.

 I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of the fields, but in His ways with men I marked Him not... -Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

 

I put Ephrael through Clip Studio and brought the image more in line with the original comic art that served as the model for my doodle. I obviously need a lot more practice with both the pen and the software, but I am pleased at the progress I've made with both over the last few years.

It seems that Life is getting the better of all of us these days and it's apparent that it's gotten the better of me from this blog. So... What's been going on. With Covid raging, grad school was a quick no-go. With all the time and money spent on trying to get in on top of the current crisis, that means that it's probably "two strikes and you're out" for me. That doesn't mean that I won't eventually have to do an M.A. as part of a career change, but the grand dream of a Phd. is out. That means I've ended up job-hunting in the middle of a pandemic with a wife whose job has moved online and requires additional child care. Right now, that's me. Oh, and I got parasites and ended up floored for five weeks and ended up having them blasted out of my guts with antibiotics that were almost as bad as the disease. Somewhere in there, my wife experienced a carjacking. The police caught the thieves, but not before they totaled her car crashing it into ...

There are no new ideas. Dive years ago, I was practicing giving pitches with my study hall and we came up with this wacky idea for a television series called "Bad Nun". The first image is a doodle of the last scene. This year, Games Workshop re-released their comic series "Demon Fuge". The second doodle is my own recreation of one of the scenes in the comic in the style of Bad Nun. Guess we were on to something!

So, a while ago I watched Season 3 of Netflix's Castlevania , based on the old Nintendo series. My first thought was that somehow they'd gotten a hold of the old Logic Stick Sagas and decided they needed some spicing up. The Lesser Prophet of Logic becomes a Sufi and gets to guiltlessly kill hordes of zombie-Christians after getting sage advice from a Jamaican Phoenix while The Dark Prophet and Puck go looking for kicks and giggles at the Abbey where the Greater Prophet has started a Cthulhu worshiping death cult. Meanwhile, Nausicaa, Ariel, and Viola have all holed up in a pimped-out Lesbian Duplex plotting to control the Land of Logic with something like actual efficiency that somehow involves Ariel and Tyr Elvenstar having hot and heavy Vampire-Good Girl-BDSM-Sex(TM). Oh yeah, and Paris loses all his friends, tries an Otaku-San-Vampire-Three Way(TM) and discovers that being alone is better. I speak to those who know. To those who don't, my mind's a blank -I'll ...

I finished reading the Iliad  today in the original Greek. It's taken about year to do with a year of prep work beforehand. What advantage was there in reading a book that I've already read in several English translations? First, there's the sound of the Greek and it's original meter. Second, the slow pace forces you to consider each section and even each sentence with greater care. Third, you begin to notice repeated words and phrases that don't carry over well in translation. Fourth, you begin to understand more fully what scholars and other readers of the language are talking about when they discuss the Iliad  or Ancient Greek writings more generally. Finally, I just scratched one thing off my bucket list. Hip, Hip, Huzzah!

There are two innovative bits of cinema I've been watching over the past week. Each deserves attention as works of art, but also as pieces that authentically put women and minorities to the fore of a genre in which they have been all too often absent or exploited. The first is Netflix's Dutch horror series, Ares . Ares  follows the biracial and poor Rosa's initiation into an elite college fraternity with connections to the highest circles of Dutch society. The portrayal of the the way in which elite groups draw in their members, separate them from their families and values, make them complicit in the group's guilt, foster predatory competition, and ultimately claim to offer absolution from the corruption through radical loyalty to the group works as well for cults and political factions as it does for honors colleges and classics programs. I can't speak to how it actually portrays race and gender in Holland, but I can affirm that this is what it feels like to be a...

I'm still thinking about Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House . Over the past year, I've read the book twice, moved on to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle , watched Netflix's adaptations of both and a further adaptation called The Haunting . As it turns out, I'm not alone. Stephen King has called the Netflix adaptation "close to a work of genius" and Quentin Tarantino says that he keeps returning to the Netflix adaptation as well. Stephen King's interest in Hill House made sense, but Tarantino's interest fascinated me. It's not something I would have expected. Then I remembered how much a fan of non-linear storytelling Tarantino is. Whether it's Pulp Fiction , Kill Bill , or The Hateful Eight , Tarantino likes the slow reveal and opportunities for slow reveal and character focus that telling a story out of chronological sequence opens up. Beneath all the homages and obvious shock-schlock is a reverence for the art of Story....

And the new sun rose brining in a new year... 2019 was a quiet year on this blog as intensive study and and a new member of the family left little time for blogging. In addition, I began posting thoughts of a more academic nature on Eidos and TheShieldofAchilles. Those posts, together with additional academic content, can be found at my academic blog Old and Forgotten Ways . All that effort centered around my attempts to get into grad school. I'll know how that goes sometime in February or March. One way or another, I'll let you know what I know. Meantime, it's a new year here at Platypus of Truth and all manner of things are possible. We'll see what surprises 2020 brings.