On Anime and Procrastination

I was doing a bit of drawing on my flight back from Houston last weekend, and looking back I'm surprised to find that all my sketches were taking the form of sort of a peculiar genre...ANIME. I'm not so artistic, and I kind of gave up the lead pencil senior year of high school when I drew this incredibly dark self-portrait with a bunch of snakes for hair (Tedusa, 2001), but I was flying SouthWest and I definitely "wanted to get away."

In a way it makes sense that this is what I came up with. I have spent several hours a day for the last six months on Youtube watching music videos set to Final Fantasy characters.

The thing is, all these emo-ass tracks I'm embarrassed I listen to are put out by bands who can't really afford music videos. So it's either a jpeg of their album cover or a trippy-ass animated movie that is occasionally bizarrely sexual. You don't have to be King Solomon to choose the latter.

It's now been like three months of peripheral exposure to the underbelly of various animated worlds, and while I have no regrets, a few issues come to mind:

1. Taking the time to edit a music video using semi-pertinent clips where it looks like the characters are mouthing the words seems like a mad weird use of time. But I'm watching, so I guess an audience does exist.


2. I had no idea the creators of the World of Warcraft programmed their characters to be able to break dance and do old school techniques like the "Macarena" and the "Suck it" move. It's pretty sick, but again, a very curious use of the company clock.


3. Games like Final Fantasy seem fresh and all, but to me (and this is based primarily on these videos and this commercial I saw yesterday for some RPG game that got a 9.5 out of ten) it seems like you just spend all your time watching earthquakes and princesses emerging from magical lakes. While these videos display impressive graphics and ridiculous imagination, they don't have me sold in terms of Gameplay alone.