Copyrighted Video Content with high production values that wasn't owned by me
Something more cinematic than other people's home movies
It might sound crazy that I got this much very important stuff uploaded to YouTube, but the year was 2005. No one knew WHAT YouTube was going to be in terms of its content.
When it comes to writing novels and drawing manga, some industry people people will tell you, “Nothing is stopping you from succeeding or getting in your way, but yourself. But as it turns out, when you really look at the market more intensely, you'll find there are a TON of factors standing in your way and stopping you from success, and succeeding at work Here's a bullet point list of the main ones. Novel Plagiarism Insult, Mock Parodies Rip-Off Books The Amount of Physical Work Involved The Daily Discipline Required Life getting in the way No quiet time to work Daily Family Noise (if you live around parents or siblings) A Crowded Market The Oncoming Irrelevance of Brick and Mortar Bookstores (Borders) The rise of ebooks Print books not selling as well Arrogant, Picky, and Stuck Up Publishers and Agents Never responding to Unsolicited Submissions American Manga Japanese Anti-American Philosophy and other Snobbery “American Manga isn't real. It's not real manga.” Hatred from Fans of American Manga Plagiairism, slander, and cyberbullying from peers and industry Not very high sales Not as popular as many other comics, even webcomics Digital Art monopolizing a once hand drawn industry The Difficulty and Labor-Intensiveness of the work. Hard work Hypercompetitive World Industry If you're “Failing” (I.E. Working) at the goal of novels and manga, and feel held back from success, it is likely one of these factors is standing your way and holding you back, if not blocking you entirely. Don't blame yourself, blame the SHIT ON THESE LISTS AND THE SHITHEADS ON IT.
Speaking as a writer, and an aspiring future political theorist and philosopher (for fictional worlds I make up when I design fantasy world militaries and governments in my head), PROBABLY one of the best, most justified things the formerly Mubarak-controlled “former regime” can do to help the Middle East and put the former Egyptian regime of Mubarak in his true place (as a worm and villain in History) would be to admit what Mubarak did to corrupt them and freely give out information about how Mubarak corrupted his own Egyptian government into a regime in the first place. Or just continued it. Honesty is the best policy, even in the Arab world. Admit what the “Powers That Be” made them lie about and commit violence against the common people for. The best thing they can do is admit what they did, without intentionally offending the people in Egypt who hear their now-Democracy-influenced message. And yes, I, Obama, and the internet WILL be listening. So you’d better approach your position carefully, Military of Egypt. The main advice I’d offer to Egypt, would be keep a REAL CLOSE EYE on Iran, the same way South Korea is keeping a real close eye on North Korea. They are the villains of world history at the moment after all. I’m not going to discuss Korea right now. The Egypt Iran tension is too big of a deal, and too much at the forefront of the world to talk about anything else. I just needed a chance to speak, a real excuse to speak my mind politically. And I did. On Twitter this morning and last night.
Thank you Obama, you’re finally actually achieving and getting results more than talking. Just messing with you.
Social Reform Movements
Symbols of Peace and Reform
The Obama Presidential Inauguration
Cairo Square (comparable to the protests at Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall Fall)
What’s left of the Egyptian Military and Government is going to have the re-write the book of Arab Politics all over again. Will that take a lot of strategy and planning and more than a year (unfortunately more than a year) to successfully achieve? Yes. Should there be a “Egyptian Constitution” written based on the Western Examples, I strongly believe so. That is how Laws and Governments get established. By Congresses and Written Government Documents and Discussion of how they should be written; believe it or not, these types of considerations seem obvious to me. If Egypt Truly wants to Stay Free, they can’t repeat recent history. They can’t repeat themselves. Democracy anywhere is built on a foundation, on organized governments that endorse freedom and pro-autonomy governance. This is an enormous opportunity for Egypt to set an example as a new paradigm Role Model for the Entire Eastern World, to show there’s more to Asia than “evil regimes, tyranny, corruption, terrorism, and socialism”. Because there’s a lot more to it than that. And if you’re an Egyptian today, you already know that. Obama and the United States Government knows all about this sort of thing. Diplomatic and international aid from around the democratic world should counsel and consult with Egypt in this Time of Change for the Arab World. Change is in the Air. Revolution really is happening in the Middle East now. I don’t want to get too excited, but it’s easy to get excited about a successful day like Friday, February 11, 2011. A Day of Democracy and Change overseas. Egypt has ended up with one of the greatest opportunities for change in the history of the world. It actually DIDN’T happen in America this time. The attention is finally on somewhere else.
And this is proof that, by sparing protestors in Egypt and helping to oust Mubarak, the Web has proven its usefulness in not only bringing peace to the world, but saving the lives of innocent people as well. The web saves lives too. Some of my influence saves lives. Not only that, it brings epic peace and justice to society. Real Justice.
In a way, Bush, much as people hate him, was the warrior
Barack Obama has been the peacemaker and strategist.
I’ve always been out to help the world though, for a long time now. I used to be against everyone. Now, I just want to help. I’m happy to help you or anyone out however I can.
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And that’s about as much political commentary as you’ll get out of me for the moment.
Wow, I feel so very, very, incredibly topical. I’m amazing! I brought peace to the world! Go me!
“Savior”?? I don’t know if I’d go that far. I have some powerful political might now. I have some political strength in the media and in society and culture around the world, but that’s about as far as I’ll go in admitting something like that. I don’t want to become arrogant and believe my own hype. I’ll just keep working for political order and peace, from a non-political diplomatic and technocratic position.
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That’s all the inspiration I’ll ever need, right now.
What’s happened in the last 18 days or so in Egypt, the reform that’s happened there is the same kind of new-paradigm political reform I want to take a literary photograph of for reference in the post-Apocalyptic. Egypt is now a Rebuilding Society. New-Earth (the world I created) is a Rebuilding Society. Egypt is playing a big part in the shaping of my “fictional” story. It’s more of an allegory now than ever before. And because of how much people have been impressed by my input through the internet, even I get to have input and say into how Egypt is Rebuilt, Politically, Religiously, Socially, Culturally, Geographically, Logistically, Militarily, and Economically. No Small Task I’m a contributor like every other major Internet Pundit. Many of the Egyptian Protestors who survived the “Martyrs” who died in the struggle, one of the main Reformers blatantly thanked Facebook and Twitter (which I have a popular account on) on CNN. That gives me more power than I had. Real power. Political and Social Reformer Power, like the Civil Rights Movement or something. Suddenly my life has a real purpose and meaning all of the sudden. Well, actually, it had meaning before, but now it has meaning that’s that much more powerful.
New-Earth and Egypt have a lot in common, in an allegorical way like Nosferatu and any tyrant overseas do.
Starting today, The Continuing Egypt Saga has given me a lot of raw source material to work with for the development of my Post-Apocalyptic fictional universe, my own mythos: “New-Earth: The Rebuilt World”. It’s like winning the allegory lottery.
I'm talking Slave Labor Graphics, Dark Horse Comics, and Oni Press. Old School Indie, Hellboy, Sin City, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Usagi Yojimbo, Cerebus, Bone, Scud, and Johnny The Homicidal Maniac. I didn't grow up on Manga when I was 16 and 17. That would happen later. I started off growing up on a diet of Black and White indie comics that were not in the mainstream of media at the time and had no movie or TV adaptations in the beginning. Just stuff that inspired me and my creativity and put me in awe. Indie comics of the 90s and early 2000s had a heavy influence on the actual design and look of my End Times series.
The Heavy Usage of Black and Silhouettes and Japanese Notan design.
And the grittiness and rawness of the artwork, how you could still see the draftsmanship and inking mistakes and the sloppiness of the artist's neurotic auteur hand on almost every panel and still loved every page of every book these guys did, despite all that.
That was the Good Shit. The way many teenagers grow up on manga, I grew up on black and white pen and ink comic books (floppy comic with glossy painted covers and gritty artwork.
“One
Sunday morning in the spring of 1932 I was hiking through the Rhine
Valley. With a pack on my back I was wandering down a quiet country
road among flowering apple orchards near Koblenz. Suddenly a car
appeared and came down the road very fast. It was jammed with people.
Almost before I had taken full notice of it, I realized it was coming
straight at me and instinctively jumped into the ditch. The car
passed in a cloud of leaflets and from the ditch I glimpsed its
occupants, six or seven youths screaming and shaking their fists.
They were Nazis, and it was election day. I was being invited to vote
for Hitler, who was not yet in power. These were future officers in
the SS. They vanished quickly. The road was once again perfectly
silent and peaceful. But it was not the same road as before. It was
now a road on which seven men had expressed their readiness to
destroy me.
That
was about the closest I ever really came to direct contact with Nazi
violence in its overt form. What this novel is about is really
something different. It is about the crisis of civilization in
general, and the Germany it deals with is largely that of Bismarck
and the Kaiser. It is the Germany that accepted Nazism. Nazism itself
was beyond me!
The
book was written in the summer of 1941, when I was teaching English
at St. Bonaventure University. I wanted to enter the Trappists but
had not yet managed to make up my mind about doing so. This novel is
a kind of sardonic meditation on the world I which I then found
myself: an attempt to define its predicament and my own place in it.
That definition was necessarily personal. I do not claim to have
gained full access to the whole myth of Europe and the West, only to
my own myth. But as a child of two wars, my myth had to include that
of Europe and of it falling apart: not to mention America and its own
built-in absurdities.
Obviously
this fantasy cannot be considered adequate statement about Nazism and
the war. The death camps were not yet in operation. America was not
yet involved. The things that were to come could, at best, be guessed
at never have imagined the inhumanities that soon became not only
possible but real. In the face of such things, this book could never
have been written so lightly. Therefore the reader must remember that
it was dreamed in 1941, and that its tone of divertisement marks it
as a document of a past era.
What
remains actual about it of course is this: the awareness that, though
one may or may not escape from the Nazis, there is no evading the
universal human crisis of which they were but one partial symptom.”
