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< Piro >

viole(n)t shift...

"1337DOWN"

Wednesday - June 20, 2012

[Piro] - 22:35:07 - [link here]

I hope you have been enjoying comic 1337 so far. People kept asking me if i was gonna do anything special for comic 1337... I told them i was either going to do a Shirt Guy Dom comic with 1,337 frames explaining how everything in Megatokyo worked XKCD style or a side story where Junko discovers that she is actually a Pony familiar to Miho (Junko Jamin'hoof) and that her memories had been blanked out by a particularly epic girls night out or Junpei running himself ragged trying to prevent a chain reaction of imploding plot points forming an emo singularity that would suck in not only the Megatokyo universe but the reader’s universe as well (I scrapped that idea for obvious reasons).

(catches breath)

So, Instead of a run-on sentence, i opted for a run-on comic. Comic 1337 should be epic, right? Hopefully, by the time i’ve finished it all, it will be.

A few things. First off, now that i’ve actually reached comic 1337 how about a big l33t sale in the MegaGear store? It sorta has to be big (like the comic) so I kept it simple:

All posters: 2 for $15
All Fine Art Prints: $12.50 each
All Light Colored Men’s T-shirts: $13.00 each
Megatokyo Sad Kitty Ear hats: $20.00 each (save $5)

And for a special limited-time you can get the 3V1L L337 design on a white t-shirt - the version largo wore when the design first appeared in a Megatokyo comic! Since it is a ‘light colored’ shirt, you get it for $13.00. :)

Also available - A remix of the original Bakaquake image - the Quake concept that inspired Piroko herself - in a violent, er, i mean violet-shift colored version... this also on a light colored shirt for $13.00.

UPDATE: just uploaded another tshirt revamp of an old Largo t-shirt design to the Megagear store: Practice Static Safety - H3CK N3K1D. Added some color and IMPACT fontified it. skin color on white...

As always, you can check out all the new stuff in the store in the ‘new products’ section. As always, thank you for your support.

Comic 1337 is also a turning point in many ways. It is a bit of a turning point for the chapter, mostly in what i hope are good ways. This was actually by design - though getting to this point ended up being a bit more awkward than i thought it would be (only I could create a ‘bath scene’ that people couldn’t wait to be over. ^^;;)

One thing you may have noticed about comic 1337 is that it is a bit of an homage to the original 4 panel Megatokyo format. Paradoxically, for such a big comic, it is also an experiment in format - i'm looking at ways to adjust my format so as tofacilitate more timely comic production. For years the comics have been overly complex... You can use panel density to make up for simplified art, but doing complicated art within a dense panel layout is... well, it’s kinda dumb. I suffer from a lot of dumb. I kept trying to simplify my art style. Yeah, i've had a lot of success with that. -_-;;

So, since i seem to be incapable of simplifying what i draw, i need to look at tweaking how i lay things out. I’ll be starting with some of these changes with comic 1338 and honestly, i hope no one actually notices - except perhaps a more regular flow of comics. For example, so far comic 1337 contains about 4 comics worth of drawings, so... it's been like two comics posted for each update so far. Not quite the 3 per week i started with, but 2 per week would be nice, right?

< RayKremer >

XKCD, they baked Fred a cake once

"Umwelt"

Tuesday - April 3, 2012

[RayKremer] - 16:45:44 - [link here]

Long before MegaTokyo drifted into an examination of the zeitgeist of extreme fandoms, one of the earliest recurring themes that Fred inserted into the comic of was that of the personal reality, most commonly exemplified by "Piro-vision" and "Largo-vision", and examined explicitly in comic [132]. Over time and as the plot evolved, most readers started to view "Largo-vision" as "aware of the masquerade" and "Piro-vision" as "not aware of the masquerade", but it's not supposed to be that simple. For one thing, the entire point of Largo seeing the masquerade so easily is that he has always expected all that stuff to be there in the first place. In fact at times he expects quite a bit more to be there than the TPCD actually deals with. Piro, meanwhile, has other things to worry about and therefore just isn't paying enough attention to see anything he would consider out of the ordinary. (This is, by the way, exactly what Douglas Adams was satirizing with the Somebody Else's Problem field, the actual human tendency to auto-censor things of low priority, no outlandish technology needed.)

Where am I going with this? Monday's XKCD comic at first glance was cool just for being an Illinois joke (I live there). But upon viewing the mouseover alt text, I immediately had to grab Fred to take a look. "Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser." That sums up the personal reality principle incredibly well.

If you check wikipedia, the term umwelt seems to be applied more to the animal kingdom than to humans, if only because the difference in sensory organs is actually significant as you cross species. Check the "See also" listing though, and you will find Reality Tunnel. "Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality." – Robert Anton Wilson

This is exactly the moral of the story that Fred was going for when he laid out the divide between Largo's reality tunnel and Piro's reality tunnel as a recurring theme. (Note that we speak of "Piro-vision" and "Largo-vision" because those two are MT's earliest main characters, but it applies to everyone equally, every character in the comic and every person in real life.) It's still a theme, in fact, alongside the newer fandom theme that has sprung up. Combine the two and you get the fanboy reality tunnel, which is most definitely a factor in the recent storylines.

On an unrelated but timely note, conventions! Since there are some coming up, I will mention them. (We've fallen down on doing that, at Ohayocon I heard several people say they didn't know Fred was going to be there.) Fred plans to be at both the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention this weekend and Anime Central at the end of the month. If you are in either area, please do stop by, bring an MT book to get signed, buy a t-shirt or art print or bracelet while you're there.

Update: I have been informed that the real gag behind the 4/2 XKCD is that the comic you see is dynamically generated according to your location and the browser you are using. I guess the joke's on me, since the comic I get using Firefox in Illinois is titled Umwelt and is on its own consistent with the theme of umwelt, a California native makes fun of an Illinois native for making a big deal of an earthquake in Illinois, then the reverse happens when a tornado strikes. Fortunately the larger point I made above relates to umwelt itself and not the particular comic I saw.

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