Thrawn05 said:
Okay, where do I begin? Well first I'm not self-righteous.
For a person who hangs out on a computer game forum to rant about uncreative popular culture strikes me as not only self-righteous, but hypocritical. Shrug. Sorry if your self-assessment is more positive.
That's not to say that I think hanging out on a game forum is lame -- after all, I do it -- but I think you have to have some sense not to start throwing stones. Glass houses, he who is without sin, etcl.
I do suck at 2d art and I openly admit it. . . . I also like your attempt at linking to the manga page, since it might be your childish attempt to embarrass me.
The problem isn't that you suck at art. You're probably better at it than I am. But at least when I doodle, I don't make *fan art of anime shows.* Anime varies between mind-numbingly stupid and trivial and mind-numbingly stupid and self-important. Neon Genesis Evangelion -- can we just start with the title? -- the inspiration for your works, is probably one of the worst in this regard. The whole thing has the aesthetic of Mel Brooks's satire at the end of A Brief History of the World, Part II (the Stars of David spaceships fighting off aliens). If there is an indication of the collapse of Western juvenile culture, it's the popularity of anime, which has replaced American home-grown aesthetics with Japanese weirdness (which is itself a failed effort at importing Western symbols).
So you start with anime, which is horribly uncreative and uninteresting (I except, say, Miyazaki here), and then you do *fan art* of it.
And then you talk about uncreative kids.
Sorry if I point out the absurdity of that, and so, if in doing so, I expose just how lame your drawings are. I'm sure your mom wouldn't mind putting them up on her fridge, though.
And apparently you're proud enough of them to scan them and put them out on the Internet (on a Google indexed site!!!). And you don't like to "hide" your identity, so why should you be upset at me posting your artwork?
Second, I'm no where's near done finishing my site, and there's a shitload more stuff I'm going to put up. I only did it up fast since I figured since google linked my site, I might as well put somthing up. Once I get my portfolio sorted I'll have it up. Until then, WYSIWYG.
This made me laugh out loud. Come on. The whole "It's just a work in progress, don't blame me!" refrain is like a punchline, isn't it?
If you are around kids a lot like I am (I have 6 nieces and 5 nephews, the oldest is 17, the youngest is 3, I do alot of sitting), you would notice that my points hold true.
I *am* around kids alot. I spent four summers teaching kids ranging from 8 to 18. But it's not clear how you can have a legitimate frame of reference for judging them unless you're at least a generation older than us. That is, you need to have watched two generations of children play make-believe to compare them. Comparing other kids to how you nostalgically and self-aggrandizingly remember yourself is just going to lead to classic generational smugness. As it did here.
As part of my mass culture omnivorousness, I try to check out cartoons, comics, etc. from time to time. (I am teh retard, obviously.) It strikes me that even including some horrible programming these days, I can think of at least a handful of contemporary cartoons that are much more sophisticated than anything I was watching as a kid except for maybe pre-Scrappy Scooby Doo. The Batman show that WB ran (and the various Timm/Dini spin-offs) is clearly worlds beyond He-Man and GI Joe and Transformers (let alone Inhumanoids, C.O.P.S., Gummi Bears, etc.). I would grudgingly say the same for Fullmetal Alchemist, anime though it is. Pixar movies are much more sophisticated than the cartoon movies I had as a kid; even the Disney "greats" from my generation (Mermaid, B&B, Aladdin, Lion King) are chopped liver compared to Pixar's stuff.
Popular children's books, most notably Harry Potter, seem more sophisticated. As bad as, say, Goosebumps is, it's still better than More Scary Stories II (as scary as that "Mexican hairless" dog was. *shudder*).
My sense is that pop culture usually moves in the direction of sophistication, although there is a jagged process because you tend to have steep drops when there's a new medium or new artform within a medium. And then you often have drops as a medium / artform is drying up. Rap was pretty silly when it started, but you listen to Dre's lyrics in his later stuff and they're vastly better than the lyrics of just about any music, ever. Seriously.
You can make up numbers too?
Yes. I'm lying about my age. Clearly I am 13.
I've always used this same handle. I don't like being a trolling asshole that has to have a new handle for every forum, since heaven forbid someone here might learned I used to post elsewhere. :shock:
See 1 Corinthians 13:12. (Three more made up numbers!)
Because it's one of many things that are affecting children on a fundamental level, and as a result kids are being pampered and cared for to point that games like "Dodge Ball" and "Tag" are too much.
Hey, I'm all about toughening kids up, too. But I don't see how a red herring about mollycoddling kids has anything to do with the question of their *creativity*.[/img]
