New Mediums:Vagabond

Often times I find myself engrossed in new art and cultural mediums. Sometimes in the broad sense, I've been studying Eastern religions lately, more often then not it's on a more micro level, simply a new artist, but in the same broader mediums I frequent. Sometimes I become obsessed with a new medium, and stick with it until it's complete, or becomes less attractive. Sometimes I don't find it subjectively pleasing and move on. Sometimes I get the chance to experience something, but then don't have access to further my interests. This could be for a multitude of reasons. Why am I explaining all of this? Well, I've been thinking about a regular subject I could write about for this blog. This subject seems flexible, and interesting enough to do just that. My only parameters will be: It has to be new to me, and it has to be art in some liberal sense. Other than that I won't limit myself. Why those two things? Because, I feel that new things will keep me from feeling a sort of staleness, and art is something I've been reflecting on a lot lately. Rather than bore anyone with philosophical jargon, I'll try to express my views on art in practice. Here I go...

So Saturday I'm in New York City, on a Philosophy field trip. I follow my friend Frank as we (21 of us) break off to find places to eat lunch. Frank is following Dan and Dan's girlfriend (sorry feminists of the world I forgot her name). They mention they are looking for someplace Asian to eat. After about 20 minutes of no luck we randomly come upon Kinokuniya, Manga distributor. Apparently it has a Japanese food quasi-cafe upstairs that is both excellent and cheap (for NYC). After eating an amazing panini and trying some not bad sushi with some sort of plum, I ask Frank if there is a Manga if I should consider. Frank being the connoisseur of anime that he is asks me about my interests, and eventually falls upon what he calls "the manga of his favorite manga artist," Vagabond. So I picked up the first chapter and read the first half wile waiting to get into the Museum of Modern Art.




The first thing I have to say about Vagabond is that this is amazing. It employs so many elements of art that I enjoy so much. The obvious comparisons are Cowboy Bebop, and Samurai Champloo, but also Edward Gorey comes to mind as similar in the drawing style. The use of cross hatching and other line paterns to create texture and to seamlessly integrate while differentiating a background from a foreground. The characters are serious for the most part. They are also violent, sometimes to a extreme. Humor plays a minor roll, but it is good when it is there, and not wacky/over done as some animes/mangas tend to be. I'll admit I've never really gotten into manga before, so I don't know what's typical. I like the use of colored art on only some of the pages. It ads emphasis reminiscent of Sin City (I've only ever seen the movie, as for the graphic novels: as Judd would say, "I hear it's good.")

The plot so far has been OK, I'm expecting it to get a lot deeper. Basically some samurai wake up after a battle surprised to be alive. They kill some guys and run into some thief girls who steal from dead soldiers, then they kill some more guys that are bothering them. I'm only half way into chapter 1, so I'm yet to be too critical about the plot. The action though has been more than to my tastes. The way the manga is set up, there is real drama. It's exciting. If you like exciting, with tons of violence and great drawing, I suggest you try it out.

I'll finish off my post with a rating. (Keep in mind that this is only an initial reaction. I may think this is amazing or sucks sometime in the future, and you may never know.) Vagabond as New Medium: 8/10

Motion Picture Magic: The Dark Knight

O.K. I know this is everyone and his brother's favorite movie of all time. And if you want to find a review of this movie you can google it to find a billion of them from many different angles. This being said I wanted to add my two cents anyway. I may not add anything new, but I've seen it three times now and was completely enthralled each time.

Before I jump into the movie I should add some prefaces. First, I'm a complete geek. This is probably obvious if you've read any of my other posts. Second when it comes to comic book characters Batman has always been my favorite. He was just darker, smarter, and just all around cooler. I watched the 1960's Batman when I was a toddler. When I got a little older I watched Batman: The Animated Series. Batman TAS really got me hooked on the character. The creators, Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, did everything they could to make Batman dark, edgy and cool. Eventually I saw the original movie and it's sequel, which were both decent flicks. The Schumacher directed movies of the 90's were pretty much trash, but they didn't really change my view of Batman. When Batman TAS became Justice League (followed by JLU), the creators went out of the way to make their batman character compelling to watch. His witty cynicism, and the ability to use his detective skills and mind to solve problems made him a superior hero to the others. I could go on with other Batman media, but you get the picture.

Getting back on track with the discussion of The Dark Knight. The batman character in the Dark Knight I think is a close second to the Animated Series (and it's predecessors). Gone is the witty cynicism, but it is replaced by an equally if not deeper character. The Batman of the Dark Knight is not fully sure of himself. This is hinted at in Batman Begins, but reaches fruition in this movie. One of the main plot points of the movie is Batman's quest to help Harvey Dent take over his role as the city's protector. Batman wants Dent because Dent is the district attorney, what he does is legal and doesn't require a mask. The movie makes a point of empathizing with Batman's desire to be Dent, from his ability to work in the open, to his relationship with Rachel Dawns. Christan Bale does a remarkable job expressing these emotions in the character. Interestingly though, it is Bruce Wayne who elicits these expressions. Once he puts on the cape and cowl, he's all business.

The villain of the film is the Joker. The late Heath Ledger did such an amazing job with his portrayal of the Joker. Coupled with the amazing writing of Christopher Nolan, the Joker steals the spotlight from all the other characters. The Joker of the Dark Knight is not really like any other I've seen. Sure he's still dressed like a clown, but gone are the gimmicks. Also missing is the wackiness. He's still insane, but in such a way that as an audience member you find yourself drawn in by him. The Joker represents something that is very rare to find on film. He has a completely different set of values. Most villains twist or break normal codes of good and evil. The Joker doesn't even compare. He doesn't know what he's doing is evil, he knows normal people think it is, but to him it's some great work of classical music or art. His philosophy is chaos or nihilism, he wants to show the world that it's highest values are meaningless, that deep down we are all just like him. And just before Batman inevitably saves the day, you'll wonder whether it's true.

The other notable member of the cast is Gary Oldman playing LT./Commissioner Gordon. Most portrayals of Gordon have either been as him as a victim or a hard nose cop who begrudgingly steps out of Batman's way. Here Gordon is Batman's partner in arms. Ironically while Batman is busy trying to make Harvey Dent into Gotham's White Knight, Gordon is fulfilling just that role. Oldman shows in near perfection Gordon's hard work, tenacity, and fear in a world dominated by forces not fit for your average police officer.

What makes this film great is the underlying philosophical issues that drive the plot and the characters. Batman is vigilante justice, taking the mantle of societies values, which inevitably leads to questioning it's own righteousness, and necessity. The Joker is Nihilism, questioning the very structure of society attempting to shatter it's values. Harvey Dent represents chance. In a world of chaos maybe the only justice is chance. Philosophical discussions of the nature of Justice are as old as Philosophy itself, but this movie paints a picture of these debates that is gripping. You don't even have to appreciate that they're there. The forces at work are so alluring it's almost impossible to not get caught up in it. As the Joker says at the end of the film, "so this is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object."

I suggest you see this movie, as many times as your wallet allows. Edit: (I just realized I never gave this movie a rating) Guess I'll cop out completely 6/5... yeah it's that good.

Trailer:

Magic: The Project

So it's been a really long time since my first post. Sorry, I couldn't think of anything I wanted to write about. For this post I've decided to fall back on my favorite hobby, Magic: the Gathering. I want to start off by apologizing to anyone who reads this and isn't already acquainted with the game. Magic is probably the most complex strategy game out there, so it would take several tedious posts to even get a start at teaching the basics. Instead I'm going to write about a deck I'm currently building. I'm going to explain a lot, considering my primary audience, JK and Judd, are former magic players who know the basics and some advanced play of the past, but are completely in the dark as to the current state of the game and the new mechanics.

The biggest thing in the magic world right now is the release of a new set, Shadowmoor. Shadowmor is a pretty good so far as I've seen. The set's main themes are hybrid mana costs, the untap machanic, wither, and persist. Hybrid mana is mana that can be spent with one of two types of mana. Think of a grizzly Bears, if it was hybrid, say Green-Red hybrid, it could be played for its colorless mana and either a red or a green mana (example). The untap mechanic is like the normal tap mechanic, but always has an activation cost and untaps the creature using the ability, thus cannot be played while untapped (example). Persist and wither are creature keyword mechanics, like trample. Wither is simple, this creature deals damage in the form of -1/-1 counters to other creatures (example). Persist is on the same wavelength, when this creature is put into a graveyard from play, if it had no -1/-1 counters on it, Return it to play under its owner's control with a -1/-1 counter on it (example). I don't think I'll end up taking about any cards with untap. Untap sucks in constructed and is great in limited, and the bulk of this article will be on constructed.

Beyond new cards and mechanics, Shadowmoor has really shaken up my favorite format in Magic, Standard. The previous set, Lorwyn, was a tribal based format, which basically means a bunch of creatures that make other creatures bigger because they have the same creature type. Elves and Faeries, and Merfolk dominated the scene. Elves seemed to be the biggest and fastest tribe so it was default for anyone who didn't like to think too much. Faeries was the pre-Shadowmoor hands down best deck. Yes, faeries! They play everything at instant speed which makes them able to play counterspells effectively, and they have the best card in the block, Bitterblossom. Bitterblossom is amazing! You get guys for life, from an enchantment. Other decks played Bitterblossom, but none had Scion of Oona to really take advantage of it (the shroud is counted on the Bitterblossom itself because its a Enchantment - Faerie). Merfolk basically breathe islandwalk with Lord of Atlantis, so they were a great metagame choice against the massive amount of faerie decks. There were other decks in the format, but you can get the point that it was a lot of beat down. There were virtually no combo decks (my favorite type of deck).

Shadowmoor changed all that. Because it is a mini-block, it was added to the Standard format without any sets being removed. Faeries is still really good, but there are two combo decks that were made possible. The first uses Swans of Bryn Argoll plus Seismic Assault plus Dakmor Salvage. You have to get the Swan and the Assult on the board, then shoot the swan with the Salvage dredging it back from the draw, you'll net one card and can start again, once you hit a second Salvage you can start throwing one at the opponent as you discard and dredge both. You run out of deck too quick so you run two Gaea's Blessing so your deck will recycle itself as you go. The second combo is Enchanted Evening plus Patrician's Scorn. This blows up the table, you destroy all permanents. Before you do that though you want to have a threat unaffected by the combo. There are a bunch of creatures that do this. Greater Gargadon can be unsuspended by sacrificing all your land and while he's still on the stack you can play the Scorn for free (assuming you've played the Enchanted evening that turn) the Scorn will resolve, destroying everything, then the 9/7 will come into play. Anything with persist also comes back from the combo, Heartmender and Kitchen Finks are the best of those. Other options are Epochrasite and Nihilith. Garruk Windspeaker can be used too, just put his second ability on the stack and then play Patrician's Scorn. Of course you could always float the mana before the combo and play a creature or Bitterblossom afterwards.

The second combo looks really fun to me. While not as powerful as the first, it seems a lot less all or nothing. Another thing is has going for it is main deck Patrician's Scorn is really good against Bitterblossom. Also the color requirements are a lot easier, and thus the deck will be a ton cheaper. I already own a lot of the more expensive cards involved with Enchanted Evening (the Gargadons and some rare lands). I've gone ahead and purchased most everything else I need to build the deck (was pretty cheap, around $30). This deck can go a ton of ways. The only requirement is either blue or white mana. With that in mind, my next post will take you through a walk-through of my building and testing and re-building process. I'm pretty sure it will end up being broken up into at least two posts. Then on the 30th I'll take to the deck to Friday-Night Magic at Let's Play in Waverly, NY (my first plug, I feel dirty). I'll make up a report of how things went, I doubt I'll find a way to do a play by play, but I'll try to remember as much as possible.

I'm extremely excited about this project. My first post... frankly sucked. I have a feeling these are going to go really well, and be a lot of fun. My cards are shipping to my house and I'm at school. So I'll get started when I'm back home on Sunday. Oh, and I'd be really appreciative if I could get any input once I start posting builds.

Meaningfulness

Let me first introduce myself. I'm Matt. I know JK because we went to high school together. Currently I am attending college at Bloomsburg University. I'm a philosophy major who spends most of his time playing a trading card game called Magic: the Gathering. I might just give that topic a whirl some time, but today I’m going to talk about some philosophy. For some of you, you may know exactly what philosophy is. For others, philosophy is a word that you’ve most likely have heard, but don’t really know what that word means. That’s okay, don’t be scared away by that fact. Historically philosophers have fought over the definition so hard it’s really hard to give it one anymore. That’s not to say I can’t give you a general idea. The easiest way to explain philosophy is to explain the kinds of things philosophers do. These things typically fall into a three categories: metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. The first two might scare you. They are pretty big words. So to keep that from happening let me spell them out. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of all matter in the universe. More specifically it is a bunch of hypothesis about the nature of things within the universe. Epistemology is the study of what can be known, a bunch of hypothesis about the nature of our capacity for knowing things. Logic as you probably have guessed is the study of arguments, how they work and such. I tell you all of this not because I’m about to jump into an entire history of it, but because; I want to talk about a specific philosophical problem. You see I am one of those people who loves their major and spends a lot of their spare time doing things that concern it. Well with philosophy that means a lot of introspection. (Also reading a whole lot of really old texts.) The problem I want to discuss is one in metaphysics.

A few days ago I attended a speech by a not so famous professor from Ohio, Dr Nathaniel Goldberg. His topic was dubbed “Meaningfulness as a Secondary Quality.” Now to understand this topic you have to understand two things, which I will explain. First meaningfulness here is just the meaning that words in any language have. And second a secondary quality is a type of condition that certain types of properties have. Properties such as color, taste, texture and smell all have been famously argued to be secondary qualities. This is because the philosophers who were arguing wanted to distinguish them from Primary qualities. The best way to define both secondary and primary qualities is to contrast the two. Primary qualities are purely objective. We believe that even if we weren’t around to sense the objects with these properties they would still have those qualities. A secondary quality in some way is both subjective and objective. With secondary qualities there is something objective out in space that acts on the subjective senses of some observer. In the case of color light waves bounce off some object and we observing them experience color. A good example of primary color is shape, shape can be deduced from two different senses, we can both feel and see shape. Shape doesn’t rely in any way on us like color does. This secondary quality distinction was very famously argued by John Locke.

To say that meaningfulness is a secondary quality is to say that meaningfulness does not exist solely as an objective property. This, to me at least seems pretty obvious. If you believe that there is a secondary quality distinction it’s very hard to say that meaningfulness is a primary quality. Yet, the part that complicates this debate and in my opinion makes it very exciting is that there is a third viable option: Meaningfulness as a purely subjective property. This objection is not as easily dodged as meaningfulness and a primary quality was. This objection can be highlighted by the difference between meaningfulness and color as properties. Color’s objective component as a secondary quality is most obviously the object and the light waves it reflects. Meaningfulness’s objective component is much harder to define. The words on the page, the sounds that we make when we talk and the gestures we make with our body all seem to be things that convey meaning. Also our natural languages in some respect were developed by ourselves. We may not have initially went about designing our language, but as it developed there are many cases in which we purposefully designed certain words. These lead some to speculate that the objective part of meaningfulness is arbitrary at best. The actual meaningfulness is just a subjective construct of our minds, the words or symbols are just a vehicle we’ve devised to share these meanings. The only objection I can think to raise to this is that even our own minds have an objective element, brain states. So if we could in principle do a brain scan to figure out what kinds of brain states cause different meanings to be interrupted, then we could use that as the objective component of the secondary quality of meaningfulness.

I hoped you understood and enjoyed what I was talking about. More than that I hope it got you thinking.
- Thanks for reading, Matt