The Public Square for June 2025

Attention Citizens!

I’m finally down in the animation mines, digging away, making… slight progress… every day.  

Animation is funny, because at the very beginning the progress is HILARIOUSLY SLOW.  It’s very normal in the early stages to be like “oh, it never occurred to me, but I’m going to need to cut to a new location here…” and then for some reason it takes like 4 hours to design that new location, and then you blink and the whole work day has evaporated.  

The video is like 57 minutes long, and I had a couple days this week where a full day of work yielded about 20 seconds of animation.  Pretty annoying!  I totally understand why people give up when they’re learning how to animate.  The beginning is so brutal.  But I’ve learned that that’s just the process.  I usually find that once I’ve completed about 20% of the animation, those unplanned 4 hour diversions are mostly resolved, and the pace really starts to accelerate.  Once I’m chuggin’ along, I can pretty reliably do 2-3 minutes per day.  If I really go sicko mode and fully no-life it, I can get up to 5 minutes per day, but I try not to do that until I’m like 80% done… for… sanity reasons.  

Progress Update:

Books I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Creative Mythology, by Joseph Campbell

  • Did you ever hear the legend of Finn McCool?  It’s not a story historians would tell you...  

    This month I finished Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell, the 4th and final volume in his Masks of God series, which covers mythology from like 12th century Medieval Europe to present.  This is the weakest of the 4 books, and to be honest it was a bit of a slog so I hesitated to include it in this newsletter, but I wanted to say the thing about Finn McCool. What a name, my god.

    If I had to recommend any book from this series it would be Volume 1, Primitive Mythology, which I really found interesting and really stuck in my head.  Campbell goes on at length about the differences between hunter/gatherer mythologies and planting/cultivating mythologies.  

    Hunter/gatherers tend to tell myths where animals become humans and humans become animals, lots of myths about people going away on quests (for obvious reasons, hunting…) and lots of stories about male spirits or gods, often taking the form of an animal.  The Indo-Europeans were (kinda) descended from hunter/gatherers, so you can really see this tendency in, for example, Ancient Greece.  

    Planting/cultivating mythologies tend to be preoccupied with death, birth, and resurrection, with lots of animal (or human!) sacrifice involved, with a lot more emphasis on female spirits or gods, often taking the form of a “Mother Earth” or “Gaia” primordial goddess.  Ancient Egypt largely dodged the Indo-European bullet and obviously remained a planting/cultivating culture, and was therefore absolutely OBSESSED with death and resurrection.  And yet they were neighbours with hunter/gatherers on both the east and the west, and you can see their influence in how Egyptian gods KINDA take the form of an animals via their animal heads.  Very interesting!  

    I find all of this really fun, but unfortunately most of the fun stuff is in Primitive Mythology, (and I guess in the 3rd volume, Occidental Mythology,) very little of it in Creative Mythology!  This final volume spends a lot of time jumping around to different topics like Tristan and Iseult and Arthurian myths and whatnot, which I found to be more of a slog.  Alas!

    I would however like to note that George Lucas is famously a Joseph Campbell superfan, and as I was reading this series I picked up some truly FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE.  Seems like George liked to swipe names from Campbell in a pinch.  The following topics have big sections devoted to them in Campbell’s Masks of God series.  

    Ashoka the Great / (Ahsoka)

    The Mines of Kestel / (The Mines of Kessel)

    Finn McCool / (Droopy McCool)

    People have gotta know.

Films I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Citizen Kane (1941)

  • It had been many years since I had seen Citizen Kane, but over the last month I accidentally watched it 3 times.  I watched it one evening, got really pumped about how great it was, watched it again the next evening, got even more pumped, read half of a book about the making of the movie, (VERY BADLY WRITTEN IN MY OPINION, NOT INCLUDED IN THE ABOVE SECTION, DID NOT ENJOY,) and then watched it a third time.  Weirdly obsessive behaviour from me, did not plan on falling down this particular rabbit hole.  

    I’ve never seen The Magnificent Ambersons, I’m going to dive into that as I’m done writing this newsletter.  If that goes well, I might decide to temporarily become an annoying Welles guy.  Never seen The Trial, never seen Chimes at Midnight, lots to explore.  If The Magnificent Ambersons doesn’t go well, then I guess I’ll go back to being normal.  

Music I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• The Decemberists

  • I’ve been blasting The King is Dead (2011) by The Decemberists on repeat for the last month.  Unfortunate title, considering recent Canadian news.  Shockingly, I’m actually not listening to it for political reasons.  It’s a great spring/summer album, great for struttin’ and walkin’ and naturin’.  Fun!  Nature!  Wee!  

    Don’t Carry It All is the best song on this album, but the whole thing is great.

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