Arrow's Progress 2024.03.01: Almost Ready to Roll
In this Arrow’s Progress:
Survey Results
You Are What You Watch: An Example
Graphic Short Story
Art
Survey Results
Last week I asked whether you’d prefer less frequent posts to lighten your email flow. Well, 100% of the three respondents said things were just fine as they’re currently working, so as Saruman said, “You have elected the way of pain!”
Haha, alright, I’m glad my posts aren’t burdensome at this point. I’ll keep with the ad hoc approach for now.
You Are What You Watch: An Example
I’m reading an interesting book, You Are What You Watch, by Walter Hickey, which is a lot broader than the title implies, about how pop culture shapes us as individuals and as a society, the economy, and more. I have another post in the works sparked by one of the book’s segments. But for now wanted to share an anecdote that illustrates on a micro scale one of Hickey’s points about how culture shapes our interests and actions.
I just finished reading another book, called The Nine American Lifestyles, by Arnold Mitchell.1 It was published in 1983, and looking at the old due date slip that is still in the book’s due date slip pocket,2 it was only checked out four times—twice in 1983 and twice in 1984—with no more checkout stamps before the Seattle Public Library went digital for its checkout system in 1987. But when I put a hold on the book I had to wait for several people ahead of me in line, and there are another six people in line after me. Why all the interest now? I’m guessing the other folks all learned of the book from Ted Gioia’s substack, like I did.
Graphic Short Story
I’ve got page layout concepts sketched out now. I’ve also decided I should do a “cover image” for the story. Normally this would come after you finish the pages. But if you’re posting pages as you create them rather than publishing a physical book, then could be nice to have a title image before the first pages. So I’ll create one. It’ll come back when I print physical zines of this story anyway (will happen if cost turns out to be reasonable).
Next, I’ll be starting on creating final pages! I’ll need to figure out and set up how things will be posted and presented on this substack.
Art
I was trying to use up the last of an ink cartridge so I can refill it with a different ink, so I did this drawing (using reference) for some more brush pen inking practice. I like how it turned out! I’m getting better control of the tool. Well, working on a table (as I did for this drawing and the recent car drawing) instead of your lap also makes a big difference.
Seemed like the ink took way longer than usual to dry. I wonder if the last of a cartridge of this kind of ink behaves differently?
And here’s a pic of messing with tools and materials as I try refilling the Pocket Brush Pen as well as a different Pentel brush pen (Aquash). There’s something fun and satisfying to me about modular tools like this.
For some reason my green ink (Diamine Evergreen) behaved really weirdly initially in the Aquash (see that chartreuse yellow-green?), but when I tried it again in the Aquash after trying the ink in the Pocket Brush, the color was fine. *shrug*
The density of the ink being laid down for both brush pens also is much lower than using a dip pen or dipping a brush. I’d prefer it to be darker (flow higher), alas.
Till next time-
Ted Gioia mentioned it in a post on his substack a couple months ago. It’s a really interesting read about a system Mitchell developed (called VALS) for analyzing different American lifestyles and social change, though it seems like his predictions were much too accelerated—they’re starting to come true more like four decades later rather than just one decade, and are probably slower moving than he thought would be. Gioia writes conspiratorially about how SRI and corporate America altered the VALS system because the ideas are dangerous to the capitalist system. Having read the book, I can see why Gioia would say Mitchell’s ideas are dangerous, but erasing the lifestyle observations from the VALS system seems like it’d be counterproductive to capitalists wanting to protect the system, since they’d then be blind to it? To be fair, that is empirically how people in power in different organizations, private and public, have reacted to “dangerous” ideas before and continue to do. In any case, in the SRI paper Gioia links, the explanation is that after three years they realized the VALS system needed revision because it wasn’t quite describing things accurately, and that comports with my observation that Mitchell’s projections seemed to assume much faster change than how they’ve worked out in reality.
If you’re unfamiliar with these, check out this website. I’m just old enough to remember when we used to get due dates stamped on a physical slip of card stock that goes in a pocket glued inside book covers. We elder millennials have a unique experience of growing up with analog childhoods before the digital revolution took off in our teenage years and suddenly everyone had (not-smart) cell phones and laptops started appearing in classrooms.