In Which Gantic Has a Busy Year
"Looking back, it's rather nostalgic. Those were the good old days, you know? Back when everything seemed so fresh and new. What makes me sad is that there are few of us regulars left who remember those times." The rabbit appeared wistful as we walked along the white halls of a gallery lined with art and poetry. We passed by many unfamiliar poems and images. "It almost seems as if Kai is the only one left, but I didn't really know him back then. Well, he's Cen now, but that's not the point. Since Beta comes around every so often. The Mysterious Swordsman pops in and out. The Toad is about as active. Yazz is not longer Yazz and then she disappeared, but she's still aroundish. Straw Pony is going to hang up his ninja mask and only comes on when he has the time, but he was always busy. Everyone else is mostly gone, you know? Haven't seen them in a long time."
Some of the users who had disappeared had been forceably shuffled off the mortal coil. Others went on to other things and just never found the time, or did not care, to come back, but they all lined the white halls in the rabbit's memories. We stopped at a repeated black-and-white pattern. The loops in hte image were alternately filled with a dark blue and dark lime green.
"I think I had first timer's luck. My first entry in the Weekly Poetry Competition and the Art Skills Competition both won me a merit. I like my first art entry better though. It was the first time I ever used GIMP. I was thinking at the time why no one had done what I did yet and I think that's partly what got me up there. It's my favorite entry. More than my username, it really is what I am about. The minimalist stylings, the ambigrammatic wordplay, I don't know how better to describe me."
His barebones approach persisted in both poetry and art entries, most notably his Books entry "in College" and his Food entry "The Essence of Apple and a Peeled Orange". It wasn't long until we came across these two. They were both second wins in their respective contests and they were both favorites.
"I really like the 'in College' poem. It summarized what I feel about college education. It was succinct and the judging really hit the nail on the head with the interpretation. I only have a few things to add. I specifically chose The Old Man and the Sea and Stuart Little not only for the open-endedness of their endings, but also to contrast the symbolism and the lack of an end, respectively. Did the Old Man die? No one knows for sure, but you could argue either way by looking beyond the literal value of the words. Did Stuart Little ever find Margalo? That, no one knows at all. There are no hints, no interpretations. Beyond words, it leaves the ending to the imagination. Of course, it was an unsatisfying ending, but maybe that's why that book has stuck with me for so long."
"'The Essence of Apple and a Peeled Orange' was an idea I was toying with. I had no idea what I could draw. I don't remember why used MS Paint's line tool, but I started with the apple first. It wasn't as simple as it looked. While there are a some stray lines, the lines had to be in the right place going in the right direction to make it look like an apple. if you really look at an apple, the coloring and patterning radiates from the stem and from the part where the flower used to be. It wouldn't look right to me any other way. The only course of action after that was to draw an orange. By the time I stopped, there was also a banana and a dragonfruit. They didn't turn out too well, so I just used the apple and the orange. Once I was finished, it really got me thinking why the lines were the way they were and how many lines I could take away before they didn't 'look right'. That's how I came to the title I gave it."
Over the course of his contest days, he had accrued six art wins and four poetry wins, or about one in five contests he entered. His style varied greatly with each entry between the two contests, from a simple crayon-like drawing to a remarkably accurate partially painted self-portrait of his human alter ego and from solemn free verse to frivolous meter and rhyme. It would have been difficult to believe the entries were done by the same person if there were no record bearing his name.
"I never expected to win. I didn't enter to win. Heck, I never collected the prize after the first for each one. It was more pride that goaded me to enter. I had an idea I wanted to show everyone. I don't get ideas too often, but when I get one it sticks to me and I want to go through with it. You know how they imagine love's origin as being struck with Cupid's arrow? That's how I imagine inspiration to be. You get struck in the butt and bam! You've got a brilliant idea. Of course, they're always brilliant when they're inspired, even if it's turns out to be the stupidest thing you've ever done."
Stupid things were no mystery to him. For every entry he loved, there were several that he hated. Some were a product of frivolity. Some were faded inspiration. The rest were placeholders for what he didn't have the time or skill to do.
"It's a matter a pride. No matter how bad criticism gets, it's always yourself that's the harshest critic. Only you know, and only you truly know, what your capabilities are and what they could be. You can't help but just hate something when you know you could've done better. You always know you will do better, but sometimes you don't. When you look at something from the past and think that's the best you could've done, then you feel proud because that was the best you could've done and you got better. If it isn't, then you just feel a sense of self-loathing. Even if you've done astronomically better than anyone else, you've still failed because you know you could do better."
"I really like 'It's Time for You Now to Guess Whoses'. It's lighthearted and silly, kind of like its subject. The meter isn't perfect but it's somewhat singsongy and users nonsensical words. I don't mention the theme of the poem as with most of my other entries, but you can still really tell who it is about and sort of how epicly he fails."
"I'm most proud of 'Gabriel's Horn: An Afterword', which was done completely using the touchpad of my then-new laptop and based on the Gabriel's Trumpet tarot card. It was really just an apple pie joke. There are three roots at a point below the ground, one trunk, four branches, each branch was one arm, that ended in five fingers each. The inspiration for the tree was taken from the people on Judgement tarot. The resurrection scene in the picture also prompted me to make a reference to my zombie entry with the raptor and the liter bottle of Mountain Dew. The pi aspect is related to the geometric figure known as Gabriel's Horn, which has a volume of pi."
We had just come across that image. It was visibly more intricate than any entries that he had ever submitted or would ever submit, and it started as a simple branched, black-and-white image that referenced pi. He gradually improved upon his original idea and added more symbols and color to expand the pi joke to include an apple.
"I think the Art Skills Competition was the first place where I carved my niche as being hard to decipher. When it comes to art, I always think, why not this? But I'll admit that I also have a penchant for being tricky. The trickiest entry I submitted was for Resolutions, the last theme Strop judged. It didn't mean much, but I'll tell you what each die represented: LIFE and SEX. That's what the keyboard code spelled. [TAB], [CAPS], and [SHIFT] represented the row on the keyboard and hte number that followed represented the letter counting from left to right. [CAPS] 9 is L. The interpretation is very broad. Basically, the drive behind resolutions is life and sex. It's drawn as cubes for not only the duality but also the die aspect represented by the numbers, because resolutions are so capricious and arbitrary like putting money down on the roll of a die, or a pair of dice."
Symbolism was frequent in his art entries, some of which were more clearly portrayed in his art than in the Freudian Cube. Sometimes context, and sometimes the title, elucidated or held a clue to the meanings. Othertimes, he left red herrings as a self-parodic joke.
"Honestly, the only title I gave my entry just to mess with Zophia was 'Conflux of Divigation'. It doesn't actually mean anything. On the other hand, 'Interfulgent' was the first complex name, though was a bit of a clue to what my entry was about. 'Interfulgent' wasn't entirely about 'stars'. There was no pun there. What it really was was that the brightness of a pixel was the ranking of celebrity. Some points were brighter than others, some were relatively the brightest around, but not absolutely the brightest. It's kind of saying celebrities are the ones who shine amongst the crowd."
The Art Skills Competition had a few celebrities of its own and was a birth place of many AG memes. The overuse of bogan started there with Since Beta. Crossdressing Straw Pony in a pink negligee started with Trick or Treat by Yazz. It was also the birthplace of the Mysterious Swordsman's hairy monster that debuted in the Hair theme and gradually developed into the lovable Domo-kun-esque Sasquatch who had an equally amusing younger sister named Yeti. And these all happened in sequential themes.
"Straw Pony, Yazz/Zoph, Kai/Cen undoubtedly had the best technical skill. You should see their art threads. Amazing stuff. They drew some of my favorite entries, and it's because of their skills but what they choose to depict. Funktastic from the Purple Injection theme has got to be hands down, one of the best inspired entries. The Yaltama Wildlife entry is certainly a picturesque vista. It's too bad she never finished it. I dare say that Cen's Night entry was more nostalgic than the Nostalgia entry, and I love it in that respect. The grayscale and pixellation only add to it synergistically. Beyond the Big Three, I love Since Beta's No Words entry.That is the single biggest WTF entry he's submitted, more WTF than his 'Food' entry. There are literally no words for it. And then there's Sasquatch. Sasquatch is just a favorite. There's no not liking him. He's been a part of the Art Skills Competition for about as long as I have."
"I really didn't stick around for the whole of the competition. No good ideas came to me, or I had ideas but not the time. The Autumn theme was not only my sixth and final win, but it was the last one I entered, and while it was my last one in the Art Skills Competition, it carried with it more nostalgia than even the Nostalgia and Your Username entries combined. It was the last one, you know?" The rabbit teared up a bit. His voice started breaking slightly. "I had entered it just for old times sake as I had gotten too preoccupied to keep up with the competition. Coincidentally, the win also happened to be within two hours of my first post in that thread. Now the contest is gone."
Next Week: "Deleterious Circumstances"
