Fortune Teller Program (Free Game!)

Dear Internet,

     I have programmed a Fortune Teller program for Windows.  It bestows on you one fortune a day generated around your birthday.  If you don't have a birthday then that's okay, because you can just mash the random button and have a fortune that has no basis in cosmic space time lobbed at you the same way!

     These fortunes are often comical in nature, some are outright mean spirited.  I didn't write them to be terribly mean, but then I'm not the one who determined who will get them.  I only wrote the algorithm.  So if you get a fortune that tells you that you are small in the pants then it's definitely the cosmos trying to speak to you, not me!

      The game is absolutely free and aside from some very minor resolution-related screen stretching issues works on any Windows computer XP and up as far as I know of.  I put a lot of work into it so I would be very grateful that you try it out and spread it around to find out your friends' fortunes as well!

     You can get the download by clicking here!  Thanks in advanced to anybody who tries it, I really did work hard on it!

With predestined love,
William John Holly III

PS: I am currently working on an Android app for those who prefer to play games on their phones!

Edit:  Some people are having trouble with the tinyupload site, so I'll include a couple mirrors to download from:

Mediafire: https://www.mediafire.com/?yn66ognyzkzd6vx
Ge.tt: http://ge.tt/30KOmlD1/v/0?c

The Copyright Free Let's Play

Dear Internet,

     Behold the let's play of the future: The Copyright Free Let's Play!

With much silent and blinded love,

William John Holly III

How I Accidentally Got Work Into An Art Exhibit

Dear Internet,

     I'd like to recall a story for you.  About a year ago I was taking a class at Modesto Junior College.  Deciding that I needed to have a good concept of what I should put into a portfolio I decided I would take the Computer Graphics Portfolio course.  I somewhat imagined that this would mostly mean a class for making any kind of graphic portfolio on a computer, but once I got into the class I could see that there was a much more specific leaning toward graphics created on the computer.

Of course I have certainly created some visual projects on a computer that I am proud of but I wanted to focus more on my drawing, which was really starting to get some passing attention and praise from the internet and passersby while I drew between classes.

According to the seating in the class I was one of the first people called up in the class to show some of my work on the projector.  By this time I had seen that most of my classmates were working in digital art proper and that I was the fuck up that was about to show everybody a gallery of ballpoint pen doodles.

I pulled up my deviantART profile and immediately started flipping through the gallery.  I usually tend to hover on my work for a while to point out all of the details but I didn't want to linger too much on my misunderstanding on the medium we would be using.  So, I opened up one of my drawings that show off the recurring characteristics of my drawings (weird faces, lots of clutter, hidden messages and signatures) and shot through those characteristics as fast as I could and then just shot through my gallery.  I opened maybe five drawings, quickly described them and then showed the thumbnails in the gallery and then wanted to get away from the computer and back to my desk where I could wait for the professor to tell me that he thinks that I have the wrong class.

Turned out the whole class thought that my art was mind blowing.  I could write a whole other post on how I don't comprehend compliments but to make it short I was extremely surprised when they wanted me to flip through some more of it.  Here I thought that I was going to be a waste of class time but the professor actually had interest in my art.

Now, the whole point of the class was to create a portfolio that would show off our art to a potential employer.  Since I have no idea what my art can be used for I set mine up like one of those art appreciation books that talk about Dali or Picasso or any of the other greats but without all of the self service garbage about the history of the drawings.  I just straight up showed the drawings, what their titles were, when they were drawn and what they were drawn with and on.  I decided to just make the book white with the drawings and black text to avoid any kind of visually distracting element to the book.

We were designing our books in a program called Indesign and, while I've never used the program before I caught on pretty fast.  The plan for the semester was that we would spend all of our class hours working on the books and then our professor would send our Indesign files to Blurb to create the books.  While most people indeed spent the entire class worrying about specific visual aspects and styles of their books my simplistic design choice had me finished with the process in two days.  This allowed me to spend most of the time during these class hours to either work on other class projects or help my friends in using the program.  I didn't submit the project file right away anyway because I wanted to make sure it would include my work that I was creating in the meantime, which ended up including some of my best work.

So it was a few weeks into the semester that our professor mentioned that he was going to try to get a gallery exhibition for our class.  He said that there were some outstanding artists and he'd try to get the school's gallery to set up an exhibit of our work.  I was shocked.  I didn't know that the school had a gallery.  Then, when I went to check it out it turned out that the gallery was awesome.  So, understandably, I got very excited about this and had no idea what was going on.

So I went right ahead and lost 100% of my sanity waiting for the five months or whatever it took for the gallery exhibit to happen.  I visited the gallery exhibits from beforehand something like fifty times trying to feel out the gallery and imagine what it would be like with all of our work on the walls.  I had never had my work printed in larger format and shown in a public place before so I was psyched.

When all was said and done and I had the exhibit with the books shown off I was feeling like a celebrity on campus.  During the reception for the opening of the exhibit I wore my conceited asshole uniform and showed up with my family and friends.

Yep, even the exhibit's mission statement had a backdrop of my work.  My head was certainly inflating at a very steady pace at that point.  Not pictured are the promotional fliers and posters around the school which also featured my art but at this point I'm just showing off.

I hadn't done any real work to get my art into a show in the gallery other than sign up for a class.  I hadn't helped out with the setup at all (which in retrospect I completely regret and feel like a douche) but somehow I managed to get my work and my book shown off.

Nowadays people who see my book usually ask me where they can buy it, much to my chagrin.  There's not really a version of it available for sale right now.  All of the work that was in it can be seen at either my deviantART page of my Facebook page.  If you want to see what it looks like I took some pictures:

That gives a pretty good idea of what the book looks like.  I promise that if I ever get the files together to republish the book online I'll spread the word to let everyone know that it's available.

Anyway, the reception went off really well.  I ate way too much of the food that was intended for the people who weren't the artists but I was really not able to control myself.

After the reception was over the gallery's exhibit stood for roughly a month before it was replaced with something much better than my shit.  During that time I got to know the art club folk that put together the exhibit pretty well and learned that the whole thing was a bit of a controversial subject considering that they usually plan the exhibits far in advanced and this whole project had been thrust upon them by the school.

I also learned the wonders of not letting people know that I'm the person whose work they painstakingly printed and put up in their gallery with absolutely no help from me.  Naturally they figured out who I was pretty quickly but I managed to get some good, honest feedback on my art in the meantime.  It ranged from my work having no merit as art because it wasn't, "a simple, flowing piece depicting one subject," to thoughts that my work is too doodle-y to my art being the saving grace of the whole exhibit.  I took all of it in the most flattering way possible.

Also, getting to take the prints and book home afterwards was excellent.

The whole thing was fun and a pretty good learning experience but I have got to say that people have ever since overestimated my role in getting myself into that gallery.  The person who got me in was the professor of the portfolio class through the school's money managers and that was mostly done while I was floating around the limbo of hoping I hadn't added too many pages to my book.  If you want my advice on how to get into a gallery, my incredibly unqualified answer would be to impress the Hell out of somebody who has the ability to put you into a gallery.  That advice is nowhere near as helpful as it could be but it's really all that I've got because it's all that I did, and that much I did on accident.

    Love and exhibitionism of said love,
    William John Holly III

Art and Your Fertile Brain

Dear Internet,

     Art does wonderful and strange things to the brain.  One of my main goals as an artist is to demonstrate and inflict certain emotions on a viewer.  Art can do that.  One of these strange things that most living creatures do is create a facade that tricks our brains.  I think it's by mistake that we are skeptical beings.  We would probably take everything at face value and be gullible in nature if we weren't constantly being deceived- if not by those around us then often by our own senses.  But, where an artist succeeds and a butterfly's wings often fail is that when we see a face in art we can have our brains momentarily tricked.  Ah, who am I kidding?  Sometimes a butterfly's wings can do the exact same thing.

(Butterfly picture borrowed from this Biome Detectives of Costa Rica blog)  ("Lady with an Ermine" by Leonardo Da Vinci borrowed from Art Times)

One of the great things about art is how deep it can get.  Sometimes even unintentionally.  When you look at something like "Lady with an Ermine" pictured above what you're looking at is crud smeared on a canvas.  All sorts of crud smeared on a canvas of varying compositions in such a way that when light reflects off of it the photoreceptors in our eyes perceive it similarly to how we would perceive light reflecting off of a person.
Some people just stop at that.  It's good enough that we, as humans, have mastered the technology of smearing crud on canvas until it tricks our eyes into thinking we're looking at a person rather than a crud-smeared canvas.  We're already bordering on witchcraft as it is, why go deeper right?

Well, for many people with artistically tuned brains it's going to go much deeper than that.  The expression on her face.  The direction of the lighting.  The colors used.  The positioning of her fingers.  The "flow" of the painting.  Everything about it.

When you look at something in real life it is constantly moving, changing, and contains infinite details going down to a microscopic level that has never been discovered by human kind and is constantly affected by forces grander and more plentiful than can have been fully contextualized.  But when you look at a painting of a person holding a weasel and looking off to the right of the border of the painting you are seeing two life forms contained within an entire universe where everything that affects them is standing still and everything that matters is either being observed directly or through context clues.  An entire world is happening before you and it's on pause for you to take in and understand.  And most importantly, it allows you to draw your own conclusions.

That's mainly what I was building up to.  See, many artistically minded people are plagued with this horrible rattling in the head that's called imagination.  Imagination can make your head feel uncomfortably crowded and chaotic.  What good art can do, however, is turn the mess of potential in your imagination into a well-orchestrated story.

Art plants these seeds in your head and your head is a wonderfully fertile place for these seeds to grow.  A character can live a whole life in your head in very little time.  Your mind is much bigger on the inside than you realize.  It's also much more fertile than you think, because some of the most simple seeds can blossom into extravagant images packed with intense emotions and implied stories.

(Munch's "The Scream", Picasso's "Girl with a Mandolin", and Mondrian's "Composition No. 10" all borrowed from Wikipedia)

Clearly it doesn't take an awful lot to set our brains off.  On a side note, the sky in Munch's "The Scream" looks like bacon to me.  I could turn that into a statement about imagination and art interpretation but I'm pretty sure that that's just an example of me being sick in the head.

Anyway, what is wonderful to me about this is that it makes art a sort of an egg.  Or, perhaps art is a sperm and your mind is an egg.  The sheer manipulative force that it has on the brain is astounding.

Some people decide to use these manipulative forces to their benefit.  Advertisements and public relations agencies pour millions of dollars into ensuring that the art that they put up on the billboards in your town plant the right seed in your brain to play a story about how awesome their products are.  This story is playing in your mind and you're (more than likely) not actively trying to induce this fantasy.  Having images "subliminally" play stories in your mind can make it hard to discern them from your own urges and wants and dreams when they're something that sounds appealing to you.  Like taking a bite of a juicy cheeseburger and imagining all of the tastes and textures and smells associated with every savory chew of the tender meat, light bread, savory cheese and fresh onions and pickles.  For example, I mean.

(Double Cheeseburger advert image from jobspapa.com)

These advertisement agencies know exactly what colors to use, what shapes, what placement of images in the overall composition, what angle to show the products from, what font and color the text should be in, exactly how succinct the text should be, whether or not it would benefit the product to address the costumer directly by saying, "You" or if it would better serve the product to use bandwagon words like, "Everybody."  Just about every aspect of this kind of art is planned to put a fantasy in your head about eating sandwiches.  They bring everything together with, "Oh, and by the way, here's where you can buy said sandwiches!"

That's part of why advertisements are so simple.  They are only trying to tell one major story: their product is amazing and you should love it and make it a part of your life.  They don't often leave many open ends.

The art that more interests me is the one that leaves millions of open ends.  See, while advertisements try to bring every aspect of their art toward one goal of promoting their product, the artists that I enjoy the most accomplish much more than their normal point.  They plant a seed in your mind that mutates and gnarls and grows in many directions because there is just so much to it.

(Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" borrowed from Wikipedia)

The triptych painting above by Dutch renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch has lost its original title but people call it, "The Garden of Earthly Delights".  It is my single favorite piece of art ever made.  It displays a single story over the entire work.  This is then separated into four different segments.  I know what you're thinking though: John don't be silly.  This is a TRIPTYCH.  It is clearly separated into three segments!

Well, that's where you'd be wrong.  That is the painting in its OPEN position.  It actually closes to reveal one last segment:

(Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" borrowed from Wikipedia)

Bam.  This piece of art has more going on in it than a "Where's Waldo?" book does but every piece of it tells more stories.  Every tiny detail carries character, conflict, and details of its own.

(Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" borrowed from Wikipedia)

Where most art plants a seed in your mind that will grow into a tree bearing many fruits, Bosch's painting plants enough seeds to grow an entire orchard.

This crowded many-concepts-in-one technique is one that I've tried often in my own art and I think it's pretty apparent.

Bosch is a huge inspiration to my work.  To me, having many pieces of art inside of one, larger piece of art gives the piece of art a longer life and thus makes my more crowded pieces more valuable to myself, personally. It's especially gratifying when I can go back to my own work and see things that I don't even remember putting there myself.

On to the final segment of this post, I want to talk about video games.  I'm not going to start a debate here about whether or not video games are art (that's for a different post altogether) but for the sake of the rest of this post let's assume that video games are indeed art and that I can make my point about them without anybody feeling the urge to debate.  After the post is over you can go back to believing whatever you want.

When people started making movies suddenly visual art had an extra dimension.  The temporal dimension of time passing in an image lends itself to creating stories that actually unfold before a viewer.  Before if an artist wanted to accomplish this they would have to make their visual art an illustration of a written story or poem.  The only other way would be to make multiple panels of different points in time, such as in a comic or a triptych like Bosch's masterpiece I discussed earlier.  Now, however, the different panels are able to switch in succession so fast that they give the illusion of movement.  Then, with time, sound was added to create an entire extra dimension of story telling, art, and mood setting.

With the creation of video games we initially had very basic artistic representations of objects mixed with amazing interactivity. 

Interactivity changed everything.  It bends the time in the narrative.  It allows you to look off the side of the canvas into the surrounding areas that you couldn't previously see.  You didn't just get the context that was given to you rigidly with the narrative.  You controlled the pace and direction of the narrative.  In just about any game you play there are at least three possible branches the story can go down: the protagonist wins, the protagonist loses before the end of the quest, and the story ends abruptly with an uncertain future (should the game be aborted before the end so the player can go eat a sandwich).

(Screenshot of "Ico" from Giantbomb.com)

Games have since been improved to have amazing pieces of visual and audio art by their own merits that put flesh and body to the world and characters a game world is made of.  This makes the appeal of games as art very similar to the appeal of something like Bosch's painting (at least to me).

One in particular that I wanted to note is an independent game out of Japan by developer Kikiyama called Yume Nikki.  Most people interested in dark, surreal PC games already know plenty about Yume Nikki, but I'll give it a brief description for those who aren't aware: You play as a girl named Madotsuki who travels around in her dark and vaguely off-putting dreams.  There's no real combat to speak of and aside from a quest to collect a number of "effects" that give Madotsuki special abilities that can unlock an ending to the game there isn't much of a goal.  Most people opt to simply wander about the dreamscape interacting with the bizarre denizens and discovering secret areas.

(Yume Nikki screenshot borrowed from GameCola.net)

What I really dig about Yume Nikki is that, aside from every part of the game being filled with superb visual art, the game lays down an incredibly interesting universe inside of this girl's head with no context or explanation of who this girl is or why she has these thoughts.  All that we know about her is what she sees in her dreams and that she won't leave her apartment.  Aside from that we are left in the dark.

This vagueness that the game has left us with combined with the extremely interesting imagery and content has sparked peoples' imaginations all over.  A quick image search of "Yume Nikki" on Google will give tons of examples of well executed fan art.  Fans of Yume Nikki have created their own spin-off games starring new characters dealing with their own messed up dreams in a similar fashion to Yume Nikki.  My favorite part, however, is how many people have tried to fill in the game's blanks with their own theories based on psychological evaluations of Madotsuki's dreams.  Seriously, people get really into guessing what the Hell this game is actually about.  Careful reading that stuff though.  It gets REALLY dark.

Anyway, that's kind of the note I want to leave this post off on.  I just wanted to rant and ramble a bit on how art can take your mind for some totally wild rides.  If you wanted to play that Yume Nikki game, you can download it by clicking here.  It's free and that's the English translated version.  Just be ready for a really unsettling romp through a nightmare world.

     Much love and mind seeds,

     William John Holly III

The Hazards of Keeping In Touch

Dear Friends and Family,

     I am absolutely terrible at keeping in touch.  I'm really sorry.  There is nothing I have tried that actually makes me better at this.  I have been able to identify some of the problems with myself that makes this seemingly simple task feel practically impossible.  I'm no good at attacking these problems head-on, but perhaps they will give some insight into why I am so awful at keeping in touch (and by that I mean hopefully it will excuse me and make me a little less easy to blame).

Part One: Time Is An Illusion

And I am immune to said illusion.  Alright, that may sound super dramatic for what I mean.  Essentially what I mean is that I have almost no ability to perceive time.  I have been sitting in my computer chair for what feels like roughly 20 minutes programming before I started typing this.  I've been sitting here for well over three hours now.  And I know what most of you are thinking: Oh, you can perceive time you silly!  Everybody gets lost in their craft!  Everybody has moments when time flies by!

Every moment is a time when time flies by.  I lose hours out a day like a Swiss cheese bucket loses water.  It doesn't matter if I'm programming, drawing, sitting completely still, trying to keep track of time, being active, being passive, talking to people, whatever.  I have no concept of time in my head and it throws me terribly off balance.

What makes this worse is that since time always seems to be moving at different speeds I remember things that happen in different days happening in the same day.  I can't remember what days are what or how many have passed.  At one point in my life I was trying to figure myself out after a rough breakup with an ex girlfriend and thought that I was only spending a few weeks to myself before two months went by.  I spent this time pretty much isolated and one of my close friends that I had recently reconciled with at the time was upset thinking that I was avoiding him and the misunderstanding led to our falling out of communication again (even after I attempted to explain what had happened).

I'm not trying to excuse myself for being neglectful of my friends.  I really thought that I wasn't spending that long in isolation.  I was legitimately surprised what month it was and it was fast approaching my birthday.  So that's my first personal flaw that makes me incredibly irresponsible: the inability for me to perceive the passage of time.

Part Two: Attention Deficit Disorder

I hate using this excuse.  So many people are so much better at dealing with their attention deficit disorder than I am.  Still, I am terrible at controlling my own ability to focus on things and this may be partially responsible for my problem in Part One.  I space out ALL of the time.  I space out while trying not to space out, I space out when I punish myself for spacing out, I space out and it interrupts an already established space out.

For those who don't know what it's like to have ADD, imagine a rambling old man.  He starts by telling a story that is super focused on his time in the war.  And during his time in the war he spent time in Europe.  You know who else is from Europe is ABBA.  Have you ever heard the song Gimme Gimme Gimme?  Oh and that movie Mama Mia is ridiculous.  But Pierce Brosnan was in it and he played a really good James Bond.  Well, in Goldeneye at least.  The rest were kind of crappy.  Oh but as good as the Goldeneye movie was the N64 game that it spawned was revolutionary.  It's practically responsible for first person shooter games being accepted on consoles!  It was fun how it was kind of like an adventure game mixed with an arcade shooter.  Oh man, my favorite arcade shooter is Carn Evil!  Have you heard of it?  It's super obscure but tons of fun!  Unless you're afraid of clowns, because there are demon clowns all over that game.  I never understood fear of clowns.  Even when I was a little kid the movie, "It" didn't really scare me.  Tim Curry is a damn good actor though.

That is what it's like to have ADD.  You have to constantly catch yourself to keep on track.  My train of thought derails more often than mine carts in action movies.  This makes it difficult to keep in contact with friends because just about any time I think to contact them I may whip my phone out and have a fond memory of them at the same time.  We were playing a game together, what game was it?  Raptor: Call of the Shadows, right?  I forget what the final boss was like in that game.  Oh well my phone is in my hand, what was I going to use it for again?  I forget, I'm just going to look up the final boss from Raptor on Youtube.

Believe me, I value my friends much more than the final boss of Raptor: Call of the Shadows.  I am just completely unable to keep myself focused long enough to do anything.

Part Three: Social Awkwardness

This one will probably seem like bullshit to a lot of you (if the previous two didn't already) but I have no idea what to say to people I haven't spoken to in a long time.  Most of my friends are delightful stoners and undergraduates so if I greet them with, "Hi, what have you been up to?" then I already know what my responses are going to be.  It'll range from, "Nothing really, just chilling," to, "Just working, man.  No time to do anything else."  

It doesn't really fuel a conversation to say that you've spent the last eight months doing nothing that you can or want to talk about.  Usually when I try to greet old friends it kind of ends on that note.  Sometimes I just try to catch up by mentioning a bunch of random stuff that I've been working up and hoping that it will stimulate conversation.  I stopped doing this because a few times it has caused some old acquaintances to think that I've become stuck-up and that I think that I'm better than everybody else because I want to talk about what I've been doing.

In any case, I'm terrible at conversing with somebody that I haven't conversed with in a while.  So far my approaches have been asking people what they have been up to which goes to a dead end and talking about what I've been up to which makes me an asshole.  The only thing left to do is try to organize some sort of hangout, but that's where the final problem comes into play.

Part Four: The Scene Is Dead

This is a cluster of problems condensed into one for the sake of brevity.  The scene is simply dead.  There are no good hangouts.  Whoever used to host parties either became too busy with work to host any get togethers or became involved in drama with too many other friends for the hangout to be worth the risk.

The only places in town (or surrounding cities) that somebody can go to actually do something cost shitloads of money.  Back when I had my old Walmart job I could probably afford taking myself to one hangout a paycheck given that I really budgeted when it came to food and gas.  California is a damn expensive place to live and not many of my friends have jobs.  Even less have jobs that pay more than minimum wage.  And even then most of them spend the money on pot which IS a thing to do during a hangout but I no longer take part in the weed as of almost a year ago due to its negative mixture with my problem in Part Two up above.  

Most of the time what I do now is hang out with friends while they smoke weed and just kind of sit half bored while they zone out and listen to music and I draw or something.  Either that or I play games online with friends that don't even live within 1,000 miles of me.  For the most part though I just sit with my girlfriend and watch television in my room while eating Mexican food and pastries and talking about video games which is honestly the most perfect existence I can imagine.

In conclusion:

So, to recap: I don't know how long it's been since I've talked to you.  I get horrifically sidetracked when I actually do remember to talk to you.  When I do talk to you I have no idea what to say.  If you want to hang out with me I have no idea what we'd do.  Write me whenever you want, I promise I'll try to make conversation but you will see firsthand how awful I am at it.  I really do want to hang out with and keep in touch with you but I am just SO bad at it.

    With love and a rambling mind,

    William John Holly III

Introductions

Dear internet,

    Well, look at what I've just drifted into.  I guess I'm writing a blog now!  It's something that I've contemplated starting for a while and I feel that the time is right for me to start.

If you have no idea who I am, that's alright.  I'm not terribly well known.  My name is William John Holly III and hail from California.  I like creating things like drawings, stories, essays, video games, and occasionally videos.  I'll be sure to share all of these things on this blog along with plenty of mind vomit.

I have some other sites that I update occasionally that I will list below:

• My Youtube Page
• My Facebook Art Page
• My deviantART Art Page
• My Not-So-Often Updated Tumblr Page

This is just the introductory post and I'll be sure to update this blog frequently with whatever is on my mind.  Thanks for checking it out and I hope you follow along!

     With much love,
     William John Holly III