Times New Viking
  • Chris L
    January 30, 2009

    Brilliant musing in these last few comics. Thanks.

  • Anthony
    January 30, 2009

    Do you act out both parts of these debates by yourself or with others?

  • Jaegermeister
    January 30, 2009

    I bet you’re killer fun at parties….

  • Dale
    January 30, 2009

    Was that the Poopsmith falling off his horse?

  • Seann
    January 30, 2009

    oh, Boy. I like Boy. such a charlie brownster

  • Oliver
    January 30, 2009

    Key parties?

  • Uncle Staple
    January 30, 2009

    Do you hand-letter?

  • EggyToast
    January 30, 2009

    I feel that it is even more tragic to think that Boy was the punchline all along.

  • leo
    January 30, 2009

    See, this is why I love Cat and Girl, I can’t have these conversations with my friends with the level of back and fourth that the characters have.

  • Earl
    January 30, 2009

    I share Oliver’s confusion. Are these noted political parties? Parties at which keys were given as party favors? I wish I remembered the nineties better.

  • eric
    January 30, 2009

    “Key parties”? Like in the movie, The Ice Storm?

  • jonthebru
    January 30, 2009

    I have few friends who “get” Cat And Girl. My step daughter does, but then she went to Princeton and truly understands irony. My wife, her Mother, on the other hand just looks at us cross eyed as we rant about such things. Cat And Girl “cartoons” are fantastic and brilliant. Politics, now there is a real tragedy.

  • mjh
    January 30, 2009

    I’m still wondering about the Times New Viking (as opposed to Times New Roman, obviously) bit …

  • plums
    January 30, 2009

    “Only with their obsolecense did they become imperfect.”

    But is that true? Typing, calligraphy, etc. may have been the technological pinnacle at their respective times, but that doesn’t mean they were necessarily perfect.

    The whole point of resisting “digital perfection” as I understand it is resisting homogeny. The flaws from works created with pre-digital technology added certain character, regardless of how cutting edge or obsolete that technology was. It may be that such flaws were not embraced until the technology was displaced, I suppose.

    That said I use a computer for damn near everything.

  • Dorothy
    January 30, 2009

    But didn’t we see the typewritten as perfection, just as one day we’ll be able to see the imperfections in our current technology? To step outside of letters for a minute – don’t you think our current crop of cheap CGI will one day look as charmingly incompetent as anything from the MST3K catalog?

  • Dorothy
    January 30, 2009

    And let it be said that the amount of time I spend in front of a computer burnishing these tiny images renders me not just a hypocrite, but a fool.

  • seann
    January 30, 2009

    side note- This comic demands the accesory of a downloadable(nay, purchaseable!) Times New Viking Font, but what would it look like? torches for i’s?

  • JK
    January 30, 2009

    I love Cat and Girl. Normally. This is taking pretentious to levels not yet seen. Give us something thought-provoking.

  • Charlie
    January 31, 2009

    For those who don’t pay attention to the vagaries of “indie” music, Times New Viking is a band that plays pretty simple garage punk with insane amounts of distortion over it making it almost unlistenable. In my opinion they’re excellent. At this point in time the level of distortion they record with is clearly not a necessity but an aesthetic choice. Also, Times New Viking is just an awesome pun and should be used as much as possible.

  • Dougal
    January 31, 2009

    Dorothy – your time, foolish or otherwise, is very much appreciated!

  • ng
    January 31, 2009

    Somehow c&g is better sans comments. Oh, the irony of commenting this —

  • Esteban (I Do Not Make Guitars)
    January 31, 2009

    “don’t you think our current crop of cheap CGI will one day look as charmingly incompetent as anything from the MST3K catalog?”

    But was the purpose of the MST3K catalog meant to ever imitate the real, as CGI has been explicitly developed for? Each generation of advancement in CGI now tries to add verisimilitude through the very act of adding imperfection to models: dents, blemishes, distortions and breaks. They know the ideals are not of this world and hurry to be the first to make a product that reflects this (those filthy neo-Platonists). If CGI today looks incompetent to the CGI of the future, it will be because it could not produce at this time – if not “honest imperfection” – then “expected imperfection.” The artists struggle to first mar their immaterial sculptures into being believable and then, when put to motion, focus upon having such small details as the buckles, bags, bulges, hair and everything else move as the laws of physics demand they should. The current model of CGI is to leave the viewer fooled into thinking what they see are real objects in a real world by leaving these virtual human fingerprints all over the medium.

    Boy’s analogue springs to my mind immediately though: strong AI proponents. Go ahead, talk to them about what progress they’ve made over the decades in their field and watch them hunch further over the bar, shoulders and arms trying to hide their draft and what’s left of their tattered pride from your scrutiny.

  • Lulu
    January 31, 2009

    Now I have to go listen to “Drop Out”.

  • Tanja
    January 31, 2009

    today’s mainstream is tomorrow’s counterculture!

  • stellaluna
    January 31, 2009

    Is Grrl channeling A Clockwork Orange in panel 7?

  • Luke
    February 1, 2009

    Times New Viking is insanely contrived. Whether or not you like their product you can’t really argue against this fact.

    With that said, I’m not positive what this comic is saying about the band. There’s nothing near perfect behind them, even without the argument of their questionable mixing… sure it’s not a product of “digital competence,” but the intent is really the same as “faux-distressed computer fonts.” It’s still pseudo-organic.

  • Dorothy
    February 2, 2009

    Esteban – but don’t you think that, say, a man in a gorilla suit with a fishbowl on his head was the times’ best approximation of real-beyond-reality? (On a limited budget, of course.)

    But on an unlimited budget, stop-motion King Kong gave way to CGI King Kong. And the CGI of the future, if it is even called that, will look as foreign and make-believe as stop-motion King King looks today. We can ape (not on purpose, that word) reality as much as we want, but our efforts will always date us to the time where we lived. And that is not a bad thing.

    Luke – The line between insanely contrived and comprehensive aesthetic sense is in a dark corner with a dragon in front of it, surely. I happen to like Times New Viking, and I do think that their aesthetic is part of a rejection of the automatic competence that computers give. I don’t know how kindly history will look upon that, but it’s an interesting first step.

  • Dorothy
    February 2, 2009

    Esteban, again – the best thing I ever heard about AI was at a lecture given by an MIT professor (I am sorry that I do not remember his name). Someone asked him when we would know a computer had achieved AI and he said – well, when you talk to a computer and it sounds like a person, there you are. As long as something sounds like a sentient being to us it might as well be. Who is going to tell the difference?

  • amjes
    February 2, 2009

    On the subject of CGI mimicking imperfection – I watched Tron yesterday, and in one of the bonus feature things they specifically mentioned how they had to mathematically figure in distance blending into the CG rendering, since without it things far away would remain perfectly focused. But is it really about imperfection so much as different standards of perfection? Where is the divergence between perfect to a standard of imperfection and imperfect to a standard of perfection? Is wabi-sabi about imperfection or perfect imperfection? Is Girl’s knight perfectly incompetent, and the knight on the horse incompetent at incompetence? LolKnights: “Falling off a horse: ur doing it wrong”?

    On the subject of CGI making things ‘more real’: well, George Lucas refreshing the effects in Star Wars. I mean, c’mon, nobody’s mentioned it?

    I think, for those not recalling the Great Key Party Blight of the 90s, that Girl is actually making a simile.

    Also, I am going to choose to read Boy’s comment as being about Girl and Grrl’s discussion, rather than perfection itself. Who’s to say those two haven’t discussed it often, only to stop abruptly upon Boy’s arrival?

  • Dan
    February 3, 2009

    . . . definitely the Poopsmith.

  • C.
    February 3, 2009

    No strip today?

  • Eugene
    February 4, 2009

    From the perspective of an animator, the mere idea of modeling and animation – be it on a computer or with tactile materials – as a ‘visual effect’ will immediately doom a project to inevitably becoming dated, as such things are always and forever on the cusp of the technological wave. And it is a wave that never quite crashes.

    The question shouldn’t be “do you mimic perfection through imperfection or vice versa?” because it overshoots the point, which is that Visual Effects merely seek to mimic, end of story. This is *regardless* of whether the mimicry requires elements of perfection OR imperfection. You are not creating something to be noticed, but rather something to fool the audience into NOT noticing. But of course, in mimicking, the artist sets him/herself up for failure in the eyes of future generations. Eyes that have long since been trained to notice the very tricks this and other artists may have pioneered.

    And lets face it, nobody likes romanesque mosaics anymore.

  • Will
    February 4, 2009

    The recent strips have been spot-on! I printed several and pinned them up. As for this one in particular, I am in favor of the “imperfectionists” out there (myself included). Don’t get me wrong. I can respect and appreciate technical prowess in a given medium, but it doesn’t impact me viscerally. What speaks to me on a meaningful level is something that shows a human touch, something original.

    Maybe that’s just me. :-)

  • Jaegermeister
    February 4, 2009

    I am NOT going to add a comment to this comic, because there are already WAY too many!!

  • Dan
    February 5, 2009

    Will, imperfection as originality? Like clothes sold already worn-in, or my favorite; baseball caps with a pre-frayed brim.
    Isn’t performing a task spotlessly a skill to be admired? I recently painted my kitchen and was frustrated at how difficult it was to keep paint off the ceiling while doing the top of the walls. When I see a really well painted room, I apreciate it.

  • another Will
    February 5, 2009

    Yes, your time is much appreciated. I loved this arc and didn’t find it pretentious, although that could just mean this arc is dumbed down, and my lack of a humanities education kept me from really getting most of the other strips. I do get enough to come back for more.

    As for strong AI, I’m with Esteban, embarrassing lack of progress so far. Maybe mind uploading will do it someday.

    Wabi-sabi! Yes, that’s it exactly!

    I’ve adored Romanesque mosaics ever since reading National Geographic as a kid about 15 years ago, and either technical prowess or a human touch can impact me viscerally.

  • Esteban (I Do Not Make Guitars)
    February 6, 2009

    A week later and a work day’s worth of ignoring the inbox gives one time to respond.

    I’ve been playing rather dangerously with connotations and watering down the meaning of the comic with my blathering. Girl/Dorothy is right in arguing that what we see as obsolete now are the discarded, once highly-esteemed tools we used to build our current, fancy tools with. And one day too, these current tools will also be seen as antiques of the standard the replaced them, giving us a method with which the amateur can rally against the work of the professional with an artistic distinction. Where I diverged with a very large footnote was carrying on plums’ point that not all arts could be said to have ever been flawless, so it would be troublesome to call them “perfect” instead of just “the best possible method available at the time.” Surely we realize even now the limits of our technology and capabilities; you have to have a certain hubris (naïveté? Ozymandias?) to think the state-of-the-art can be considered a perfection. We do not so accept it as perfection as merely the new “best competence.”

    I think Eugene puts the argument the best (most likely because he is painfully aware by trade of these issues). It’s like when the secret to a magic trick is revealed, and you can no longer keep a sense of amazement as it’s done, knowing that – assuming no one ever was convinced it was magic – it was believed to be something nearly magic before, something you didn’t know how to do being done right in front of you. That’s the sense I get from Eugene’s statement; he sees the man behind the curtain and the floating head is now a prop – a prop that can be improved upon, and perfection can never be improved upon.

    But Grrl’s comment will always stick: “Nothing ages faster than realism.” And nothing but reality makes you age that fast.

  • Dorothy
    February 7, 2009

    I do believe CGI is as close as we currently get to something that is accepted as real. Not believed to be real, sure, we as sophisticated viewers know CGI when we see it – but we are willing to accept its visual limitations and call it real. Just as viewers of Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory, while knowing their reality was not black and white, were so overcome by the motion captured that they could call it real.

    There is blue-screening today, and there is good blue-screening (that we as viewers do not recognize unless we are particularly aware of blue-screening) and there is bad blue-screening (that everyone knows looks fake, even if they’re not sure why.) The technology is not what determines the current idea of perfection – it’s the use of that technology.

  • Rex
    February 28, 2009

    I remember the first time I saw the video for “Leave It” by Yes. I was floored….. weird to see it today.

  • Rory
    April 27, 2009

    My older brother said something that I thought painfully stupid the moment he said, “One day they’ll be able to make [CG technology] more real than reality.” Then The Matrix came out. And really, it’s what you accept as real. The visual quality between two things can be identical, but if it’s the wrong brand, it’s not as good. The point of making CGI mimic true-to-life figures is to help less abstract people suspend their disbelief.

    In fact, I’m surprised that you commenters have suspended your disbelief on the comic medium. Some turn away because it’s just silly little shapes that don’t look like people at all. Then there are the people who realize there’s a bit more because they relate this to their own perception of reality. Without anything in common to their own experience, they quickly become bored.

  • tony
    August 16, 2017

    I thought a key party was when swingers all put their house keys in a bowl and then all picked out a set at random (other than their own) and that was how they wife swapped. ewww …surely that’s not the reference tho…… LOL wouldn’t make sense

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