The Return of the Comics

A few of you may remember Escape from Camp Artemis, the short comic I put together a couple of years ago. A 12-page story about two girls who escape from summer camp, the comic was put together as part of a class I took at Meltdown Comics. The project was a fun one, and I was happy with the result; it was nice to have a little story that I could hand out and share with friends. Many people really enjoyed seeing it, and my instructor encouraged me to keep making more comics after the class was over.

While I had ideas for fun follow-up projects, it's been hard to muster the energy to get them off the ground. It can take a lot of effort to even create an individual piece of art; it is even more intimidating to commit to a project that involves putting together story outlines, designing characters and environments, writing dialogue, creating dozens of individual drawings, and finding a way to display them on a page in a way that flows and serves the story. And, because you have to stick with the same style and designs for the entirety of a project, it is easy to become critical of your preliminary designs and ideas, leading to inertia.

The Little Things

I think everyone goes through times when they're feeling a little overwhelmed, either because achieving their goals is dependent on factors outside their control (e.g., other peoples' choices or material factors they can't change), or because the ultimate goal is so large that any efforts to accomplish it don't seem to have an effect. In these situations, it's sometimes helpful to figure out something small and easily-achievable you can do to improve your life, even in a minor way. These minor efforts might even evolve into regular or semi-automatic habits, subtly but continually improving your productivity or general well-being.

This is probably one of the reasons why rituals of all kinds can be appealing; they can offer reassurance that a person is making regular progress, even if it isn't noticeable. Even if the rituals don't actually have any effect, they can still provide a person with a sense of control over their lives and problems and serve as a source of comfort.

Laptop Traveling

Recently, after hearing about Geoguessr in various places, I decided to try my hand at it. If you haven't heard about it, it's an Internet-based game that makes use of Google Street View; the five-round game places you in an unknown location, and you have to look around the environment and figure out where you are.

There are two ways to play the game: (1) trying to guess a location purely by looking at the environment and picking up context clues, and (2) using Internet research to more precisely pinpoint where you are.

I tend to prefer the latter approach, which makes the game more involved, though there are some cases where you need to make a more general guess because you can't find anything specific enough to use as the basis of your search (because the image quality is low enough that text isn't legible, because the writing you come across uses a different alphabet, or because you're given a limited area to wander through). It's interesting to scour around for clues, both obvious (road signs, store names) and less obvious (telephone area codes, semi-unique buildings), and see if you can figure out your position by cross-referencing that information online.

Once you've finished five rounds, you are given an aggregate score based on how accurate your guesses were (so far, my top score is 32,044 points).

Still, the point of the game is not really about getting a high score. First of all, some locations are simply easier to find than others, because they are in less remote areas, or because there are more clues around to aid you.

More importantly, the true enjoyment of the game is about researching these locations, learning a little bit of information about various regions of the world, and finding some interesting locations along the way. It gives you an opportunity to appreciate the diversity of many countries, outside of the largest cities and most well-known monuments.

The game, of course, is not perfect. Because Street View hasn't mapped every corner of the globe, there are large portions of Asia, Africa, and South America that aren't covered by the game. I would also like to see a version of the game that allowed you to modify settings, so you could, for example, avoid being placed on empty stretches of road or choose not to be placed in U.S. locations.

In any event, I'm glad that something like Geoguessr exists, and that it has given me a chance to explore different corners of the globe.