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A few thoughts about math-yacht since nothing is worse than explaining a joke.

Justin Farrington said something about a potential subgenre called post-yacht, as a logical extension of yacht rock, which consequently triggered the idea of math-yacht. I have used the term in lower case throughout because it is ostensibly a genre name, although it does seem to have also become a title.

As I observed a couple of days ago, these pictures bear some resemblance to saucy postcards. I’ve had a few comments that they occasionally sail rather closely to soft porn, and occasionally they do, but if we’re considering the intention and execution of these:

a) I’m really not sure one could fapp over them – although please be sure not to tell me if y’ve tried.

b) The quality of 3D graphics used in porn is far more exacting in its attention to skin tones, &c, and would probably take hours to render. I’m not enough of an artist for that.

Returning to the notion of saucy postcards, although I feel that many of these have a humorous intent, not all of them need to be funny. In fact I’ve occasionally felt that since intention is hard to read, especially in visual humour, that dynamics such as boys snogging could be seen as something that I find funny or weird. Not so. As far as I am concerned it’s about a constant shifting of possibilities.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now. More from the math-yacht gang soon.

A few things about how math-yacht works. If y’d prefer to believe that Sally drops by everyday and pulls this stuff out of the top of my head, that’s a perfectly legitimate explanation. If you want to hear more about how thin and un-story-like the method is, please read on.

Most of the time I come to a new math-yacht by thinking about a part of the boat, or an object, or a character who I want to do something with. BTW: the characters’ names are: Sally, Takahashi, Viktor and Nidge. I find some poses I want to use, either build them from scratch, or more usually adapt off-the-shelf options; find an angle where things don’t get blocked too badly, and then I start working on the lighting.

As far as I understand it, most of the magic happens in the lighting. The scenes often look quite dead until I spin the lights a few times. I’m trying to find angles that bring out something in a facial expression, or even create an expression that wasn’t even there before. When I have that I can render the scene.

I drop an almost random background, of which I have only a few, behind the action, and then there is usually very little Photoshop to do.

The apparent narratives emerge almost by themselves. I’m pretty much always just about spinning the lights.

I’m not much concerned with form. I did four novels, and a couple of shorter books, and some of you might be aware that I did a tarot set, and some other things.

It’s not that I feel that one may use any form to tell a story, because I’m not much concerned with stories. Maybe it’s because most stories make me unhappy. Most of the time if I’m telling a story in real life it’s because something has gone badly wrong. I don’t want to inflict that shit on friends.

So yes, whatever it is that I do through video or painting or blurry photos of derelict buildings that I have strolled into, it doesn’t have any big message. Sure, this set of hybrid images that I’ve been emitting at a rate of knots over the last few weeks often has captions attached that give the impression of some larger thesis.

You already know that there isn’t one.

The only real advantage of the current form is efficiency: a picture is a thousand words. Not so easy to knock out a thousand words, but so much easier for an audience to ignore them. And video makes me swear at the screen a lot. Fuck that medium; so fucking shit to control.

Anyway, how few of you got this far down this update proves what I was saying about images being more efficient, innit?