C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I am a week overdue in telling you about The Dark Knight. This is the best movie I've seen this year, in a summer when my expectations are unprecedented.

You remember I said that in order to avoid bankrupting myself on theater tickets, I would only see this season's crop on video, in second-run theaters, or as a gift from a friend, as an excercise in moviegoing self-discipline. I've held to that. Jen asked me months ago to pick one film as a gift from her, and on the strength of the trailer and its predecessor Batman Begins, I selected The Dark Knight.

The plot was superb. Usually I hope against hope that a summer blockbuster's story will at least make sense, and this one did, but I had no idea what was going to happen. It tied everything together with themes about whether or not there is any real courage.

Heath Ledger performed the Joker as if from beyond the grave. Aaron Eckhardt was just amazing as Harvey Dent. The supporting cast was stupendous. It's not often I get to see Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman for the price of a single ticket!

I laughed, I cried, I cheered, I clapped, I was on the edge of my seat. No, I mean it, all of those things, out loud. How often can you say that about a movie?

My favorite line was delivered by Morgan Freeman to the accountant. If you've watched it, you know the one. I realized at that moment how strongly we were sympathizing with the Batman, very concerned for his well being. Was not Morgan Freeman's delivery perfect to put it in perspective? So very funny.

Where on earth could the Nolan brothers possibly go from here?

1. The obvious choices seem impossible. Nobody wants to see the Penguin and Riddler. Those characters, like most Batman villians, have been done with such campiness so often that it became their identity. They get no love. No crime lord in the Nolanverse will be named Oswald Cobblepot. But he doesn't have to be. This is forgetting that the Gotham of Nolan is one of re-invention. In Batman Begins, a villian wore a burlap sack on his head, and it worked. Don't say that they can't make a trick umbrella seem plausible. The problem is merely a failure of imagination.

The best evidence I can show you is that the comic book Doctor Octopus was a chubby guy in a leotard with a bowl haircut, but the costume design and the performance by Alfred Molina in Spider Man 2 made it into what was, at that time, the best superhero movie ever. I don't want Spider Man 4, I want a film titled Doctor Octopus. I am that much of a Doc Ock fan now.

2. The villians from The Dark Knight again. Right now, Heath Ledger has a sacred aura with fans, so this may be risky. But if anybody can find a replacement for him, it's the creative team that chose him in the first place.

3. Minor villians. I think this is most likely. Batman Begins had Scarecrow and Ras Al Ghul, remember? I pored over the Batman's Rogue Gallery growing up, and even I said, "Ras-al-what?" Well, OK, Clayface will never happen, but there is no reason not to do a realistic version of Killer Croc. That way maybe the third movie will be about Batman again.

This is the PDF for the program I designed for PyOhio. It's Ohio's regional conference about Python, a free and open source programming language. It takes place Saturday of this week. Alas, I will not be able to attend due to conflicts.

The program is to be printed on one double-sided 11"x17" sheet and folded twice.

In this post, I will make another feeble attempt to think like a businessperson. Well, perhaps not quite. Business plans are stereotypically concerned with starting a company, hiring employees, changing the world, and becoming rich. This plan concerns merely generating enough supplementary income to live on. I have realized that life itself requires a business plan, so that counts.

As I have been mentioning to anyone who will listen, I am inspired to earn income by having customers and tip-donors rather than offer a service to clients. My long-term goal is to reach a place where I earn $2,000 a month by going directly to users of my creations, without having to work for a BigCo or a client.

As Escape Artists has a cozy team of about half a dozen, and all our listeners are consuming something that I absolutely love, I consider that part of this plan. I consider a successful webcomic artist or internet musician to be another type of person who lives this way.

My latest scheme is to make games and sell them on my website. What prompted all of this was finding out how easy and inexpensive ceramic is. It also plays to my strengths, both as someone who likes building things with his hands, and using art software. Custom cookie cutters, and rubber stamps based on my own vector illustrations, will make easy and fast replicas. I just press the stamp into a sheet of clay, for an entire game; then cut out the tiles with my custom cookie cutters, which I've already made. The first set is drying now.

I'm used to game designers telling me that the only way to make and sell games is a massive outlay of capital, based on a small business loan, to get a production run of plastic parts in China. What little credit I have is mildly poor, so I used to feel game entrepreneurship was beyond me. It turns out the cost of a 7"x9" rubber stamp made from my vector art is only $35. I'd only ever have to sell one copy to make back the money to start the product line. I'd lose on the cost of my own labor if I only sell one copy, but it's the way I would want to spend time anyway. In the worst-case scenario, I've made beautiful things that previously only existed on paper. I don't see a downside.

I think many of my products will involve Japanese, since I have familiarity with that, and I know people who can help me get in touch with lots of students who might like to buy beautifully-made learning games.

Tor.com is not your typical company website, once again proving why they're my favorite paper publisher. This site is a reader community, offering author/editor blogs, free original stories, and a cover art gallery. To generate anticipation before the site launched, they were giving away one free unrestricted ebook per week. Now that the site is launched, they're re-releasing all of the ebooks in that program for free at the same time, plus a new graphic novel. They kicked it off with a new story set in the Old Man's War SF future by John Scalzi, and a new story set in the Lovecraftian spy-agency setting by Charlie Stross.

The grand opening is grand indeed-- worth checking out at the very least. I for one intend to stick around. When you register, please type Matt_Arnold into the User Search and add me, and if I know who you are I'll add you back.

I made this board in the mid-nineties out of air-drying paperclay and painted it with guache. I painted wooden tiles with Japanese hiragana and katakana characters, and invented a Mah-Jongg variant to memorize them. It was a much less boring way to do flashcards. If you click the image and go to my web gallery, then click the magnifying glass button to the upper right of the photo, you can see lots of texture and detail.

I have decided to try a ceramic puppet head, so I sculpted this tonight.

I need about 48 identical squares, anywhere between an inch and a half to two inches across, of an opaque material stiff enough to not easily dog-ear on the corners. They would have to be fairly inexpensive. I want to playtest a game design and see what happens.

Rules

Equipment:

1. Forty-eight identical square tiles that are divided diagonally into two colors on the front side. These instructions will assume they are black and white.
2. A table (not included).

Setup:
1. Leave a clear space on the table and place the tiles in reach of the players.
2. Choose which player is which color from the two colors on your tiles.
3. There is no step 3.

Procedure:
1. Simultaneously, each player takes a tile from the supply.
2. Simultaneously, hiding the front side from the opponent, each player positions their tile upright with its edge on the table.
3. Simultaneously, when their tiles are both touching the table, the players tip their tiles toward each other so the tiles are laying down on the table.
4. Repeat.

The first turn, when there are no tiles on the table, the first tiles should touch each other at the edge. From then on, a players may position the tile so that it will touch any edge of any tile that is already played. If players both want to place on the same spot, the first player to touch a tile's edge to the table in that placement gets it.

Scoring:
Players attempt to form the following three shapes with their own color and the opponent's color:

Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors. As soon as there exists a pair of shapes that do these, the player whose shape did the cutting/covering/breaking is the point winner and may point it out.

The player whose shape was cut/covered/broken selects one tile from each shape and gives them to the point winner. The point winner keeps them in a scoring stack.

For example,
1 Black points out that there exists a black paper and a white rock.
3 White chooses a tile from the black paper and a tile from the white rock, removes them from play, and hands them to Black.
4 Black puts those two tiles in Black's scoring stack.

Game End:
The game ends when a player compares the scoring stacks, looks for opportunities in the layout of the tiles in play, decides the game is no longer winnable, and concedes.
Alternately, if all forty-eight tiles are played (twenty-four turns), players count the tiles in their scoring stack and divide by two to get their score; the player with the highest score wins.

Strategy Basics:
Pay attention to what structures your opponent is building, and disrupt them if necessary.
Remember, with every tile, you are placing your own color and your opponent's color.
"Telegraph punches that you're not throwing." Get your opponent to believe you're building toward a particular victory, and suddenly switch to build a different one.

The Absurdly Unplayable "Elements Expansion"!

 

earthenwood watched "Waking Life" with me today. Fun and thought-provoking! Of all the people with whom to watch a film composed of interminable lectures full of wise-sounding bullshit, if you select me as your viewing partner, you could do far worse. I will replace them with my own interminable lectures of wise-sounding bullshit. ;)

This reminded me of the following faux-religious text I wrote several years ago. Since then I have gotten much better at keeping my eyes open to the world around me rather than on abstractions. Bear with me in Chapter One-- the territory is guaranteed nebulous and difficult no matter what. Ready to rush in where angels fear to tread?

---

I've been asked how I would formulate a "creation" story if I did not accept the one in Genesis. First, I do not believe it is "creation," so it is not going to be a creation story. But in the spirit of the question if not the letter, here is an "origins story" I would accept. Several times I am quoting from Douglas Adams, such as most of chapter four.

( Chapter 1-- Irreducable Primaries )
( Chapter 2-- Cosmology )
( Chapter 3-- Life )
( Chapter 4-- Consciousness )
( Chapter 5-- Evolution in History )

Footnote 1: For more information on the probability of abiogenesis, see Ian Musgrave's essay Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations.

Footnote 2: Chapter 4, verses 10 through 15 are paraphrased with only minor changes from the speech Is There An Artificial God? delivered by Douglas Adams and published posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt.

I just lost a temp assignment paying a very good rate to design websites, because I couldn't think of any URLs to send them to. An hour ago everyone was excited and it looked like I had it in the bag. The agent just called to ask for samples, and I choked in obvious shame and embarrassment about how I have no online professional experience to show.

My work for Valenite is locked up behind passwords. I don't want employers going to my personal site, because it's the kind of content that should not have any bearing on the workplace. There's still Kirk In The Hills, but I did that years ago. Penguicon 6.0 is still online from last year, but was not paying work, and was basically just a masthead and some color choices. Plus there's some weird "Local pop get this player" glitch going on in the upper-left corner recently that I don't understand.

A portfolio of websites, by nature, would be looked at without me present to explain, by a stranger who knows nothing of me or the context of the work. Not all design is equivalent for these purposes; how do I know which site is relevant to send them to, before I know which kinds of design challenges they want to consider me for? When I send someone to look at a site, how do I know which part of the work are they going to judge? How do they know what I contributed to the site? For my personal site, I took somebody's Wordpress template and personalized it. Kirk In The Hills hired a hosting company that provided content management coding services, and just asked me to decide how it looked. Penguicon 6.0 is the standard blog outline. All my work for Valenite was adding content to an existing site that was already designed.

What would a portfolio of web sites be like? The concept seems counter-intuitive. A web site is its own entity with its own purpose outside a portfolio. It lives and breathes and changes for its purpose, out of the designer's control. A site that only shows off "design", devoid of content or audience, would show off... what? What is design without content to design around and a specific audience to design for? An empty frame to hang on the wall, meant for strangers. Certainly not something that I know how to do, or even begin.

When I design, I please a particular audience, because I know something about them. That audience is the group of people who will have to look at the thing and use it. Unfortunately, in an employment context, this is not the same group who are paying for it. With a portfolio, I would have to design for people who are only looking at it because they are paid to look at it. Not because they want to find out about the topic of the website. I don't know how to help them find information they don't actually want. Can you tell how frustrated I feel about this?

I have many sites in the works, on paper prototypes. Me and le_bebna_kamni have been on a paper prototyping binge of late. A Massively Multi-Author Webcomic. A Lojban combat quest game. A concept I call "FOMS", for user input on convention scheduling. I think what I'll do is start a YouTube video series showing the paper prototypes and how these web apps would function if anyone coded them. I suppose that in order to get professional web work, I'll have to have a set of web sites that exist completely within my control, for which I am solely responsible. For someone who likes to collaborate, that's frustrating.

ConVersation, MPCon, and PyOhio are all on the same weekend. I'll go to ConVersation and leave briefly to have a meeting with the MPCon organizers and their sponsors. Even though I'm doing the program book for PyOhio, Columbus is too far away to catch either of the other events.

(1.6 MB PDF file)

A useful read, all the more so because it gets to the point quickly.

I wish I could say the same of the nonfiction books that clutter my shelves. I don't make it through one or two chapters of the typical professional book, no matter how the topic electrifies me, no matter how much I respect the author. I get bored out of my skull, because the amazing central idea has to be fluffed out with filler to turn it into a publishable book. "Good grief, I got the point twelve examples ago!" I am deciding right now not to even try to sludge through them, ever. They will not waste one more minute of my life. I don't think I want to read any more professional books.

Give me a quick pamphlet like "Time Management for Creative People" any day.

Look, I'm sorry if this clip makes you feel bad about yourself, because that's not the point. It's the world we live in. If the shoe fits, wear it, and make your religious expression more sophisticated. If the shoe doesn't fit, I'm not intending to make it fit you. Not everything is about you.

I have a temp job starting tomorrow (Friday) and going through Thursday. The pay rate is wonderfully satisfactory. It's a Production Artist position. Whereas Graphic Design focuses on creativity and taste, Production Art focuses instead on software technical proficiency and special understanding of the final print manufacturing requirements. Right now, Production Art is closer to how I want to use my existing experience and training for my professional life. So this is good news.

I had two different tires blow out on the same trip! For the first one I used my spare. For the second one, R saw her way clear to kindly drive out at quarter after 11 PM and pick me up from the shoulder of 696 at Lahser.

The car is still there, while I am stranded at home. Tomorrow I need to figure out how to get transportation to fetch the rims, take them to a tire place, get new tires put on them, and take them back out to the car.

I've scanned a lot more drawings from the mid-to-late nineties into the Old Notebook album.

I took the photos from the Ann Arbor Startup Weekend Flickr Stream that have people I know, put them in a web album, and captioned some of them.

Ann Arbor Startup Weekend (SWA2) reminds me of a type of Alternate Reality Game. That's a structure that blurs the line between a game and normal life. Like an Alternate Reality Game, SWA2 provides a tantalizing dramatic narrative (about you, starting a company), gradually revealed through a series of questions that stimulate your curiosity.
( Read more... )

Those of you who enjoyed the Lojban translation of Jabberwocky may also enjoy I Am A Little Teapot Of Borg. That one is my own translation.

overthesun  asked for Jabberwocky translated into Lojban and back into English. This is done by inventing gibberish words within the Lojban phonotactic and grammar rules, just as Lewis Carroll did in the original. The problem with translating it back into English is that Jabberwocky is mostly not English to begin with. I'll do a partial retranslation.

The Lojban translation of Jabberwocky is by xorxes.

( djaberuoki )

Guess what today is? No, I mean the other thing.

Today is Download Day! Version 3 of the Firefox web browser is released today. It's June 17, and I think something happened on June 17 thirty-four years ago, so some people have been calling me today to ask what presents I would like. I want Firefox 3 to break the record for most downloads in one day!

If you already use Firefox, you know how much better it is than Internet Explorer. If you still use Explorer and you're tired of viruses, popup ads and slow load times, here is why to join the 20% of the marketplace who have switched to Firefox. It is free, forever, so Happy Download Day and enjoy your browser!

Go here to download Firefox 3 before the day is out!

www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/firefox3 has more to say about this record-breaking goal, but as of this writing, that site appears to have crumpled under a massive load of traffic. I think that's a good sign.

Happy Download Day to you
Happy Download Day to you
Happy Download Day, dear Fiiiiiiiiire Fox
Happy Download Day tooooooooo yoooooooooou