Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

Vote Yourself!

Published November 6, 2012 by centaur

Yes, the election is OVER today ... but the outcome is up to YOU!

My wife and I have an election evening ritual to review all the candidates and make our decisions.

To find out where to vote, check out Google's Voting Guide, which will tell you where the polling places are, who's up for election, and what the referenda are in your district, if any. Since we're in California, we also used resources like the KQED Proposition Guide, the San Jose Mercury News endorsements, and the LA Times endorsements - less for the endorsement value than the discussions they prompted. For some more obscure races, the Smart Voter site and simple Googling helped.

I've already stated my reasons why I think Obama should remain President:

... the left of us are going to vote for the guy who passed healthcare reform, repealed don’t-ask-don’t-tell, ended the war in Iraq, repaired our relations with the world, and made a good-faith effort to close Guantanamo, and the moderates among us are going to vote for the guy who saved the auto industry, passed the stimulus, refused to prosecute those who were prosecuting the war on terror, repeated Bush’s surge trick in Afghanistan, piffed Osama bin Laden, and finally put the smackdown on Gaddafi the way Reagan wanted to oh so many years ago.

And in the same article, I outlined why I have a hard time voting for Republicans for the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, or for California state offices - though I think they make swell governors and have voted for a few of them myself, and they can be excellent local representatives. (Though I mostly voted for Democrats this time).

The propositions are a murkier matter: I recommend voting against the deceptive Proposition 38, which says it provides money for schools but will actually most likely cause a loss of six billion dollars to schools, against Proposition 31 which is a grab-all reform of the state legislature, against Proposition 32 which is bankrolled by corporations in an attempt to prevent unions from doing the same kind of bankrolling, and in favor of the backwards Proposition 40, where a yes vote actually means to leave the new election districts the way they are - and even the backers of the measure have backed off their support (meaning, even the people who wanted you to vote no now want you to vote yes). For the bulk of the rest of them, it depends on your feelings about contentious issues like the size of government, the food labeling, and capital punishment. Vote your (well-informed) conscience.

But vote! Because, remember, cats can't vote ...

And if they could, it would be just for more food.

-the Centaur

Pictured: our vote by mail ballots, which enable us to vote the night before and walk the ballots over to the polling place at our leisure. Go democracy! Hooray America! And if you're not in a democracy like America's, you should think about getting yourself one!

“Feral” Cat Update

Published November 5, 2012 by centaur

As some of you may know, we adopted a "feral" cat we now call Loki. How's that going?

Axually, pretty well. "Yeah, feral. I'm sooo feral. Now feed me, humans."

Loki is axually still an outdoor cat - he's got a spraying problem. But, given a combination of food, shots, neutering and love, he's grown friendly, even loving ... and HUGE.

So score four, crazy cat people. We'd like to stop, seriously. Don't send us any more.

-the Centaur

National Novel Writing Month – Spectral Iron

Published November 3, 2012 by centaur

"Everyone's favorite skeptical witch is back for her fourth foray in SPECTRAL IRON!"

Sheesh. I do find it hard to write marketing copy. I just had to stop, right there.

SO ANYWAY, National Novel Writing Month, 2012. My one, two, three, four, five, six ... seventh, SEVENTH time writing 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. It's quite the challenge, but it's the second best thing I've ever done for my writing other than join the Write to the End group - more writing comes out of Nano than (almost) anything else.

How much writing, you ask? (Or maybe you don't, but hey, it's my blog post). Nano itself six times would be only three hundred thousand words, but it was the seed for seven hundred thousand words of text and four completed novels. The Nano's I've done so far were:

DELIVERANCE - 2002 - 150K words - IN PROGRESS
Seven hundred years after the Fall of Humanity, a rag-tag crew of a human spacecraft at the Frontier of space encounters a distress call from a ship owned by the aliens that took the Earth - and encounters one of the humans they left behind, who doesn't seem to think Humanity fell after all ... even though she barely looks human.
Didn't finish this one, even though I eventually got 150,000 words into it. Hope to get back to it someday. My story "Stranded" in the anthology of the same name is set in the same universe, with a YA version of the same setup - the protagonist of "Stranded" is actually the granddaughter of one of the protagonists of DELIVERANCE.
FROST MOON - 2007 - 100K words - DONE
Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist who can bring her tattoos to life, is asked by the police to track a serial killer preying on the magically tattooed around the time of the full moon - and then she encounters a werewolf who wants a tattoo done before the full moon to control his impulses. Has she found the killer ... or the next victim?
Finished this one in 2009, published in 2010.
BLOOD ROCK - 2008 - 150K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now fighting a plague of killer graffiti that is attacking vampires, werewolves and humans alike. As Dakota struggles with this new plague, she finds that fighting it threatens her relationship with her friends, custody over her new daughter---and ultimately, her life.
Finished this one in 2010, published in 2011.
LIQUID FIRE - 2009 - 120K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now struggling to keep her head above water in a magical world which threatens to consume her. A chance meeting on a plane leads her to befriend the beautiful fireweaver Jewel Graceling - but as Jewel increasingly comes under attack, can even Dakota save her?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013.
JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE - 2010 - 100K words - DONE
There's no better defender of the Liberated Territories of Victoriana than Jeremiah Willstone, and she'll tell you that herself! But when her rich and powerful uncle calls down a monster from another world and escapes with it in a time machine, is even the stoutest defender of Liberation up to the challenge?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013.
HEX CODE - 2011 - 55K words - IN PROGRESS
Cinnamon Frost is a street cat turned domestic - where by cat, we mean weretiger, and by domestic, we mean adopted. But can someone who grew up running the streets really learn to settle down in class? Even if they have her favorite thing in the world, math, there's always English class - and if that's not enough, someone may be trying to kill her.
Still working on this one. Hope to finish it in 2013, have it come out in 2014.

Now it's on to SPECTRAL IRON, book 4 in the Dakota Frost series. Pictured above are some of the books I'm reading to "feed my head" for the plot of the book, which involves magical tattoos, piercing, the fae, ghosts, three kinds of zombies, television, and the appropriate relationship of science to skepticism. From the site, here's my blurb:

Dakota Frost is the best magical tattooist in the Southeast - but she's not in the South anymore. Her new role on the Magical Security Council has taken her to the underbelly of San Francisco, and she's got a camera crew dogging her every step as she's trying to map the magical Edgeworld. But when she runs foul of the fae, and is forced to do them a favor, even one of the world's most skilled skindancer may be in trouble.

Because if you don't know how to kill a ghost, how can you track down his murderer?

You need to write 1666 words a day to succeed at Nano, and so far, so good. Halfway through my day, and more than halfway through today's progress. I should easily catch up to where I should be (missed ~300 words yesterday because me and my wife decided to take a long walk and then crash after that, rather than me getting my late night writing run in).

But most of the day is ahead of me. Alright, enough procrastinating. Back to work!

-the Centaur

A 24 Hour Comics Day Timeline Reloaded

Published October 24, 2012 by centaur

So another 24 Hour Comics Day has come and gone ... my fourth. I'd love to say it gets easier, and in a sense it does, but churning out 24 pages of a comic in just 24 hours is daunting, even if you've done it before. To help ourselves improve, my buddy Nathan Vargas and I put a lot of thought into what goes in to making the challenge a success and collect that at the site Blitz Comics.

To give a flavor of the experience, here's a timeline of my 24 Hour Comics day this year. Like last year, there are highs, there are lows, there are moments of triumph and despair, of hard work overcoming challenges - and experiences which are simply bizarre. Last year actually was more bizarre than this year ... but there were still a few dark hours near the hour of the wolf.

Before the event

T-minus 1 Year: Finish 24HCD successfully. Attribute success to a combination of the Blitz Comics Survival Kit and more life drawing classes, as I went from 7 pages done in 2010 to 24 pages done handily in 2011. Hooray! Resolve to improve Blitz Comics and take more life drawing practice.

T-minus 6 months: Remember we waited to last minute to prepare for 24HCD. Send message "Blitz Comics Lives" and begin planning to update our kit. Get overly ambitious, then scale it back as Nathan's booked up with work and Anthony's booked up with writing.

T-minus 3 months: Finish point update of Blitz Comics Survival Kit. (As of today, full versions are not posted everywhere due to some miscommunications and site storage issues, but we're working on it). Plan on giving another Blitz Comics tutorial, this time at Mission Comics. Other venues considered, but, man, Mission Comics .

T-minus 2 months: Give Blitz Comics Tutorial. Due to a publicity gaffe on our part, no-one shows up except a couple of friends, who leave before it begins. Decide to hold the tutorial anyway for practice. No-one attends but a beautiful and bizarre looking chicken; chicken's owner says our talk is fascinating. Really, I can't make this stuff up.

I'm not kidding here about the chicken. Photos or it didn't happen?

Oh, it happened. After the tutorial, back to preparation...

T-minus 1 month: Hold weekly "just drawing" parties where we mostly chew the fat about life, plan the event, and get in a few minutes' worth of drawing all at the end. Surprisingly, this really works. Get ready fo the event proper, agreeing to bring donuts and art supplies to Mission Comics. Oh, and sign up for space at Mission Comics event!

T-minus 1 week: Buy art supplies, both for ourselves and a large amount of free stuff to give to people at the event. Gather extras of the Survival Kit; make sure I can find all of last year's materials. Coordinate with Leef of Mission Comics to make sure we're confirmed and on the same page with Blitz Comics sponsoring event. Scope out parking garages for the event (fortuitously, I right up the street for a different event) and enter in GPS.

T-minus 3 days: Last "just draw" meeting. Confirm schedule for Saturday morning, which will include breakfast, donuts and helping Leef set up before the actual event. Draw up TODO and shopping lists. Draw some more.

T-minus 2 days: Last trip to the store since Friday will be booked up. Last minute art practice.

T-minus 18 hours: Last minute art practice and reading. Bail early on normal Friday night dinner-coffee-bookstore run in favor of going home to get everything ready.

T-minus 12 hours: Dig through post-novel-writing mess to find art materials. Wonder what I've gotten myself into. Find most of the materials, but decide to crash super early to make sure I'm awake for event.

T-minus 4.5 hours: Up at 5:30 and packing stuff up. I am king of the pile people, and the tote bag is my emblem.

T-minus 3 hours: Depart for event. Pick up Nathan, go for breakfast. My meal is up before Nathan's finished ordering, which is weird. Chill out, discuss what we're doing and why we're doing it, conclude that we're both crazy, but we're doing it anyway.

T-minus 2 hours: Leave breakfast, go pick up donuts for participants. Krispy Kreme FTW! One box regular, one box mixed (with an extra chocolate glazed for me). By the time we're done the time's now 9:30ish. Head to San Francisco, by this point almost an hour drive. Traffic is smooth and we've got lots of buffer.

T-minus 45 minutes: Arrival in San Francisco. Park, gather stuff, head to event. Nathan reroutes us from the shortest path to a nearby street which "has better energy;" this street proves to have a row of beautiful homes rather than backdoors and garbage cans, so, yes, indeed, it had better energy for walking up to the event.

T-minus 30 minutes: Arrive at Mission Comics. Set up. Because we're so early, Nathan and I get primo spots near Leef's desk (and the bathroom) but still in the front room. Chitchat. Notice first page of notebook has some damage on it and draw a "Cover Page" on the presumption that I'm going to adapt the second part of "Stranded". Get ready.

Yes, it is STARTING!

That page doesn't count towards my 24. Alright ... ready ... GO!

24 Hour Comic Day Begins

11:00AM October 20th Leef says "Go!" and I start reviewing my story ideas. I'm planning on adapting part 2 of "Stranded," picking up where I left off last year, but in the spirit of the event I leave the actual decision to the start of the event - and give myself the opportunity to bail if I'm not feeling it. I read the story over in my mind.

11:05AM (by watch), 11:07AM (by phone): Committed to story, synchronize watches. I skim my story in the print book, figuring out a good chunk that's easy to adapt, and picking out comic-friendly lines of dialog.

11:12AM: Rough story outline done. Comparing lengths to make sure Parts 1, 2, and 3 are roughly the same; they are. Find a great ending point which uses Keith's Johnstone's idea of reincorporation to great and surprising effect. I mean, it was in the story before, but it makes a really great Part 2 ender.

11:15AM: Story review done. Review overall structure to get down the "beats," the ebb and flow of the story.

11:21AM: Donut / bathroom break. Ready to tackle thumbnails.

11:22AM: 23.5 hours remain, 24 pages to go. Start thumbnailing - sketching your comic as a whole, with each page as a tiny square. Many comic artists do this; Jim Lee's Icons book has some great examples done by a master of the genre. There's a the Blitz Comics thumbnail worksheet that I think I came up with but paradoxically that Nathan uses extensively; for me, my style is so sloppy that I need to use a whole page.

11:40AM: Roughs done. I take out some time to set up my laptop so I can blog (ha!) look up reference shots (more realistic) and time my progress.

11:44AM Laptop setup. Switch notebooks Setting up page for drawing.

11:47AM: Take a ~13 minute break.

Total Planning Time: 1 hour. This is comparable to last year's 52 minute planning session, but it can take up to 3 to 4 hours to plan if you don't have a story in mind. As it turns out, another 2 hours planning wouldn't have hurt me.

The outcome: this sheet of thumbnails. My map to my story.

Alright, back to it. All the preliminaries are out of the way: I've got a story, an outline, thumbnails on one art book and an empty art book next to it, a laptop with Internet, art books, art materials, a soda, and a donut. Now: starting the first page!

12:00 NOON START PAGE ONE: Riffing on the two page spread near the end of the previous book, without being too obvious about it if you read it straight through.

12:05PM: Panel borders penciled.
12:15PM: Panel borders inked. Need to improve this process.
12:26PM: Sketching done.
12:46PM: Panel 1 done. Too slow.
1:06PM: Panels 3-4 done. Getting sloppy, messed up space for dialogue. Whiteout marker broken, decide to come back later and fix. (I never did).
1:22PM: Panel 5 done.
1:24PM: Finish ~2 minute break
Total time for Page One: 1 hour, 24 minutes. Way too slow. Need to be around 45 minutes.

Now I know I'm going to be drawing people I've drawn less often, like Norylan below (note: this is a colored sketch from my notebook, NOT from any 24 Hour Comic Day :-). So it's time to break out the laptop.

So the laptop setup WAS important after all!

1:24PM START PAGE TWO: The first new page, first appearance of Norylan. I use the laptop to find a "Mug Shots" directory I did for the Serendipity Facebook page, and put up faces of all the characters. My target for this page is 2:15PM.
1:30PM: Finish pencil panel lines.
1:35PM: Finish inked panel lines.
1:49PM: Rough pencils.
2:04PM: Panel 1.
2:17PM: Panel 2.
2:29PM: Panel 3.
2:34PM: ~5 minute break.
Total Time for Page Two: 1 hour, 10 minutes. Still need to streamline. Starting to get worried, even though I know I have two dual page spreads in my layout.

2:34PM START PAGE THREE: Focusing on how to do this easier. Not sure how, but work at it. Target: 3:15pm.
2:38PM: Inked panel borders.
3:00PM: Finish panel 1, after some researching centaur shapes and Norylan poses.
3:15PM: Finish 15 minute interview by reporter for a blog.
3:27PM: Finish page.
Total Time for Page Three: 1 hour, 3 minutes. Things are improving, with the caveat that this is the point I start counting the breaks at the start of the page rather than at the end (because if you get done just before the end and then take a break, who cares?)

3:28PM START PAGE FOUR: Really focusing on how to speed up. Ambition not helping so much.
3:30PM: Finish 2 minute bathroom break.
3:33PM: Finish pencil panel borders. Really wishing I'd made an 8x12 template.
3:38PM: Finish inked panel borders.
3:51PM: Done with Panel 1.
3:55PM: Done with Panel 2. HOW? How did it get done so fast?
4:13PM: Done with Panel 3. WHY? Why did it take so long?
4:25PM: Finished Panel 4.
Total Time for Page Four: 57 minutes. Starting to improve. We might finish if we power through it.

4:25PM START PAGE FIVE: Switched to inside the ship. Maybe this will speed things up. And add context.
4:28PM: Finish ~3 minute break.
4:40PM: Finished ink boxes.
4:48PM: Finished setting up Excel spreadsheet to track progress and see how fast I need to go to finish. I used it up to about the second dual page spread.
5:26PM: Finished page.
Total Time for Page Five: One hour, 1 minute. Argh. Back to slowness. But people seem to like this page.

The following graph shows my progress over the day - spoilers, but you should already know I finished.

The graph is after the fact; I just used it at the time to figure out that I needed to be doing a page in 54 minutes or less. Back to it!

5:26PM: START PAGES SIX AND SEVEN: A dual page spread at last! Target: 6:15PM.
5:45PM: Finish break.
5:50PM: Finish sketch and borders.
6:26PM: Finish page.
Total Time for Pages Six and Seven: 1 hour. Still slow, but I've made up time by the dual page spread.

6:26PM: START PAGE EIGHT: Back to a page, aware I need to pick up the pace. Can I simplify? Target: 7:15PM.
6:36PM: 10 minute break concludes.
6:46PM: Panels done, plus talking.
7:04PM: Panel 1 done.
7:22PM: Panel 6 done. By a happy coincidence, I had three small horses in my box of art props, in positions ranging from standing to trot to gallop, perfect for panels 5-7.
7:26PM: Panel 7 done.
Total Time for Page Eight: 1 hour. Still not speedy. Argh.

7:26PM: START PAGE NINE: Nuts, poses with people looking up. Argh! Target: 8:15PM.
8:20PM: Done, with a 5 minute break in there.
Total Time for Page Nine: 54 minutes. Still not speedy. Argh. But it's a notch faster than my 56 minute desired time (time has ballooned a bit since I had been falling behind).

Somewhere around this point I really started to flag, to really feel despair and to decide I didn't want to do this, but I pulled out a Panera bread cinnamon roll I'd purchased for just such an occasion and was soon re-energized!

Beans and vinegar, sugar high, go!

8:20PM: START PAGE TEN: A complicated pose, but only two panels, easy, right? Target: 9:05PM.
9:05PM: Finish Panel 1. During this, I had to pose several models on top of each other, hold the models at different angles, tweak the stuff ... oh dear.
9:30PM: Finish Panel 2. Argh! But people seem to really love this shot.
Total Time for Page Ten: 1 hour, 10 minutes. But it's a great page.

9:30PM: START PAGE ELEVEN: An even more complex pose: two characters holding another on a gurney looking down from the top of the ship. Argh! Target: 10:15
9:38PM: Finish break.
9:46PM: Finish panels. Where's that 8x12 template again?
10:20PM: Finish page.
Total Time for Page Eleven: 50 minutes. Getting better.

10:20PM: START PAGE TWELVE: Things going better; I'm on page twelve, I should be on page twelve by my Excel spreadsheet. I decide to skim backgrounds and use silhouettes here to simplify.
10:30PM: Finish ~10min break.
10:51PM: Finish Panel 1. Silhouette of Norylan looks great. Made a slight gaffe overblacking an area, but you can't tell in the finished product.
11:05PM: Finish Panel 2. The blaster design is what I can draw. I'd have done this with 3 panels if I could have.
11:15PM: Finish Panel 3. Norylan!
Total Time for Page Twelve: 55 minutes. Right on time, according to Excel.

11:15PM: START PAGE THIRTEEN: A single page spread, on purpose.
11:54PM: Finish Panel 1. Suprisingly hard to get the design of INDEPENDENCE right, but in the end, the ship looks great and is a great backdrop for the action.
Total time for Page Twelve: 39 minutes. Woo hoo! Getting ahead.

11:54PM: START PAGE FOURTEEN: Even simplified, this will be a bear. 7 panels, one a crowd scene.
12:09AM: Finish ~15 minute break. Isn't it weird that AM and PM designators switch an hour before the clocks roll back from 12 to 1? I guess the easier way to think about it is that since the clock loops around, 12 on the clock really is a funny way of saying 0 (12 mod 12 = 0 :-).
12:15AM: Finish panel boxes.
12:29AM: Finish the surprisingly complex Panel 1 - four characters in a complex pose.
12:32AM: Finish Panel 2.
12:40AM: Finish Panels 3 and 4.
12:59AM: Finish Panel 5 - a night crowd scene around a fire. AAAAA!
1:10AM: Finish Panel 6. Tianyu came out very well as a shadow in the dark.
1:16AM: Finish Panel 7. Ah, done with blacks for now. Next few pages, I cheat.
Total Time for Page Fourteen: One hour, 26 minutes. Argh. Back to the grind.

It's around this time, not sure when precisely, that I had the second incidence of questioning my sanity.

I'd already had dinner from a nearby cafe, and a donut didn't help, so it wasn't food shortage. My memories are a bit jumbled, but I recall taking a brief nap, about 10 minutes, but panels danced before my eyes and I realized my resistance was that I didn't have a good plan for the next few pages. I scanned the panels in my mind, decided, and got up and went back to work.

1:16AM: START PAGE FIFTEEN: Simplify. Eliminate blacks; pretend the campfire illuminates like day.
1:33AM: Finish ~17 minute break. Needed that.
1:37AM: Finish inking panel borders.
1:40AM: Finish panel 1. Not even sure I penciled this one.
1:50AM: Finish panels 2-3. Almost no penciling again: close characters in foreground.
2:12AM: Finish panel 3. Complex characters in interesting pose, more work.
Total Time for Page Fifteen: 56 minutes. Not bad, counting the break.

2:12AM: START PAGE SIXTEEN: A complex pose atop panel 1: a centaur falling on a person. Argh! I put a horse model atop a superhero model and used that. Sadly, you can sort of tell as the person's pose is too stiff.
2:58AM: Finish Panel 3.
Total Time for Page Sixteen: 46 minutes. Not bad. Getting bolder with the no pencils when I can get away with it.

2:58AM: START PAGE SEVENTEEN: I like this page. Romance, kung fu, and death threats!
3:12AM: Finish ~14 minute break.
3:59AM: Finish Panel 3.
Total Time for Page Seventeen: 1 hour, 1 minute. Slower, but complex.

Again, somewhere around here, it isn't clear, I wanted to just give up - for the third time.

This time, it wasn't a sugar low, or a panel problem, or any of those other things. Despite the picture (actually taken earlier in the day; I was too busy to take pictures at this point) I wasn't that tired. I just wanted to quit. I realized there was no external thing I could do to help me. I had to just power through it, just reach in and find the place that said ... continue.

3:59AM: START PAGE EIGHTEEN: Simplify, just keep it going. Took a short break.
4:36AM: Finish Panel 4.
Total Time for Page Eighteen: 37 minutes. How? Amazing.

4:36AM: START PAGE NINETEEN: Simplify, but this is more complex. Avoid pencils?
4:48AM: Break for 12 minutes.
4:55AM: Finish panel borders.
5:02AM: Finish sketch of Panel 1.
5:09AM: Finish Panel 1.
5:36AM: Finish Panel 4.
Total Time for Page Nineteen: 1 hour. Slower, but we're getting close to the end.

5:36AM: START PAGES TWENTY AND TWENTY ONE: A dual page spread, woo woo!
5:37AM: Finish 3 minute break.
6:20AM: Mostly finished.
6:22AM: Finish Panel 1.
Total Time for Pages Twenty and Twenty One: 46 minutes. Not bad for a two page spread!

Now I am officially way ahead. The dual page spread, finished early, has put me 1 whole page ahead of schedule.

This picture, again taken earlier, represents my now renewed burst of enthusiasm - shoot, still 3 more pages.

6:22AM: START PAGE TWENTY TWO: When I "should" be at page 20. Woot! Goal: 7:10am. This page could be complex, but I'm going to simplify it. Most complex thing: two characters riding a centaur.
7:01AM: Finish Panel 4.
Total Time for Page Twenty-Two: 38 minutes. Woot! Go no pencils, except where hard.

7:01AM: START PAGE TWENTY THREE: When I "should" be at page 21. Woo woo! Simplify even more; drawing a giant door. Yes, I'm ahead, I could get complex, but *F* that at this stage, it's better to be DONE! Hardest part: showing a character falling backwards into water.
7:05AM: Finish inking panel borders.
7:35AM: Finish Panel 3.
Total Time for Page Twenty-Three: 34 minutes. Almost there ... stay on target ...

7:35AM: START PAGE TWENTY FOUR: When I "should" be at page 22. Almost there! One single panel spread!
8:20AM: Finish Panel 1.
Total Time for Page Twenty-Four: 45 minutes? Axually, I don't know. I strongly suspect the 8:20 figure is my "target time" and that I finished slightly early. Still ... it's better to be DONE!

Hey, wait a second ... I FINISHED! Go Team Centaur! Go Blitz Comics! Go Mission Comics! Go 24 Hour Comics Day!

So ... now what? Well, after chilling out a bit, stretching, I hung out with people at the event. People began to finish up around me; a few people had beat me, some by a little, some by a lot - two people finished way early and went back and watercolored all their pages. While I didn't track times, this is how the rest of the day went, more or less:

8:20AM: START CHILLDOWN. O.M.G. I'm done. Don't panic. Don't gloat. Chill out, stretch your wrists, take a walk.
Mostly, I just walked around, talked to people, started cleaning up. Sooner or later, people started cleaning up.

9:00AM: SHOW ME YOURS, I'LL SHOW YOU MINE: People start noticing that others have finished, or people begin announcing it. Some people pass around their comics. At least three of them were watercolored. All were interesting, all were different, and a few had really genuine scares and laughs.

10:00AM: INTERVIEW: The reporter returns and begins interviewing everyone. Each one takes about 10 minutes. It's fun and great to unpack your thoughts.

10:30AM: TEARDOWN: I and Nathan begin packing up. I vow not to take so much next time; I have a good grip on how much I can use in one trip now. Basically, if it doesn't fit in one bag that you can sit next to the desk while you work, you are not going to pull it out.

11:00AM: FAREWELLS: Nathan and I are invited to have breakfast with Doc and Leef, but Nathan's too worn out for this and needs to crash. We decide to bail, say our farewells, and leave Mission Comics to wind our way back the street of trees and dreams.

T-plus 1 hour: THE VOYAGE HOME. Nathan and I are surprisingly alert enough to start a postmortem. We come up with a list of ideas about 24 Hour Comics Day which we're going to turn into a series of blogposts. I'm fading fast, and feel microbursts of sleep as I drive. Not safe. Drop Nathan off, then get breakfast.

T-plus 2 hours: BREAKFAST AND POSTMORTEM. I go to my favorite restaurant, Aqui's in Blossom Valley, and get a spectacular French toast breakfast while I unpack my ideas. I email them to Nathan, capturing our conversation on the drive, then hastily bang together a trip report. A friend is having a baby shower, but I'm simply too exhausted and go home to sleep.

Yes, French toast. That is my reward for a hard day's work. That, and blissful unconsciousness.

But that's not the end of 24 Hour Comics Day, oh no. We need ... the POSTMORTEM! This postmortem, axually.

T-plus 3 hours: NAP Yes, sleep. But not much. I'm too wound up, and wake up.

T-plus 5 hours: UNWIND. I unpack the car, kick around the house, chat with Sandi, and unwind.

T-plus 11 hours: CRASH: After doing as much damage as I can, I crash, hard.

T-plus 23 hours: AWAKEN: Yes, I do indeed wake up at almost 10 the next day. What can I say, I love my job, which cares more about how much work you do than when you get there. I got in to work around 11am, 24 hours after 24 Hour Comic Day ended.

T-plus 2 days: BACK TO SPEED: The first day was rough, but by Tuesday I was back at it and had started writing this postmortem. It took me two whole days.

T-plus 3 days: POSTMORTEM COMPLETE. Complete as of me writing this paragraph. I've got back to speed with my other writing projects (DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME and SPECTRAL IRON, *ahem*), scheduled a meeting with Nathan for next Wednesday to plan out the next year of Blitz Comics ... and finished this postmortem.

And that, my friends, is a 24 Hour Comics Day.

-the Centaur

Pound Cake, Interrupted

Published October 23, 2012 by centaur

Pound cake is practically my favorite food. It's right up there with Lebanese favorites like tabbouleh and kibbey nayye and right up there with my favorite dessert, the Panera Bread cinnamon roll. But not all pound cakes qualify: I like slices of large ring pound cake in the style carried by Ingles grocery store in Greenville, South Carolina.

As I've moved from city to city, I found substitutes - the Kroger ring pound cake in Atlanta and the Safeway ring pound cake in the Bay Area. For a while, however, Safeway stopped carrying this item, so I started baking my own pound cakes for my evening ritual: two slices of pound cake, one glass of milk, and a book, just before bed.

Someone asked me about a good pound cake recipe, but as it turns out I haven't made pound cake in a while as (a) my oven failed just before (b) Safeway began selling ring pound cakes again right around the time (c) my first novel got published, at which point writing sucked up the time I spent on other hobbies.

Wow. That last bit is really true: I just don't have as much time for karate or cooking or anything else because I gotta write, not just for enjoyment but because people want to read my stuff. But (b) is the controlling factor, because I gotta have pound cake, and I could make time if I had to since I have a doorway to extra time.

But I can share the recipes that I was working on before the oven failure. The following is a "ring pound cake" that was my most recent success that didn't involve Splenda, which I'd been experimenting with, off and on, to try to reduce the calorie count of my cakes. What follows, however, is (nearly) pure butter sugar flour eggs joy:

May 18, 2009: Experiment: Six Egg, Three Butter Stick Pound Cake: SUCCESS
New recipe, not as sweet as last time but structurally better.
- Recipe: Interpolated between "Butter Sugar Flour Eggs" and "I'm Just Here for More Food" by Alton Brown
  - Three and a half cups of allpurpose flour
  - Six large eggs
  - Two and one eighth cups of sugar
  - Three-quarters pound of butter
  - One half teaspoon of salt
  - One half teaspoon of baking powder
  - One teaspoon of vanilla
- Preparation Tricks:
  - Used a deep bowl big enough to handle all batter, which speed up mixing and made things cleaner.
  - Let butter sit as long as it takes to soften on its own, or you won't be able to make it fluff.
  - Beat butter to a whip before adding sugar, one cup at a time
  - Beat egg yolks, egg whites and vanilla together for mixing into creamed butter.
  - Sift non-sugar dry goods (salt, baking powder, flour) together 3 times.
  - Alternate adding dry goods and buttermilk to the batter.
  - Let cool in the pan for at least 15 minutes.
  - Rack cool for at least 15 minutes.
- Texture: smoother, heavier, close to what it ought to be, a little flakier this time
- Flavor: sweet but not too sweet, smooth
- Crust: decent texture, now darker with +2 minutes to cooking time
- Structure: firm, though still has a slight ridge developed when cooling in the pan
- Comments: People preferred the flavor last time, the structure this time.

My previous best recipe is similar. I adapted one from “I’m Just Here for More Food” by Alton Brown, a chef well known for his excellent, scientifically-based cooking. After cross-referencing against the Joy of Cooking, I felt safe leaving out the vanilla on the suspicion that last time’s funny flavor wasn’t just the Splenda but my fairly old vanilla flavoring (which I found was labeled “bourbon vanilla” which made me even more suspicious.) This left the recipe:

Three cups of allpurpose flour

Three large eggs

Two cups of sugar

One cup of buttermilk

One half pound of butter

One half teaspoon of salt

One half teaspoon of baking powder

Preparation involved a $25 handheld motorized mixer from Fry’s
Electronics. Also I used a few tricks:

Use a motorized mixer (handheld or standup)

Allow butter to warm to room temperature by itself – no heating in the microwave

Mix the butter and sugar and blend until fluffy with no sugar grains visible in the mix

Beat egg yolks and whites together and mix with butter and sugar blend in 3 batches

Sift all the dry goods (salt, baking powder, flour) together 3 times

Alternate adding the dry goods and buttermilk to the mix

Carefully flour the pan to prevent sticking.

The oven was preheated to 325, baking was 1 hour, and the cake was allowed to sit a bit before being taken out of the pan.

Results: Yum. The texture was light and flaky, on the edge of being too flaky. The flavor was good, though slightly bland – it could have used more vanilla. The crust had a good texture, but it could have been a bit darker.

See my blogpost for more details. These are the last things I have records of trying.

Maybe it's time to try again.

-the Centaur

Blitzing 24 Hour Comics Day 2012

Published October 21, 2012 by centaur

24 Hour Comics Day is a challenge to create 24 pages of a new comic in 24 Hours. The challenge was originally conceived by comics whiz Scott McCloud in 1990, and the challenge was organized into a formal day by Nat Gertler in 2004. Now, eight years later, 24HCD is a global event in which thousands of people participate.

My first two tries at 24 Hour Comics Day were miserable failures in 2009 and 2010. My good friend Nathan Vargas also failed, and we started putting our heads together about how to succeed. For me, pulling a Jim Lee and taking a year off to massively cram at being a great artist might merit an angry note from my mortgage service provider, so we needed other options.

We analyzed how we failed, developed strategies and tutorial materials, and ultimately produced the Blitz Comics Survival Kit --- not called 24 Hour Comics Survival Kit because we didn't want to look like we were providing "official" materials; the Survival Kit was just our take on how to succeed, and we didn't even know whether it would work, because we hadn't done it yet.

As it turns out, the techniques in the Kit did work in 2011, not just for Nathan and me but also for a wide variety of other people as well. Nathan has worked hard to promote the ideas and concepts in the Kit while I've been a slack ass lazy bum writing novels, so since he works hard now Comics PRO distributes our materials as Participant Resources. But was our success a fluke?

Well, to test the theory, we tried it again. A few months before we reviewed our exercises and updated the Survival Kit, though website problems prevented us from updating the materials everywhere in time for the 24HCD event. We re-ran the tutorial we'd done before, and practiced a month or so in advance, cracking the knuckles so to speak, to get ready ...

Because yesterday was 24 Hour Comics Day.

We both succeeded, of course; me around 8:20am and Nathan an hour and a half so later. It was great to participate at the always wonderful Mission Comics, but unlike previous years where we were too zonked to think at all, this year we had an interesting and lively conversation about what we did, why we did it, why we're doing this, and how to make it better in the future.

And unlike last year, we're planning to meet next week, rather than a few months in advance. Hopefully there will be some great stuff to show you - such as our comics, which we finally may have a strategy to get online without fixing the server error that's been a pain in the patootie to fix. Next up: a 24 Hour Comics Day Timeline, like last year's. Stay tuned.

Now, home to bed, because at this point I've been up 32 and a half hours straight!

-the Centaur

Pictured: the last page of my 2012 24 Hour Comic, "Stranded Part 2", my adaptation of my own story "Stranded," published in the book STRANDED. Got that? Also pictured is a bunch of writers at Mission Comics and Art. Thanks Leef!

Dragon*Con Reservation FU

Published October 10, 2012 by centaur

And I don't mean "fu" as in "kung fu".

Once again, Dragon*Con's main hotels have sold out almost a year in advance. The very nice hotel I was in this year, just up the street from The Big Five - the Marriott Marquis, the Hyatt Regency, the Hilton, the Sheraton, and the Westin - sold out before I'd checked out. Three of the Big 5 were sold out by the time I checked that afternoon. The Hilton has rooms at north of $300 a night.

Only the Marriott had rooms, which went on sale at 9:00AM EST today. Sold out by 9:45.

I didn't log on at 9:45, of course. I logged on at 9:00 AM sharp (necessitating getting up at 5AM PST). Dragon*Con's site was overwhelmed, but eventually I got on and got the login information at the very late time of 9:01AM EST. The login information didn't work, for the simple reason that it was wrong.

Sometime around 9:20ish this morning (don't remember the exact time), the overloaded Dragon*Con site (overloaded no doubt by people like me refreshing it looking for the correct Marriott Marquis login information) eventually refreshed and posted the correct login information. (The old data had dropped a digit at the end of the URL). I logged in, after several tries, around 9:21AM (really, pretty quickly), found a hotel room rapidly despite the sluggishness of the interface, and clicked Book.

Nothing.

The site was so overloaded that it wasn't responding to every click event (or, worse, the page got corrupted on download, so the Javascript for the button was broken; it isn't quite clear). I've been around the block, of course, so I had a different browser (Firefox rather than Chrome) and managed to log in there as well, and also found rooms - but the doubles were already sold.

This was around 9:30AM. Shit shit shit!

I continued this reservation. In the background, my original billing had finally timed out, but I kept going on the new one, which seemed to be working. It went all the way to booking, with weird requests for more and more information that kept slowing me down, but still, around 9:39AM EST, I had a correct credit card and was hitting send.

I captured a screenshot of what happened next and pasted it in the head of the article.

That's not a Photoshop, by the way - the "Some of the nights you have selected are no longer available" screen really did say FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU(*). I hit "back" on my previous reservation and, magically, the session wasn't expired. It permitted me to continue to book THAT reservation too, right up to the credit card as before. Same result - rooms no longer available.

And all were sold out when I started over.

I could tell you about my struggles with Expedia, but really, they were minor. I went to Expedia, put in the dates of my reservation, selected Downtown Atlanta, saw the hotels on a map, and picked one. The only problem was that clicking on a hotel closed the map and hitting back took you all the way back to the search screen, but I found a hotel, pretty close, pretty cheap.

Just before I hit "book it" I got a funny feeling and checked the hotel on Yelp. Yelp warned me off - in no uncertain terms - and I started my search again. This time I found an even closer hotel, slightly more expensive, near the Aquarium, with glowing reviews in Yelp and Expedia. Then, I found out I wasn't logged in to Expedia and had to start over. But then, when I did...

So maybe there IS reservation fu to be had here. For one of these crazy cons:

Check your con long in advance.
Find out when they book up.
Check their web site early.
Don't take the web site's word for it on the URL or login information if you're having trouble - look at it carefully, try it in several browsers, and check back to the web site if you have problems.
Try more than one browser if you've got the right information but are still having trouble.
Never, never, never give up - but change tactics if you've confirmed the failure.
Try calling them on the phone (I was doing this in parallel with all of the above).
Try using Expedia or your favorite reservation site - but use a map, or you'll get screwed.
Double confirm your choice with Yelp.
Make sure your credit card is handy and you're logged in to the site.
Make sure your rapid rewards or rewards plus or whatever information is on hand.
Never, never, never give up.

So ... I guess I'll be seeing you all next Dragon*Con!

-the Centaur

(*) Or maybe I just imagined that, and then Photoshopped the screencap to match my imagination. Who knows?

Dragon Con, Dragon Con, Jiggety Jig

Published August 30, 2012 by centaur

Well, it's back again to Dragon*Con, my home away from home in the magical city of Atlanta.

Like Comic-Con, the show at Dragon*Con begins even before you get inside.

Unlike Comic-Con, however, the architecture of Dragon*Con is not awesomely mega, but mega awesome.

From the floor to the ceiling, the hotels of Dragon*Con, especially the Marriott, are awe-inspiring.

It's simply hard to take them in all at once.

In the midafternoon, things are just getting started...

... but don't worry, things will fill up soon enough.

I'll be at the Bell Bridge Books author spotlight on Sunday, hawking STRANDED, the anthology of which I have not yet seen a copy, but whose cover looks like this.

What's even more awesome is the con officially hasn't started yet ... and the costumes are amazing.

Amazing.

Amazing!

I mean, AMAZING.

A-MAZ-ING!

Seriously ... you know.

So, on this first night of Dragon*Con, I've had a great meal...

Powered up with caffeine...

And filled out this, my traditional first post of Dragon*Con!

-the Centaur

Good Parking Karma

Published August 17, 2012 by centaur

Recently I've become more interested in the scientific method, especially after spending a few weeks doing that Prometheus vs the Thing essay. After doing that, I realized that I believe myself to have superior parking skills ... without any hard evidence to that effect.

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence, of course, for my supposed superior parking skills. My wife admires my parking skills. She can't parallel park, whereas I can. Actually, she's not the only one to have remarked upon it - other friends have too, as have strangers. Once, back when I drove a large SUV, I successfully parallel parked it in a tiny parking space with only inches of clearance front and back. Dissatisfied that I was more than four feet from the curb, I then, with a sequence of back and forths worthy of Austin Powers, slid the car sideways to within four inches of the curb. When I got out, the people watching in the nearby cafe applauded.

There's other anecdotal evidence. I have spectacularly good "parking karma". There are at least three different parking lots that my friends avoid that I have no trouble parking at. Part of this is a positive attitude: I believe there are spaces, so that helps me find them. Part of this is patient strategy: I know there's flux in almost any parking lot, so I don't get frustrated and drive off just before a space opens. And part of this is again skill: I know certain tricks for parking, like backing into a narrow space so my passenger door aligns with the other car's passenger door, and I can leave more space for my driver door and the driver next to me. I enjoy finding the space that other people can't find and don't want to park in and taking that.

But this is all anecdotal. I've never done a scientific survey of parking skills and compared my abilities to the population mean. I've never even tried to define the term parking skills in a way that would make a concept of superior parking skills meaningful. It's just an egotistical little belief I've picked up over the years. Just like the "parking karma," an unscientific concept if there ever was one.

But I do have a good time parking, even today, in a lot so busy my friends often complain that it's hard to park, I squeezed my car into a tight space today, a narrow, angled space a larger SUV drove past. I had to slide my car in and out of the space three times to align properly enough that I could get out of my car, because the car to the right was angled over the line, into my parking space.

But I parked. And when I got out, I checked. The car to my right could still open his door just fine.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a different parking situation, in which some car far to the right had leaned out of his lane, and all the subsequent cars had to either keep parking at an odd angle, or drive on by. Other cars drove by; I parked just fine. Good parking karma continues.

A Man After My Own Heart

Published August 16, 2012 by centaur

I don't know what it is about people born about the same time as me, like John Scalzi and Warren Ellis and Richard Evans, but ever time one of them creates a groundbreaking game, gets nominated for the Hugo, wins an award or lands on the moon, they always make me feel like I've been sitting on my ass.

Well, John Scalzi has beaten me to the punch again, this time by eerily mirroring events from my own life and blogging about them while I'm still digesting the events. He recently found a small stray cat, and blogged that has he decided he's going to trap it, get it fixed and possibly tame it, because he'd "rather be a sap than have a dead kitten on [his] conscience."

Boy, do I know this feeling. I also have "cat lover AKA sucker" written on my forehead, and I and my wife have been going through a similar arc. We spent the last three months socializing a little spray monster we've taken to calling Loki, and yesterday my wife took him to the vet to get him his shots and fixed. My wife thought it worthwhile to share some of what we've learned that made us choose to trap, neuter and release him, even though it might scare him off.

We strongly suspect Loki is the brother or cousin of Gabby, the gold cat above that we adopted about two and a half years ago. While their coloration is starkly different, both are highly vocal longhaired cats with similar tails that seem to know each other. Loki's tail has thinned alarmingly in the above photo, but they looked even more similar a few months ago.

Loki isn't a feral cat: he's a stray---that is, an abandoned cat. Feral means an unsocialized wild cat which wasn't raised with human contact and won't approach people willingly. Loki? After some initial skittishness, probably caused by either abuse (he's afraid of feet) or our initial attempts to chase him off (after another stray cat invaded our home and attacked my wife), Loki's approach distance rapidly dropped to zero, and he can be petted, picked up and will even lie in your lap. More tellingly, he knows how to claw and bite without ever drawing blood---a sign of early exposure to humans. Loki was someone's pet, once.

Now he is again. We don't know if he can ever become an indoor cat---he was a little spray monster, and when we realized he was coming in through our cat door and making our other cats spray, we had to eliminate the door. But clearly he'd come to rely on our home for a food source, and even when he was skittish, he meowed piteously, trying to beg even as he ran.

So, back to John Scalzi's plan: he's dead on the money. Even if you don't want a stray cat in your yard, it does you no good to get rid of it. Not only is it inhumane, all you're doing is opening a space in the local cat territory map for some other, possibly more annoying cat to come in and take it. The right thing to do is TNR: trap, neuter, return. This preserves the local territory, so no more cats move in, but stops the cats from breeding out of control and taking over the local wildlife.

We just spent several hundred dollars on examinations and shots for our three cats plus examinations, shots and neutering for Loki, but if you're not planning on keeping the cat, there are probably local animal shelters who will do the neutering for a much more reasonable fee. And unless the cat is a sweetie, there are good reasons not to keep him.

If a cat you're trying to tame becomes approachable, great; but don't try to tame one that's obviously feral and wants nothing to do with people. The cat that attacked my wife, Graycat (pictured above) was so close to feral that only I could handle him, and that was with gloves. I was making progress at it---I could pet him, even play with him with toys outside---but that emboldened him, and he came into our house, fought with our cats, and then tried to attack my wife. She had to fend him off with a broom, not hitting him but trying to push him away---and then he attacked the broom, before running off. Sadly, we can't deal with cats that attack us, and had to have him put him down.

It's better to make a judgment call, which John Scalzi is currently doing with his skittish kitten. I wish him the best of luck with that! As for us, we're hoping Loki comes back. After the neutering, we released him, and he hasn't yet returned. Sad to say, neutering can permanently change the personality of a cat for the worse; my wife has had two cats "ruined" by bad vet experiences.

Still, our vet is good, and Loki took to it better than our three other little monsters. Here's hoping he returns, that he stops spraying once the hormones drain out of his system, and that he finds a good life here. But regardless, we've done our duty: we've made his life better, at least for a while, and cut back on the local cat proliferation, at least for a bit.

Here's hoping he forgives us for that, and comes back for the love. And the can food.

And the laser tag.

-the Centaur

Pictured: assorted furmonsters. Loki, Loki and Gabby, Graycat, and Loki again.

UPDATE: He came back!

Twice. And he's more affectionate than ever (though you can't see that in these photo :-) ...

I think it's safe to say he's here to stay.

Back to Comic-Con

Published July 10, 2012 by centaur

It's back to Comic-Con this week. I have no appearances, no obligations; I even sent the revisions of "Stranded" to the editor before my departure, so it's just a fun week soaking in the concentrated geekery of one hundred and fifty thousand of my spiritual friends. I don't even know the schedule of the con yet; here's to having fun.

I do have to say it's getting ridiculous in size, though. Hotel rooms aren't quite as bad to come by as Dragon*Con - which you need to order a year in advance, whereas Comic-Con opens up hotel rooms at more like six months - but the ticket procedure is crazy. If I wasn't going as a professional, I wouldn't be able to make it; I logged on as early as possible that morning and still failed to get a normal ticket. I don't know how other people do it, but clearly, one hundred and fifty thousand of them do.

Still, the programming is great, the dealer's room is awe-inspiring, and San Diego's Gaslamp district is a wonderful place to hang out with friends for dinner (or even to retreat to with your laptop when inspiration strikes and the lines and crowds are getting a little too much to deal with in the Convention Center).

Here's hoping the Comic-Con team can find a way to continue to offer this wonderful event!

-the Centaur

“Stranded” back from the editor!

Published June 21, 2012 by centaur

"Stranded," my young adult space pirates story set in the Library of Dresan universe, has been provisionally accepted by Bell Bridge Books and I'm responding to the edits now. It's set in a distant future where humanity has spread through the galaxy in two groups - one, the Dresanians, citizens of the grand and sparkling intergalactic civilization known as the Dresan-Murran Alliance, a mammoth polyglot alien culture of which humanity is the tiniest part, and the other, the Frontiersmen, humans who fled the Allied takeover of Earth to found their own civilization at the edge of the deeps --- but at least it's human.

What happens when these two groups collide?

Serendipity snapped her fingers. The map of the Alliance collapsed into the tiny glowing sphere, which leapt from the tree and flew into her hand. Tianyu scampered up onto her shoulder and rubbed her cheek, and Serendipity rubbed him back as the farstaff chimed.

“Let’s go on an adventure,” Serendipity said—and in a twinkle of light, they disappeared.

An adventure she wants? An adventure she'll get.

If the editor and I can beat the story into shape, it will come out later this year in an anthology called STRANDED, and later my space pirate sequence of stories will be collected into a novel called MAROONED. The alien child pictured above, Norylan, is actually from the sequel to "Stranded", "Conflicted", which will form part 2 of MAROONED. Got that? Good.

All coming Real Soon Now to a bookstore or ereader near you!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Norylan, a child (sort of) of the Andiathar, the dominant species of the Alliance, drawn by yours truly while working through story notes, photographed by my phone (you can even see the shadow of my hand in the original shot below), and colored (also by me) in Photoshop as an experiment for doing "quick" (ha) art for a blog post. There's a lot I'd like to do to fix this piece of art, but then that would fail my intent of making this a quick experiment.

Scam, Shame, or Simply Expected?

Published May 6, 2012 by centaur

I've just come across two instances of friends and colleagues getting bitten by bad products ... and the companies involved putting the bad product straight back on the shelves. First from my friend Jim Davies:

http://jimdaviesrants.blogspot.com/2012/05/reselling-bad-product-after-returns.html

Unfortunately, the game did not work. I cleaned it and tried several times, to no avail. I planned to bring it back. And even though I had no reason to suspect Chumleighs of any foul play, just to make sure I never bought that particular disc again I put a tiny dot of ink on the case insert in a place I would remember later. They gave me my money back. Just today I was browsing, and there was the Hulk game. With the same dot. I told the clerk that I'd returned this game and was disappointed that it was back on the shelf. She said that it might be a different copy, and I told her about the dot. She took the game to the back, and discussed something with somebody, and then put it back on the shelf, right in front of me.

And from fellow transhumanist Elf Sternberg:

http://elfs.livejournal.com/1504793.html

We tried playing it in the Playstation 2, then the Lasonic (which will try and play a frozen pizza, that thing's amazing, pity about the heat buildup issue...), and finally out laptops. Not even Handbrake could make it past 1:10. I called RedBox, and they were very kind about giving me two coupons (no refunds, sigh): one for this film, and one for any other film I wanted. Then she said, "Make sure, if you try and take another copy out, that you take it out before you put this one back, or it will just give you the one you have already tried." I expressed surprise. "Doesn't it know the disc is unuseable?" "When we send someone to service the box, if it is present we will take it out. But while it is in the box, it is considered in circulation."

Ouch. Needless to say, neither of them were happy.

I, in contrast, have had good experiences with returns. The image pictured is a cracked Kindle DX I got from Amazon that they replaced almost instantaneously. I buy a lot of electronics gear from Fry's, which has a generous return policy and often (seems) to put stuff back on the shelves because people can't distinguish between "this is incompatible with my setup" and "this is broken". And I buy a lot of used and discount books, including one recently from Kepler's, where I found a book I bought for a dollar turned out to have a missing section due to the printer error.

I didn't complain - I needed the book to help my wife out with a problem and the section I needed was mostly intact - and felt like, "hey, I got this for a dollar". I felt like, hey, this is simply expected. But should I have felt that way? Shouldn't the book have been marked? And shouldn't Jim and Elf have the expectation that the games and movies they buy or rent are in good condition? Even if many people bring things back as bad when they aren't, shouldn't there be an expectation that if someone reports they've tried a game or movie in a dozen machines that yes, it's probably bad? Can't stores have a machine to test their product?

I don't buy the argument that "it would cost more money". I buy the argument that the people who're running the businesses or even the local stores don't want to be bothered. That they'd rather follow procedure than be flexible enough to handle anything more than the default case. I've seen a lot of this attitude recently. I don't think it's new, but I personally have seen more and more of it, where people in charge of systems only want to satisfy the lowest common denominator. Often that means they're doing things efficiently and cheap - but if the cost of efficient and cheap is selling crap products, I think the cost is too high.

Or is that even fair? Stores know they're going to get returns. They plan on it. They even gave Jim and Elf their money back (Elf, with some extra). So you can expect to get crap from time to time. I guess what's bad here is that the system has all the information it needs to do better ... and simply doesn't. It would have been easy for the woman at the game store to toss the item into the garbage or the "for sale - damaged" shelf. It would have been easy for RedBox to mark a video with a damaged bit. That's what rankles here ... when we know what we need to know to do better ... and don't.

Sigh.

-the Centaur

We Interrupt This Broadcast … to Bring You Art

Published April 26, 2012 by centaur

A pause, however brief, from THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. My wife Sandi has worked the past week collecting over two years of new pictures documenting her work as a faux finisher and artist, and I've just updated our gallery software to support detailed thumbnails (as shown above). After a long night's work, I've uploaded all this new hawtness to Sandi's newly refreshed website, studiosandi.com. New, improved, with her California Contractor's License number, 966222:

Now serving all your faux finishing, decorative painting, muraling and fine art needs in the Bay Area.

Soon back to your regularly scheduled clockworks...

-the Centaur

Too Many Projects … or an External Memory?

Published March 14, 2012 by centaur

Anyone who knows me in detail knows I'm a pile person. You can see the all the windows open above, but that's not the half of it: I had 14 tabs open in Firefox, 3 windows with 17, 13, and 3 tabs open in Chrome, and ten windows open in Finder, Mac OS X's file browser. I hammer my operating systems, loading them with as many windows, programs, files and fonts they can take.

But it's not just operating systems. I've got a huge folder of todos in my jacket pocket, a pile of books in my bookbag, on the table, in my car. My library, office, spare office and even kitchen table are filled with piles, as is my desk at work.

On the one hand, this could simply be because I'm a hoarder and need to learn to clean up more, and maybe I do. But most of the piles are thematically organized: in the shot above you can see (slightly overlapping) piles for a young adult and urban fantasy series, an art pile, a pile of bills, CDs being organized, and so on.

Some of this is, again, a product of mess, but the rest of it is a deliberate strategy. A collection of books on a topic serves as an external memory that augments the goo we have in our heads. This is part of the theory of situated cognition, which posits that our memories are elaborated through interaction with the external world.

William Clancey, one of the founders of situated cognition, puts it this way: his knowledge of what to take on a fishing trip isn't in his internal memory: it's in his fully stocked tacklebox, which represents the stored wisdom of many, many fishing trips; if he was to lose that tacklebox, he'd lose a portion of his memory, and become less effective.

My toiletry bag for flying serves the same role. Its contents have been refined over dozens, maybe even hundreds of trips. It doesn't just have a toothbrush and toothpaste, contact lens solution and hairspray, it has soap, shampoo, cough drops, nail clippers, bandaids and more. If I forget it, and try to recreate the toiletries that I need for a trip on the fly, I almost always have to go back to the store.

Situated cognition has been challenged, and I couldn't find the perfect reference that summarized what Clancey said in the Cognitive Science Brownbag talk I attended at Georgia Tech so many years ago. But I know how I work, and I know how it's influenced by that framework.

When I'm tackling a project, I build a pile. It might be a pile of tabs in a browser, folders of links in my bookmarks, files in a directory, books from my mammoth library. These serve as references I use to generate the text, the material I use to generate my writing, but they also serve as something more. They serve as a pointer to return me to an old mental state.

If I have to close my browser, reboot my machine, put a project aside, switch to another book, I can keep the pile. I have mammoth collections of files and bookmarks, and a mammoth library with something like 30 bookcases (that's cases, not shelves). And when I'm ready to reopen the project, I can start work on it again.

I've done that recently, restarting both my work on the "Watch on a Tangled Chain" interactive fiction and an exploration of programming languages - one project I hadn't worked on for a year, and one maybe for several years. But when I found the files, I was able to resume my work almost effortlessly. With physical piles of books, the process is even more joyful, as it involves reading snippets from half a dozen or so books until I'm back into the mindset.

So thank you, my poor processor, my crowded browser, my packed library. You make me more than I am on my own.

-the Centaur

GDC 2012

Published March 6, 2012 by centaur

The Game Developer's Conference 2012 ... it begins:

GDC is an amazing conference for game developers. Imagine a film conference where Steven Spielberg's keynote is likely to be followed by an indie filmmaker roundtable discussing how you could shoot on the cheap without a license, where almost everyone at all levels is hobnobbing on the same floors. Translate to games ... and you get the idea.

I come for the AI Summit, which is generally of very high quality. I won't post any pictures of teh slides, except the one above, which gives you a flavor of the kinds of talks they've had over the past few years (not just at the AI summit, of course, but usually in the programming tracks). Ok, wait, I will post one more to give you a little more flavor:

A lot of the people in game AI say "they don't do AI"---one of them said today Academic AI and Game AI share only two letters---but I'm afraid I can't agree. I'm interested in Game AI because it's AI that has to work, which is refreshing after years of arguments between symbolic/neural fuzzy/scruffy mathy/empirical logical/architectural oh would you all please shut up about how you're better than each other and make something that WORKS and get back to me thank you very much. Not a problem at GDC!

On the first two tutorial days (Monday and Tuesday) it isn't so bad (oh and hey there Apple logo! Nobody's fooled that you're trying to horn in on our event for free publicity), and it never gets like Comic-Con ... but by the end of the week it becomes a zoo. Here are a few tips to surviving it. First, if you want lunch at Chevy's, sneak out during the Q&A of the pre-lunch session before it ends up looking like this:

Second, park in the 5th and Mission garage, and if you do, it has many food options. Skip the uber-long lines at the Starbucks in the morning (sorry, guys!) and either hit Mel's Diner (with the fastest bussers in the West) or grab a bite inside the Moscone Center itself. Also, note the excellent 'wichcraft sandwich shop across the street as another food option.

While the snacks in the Moscone Center are good, my kerfinicky stomach does not leave me able to recommend the (actually not bad) lunch they provide on site, so I usually forage for food, at Chevy's, 'wichcraft, Mel's, the restaurants of the Metreon next door, and if you parked at 5th and Mission, note the Bloomingdale's across the street? That's actually part of a huge Westfield mall, with an excellent, giant food court hidden therein that somehow I've missed all these years.

There are more tips ... like hit the GDC Bookstore the first day to pick up t-shirts and schwag, but wait until the Exhibit Hall opens later in the week to score deals direct from the publishers and only go back to the GDC Bookstore if the publishers are missing something (they will be) ... like make sure you give yourself four to six hours to hit the Exhibit Halls, that you check out the Independent Games demos, and be sure to hit the AI Roundtables if you're into that sort of thing, which is a gateway into the AI Programmer's dinner, which led to me being able to ask the developer of some of the software I use a question today because she knew me from previous years. So be sociable! That's half of what this conference is for!

But the biggest tip for someone like me, who lives an hour and ten minutes away in no traffic, or two hours in morning traffic?

Get a hotel right up the street.

More news as it happens. The AI Summit has been very quoteworthy so far and I've taken a lot of notes.

-the Centaur

How Crazy is Comic-Con?

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

How crazy is Comic-Con registration? I logged on at 8:00am this morning to get in the waiting list and by the time I cleared the "waiting room" for the signup page (at 9:10ish) it was completely sold out. This is what I saw when it finally "let me in" to register:

I hate to do it, but I have to lay the blame squarely on Gmail. Comic-Con sent me a registration form, I clicked on the link at 8:00am, just like they told me to ...

The wait is over! Comic-Con 2012 badges will go on sale at 8:00 a.m. PST on Saturday March 3rd, 2012. To access the EPIC online registration website, click the following link: (link deleted for security reasons)

. The link kept timing out, as one might expect from an overloaded system, but after 5 or so minutes of click ... timeout, click ... timeout, I started to get suspicious.

But the problem wasn't in the site ... it was in something Gmail was doing to the URL. Clicking on it didn't work; copying the link location didn't work. Copying just the text and pasting it ... got me in at 9:10AM. Too late. Ah, Gmail, can't live without you, but every once in a while...

BANG! ZOOM! To the moon. Oh well, here's hoping I get in as a professional like I did the last two years ... this year I have even more claim, I guess, as I have a second book out, appear in two more books, and am involved with Blitz Comics. Crossing my fingers! -the Centaur Pictured: Lots of stuff. Fair use and whatnot ... parody, informative commentary, transformative and educational uses, and so forth.

Involves politics, but not really political

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43. He was apparently a conservative commentator; I wasn't too familiar with him except for some of the scandals he broke. But the point, as John Scalzi said, is that he was 43. I'm used to hearing about accomplished people who are much younger than I am ... Larry Page, Britney Spears, Christopher Paolini, that last born when I entered high school. Occasionally people in that age bracket die. It's a damn shame, everyone says, they died so young. But when Andrew Breitbart died, while it was clear that he died young - to the point of spawning (what at first appear to be ridiculous) conspiracy theories - no-one is too surprised. Because a male's chance of dying of a heart attack triples when you move up to 35-44 year age bracket, and triples again when you roll over into 45-54. I'd enter some snark about white males like myself being worse off, but it doesn't seem to be the case. So Andrew's about the right age where people should start worrying about dying of a heart attack. So am I. God speed, Andrew. And may God be with us all. -the Centaur Pictured: a memento mori featuring my cat, Caesar, curling up in the lap of luxury next to the skull of one of his less evolutionarily successful distant relatives. Looks like Caesar had an easier time taking down that giraffe than his buddy there.

Five Favorite Noises

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

My friend Keiko started a meme over at Write to The End: what are your five favorite noises? The rules:

Don’t take too long on it. I’d say post your list within 24 hours. And don’t worry about trying to get your absolute top 5 favorite sounds ever. When you’ve collected 5 sounds you love, just post the list. We know this is just for fun, and we won’t hold you to any of your stated favorites. (And if you think of 5 more, you can post those, too!)

My favorite noises are:

Gabby's Purr

Dad's Whistle

The Enterprise Going to Warp

The Sound of a Lightsaber

The Engines of the TARDIS

Runner up goes to the weird noise I can make in my throat.

-the Centaur

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternally Inspiring Tome

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

This is the book that got me started on artificial intelligence ... and now has inspired me again to attack my craft with greater vigor. I was writing an essay for The Centaur's Pen column for the Write to The End site and realized it depended on a concept - true, but unprovable theorems - which isn't in wide circulation. So I've started an essay on that topic for this site, and decided to go reread Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book which introduced me to the concept.

At the writing group, the topic of the essay and Gödel, Escher, Bach came up, and we all started discussing how intricate, how rewarding, and how friendly Hofstadter's immense tome is. It's a work of genius that continues to stagger me to this day. And then my writing friends told me that in the new edition there's a foreward with the entire back story of how the book came to be.

I picked it up last night, and reading the new intro I was gratified to learn that I understood his basic thesis - that conscious intelligence arises from bare matter by grounding its symbols in correspondence to reality, then inexorably turning that grounding inward into a spiral of self-reference with no end. Hofstadter and I might disagree about what's sufficient to produce conscious intelligence, but we'd just be quibbling about details, because I think he nailed a necessary component.

But after the intro of the foreword, when I began to read the story of how this 750 page long Pulitzer Prize winning book started its life as a 20 page letter that Hofstadter decided needed to be turned into a pamphlet, I was stunned.

He wrote it in 5 years.

Well, it actually took 6 to complete, because he typeset it himself---through a happy-but-not-at-the-time accident, twice---producing an amazing work that was polished far beyond his original intention. But he wrote it while in graduate school, while teaching classes, while traveling cross-country. He put it down for a bit finishing his PhD thesis itself, but basically the book's a white hot blaze of inspiration polished to pure excellence.

I'm inspired, all over again.

-the Centaur