Category: Pulverbatch

The dark side of self-exposure

January 20, 2010 /

Sumana called me out on my 2007 goal-announcement entry and asked what the follow-up was for 2010-2012. First, HOW IS IT 2010 ALREADY. Second, I thought I’d already done an update on how those goals went, but I can’t find it if I did, so here we go:

Accomplished

  • Get driver’s license

Failed

  • Everything else

Okay, so at 28 I have managed to just reach a 16-year-old’s level of basic competence. Right on track! I got accepted to Clarion but couldn’t afford it, and GSP gently declined my teaching application: this indicates an unsurprising trend of nonprofit programs being happier to take my money than to give me more. I stopped running not long after I posted that entry in 2007, but I struggled into reasonable shape last summer and might be able to get there again now that I own an inhaler.

So. Let’s try this again.

My goals for 2010 are to script a graphic novel and run a half-marathon.

My goals for 2011 are to write a novel and publish a computer game.

My goal for 2012 is to be out of non-student-loan debt.

He even managed to include the Secret Bonus Criterion! (dog sex)

January 15, 2010 /

Over on the Facebook feed, Stephen kindly took it upon himself to respond to my last post with 101 words that simultaneously satisfy all my plot-criteria:

Melinda looked down at her gun. “I had no idea this had so many bullets in it,” she yelled. “Turns out I’m pretty powerful, even though I am a woman.”

A pause for dramatic effect, then: “Now if I can just quit being so sad all the time, I can find out who had sex with all of my dogs.”

Melinda had thirty dogs.

Suddenly, her phone rang! It was her best friend who said, “I had sex with your other best friend yesterday!”

Dramatic pause. Then she (the best friend on the phone) said, “My desires are tearing us apart!!!!”

So that’s that, I guess. No more need to read stories! Thanks, other stories, you can go home now.

In which scrolling through Google Reader gives me a mild heart attack

January 14, 2010 /

Rian Johnson is posting like twenty pictures a day to the just-created Brick tumblr, for some reason. Happily, today he included this DVD-cover fan art that I did back in 2005. I always meant to clean that up and redo it; I had a couple other ideas for doing similar treatments of different scenes, but I don’t remember what they were now.

I’ve been thinking about Brick a lot the last couple of days, actually, because it’s occurred to me that I have pretty simple tastes in terms of plot. Give me any of the following and I will squeal with delight (double points for setting it in high school):

  • Emotionally crippled badass tries to get to the bottom of things (Brick, Neuromancer, Veronica Mars)
  • Young woman comes into her own and learns how dangerous she can be (Howl’s Moving Castle, The Privilege of the Sword, Bone, everything by Robin McKinley)
  • Tenuous network of friends and lovers collapses under the simple pressure of human desire (Lovebot Conquers All, Battlestar Galactica, Magic for Beginners)

And, of course, the latter is why I love Scott Pilgrim. Take away the video-game trappings and the fight scenes and the hipster music references and the fourth-wall humor and… okay, don’t take any of those, they’re great. But the real reason I have such an aching priapism for those comics (which I didn’t pick up until 2008! GAH) is the way O’Malley spends so much care and attention setting up what we in the Indie RPG Club call a relationship map. He gets you to like everybody in it, gives them each their own petty little wants, and then lets them tear each other apart.

Not that I would know anything about what that’s like.

My sister got married!

January 4, 2010 /

I have to write about that, but first I have to pull some wedding pictures off the camera, which is way over there.

So instead, a quick navel-gaze: according to fan mail and a vague sense of the Ommatidia Facebook community, my writing tends to attract people who are a) very clever and gifted and b) much, much younger than me. Like, around a decade younger than me, because a lot of them are in late high school or early college.

Does this say something about the genre-trappings of the stories, the methods by which fandom propagates, or just the appeal of the format? The hoary journalistic trope to fall back on here is a bunch of rumbling about Kids These Days and Short Attention Spans and Nothing Longer than a Text Message, but I am resisting that because it’s dumb.

I suspect the reason is simpler: many of my favorite books are YA novels, because those are the best ones to read if you like stories where people do stuff and things happen. I write stories that I think I would like, and the influence of YA authors is heavy upon them. By definition, then, they appeal to young adults.

I think that is awesome. I wonder how long I can keep getting away with it?

Speaking of decades and youth, I’ve been a fan of Erika Moen’s for almost ten years now, since Scott Thigpen linked to Vera Brosgol who in turn linked to her. (Man, look at the arc of those three careers alone!) Erika just ended DAR, her autobiographical webcomic; it was sometimes explicit, always brutally honest, and very, very funny over its six-year run. I’ll miss reading it.

But I’m very excited about her new projects, in part because one of them is a graphic novel that I’m scripting! This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened! Erika broke the news first, and I’m not going to give too many more details than she did: it’s called Grimm, it’s YA, and it will probably run around six to eight “issues.” Not sure yet whether she’ll be posting a weekly page or one whole arc at a time a la Octopus Pie. Very sure that it is going to be great!

Told you I was lying

December 14, 2009 /

High-text, low-art comics like Narbonic and xkcd are fine for what they are, but the four panels of today’s Bobwhite are all anyone should need to understand exactly what a skillful artist can do with fifteen words, some posture and a few carefully rendered facial expressions. The second panel alone! Man!

Skip this one, Mom

November 10, 2009 /

In mid-writing session:

Brendan: It’s a pretty old joke structure, but as Tina Fey has pointed out, if you get to a certain gag density people don’t notice that kind of thing. Many of the jokes in Arrested Development are groaningly old, but nobody notices because they come so thick and fast.
Brendan: … This is the part where you make a joke about coming thick and fast.
Stephen: I WOULD TOTALLY COME THICK AND FAST WITH TINA FEY
Brendan: There you go.
Stephen: BOYOYOYNG

Suggestionbombing

October 30, 2009 /

I twitted this, but I think it deserves a fuller exploration. Is it possible to Googlebomb Google’s own search-box completion content via sheer volume of queries? Presumably the things you get are based on search popularity modulated by recentness, which is why typing in “blagojevich go” gives you “-vernor” first followed by “-lden.” That makes sense, but that means it’s also vulnerable to mobbing.

Say I run a company called Adkins AC, selling air conditioners. Getting my site to the top of the results for “air conditioner” is going to be extremely difficult, requiring either a lot of time and work, or a lot of money to SEO spammers whose efforts will eventually get me deranked anyway. I can buy an Adword, but in the summer that’s going to run through my budget pretty fast. Another vector of attack would be to just get a whole lot of people to search for “air conditioner adkins ac,” which is going to put me much closer to the top in the dropdown suggestions.

Now even if I make all my friends and business contacts do that, it’s not really going to affect Google’s giant sample pool. But if I pay a few thousand bucks to somebody who runs a botnet, I could have a million PCs searching for “air conditioner adkins ac” in a randomized, staggered pattern from February to April. By the time things start heating up in May, I’m the first suggestion result, and I’ve probably spent less money than a consistent Adword would cost.

Yes, this is all illegal, but much less detectably so than SEO or email spam. The botnet owners could probably make good money this way too, since you could take on hundreds of customers at a time, and the market for DDOSes-on-demand can’t really be growing that much. Now I’ve fixed the economy! Well, someone’s economy.

I know the Googlebomb wars are kind of a thing of the past, since Google’s gotten much better at deranking targeted efforts to mess with Pagerank, but suggestions are a whole different frontier–and like most frontiers, I’m guessing it’s not well policed.

New job is new

October 22, 2009 /

Areas in which I have attained some level of competence in the last three weeks, after putting off or avoiding learning about them for three to ten years:

  • OS X and Unix environments in general
  • Debugging tools and IDE development
  • Regular expressions
  • Public-key authentication
  • Bash scripting
  • WordPress hooks
  • How to page down in Emacs

It’s… it’s almost as if being challenged can cause you to grow!