Author: Teel

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
-Leo Buscaglia, author(1924-1998)

Okay, so I recently read this article about how one guy would like to see webcomics make better use of the things that seperate the web world from the print world. Now, he bashes the infinite canvas and Scott Mccloud pretty bad, but he does have some not-unreasonable suggestions. Some of them I have thought of and have scripts for interactive comics hiding from me somewhere among my infinite ‘stuff’. Others I don’t think I like (telling the same story in different genres based on the end-user’s preference? Shouldn’t the genre of the story have been selected in the first place to help tell the story, not because it is irrelevent to the story?), or think need to be re-thought-out. Plus, I love the idea of the infinite canvas, even if I haven’t exactly worked out how to implement it yet.

I’d like an interactive infinite canvas, please.

Some people, having read this article, have said that making comics interactive turns them into games. I disagree. Partially because I read the article and it turned something on in my brain. Something in the article must have seemed like a challenge to me, because my brain started working out ways to create the interactive comic being called for here, in one way or another. But an interactive comic not for the sake of interactivity, but for the sake of the story. And I did. Come up with an idea, I mean. For a comic where an unconscious choice by the reader towards the beginning of the comic changes the way the story unfolds. And where the story has an entirely different character depending upon that unconscious choice, but where I basically don’t have to do any crazy programming or complicated server-side stuff or even do any extra drawings or script-writing to create the alternate versions than I do for the first one I create. So then when I saw them say it would turn the comic into a game, I thought of the comic I’m going to have created very soon (if I were at home, I’d have already drawn quite a bit of it by now), and disagreed. I’ll show them what I mean when I post it in a week or three.

(Assuming the world doesn’t end Sunday/Monday.)

No idea what that was about. Some lyrics in my head, maybe. The Murmurs.

I guess I’ve gotta crack this next Smirnoff Ice Triple Black to take the allergy pill I forgot to take the second I walked in the door. See, in Phoenix, when I’m staying with my dad, I have to keep my system flush with antihistimines. I’m allergic to the whole fucking house. Maybe it’s the cats or the mold growing in the walls or the residue of my mother’s old hand-rolled cigarettes (I have the same thing in her old car…) I don’t know exactly what it is, but i know that I can’t get to sleep if my eyes are so watery and swollen that I can’t close them and I’m sneezing constantly and leaking mucous like a running fire hose… SO, i’ve taken the pill, and let’s see if it works fine in a pool of Smirnoff Ice…

Tonight, something like five minutes after I arrived here, I left again, to go see Confidence (now playing at a theatre near you). Here’s as close as I’ll come to writing a review of that movie unless someone specifically asks for one (which I doubt): Good cast, I mean, hey… Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Weisz, Ed Burns and Paul Giamatti. Good cast. Probably a good script. Or maybe it was a good script before a sloppy edit. I think someone cut ten minutes off the end because they thought the full two hours was too long. Anyway, that’s not the review, this is: I left the theatre, and the feeling that I had wasn’t satisfaction with the movie (though I was not unsatisfied by it) or any other of a wide array of emotions one can come out of a movie with, but the impression that what I needed was a stiff drink.

Except that I’m not aware of any reasonable bars in walking distance of here and it was just about midnight, so I just settled for this six-pack from the Circle-K. I’ve been barrelling through it fast enough to actually get a buzz, which, if you’re familiar with my metabolism, you know takes effort and practice. Anyway, that’s nice. I feel a little better now. A little off, a little like I better go pee soon, but better. Oh, and did I mention that based on an article I read earlier I’ve got an interesting idea in my head for a subtly interactive online comic? I think it’ll be a fun little one-shot when I’ve drawn, colored, coded, and posted it. Fuck, and I’ve got to write it, too, don’t I? Maybe I’ll work on that a little tonight before I pass out on the couch.

Do you think this buzz will help? It doesn’t seem to have hindered my writing so far. As far as I can tell. What do you think? Anyway, it’s Nogales tomorrow, and I suppose X2 on Friday, though I’ll admit I don’t feel the anticipation for it I suspect I ought to. Probably all my expectation is used up on other things. Like The Matrix sequels. I mean, I knew X-Men would have a sequel in 2003 before X-Men came out. Because Brian Singer told me so at the Comicon. So, yeah. I even had a good idea of the story, new characters, and so on, because most of it was already decided. But The Matrix. I’ve been waiting what? Almost four years for these sequels. Plus the game. Plus the Animatrix DVDs. All my anticipation for sequels is used up. I hardly care to see tiny men fight giant spider ladies or whatever…

Okay, I can feel the numbness starting to kick in at my extremeties… my fingers, my feet… my nose an dmy upper lip… Time to shut down for a while, I guess. Got to get up early to… ride in a car for half of forever, then see about my clandestine Mexcian mission, then ride in a car for the other half of forever. Yep. And maybe write some of that fancy new webcomic. Night. Or, again, probably morning, when you read this. Good morning.

First, something I was working on earlier and gave up on:

“I have recently been experiencing an unreasonable amount of difficulty with my dial-up internet access. It seems that five out of six time I dial the ISP, I get connected, authenticaed, and am able to send data, but nothing comes back down the pipe to me. The sixth time, it comes down, but apparently with much difficulty. The data is coming down slower even than it was a week or two ago with the same ISP. THe difficulty started occurring BEFORE I spilled on my keyboard, and thus was effecting my iMac and is now effecting my Powerbook as well. More often than not, once I’ve found a modem that will connect AND send data back, it hangs up on me after a couple of short minutes. I’m beginning to get fed up.”

And now on to the regular post, while I have online-ness to work with. Something about timing.

First, hooray, Easyspace agreed with me that things were a little off in my records and that instead of everything expiring 5/3/03, they expire 7/15/03. Which is really good, because we’ve earned less than one third of the amount required to pay them off. I might have been able to make up part of the difference out of my own pocket despite not selling more than the one painting, except that Cox Communications is convinced I still have one of their analog converters, and stol $150 out of my checking account. A month ago. I’ve called half a dozen times & everyone tells me they’re powerless or (as they finally did today) that they refuse to give me my money unless I can come up with a three-year-old receipt showing that I turned the box in. Except that, thinking that my final bill from Cox had already come and gone, I converted all my old Cox bills and receipts to heat about 6 weeks ago. And I doubt anyway that the receipt in question would have been saved anyway. So, they’re “checking their warehouses” to see if they can locate the box. Which means that they’re going to keep my $150 dollars, perhaps forever, while they do nothing. There is little else I can do about this, considering I DID give them the box and I DON’T have the receipt. Which seems like another reason to hate Corporate America, to me. That even if I could afford to take them to court, I couldn’t win, because I can’t prove they have the box. I offered to come down and look through their warehouses myself, considering they’ve been “looking” for four weeks and have come up with nothing, not even a completed unsuccessful search. Note: they began the same search two and a half years ago the first time they tried billing me for the same box they lost, and after several conversations (fewer than I’ve had this time) they decided not to bill me, saying they’d found it. I guess no one wrote it down that way, though, because they swear that they still don’t have it.

What I want to know is, what the fuck would I be doing with a Cox Communications Analog Cable Converter box, 100 miles from the nearest Cox service? Holding it out of spite? The people I was talking to today about it were clearly not rational, agreeing with me that there was no reason for me to have it, but that unless I could prove that they had it, they were going to keep my money. Then my cellphone’s battery died after about ninety minutes of this, and then before I could find their 800 number and call from the landline, their billing department closed for the day. Fuck. What’s the deal with irrational company policies? Fuck Corporate America. Fuck the company line.

Anyway, yeah. So, I’ll update the banner later this week. Probably when I get back from … away. Tomorrow my father and sister come up to Pine, then tomorrow night I go back down to the valley with them. Then Thursday Angela and I go down to Nogales and back. Some time after that, by bus or other means, I return to Pine. Hopefully before the beginning of time. That is, I’m taking a clandestine trip to Mexico three days before the beginning of Year Zero, and then returning to my mountain hideaway, 100 miles from the nearest metropolis and a mile up, before Year Zero begins. … I haven’t been watching the news lately… have they verified that Saddam is dead … and recovered his nuclear arsenal … “yet”?

So, there’s that one song by Portishead I know for a fact I like. So I was browsing Apple’s new Music Service, and they have most of the album that it’s on, but they list it as “Partial Album” so you can’t buy the whole thing, just individual tracks. Which might have been fine, since I thought I’d just like that one song. Except that one song is the one not available for purchase through the service. What a silly thing.

Tonight, while watching Felicity on DVD, I invented a new version of Solitaire. I tried several times, and kept coming up with too-easy games. When I did come up with an interesting one, I wasn’t sure if it was possible to win, so I played it and played it and played it, and after around seven tries I hadn’t come close to winning, but could see that it wasn’t 100% luck that determined winning, so that was good. It’s mostly similar to the classic Klondike version of Solitaire, and I won’t try to explain how to play, but maybe I’ll show you. Likewise, I can’t say if it’s exactly easier or exactly harder than standard Klondike. Certainly more complex, but … as far as easier or harder goes, I’m not the one to ask. I think it may be both. Harder because more cards are locked up at the outset of the game and fewer are available in the …uhh… remaining deck which is accessible only every third card as in Klondike… but also Easier for some, because the modification makes it possible to use a longer-term strategy… more cards are face-up at the beginning of the game, though not necessarily accessible. Okay, so. I got some new decks of cards from my sister, and was playing with them, but didn’t just want to play Klondike again… and didn’t want to go get a book and learn some existing game… so I modified it to give myself a challenge. Oh, and on the eighth-or-so game, I did win, so it is possible.

Okay. Bed. Or wait, is that Sara waking up? Maybe I’ll chat with her for a bit as I drift into unconsciousness…

As I predicted yesterday (with quite a bit of help from the half-dozen Apple rumors sites I read more often than any webcomics site), Apple announced a new music service where users can download music from all five major labels for about $1/song, or starting at about $10/album. Which is nice. I’ve just set up my existing Apple account to include the Apple Music Service, and by giving them my credit card number and agreeing to their EULA (the bulk of which I read carefully, to be sure I properly owned any music I bought and couldn’t be charged unexpectedly, and to be sure there weren’t any weird clauses like MS puts in theirs about scanning my hardware and software randomly and sending whatever the software finds to MS), I can now browse fairly easily (I say fairly because I use dial-up – on Broadband this thing must be like butter) through over 200,000 titles and click ‘Buy Now’ and have the song or songs begin instantly downloading to my computer where I am legally allowed to copy them to up to three Apple computers, as many iPods as I own (currently zero), and burn them to CDs (or now DVDs) as often as I’d like (though I can only burn unmodified playlists up to 10 times). I think I’ll buy Eminem’s Academy Award Winning Lose Yourself, which is only available on the 8 Mile soundtrack album, the rest of which I’ve never wanted to own.

Plus they updated their line of iPods to a sleeker design (if you remember the old iPod design, you might not have thought it possible, but the new design is not just smaller, it’s sleeker and sexier) and capacities of 10Gb, 15Gb, and 30Gb. They’ve also updated the internal software to include not just the music, address book, and calendar that the last version had, but now three games (including Solitaire), an Alarm clock, and some other advancements, including the ability to use AAC files instead of just MP3 files. Oh, and if you buy the 15Gb or 30Gb models, they come with the new dock included, so you just set your iPod in the docking cradle, and it stands upright so you can read the screen, communicates via Firewire (or USB 2.0 for you PC people), recharges, and if you have powered stereo speakers plugged into your dock, will allow you to play through them directly from the iPod/dock. So, yes, most of the updates (including a new version of iTunes, the Apple music software) were about how the iPod handles music, and draw attention to it as a music-playing device. But I remember back when the first iPod was introduced, a column in MacWorld magazine theorizing about the future of the iPod. It theorized a gradual evolution of features included in the iPod that would eventually lead to a device that had all the features of what is currently considered a ‘handheld computer’, plus a slew of Apple’s own bits and pieces, that will have totally changed the paradigm for portable computing without anyone noticing until it had already happened. I thought “Great!” when I read that column, fully believing that that sounded like the best way for Apple to go, and a believable way, too. So far, every software update, the calendar, the new games, the alarm clock, the address book, all the music-related updates of course, have been available to even the earliest iPod adopters, with the first 5Gb models. I expect that as Apple slowly turns the iPod (whose name never really said ‘music’ to me, but which makes a lot more sense as an all-in-one portable computing device that evolves over time) into the handheld computer of the future, the fact that someone bought the v1.0 hardware won’t leave them behind – they’ll still have the cutting edge device because the cutting edge is in the software, and even the earliest iPods were dual-processor machines. I mean, heck. Apple just released an update that increased battery life on all iPods across the board. People who thought their batteries were building up a memory and might need replacement have found new life by downloading a software update! And today they’ll be downloading much more. There’s a part of me that wants to wait, to buy the first color iPod (for surely when OLEDs become cost-effective, Apple will put them into iPods) or the first iPod whose whole front face is a touch-sensitive color screen. (The current rank of iPods have gone to all touch-sensitive controls, no moving parts. The original iPod control wheel was actually a spinning wheel, but now… a state-of-the-art touchpad instead.) But how many years away would something like that be, if it ever occurs? And what small limitations would it bring to my ever-upgradeable software experience on an iPod I bought right now? Is this the last iPod before color, or one in a long line before color? Or will they go with another idea I’ve had, but which I want to put together a proper proposal for and somehow get into Steve’s hands, which will mean the iPod never needs to go to a color screen, and which will allow the eternal upgradeability of old iPods to be carried forward into the full-color future?

I’ll stop. Really. I’m getting silly. I should probably be working on something else right now. Cleaning my room. Or that proposal for Steve. Something. Okay, I’ve already discovered a problem (for dial-up users) with Apple’s Music Service. They offer a free 30-second, high-quality preview of any song in their catalog, so you can be sure it’s the one you want to buy before you buy it. Which, with broadband, would start playing immediately. They have thought of us poor dial-up customers, and have an option to allow the entire 30 seconds to buffer before playing (which is nice, and allows for uninterrupted playing, instead of 30 seconds of music playing over 5+ minutes). Except that I wanted to just double-check on a song before I agreed to pay $0.99 for it, and the second time I wanted to listen to the 30-second stream I’ve already heard, it had to start downloading it all over again. Sigh.