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-->June 4, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Day of Recovery
Barely did anything today, other than recovering from the week and weaning myself from the frightening levels of caffeine I've managed to start putting into my body. With luck the latter will become more manageable with time.
The control key on my keyboard was broken by... er... my cat's face, so I'm also a little off my game. (The poor thing jumped for the coffee table, missed, and did a face gainer right into the keyboard. There was, to quote Two Lumps, lots of pettings and gooshyfood afterward.) Still, I'll work to get real posting done tomorrow.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:57 PM | Comments (2)
-->June 3, 2005
Eric Burns-White: I adore the phrase "calming anesthetic saliva!" I'm going to find ways to use it for the rest of the day!
(From Starshift Crisis. Click on the thumbnail for full sized helpful bug monsters!)
Okay, I admit it freely. This strip is totally being snarked because of the phrase "calming anesthetic saliva." There's nothing that could so perfectly establish the nature of Mr. Jinx than that simple phrase.
I'm liking Starshift Crisis so far. It's got Straub's sense of humor behind it, all right, but it's far more solidly story-oriented. I've been curious to see how well Straub can maintain the balance of story and gag-a-day funny. So far, it's worked pretty well.
Dude. Calming anesthetic saliva.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:42 PM | Comments (18)
-->June 2, 2005
Eric Burns-White: On the other side of the City of Heroes equation...
...there are possibilities. For example, there's a system I actually proposed for the integration of City of Heroes and City of Villains -- an integration that doesn't actually involve Player verses Player. An integration that would happily have me owning and playing both games for years to come.
So let me repeat it here, to make my negative a positive suggestion, because... it would be so freaking cool!
From my City of Heroes board post on the subject...
...which is gone. It apparently expired. Though there's older stuff on that board.
Well, dang! I guess I recreate it here.
Here's the proposal, in a nutshell:
Players who own and subscribe to both City of Heroes and City of Villains can link one of their heroes to one of their villains. They design them both, of course, but designate the other as a Nemesis. Now, so long as the hero and villain are within three levels of each other... they actually appear in missions for the other. The hero has his villain run through stock missions based on the villain's origin type, the villain has the hero showing up in attacks. The battle cry the player designated gets used, if the character has minions they're used in the attacks. The Nemesis -- obviously run by the computer -- is appropriately leveled to be a Boss automatically.
In other words, it's still Player versus Environment, it's still automated... but the content is specific and unique to the individual character. When he teams, eventually, then other Supergroup members (leveled accordingly) might appear as Lieutenants. The same engine that allows Phantom Armies and other pets to wield the powers of others could be repurposed for your enemies -- and the need to keep within three levels to keep getting the missions would prevent players from dogging it with their characters.
Think of an ambush -- you leave a bank as a villain, and your own character and the characters from his Supergroup round the corner and attack! You're a hero, having gathered the Jewel of Hera (again), only to have your own villain character crest the hill and attack to steal it. Obviously, defeating the computer run nemesis wouldn't cause debt -- it wouldn't affect the other character at all...
...except in motivation! Damn you, Captain Napalm! This time... I WILL KILL YOU!
It would be intensely cool -- it'd be an enemy you could face through your entire career. It wouldn't need PvP and it wouldn't replace PvP (if they wanted to make a PvP "Archfoe" system for the folks into it, that'd be cool too.) And it could be done with largely repurposed code, level design and the like.
The folks at Cryptic really are good at this stuff. They could make a Nemesis system like this work. They really could.
(And, if they decided one day to put in a Secret Identity system, I'd be good with that too. I'm just saying.)
Anyway -- I've been doing some reading, and it looks like City of Villains will have one archetype that specifically commands legions of minions. So... it's clear I'll at least try it.
But I seriously hope Issue 5 has some goodness for we the altaholic casual players, still.
Seriously. You design your hero, you design their arch nemesis. Tell me that wouldn't be cool.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:43 PM | Comments (19)
-->Eric Burns-White: Upgrades!
We've upgraded to the latest Movable Type install here at Websnarkia, which means that pages will hopefully load faster and maybe -- maybe -- Typekey will stop hating Internet Explorer. Let me know if anything weird happens to you.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:09 PM | Comments (4)
-->Eric Burns-White: Can I even do a "you had me and you lost me" essay for video games? And if so, should I be preparing it?
So, it had to happen, eventually. The luster doesn't stay on things forever, and once tarnish begins to kick in, it spreads quickly.
I'm fast falling out of love with City of Heroes.
This, frankly, stuns me. I mean... it's City of Heroes. I joined up before it went live! I have tons of characters! And I loves me the Superhero action! What the Hell's wrong with me?
The answer is multifaceted. First off, the game seems increasingly less interested in players like me -- somewhat casual players who enjoy multiple alts more than a single main pushed to higher and higher levels. I've been playing for over a year and while I have two characters at Level 26, I don't have any characters higher than that. And further, I have little drive to make them. For one, I'm more casual a player than the rest of my team, so they all have significantly passed me by at this point. It's hard to catch up from L26 to the 30's... and to be honest, the mid and high level game just isn't as fun as the low level game. One ends up teaming, and then the fighting starts, and then pyrotechnics are going off in all directions and if you're playing a damager you keep targeting and attacking, and if (like me) you prefer support characters you click through the same buffs and debuffs, barely bothering to target. At this point, when I play Transit, I can usually talk on the phone to someone while I play, because it's not like I really need any focus on the game. So long as I follow someone and wait until someone else attacks, I'm pretty well good. Oh, and speed boost all the people who should be speed boosted.
It's a good thing I don't need to have much focus, of course, because with bubbles and buffs and attack powers in all directions and enemies everywhere, I have absolutely no idea what's going on most of the time. I yearn for the ability to turn allied special effects off. I never want to see that freaking bubble animation again.
Now, the thing I like most about City of Heroes is the Low to Mid game, where every fight is something of a struggle, everything's comprehensible, everyone's on the same team, and you're smiting evil. I love rolling up new characters and trying out new combinations. That's just plain fun.
Of course, the new archetypes rolled out an issue or two back -- the Kheldans -- aren't available for people who don't have a Level 50 character. So, as a player who loves to play with different combinations and who doesn't love grinding out levels... er... I don't get to play with all the combinations. Ah well. C'est la vie. At least each new Issue includes lots of meaty content for me, right?
Right?
Well, no. See, the last issue -- Issue #4 -- introduced Player versus Player. And new costume options. But mostly Player versus Player. They made a big deal about Player versus Player. They extol the virtues of Player versus Player. They swear that they're not trying to take away from the Player versus Environment game and PvP will always be optional... and then the latest round of advertisements are all about the action packed excitement of 1-on-1 grudge matches or Supergroup Battles and tournament style rankings and PvP PvP PvP PvP!
I don't have any interest in Player versus Player. None.
I've tried it out a couple of times. I even enjoyed it once (in the 1-5 Level weight class, when everyone's more or less equal and no one's supertuned their character into a PvP monster). Anything above that, though, becomes an exercise in being reminded that I am terrible at Player versus Player. I really, really am. I'm bad at first person shooters. I'm bad at team based competitive games. I'm bad at God Damned Bolo. If someone else is my enemy in an online game, I'm at the bottom of the tote board every single time.
The City of Villains game is about to go into beta. That's going to introduce multiple PvP-only Zones, and reams of content only available if you open yourself up to Player versus Player and Supergroup Base Raids and the like. Well, I'll tell you something right now -- I don't play a superhero game to watch my superhero constantly being defeated and destroyed by the forces of evil, and that's what'll happen any time I step foot in those zones.
They insist, over and over again, that players who don't like PvP won't have to participate. Which would be fine, if they then don't give interviews (such as "Zeb" Cook's recent) where they talk about how the whole CoV/CoH connection is clearly designed to encourage players to fight each other. This is going to take away a lot of focus from the PvE stuff. It pretty much has to. It already has. This is what Issue 4 was about. I suspect that post CoV, there will be heavy PvP content in every issue. They're staking too much of their grubstake on it.
Which would be fine, if the PvPers hadn't all left when it didn't show up at the start of City of Heroes in the first place. They're almost doing a First and Ten Syndrome -- they really want all the people who don't care at all about superheroes or supervillains, but want to fight other human beings and powers are cool, so they're throwing in hard to appeal to them. Meanwhile their existing base -- who were hanging out because they like City of Heroes -- has less attention and, if they're not into PvP, find themselves relegated to a kind of second class citizenship. "Oh. Well... yeah, you're going to miss out on all this cool stuff... but it's okay. You don't have to do PvP."
"No no. If you're not the sort of person who powerlevels to 50 just to make it to fifty, you won't get access to the new archetypes... but that's okay. You don't have to get the new archetypes if you're a casual player or like to play alts instead of a main. That's okay."
And then there's the comic book.
Subscribers get a free comic book every month (unless they opt out -- and it probably tells you how bad the comic was if there's an opt out program for a free comic book.) Now, the comic, produced by Blue King Studios was pretty bad -- chock full of costume choices and powers we weren't allowed to get, along with apartments and secret identities we weren't allowed to have. It was like it was City of Heroes, but with all the cool comic book stuff that City of Heroes doesn't include. So it rankled a touch. And it was badly written, largely.
And yet, it was also goofy fun. There was a real sense of the City of Heroes dynamic in it -- the random pick up teams. The funky changes to voice balloons. The plethora of costume options. The Fifth Column. (Man, do I miss the Fifth Column.) In a way, it caught the true spirit of City of Heroes -- a very Silver Age-to-Eighties DC Comic spirit. Heroes are good things in City of Heroes. People make a difference. The populace is grateful and raises up monumental statues to heroes in thanks for all they do. Heroic sacrifice is appreciated. And things are generally goofy and fun.
Well. They fired this group, because... as goofy as this comic was, it wasn't good. And they hired Top Cow to produce a new comic, and they in turn hired Mark Waid to write it. That's huge. And I've read the first issue. And it's extremely well written and produced. It is.
I hated it.
I hated it because they went completely Marvel Angst on it. Within the first three pages -- oh, I'm spoiling the comic. If you care, stop reading now. If you don't read on -- they depowered all of Paragon City, they had a bunch of heroes killed off, they broke up the Freedom Phalanx -- the preeminent heroes of Paragon City, and they essentially ended everything. They're rebuilding all of the damaged sections of town. They're painting over all the billboards. All the street gangs and the like have apparently been eliminated -- and of course, the populace is really really glad and relieved that the heroes are gone. Because Heroes are bad. Everyone hates heroes.
And the Freedom Phalanx? One is homeless and insane, with a horrific knockoff of classic Rogue Split Personality Syndrome. One has post traumatic stress disorder that somehow his having superpowers kept in check because... um... I guess he could outrun the trauma. One is completely bitter and hateful towards Superman analogue Statesman for "abandoning" them for no real reason. One is sitting in their old headquarters because his powered armor stopped working and so his ANTIMATTER IS LEAKING.
HIS ANTIMATTER IS LEAKING. Okay, somehow the leaking antimatter hasn't blown apart Rhode Island. Accept that. Why is his power and his power alone the only power not to be turned off?
(And for that matter, what about all those martial artists and other Natural heroes? They make the point that Manticore's bow and arrow skills still work just fine -- though an unpowered Synapse is able to catch a freaking shot arrow. Why aren't the naturals still patrolling the city?)
Oh, and all the statues and the like are gone. Because... um... well, heroes bad. I honestly get the feeling the artists don't even play this game, because after page three, nothing in Paragon City looks even slightly like Paragon City.
In other words, it's dark and angstful and all Identity Crisis crap, and it's completely antithetical to the spirit of City of Heroes. It can't possibly have any connection to City of Heroes, since the game isn't going to repair all the crisis zone damage, much less depower all the heroes for six weeks. Heroes bad.
So, it either has nothing at all to do with City of Heroes, in which case why am I reading this... or this is the tone that Cryptic wants for the game, in which case why am I playing this?
I have held to the faith. I know there are two new archetypes and more content scheduled for Issue 5. Maybe it will be targeted to players like me. Or, maybe it won't be available at anything less than level thirty or something, in which case forget it. I'm done.
I'm still in the game for now, but the clock's ticking. They won't care if they lose me, mind. I'm just one guy. But if they lose a lot like me, they might start caring.
Unless, of course, they get all the World of Warcraft players back to play PvP.
Yeah, that's going to happen.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:40 PM | Comments (30)
-->Eric Burns-White: Because God knows we needed more terminology for this website....
(From Kevin and Kell! Click on the thumbnail for full sized evolutionary processes!)
So... here's the thing. Kevin and Kell was an eternal comic strip.
I don't mean there wasn't continuity. There was. Detailed, rich continuity, in fact. Sometimes grand, sometimes personal. Things happened for a reason. Characters evolved. Characters moved on.
But the Dewclaw family remained pretty much static. Lindesfarne and Rudy were both in high school, albeit a couple of years apart. Coney was a baby. Kevin and Kell were indeterminate "adults old enough to have teenaged kids but not too old otherwise" age. The premise was self-perpetuating. The kids would no more grow up than Charlie Brown and Lucy ever did.
And then, a couple of months back... that began to change. Lindesfarne began talking about graduation. (Which means that her friends like Tammy are high school dropouts, officially. Dude.) Coney began talking and took off her baby bonnet. And now Lindesfarne has graduated.
In other words, the strip is beginning to pull a Doonesbury Trick.
That's right. It's new Lexicon Term week here at Websnark. Which means yes, the Penny Arcade Defense will finally get added to the Lexicon, along with Mary Richards and Ted Baxter.
The Doonesbury Trick is a transitional technique in comic strips where a strip that has traditionally been eternal -- that is to say, the characters might evolve but do not age -- becomes linear instead. The term refers to a conceptual shift behind the Doonesbury Comic Strip. From 1970 to 1983, Doonesbury's cast were college students at Walden College. They went from being Freshmen to being... well, non-Freshmen, but otherwise they remained in that indeterminate early twentysomething existence. B.D. was the lead of the football team. Mike was unlucky in love. Mark was a campus radical and D.J. And so on and so forth.
Then, in 1983, Doonesbury creator Garry "not Prime Minister" Trudeau went on a 22 month hiatus -- which was unprecedented in comic strips. During this time, he turned Doonesbury into a musical. (I have a copy of the script, actually. It... was definitely a musical. Yessir.) The events of the show detailed the graduation of the cast from college, hitting all the high points and wrapping up plot. And when the hiatus was over, the Doonesbury cast were in the real world, outside of college... and aging.
In a lot of ways, this was a great move on Trudeau's part. For one thing, since he isn't a college student any more, he couldn't effectively do the college thing in his strip convincingly any more. (As proof, have a look at... well, any of the college student strips he's done in the last fifteen years. They're funny, but they don't ring true to today's students, really.) He's able instead to track the evolution of the Baby Boomer generation as they get older.
Well, I don't know that Kevin and Kell needed to do the Doonesbury Trick, but whether it needed to or not it's done. The characters are aging, and evolving. Lindesfarne's headed for college. Coney's growing up. And it'd surprise me if Rudy and Fiona didn't show some signs of getting older too.
How far will the trick extend? Will they age a little bit and then freeze in their new positions, giving Holbrook a new premise to serve as fodder for strips and storylines? Or will they continue to age in something closer to real time?
And you know... if I remember correctly, Fiona made a joke about setting her biological clock to 2007 (or 2008... not sure which and the search engine for the strips has vanished), which at the time we thought was just a joke....
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:43 AM | Comments (16)
-->Eric Burns-White: Where Madison Avenue meets Milholland Drive. *pause* No, I can't believe I made that pun either.
So. Let's talk about advertising. Yes, I'm going to snark actual webcomics today. Yes, I'm going to poke at more Shortbreads today. But for the moment, let's talk about advertising.
There's always a question, before you advertise, over whether or not it will do any good to advertise your webcomic. You know the conventional wisdom about advertising, but the conventional wisdom is often conventionally wrong. Still... I have a webcomic, alongside Soul Brother Number Nine-Fourteen Greg Holkan. You may have heard me mention it before. And while we've had a solid readership -- especially for a brand new webcomic -- obviously we want more. Lots more.
And that means advertising. Among many other things.
Now, to be fair, we had advertisements before. As part of my compensation for writing articles for Comixpedia, I get a certain number of ad banner impressions each month, and as soon as Gossamer Commons existed, I swapped over to that. (I've never felt a need to advertise Websnark. I'm not sure why. I did it -- with the worst banner ad in existence -- when that was the only website I had, but now that I have a webcomic my ad space went to that.)
But, we've had that from the very beginning. And it works. I do in fact get a number of monthly referrals from that ad. But that won't expand my readership, because we've always advertised there. If I were going to try the grand experiment, I needed to figure the best places to put ads for our strip where there were no current ads.
I was holding off on more general advertising strategy until we had a solid archive of strips for people to read through, as well. And I wanted to wait until I felt like we really had our voice. And the last couple of weeks of strips have hit on all cylinders, so this seemed like the time.
This week, we did this. We put a vertical ad banner on Something Positive, and we advertised on Blank Label Comics. For Something Positive, we took out ads on a few days on the sidebar graphic -- Greg put together a fantastic banner ad to meet the Something Positive size requirements. You see that same sidebar advertisement on this post. At Blank Label, we offered up the same horizontal ad banner we use on Comixpedia -- another excellent Greg Holkan design.
(Greg designs the ads, I pay for the advertising. This to me is way more than fair, since if we reverse the equation the ads would drive people away. You don't want to see what it looks like when I draw Sonata.)
There were two solid reasons for advertising on Something Positive. Pragmatically, Randy Milholland's strip is extremely popular -- not just with people in general, but with the sort of people I hope will actually like Gossamer Commons. The demographic seemed a good fit.
The emotional reason for advertising on Something Positive is because without Something Positive, Gossamer Commons wouldn't exist.
See, I knew I wanted to do a webcomic. Very badly. I knew I couldn't draw it, and that I'd have to find someone who could. But beyond that, I needed a solid idea and a solid premise. For a while, I thought it'd be a webcomic about Trudy Glick, kind of somewhere between Bruno and Girls with Slingshots.
The problem was... I couldn't make it work. I'm not a good enough writer, and Trudy as I envisioned her wasn't a strong enough character to support a webcomic by herself. I needed a Mary Richards, and she was one hundred percent Ted Baxter.
Now, years and years ago, when I was actually living in Ithaca, I came up with an idea for a novel. See, I knew the folklore. I didn't make up the whole "if you see a fairy you're marked for death" idea, though I think my implementation is somewhat different. I first heard about it when I was acting in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. So, I came up with an idea that a young man saved a beautiful (very much 'age of consent') fairy whose leg was caught in a trap, and so the Fae court decided they wanted to reward him instead of kill him. The joke in this story would be that they weren't very good at rewarding him. Ultimately, of course, the man married the fairy girl -- like I said, totally not Sonata, who is the fae equivalent of three years old -- and fathered children with her, and then died ironically.
As novel premises went, it was okay. The kind of novel you come up with when you're twenty-two years old and spending a lot of your time writing about crappy super heroes. But I never got around to writing it and stuck it in the back of my head. Something about the premise didn't quite work for me, you see.
So, I was casting around for an idea for a webcomic, trying to find something good. Something I could write. Something that -- while an original idea is next to impossible -- would be at least somewhat different.
And then I was rereading the Something Positive archives one day -- I don't even remember why -- and I came across this strip.
And something between the righteous "anti-cute-fairy" sentiment of the strip, plus the darkness of it, plus the phrase "winged harbinger of death" just absolutely clicked in my brain. My old story cropped back up and I was able to completely recast it in a more modern, less clich»d light. In particular, a sense of utterly dark humor that was missing from my original premise -- which was, after all, romanic comedy -- slid in, all Milholland-like. Certainly, Sonata's design was entirely designed around the kind of cute, cuddly, adorable tinkerbellesque fairy that someone like Anna would probably like to meet sitting on a toadstool, giggling and waving and marking Anna for a horrific death in the process.
So, it went without saying I'd advertise with Something Positive. I owed him, even though he didn't know it, and besides it made sound business sense.
Blank Label, on the other hand, was a happy coincidence. I was looking around for other venues -- things that could fit in my budget, which let out most of the Big Guns of Webcomics (the other advantage to Something Positive is it's affordable). But here's Blank Label, just starting up, but with six extremely established cartoonists working for them and extremely affordable ad rates for webcomics creators. Affordable rates that would put our ad banner on Shortpacked, Checkerboard Nightmare, Greystone Inn, Melonpool, Wapsi Square and Ugly Hill, among others. Solidly established strips, among the top tier, with (once again) compatible senses of humor to mine. It made a lot of sense to advertise with them.
Though I did find it morbidly amusing that this meant I was actually advertising on It's Walky. I'm waiting for David Willis to laugh and laugh and laugh at me. And then possibly do me an injury.
The Blank Label ads cost less, but Something Positive is a full day's sponsorship, which means a lot higher percentage of people seeing it. A good tradeoff.
So. The question... back from the beginning of this snark... was "is it worth it to advertise." I mean, we had a solid readership to begin with. Not huge, but pretty damn good.
Holy crap, dude.
Our page views for the past three days have been in six figures. We did as much bandwidth yesterday as we did in April. We've done more bandwidth since May 31 than in the entire history of our webcomic combined times two. We have a huge number of people coming over. And a good percentage of those people are trawling back through the archives. I've gotten e-mail from new readers. We've gotten a passel of new links elsewhere. This has been huge.
The Something Positive referrals have been higher -- but then, as I said, that's a persistent ad. On the days I've sponsored, it's always there. That's huge. Certainly, we've had a solid response from Blank Label as well.
Now, part of the credit goes to the ad banners themselves. Greg Holkan knocked himself out on them -- look at that sidebar advert again. It's great. Visually it strikes you solidly. Hooks you in. Creates a sense of dissonance that makes the viewer want to resolve. It's the same sort of dissonance -- in a different form -- that he did with the vertical banner.
The next step is to let these advertisements run out, and see how many readers stick around. Once we've done that, then it's time to advertise again, possibly in these venues, but definitely in some others as well. Almost certainly, we'll advertise on Real Life Comics -- Greg Dean actually linked to us in his links list, and we get a decent number of referrals from that, so we owe him to begin with. And again, his audience is a good one to shamelessly beg to. When Modern Tales/Joey Manley's Ad Comics Nation spins up, we'll no doubt participate. And I'll start exploring the costs over at Dayfree and Dumbrella, where applicable.
(Why not Keenspot? I can't afford Keenspot. Q.E.D. It's not because I don't feel love. There is the love! See also PvP and Penny-Arcade and Sluggy etc. Frankly, I'm stunned that I could afford Something Positive. S*P is, for right now, one of the best values in advertising.)
In the meantime, advertising has clearly, solidly worked. Now it's our job to actually keep the new readers.
Because... I find I like having people read this webcomic. Go figure.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:36 AM | Comments (20)
-->June 1, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Back to life.
The flight went mostly well, though I had tomato juice spilled in my lap. Which, admittedly, was refreshing in a way.
Today was a cipher. We got in at about two thirty in the morning (local). Waking up was very hard. And then I slept a while in the afternoon. And now, I have a bit of caffeine withdrawal and some general recovery and fatigue and junk.
Tomorrow, the alarm goes off. And we get back to work in many ways.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:48 PM | Comments (7)
-->May 31, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Dead Dogs.
It's twelve sixteen in the morning, Pacific Daylight Time, technically on Tuesday, and my vacation is at an end. I should be asleep, but then there are a lot of shoulds running through my head right now. I just learned a college friend died over the weekend -- any number of shoulds crop up from that, of course. I should have written more during the vacation itself. ("Oh, I'll do Shortbread essays. I'm sure I'll make the time to do one or two of those a night." Yeah, right.) I should have read my mail earlier so I could go down to the bar and have a proper libation to the memory of my friend, but I didn't so it's going to have to be Room Service Tomato Juice. It can't be Room Service Beer, because I can't drink beer. Fermented products produce gas and that's not on the list of approved substances. Wine is all wrong for Charlie, and if I want scotch or the like, I have to buy a full bottle. (Though it will come with glassware and "five mixers," whatever that means.)
So I'm going with tomato juice and an iced tea chaser -- a combination which my friend Russ, who I always go to Baycon with, now officially refers to as a "Bloody Nigel." -- and I'm considering old friends and I'm considering the vacation past. By this time tomorrow I'll be in Maine, and then a few hours later I'll drive the cat home to New Hampshire, and get back to life and preparations for The Visit, of which you'll hear more later.
This is the Dead Dog of the convention -- the time which, according to Weds, takes place between the official end of Con and the point where the very last person leaves the hotel. Walking through the halls, the ineffable presence of reserve has again settled on the Doubletree. Con attendees, fans, fen, call them what you will -- last night they were hooting and hollering, wearing corsets and body paint and Regency Wear. Tonight they're largely in civilian clothes -- perhaps with Genre tee shirts, perhaps in black, even one or two still in corsets -- and they speak in hushes. This is a hotel again, not a Con, Dead Dog or not. The freedom to be as geeky as you like has been replaced with the sense of quiet restraint. The sense that you have to fit to the world of the mundane again.
Sitting in my hotel room, sipping my Bloody Nigel, and considering past friends and past days of the Con, I am in the Dead Dog.
Approximately one hundred and thirty two hours ago, I was in Chicago, Illinois, in the airport. I was on something of a high, as I'd had a milestone that only truly fat people like me will understand. I had risked booking my flight in Economy Class, coming over -- and yes, that was actually a risk. The last time I did Baycon -- two years ago -- I had to fly First Class because I didn't fit in the seats in Economy. Comfortable, in its own way (at that weight, no seat was comfortable for four hours) but a rather expensive hot towel. This time, not only had I been able to sit in Coach for the flight, I hadn't needed a seat belt extender. I haven't flown on a plane without needing a seat belt extender for years.
So I was in a good mood, and a little puzzled at the architecture of this airport. I had landed at concourse A, and my connecting flight was on Concourse C, so to get there I had to descend a stairwell from the well lit and cheerful concourse to a dark undertunnel with peoplemover belts and strange, flashing neon lights and music playing up above. It was like we had to crawl down into the tunnels underneath New York in the old Beauty and the Beast television show to go from one concourse to another.
Ascending the stairs back into the light, I rounded a corner and started heading to my terminal, when I got slammed into bodily and thrown to the floor.
The missile in question was about fourteen years old and running at a full tilt -- headlong, as it were. He wore a white shirt with -- if I remember correctly -- a blue 7 on it. And a hat. He had a hat. He was thin faced, and dark skinned, and kept on his feet even as I went down hard, right on top of my backpack. He froze for a minute, startled, and then spread his hands and gestured -- like he was a conductor moving his orchestra into a decrescendo -- saying "Sorry, guy." And then he took off running again, as fast as he could.
A United Rep yelled after him, then came over to see to me. I was still on the ground, trying to absorb what all had happened. We took the time to do a fast inventory. The backpack was intentionally designed to protect the powerbook inside it, and in that task it succeeded completely. My powerbook was and is completely fine. However, there were sacrifices deeper inside -- a pair of sunglasses that are now dead, A broken set of headphones.
And, more expensively, a wholly destroyed Palm Treo 600 Cell Phone, and a sacrificed iPod.
The United Rep was scandalized. But there wasn't much we could do -- the kid was long gone, and I doubt we could put out an all points bulletin for "Number 7." With the speed he had put on, I had to figure he was already boarded. As it was, I wasn't in (too much) pain, my powerbook was okay, and... well, the iPod was a first generation. Substantially larger than current models. Probably due for retirement (though I would have preferred to "retire" it to my mother or the like). And of course, it had all my audiobooks for the trip on it. The Cell Phone and PDA bothered me more -- it was a nice Treo -- but I'd been kind of wishing I could drop my overly expensive Verizon Wireless service anyway.
If all this sounds like I'm justifying... you're totally right. But what the Hell. It was done. There was nothing left but to board.
By the way -- United doesn't have meals. They have "snack boxes" you can buy. I got one with beef jerky, because at least that has decent protein. Tomorrow, I plan to buy food at the airport to eat while on the flight.
Twelve Forty Eight, and the Dogs are still Dead, and the Bloody Nigel is history too, and I'm thinking about Charlie. Charlie taught me Star Fleet Battles. He worked Dunkin Donuts in Kenmore Square my Freshman year of college, and used to slip my friend Robin and I donuts for free, with a smirk on his face as he did it. He had the best smirk on his face. Four years later, he was in a motorcycle accident that left him in a wheelchair. As far as we know, it was complications from that that led to the infection that cost him his life a few days ago. Knowing Charlie, he was probably hitting on a paramedic as he was being transported to the hospital. And knowing Charlie, he was probably doing it pretty well.
One hundred and nine hours ago, I was discovering the joys of Caltrain at the Palo Alto station. Caltrain is light rail -- I know people who call it heavy rail, but just because heavy rail travels on those same tracks doesn't make Caltrain heavy rail. It was entirely commuter, with two levels of seats -- groups of two seats side by side on the bottom, and a small stair to single seats up above. I was sitting in one of the upper seats, noticing how utterly quiet the train was, watching the adjacent tracks whiz by, as we passed through Redwood City, through San Carlos, through Menlo Park, South San Francisco and San Francisco itself. The architecture of each new suburb and community was uniquely bay area, and very cheerful. There were differences -- we passed by one Honda dealership that was open and inviting. We passed by a BMW dealership that was entirely enclosed by thick cement walls and dual strands of razor wire across the top. But it didn't take long, all told. I was reading a book my father gave me -- The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. The first book of the Dark Tower. I was enjoying it a great deal, and missing my iPod. At the end of the line in San Francisco, Shaenon Garrity was waiting.
Shaenon Garrity is just about what you would expect her to be. She looks not unlike her self portraits on certain Narbonic Sundays. In attitude and appearance, she's more of a brown haired Helen than anything, though something about her hair and bearing practically screams Mell. She walks quickly and she is more fun to be around than put near anyone.
We did the Cartoon Art Museum, which was amazing. It was incredible. They had Will Eisner Spirit pages. They had originals of Windsor McKay's Rarebit Fiend. They had animation cels from "What's Opera Doc." They had a cover from ROM, Spaceknight that I owned when I was younger. It's what a museum like that should be, completely, and I'm utterly glad I'm a member. I got to use my card, too. And I bought the latest Peanuts collection as well as a Windsor McKay collection. And then Shaenon and I went walking, all over. We walked through Chinatown and up hills. We walked down past the Modern Art Museum and later down to Fisherman's Wharf. We saw slacker sea lions -- dude, these were a pile of sea lions lying out on platforms. You totally knew their parents were bitching, too. "When are you going to make something of yourself. Do you want to end up like your father? Lying in the sun being stared at by tourists all day? For this we sent you to college?"
But that wasn't the thing that blew my mind.
Nor was it the fact that we were able to go to the Apple Store... of the Future. An Apple Store... of the Future is just like any other Apple Store, but on two levels (not that they have any more stuff, but they duplicate a bunch of the stuff for the second floor), with lucite stairs leading up. I got a new iPod -- 20 gigs, which is about right for me -- and therefore restored my universal understanding. I also got a car charger but failed to get an iPod case, which it really needed.
No, the thing that blew my mind happened when we were having lunch.
"I have something for you," Shaenon said.
"Oh?" I asked. Grinning, I would add, because she was taking out her sketchbook. I'd seen it once already -- she'd been holding it up with my name written on it in the train station where we met.
"Yup," she said... and proceeded to give me not a sketch, which is what I thought she was preparing to give me. Instead, she proceeded to hand me several pieces of bristol board.
Specifically, comic-strip shaped pieces of bristol board.
With originals of Narbonic comic strips on them.
In fact... the originals of every weekday Narbonic I've ever Snarked excepting one with Zeta (which had already been given elsewhere).
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Later, she showed me the editorial and layout offices at Viz, and that was also cool. And we talked for hours. We talked about cartooning and comic strips and things that have nothing to do with either. I had it reinforced that Shaenon Garrity is one of the coolest human beings on the planet. And she gave me comic strips. Of the stuff I snarked.
Jon Rosenberg didn't give me comic strips. I'm just saying.
One ten am. Russ has gone to bed. We've set a wakeup call. I should be in bed too, but I can't. Not yet. I can sleep on the plane anyhow. It's no big deal. I just have to be largely mobile enough to pack up art and Narbonic strips at a FedEx Kinko's in the morning, to be shipped separately. I need to keep writing. I'm not ready to face sleep. I'm not ready to let the dog fully die. I'm not ready to face dreams just yet.
Seriously -- what kind of hotel doesn't have sample bottles of vodka for easy purchase? Or a fucking minibar?
I got back late, back on Thursday. I was supposed to meet Russ so we could make it to Redwood City for a show for 7. But I missed my train going back and had to take a later one. But, as it worked out, he was told 7 but the show started at 8, so we were among the first people there. The show was the 5th anniversary for Hookslide, which is an a capella group. Jon Pilat, the group's phenomenal bass and beatbox, is a friend of Russ's. And I am still in awe of this man (and the whole group) days later. I will own their album. Oh yes, I will.
One-eighteen. I'm still not asleep. I'm still not writing fucking shortbreads. I'm on vacation. So long as I avoid that bed, I'm on vacation. It's still Monday. It's a day off, not a travel day or a travel recovery day.
So long as I'm still up, and still writing, I don't have to go to sleep knowing my friend is dead. I don't have to think about how many years it's been since I called him.
I got the message from Andrew, as I said. I passed it along to other folks I knew, as I said. That's what you can do when you hear news like this. Because in a way, it's remote. Charlie and I haven't spoken for years. We weren't in each other's lives any more. That's not as true for some of the others. Every twelve or eighteen months I speak to Matt. I trade e-mail somewhat more often with Ernestine. I actually saw Andy (not Andrew) just a couple of months ago, and Robin not too long before that.
Only it is too long.
There are others I had even less contact with. Erin just got married -- she left a voicemail to that effect... last Summer, I want to say? I got it too late, sadly. Abbe I spoke to something like four years ago. In ways, that whole clique of friends took the place in my head of what most people consider "high school friends." Of my high school friends from actual high school, one of them died before graduation, one I've completely lost touch with, and the last (Andrew) came with me to Boston University, and so he crossed over into that other group.
My "college friends" list, on the other hand... that's almost more Frank and Bankert and Christy and Becki and Karen and John G. and the Rose and Seanna and so forth and sundry (and now Lisa's added into that). Many of them are actively in my life. I saw them not too long ago, in fact. So even though I didn't go to college with them, they're my college friends, my actual college friends are like my high school friends, my high school friends are completely out of my life otherwise....
One-twenty-six, and the Dead Dog continues. A Dead Dog party of one, now that Russ is asleep. Maybe I'm the last person awake in this hotel, the last person keeping Baycon 2005 alive.
It was an excellent convention. It really was. The Art Show was better than I'd ever seen. The panels were excellent. The "Con Suite" was a tearoom of exceptional skill and taste. We arrived eighty four and a half hours ago, more or less. And then it became a whirlwind.
Baycon is a "whole hotel" kind of con. They do things like project genre films and looney tunes cartoons up onto one whole outdoor wall of the hotel, overlooking the pool. Some people float in the pool and watch Flash Gordon. And there are beautiful women in bodices and corsets and miniskirts and bikinis. And some men too, because... well, that's what happens. There are stormtroopers and jedi knights, and a few Battlestar Galactica (new variety) officers, and "gratuitously torn bodysuit Padm»" and all the rest. There are beautiful women who are convinced that they're not, because they don't match up to the traditional ideal of beautiful women, so they hide and cover up and stay quiet until they get to a Convention, when they are surrounded by their own people, and then they lean far forward in corsets and tease and taunt and are saucy. Here, they are with their kind, and they know they are beautiful, and they revel in it, and so do I, because I get to see them.
Registration took forever. Every time there was some sort of Baycon Queue, it took forever. For all that Baycon goes really really well, any time they actually go out and take money or do any kind of organized activity, it takes forever. But everyone is pleasant enough, so you just go with it.
I bought two Bob the Angry Flower compilations and a DVD of three -- count them, three -- Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials.
I also bought Chase Masterson's music CD. Chase Masterson, for those who don't recognize the name, played Leeta on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Her presence was startling, to say the least. We don't get media guests at Baycon. To my knowledge, they don't want media guests at Baycon. But Ms. Masterson was extraordinarily nice to fans, cheerful, friendly... and staffed her own table in the dealer room. Which didn't get nearly the traffic I would have expected. I mean, she was on the best of the Star Trek series (and now the hate mail starts), she has really begun to fill the female Bruce Campbell/B-Movie Science Fiction niche (she's in Manticore for Christ's sake), and... well, she's a very attractive woman with red hair. These are usually monumental magnets for at least male fen.
So I bought a CD from her. Jazz standards -- big band era. Nicely done, I would add. So I have no regrets. Besides, I'm male fen too.
Fifty-six hours ago, more or less, I was interviewed by Sumana Harihareswara. This was the only real point during the weekend that I had my Websnark hat on. Ms. Harihareswara is an enthusiastic and insightful interviewer, who knows Webcomics well. When I know where the results of said interview will appear, I will let you know. That's my promise. As we talked and she recorded, I also had a glass of Scotch. So I don't entirely promise that I don't sound overly enunciative on her tape. I might also have advocated that New England secede from the United States. I'm not saying I did advocate that, but it was very good Scotch, so we really can't rule that out.
Don't you imagine New England seceding -- maybe with New York and Jersey and Pennsylvania thrown in for good measure -- would be a profound relief to the Southeast and Midwest? Well, Illinois (Chicago, anyhow) would probably want to come along with us. And maybe Wisconsin and Michigan.
But I digress.
One-thirty-nine. I wish I had more tomato juice. I don't want to call for more though. Russ is sleeping. And he needs to be somewhat awake in the morning. I just need to show up and haul crap. I don't want to go to sleep, damn it. I knew I wouldn't, even though I didn't know how complex my feelings would be, tonight. This is one reason why I have Wednesday off from work too -- so I can recover from the jetlag and travel. The other reason is my flight lands at eight minutes after midnight. (Which means I need to put up Gossamer Commons for tomorrow night before I go to bed too. Good. Yet more ways of putting off sleep.)
Thirty-four hours ago, I met up with my friend Carol. I always hang out with Carol for a while on these trips to the bay. A lovely and intelligent girl, who has the lapse in judgement necessary to hang out with me, Carol took me out for driving, for food, and for errands. Multitasking.
While we were out, I hit Best Buy and got a case for my new iPod. It's translucent white silicone, and looks like a condom. It's even ribbed.
"Twenty dollars for a piece of plastic?" Carol asked.
"Now now," I said. "It's silicone. Which means it cost even less to produce."
Russ later on made reference of the fact that I've put breast implant technology to new and better use, protecting my iPod from scratches.
The new iPod is significantly better than the last one, by the by. Lighter, smaller, better sound quality. I would walk around the con listening to it, letting it form a soundtrack. Giving me a chance to up my pace. Which I needed to do, because remember back earlier in this essay when I was tromping all over San Francisco, up and down hills and through Chinatown and Viz and the Apple Store... of the Future? Well, back when I was 160 lbs heavier I could never have done any of that. It would have killed me. Shaenon would have done a lot of sitting around watching me wheeze. This time, I could. I mostly kept up with her (or she managed to make me think I did, anyway).
And for three days after, I was sore. I was powertaking ibuprofin and generally trying to get over my muscles being on strike. It wasn't really until today that the last shin splints faded. As a result, I feel like I can walk for miles. And the iPod helped lengthen my stride even when it hurt. Which is why I needed the condom case.
While I was out with Carol, I also grabbed a pair of shorts, as this is California and I was warm. And some socks. The shorts told me I'd lost another four inches off my pants size. The socks told me "it's good to have new socks."
One-fifty-three. I'm dragging now. I'm tired. I want to go to bed. But I don't want to go to bed. It's like I was nineteen again, fighting through fatigue to stay up a few more minutes, to conquer the night.
I'm not nineteen. I'm thirty-seven. And I've had several friends die now. And each one seems so odd to me. Like it just shouldn't happen.
Thirteen hours ago, I learned I'd won four pieces in the Art Show Auction. All angels, because that's the kind of thing I bid on. All absolutely beautiful, drawn by Lawrence Allen Williams (a "Lawrence" whose name spells out LAW.... my In Nomine senses are tingling).
And it's easiest to describe my pieces in terms of In Nomine. Penance is clearly a Mercurian. (Admittedly, a naked one, and vaguely NSFW if you work is uptight). Solaris is clearly Gabriel. Penumbra is clearly Blandine. And the truly remarkable and beautiful The Ascendent (which is also just barely NSFW) is one of the best conceptual designs for a Bright Lilim as I've seen. I like my art.
It's after two in the morning. Russ just woke up briefly. I've stretched it as long as I could. And it's all right there and yet there's so much unsaid. I haven't talked about the shouldercat, or the goth jewelry girl. I haven't talked about sword shopping or Shaenon's theory of Green Lantern Acid Tests or the night we ate sushi by tradition or room service. I haven't talked about the lack of a fridge despite our request, or the difficulties in finding appropriate food as a result, or all the fucking melon I've eaten. I haven't talked about coffee or lattes or the lack of sugar free syrup or explaining lamination or being more or less bathed in chocolate fondue I couldn't even eat.
I haven't said anything, but I've said too much.
The dog is dead.
And I need to go to bed. Five minutes to upload to Gossamer Commons, and then the oblivion of sleep.
Goodbye, Charlie.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:16 AM | Comments (28)
-->May 30, 2005
Wednesday Burns-White: [w] Brevity
The day was surprisingly exhausting. Eric's still away, and I have very little for you. I am very sorry.
I did join the ranks of people who had seen Episode III tonight, though. (I didn't really want to join the hordes of chav cosplayers descending upon the town centre that Friday night, and had no company until now.) I don't actually have a useful opinion; Star Wars isn't really part of my nostalgia (didn't see the originals sensibly through until just prior to the special edition releases to cinema, and I was quite drunk when I did), and all the appropriate remarks about corniness or whiz-bangery and such have been made. This mostly leaves poor Dead Milkmen filk, and I'm not about to do that in a public forum. It's just not right.
(Mostly: "Okay. That was shiny. Can I see Serenity now?")
It did strike me to mention, however, that there's something very wrong with a world where the trailers before a bloody Star Wars film are all desperately uninspiring. For example, I now actively don't want to see War of the Worlds, because it seemed indistinguishable from a run-of-the-mill disaster flick, and that's wrong. At the very least, I should merely be apathetic about an adaptation of War of the Worlds.
I don't even remember what the other stuff was.
That's incredibly depressing.
Anyhow. Eric will be in a plane tomorrow. Tomorrow, we will talk about webcomic site infrastructure some more. Or something.
Tomorrow.
Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:32 PM | Comments (15)
-->May 29, 2005
Wednesday Burns-White: [w] Priority Origami
You may be familiar with the concept of the "fold". In the case of a broadsheet newspaper, it refers to what you see when you fold the closed paper and rest it with the top side facing upwards. The closer to the top any given bit of content is (headline, photo of current event, ridiculous column by popular writer in enclosed tabloid supplement, &c.), the more likely it is to catch the eye of the passerby, who will then purchase the paper. Or so the theory goes. For web designers, the fold is the point at which your reader has to start scrolling down to read the rest of the page.
Now, that point's pretty arbitrary. The best thing we can do is make somewhat informed guesses, do a lot of reading, compensate for certain alternative browsing environments, make the layout as semantically correct, as fluid (or, at least, as spare), and as gracefully degradable as possible under the circumstances, and roll with it. Still, the salient point remains: you want as much of your essential content -- stuff like core navigation, certain forms of advertising, a reasonable amount of branding, and, uh, your comic -- as near to the top of the document as possible, because your audience is there for a reason.
All of this blather is so that I can pull a nit out of my hat and beg of you, the creators, the people: Please resist the urge to randomly push your comic's starting frames below a sensible fold point in favour of chrome or secondary content. The more stuff you cram at the top of the page, the less important your comic seems to me.
I love Bruno to death, so it rather pains me to cite it as an example, but I'm going to anyhow because it's recent, and because it self-corrected. On occasion, such as this past week, Chris Baldwin will completely displace the comic with a very large announcement for something else -- in this week's case, a book release, along with the cover art. At first, where the comic was, you got the cover art and a lot of text, and there was a fair amount of scroll until the day's comic became visible.
Now, I'm not opposed to scrolling, but, at a first glance, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't a comic that day because instead there was a book announcement. There's the space the comic occupies... and it's full of something else.
As of Friday, possibly a bit earlier, the comic was on top of the announcement, albeit dwarfed by the cover art. I don't know if Baldwin changed his mind about positioning, or got complaints, or what. The problem was remedied, and that made me happy, but there was still a nagging sense of disorder. Like the rug had been a little bit pulled out. And I remember having seen this sort of thing before. Perhaps other people don't notice or keep track of trends like this, but it registers for me as a metaphorical collar-grab -- "no! Look at this first! It's more important than the whole reason you're here!" I'm sure that's not the intention at all, but that vibe still remains for me.
I've seen a fair few comics do this sort of thing over the years. A large, splashy logo shoving the comic a little ways down... and then the adbanner at the top gets a little bigger, a little fatter... and then it seems like a good idea to put a great big link in to the con countdown, or the news about the new book, or the big graphic letting people know that such-and-such another strip has moved to a new site...
The more emphasis goes to an element which is not vital to the purpose of a comic, the more one gets the impression from a site's design or layout that the comic's not as important as other stuff. Stick an extra lump of text, or an extra picture, on top of the strip one day? What you're telling me is that the comic's not as important that day. Let that build up, and you're telling me that the comic is sliding down the list of priorities. Consistent elements are something else again (although I'd beg people not to take up huge amounts of vertical screen real estate with logos if they don't have to, especially if nothing else usefully occupies the horizontal); fluctuating ones, though, diminish the amount of trust I have, as a reader, in your priorities.
It's not that I'm too lazy to scroll. Far from it.
This sort of fluctuating element thing can be done well, and unobtrusively; consider Achewood, whose occasional insertions of update status/short announcements don't displace the comic in any significant fashion, and whose on-again, off-again banner ads slot gracefully into the layout. It's more spartan than some approaches, but it does work, and work well. The eye is drawn to where it needs to be drawn.
Which is pretty much all you really need to do.
Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:08 PM | Comments (17)
