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January 13, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Submitted Without Comment: The Most Important Post I Will Ever Make
As most of you know, the "submitted without comment" posts I do are generally me uploading some reference to a strip where Websnark is referenced (directly or not) or Weds and I appear, or something like that. So it is with today.
The joke -- and I use the term as loosely as I possibly can -- is that I always comment extensively on those posts. Parenthetically.
Well, I'm commenting on this one, and I'm doing it directly. There is a full comic strip behind the cut at the bottom. (Why is there a cut? The strip is seventeen panels long. I don't hate everyone reading this.
Said comic strip has been produced by something of a supergroup of webcomics professionals. It's like Abba, that way. And it's also available -- for those who might be interested in sound and music and effects -- as a complete Quicktime MP4 file. An MP4 which, at the specific time this post automatically appears in queue, will be being presented at my Arisia panel "The Best Webcomics You're Not Reading."
A panel, it's worth noting, Wednesday is also at. This is important, which you will see momentarily.
As a side note, my thanks to the Arisia programming staff, and to fellow panelists Rob Balder of Partially Clips, Ferrett Steinmetz of Home on the Strange, and Kelly J. Cooper of Comixpedia, who helped set this whole kurfluffle up.
I also need to thank Ursula Vernon, Scott Kurtz, Greg Holkan, David Willis, Rich Burlew, Peter Venables, Josh Lesnick, Chris Crosby, Howard Tayler, Kristofer Straub, Frank "Damonk" Cormier, Brad Guigar, Darren "Gav" Bleuel, Jon Rosenberg, Shaenon Garrity, Meaghan Quinn, and the master of funk himself, Randy Milholland.
Also, my thanks to Bill Mallonee (formerly of Vigilantes of Love) for his permission to use his song on the MP4.
So. Behind the cut....
Submitted Without (Further) Comment.
(Wow.)
GAH! Corrected Rich Burlew's entry! It is now on there.
Oh. By the by?
She said yes.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:01 PM | Comments (149)
January 12, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Necropost: On the Culling of iTunes
(Written January 26) Recently, I underwent a Culling of iTunes.
Part of the joy of iTunes is the astoundingly simple access to music, the convenient management of your music library, the trivial capacity to download new songs, and somewhat inflexible but always cheerful organizational tools. I've used it for years now. And, as I mentioned some time ago, iTunes allows us to express our musical tastes without exposing them to the sniffs or snorts of others. If we want to enjoy ourself some Pat Benatar or "The Final Countdown," we can and we do, and it's no one's business but our own.
But there is a down side to this. Once a song enters your MP3 collection... it is generally a very cold day in Hell before it leaves it again. You begin to hoard your songs. It's as if you can't bear to lose any of them. Even if you're not interested in listening to something, you might want to listen to it someday. So your music collection grows and grows, and you begin to come up with new playlists of stuff you actually like and might want to listen to so you don't need to weed your way through a thousand songs written by ten thousand people about things you couldn't care less about to begin with.
Which is where I was. I had like forty gigs of music and another thirty gigs of video, which meant I couldn't fit my collections on either my old 20 gig iPod or my spiffy new 60 gig iPod video. It was time to Do Something About It.
Naturally, I backed stuff up to external hard drive, 'just in case,' but otherwise I was brutal. Stuff I actively liked stayed in. Stuff I had an active interest in listening to or developing an appreciation of stayed in. Other stuff went. Frank Zappa went, because even though I know he's brilliant that brilliance hasn't translated into an actual desire to listen to the songs. And if Frank Zappa went, no one was sacred.
I cut it down to about seventeen gigs of music. Most of the video made the cut (though I wiped most video podcasts, because I subscribed to them originally because I didn't have video for my Video iPod, and now I have tons of it. The complete run of Justice League Unlimited. The complete Venture Brothers. A near complete Penn and Teller: Bullshit. A disturbingly large amount of Power Rangers: SPD -- but more about SPD another time.
And now, when I drive, I just click on my library and hit shuffle, and listen. Sometimes I click to the next song because of mood, but almost everything that's on the playlist is something I actually wouldn't mind hearing. And that's cool.
As a side note, one of the miscataloged things I saved was my rip of the Hitchhiker's Guide CD sets -- the ones of the original radio shows. And because I didn't quite understand how to rip CDs of audiobooks before, it both wasn't tagged as an audiobook and was broken up into 2-5 minute chunks. And as it turns out, that makes for surprisingly fun brief bits of humor interspersed among the music. It seems weirdly intentional.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:23 PM | Comments (5)
January 11, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Making up the missing days: The Malfunction Junction snark
(From Malfunction Junction! Click on the thumbnail for full sized customer appreciation day!)
This is a necromantic post, traveling back through time from the bright, cheerful vantage point of January 18. As promised at the top of the year, there's a conscious choice to 'make up' missed posts, because... well, because. And this then would be the first of them for today.
Because it's being written seven days after the fact, it becomes entirely possible that time itself will become unravelled and the universe will be devastated by vortices. I've read science fiction. I know how all this works. And the evidence of that would seem to be 'today's' Malfunction Junction snark, which is about Matt Milby's January 13 entry, even though this snark is officially from January 11. You see? Space and time are becoming unravelled and all is horror!
But enough of that.
I've been a fan of Matt Milby's since Gin and the Devil -- one of my favorite strips from its era. It wasn't, sadly, one of Milby's favorites. He didn't want to continue down the continuity path. At the same time, his style of humor isn't exactly "gag-a-day." So he decided to write what we'd have to term a journal comic, based upon his own life and his own experiences. This is less the Overcompensating method of flights of fancy built around Jeff Rowland's life, and more a sharply grounded in reality exercise in unmitigated sarcasm and bile. And it's fantastic. You honestly believe that this is Milby's view of his world -- the most banal experiences become fuel for the most biting comedy.
The epitome of this process resulted in the now-infamous October 24th strip from last year. This was one of the worst moments of Milby's life, alchemized into... well, a really kickass comic strip. It was absolutely note-perfect, and even today I read it, grin, stop, and think Jesus Christ. That really happened.
'Today's strip' isn't quite the same thing, but it represents a solid example of the Milby form. Here's something that happened. Here's Milby dealing with that something through drawing a comic strip. Here is an absolutely savage breakdown of the core stupidity of the moment. And here's me laughing my ass off at it. I absolutely believe this strip happened exactly as Milby described it.
It's possible these strips are a kind of therapy for Milby. It's also possible these strips are just a way of putting Milby's life into sharp relief. Or maybe he just does them because they make him laugh. I dunno. All I know is he does them, and that's pretty cool.
On... to January 12!
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:01 AM | Comments (10)
January 10, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Portentious!
This was a day of too much activity, though none of it was bad. Technical problems to be dealt with early. Things at work. Play rehearsals (I'm in Big River, and I get to be eeeeeeevil). And then a trip to Maine and dinner with my folks. I ate Bison and Bacon with cheese. And then shopping, and....
You get my point. This was a day of a fast note.
For the record, however, there is Arisia this weekend. Weds and I will be there, at various webcomics things. I will let you know more soon.
I will mention to snarkoleptics in the Bay State area that the 3 PM panel "The Best Webcomics You Aren't Reading" should be an excellent time. The Ferrett of Home on the Strange will be there, along with veterans myself and Weds, Kelly J. Cooper and Rob Balder from last year's. Seriously, if you're reading these words and you're at Arisia, go to this panel.
Off! To bed!
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:59 PM | Comments (9)
January 9, 2007
Eric Burns-White: The State of the Steve Jobs Reality Address
In Apple's defense, it's a very nice cell phone.
You have to understand. I'm a long standing Apple fan. My big graduation present from high school, back in the mists of time before most of you were born, was an Apple IIc with monitor and printer. One of my first purchases in Seattle was a behemoth Macintosh IIvx that was surplused from Boeing. Later, I upgraded to a Duo 230 with DuoDock (man, I loved that combination). The first major purchase I made when I established myself as middle class was one of the last generations of the Pre-Mac OS X Macintoshes, the Power Macintosh 8600. (A computer still in nominal use today, I would add.) At my day job, I sysadmin for Macintoshes. I've been a part of the purchasing decisions for the school, and had a significant role in close to four million dollars worth of Macintoshes and other Apple products over the past decade.
And MacWorld Expo is one of those wonderful times of year to be a Mac user. We get our Brent Sienna on -- we go all pretentious and excited, and we tell the world about the exciting world we live in that you too can be a part of. And the centerpiece of MacWorld Expo is the Steve Jobs Keynote, where he comes out onto the stage in his sweater, lights gleaming off his receding hairline, and proceeds to redefine reality with the power of a Balseraph and the conviction of a Preacher who sells used cars on the side. It's fun.
And so we came to this year's MacWorld Expo. And this year's Keynote. Coming off of a banner Apple year, no less, with a lot of excitement in the air. There's a new operating system coming out. There's Core Duo 2 computers. There's things, and we're full on ready to grab hold of them. And we were waiting for Brother Steve to come out and show us the promised land.
Well, we have seen the land of milk and honey now. Only I can't say that the milk is healthy for drinking and the honey would trigger my dumping syndrome, and I'm feeling at best some Christmas Let-Down.
It's not that the previewed products are bad. They're not. They're solid pieces of engineering. They're exciting. They're well designed. In short, they're Apple products.
They're just not products... well, for me. Or, for that matter, for most of the Apple faithful.
There was the usual "here's how much better business has been" gloating, and the obligatory Microsoft mocking (including yet another Mac vs. PC commercial -- which continues the odd but moderately delightful casting of the Macintosh as the somewhat staid straight man and the brilliant John Hodgman getting all the laughs as the PC. Frankly, the Mac's a better computer but I'd rather spend time with the PC.) And then we actually got to the new product announcements. The charting of the course for the year.
That course opened with the Apple TV -- a box that looks like a very thin Mac Mini. The device is designed for WiFi or network access, and it allows full on synchronizing with a Macintosh and streaming from up to five others. It then feeds that signal at 720 dpi into a widescreen television, letting you take all the video you suck down from the iTunes store and otherwise get it into iTunes and watch it on... well, your television.
And it looks good. That much is very, very true.
But... it requires component video or HDMI out, and a widescreen television to use. And... it has a 40 gig hard drive, which is smaller than my iPod Video currently has. The iPod Video I can put on a dock and watch on the television I already own, rather than necessitating me buying a new television.
Which doesn't make the Apple TV a bad product. It's not. It's really slick. But it's nothing that'll be in my life any time soon. For three hundred bucks I could get some pretty staggeringly cool video components for my current setup. And if I did get a new HD television, that money would probably go a lot farther towards grabbing a full PVR for it, instead of an interface for the more limited selection of video in my iTunes folder.
(I actually have a ton of video in my iTunes folder, but a plurality of it came from my Tivo, which means it's not high definition in the first place.)
But fine. A cool thing I can't use is still a cool thing, and it was clearly setting the stage for something amazingly cool.
Really.
In Apple's defense, it's a very nice cell phone.
It's called the iPhone, and it's been rumored approximately as long as there has been Apple and Cell Phones. It is a full on next generation Smartphone, which looks as easy to use as Apple products usually are. It has monumental integration with contact information, it's widescreen with a massively cool touchscreen interface -- it's absolutely the next generation of these things, and at four or eight gigabytes of storage--
Um...
Well, it'll replace your Nano, dagnabbit! And it's gorgeous and exciting, just plain working and blowing the socks off of any other phone in the room. Which is good, because it's as expensive as any phone in the room, with a two year commitment. But it deserves to be. Seriously -- this thing is just astounding.
But, it's exclusively on Cingular, and Cingular doesn't work all that well in these here parts, and I'm not going to pay that much money for something that might not work all that well for me. If I were in the big city, I'd think a lot harder about it -- it's that much the sex -- but right now it wouldn't make sense at a fifth the price, and I'm sure it wouldn't work financially for that amount of money.
Even if they worked well in my area, that is a lot of money, and while I have an iPod Video and a cell phone and a PDA, and this wouldn't cost as much as all three of those did... I already have an iPod Video, a cell phone and a PDA, and they're not going to give me my money back for those.
Okay. So there were two cool things -- and an intimation that Google and Apple were getting really cozy together, these days, and an announcement of Paramount coming to the iTunes store, which... um... well, cool, I guess. And then they had a musical number... but it was okay. They hadn't done "One More Thing." There was always "One More Thing" and it would blow everyone's socks off. Maybe it would be Leopard related, or a MacBook Tablet (though the new third party ModBook is poised to come out at least until the cease and desist). Or something.
But there wasn't. There wasn't one more thing. Except an annoucement, that Apple Computers was becoming Apple Incorporated. After all, they sold digital music, and music players, and phones, and consumer electronics. It doesn't make sense to call themselves a computer company any more.
And... that was it. A thing for the television, and a cell phone. No computer announcements. No Leopard update. No software update. No announcement that the Intel Adobe Creative Suite was about to come out....
...and here we were. At MacWorld Expo (not AppleWorld Expo), we had a couple of really cool consumer electronics announcements, and a musical number. The tone for the year has been set, and it ain't the Macintosh.
But in Apple's defense, it's a very nice cell phone.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:12 PM | Comments (32)
January 8, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Sadly, even after all this time I always think of "Digg'um" the frog from Sugar Smacks.
(From Digger! Click on the thumbnail for full sized most current episode for free!)
I find Digger fascinating.
On the one hand, Ursula Vernon's art has always blown me away. It's always worth remembering that Vernon didn't come to comics via comics, but instead was a fine artist and illustrator who kind of segued into comics. It shows in her style, which is perhaps the most beautiful pen and ink work on the web. Vernon knows how to take black and negative space and make them into astounding pieces. There are days I swear the woman makes woodcuts which she then presses onto the internet through some kind of woodcut-internet-pressing process.
But as pretty as Digger can be, it's the story that keeps bringing me back. And the Shadowchild's story in particular is fascinating and robust, and I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The Shadowchild, you see, is an innocent. No one knows what he is or where he came from. Some think he's some kind of demon. Others don't know what to think. All Digger seems to be able to figure out is the Shadowchild means no harm and is a nice enough fellow when you get to know him, but he's major trouble because in his innocence, he can wreak havoc.
Recently, he had been causing trouble for the local tribe of hyenas. You see, the hyenas had tried to eat Digger. They failed in this, and later Digger made amends by saving the life of their chieftain. However, the shadowchild had wanted to know why eating Digger was a bad thing, but eating other animals wasn't. The extremely rule of thumb explanation was that "you don't eat things that talk."
So the shadowchild has taken to asking all the wild game if it could talk before the Hyenas could attack. Thus the Hyenas couldn't successfully hunt. Ever. The game was being scared away by an inky black hellish thing that was worried about its health and communication skills.
So how does one explain to an innocent that it's okay to trust that deer don't talk. Especially when the innocent responds "but what if just one can talk?"
As said in the strip referenced above, being good is hard. And it is, because what's good in one situation might not be good in another. The strip itself is done in pure black and white ink, but if there's one truism that's carried through, it's that the world Digger lives in is made up of shades of grey. The hyenas had attacked the temple guards (the veiled), but they also made peace with Digger. The leader of the guards, Captain Jhalm, is at best an antagonist, but he also saved the life of Murai.
It's hard to be good.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:47 AM | Comments (15)
Eric Burns-White: I wonder if it was like the chip we stick in our cats....
(From A Softer World. Click on the thumbnail for full sized adorable dystopia!)
There's lots to like about A Softer World. I like it's koan like invocations. I like its composition. I like its sense of aesthetics. I like its use of color (or grayscale) as a stylistic choice. I like its sense of humor. I like its sense of life. I like its sense of horror.
This edition, however, is interesting by how much is conveys in so little. Snarkoleptic Soul Brother Number One Mckenzee once described strips like A Softer World and his own Sinister Bedfellows as haiku-like, and that's a good description. The language here is simple and brief, but absolutely laden with imagery.
This installment frames a dark future, but it gives it a very human face. And at the same time, it makes you laugh. That's a hard hat trick to pull off, but they manage it.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:08 AM | Comments (4)
January 7, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Erratatica!
I've had some interesting (and sometimes spirited) reaction to my recent City of Heroes post. I stand by it, but in writing, I let enthusiasm and memory guide my writing, and said memory failed me in a couple of areas. Areas which should be acknowledged and corrected.
For those who are new around these parts, when I need to issue a correction -- and it does come up -- I leave the original essay up. It seems to me that the nature of discourse requires we have our errors stay in the record.
The errors, it's worth noting, were not in the thesis. The core theses -- that Issue 8 was a superior edition to City of Heroes which both introduced great innovation and highlighted other innovations that have come along to distinction, leading to a revitalized game that deserves to be played -- I stand by without comment. The errors were in supporting materials.
Probably the most egregious was in terms of the various holiday events that have happened. I had forgotten that last year's winter event had temporary powers (including a really cool Jingle Rocket Flight Thingy, and yes indeed, a costume part) aplenty, for example. And I ascribed the first co-op Hero and Villain mission to the Halloween event, instead of to the Valentine's Day event from significantly earlier. The halloween event didn't have a co-op mission -- but it did have the ability to add a permanent costume slot to a character, which was a really cool perk.\
The reason this is important is twofold, really. One, because it again highlights that the innovations listed predated Matt Miller's heading of the development team. We need to remember that Jack Emmert initiated many if not most of the innovations that have revitalized the game that he was one of the core visionaries behind.
The second reason this is important, however, is it really does highlight the stronger public relations position the game is in now. I remember very clearly, when City of Villains was scant weeks before release. I was in the beta, and like most folks in the beta I loved City of Villains. There was a groundswell of excitement both for the expansion/new game, and for what it implied for the future of City of Heroes itself. (Things like Elite Bosses/Archvillain scaling, the more mature mission design, contacts who gave cell phone numbers early instead of late in a contact tree, and... well, Masterminds, which remain the coolest archetype ever. I still wait for the last to be ported in some fashion into City of Heroes -- perhaps by creating a 'duplication' powerset). There was some real, hardcore excitement.
Which is when "Enhancement Diversification" was first announced. And it was announced on the beta forum for City of Villains, where anyone who broke the NDA to tell the regular community about it would be subject to losing their beta status and very likely from City of Heroes entirely.
Naturally, someone immediately broke NDA. And a huge maelstrom burst. Now, I don't actually think the Cryptic team was trying to deceive anyone. I think they had decided the Enhancement Diversification scheme was the best thing for the game, and they were actually going to their beta testing community with it because they actually meant to... well, beta test it. However, the way it all went down made a lot of people angry and upset.
And it made them angry and upset just a few weeks before the first sequel game and/or paid expansion of the game came out. Scant weeks before they wanted people dropping money in stores -- and recouping a lot of investment and development costs -- their most devoted fanbase was, to be blunt, losing their shit.
That was, to put it mildly, a public relations problem. It got people angry when they wanted them frothing with excitement. And it was hardly an isolated incident.
Matt Miller, on the other hand, has built significant momentum and enthusiasm, both by having several successful big changes and events in a row, by teasing future upgrades and new elements ("oh, gosh, we accidentally turned the Wentworth's contacts on on the test server! How could we have so foolishly let people see these potential future plans that we're doing -- woe! WOE!")
Now, there's been problems too. Maybe most significantly, there have been some persistent bugs in the game. One of the most serious I'll quote from the Known Issues page:
Gauntlet and other Inherent Taunt powers currently do not effect Lieutenant, Bosses or Underling rank critters.What this means is one of the lynchpins of team-based City of Heroes, the Tanker, has trouble with his most important power. Tankers are designed to absorb massive amounts of damage, so they have the power to attract the attention of the enemy, so that the squishier heroes can avoid being smacked around. Take those abilities away, when it comes to the most dangerous enemies, and that's a major problem. Heck -- one of the things I love in Veteran Rewards is the team base teleport, and I've been dumped out of it back to the zone I just left more than once.
But despite persistent issues, the majority of players seem to be pretty darn happy and excited about the future. Not blasé, not pissed off, not accusing the devs of immorality... happy and excited for the future.
That's public relations. And they're doing it well. And that's a good thing for this game.
Had I gotten the details right the first time around, that would have been made clearer.
(I also had a couple people point out I described the Event co-op missions as 'task forces,' which mean something quite different in the game, and I called the old Faultline a Hazard Zone instead of a Trial Zone. I regret those errors too,)
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:44 PM | Comments (17)
