Another Google Reader Opinion Post

I have reserved my judgement about the changes to Google Reader until after the changes have occured. They have occured. I hate it. Here is why.

Google reader was the best 'social network' to exist thus far for me. Why? It was specialized. Google+ and Facebook duke it out for the end-all-be-all-one-stop-shop center for social interaction on the internet. This is idiotic. What we need more is specialization, think of the linux 'one thing well' philosophy. More specialized communities such as reddit, twitter, instagram, tumblr, quora, and yes - google reader have flourished underneith facebooks rule of terror. Now Google+ is taking them on directly, and that's all fine and good (whatever) but the recent changes to gReader have merged google+ into Google Reader.

When I found something worth sharing on Google Reader, I would shift+s, it, then continue on. The post I shared would go to my shared items, which is a page on the internet generated from an RSS or Atom feed. But most importantly it can be viewed by other google reader users, right inside of Google Reader. I would read what people I follow (such as my friends, or tech guru's) have posted, then I would go to my subscriptions and share posts I liked. The best part of this is that people would only see my posts if they wanted to. Now, my posts show up in my google+ timeline, and if I continue doing it the way I am I will flood everyone's inbox with my stupid internet shit they don't care about.

But the posts shared in my  stream are viewed at a different site than gReader, They are excerpts only, one has to click through and open a new tab/reader to view the content. All the good out of google reader (content in one place) is gone now. Fuuuu! . . . Fuuuu!

</rant>

Somebody else's opinion Here

To Be Human

What separates humans from apes? Evolutionary speaking, people look for a line, but there was no animal that transitioned to being a human, there was no first human. For this animal to be human, there must be other humans. To be human is to be social.

I Attempt Fighting Fantasy

Fighting Fantasy is a series of game-books. Think of an overly complicated Choose your own adventure book. Read more about them here. Like choose your own adventure, but with stamina, items, etc. OK, so lets get going on our magical, and hopefully sodomy-free adventure! The first thing I need to do (after buying a book and pulling out my metal die) is create a character. There are a few already created for me to get started with, but screw that! Am I right? (...I am)

The book I bought is called 'City of Thieves'. So, I am assuming I will be playing as some thiefing character. The first thing this character needs is a name! A glorious name for a glorious character! I lanched this name-generating web page and got "Horril Darkeyes the Wondrous". That sounds like a pretty shitty name, so lets just go with "Uncle Touchy McClumbsy-Buttons Jr."  Now that - that is a name of champions. The first thing I roll for is 'skill'. This reflects my fighting expertise. I roll a one, which gives me the lowest-possible-skill of 7. Sweet. Luckily my stamina and luck arn't bad (20 and 10, respectively). Uncle Touchy may not be skilled,  he can take average damage, but he does have above par luck! [edit: Nope. Having high luck is bad, this character is shit] So lets start our adventure!

I have entered a strange town, wealthy but nervous. Despite enjoying my own company to that of others, I decide to stay there the night. I go to an inn and then a fat mayor shows up and demands he talks to me. Apparently they have been put under a curse, yada yada Zanbar Bone, yada city of theives, ect.  or something. I don't really know, I just kind of skimmed this bit. Reading is hard! I have to go on a quest to find this Nicodemus guy. He is some old wizard, and totally not a brand of quit-smoking gum.

Uncle Touchy gets to Port wherever, and  immediately an angry looking guard confronts me. My choice is to attack him, sell something to him, or tell him I want to be taken to Nicodemus. Uh, taken to Nicodemus! Duh!

So basically some guards grabbed me and said I was ugly. My choice is to let them put me in a dungeon, bribe them, or fight them. I decided that bribing them was the best option, because there is no way these guy's are not corrupt in the city of theives!

The next choice is how much to bribe them for, 5, 10, or 15. I don't want to lose half of my money, but I think they might sodomize me if I only give them 5, so I pick 10. Uncle Touchy is not a fan of sodomy.

After a while, I am walking down a street, and a ragged beggar boy runs out and hands me a message. It says that 6 arrows are about to kill me if I don't drop 10 coins and leave. I doubt these people would share the gold, so there probably is only one. I call that guy's bluff, probably just the beggar boy trying to get some cash for magazines he is too young to read.

I was, well, wrong. Not a bluff at all. I roll a Die to see how many arrows hit me. I roll a fucking 6, and this brings my stamina down from 20 to 2. Uncle Touchy is still alive! [insert surviving penetration/sodomy joke here]

I decide to staggar bleeding into a strange house, mostly because a little girl told me to. An old-as-fuck guy heals my wounds, kind of! I am up to 14 stamina, but he takes my sexy broadsword and gives me a crappy one instead. This makes me lose a skill point and I become the world's least skilled pedophile. 

And on top of being an unskilled pedophile, I have to fight guards because I don't have papers. What is this, Arizona? (hey-o!). This doesn't look good for me, but I try anyway! I beat the guards, (somehow-- I rolled snake eyes on myself once), but I lost all but 2 of my stamina points doing so. In all honesty, it would have been pretty pathetic to watch.

I beat a barechested muscle man at a game of dont-drop-the-cannon-ball! I remember playing that when I was younger, those were the good ol' days. I pay a fat crystal-ball user for the location of Nicodimius and head off to look for him.

Nicotine the wizard-douche tells me he is too much of a wimp to fight zanybar himself, and that I have to do it. (gee, who didn't see that one coming?). Well, shit. Basically I have to buy/aquire a bunch of stuff to beat him. I am happy I am still alive at this point, so I decide to keep reading the book.

I aquire the silver arrow, but die by the hands of a giant motherflipping centipede in a sewer. Possibly the least honerable death anyone can think of, being killed by a bug while standing in shit.

I hate this book. Fuck reading.

Choose Your Own Adventure Comic

first off: check out http://checkthismusicout.com

and after that shameless plug, check this out for interesting and relevant things: http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/

Comics? Those are for kids!

Choose your own adventure stories? Those are for kids!

That's right. I am combining the two most disrespected forms of art by society -real corner-of-the-library shit- and putting them in one project. To be delivered (wait for it...) on the internet!. How could this possibly go wrong? That's right  It can't - it's too awesome.

My current project is an incredibly epic choose your own adventure comic. Right now the comic has 80 panels, some of them will need to be broken into multiple (ie: more narrative panels), so I am guessing in the end about 100 separate images, each with webcomic-like size and formatting. It's pretty cool.

Writing this was not as difficult as one would think . The first step is to get an overall idea for the project, where certain paths will lead (in most cases - where the 'correct' or 'winning' path(s) will go). I got out a pen and paper (no, really!) and wrote down some key events, some important things that I knew would change how the story worked. I then roughed those out into a flow chart in my mind, how the hero will go to the different paths. In mine, it quickly splits into three separate adventures, and two of them merge back together. It's actually much more complicated, all of the stories cross and weave about each other, sharing events (often from separate points of view). This depth is partially why I am so excited about this project. The next step in the creation is making a spreadsheet. I fired up OneNote and my tablet, but the sheet was quickly too large for that, so I switched to my desktop and used online flowchart software lucidchart.com to create the flowchart. I should have just used some desktop flowchart software, so I would have more control. The flowchart is for for reference and brainstorming. It's easiest to write these things when you can see the big picture, and not get stuck just traveling down one path.

The next step was opening up Google docs and creating a spreadsheet. In separate columns: [description, choice 1, link 1, choice 2, link 2, choice 3, link 3, type]. Type is not needed, it just identifies the panel as being a ending, narrative, or choice panel, and thus the above pie chart can be created. The spreadsheet is confusing and dense, but beautiful in it's layout, it's is set up in a way that almost all of the links go to a point further on in the doc, not previously. That is to say, if it were a book, you would always be turning further, not back.

I will update here with more details as I work on the project. My plan is to look for some artists to help while I go back over the spreadsheet, and add visual cues and basic layout information to help with the art later.

 

Check This Music Out

New Website: checkthismusicout.com

Why I created checkthismusicout.com

I created this website for 2 reasons. The first is that music recommendation algorithms are imperfect, and the second is because you are not as smart as you think you are.

Music recommendation algorithms that analyze the qualities of the music, such as The Music Genome Project, are pretty cool. There is a lot of technology there, and how it works is not what I am saying sucks. What I am saying sucks is the entire concept in general. It's because they are very good at finding music that sounds the same. Let's face it, a lot of music sounds the same. Bands can't afford to be experimental, and being experimental is not what fans want*. For more on why music all sounds the same, check out Kirby Furgusons Everything Is A Remix video series. Us pathetic humans are totally OK with this - I am not saying it's a bad thing - But what is bad is not exploring. Listening to similar sounds is not bad. If it sounds good, it sounds good! But when we forgoe exploring and listening to new artists in favor of the familiar, this is where things go sour. I look at my friend Camerons library. Not one artist is not some subgenre of metal. I try and show him some fast Techno, but he doesn't even bother listening "Oh" he says. "I don't like techno". But he has never listened to it! This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Another friend only has artists that have appeared on Billboards top 50. This drives me insane.

In summary: Be Eclectic. Music recommendation algorithms are not good at helping you be eclectic.

You don't know what you like to listen too. You think you do, but you don't. If you think I am wrong, go listen to Fanfarlo. You liked them, didn't you? Yeah. Everyone does. But you didn't know you liked them! People are too comfortable listening to the same music, and never finding anything new. Try something new sometime. Trust me, you won't regret it. But where will you ever find this new artists. Oh, wait - I just helped solve that problem with the site Check This Music Out.

As a side note, I didn't really create the site. Alec Gorge did. We have been working together on code projects for a little while now. He is the code guru. He code's like beowulf. I just get the idea's, and I help out with User Interface and Design. I also contribute some code, but this is usually replaced by him later with a mumbling of profanity and confusion. I give Alec Gorge a high five. And some money. If you play Minecraft and have an iPhone, you should totally check out his iPhone app: Adminium.

How The Site Works

It's pretty simple, you go to the site and it commands you to check out a few tracks by an artist. It's really hard to pick just a few tracks, and I don't like the site working that way, (check out this album, or check out the band would be preffered) - but it's the best way to do it. We put a few songs on there because it gives you a starting point, something to search for and actually listen to. If you like the songs, you know how to delve deeper, look at albums and such. Personally, I buy (yes, buy) music by the album and never sort by genre, but that's just me. If you don't like the songs, then just go back to the site and look at another, we have a lot of different styles of music in here.

Speaking of purchasing music, the site does not display advertisements. Instead, at the bottom of the page there are to buttons that link to amazon. If you decide you like the artist, and want to show us some love, buy them after clicking one of those links - we are part of amazon's associate/referral program. Cool, right?

There is also a page where you can view the entire database in a nice list, if you prefer that to random chance. It's even alphabatized.

 

*There are a lot of exceptions

I am not an adult

culled from the notebook on 10/18/11

Today I was called an adult. That's right, someone called me an adult. And not some guy who I held the door open for, an old teacher asked me how adulthood felt like, about college, freedom, the path of my life.

These are not questions I can answer. Fuck no.

Me? An adult? Don't I need a newspaper subscription to be an adult? I don't host dinner parties and I hum a rhyme when I tie my shoes. I take lots of candy whenever a bowl is on a counter. I've never enjoyed wine for fucks sake! I don't give a damn about televised news channels or local elections. I still watch complete episodes of Spongebob Squarepants - and not just when it's on, I netflix that shit.I don't listen to NPR or iron any clothes, ever. I don't own dress shoes or socks (not just dress socks - I don't own any socks). I don't know how voting or taxes work and I have never bought furniture that isn't filled with beans. My savings account has 17 cents in it and a month ago I went 4 days on nothing but 1 box on apple jacks. My resume, entirely hypothetical, boasts that I once stayed awake for 5 days. I have never had kiwi or owned an umbrella. My close has over 40 t-shirts and my one jacket isn't earth tone. I don't know what 401k means. Recently I ate an earthworm because a friend dared me to. When I go to concerts, people stand. My bookshelf is mostly comics. I put clothes in my microwave to dry them. I spray deodorant and my underwear is not white. I read The New Yorker for the cartoons and don't know my relatives birthdays. I have never used a filing cabinet, and I draw on placemats at restaurants. I've never changed the oil in my car or had someone call me "sir". I don't golf or play poker. My bed sheets have rockets on them, and up until 2 days ago I though "Manilla" folders were "Vanilla" folders - due to their color. (Why was I never corrected? Oh, right, I never use them!) I don't watch documentaries, drink out of flutes, or have an insurance card. I still drink chocolate milk for breakfast, every breakfast. I feel uncomfortable in Nordstroms but right at home in a arcade or lazer-tag place. I don't have reading glasses or 'special' cuff links. If you put my in a casino or at a bar, my mind would insist I was doing something very wrong and should leave. My wall has movie posters, not nautical maps or landscape paintings, I've never been to an art museum outside of a field trip. I say 'bro', 'dude', and 'peace'. If needed, I could survive 3 weeks on hot pockets. At a gym, I dont use the elliptical. In front of a skeeball machine, I wont look like a dork.

I am not an adult.

When people call me teenager - that's not right. That label puts me in the same group as fans of Glee and Twilight, eye-rollers who worry about rumors of rumors and what everyone else thinks. I'm not that. So what am I? 'young adult'? - That sounds like your complimenting how nice your 11 year old nephew looks at a wedding. "Mature teenager" doesn't give the pop-listening (and by this label, immature) ones enough credit. They have suffered more relationship drama in 2 weeks than an adults past 3 years. 'college student'? No - to many connected memories to drinking and acting like 6 year olds.

I am in a confusing crossroad of cultural identification. I can't be labeled by any symbolic of sweeping term. So what am I to do?

I don't know. Whatever, I guess. It doesn't really matter what you stereotype, group, label, or call me. I am still an individual.

More Juggling Practice Advice

I am working my way up to a 5 ball shower, with the arrival of 5 new dube stage balls (bringing my collection up to 9). Here is my personal roadmap for this:

(3 ball shower each way)
3 ball snake (follow?)
Flash 3, clap
Continuous 3 flash (clap)
some nice tricks to stay happy (mills!)
-
4 ball fountain
552
5551
-
The actual learning 5 cascade: [start from both sides!]
4 ball throws (in crossing 5 pattern, catching)
5 ball throws (flash) let drop
5 throws, catch them
move up one throw at a time.
6 toss, 7, 8, 9, 10, long as can. (don't always try to keep going continuously)

And some quotes to keep in mind:

Learn juggling with 5 in steps. First learn 5 throws. Then learn 6 throws. Go on to 7, 8, 9, 10. Then try to juggle as long as you can. Don't always try to do endurance runs. Set your goal to perhaps 20 throws and make sure that you can do that really good, and perhaps with a neck catch as finish. - Peter Olin

I found catching the balls rather than trying to go for extra throws was really useful because I didn't have to chase them all over the place. The extra throws just came naturally, and I added them only when I was ready rather than going until the pattern fell apart (thanks to advice from Steve Ragatz on practice style). - Steve Joyce

quote from this great page

The idea is that setting solid benchmarks will help. I have been doing this to a limited extent in my juggling thus far, mostly I just go for it and try to keep going continuously. I do stop myself when the pattern breaks apart (i'm throwing forwards or backwards, or the timing is off), so I have the same idea of only practicing doing it right (learning correctly!), but with explicit throw number goals, it puts definitions on this ideology of juggling.

Pretty soon (next?) I will be making a post covering my juggling equipment. In other words... Pictures!

Unicycle / Juggling act in Depauws Talent Show

Here is my act from the talent show I was in last night.

Some things to learn:

• Get the audience laughing, they won't expect skill. Surprise them.


• If you drop on stage (mess up), just laugh it off.


• When doing a routine to music, make sure it's dead solid. A mistake throws you off, because the music doesn't stop!


• I didn't ride the giraffe because backstage, I didn't have enough headroom. I couldn't fit through the door. Because I still can not free-mount the giraffe, I would (should?) have played it over-the-top difficult. Get some assistants in hard hats to hold a latter, draw out getting on the thing, be funny.


• Funny is good


• Rings are awesome for stage performance. I was juggling rings on stage beforehand, and they are large, visual, high, lots of fun.


• At least have a general idea of what you are going to do. The entire club part of the act was improvised, I wish I at least thought of some tricks to do ahead of time, practiced them.


• Just because something is difficult does not mean the audience will appreciate it. When I did 'factory' I got a huge reaction, but the mill's mess/pistons combinations were confusing. (although I did get comments on that trick after the show). Flashy is good, difficult does not = good. What I am saying is juggle for an audience, not for personal skill or other jugglers. There is a reason why taking a bite out of an apple (maybe the 2 trick I learned) is so popular.


• Be personal with the audience, casual. This may not work for everyone, but I like being really relaxed and loose, doing a trick like i'm showing the audience some cool secret. Drop a few times, they are with me trying to succeed. When I do, all the better.

On the Future of Comics and Technology Memo

Comics are a visual medium, and they are printed on paper. Here is the strange part: they no longer need to be printed on paper. Monitors are the new paper, computers, the internet, and other electronic mass communication technology is surpassing printed issues as a means of distribution. Comics are trying hard to stay away from the hellhole that newspapers have trapped themselves in, most notably, how to sell papers and compete digitally. Comics have one thing on their side that will keep people coming into stores and buying well arranged ink on paper: They are made for paper. Newspaper columns, for example, are text. Text can be transposed from one medium to another easier than any other. Comics can not traverse well.

Painting and technology is tricky. Because many paintings can't be digital, they stay away from being trapped in the ridiculously widespread (and socioeconomically speaking: interesting, but not what I am going to talk about) Internet mindset of 'open source" (free stuff is good). There is a problem when people make Digital Paintings (woo wacom!). Most artists just post these things online for free, without fear of theft of appropriation of their work. Why? Another interesting issue, but I want to stay clear of Internet societal reasoning's. I will say this: Posting something online ensures it will get stolen, kind of. Most people who steal things do not claim it as their own, this is very rare. What they do do, is steal it and punish it. The problem is not with intellectual property theft, but rather with content distribution rights. I have written a lot about this, and how to fix it elsewhere, and I think I am supposed to be talking about comics. Right then: Comics! When one thinks of comics and the Internet, usually we think of things like XKCD. Strip comics, the digital alternative to the funny papers. What I want to address is not webcomic issues, but the transition of Graphic Novels to THE COMPUTER.

In particular, the use of an infinite canvas. Comics on paper are bound to have borders, and to be read more-or-less like a book. (zag down a page, turn it, etc). When companies like Graphic.ly, Marvel, or other distributors scan their comics (not scan, as they have probably been created digitally anyway) and place them online, (behind a pay-wall, perhaps?), the transition of form is rather ugly. The comics do not read easily, and one is forced to turn digital pages as they read a paper comic that is plastered to a screen. It doesn’t work well. Now, it can work on things like tablets (Ipad) or touch screen displays, which add a level of control over viewing that is closer to that of paper. Tablet’s are still in their infancy, and most touchscreen smart phone’s just are not big enough to read comics easily on. So what does one do? How do comic creators contort their form to fit the new screen? Having the screen zoom in and follow a pre-set path (where the eye did this work before/on paper). Letterbox away and focus on one panel at a time? Tricks like these may make comics more applicable to a digital presentation, but one is ignoring the real problem: we are trying to put paper on screens. Screens have always worked better as a small view window into a larger canvas (think scroll bars and text/web site design), as opposed to a complete paginated/tabbed representation of the content. (we like scrolling over click-next-page-ing. Graphic storytelling (comic) artists have to take advantage of this property of screens. Make a comic like one could on a giant piece of paper, stretching the boundaries of what is possible in this new medium. Comics displayed on a computer are still in their infancy, which means that analysts’, reviewers, critiques, and formstudy-ers should stay the f*ck out of this medium. But we invite experimental artists to enter, and play around with creating forms and techniques, from there other artists can build on them and the medium can develop. Let  Cayetano Garza, Patrick Farley, Dresden Codak, Daniel Goodbrey, Scott McCloud, and many others experiment and create in form, and other less creative adventurous can use their work as a base. (Defiantly check out http://e-merl.com [tagline: New experiments in fiction].

I am personally playing around with different experimental things to use with an infinite canvas, And I am curious if I could do something like this for the Final project in this class.
Some Ideas I am playing around with

• Choose your own adventure comic


• Time is x axis, character moods are y


• literally parallel, crossing, circular stories


• Separate stories share same environment


• Pacing and timing can be made with physical space


• Panel layout can have more meaning: a stories L-R path changes suddenly, (start reading down or up) as plot changes


• Stories themselves can be more interesting, veritably looping, etc.

The point of this memo is not to explore the new way graphic stories could be told with a digital medium, but rather point out that this is a very necessary change, and that it’s past time for experimental artists to break some boundaries and preconceived notions of the comic environment. Thusly: It’s past time for experimental artists to break some boundaries and preconceived notions of the comic environment.