What do you do when your psychological tank's empty?

I'm facing that today. I had an exhausting week at work, classes started Wednesday, and I DMed for 4 hours last night. It's now Saturday morning, and I'm trying not to crash.

You recharge. You do those things that truly satisfy, that excite you.

Of course, you have to find those things. A lot of people seem to think that TV recharges; no. TV relaxes. Different thing.

We're looking for something that energizes. It's different for different people, of course. For example, I'm recharged by:

• Books
• Unusual magazines
• Good anime
• Comics
• Experimentation

What recharges you?

This is what happens when I play around on the computer for an hour:

About a week ago, I received an email asking me my opinion on the Kindle versus the Sony eReader for a particular situation. I offered some advice, and was asked to post the conversation on my blog here, for the world's benefit. So, here you go:

My girlfriend wants to buy me a Kindle. I'm about average to slightly above average on my level of reading; about 1 book a month.

I have done a bit of reading on the net, and I really can't tell if a Kindle or Kindle 2 or Sony reader or some other option would be best.

Doesn't Sony allow you to purchase ebooks from various sources and share it to other devices, while Amazon ebooks are only useable on Kindle?

I'll start with the final question. All of the ereaders support formats other than their store's standard format. For example, besides the Kindle Store's .azw format, Kindle supports .mobi, .prc, .rtf, .pdf, and .txt natively, as well as Word documents through a free conversion service. Sony's and B&N's have similar setups.

The Kindle's big advantage is its market share — it offers a wide variety of current and older books, at (usually) lower prices than its competitors. Generally, more of your favorite books will be available for Kindle than the others.

As to which Kindle is best: For what it's worth, I've owned all three major versions of Kindle: 1, 2, and DX. I like the DX because of its larger screen size; it's like reading a hardback book compared to a paperback. It's just nicer that way. Most of the folks who prefer a Kindle 2 want to be able to put it in a purse, or just want something very lightweight; I personally don't have those needs. The DX isn't particularly heavy anyway.

As to whether you should get a Kindle at all: I'll say that I was a fairly heavy reader before getting my Kindle (several books a month), and I became a *heavier* reader after getting it.

Its free samples made it much easier to check out genres I never would have looked at before. If friends recommend a novel, I can easily check out the first chapter or so, without standing in a bookstore for 10 minutes.

Would you recommend the K1 or K2?

I prefer the K2 to the K1, as I find the K1's scroll wheel clunky. It works, but it's not nearly as convenient as the K2's mini-joystick.

A lot of people who like the K1 point to the SD slot and the replaceable battery.

On the SD slot — it caused quite a few problems on the K1, as something that would often get stuck or otherwise confuse the OS. Also, there's no need to store tons of books on the Kindle; all the purchased books are backed up by Amazon, and anything else would be backed up on one's computer (I should hope!). One will never be away from a computer long enough to get through a thousand books stored on the device, if you get my meaning.

On the replaceable battery — that type of battery (Lithium-Ion, I believe) dies even when it's not being used. So a replacement will age about as quickly as the battery in the Kindle, so when the Kindle's battery dies, the replacement will already be about dead. Moreover, Kindle 2 and DX battery replacements are done with overnight shipping, so one would only be without one's Kindle for a couple of days.

K1's a fine device, but I just don't think it's worth it when it has a clunkier UI. But that's just me!

Naturally, I've been thinking about Apple's iPad a lot lately.

It's a lovely device with several limitations. I can see four major markets for it, and each gives me pause.

Geeks have a chicken-and-egg problem. They have two options:

• Use it as a light laptop. Problem is, geeks need disk space for all their cool tools, and the iPad only has a few dozen GBs of storage. That's going to frustrate folks, as they realize they can't even download a full season of a TV show.
• Live in the cloud, with all data stored on the web. Problem here is the iPad's lack of Flash support. If you want to live in the cloud, you need that. (Five reasons: Hulu, Pandora, CNN video, FarmVille, and let's be honest, lots of porn sites.)

Moreover, the iPad is a closed system, not meant to be hacked. How much will that interest the average geek? Oh, quite a few will buy iPads just to look cool and to tinker with it, but I don't geeks massively turned on by it.

Retirees would be perfect iPad users — they use computers infrequently, mostly for email and occasional light web surfing and shopping.

But imagine you're 65, you walk into an Apple store, and you tell an associate that you want an iPad. You'll have six choices. How big of a hard drive will you need? How will you know? You can't compare it to your current computer's hard drive; it'll be far less than that.

Then the associate will ask about whether you want the 3G modem with the data plan. How many retirees will be able to answer that question?

This assumes that the average retiree is willing to spend $500-$800 for an iPad. They're going to look at that price tag and remember the Best Buy circulars advertising $250 netbooks. Remember, they don't care about technology by definition (or they'd be using their computers for more than just email and light web surfing).

Students also seem like a natural fit, especially if there are textbooks. They can bring iPads to school, with all their textbooks on them, presumably non-3G models so they can't surf the web while in school.

Makes sense, but Robert Scoble's son, a high school student, doesn't think so. He points out that he would never put a $500-$800 device in a bookbag (and risk damage), nor bring a device that expensive to school where it would attract thieves and soon be stolen.

And that's assuming strong textbook support. Textbook companies are not known for their technological savvy.

The most interesting market, to me, are organizations. If you want to make your millions, make an iPad app to store and display medical records, synced to a local data server. Every doctor's office would have a couple. Imagine a factory manager with one of these. Or a meat inspector.

The problem there is that organizational adoption tends to be slow and unpredictable. You can't make a success off a few organizations, either.

But that gets to back what the iPad is, the first commercial proof-of-concept tablet computer. This is the first reasonable tablet, but we're not quite there technologically; nobody can cram absolutely everything onto a tablet yet. This is not The Tablet.

This is the kick-off. This version of the iPad may not sell like the iPod or iPhone did, but we've now entered the age of the tablet computer.

Thanks very much to FOX5 for inviting me to talk about Apple's iPad on their morning show today. It was a thoroughly professional environment with friendly people. I hope I can come back soon!

Here's the video:

One primary design goal for Gunwave is simplicity. I want players to be able to pick up the game and start playing very, very quickly — without needing hours to absorb the game's rules.

When I first wrote the Gunwave rule set, its D&D roots showed clearly — each player chose a Race and a Specialty, just like D&D's race and class. Each Race and Class came with a menu of powers, from which the players could select a certain number for their character.

Players enjoyed this process, but I discovered several problems:

• Players spent quite a bit of time reviewing their options. They wanted to pick just the "right" powers.
• Players quickly became critical of powers that didn't seem useful, dismissing them out-of-hand.
• After one game session, players complained about having picked "useless" powers (sometimes simply because those powers hadn't been used in that session), and wanted to swap out their powers.

So I built a number of archetypes, common character profiles with a simplified menu of powers. Players now had a smaller menu of powers to choose from, but each power was tailored specifically to that character's role and purpose in the game.

Did I succeed? No; I just lessened the above effects. Players still worried over their power choices, criticized "useless" powers, and wanted to swap powers.

So I pre-built a dozen characters. Early in the main game document, the players are presented with stats and powers for these characters, and are encouraged to use them for their initial sessions. Straight. The archetypes now reside in an appendix to the document.

This works extremely well for playtesting — players just choose a character and go. I've no idea how it'll work for regular players, though; will they appreciate this structure?

Either way, this solution satisfies my design goals, so I'm going to use it until it breaks. May seem counter-intuitive, but that's sometimes what happens with specific goals.

Now to try it out.

Not long after D&D 4th Edition appeared, Saalon pointed out during a chat that the basic D&D 4E system would be ideal for an RPG simulating giant robot combat, like Gundam or Robotech. It could emulate the feel of those shows, with rapid action and cool powers.

This idea so inspired me that I grabbed my laptop and wrote a few pages of a system just like that. To my surprise, not only did I enjoy writing it, more material came easily. Soon enough, I had a player's guide several dozen pages long.

Fortunately, I also had a group of role-players who were interested in the system, and they were willing to playtest the game. So we played it, and I collected pages of notes.

And here's where things got dicey: I started incorporating those notes.

As I incorporated notes, the game diverged from D&D 4E. That helped the system insofar as it removed elements that didn't fit into a mecha war universe. However, D&D 4E's design is surprisingly tight. Rules reinforce other rules. Adding new elements—or removing existing ones—can easily unbalance the game.

It's like making a stew. Anyone can throw a lot of ingredients into a pot, but the results may taste terrible. Testing helps determine what works. But a knowledge of flavor balance ensures a good soup (and game) every time.

I don't have an easy answer to this. I'd like to think the key is a relentless focus on the kind of game one is trying to play. It's not that simple, though — some rules are more true to the mecha experience, but ruin other parts of the system.

Games must be very carefully designed. I'm realizing, increasingly, that there are no easy answers.

I subscribe to a bunch of role-playing blogs: Musings of the Chatty DM, NewbieDM, Some Space to Think, At Will, The Core Mechanic, Gnome Stew, Trollsmyth, and others.

I first started reading them in late 2008, when they were full of fire about role-playing. D&D 4th Edition had just come out and debates raged about its advantages and disadvantages compared to 3rd Edition. Cool indie games were getting attention, like Dogs in the Vineyard and Dread. Bloggers wrote about interesting subjects: how to adapt D&D concepts to other genres, how to get more players, how to organize one's materials, etc.

I'm still subscribed to all those blogs, but I realized today that I only glance at them every week or two. And I've been in that mode for several months now Partly, that's caused by my growth as an RPG player, runner, and designer; I need less hand-holding. On the other hand, the content of those blogs has begun to pale.

Much of the recent blogging in the RPG community has been very inwardly focused. "Here's what I want to accomplish in the RPG industry." "Here's the kind of game I like to run." "Here are some things I've been thinking of buying." "Here's my quick review of source book X." Nothing wrong with any of this, but it's not particularly helpful, and it's thin gruel, especially considering the RPG blogging I'm used to.

I'd like to see more practical advice culled from real experience. I'm not referring to campaign logs with a few comments; I mean building a blog post around a key concept illustrated during a play session.

I'd also like to see a lot more blogging by game designers about the game design process.

While I can't change others, I can change myself. So I'm planning to write those sorts of blog posts myself in the upcoming weeks and months, centering on the design of Gunwave.

Watch this space.

Found this lying face-up in a grocery store parking lot. Decided to give it a good home.

Haven't tried the recipe yet.

I think this warrants a blog post: Two days ago, I released a WordPress plugin. It's called Latest YouTube Videos, and it displays the most recent 1 to 10 videos from a given YouTube account in the sidebar of a WordPress blog. Requires no extra plugins or frameworks; just install and use (it uses HTML and a bit of JavaScript).

I wrote it for the classic reason: I needed that functionality, and no existing YouTube plugin would provide it. While there were a bunch of YouTube plugins, they weren't for the sidebar, required some framework or other plugin that I couldn't get working on my version of WordPress, or just plain wouldn't load the videos properly.

So, my plugin. Simple and effective. Learned quite a bit about the WordPress API, too, which like most APIs at first seems bizarre and inscrutable, then feels surprisingly elegant after some use.

About a year ago, I published two role-playing PDFs, an adventure (War in the Deep) and a sandbox setting (The City of Talon). I posted my earnings-to-date six months ago. Here's what I've earned since then:

Sales For The Past Six Months (June-November 2009)

Sales For The Past Year (November 2008-November 2009)

I won't bother charting the month-to-month sales, as they've obviously tailed off dramatically.

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 6,649.

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum in past six months: 7

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 3,852

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum in past six months:

The keywords used to find Talon: "the crimes of talon" (7!), "brent p. newhall", and "d&d quest ideas"

bluedwarf.co.uk appears to be a text adventure inspired by Red Dwarf. No idea how that links back to Talon; maybe somebody linked to it on their forum?

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I'm a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

I'm happy to have made over US $120 on two PDFs, though it's still not that much considering the amount of time I put into them. Even so, $120 is at least a return on my time spent on this hobby.

Plans

I now want to publish more supplements, of course.

In my last "Plans" section, I wrote about my intention to publish two settings and one adventure by...now. That hasn't happened, though one of those settings is now about 80% complete.

So. I will make that 80%-complete setting a focus, and will ramp up work on an adventure to publish.

I would like to develop an overall theme for my adventures, so I'm not just publishing random ideas. So, I've decided to build a broad campaign idea, and set each adventure somewhere within that campaign. Each adventure can be played alone, of course.

I'm also thinking about expanding into systems beyond D&D 4E. Everyone's building for that. Imagine a series of adventures just for Star Wars players, for example.

Hmmmmmm.

Miniature picture courtesy adobemac on Flickr

What makes Google Wave work for role-playing games?

I've been playing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, primarily with role-playing Waves. These are Waves in which people pretend to be characters in a story.

There are tons of ways to role-play; sitting around a table, over live text chat, or on a forum. Wave appears to be well-suited to role-playing.

I've noticed a few things:

• Players are less committed. That is, players leave for relatively long periods, then come back. This is partly due to Wave's youth; checking Wave is not yet an ingrained habit for players.
• Parties are less cohesive. Same thing here; Wave's not yet a habit. But I can see parties as being much more malleable; people will come and go.
• Systems must be simple. I'm observing a D&D 4E game on Wave, and one combat round took 2 days. I love D&D 4E, but I think it—and other relatively "heavy" systems—are less appropriate for Wave than their simpler cousins.
• Everything's visible and malleable. Anyone can jump in and fix a mistake or restructure content.

My Response

I've created an RPG experiment on Google Wave. It's a floating fantasy city that anyone can interact with. It's a sandbox role-playing game of exploration and intrigue. It has elements of:

• Wikis
• Choose-your-own-adventure books
• Old school text adventures
• Tabletop RPGs

Even better, I've created a website where you can see all of this. I think it will be visible even if you don't have a Google Wave account. Go here:

There are already 10 locations you can explore and interact with, and a fairly robust (and original) system for creating your character. Hop on in!

What do you think? Does this interest you?

Google Wave logo courtesy Google; fountain photo is courtesy antmoose on FLickr.

(This posted a couple of days late; technical issues, blah blah blah.)

Here are the purchases I made this week:

Ridiculously low expenditures this week, thanks primarily to a pot of ham soup I made over the weekend. This provided me with a meal every day, and the rest of my sustenance could be provided by other groceries.

And this marks the end of my weekly expenditure adventure posts. I've proven to myself the importance of recording my expenditures. I'll keep doing that; I just won't post about it here on the blog.

There's value in public exposure too, of course. But I want to try keeping them private, to see if that's enough.

Note: This is part of my attempt to review every Gundam show that I've seen, which is almost all of them. This is a spoiler-free review, though I do describe the show's premise and villains.

After War: Gundam X was the third Gundam series set in its own timeline, and it suffered for it. G found a core audience but was generally reviled by hard-line fans for being too cheesy. Wing was hated for being too melodramatic (and its pilots for being "too pretty"). After that, a lot of Gundam fans just stopped caring. So X suffers it ignominy of being the only Gundam show (besides the first) to be canceled partway through its run.

It didn't deserve that fate. While X is a lighter show than, say, Zeta or Wing, it's a solidly constructed series that runs a wide range of emotions and themes.

Its timeline is actually closest of all alternate timelines to that of original Gundam ("Universal Century"); in fact, X can be seen as an alternate history version of U.C., asking what would have happened if Amuro had never appeared, and Newtype psychic development continued its rapidly escalating arms race.

In After War Gundam X, 15 years have passed since this universe's version of the apocalyptic One Year War. That conflict grew increasingly devastating, until Earth's biosphere partially collapsed, wrapping the planet in a decade-long cloud of choking dust. While humans and most species survived, the world is now a post-apocalyptic wilderness of fierce bandits and abandoned technology amidst struggling pockets of civilization.

And struggling as much as anyone is Garrod Ran, the show's 15-year-old protagonist. He's a standard mecha shonen hero: courage and spirit to spare, but not a lot of brains. Not to spoil anything, but in the first episode he stumbles on a Gundam, and proceeds to pilot it (big shock there), with the help of a very quiet (and, it's hinted, previously abused) girl named Tifa, who can activate an insanely destructive weapon in Garrod's Gundam. The two quickly develop feelings for each other: Garrod wants to protect the delicate and sensitive Tifa, while Tifa appreciates the first person who's ever cared for her safety.

Garrod and Tifa soon join the crew of a large hovering battleship, the Frieden, and with a few other mecha pilots, they wander around helping people and running from the enigmatic and delightfully evil Frost brothers.

So, it's basically an action/adventure show. It's a bit less episodic than most super robot shows (or G Gundam), though; the Frieden's crew soon investigates the Frost brothers' political machinations, and seek to forestall potential conflicts and wars. Characters from previous episodes re-appear as larger foes emerge.

If this sounds simple, it is. And that's part of the charm of X. It avoids the over-the-top energy of G which puts off many fans, while following a straightforward, easily-comprehensible story. The characters are easy to root for. The Gundams are presented as powerful war machines. Secrets are revealed and the stakes build. The animation's clean, and the music's appropriately operatic.

It's a fun ride.

This is the latest in a series of reviews about every Gundam series that I've seen (which, at this point, is almost all of them).

My last review focused on Gundam Wing, but let's back up for a minute. Before that, and after Victory Gundam, Sunrise decided to expand into new, "alternate universe" Gundam shows, which would preserve the core themes of Gundam but tell stories in different worlds and timelines.

The first attempt was Mobile Fighter G Gundamm, which returned to the roots of the mecha genre with an over-the-top, high-spirited show of Manly Men.

Which brings us to the Dragonball Z comparisons. Indeed, G is close in spirit to Dragonball Z. This strikes Gundam purists as heresy, and I understand. I tried to watch G several times, but suffered from prejudice. I was so used to the more serious—or at least convoluted—style of other Gundam shows that I just couldn't stomach a show that looked so much like a cheesy shonen series or a 1970's Go Nagai mech show.

Which turns out to be the key to appreciating G Gundam. This is a throwback to early giant robot shows, to Getter Robo and Mazinger and Voltron. The characters are mostly two-dimensional, but they're supposed to be. They're archetypes. They're characters in a morality play. They exist to show us clear viewpoints and opinions.

And they do so in the context of the Gundam Fight, the cheesiest mecha idea ever — giant robots descend from space colonies to Earth and bust each other up, the winner's colony winning control of Earth for the following four years. I mean, really, what?

It works. It works because the Gundam Fight is not the point. This is a story of characters and morality. Of people pushing themselves and striving to accomplish lofty goals.

It's a cartoon about giant robots beating the crap out of each other.

Relax and enjoy.

I was on a business trip this week, which took care of most of my meals. Even so, here are the totals:

Quite a few snacks. However, I couldn't exactly bake a batch of cookies in my hotel room, so I was limited there.

$70 of this week's expenditure was parking at the airport, which I'll get back, so really I only spent $159.70. Huzzah!

I definitely think that just keeping track of my expenditures has made me subconsciously spend less.

Just finished this book, and while it's probably more appropriate for Otaku, No Video, I wanted to gush about it here.

God of Manga is a book about Osamu Tezuka, a man who basically created both modern manga (Japanese comics) and anime (Japanese animation). There was a ton of manga before Tezuka; he established that the artform could tell stories appropriate for a wide range of ages. He then took his most popular creation and made a TV animation, Astro Boy, which defined a great deal of the anime's eventual look-and-feel.

God of Manga is 3 things, really:

• A biography of Tezuka
• An analysis of Tezuka's works, including common themes
• An overview of the manga field throughout Tezuka's life

Tons of great insights, particularly involving Tezuka's "Star System" and repeated gags. The man was an absolute genius, and this is a great testament to his abilities and influence.

I'm at a conference this week, for work. I didn't particularly want to be here. The content (thus far) looks to be of limited use at work (our customers don't want a lot of the features being presented), and I can't do fun stuff at home this week.

But I'm very glad I came.

Because of the people. I see how others are using their systems, and I see how productive and charged and successful they are. And I don't mean "success" in the phony sense of charging down hallways while gripping a binder.

Folks are doing useful things with their software and systems. I want to be like them. I've now got pages of scribbled notes, full of neat ideas for things we can do with our software. I've also got the email addresses of helpful people.

The same is true of most conferences and conventions I've attended. They're worth attending for reasons completely separate from the actual content of the events.

Shop Class as Soulcraft is an important book.

It has flaws—significant flaws—but Matthew Crawford's overall themes deserve wide attention.

Shop Class as Soulcraft concerns itself with the dignity of manual labor. It makes a case for the importance of work that repairs and maintains our world, from plumbing to car repair. It defends the kind of knowledge gained through practical experience and apprenticeship, compared to that learned through rote memorization and following "idiot-proof" processes.

This leads to my main beef with the book: he glorifies practical experience and blue-collar work as inherently superior to other kinds. I had moments where I had to put down the book and walk away, I was so frustrated by his insistence that white collar work is inherently inferior to blue collar.

They're important in different ways.

But Crawford's voice needs to be heard. Well worth a read.

Okay, now that I'm back to regularly tracking my expenses, let's see how I did:

Not only are these fairly minimal expenses (and mostly due to $50 worth of Halloween party ingredients on Friday), I'm particularly proud of spending no money for three days. I didn't intend it; I just noticed on Monday that I'd spent nothing the day before, and wondered how long I could last. I ended the run with a delicious Rueben and hot tea at a local cafe Wednesday night.

And this is one of the hidden utilities of tracking my expenses: I find unexpected ways to save money. I become much more conscious of my spending. A few months ago, I simply never would have been aware of how much I'd been spending in the previous few days.

Time for a rant.

I was struck recently by the number of pundits who confidently attempt to predict the future.

This is often in small ways: How Amazon's Kindle Will Kill the Paperback or Why Company X is Doomed. Most of us are savvy enough to cast a suspicious eye at big claims about the death or supremacy of any commonplace thing in life.

Even the smaller-scaled predictions have insufficient respect for social inertia.

Books are a great example. I love my Amazon Kindle, and I use it almost every day. But I don't believe books are going to go away any time soon. This is not a complaint about Kindle; it's an observation about how many books there are.

The rise of cell phones didn't cause everyone to rip out their landline phones. The internet hasn't killed physical libraries.

People, as a collective, are slow to change. That's just reality. And it's okay; it's good, in fact. Science fiction literature is praactically one big warning to slow down and think, so we don't en masse implement a disastrous change.

About six months ago, I stepped away from my novel series, Giant Armors. I couldn't see a way forwards, and worried that I was pushing forward on a stale idea. These things can die.

I spent the past six months concentrating on other things. I knew that I needed time for my brain to breathe, to work on different problems, so it could approach Giant Armors again with a fresh perspective.

I looked back at the series a week ago, and discovered—to my considerable surprise and relief—that I still have the same passion for it that I had while writing Book 0 years ago. I love it, and I want to continue it.

Problem: I've half-published book 0 online, and am stuck on book 1. What to do?

Thanks to a video by Chris Brogan, of all things, I figured out what I need to do:

1. Finish publishing book 0 online.
2. Create a contest, viral if possible, that will get folks to read book 0.
3. Re-read book 1, re-writing it from scratch if it needs that.

So I'm back to publishing chapters of book 0 on giantarmors.com every week. I've been re-reading book 1, and discovering that while it needs major surgery, it can be fixed.

So, the six month Sabbatical was worth it. I have a path forward.

Now to follow it and see where it leads.

My Mom still fills a Christmas stocking for me every year. It's the same stocking I've had since I was little, one that she knitted for me herself (and it's the biggest one, of course). Every years, she fills it with candy, bags of tea, and goofy little things. Last year, one of the things in it was a box of gingerbread hot cocoa mix.

It was delicious. I wanted more, and while my first impulse was to head online to buy it, I thankfully stopped and remembered that I make my own regular hot cocoa mix, so why not try to replicate this deliciousness myself?

I flipped over the container to the ingredients list. Besides the cocoa, sugar, and multi-syllabic wonders of modern chemistry listed, I discovered the two magic seasonings: ginger and cinnamon.

Well. That made sense.

So, here's a recipe for gingerbread hot cocoa mix. Dump all of the following into a container and shake, shake, shake:

• 2 ½ cups powdered milk
• 2 cups confectioner's sugar
• 1 cup cocoa powder (Dutch-processed, if possible)
• 1 tsp salt (fine-grained, if you can)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp ginger

Note that you may have to use a whisk or something similar to break down clumps of the confectioner's sugar. Just look at the mix for clumps; if you see any, whisk away.

To make normal hot cocoa mix, skip the last two ingredients and add a little cayenne pepper.

May it comfort you on a cold day.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It was an overcast day, which is never ideal for photos, but here they are:

The big excitement of the day: I had my first deep-fried Snickers bar. Sure enough, it was delicious: a melted chocolate bar surrounded by a donut.

Quite a few more photos on my Flickr photo stream for the festival.

I've blogged before about my nascent bakery business and the process for putting ingredients in a bread machine. Now I'm going to share the secret formula for bread.

Really.

It's 3 parts water, 5 parts flour, a little yeast, and a little salt.

That's it.

What about the punching down and the rising and all that? That's easy: 2-400. Mix it, let it rise, then "punch it down" (push it into itself). Do this a total of 2 times. Then put it into a 400° F oven until it's golden brown and delicious.

You now know the Secret Formula. Use small amounts of water and flour for a small loaf, or a lot of water and flour for a large loaf. How much yeast is "a little"? Oh, maybe 2 teaspoons for a large-sized loaf. But it doesn't really matter that much.

That's part of the secret: Bread really isn't as finicky as most people suggest. Keep to that formula, and you'll have great bread.

What about variations? Fine; just add them to that formula, or replace if it's similar to an existing item. So, if you want whole wheat bread, just replace some of the flour with whole wheat flour. If you're adding lemon juice or syrup, count that as part of the water. But if you're adding seeds or raisins or whatever...just add 'em.

Hey! You can now bake all kinds of bread. Congratulations!

I'm always here to answer any questions you may have, too.

Yeah, I haven't been keeping up with this for a couple of weeks, so it's more like week 10. But it's week 6 of keeping track. Whatever!

Not bad! This doesn't count bills, of course (electronic bill pay). I really should include that in future, now that I look at it.

Anyway: I'm pretty pleased! That's not bad for a week.

You may have noticed the lack of Weekly Expenditure Adventure posts on here. Why? I fell off the wagon.

As easy as it is to track one's expenditures, it's just as easy to forget. And then you face days' worth of half-remembered purchases, and going to the mental effort of remembering just feels like too much work. 'Cause there's always something else to do.

Which is no good excuse. I'm reporting my expenditures to keep myself honest about my finances, and I can't be honest if I don't know what's going on. So these records are important, even if I can't remember every price down to the penny.

So I sat down a few days ago and rebuilt my expenditures as best I can remember. I'm back on the wagon.

I refuse to let laziness get in the way of improving myself.

Cooking is hard. Well, no, the actual act of cooking isn't particularly hard; it's the knowledge. How long does an omelette need in the pan? How hot should the pan be, and within what range? All that stuff.

Plus, once one moves on in one's cooking life from rotely following recipes, one is confronted by the bewildering jungle of choices known as flavor. What goes with what?

Along comes The Flavor Bible to help. Simply, this is an alphabetical list of flavors along with their accompanying flavors. So, if you're making an apple dish, flip to the Apple section for a list of flavors and ingredients that pair well with apples (caramel, raisins, cinnamon, etc.).

Interestingly, each section is accompanied by the names of dishes from famous chefs using that ingredient. No recipe; just "Baked Pear Torte with Caramel Sauce." Not only does it make your mouth water, the mind responds with, "Now, how would I make that?" Perfect.

Of course, if you always want to follow the recipe, this book is pretty useless. But if you like to experiment, this is manna from heaven. You can learn the basic process for, say, making a cake, and use The Flavor Bible to come up with dozens of variations without ever touching a cookbook.

I'm definitely glad I bought it.

I recently started a side business.

I love to bake. For some reason, I find it easy: you combine a few ingredients in a bowl, toss the results into an oven, and come back later to find something awesome.

Then I stumbled on a beautiful old book, Beard on Bread, a yellowed hardback with dozens of bread recipes and pencil sketches. I tried a few of the recipes. They were excellent. I gave out some bread. People loved it.

And thus I discovered that I'm good at baking bread.

To my surprise, folks to whom I gave that bread told me—repeatedly—that they'd pay good money for it, and that I should sell it. After enough of this prodding, I thought, why not?

It's not like I need to drop my life savings into opening a physical bakery. I can start small.

I made up some simple order forms, and recently created a simple web site for it. Folks can fill out the order form and email or hand it to me. That's enough for now.

To my further surprise, I've gotten a couple of orders. This is working, on a very small scale. And at that scale, I can easily fulfil orders in my spare time.

Where will it go? I've no idea, and frankly I don't care. This is a fun little experiment, and I'm happy to experiment.

If you want to order bread from me, go to bakery.brentnewhall.com. Note that I currently have no way to ship bread, so it'll have to be local delivery only for the time being. ;-)

This is the post where I apologize that I haven't blogged in a while.

As usual, it's not because I've been terribly busy. I have been busy, but I can usually blog when I am.

It's the normal problem I Have with this blogging: I can't come up with a consistent schedule of content that continues to inspire me, so I write about neat stuff for a while, then...forget. It lapses. Like anything.

Perhaps this means I should be more diligent about it, like I've been with writing. Or that I should relax and be okay with an erratic schedule.

But an erratic schedule doesn't feel right.

Anyvay. I'm at the New York Anime Festival this weekend, which greatly intrudes on blogging time. Moreover, I haven't been keeping good track of my expenditures for the past couple weeks, and I'm not quite done with my current book (Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, which to be fair is 295 pages long).

Meanwhile, I've...actually got a lot to blog about, now that I think about it. Like my new baking business. Hmmmm.

I guess you can expect more blog posts soon!

The toughest part of writing is to keep writing.

It's easy to type merrily away when inspiration strikes. Ideas flow! Characters pop out of one's forehead, full-formed!

The question is, will you write the next bit tomorrow? And more the day after? And again next week?

An 80,000-word novel is a Frankenstein's monster of tiny parts added every day. Another five hundred words one day, maybe two thousand words the next. But this is accompanied by horrific surgery, as large sections are gutted and replaced with another few hundred words pulled from this bin over here, then carefully massaged and sewn into place.

So, a real writer writes. Every day.

I've heard of some writers who only write, say, once a week. I don't quite believe it. There's too great a chance you'll miss a day. Besides, this is like saying that, instead of running for an hour a day, you'll just run for seven hours every Saturday. The muscles atrophy, whether they're physical or mental.

How to find time to write? You make time. I set aside 9:00pm every day to write. If I'm laying in bed at eleven o'clock or midnight and realize that I forgot about it, I get up, go into my studio, and write.

I wish there were shortcuts. I wish it was easier.

But every day, I write. And I'm now several thousand words into this novel, and I have a grip on it. I can move forward.

Making Things Talk is intended for a specific audience, but one which I wish were bigger. It's aimed at folks who want to wire up stuff.

Stuff like motion-sensing stuffed animals. A doorbell that chimes every time someone visits your website. Real-world, physical objects.

But without all the hassles of soldering.

Enter Making Things Talk and the Arduino module, which you can plug into any computer with a USB port and program using a simple language. The book—written very well by O'Reilly—explains how.

If the above description fired off an idea or two for something you've Always Wanted To Make, this is the book for you. It starts at the very basics, assuming you're intelligent but uneducated about electricity, electronics, etc.

You'll need to spend a fair amount of time fiddling with small parts, of course, and a bit of basic equipment. Which is why I bought Making Things Talk as part of the Advanced Arduino Starter Kit (US $115), which comes with most of that basic equipment.

If you're willing to put in the time, you may find this to be a fun hobby—one that I've only begun to scratch the surface of—which provides a satisfying sense of accomplishment. At the end, you have something you can literally carry around and show off to your friends.

And there's a lot to be said for controlling and inventing your environment.

A month into my experiment in spending less! Let's see what this week totals:

To be fair, I was at a wedding last weekend, so I didn't have to spend any money there.

What I find most interesting here is the large amount of money I spent on Monday, just on a $15 candle, $44 of groceries, and $53 at Home Depot. Without those, I would have spent practically nothing this week.

I'm also surprised that, for me, a day without spending money is rare.

The idea leapt into my brain and grew rapidly.

I've no idea, even now, where it came from. I do remember tweeting about it on 27 August.

As is usual with ideas, it was a synthesis of several things I'd seen recently and several things I like. I imagined a character like Max in The Road Warrior--serious, driven, quiet, living in a harsh world. I crossed that with Vampire Hunter D, which I'd read the first few issues of a couple months ago—a serious, incredibly skilled man thrown together with a fiery girl.

Which gave me the idea for a story.

I did what I've learned to do as soon as I have an idea: I write it down. In this case, in a text file on my laptop. I have probably two dozen ideas in there now, collected over the course of the past two years (a small number, really, by most writers' standards...but then, I've written little new in the past two years).

As I wrote down the idea, I fleshed out a few of the ideas that begged for detail. The man is a vampire, living in a post-apocalyptic world. The girl is a vampire hunter, initially, though she quickly passes the limits of her abilities, and the vampire protects her.

In other words, it's a manga. But written. It's a cross between Mad Max, Vampire Hunter D, and Twilight.

That makes me gag a bit, even just writing it out.

But it's the best idea I've got at the moment, and it's tugging at me to be written. So I'm writing it.

More to follow, God willing.

Here's what I spent on various expenditures this week:

Excellent! Much less than the previous week, even with the huge gas fill-up on Thursday.

I am a minimalist.

This is especially so in the kitchen. I haven't bought a new pot, pan, or kitchen utensil in 5 years. I just don't need to. I know the basics.

I have a slightly more eclectic approach to cookbooks. I believe in learning how to cook things in general. I don't follow an omelette recipe; I know how to make omelettes, and will incorporate whatever ingredients are handy and/or interesting to me in the moment.

As such, I recommend cooks buy The Joy of Cooking, and concentrate on that for their first few years.

But. An unusual cookbook can inspire the cook, and introduce an unexpected flavor or texture combination. A treasured few can do that, while beautifully illustrating methods of cooking that may be a bit too briefly covered in the venerable Joy of Cooking.

Such is the case with Delia Smith's How To Cook. I confess that I stumbled on this large hardback in a nearby cafe-cum-bookstore, just after sampling a deliriously delicious coconut cake. As luck would have it, this book had a recipe for just such a cake, and even better, it was on sale. So I bought it.

It's a lovely BBC production, a companion to a TV series, and the pages are laid out in an admirably clear, downright artful structure. It really shows you how to make an omelette, and roast a chicken, and prepare fish, and many other common kitchen projects, in addition to its many recipes (all lovingly photographed).

I'm trying not to lead up to a "you should buy this" finale. Does everyone need this book? Of course not. But it is beautiful and useful.

And of how many things in life can one say that?

(Updated to include bills paid on Wednesday.)

Okay, yeah, that's a lot to spend in a week, but $1,100 of that was mortgage, power, and iPhone bills. Cut that out, and it's about $200 for food, groceries, and gas. Which still seems like a lot.

I originally wrote, "I'd be in much better shape if I didn't eat out as much." But I only ate out three times this week, for a total expense of under $20. Much of the money went to those fence posts and $50 in gas this week.

I really hope my new truck isn't going to cost me $50 in gas every week.

But at least I'll know it.

A friend of mine recommended this Poul Anderson fantasy novel, Three Hearts and Three Lions a while back. I've finally been working my way through it.

I'm not going to finish it.

It's about a guy who wakes up in a fantasy world, and can mysteriously speak the language and ride a horse and fight (quite well!) in armor. And he's trying to figure out how he got here, and why. So he's talked to a nearby witch, who's directed him to the nearest elven lord for advice. He's attracted a dwarf and a shapeshifting girl as companions.

That's it. I'm 1/3 of the way through the book, and that's as far as we've gotten.

I don't mean to be impatient, but at some point this ceases to be worth my time. There's some fine writing, and some fine sequences, but the story's dull as dirt. The characters are fun, but none have much stake in anything.

Worse, this is not a bland novel. Anderson was a strong writer, and this world comes alive at times. I find his use of phonetic dialect frustrating (I kid you not, this is an exact quote: "'Tis naw so canny a steadin' ye're boon fawr."), but it does add richness to his characters. And the protagonist was a smart engineer in his past life, so he's constantly evaluating his surroundings to figure out the scientific implications ("He wondered what they used in place of steel. Aluminum alloys? Surely magic could extract aluminum from bauxite. Beryllium, magnesium, copper, nickel, chrominum, manganese—while doubltless correct, the idea of an elvish wizard with a spectroscope was funny enough to restore a balance in Holger.").

But, ultimately, the book feels like no more than a neat idea and a richly-imagined medieval world. And I'm sorry, but I need a little more out of that in my novels right now.

(Writers: Does this describe your novel? What could you do to give the characters a more pressing problem to deal with?)

So, this one goes back on the shelves. A pity; I loved Anderson's The High Crusade.

This is a tough one to explain.

A few days ago, the Chatty DM tweeted about the need for a revival of Car Wars. If you're not familiar with it, Car Wars is a tabletop car duelling game from the 1980's, in which you drive a gun-laden car around a post-apocalyptic arena or road, blowing up other cars. It's Mad Max as a free-form board game.

I thoroughly agreed with him; as it happened, the same thought had crossed my mind a few days earlier, but I'd never gotten around to tweeting about it. Car Wars was a fun, gritty, action-oriented game with an easy-to-grasp world. You get to play a smelly, unkempt survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, driving around a turbocharged Camaro with a built-in flamethrower. What could be more fun than that?

So, yes, this struck me as a fun game to revive. Turns out Car Wars was developed by Steve Jackson Games, and the last revision was released 7 years ago to mediocre reviews.

Time for a revival. What next, then? I was tempted to write a blog post about how cool Car Wars is. I was tempted to write Steve Jackson Games and suggest an update.

Then I realized: Why not do it myself?

So I created a wiki page called AutoWar, and wrote up a simple game system.

You choose your car's frame, armor, tires, weapons, etc. During each turn, everyone moves simultaneously, then everyone fires their weapons. The game uses standard 6-sided dice for its mechanics, so to attack you roll 3 dice and subtract distance and relative speed, hoping to roll higher than 3.

Then I tweeted about it. Within a day, several folks had jumped in and fleshed out several sections of the page.

Which inspired me to create graphics, and playtest the system. I worked up a simple scenario: one basic car versus two light cars on a highway. However, this step worried me. I threw the system together on a whim; would it work at all? I'm no experienced game designer.

To my great relief, I had a lot of fun playtesting it. The mechanics needed quite a bit of work, but the action moved quickly and felt exciting.

So I updated the page again. The game's improving. It's fun. It works. Now it needs some playtesting.

The most interesting thing about this game is that I'm leaving it open. Anyone can change it. I've posted it under a Creative Commons Attributeion ShareAlike license, so anyone can publish it. It's a bit scary, but feels right somehow.

Check it out, fix whatever needs fixing, and try it out. Heck, tell me what you'd want available so you can playtest it.

Please! Play my game! :-)

It's difficult to review Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go without resorting to reviewers' favorite candy phrases: heart-wrenching, melancholy, tragic, and the one that I always shudder at, tour de force.

This is partly because of its deceit. For its first few chapters, it appears to be nothing more than a woman reminiscing about her childhood at an English boarding school. Moreover, the protagonist is nothing special, and spends much of her time second-guessing her (and others') actions.

Then you begin to notice that something's a little...off. Certain life details are conspicuously absent. Some normal things are never mentioned, while others are referenced in strange ways, and there are these strange euphemisms about donations and completing.

These are the two great strengths of Ishiguro's novel:

1. The writing is delicately structured to intrigue and reveal, despite a narrator who is rather dull herself. One learns things about characters that the characters don't realize themselves.
2. There's a twist to this woman's life and entire world that's revealed slowly and naturally (another of Ishiguro's impressive feats), and which adds several complex layers of meaning to her memories and worries. This drives the story forward even further.

Which makes Never Let Me Go even more difficult to review. Ishiguro's subtle touch masks wonderful layers of intriguing complexity, and the twist really shouldn't be revealed in a review like this. So what can I say?

After I finished the final page, I felt like my head had blossomed open like a flower, and I felt dazed for a few hours.

I can hardly think of higher praise.

Friday feels like a good day to record and analyze my expenditures from the past week, though perhaps I should wait until later in the day. Ah well.

Here, I lay my soul (and wallet) bare:

Saturday and Sunday were spent at GenCon, thus explaining the higher values then. I had to pay $50 for airport parking on Sunday. Urrrrg.

I bought groceries on Monday to stock up after GenCon, and had to buy a $40 badge for Anime USA on Tuesday since I'm going to be running a panel and they don't give out free badges for that (<sigh>). I'll be buying groceries tonight, thus the estimated $40 expenditure. Yes, I normally spend about $40 per week on groceries.

The total actually feels pretty reasonable to me. Subtract the unusual expenditures on Saturday ($20 in the exhibition hall and $40 for taxi rides) and Sunday ($50 for parking), and I spent about $120 this week on groceries, gas, and food, which includes essentially two weeks' worth of groceries.

I'd like to be more frugal than this, but how can I be until I understand myself better? Which is the whole point of this exercise, after all.

So, a while ago, I noticed a Twitter RPG design competition. You had to pitch and describe a tabletop RPG system in 140 characters or less. A fun little challenge. I'd just been reading the Mouse Guard RPG system, where the main villains are tricky weasels, and they struck me as interesting characters. So, an RPG about weasels.

I've also been toying on-and-off with a dead simple RPG system, designed for play with non-RPG friends. It uses a straightforward roll-under D6 mechanic; if you're attempting a dangerous vehicular stunt and have a Driving skill of 4, you roll a six-sided die and succeed if you roll 1, 2, 3, or 4.

So, weasels. Needed a few basic attributes for weasels. Standard role-playing attributes are mind-related (intelligence, wisdom), body-related (strength, constitution, dexterity), and social (charisma), plus hit points and such. But since I had very little space for flavor, these had to be very weaselly attributes. So I settled on Sneaky (mind), Vicious (body), Persuade (social), and Health.

Since I was using a six-sided die, each trait had to have only a few points, balanced in some way. This took a bit of fiddling; you want characters with at least one good skill that doesn't make them useless in everything else. I ended up with requiring a total of 13 in all 4 traits.

How to handle combat? Simple: all hits do 1 point of damage, subtracted from Health. When you run out of Health, you fall unconscious or die or whatever makes sense for the situation.

Which lead to the following tweet:

Play intelligent weasels with other beasts in forest. 13 points in Sneaky, Vicious, Persuade, Health. Beat 1d6 to succeed; 1 damage per hit

Today, I discovered that it won the competition. Wow!

This was so cool that I opened up NeoOffice and typed up a one-page combined system explanation and character sheet. This led to an expansion of the system: for example, if you don't make your die roll, you still succeed, but with a complication of your choice. I then created a quick page for the game on my Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders.

So, you can now download Weasels! as a one-page PDF, which contains a description of the weasels' world, the mechanics of the system, and space for your weasel's traits and attributes. Enjoy!

I'm trying to live within my means. This blog post is the first record of how much money I'm spending each week. I only started recording my purchases on Wednesday of last week, but even so, here are my purchases:

This is due mainly to $40 per day spent taking a taxi to and from GenCon, and buying lunch and dinner out every day from Thursday on. So it seems like a pretty reasonable amount.

As much fun as I had at GenCon, it was expensive. Here's everything I spent, including prior purchases:

Seems amazingly expensive when I actually look at the final tally. And none of that was really avoidable, other than the $150 taxi fares if I'd reserved a convention hotel.

(Note: I haven't forgotten about my previous plan to post about my finances and books! I'm just having trouble collecting the data. Should have something up here in a day or two. Meanwhile....)

While I was at GenCon, I went to a panel on higher-level adventure design. I noticed a disturbing trend: The DMs asking questions lacked a certain imagination.

They had great adventures. Neat stories. But they played the game completely by the book. If the book said that a good challenge for a party of X adventurers was Y monsters at Z level, they'd throw exactly Y monsters at exactly Z level at their players.

One person complained that one of his players claimed some way to defeat the most powerful creature in D&D 4th Edition, Orcus, with a 21st-level wizard (out of 30 levels) using a certain combination of abilities. And the D&D designers running the panel paused for a moment, then replied that the players aren't going to face a demigod as a lone opponent in an empty room. Orcus will make sure they slog through half a dozen other tough enemies first, then halfway through the battle will teleport out for a bit, rest, and come back recharged with a new weapon.

The DMs in the audience spoke as though adding an extra monster halfway through a battle was an indication that the system was inadequate. Like a role-playing system has to spit out a precise number—size of enemy group, type of monster, whatever—for any given situation.

And, granted, there was a lot of self-selection going on there; confident DMs with no problems improvising a high-level situation probably didn't attend that panel in the first place. But it was sad to see, in a fantasy game where everything's made up anyway, people running it as though the rules are legally binding.

If the game's not working, change it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about throughput.

I think we all understand the concept: how much stuff can be forced through a particular channel at once. Humans have throughput limits, too.

I currently have a stack of books teetering next to the leather chair in my studio. This stack has towered over 2 feet high for months. When will I ever get through the pile? And what happens when I get a new book? How long will it take me to get to it?

Every week, I write a list of projects that I want to accomplish that week. I usually aim for 10 projects a week, but I rarely get through half of the list. From one perspective, that's okay; at least I'm accomplishing things. But wouldn't I be better off with more realistic estimates of my throughput?

Thanks to a few monetary gifts, I've had a lot of disposable income for the past few months. I, er, don't any more. I need to be more responsible with my money, so I live within my means. How can I do so when I make those purchases privately?

So. I'm aiming to read one physical book a week, and will post a review of that book here when I'm done. Thus, you can expect a book review here every week (with a few exceptions; Saalon's gift of Neal Stephenson's 960-page Anathem will take a few weeks). Next week's book is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

I'm going to limit my list of weekly projects to five.

And, I'm going to keep detailed records of how much money I spend each week, and post the numbers here every week. Not every single expenditure, but weekly totals, and analysis of expensive days and key purchases. (It'll be revealing to fully account for the monetary cost of GenCon.)

I believe this is the best way to push me to change. What do you think?

Role-playing games exist in a problematic black hole. Existing role-players play RPGs, but the hobby isn't attracting a lot of new players (though D&D 4th Edition appears to be changing that somewhat).

So how to attract new players to the hobby?

Well, last Sunday, I had the chance to run a game of Dread, and it was a revelatory experience. It might be the answer, or at least point the way towards the answer.

Dread contains a very simple system: each player gets a sheet filled with about 9 probing questions about the person they're going to play in that evening's entertainment. These questions are usually intrusive, like "Who forgave you just before he died?" and "What childhood toy do you still carry with you, and why?"

While the players are answering their questionnaires, the host (who runs the game) explains the situation in which the characters will be involved, and sets up a Jenga^TM tower. (For those unfamiliar, Jenga is a tower of wooden blocks, three blocks per level.) In our case, the characters were college students in the middle of a wilderness adventure in the Grand Canyon.

Once the players have filled out their questionnaires, they should have a good feel for the character they're going to play, and the game begins. The host reveals the initial scene. In our case, the characters woke up in the middle of the night to the screams of their guide, and found him hauled several yards from his shredded tent, badly wounded and delirious.

The players then act out their characters. And here's where the incredibly simple but remarkably effective system comes in. Whenever a character attempts something difficult--anything from leaping across joists in a burning building to staying calm in the face of a serial killer—the character must make a "pull," by removing a block from the Jenga tower and placing it on the top of the tower. If a player knocks over the tower, then that player's character dies.

As you can imagine, characters die a lot in this game.

After a character's death, the tower is set back up, and three blocks are immediately pulled for every dead character. And the game continues.

So, it's a game of psychological stress and horror. The three sample stories included in the book cover a werewolf attack during a camping trip (the one we played on Sunday), space marines exploring an alien-infested starship hulk, and a horny-teen slasher film, all perfect for this system.

The Jenga mechanic provides several interesting advantages:

• You can explain the mechanic in about a minute, to anyone. Those who've never played an RPG in their life can get into it immediately.
• It creates a literary-style wave of rising tension, release, then more tension. Because blocks are pulled after each death, the tension increases on every iteration.
• The central tower, standing in the middle of the table, is a potent reminder of the deep trouble the players face. When a player makes a pull, conversation dies. Players hold their breath. There's actual palpable tension.
• Because there are no numbers, the host has fewer distractions and can focus on the story.

I've never had as much fun as I did hosting that game. Everyone enjoyed themselves.

I read with interest and some amusement the news items today about Facebook buying FriendFeed. Robert Scoble is convinced this is great news, and he got the impact absolutely right, though I think he's still blind to one important point.

What did he get right?

FriendFeed the site will continue to operate independently for a while, but the engineers will get folded into Facebook and eventually FriendFeed will merge with Facebook and become an anemic side feature on that site. That's what almost always happens during mergers: the smaller guy gets merged into the larger, becoming less efficient in the process or completely subsumed.

Even if that doesn't happen, FriendFeed has a larger fundamental limitation. FriendFeed is too content-rich for most people. Early adopters love it. Geeks love it, because they're used to dense streams of input. But for the vast majority of users, it's too much.

Let's compare it to Twitter. Now, Twitter is not exactly the same kind of service, nor am I suggesting it is. Bear with me.

I currently follow 218 users on Twitter. I can keep up with that much conversation throughout the day; I rarely miss any tweets.

When I signed up for FriendFeed, as soon as I subscribed to more than a handful of people, I had more content than I could reasonably read. Between comments, photo collections, embedded videos, and the messages themselves, FriendFeed was sending me so much stuff I couldn't keep up with it.

And the solution, of course, is to read differently. One doesn't read FriendFeed the way one reads a book; one skims rapidly.

But most people don't do that.

Most people want to keep up. Most people want to be able to actually read what their friends are saying. Heck, there are two reasons I use TweetDeck, and one is the column I set up showing just tweets from my closest friends (the other is the ability to manage my OtakuNoVideo account simultaneously).

FriendFeed got a huge surge in initial popularity because it's the perfect tool for techie early adopters who regularly and happily deal in large streams of information. But—and this is what I think Scoble doesn't see—it's not as useful for the rest of the population. Most folks see that huge stream of FriendFeed entries, feel exhausted, and go to YouTube.

Again, FriendFeed is a great service for a certain brand of person. But it's not for everyone, and I don't think it ever would have been.

I'm back from Otakon, the second-largest anime convention in the Western Hemisphere. Feels like the largest, partly because folks are packed into small spaces. Not a compliment.

Here are the photos on Flickr. Represented: Silent Bob, Neo, Beetlejuice, Tiger from Kung-Fu Panda, Gambit, a Mind Flayer, several Gundams, Spider-Man, Billy Mays, Dr. Forrester, several Rorschachs, and a number of anime characters.

These things are always exhausting, but worth it. Every single time.

On Saturday, I interrupted a wonderfully productive morning to drove up to Frederick, Maryland. Clouds moved in to shelter an otherwise perfect day. I pulled in to Rose Hill Manor, parked my car in the big field, and ran towards the other side of the property, camera in hand.

"Rebels in the cornfield!" The cry came up around me. Men dressed in Union uniform ran up to the lone cannon, some passing it to take up positions around an ancient oak tree at the bottom of the hill. I heard the crack of rifle fire and saw occasional flashes of grey passing through the corn.

Then the cannon fired, and I jumped. Not quite literally defeaning, it was nonetheless a shock every time it thundered. And still the rebels came, materializing out of the cornfield and leveling their rifles at us.

It was a re-enactment, obviously. It suffered from a few problems. Because there were only a few dozen re-enactors, only a few "died," despite the lines moving to within fifty yards of each other. Moreover, the re-enactors were having too good of a time to look scared or ferocious; many of them cracked easy smiles as they marched towards the rifles of their enemies.

But that added a relaxed atmosphere to the event. We all know the horror of that war; we could easily imagine the soldiers' pain and terror. These were computer programmers and auto mechanics, dressing up and playing soldier for the afternoon.

The entire grounds had been converted into a Civil War-era bivouac. Dozens of tents spotted the fields, most of them complete with low fires, kettles, lanterns, the vital bottles of whisky, and other accoutrements of the time. Quite a few non-soldiers wandered about wearing costumes of the era—how women didn't sweat every drop of water out of their bodies in an hour fails me—and they were all more than happy to regale you with stories and facts of the period.

It felt like a convention (then again, I have cons on the brain this summer). Vendors were selling food, books, fake rifles, real Civil War bullets, belt buckles, hats; just about anything one could imagine. A folk singer sang songs of the era. And all of this was occurring on the grounds of a beautiful manor house, with the flowers in full bloom.

What better way to spend a summer afternoon?

I'm just back from Anime Expo 2009, and despite the jet lag, I'm going to try to share the differences between Anime Expo and Otakon (at least, based on my experience with AX 2009 and Otakons 2001-2008):

• AX's L.A. Convention Center feels slightly larger than the Baltimore Convention Center. This means more walking, but also the crowds never got densely packed as they can be at Otakon.
• The LACC isn't as nicely situated in the city as the BCC is. At LACC, you have to walk a few blocks to get to any restaurants, and there's really nothing scenic nearby. The BCC's got restaurants across the street, and the Inner Harbor is just a couple of blocks away.
• AX is more laid back, as befitting California. Folks walk a little slower, expressions aren't as intense, and there's little of that simmering frustration you see in folks stalking around the Baltimore Convention Center.
• It's rare for an Otakon panel to be completely full. Happened several times just for the panels I was interested in at AX.
• AX has somewhat more Asians, and definitely more Asian guests than Otakon.
• The AX dealer's room has a slightly larger selection, but it's ultimately like Otakon in terms of what you can buy. So, while an Otakon dealer might have 40 different Gundam model kits, an AX dealer might have 50. But there was nothing there I felt I couldn't possibly buy at Otakon (and I could certainly get any of it online).
• There was way less video gaming at AX than Otakon. Otakon has a huge room with literally dozens of consoles and video game machines running. AX's video game room had two DDR machines, a Para Para Max machine, a few copies of Street Fighter 4 and a few other games, a wall of crane machines (?!), and an air hockey table (?!?!). The console game room had a grand total of four games running while I was there (Smash Brothers Brawl, Blaz Blue, a Japanese SNK vs. Capcom, and Guilty Gear). Both rooms were small.

Otherwise, the two cons felt the same. There was about the same number of events, the same kinds of panels and events (guest Q&A, a concert, an AMV contest, etc.), the same amount of cosplay as a percentage of guests, about the same quality of cosplay. Most panels started within about 10 minutes of the scheduled starting time. Everything went as smoothly as a fan-run con ever goes.

All in all, they're more similar than different.

This will inevitably post to my blog several days after I actually write it, as I'm writing this in a hotel room in California at Anime Expo, and I refuse to spend $13 a day for the privilege of posting to my blog (and otherwise accessing the vast reaches of the internet).

I'm tired, but I feel fulfilled. Literally, filled full. I experienced a lot today, from cool interviews to fun Q&As to interesting anime.

In other words, it's been an adventure.

Unrelated but related: I've had trouble sleeping for the past few months. Nothing serious; just an hour or two cut out from a full night's sleep here and there. I'd catch up, then lose a few more hours' sleep.

I won't have that problem tonight. Which leads to an inevitable conclusion:

Adventures fulfill us.

Adventure can mean a lot of things, of course; from a trip halfway around the world to a new restaurant down the block. But I suspect that most people stay on the safer end of the spectrum than would be best for them.

Don't folks complain about ennui? About depression? Feeling drab, a slave to work, a slave to routine? Unfulfilled?

Doesn't that strike you as a serious spiritual illness? How can we perform to anywhere near our best when we're depressed? And don't we need to perform to our best these days?

Wouldn't adventure solve this?

Now, I had an upset stomach for most of the flight here. I nearly threw up on the plane. I'm 95% sure this was directly caused by the stress of the trip. I just don't like to travel.

That shouldn't stop us. We need more adventure.

If you're looking for a fun, touching summer movie, you can't go wrong with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

It's an anime film released two years ago, centering around a Japanese high school girl with two male friends, and the surprising summer she has as she stumbles upon an ability to (duh) jump through time.

It's a high-quality production throughout. The animation's fluid, characters are drawn consistently and realistically, the music fits, and the voices work well.

Even better, it avoids anime cliches. This is a light-hearted film that just happens to be animated.

It's a perfect summer flick; fun, light, airy, but with just enough melodrama to remind one of lazy teen summers and the fleeting hearts of youth.

(Okay, I blush at the cheesiness of that last phrase. But it fits, somehow.)

Note: I've skipped two shows. After ZZ Gundam came Victory Gundam, which I'm less than a quarter of the way into. Gundam's overall popularity waned when the ultra-depressing Victory was released, so toy company Bandai (a long-time commercial collaborator with Sunrise) bought out Sunrise and suggested new Gundam series set in separate universes. That resulted in G Gundam, which likewise I'm about a quarter of the way into. So I'm skipping ahead to the series after that: New Mobile Report Gundam Wing.

This is a spoiler-free review, as I won't even attempt to describe the show's plot.

I cannot review this show objectively.

No review is ever truly objective, of course, but one can at least hold most shows to some kind of standards, and see what most would enjoy.

The reason for my subjectivity began with the Midnight Run on Toonami. They'd show uncut episodes of Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z from midnight to one in the morning every weeknight. It's an odd time to watch an action show; the house is quiet and still while brightly-colored people scream and gun each other down on the flickering TV screen.

I'd watch Midnight Run in my room, running an IM conversation with Saalon (and occasionally Brennen) while watching. Unfortunately, the computer screen was directly opposite the TV, so I kept whipping my head around to catch action on the TV or a message from Saalon.

We came in about halfway into Gundam Wing (and a few episodes into DBZ's Frieza Saga). We had no idea what was going on. We couldn't keep track of the pilots. Characters seemed to switch sides every episode. The mecha fights often re-used the same movement and explosion animation.

And yet, Saalon and I fell completely, head-over-heels in love with the show. We loved the complexity of the storyline. We loved the intensity of the characters. The Gundams looked cool.

We later re-watched the show, finally understood what the heck was going on, and we loved it even more. I'm sure Wing has all sorts of flaws, but I literally can't see many of them because when I watch the show I instantly enjoy myself.

So, with that little ego boost out of the way, what exactly is Gundam Wing?

It's a politically complicated show about terrorists sent from space colonies to soften up the Earth's militaries, in preparation for the colonies declaring independence. Each colony sends its own pilot, under separate orders, so the pilots don't necessarily know (or even like) each other, despite working for the same overall goal. Indeed, the pilots often come into conflict with each other. A few of the pilots are certifiable nutjobs.

As the story progresses, the pilots begin to question their goals and develop more complex opinions of the growing conflict. And some of them go even more nuts.

Gundam Wing marked the second Gundam series told in its own timeline, after the intentionally cheesy G Gundam. Wing returned to a somewhat more serious tone for the franchise, though Wing is cheesy in its own way. Whereas G is cheesy like a 70's super robot show, Wing is cheesy like an overly-serious opera.

The show is arguably the most politically complicated show I've ever seen. Alliances are made and collapse, characters switch sides; if you miss an episode or two you can be completely lost upon returning to the show to discover that one character's dead, another's fighting for a completely different group, and heck a new political alliance has formed.

Interestingly, the five main pilots are themselves the least politically motivated. They're given orders, which they (initially) carry out completely and without question. It's the folks around them that are constantly jockeying for advantage or the betterment of mankind, and trying to maneuver the pilots into acting for or against their own interests. It's a revealing moment when, fairly early into the show, the viewer realizes that one pilot's actions play completely into the plans of one of the villains, neatly accomplishing the villain's goal. That's the kind of show it is.

Every character has a distinctive personality. When reviewing Baccano! for Otaku, No Video, I described the characters as having "bold" personalities. I can think of no better adjective for the characters in Wing, though the boldness is more a melodramatic intensity and distinctiveness. There are very few shy, retiring characters here.

Opera is actually an apt comparison. Wing is big, brassy, over-the-top, and melodramatic in tackling an epic story with memorable (and often insane) characters. You have to accept it for what it is, and when you do, you'd better strap yourself in for a heck of a ride.

Forgot to mention: I have a Kindle DX.

Not sure how to describe it, as I'm not sure how much you all know about Kindles. Where to start?

The Kindle is Amazon's electronic book reader. The DX is the latest in their line, and larger than the previous Kindle 1 and Kindle 2. The screen's 9.7 inches along the diagonal, compared to earlier Kindles' 6-inch screens. So the DX is more like a hardback book, while the others are more like paperbacks.

Which is not an unqualified difference. The K2 is a tad lighter, and thus a little easier to hold, but has a smaller screen.

Basic functionality: you read books on it (duh!). There's a Sprint cell modem on it, so anywhere one can get a Sprint signal, one can access Amazon's e-book store and buy more books. E-book prices are averaging $5 to $10 each at the moment.

While my initial interest in the Kindle cooled after six months, it's ramped back up since then. And not just because of the DX. About nine months in, I found myself reading more than before. It's just so convenient to always have a book with you, which can always become any book. Or magazine or newspaper (the selection grows). The DX makes the whole experience more pleasant, as magazines and newspapers just fit onto it better.

I use it constantly, and for a bibliophile, what better endorsement is there?

Every time I try to write about Loading Ready Run, I end up with a dry essay. Which is the antithesis of Loading Ready Run.

LRR is an online comedy team. Which immediately conjures up images of college-age guys making cheap videos and desperately trying to be funny; folks who see Saturday Night Live and think, "That's easy!"

Ironically, LRR's videos are cheap, but they're also funny. Some of them are absolutely perfect; I've re-watched It's Very Simple and Halo: The Future of Combat many times and am consistently floored at how well they're executed.

LRR's got about a dozen regular cast members, and about that many more occasional contributors. They post a new video every week, almost always a sketch a few minutes long. They have a few themes that they occasionally return to, but those rarely amount to more than three videos.

Then they did something interesting.

After posting videos every week for years, they felt a need to grow. So they created "Commodore Hustle."

How to describe this? Okay, in creating several hundred short comedy videos, the cast members inevitably made videos in which they played, essentially, themselves. But just as inevitably, they were playing dramatized versions of themselves. Pushed to extremes. In reality, Paul isn't quite as single-mindedly geeky as the "Paul" you see in videos.

So they decided to create an ongoing video series starring these dramatized versions of themselves. They're essentially making a movie, in 15-minute segments of inter-related sketches about themselves working on their videos and generally dealing with life.

Which was fine and funny for the first few segments. Some of it's bizarre, some of it well-written, some relies on editing.

Then around about episode 5, it got really interesting. They developed a villain—who plays his role perfectly—as a frustrated comedy writer who works at a video store and wants to Take Them Down. It's evolving into a serial, really, something that I look forward to watching more of.

And they keep posting their regular videos every week, too, so they keep fresh with that.

Awesome to see folks build and develop their skills, and grow into creating something remarkable. They're an inspiration.

(Warning: I haven't been watching LRR recently, so likely they've finished Commodore Hustle or gone in a completely new direction or summat.)

I'm re-reading Brennen's chapbook, unrequited poetry. Above is a quote, rather obviously. Every time I do this, I'm reminded of why I love poetry, and why Brennen's such a great poet.

I'm buying another copy, to give to a friend who's developing an interest in poetry.

I figure it's worth grabbing any chance to expand one's horizons of great poetry.

Spoilers are hardest in this review. My enjoyment of this show hinges on several characters and plot points that reference the previous show. So, the first part of this review has no spoilers, and the last half will be clearly marked as spoiler territory so I can explain my love.

I've enjoyed every Gundam series I've seen. Each is fun in its own way, of course; Gundam spans a surprising variety of philosophies and tones.

While I enjoyed ZZ Gundam, it's the most difficult for me to recommend. It doesn't fit traditional categories of worth or enjoyment. It starts out lighthearted, more in the vein of an adventure show for tweens. The protagonists exhibit minimal angst or emotional problems; they basically go on weird adventures for the first half-dozen episodes. Then, halfway through, the show delivers possibly my favorite episode in Gundam; it gets serious and dramatic and downright painful, which the show returns to frequently throughout its second half.

But that's not to say that ZZ Gundam starts goofy and turns serious. It's a trend. It's fun throughout; there are just more serious moments in the latter half.

I also have trouble recommending this show because of the villains. They're just completely flat and uninteresting. From a stale rip-off of Char Aznable (supposedly, this character was supposed to be Char, but Tomino got a green light on his later Char's Counterattack movie as he wrote ZZ, so he substituted this character for Char), to a spastic woman wearing dominatrix gear who occasionally flashes her breasts at the audience, to the sadly one-note presence of Haman Khan, the various Neo-Zeon antagonists never appear threatening.

The show begins literally hours after the final moments of Zeta Gundam. The main ship limps into port at Side 1, and gets involved with a group of rough-and-tumble teens, who become the protagonists of the show.

And it is odd. We basically watch these kids stumble around for a good chunk of the show. They're no big fans of the Federation. The central pilot, Judau, is a typical passionate shonen teen, full of bravado. His friends are also similar shonen characters. In fact, not long into the show, Judau's sister falls into the hands of Neo-Zeon, and I think this was the only way to keep Judau and the others fighting.

SPOILER WARNING

Then, halfway through the show, Judau finally re-unites with his kidnapped sister. Briefly.

He finds his way into a Neo-Zeon stronghold and grabs his kidnapped sister. Guards open fire, and a shot hits his sister in her side. They escape, Judau hiding his sister in a nearby hut while he returns to his Gundam to fight off the Neo Zeon forces chasing them. Judau then takes out a mecha which crashes directly on his sister's hut, which explodes in fire and metal scrap. Judau lands, unable to believe she's dead, and paws through the wreckage while the ten-year-old girl he rescued earlier drags at his arm, crying, "I'll be your little sister from now on." At which point he turns and slaps her across the face. And she collapes in a crying heap.

It's an episode of pain and pathos. Perfectly done. It works.

Which is a relief because ZZ is a mess. It's a jumble of drama and comedy, of laughable villains and stock protagonists. But when it starts to fire on all cylinders, it barrels along with an intensity rarely matched in any other Gundam show before the turn of the millenium.

One of my favorite aspects of this comes in the form of Kamille Bidan, the protagonist of Zeta Gundam. He appears in ZZ, still a shattered, catatonic shell after the events of Zeta. In an episode about two thirds of the way through ZZ, the characters end up in the same city where he's recovering in the hospital. He now shifts uncomfortably in his coma.

During an episode involving at least four Newtypes (people who've developed mild psychic powers), Kamille leaps to his feet and runs from the hospital, still incoherent and unable to recognize even his girlfriend. He flees down the coast to observe the battle which he can clearly sense.

The battle rages on, the pilots fighting on multiple fronts, separated and searching for one another. Suddenly, a voice speaks in their heads, calmly informing them of each others' whereabouts and situations. We cut down to the beach, and Kamille sits there, staring at the flickering lights of battle overhead. You know he was the one speaking. You know he's okay, somewhere in his head.

Especially after the emotionally exhausting end of Zeta, to see that Kamille is on the mend and would be okay is a huge relief.

An odd thing to mention, perhaps, in a review of ZZ--the treatment of a character from a different show. But it shows just how sensitive Tomino is to his characters and his audience. He knows who we care about. Of course, it also says something about how little I ended up being emotionally involved in the actual protagonists of ZZ.

And the characters are what make ZZ work, in the end. There's a big battle at the end, of course, and despite the muddy execution, I felt good about who fought whom, and who won. It also has possibly my favorite death in Gundam, mainly because of the poetic justice of it all. Again, this is Tomino knowing how to treat his characters right.

Overall? The show is as muddy as this review. There are plenty of things to dislike about it. But, despite that, I enjoyed ZZ, I'm glad I watched it, and I wouldn't mind watching it again. There's some good stuff here.

I was reading a Wall Street Journal article about the problems of graduating college this year. The author points out that, with the economy, job seekers will have to either make less than they anticipated, or start in a different industry than they wanted to.

Good.

We no longer live in a society where you can graduate and immediately make $40K a year. That was called a bubble, and it's burst.

And about changing industries: every single person I work with is doing a different job than the one they went to college for. Some still work in a similar industry—a nurse becoming a manager at a pharmaceutical company, for example—but none of them are doing what they planned.

Listen, all you graduating seniors: Grab this opportunity.

1. Learn rigorous financial scrutiny. Watch every dollar you spend. Literally, record every purchase and compare it to your other purchases. Don't worry; you won't have to do it forever. But this will keep you from becoming like my generation, which bought more than we could afford.
2. Explore the job world. Your goal right now is to get as many job offers as possible. So, apply for jobs you never thought you'd want. What's the worst that can happen? You can always politely decline their offers. You can find some fantastic people to work for, and you can learn skills that you'd never get in your intended industry. Heck, why not take a 3-month job in a weird industry?
3. Meet a lot of people. Make a big network of friends and acquaintances. You don't have to like all of them. But many of them will be useful, and the bigger the pie, the bigger the slice.

In general: Take advantage of this. Please.

If you want a job, drop me a line, and I'll try to hook you up with someone.

I started reading a Kindle book on organic gardening. And I was immediately put off by 1) the repeated sermons on the evils of chemical pesticides (if I've bought the book, I probably don't need to be sold on avoidance of chemicals), and 2) the insistence on planning. I quote:

On one hand, this makes sense. Don't over- or under-produce, if you can help it.

On the other hand, how on Earth can the beginning gardener know what is "sufficient" or "excess?" Will the book attempt to tell me? What author can possibly tell me how many tomatoes I need?

Should one plan? Sure. But only approximately. Especially in a garden, where so little is under your control. Plan out your exact potato usage over the year, then watch half your potato crop fail.

Why can't we just experiment? Approximate our needs and then go for it? It's not like the average American homeowner is going to starve because their backyard organic garden produced insufficient quantities of cucumbers. And if you have too much, why can't you give some away? I don't think I've ever had trouble giving away food to co-workers and friends.

There are too many variables. Just grab a bit of land, dig in some good soil, plant a few seeds, and water it occasionally. This is my first year with a real vegetable garden, and I've got more lettuce than I can eat growing from a 2'x3' plot.

As I mention in this YouTube review, I had a grand time watching the new Star Trek movie. Afterwards, I started thinking about it, and I had second thoughts.

What do you think?

Those of you familiar with my Giant Armors project may wonder how it's going.

It isn't.

I've been stuck for months. Not with writer's block, exactly. I've known what needs to be done, I've just had no creative juice for it.

It's weird. I know how to sit down and work at writing. I know how to burrow my way out of landslides of doubt and dead ends.

This feels different. I feel like I've outgrown the idea.

We've all done this. We come across an idea we had years ago for some project, and we wonder why we ever wanted to do it. It just seems so...wrong for us now.

I don't know if Giant Armors is wrong for me yet. It feels like an idea half-formed, that needs more gestation. Perhaps I started too early. Perhaps I haven't given it enough attention. However, whenever I give it attention, nothing usable comes.

So, I'm setting it aside. Like a favorite outfit that's out of season, Giant Armors is going in mothballs for a while. I'm giving it about six months before I'll force myself to revisit it.

I just...it frustrates me. I want to be able to slam through whatever problem I have. Win by persistence and dedication. All that great samurai stuff.

Do I need more dedication? I don't know. I just don't know.

I do know the danger of having too many projects going at once. And while I'm now clearing this from my plate (for now), is that just another way for me to do more stuff? Is this just the easier path?

I don't know. I can't process it logically, I can't feel what's right, and my gut isn't leading me in any direction.

So, I'll simplify. And look at it again once I've rested.

Note: This is the second in my series of articles on each show in the Gundam franchise. I don't have a specific schedule for this; I'm just writing these reviews as I feel like it. The last one was Why You Should Watch Mobile Suit Gundam.

Four years after the broadcast of the original Mobile Suit Gundam (which was not particularly popular during its broadcast), and the increasing popularity thereof thanks to the three movie compilations released afterwards, Sunrise produced Zeta Gundam. It's set 7 years after the end of Mobile Suit Gundam, and introduces a mostly new cast of characters and giant robots. The One Year War is over, and heroes must rise to face new problems.

And the cast of Zeta is one of its best aspects. Nearly every character has a role to play, in illustrating an ideal or pushing another character in some important direction. And this with a very large cast of several dozen characters.

Whereas MSG takes place during the final months of the One Year War between Earth and Zeon, Zeta's primary conflict is a guerilla war. The Earth Federation military has been taken over by a ruthless, Nazi-like military faction called the Titans, which the protagonists are fighting to stop.

This is a bit of a problem, actually. Zeta doesn't have quite as tight of a narrative drive as Mobile Suit Gundam did. In the earlier show, the overall state of the war helped to drive the plot of the story, and often directed the characters' next actions. Because Zeta concerns itself with a series of small military skirmishes, its plot doesn't feel like it's building to a big story climax. While there is very much a big climax, the overall guerilla war—though it escalates—doesn't hold together the way a large war with major military offensives does.

As a result, Zeta spends more time on character moments. When I think about Zeta, I think about conversations between characters as much as I remember cool mecha action. This show contrasts its characters, and isn't afraid to present characters with whom we only sympathize some of the time. Kamille, the protagonist, is a fascinating study in light and dark: he's impetuous and vain, but absolutely dedicated to ideals of justice. While Amuro spends most of MSG agonizing over his choice of being a pilot, Kamille makes his peace with that choice early on.

A few other characters show up, and this is another example of Zeta's strengths and weaknesses. Char works with the "good guys" now, which is awesome; we get to spend more time with a complex character who has multiple allegiances. But he's now merely an excellent pilot, as opposed to being unquestionably the best pilot alive as he was in MSG. Sure, he's in hiding and doesn't want to show off, but those skills would inevitably appear during life-or-death combat.

So it goes with the re-introduction of Amuro, who joins the cast for a while. He's still a shockingly good pilot, but he suddenly can't make the kinds of kills he could seven years ago.

On the other hand, Amuro's a great example of the strength of the characters. Amuro is world-weary, angry at the Earth Federation, and still uneasy in his relationships. He's an adult, no longer unsure of himself, but still plagued by many of the same emotional problems. It's a fantastic update to the character (much like, say, Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi).

This presages the much darker tone of Zeta. It seems like a solid, more complex sequel to MSG, until about six episodes from the end. Then characters start to die. I won't tell you who or how many, but suffice to say by the end a lot of characters have gone on to the Great Dip In The Sky.

And it wraps up with perhaps the most nihilistic ending I've ever seen in anime. I've seen some really dark endings, but usually there's a ray of hope. Evangelion and Ideon end with quite a bit of hope for the future (well, the final Ideon movie, at least), and even Akira ends with a certain kind of life asserting itself. Zeta ends, er, very much on a downer.

Which explains my initial reaction to the series: tepid appreciation. I felt like it had some great animation and some neat character moments, but that it was just muddled and ended on such a downer.

Until I let time pass.

The more I thought about Zeta, and the more I analyzed its relationships and characters, the more I appreciated it. I realized that the arrogant characters were supposed to be arrogant, and the cold ones were meant to be cold. They were all pushing each other in different directions.

Zeta is a morality play. The action's cool, but ultimately it's about a bunch of flawed humans, doing their best to stop injustice.

A good example: one running gag in the franchise is the word "ikimasu." It means "Here I go," and it's what Amuro yells in MSG whenever he launches in his Gundam. There are many different phrases one could use to announce that one is going out; that's just the one Amuro tended to use. It's become a standard part of Gundam that, whenever the protagonist steps into the role of hero, he starts to use "ikimasu" when launching.

Late in Zeta, one of the characters dies in Kamille's arms. It's in the middle of a larger conflict, while they're inside a large structure that's about to explode, so Kamille reluctantly has to leave her there. She asks him to finish what they started, and he agrees. She breathes her last, and he stands up, walks to the door, then turns and softly murmurs, "Kamille Bidan. Ikimasu."

It's a beautiful moment, perfectly representing the kind of writing that Zeta achieves on a fairly regular basis.

One other side note: Zeta is amazingly well-animated. It came out 2 years after Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, which established that anime could be well-animated, and they took that lesson to heart.

For example, when the mecha are maneuvering in space, they have several dozen tiny "Vernier thrusters" all over the frame. The animators actually draw each individual thruster blast as the mecha twist and turn during combat. That's the kind of detail you get in this show.

So it looks good, and it has complex characters. And it ages like a fine wine. Sure, it has stretches of bland writing and less-than-stellar animation. But overall, it's a remarkable achievement in the Gundam franchise.

About six months ago, I started publishing tabletop RPG PDFs under the name Brent P. Newhall's Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders, starting with the short adventure War in the Deep in November 2008 and continuing with the sandbox setting The City of Talon in March 2009. I publish through DriveThruRPG, which takes a percentage of each PDF sale. The PDFs themselves are unrestricted.

I've always been a bit frustrated at the lack of real numbers about publishing PDFs online. How much money do these things make?

Here's how much I've actually made. Each PDF sells for US$5.00; I get $3.25 of that.

Sales

Month-by-month for War in the Deep, which was first published in November 2008:

Month-by-month for The City of Talon, which was first published in March 2009:

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 3,737.

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum:

The keywords used to find War in the Deep: "heroic tier adventure", "printable d&d counters", "rpg adventure plots", "rpg adventure writing", and "rpg for commercial use"

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 1,734.

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum:

The keywords used to find The City of Talon: "crimes of talon", "brentnewhall", and "role play blogs".

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I'm a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

Making just shy of US$100 with no advertising budget is no mean feat. On the other hand, considering the dozens of hours I put into these PDFs, I couldn't exactly make a livable wage off this yet.

The biggest surprise is the 32 pageviews from ENWorld, a huge D&D-oriented site. Upon further investigation, I discovered that ENWorld has a wiki page of 4E 3rd Party Publishers, and somebody kindly added my Musaeum and War in the Deep there. In writing this entry, I added the City of Talon to that page, so hopefully that'll drive some traffic to it.

I find it interesting that the RPG Bloggers network was much more interested in Talon than War in the Deep. This confirms my suspicion that GMs need higher-level creative resources more than they need pre-generated adventures. Note that Talon's made almost as much in 2 months as War in the Deep made in 4 months. However, Talon required far more time to create than War in the Deep did.

Plans

I plan to focus on settings. I'll continue work on my abandoned underground city setting and my floating city in the sky setting. I plan to publish both in the next six months.

However, given the relatively low time investment in writing an adventure, I'll probably publish one more adventure within the next six months. It seems worth it, especially if the adventure's fun to build.

We can have up to 10 players at my tabletop gaming group. That's a lot of people to manage; most groups max out at 5 or so. While I'm trying to get better at splitting the group up with another GM, I've had times where I've had to run a game wtih 10 players.

A few suggestions:

1. Notify the next few players in the turn sequence. When you tell somebody that it's their turn, point to the next person and advise them that they'll be next. They can then use the upcoming few minutes to prepare their next action.
2. Enforce turn time limits. Our group is upfront about the fact that, with a large group, we can't wait for minutes on each person's turn. In fact, I keep out a one-minute egg timer, which I use on anyone who isn't ready with their action when their turn starts (myself included).
3. Avoid combat. "True" role-playing, in the sense of acting out a role, is actually easier for large groups. The group can act off each other. You don't have to completely eliminate combat, but dropping one or two fights is probably a good idea.
4. Make combat quick. With 10 people, two fights can chew up the entire session. On the other hand....
5. Scale your enemies. By the time 9 players have taken a whack at a creature, it might be dead without getting the chance to use that one cool life-draining spell. Just beware making it so tough that one fight takes all night.
6. Make combat interesting. In a fight with several different kinds of creatures, different players can concentrate on particular enemies.
7. Pay special attention to quiet players. It's extremely easy for one or two players to fall through the cracks in a game like this. At least engage them in conversation.

The good news? A big group feels more like a party. A large group can be just as much fun as a small one, especially if big groups are rare. So have fun with it!

This is intended to be the first of a multi-part series where I write about each major animated work in the Gundam universe. I want people to know what each of these shows has to offer.

About spoilers: I won't tell you who dies, but this is a review of a 30-year-old show, for Pete's sake. Anything I write about here has long since been analyzed frame-by-frame on 2ch.

Mobile Suit Gundam, of course, is where it all began. The first Gundam show, which aired in 1979.

And that is the key aspect in appreciating this series. Mobile Suit Gundam (MSG) must be understood in its historical context. Before MSG, anime was aimed squarely at pre-teens and tweens. There was no anime aimed at teens or adults, except maybe Go Nagai's cheesy giant robot shows, depending on how you squint at them.

Mobile Suit Gundam was aimed at mid-teens, as evidenced by its 15-year-old protagonist (in most anime series, the protagonist is the same age as the target viewer). Heck, the only characters younger than that are the comic relief orphan children.

(Only in Gundam do you have comic relief orphan children.)

MSG also strove for realism. In previous mecha series, the titular giant robots almost always had ridiculous backstories—designed and built by a single scientist, usually. Transformation sequences often made no sense; the vehicles that made up Getter Robo melt together to form the giant robot.

Not so in MSG. There's certainly a magic technology—there has to be for giant robots to be practical—but it's placed on a different level, behind that of the giant robots. MSG introduced Minovsky particles, an otherwise undiscovered element that makes compact fusion drives possible and jams radar. This makes hand-to-hand combat critical, especially for large vehicles. And when one side adapted the arm-and-torso construction machines originally used for colony construction into fearsome humanoid war machines, they suddenly found themselves with an ideal war technology for space combat.

(Think about it: You need huge construction equipment to build something as big as a space colony. The construction equipment needs to be highly flexible and powerful. What sort of controls do you put on a highly complex piece of equipment like that? You make it as humanoid as possible, since people can more easily map controls to human movements.)

This is what you get in great science fiction—the magic technology suggests technological innovations and historical responses.

The two sides of MSG's conflict also stand out. The Earth Federation—the "good guys"—is simply Earth's government. It's not particularly noble or just; in fact, it's portrayed as bureaucratic and behind the times of modern warfare. The Principality of Zeon—the "bad guys"—objected to Earth's control of a fundamentally new civilization in space, and declared independence. Not only are several Zeon characters sympathetic and noble, one of them became one of the most popular anime characters of all time, Char Aznable¹.

Side note: Most folks see the Nazi-style uniforms of Zeon and read that Gundam's creator, Yoshiyuki Tomino, wanted MSG to feel like the German offensive in World War II, and call Zeon simple stand-ins for Nazis. Saalon and I disagree. Zeon is much more similar to Japan in WW2; motivated by a zeal for independence against an economic powerhouse that they see as oppressive. While I'm sure Tomino originally intended Zeon to be like the Germans, I think he ended up creating Japanese. While the upper-level Zeon nobility are clearly power-mad, most of the other Zeon characters are portrayed as soldiers doing what they think is right.²

Characters, too, elevate MSG above other anime of the time. I can list four main characters who behave significantly differently by the end of the series. And others explicitly don't change, to their detriment. I can't think of any other anime with that much character change.

And those characters! A few highlights:

• Ramba Ral is a fat Zeon military genius who travels with his wife, leading his men into ridiculously dangerous battles in one of Earth's backwaters. Because he's crazy like a fox; he knows that extreme daring inspires soldiers and throws the enemy off-balance. The sequence where he assaults White Base, corridor by corridor, presages Evangelion's assault on NERV HQ by fifteen years.
• Garma Zabi is a driven royal teenager who's been assigned an extremely safe area to hold, and desperately strives to prove himself. I felt bad for this proud, driven teenager, who could just sit back and enjoy the good life but insisted on doing something with his life, and suffered for it.
• Then there's Char Aznable: Charming, handsome, mysterious, an incredible pilot, and extremely successful. Then he kills one of his friends, and bursts out in triumphant laughter.

How can you not be intrigued by these people?

MSG accomplishes so much, especially in 43 episodes in an era when most anime had the barest thread of a story arc over the course of 50-odd episodes. Characters evolve (and some die), technology changes, and the war builds up to a fever pitch. Heck, the unexpected early cancellation of the series helped it, as the show focused on its end game for the last six episodes, and drove straight for it at full speed.

I distinctly remember watching a sequence about two-thirds through the show, in which the narrator explains the current Federation offensive against a major Zeon supply base. There's a shot of White Base, followed by a shot of General Revil debating strategy options. I suddenly realized: I understand the overall course of the war, and the characters' exact strategic role in that war, and I know what the characters are going through (and they're going through a lot). I've seen this show only once (plus the recap movies), and I just turned to one side and rattled off the names of fifteen major characters. I know them that well. I literally can't think of any other anime that accomplishes this much; even later Gundam series sacrifice one of these levels of detail.

Downsides? In 1979, the Japanese still hadn't wrapped their heads (or their drawing hands) around fluid 2D animation. MSG can be painful to watch, unless you've seen a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

It's also uneven. Tomino felt compelled to include a mobile suit fight in every episode, and at times they feel unnecessary.

But it's worth it. Oh, it's worth it, if just for the experience of this futuristic war story, and the great characters you'll meet, and the choices they face.

¹ Char's popularity is according to polls in Newtype magazine, which consistently put Char Aznable in the Top 20 list of most popular anime characters.

² See Of Space Nazis, Gundam Sequels and the Horribly Underated MS Igloo for an excellent analysis of the Nazi design aesthetic in Gundam.

A few weeks ago, my role-playing group tried to add a virtual player.

Wait. Back up. One of our regular players went off to college. Worse, she's one of the best role-players in the group. I pined for her.

For those of you unfamiliar with tabletop role-playing: A bunch of friends sit around a table. One of them lays out a situation, while the others pretend to be people in that situation, and narrate their reactions to the situation.

So, physical presence is important. A simple phone call won't suffice. Moreover, we play with miniatures laid out on a wet-erase mat to illustrate everyones' physical placement in the scene (especially relative to the occasional nasty monster). You need to see.

So we decided to try setting up a Skype webcam-based video conference call with her. I brought my laptop, connected to Skype, and placed the laptop on a few books. She came online, I called, she accepted, and after a bit of fiddling with audio and video settings, her head filled the screen.

I was worried. Had been in the weeks leading up to it, and was while I set this up at our table. It's undoubtedly just my prejudice, but when I think "free videoconferencing," I think of jerky footage, stuttering audio, and a dropped call every ten minutes. Webcams still kinda suck, my geeky side declaims, and audio/video quality over a college network tends to sound and look like RealVideo streams from 1999. And if we had a mediocre experience, we'd soldier on through the session rather than drop one of our best players. I grit my teeth and prepared to wrestle with technology.

It worked perfectly.

Besides the aforementioned technology issues (especially when we switched laptops, and the second laptop had a microphone worse than mine), we played normally. The technology mainly faded into the background, and we just talked and narrated and had fun.

Of course, it wasn't exactly like having her in the room. Humans just aren't used to talking to a flat screen that's filled with a smiling human head, and she couldn't pick out everything we said.

This is now simply part of how we play; if you're physically not there, you can always call in via Skype. And with the second laptop (and a better microphone, hopefully), we can add another distant player.

The technology works.

Wil Wheaton is an awesome person, and a great writer (I'm reading his latest book, Just a Geek, and am thoroughly sucked in. And it's an autobiography).

I heard last year that he gave the keynote speech at the Penny Arcade Expo (a.k.a. PAX). All I could find was an audio recording. I sat, dumbfounded, listening to it all, laughing at all the right moments. The speech was human, and emotional, and actually made important points about important things. And I enjoyed it consistently, all through its 55 minutes.

Well, video is now online, thanks to Google Video, so you can watch Wil give the entire speech as one uninterrupted sequence of awesomeness.

I'm embedding it below, and hopefully it'll show up for you (one never knows, these days).

(And, of course, now that I've given it that big introduction, you'll probably be disappointed, if you haven't listened to it already. And, granted, I can imagine there are people who just won't get it. But please give it a try, if just for the more important things he has to say. And if you ever have to give a speech, this will show you how to do it.)

I'm rewatching the speech now, actually. It's just that entertaining to me. Which is odd, since I'm not a gamer, which is what the keynote is all about. But that's the power of a speech like this.

You may have noticed a completely new homepage here. I've decided to make the homepage more of a central launching pad for my online content. This will undoubtedly change more over time (I'm already thinking of adding a Flickr stream).

The main advantage is that this new design will let you see more of what I do, all at once. It will also de-emphasize my blog, which I update less often now than in the past.

Please let me know what you think!

So, let's say you have a website. That means you're broadcasting information to the world, and presumably other people consume that information.

How do you know what people like about your content? How do you know what's popular?

Some web hosting companies will provide a few pages of hit tracking. Setting up your own hit tracker and integrating it onto your site is typically a pain.

Enter Google Analytics. It's a free service, tied into your Google account. When you create your Analytics account, the site displays a short snippet of HTML and Javascript code. All you have to do is paste that code into each webpage that you want to track.

Within a day or so, when you return to Google Analytics, it'll show you a huge range of statistics and data about your site—which pages are popular, where your visitors are coming from, etc.

Stats are updated once per day, and there's a wide range of ways to slice and dice the data. Very useful for getting a better idea of how your site's used, so you can better help the people you help.

There are a number of blog posts and articles about essential business books. "Ten books everyone entering the working world should read," and such.

I only have two.

One, Getting Things Done, I've already talked about quite a bit here. Just about everyone needs some way to organize their work. GTD does a great job of explaining what you need to track (and what you don't).

But today, I want to write about Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive. Drucker's the best writer on business and management I've ever read, and this is my favorite of his books. It's also the most directly helpful to regular workers.

First, an explanation: By "Executive," Drucker's referring to anyone in an organization who executes. So, the book's aimed at those who work with their brain, which seems to be a large majority of the work force these days.

The book is a rumination on—and a set of advice for—knowledge workers. We have to be responsible for our own work, while also fitting into a larger organization. We have to manage our own time, while respecting time restraints placed on us. We have to be independent and lead, appropriately.

Here are a few of his insights:

• Effective executives ask "What needs to be done?" and "What's right for this company?"
• Take responsibility for communicating
• Take responsibility for decisions, and make some
• Run highly efficient and productive meetings
• Think "we" instead of "I"

Which sounds like standard business advice. But each one of these (and more) are accompanied by in-depth thought and advice. There's plenty of analysis of what this means, and all of it is clear and concise.

The book's amazingly valuable, if just to help one re-think one's place and responsibilities.

In the real world, The City of Talon is a role-playing setting. It's a 107-page PDF that describes a fantasy world, including physical locations within the city, well-known residents, the history of the city, etc. It can be used in pretty much any pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG, and is also a great inspiration for authors; Talon makes for a great setting for a story. The PDF is a US $5 download from DriveThruRPG.com.

Within that document, Talon is a bustling, hectic port-side city. It's relatively new, and highly mercantile. Duke Malinare runs the city with a strong and very involved hand, but does little to disrupt trade. For money is the lifeblood of Talon.

I've developed dozens of characters who live in Talon, from the influential judge Sirrah Mortiss, to commoners like the kind healer Sera, to killers like Alphonse the Slayer.

I've laid out dozens of places within Talon, from the elegant hills of Bloodoak Row to Ged's Slaughterhouse to the Sanctuary of the Nearly Damned to the sprawling Pits beneath the city.

I did it to create a tiny world, and to give people a chance to live in that tiny world for even a few short hours. I did it as a creative exercise, and a chance to make a little money.

And it's worked. I've made a few bucks, and a few folks have checked it out. I'm proud of the document, too; it's well-organized and contains quite a few helps to potential GMs (including character stats in several different systems). I made sure to include a number of things I find important, such as a full index, a full table-of-contents, and many links and references within the document. If one character description mentions another character, there's a hyperlink and a page reference right there. I also created some effective, full-color maps.

If you're interested, feel free to check it out, and let me know what you think.

So imagine a Japanese film, set in the 1960's, involving a down-and-out Japanese private investigator named Maiku Hamma ("My real name," he says), who takes a missing-person case and winds up in the middle of a yakuza/triad turf war. He drives a convertible, wears a samurai-style jacket, and has an shoebox-sized office over a movie theater (you have to buy a ticket for the latest movie just to go up to see him).

It exists. It's called The Most Terrible Time In My Life.

The director, Kaizo Hayashi, was obviously influenced by French New Wave, American noir, samurai, and yakuza films. Everything's in black-and-white (almost), the characters are almost all tense (or hiding something, or both), and there's even a brief scene with Maiku's "mentor," who wears a white suit and uses a cane.

(If you're a die-hard MST3K fan, you'll be tickled to learn that the aforementioned white-suited mentor is played by the thick-jowled spaceship captain from "Star Force: Fugitive Alien" and "Fugitive Alien II," he of the maniacal laughter followed by "You're stuck here!")

See, this movie should be a terrible mess. This should be confusing. Instead, while the film certainly has its flaws, all of these elements work together.

Why? Because the director's influenced by all those disparate film styles; he's not trying to make a film that embodies all of them. He uses those styles to create effective scenes. They're all tools.

The result is a remarkably entertaining film. It starts out as simply great fun, then grows increasingly dark and brooding as the various plotlines accelerate towards the (inevitably bloody) end. Which is exactly as it should be for this sort of film. As long as you aren't expecting a mindless, high-speed action flick—Japanese movies rarely are—you'll probably get it.

And you'll find a weird, wonderful little gem. I can't wait to see the sequel.

This is one of the insidious dangers of owning an Amazon Kindle: I stumbled upon yet another book, and read half of it without realizing.

The Kindle's ability to download a free sample chapter of almost any book in its library is akin to a free sample of anything in a restaurant. I can easily download half a dozen samples of books that interest me, and at least one will grab my interest.

So with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a wonderful book I'm now halfway through reading, after reading the first word earlier tonight. It's a (fictional) set of letters between an author and a group of British country folk who lived on the island of Guernsey when it was occupied by the Germans during World War II. Besides teaching me that British Channel islands were occupied by Germans during WW2, the book is increasingly complex. It reveals more and more about the characters and the situation; living under German occupation forced all sorts of subtle and complex choices on these simple people.

And yet, it remains light-hearted and high-spirited. No mean feat considering its letters are (fictionally) sent just after the end of the war, when British food was still rationed and British subjects still walked past bombed-out buildings every day. And while the book can get serious and downright melancholy at time, that's not the point, and the book knows it. The tone varies while remaining true.

Which is why I found myself reading the book for two hours tonight, heedless of the time going by. I certainly hope it ends well.

I really need to get to bed right now, but I just couldn't help sharing this. I've just released a serious upgrade to my mecha anime-inspired tabletop RPG system, Gunwave. It's a fast, fun, exciting game that lets you play angsty teens during an epic space war.

And it's all free. Check out the PDFs on gunwave.net, stop by the forum, and let me know what you think. It's still in beta—need to do a lot of playtesting and get lots of opinions and just generally add some more cool stuff—but it's playable and fun right now.

Hope you enjoy.

I'm almost halfway into my spring Media Fast. No TV, movies, DVDs, books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, or music.

I don't take this too seriously. I'll check out a blog article if someone insists, and I listen to certain music at work that puts me in the proper working mood.

But I've already gleaned 3 insights:

1. I spend huge amounts of my days consuming media.
2. Media is my default choice. If I don't have anything to do, and I want to relax, I turn to media. I don't meditate, or sit in my garden, or just daydream. I consume.
3. I'm much more productive during my Media Fasts, and all around, I'm happier. I think this is because I'm less distracted.

I now plan to conduct miniature Media Fasts every week. From now on, I plan to consume no media Fridays and Saturdays. Obviously, if I absolutely need to read or watch something to get other work done, I will. But those days will be mini-vacations from media consumption. Days when I can truly relax.

Or I'm completely misguided. Still worth trying, I think. Perhaps I'll have a very different opinion later this week!

I've been reading Thea von Harbou's Metropolis, her novelization based on the original script she wrote with Fritz Lang. It was published before the movie was even completed, so this is their original vision.

I'm stunned. This is like Ray Bradbury at his best. The characters are memorable, the plot leaps forward like the best SF, the dialogue fills one with emotion. This is top-notch work. I'd love to know who translated it.

Here's a brief excerpt:

This is not the best of it, because the novel uses repetition to drive its points home. You're reminded of past images and sequences, and the memory fills you with dread.

It may well be better than the movie, and I think the movie's one of the top 5 SF films made before Star Wars.

I've been working on a major role-playing project for the past few months. It's called the City of Talon, a small book that describes a busy portside fantasy city, suitable for any fantasy role-playing game. It can even be raided for ideas for short stories and novels.

It's a grand experiment. I love the creative side of role-playing, and I wanted to try my hand at creating a city that other people could include in their own games.

A document like this is very different from the articles and stories I'm used to writing. While fictional, it's very structured. It begins with an introduciton to the city, laying out its basic governing structure, level of technology, and overall feel. It then proceeds to a description of various places within the city—taverns, clubs, dives, docks, etc.--in some detail, including overall size and frequent patrons. I even drew maps for 9 major locations using the free vector graphics program Inkscape.

The book then lists dozens of famous (and infamous) denizens of the city, from nobles to paupers, just and unjust. I wanted these characters to be easy to imagine and role-play, so I ensured each had at least a motto, a physical quirk, and some background.

There's much more to a city than buildings and people, of course, so I also created short sections on major vices in the city, political organizations, and possible stories and adventures.

And finally, because people may want to fit these characters into their role-playing sessions, I mapped out the top dozen characters in three RPG systems (D&D 4^th Edition, D&D 3.5, and GURPS). This took a lot of time, but I hope will be particularly useful to GMs as they narrate their players through the city.

It ended up at 50 pages, and I learned a lot. I'm already starting work on another setting, this time a large floating city buzzing with airships and intrigue, and I know how to make it even better than Talon.

Anyvay. If you're interested in Talon, for role-playing or as a spark for writing projects (lots of people and places to plagiarize), it's a $5 PDF at DriveThruRPG, or drop me a line and I'll send you a copy.

Let me know what you think!

Much as we've engineered our world into consistency—on any day of the year, you can find tomatoes in the grocery store—our planet maintains its seasonal cycle. Our kitchens may keep the same color every month of the year, but we step outside in March to a changing world.

While the mornings are still chilly, the air has a warmth and vitality that we haven't seen in months. After the long sleep of winter, Earth is taking its first wakening breaths.

And so my mind turns to my garden. I have two of them, really: front and back. The front garden is a simple patchwork of flower beds and healthy shrubs. The back garden is my canvas and my laboratory.

The crocuses have appeared, like shy girls at a dance, peeking up in ever-greater numbers. They are heralds of spring, and I'm craning my neck to see the rest of the season's bright entourage. No such luck, yet.

But that's okay, because my tea plant arrived today.

More accurately, my Camellia sinensis arrived from Camellia Forest Nursery today. Via UPS:

I immediately unwrapped it and dug it into a pot that sits next to my back door:

Camellia sinensis is the plant that all leaf teas are made from: green teas from fresh, steamed leaves; oolong teas from slightly browned leaves; and black teas from thoroughly browned and dried leaves.

While this single bush won't provide me with enough tea to entirely satisfy my daily afternoon tea cravings, the plant is a whimsical and useful addition to my garden. And a great beginning to the season.

(Bonus points if you catch the reference of this entry's title.)

So, I've been avoiding this blog for almost a month now. Not because I hate it, but because I have nothing to write about in this form.

I'm writing a lot on Twitter. I'm doing a lot—producing episodes of my podcast, working on Gunwave, watching anime—but I have nothing really to say about any of it at the moment.

Because, sometimes, life is work. And as valuable as writing can be, sometimes it accomplishes nothing. In fact, sometimes it confuses the matter.

It's funny. I like my blog's structure. I like the way I update it. I like having people read it.

But it's a platform, on which I stand and lecture. And we live in a world full to bursting with platforms and lectures. What have I got to say that's different than others' opinions and facts?

This blog isn't working for me.

About a year ago, I decided to change this blog into an ongoing series of articles about technology, self-improvement, reviews, and other miscellaneous topics.

I've now completely lost any interest I had in continuing that. Frankly, I've run out of article ideas. I could always review a movie or book I've watched lately, but what's the point?

Fundamentally, the problem is that I've failed to drive much traffic to this blog. I get almost no comments or emails from readers. Why should I write for no audience?

This is not to whine or complain; simply to explain why I'm struggling to find a reason to continue blogging here.

Problem is, I joined the RPG Bloggers' Network a few months ago, so I feel a certain duty to continue writing about role-playing here. Which I may do. But otherwise, I'm much more active on Twitter, and otherwise my friends somehow manage to get updated about my life without this blog.

So, I don't know what I'm going to do here. This blog certainly won't disappear, but it will probably see far fewer updates.

I just wish I had a more compelling vision of what to do with this thing.

An update from yesterday's entry: I'm sticking to my resolutions (½ hour on email and blogs per day, more drawing and reading, and a tighter productivity system). Despite the difficulty; I'm currently out of town.

Of course, the first few days of any major change are relatively easy. Big changes are 900-pound gorillas; easy to remember and follow. The two main questions are: How well does the new change work in those few days? And: Do you stick with it for more than a few days?

I usually start to falter after about a week. It's not new and exciting by that point. I'll forget off and on, then I'll completely fall off the wagon about two weeks after I start. I suspect this is common.

That's not a worry; that's an observation. However, I don't need to worry about that just at the moment.

The more immediate concern is the efficacy of these changes. Do they bring about the more fundamental change I want? For me right now, I want to feel less tied to a computer, more present in the real world, and I want to steadily improve several skills I feel are important to me. Will this do that?

I must monitor my feelings. Check my stress levels (much as I dislike the term "stress"). I must tap into myself.

None of this is easy. But if I can get to that better place, it will be worth it. Don't you think?

Why no updates here in a week? I've been sick. And I've been busy—always a dangerous combination.

This coincides with a lot of recent thoughts about, um, my life. My productivity system has lain essentially undisturbed for a week. This has led to thoughts about the source of productivity, and its importance. This, in turn, has caused a re-examination of my life.

As many things as I have going on in my life, I think it's time to simplify yet again. And to be drastic about it.

So, a few still-solidifying resolutions:

1. Half an hour on emails and blogs every day. Maximum.
2. More drawing, every week. I like to draw. It exercises odd, useful muscles.
3. More reading. I already read, but not as much as I'd like to. And why not? What more wholesome pleasure is there?
4. A greater respect for greased wheels. All my little notes to self, snailmail, reminders, voicemails, etc. are to be processed and incorporated into my productivity system every day. Within 24 hours. Period.

Too bad I won't have a chance to implement this until Saturday, if that. But at least I can commit to it, and work out how to do it.

Time for change.

Don't give your brain too much credit. I posted about this recently on the Getting Things Done forum: the Dangers of the Projects List.

A little background: A GTD user manages work through a couple of different lists, that track work on several different levels: larger Roles in life, specific Projects identified with actual end results, and nitty-gritty Actions. Nearly all of one's Actions should be in service of Projects, and most Projects should fit into the larger Roles. Meanwhile, day-to-day, one works off one's Actions.

I've been experimenting for a few weeks with a tweak: I kept my list of Projects visible all the time. Ideally, I'd want to work on my Actions more if I could immediately relate them to Projects. So I could see where I was going.

It didn't work. To my surprise, I found that my brain would get distracted by my larger goals, leaving me unable to concentrate on my day-to-day Actions. It was like a runner constantly thinking about the marathon, and not about daily training.

It's a strange aspect of the brain: Allow it to focus, and beautiful worlds open up out of the simplest subject. Give it too much to think about, and it goes haywire, leaping from topic to topic without dwelling on any of them enough to move forward.

Beware the Projects list.

YouTube is the grand-daddy of online video sites. But it's not the only online video site.

Vimeo is one of the sites aiming to take on YouTube. They're doing it by focusing on a slightly different audience:

• Vimeo actively pushes its users to upload only personal videos. This isn't a place to post TV clips or anime.
• Vimeo promotes a community atmosphere. It's a bunch of people, sharing personal thoughts and their own entertainment.
• Vimeo has high-quality video, by default. A normal video on Vimeo looks better than a normal video on YouTube, to my eyes certainly.

It's also easy to use (despite being bought by Google, YouTube still feels cluttered to me), and Vimeo videos have fewer inane comments than on YouTube. I think that's partly an effect of Vimeo's community, and partly attributable to their relative size.

Still. It's a very nice video site, and when I post videos, I prefer to put them on Vimeo if just because they look better and don't get stuffed with pointlessly negative comments.

A few months ago, I published my first RPG adventure, War in the Deep, a D&D 4th Edition adventure for Heroic Tier players. Here's what I learned in writing it.

1. Artwork turns a bland adventure document into an exciting one. I searched Flickr for photos licensed under the Creative Commons for commercial use, and I used Inkscape to create color maps.
2. Most people have black-and-white printers, so make sure your maps are still legible when printed grayscale.
3. Play around with fonts. You can go crazy, of course, which is bad; you don't want readers crossing their eyes as they read. Fonts must be clearly legible. But a slightly more antique font, reminiscent of 1900's-era type, for example, can give your adventure text the right tone.
4. Beware text tricks. Adventures use a large variety of types of text; background plot descriptions, dialogue, traditional "boxed text," stats, headers, and map captions (at least). Make each one distinctive, but not wildly so. You only need two or three different font families; use italicization, bold, indentation, borders, and other such effects to differentiate types of text. (I ended up with one font for headers, one font for text, and one slightly different font for stats because the main text font looked weird at small text sizes.)
5. An adventure's plot must be railroaded. Unfortunate, but true. War in the Deep is a 4-5 encounter adventure. There's simply not enough space to wait for the players to wander around investigating plot threads in detail or uncover background plots. So the action must move naturally from one plot point to the next, with little variation. Many stories simply won't work in this format.
6. Direct players from one plot point to the next; don't force them. In my first draft, characters would simply insist that the players take up a quest or follow them in a particular direction. Several reviewers pointed out the frustration caused by high-handed NPCs (more accurately: heavy-handed GMing), so I toned that down, while still pointing the characters in a specific direction.
7. Write for the GM, not the players. I wanted to describe the differing personalities of three NPCs very briefly and memorably, so I explained that they act like Han, Leia, and Luke as of the end of Star Wars episode IV. The players won't ever know this; the NPCs are aquatic elf nobles sitting on a council, so they won't ever mention Alderaan or the Force. But this shorcut gives the GM a handy hook for each character's personality, and how they interact.

This was a random, wonderful discovery at my local comic shop, and one of the advantages of and reasons for local comic shops.

Barnum tells the story of P.T. Barnum, who gets drafted as a special agent to stop a mad Nicola Tesla from assassinating President Harding in a bid to take over the world. And P.T. uses his circus performers to do it.

It's wild. The performers run the gamut from a diminutive strong-man to a young punk acrobat to a wily female hypnotist. They're all...well, they're all geeks, really, which is part of the appeal. These are social outcasts who Barnum hired, and have formed something like a family.

And they go on a rollicking adventure across America, involving all sorts of then-state-of-the-art technology, from dirigibles to a calculating engine. Fortunately for the reader's suspension of disbelief, P.T. Barnum's incessant collecting bug provides a reason for much of this technology to pop up: he's either actively pursuing it, or his enemies are deploying it against Barnum's formidable forces.

But, ultimately, this is a fun, light action-adventure story. One could easily compare this with The X-Men, Barnum serving as a manic Professor Xavier and his sideshow freaks as real-life mutants, minus energy powers. And while Barnum delves into a little social commentary about society's outsiders (and the irony that they now do very well for themselves by highlighting the very attributes that make them outsiders), it's still mostly the story of stampeding elephants, high-speed chases, and charging pygmy warriors.

Great fun.

Been playing around with TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client. This lets you not only read your Twitter stream, but also split your stream into separate streams for just certain groups of folks (personal friends, business contacts, etc.).

It works well for its stated purpose, though the tweets take up a lot of space compared to, say, the main Twitter website. So you can only see 6-7 tweets per column, though I can see 4 to 5 columns at once.

But the big advantage is that you get a more comprehensive view of Twitter traffic. You see recent messages meant specifically for you, your friends' conversations, etc. — all at a glance.

Of course, it's only useful if you like Twitter. But if you do, TweetDeck's worth considering.

I'm confused.

I see a lot of articles on the RPG Bloggers Network providing game prep advice. What to think about before a session. What to write down. What to roll up.

Do GMs really have that much trouble preparing for a session?

Seriously. Do we not know how to prep? When I started GMing, I used the advice provided in my GM guide of choice, which laid out the things I'd probably need (maps, enemy stats, etc.).

So, before each game, I made sure I had mapped out any places the players were likely to visit, rolled up stats on any enemies, and figured out what I thought would happen.

Then I GMed. Oh, I've tweaked the formula over time—I love world creation, so I suss out lots of details—but I didn't need to read half a dozen articles about game prep.

And I wonder if other GMs are the same way. Do we really need prep advice? Don't we know the basics that need to be set up?

I wonder if it isn't anxiety, stemming from a desire to control the events of the game. Perhaps GMs hope that, with the right prep, the session can go exactly the way they want it to.

Problem is, it rarely does. The story belongs to the players as much as the GM. They have the freedom to pull the story in a different direction, no matter what the GM has prepped.

So, shouldn't we all just prep the basics, and go with the flow?

This may seem like a simple, obvious topic. But the important things usually are.

I've stopped worrying about later in the week. Oh, I'll put down reminders and mark my calendar. But I don't think about it.

I focus on today. What can I get done today?

Because that's all I've got. I don't even have that; I might have a heart attack and die in an hour. Who knows?

But I'm pretty sure I have today. I can focus on today. I can plan today, and work today. Fill the day with Good Work, Done.

Because if I spend much time thinking about tomorrow, today seems less important. There's always tomorrow. Right?

But our life isn't made up of tomorrow; it's made up of thousands of todays. And if we don't focus on those todays, they slip by and we regret the passage of time.

So, let us focus on today. And make today rock.

Imagine having 100 to 200 role-playing miniatures, in color. Some of them fantasy characters, some of them sci-fi characters, some horror; whatever. And imagine if they cost about 5 cents each, and you could keep them all in a box the size of a hardback book.

I came across these at the D.C. Game Day last year, and I wish I knew the name of the guy who made them. Because they're ingenious.

First, think about standard RPG tokens, the circular ones printed on heavy card stock. You cut them out and put them on your battle mat. But they're hard to keep track of, they fall into all sorts of cracks, they flutter and blow around at the slightest breeze, they bend and get creased. They're a pain.

Okay, so imagine gluing them to the flat side of a washer. Hey. Now they stay put, and they don't get lost as easily. But you're still limited to the tokens that your representative game company puts out.

But you're not.

Go on the web and search for webcomic art. Find some cool web comics. Some will have awesome fantasy characters, some awesome sci-fi characters, some cool monsters; find cool stuff. Drag and drop some great samples to your computer.

Now, open up your favorite image editing application. It can be MS Paint. Crop each strip to just the face of a character (in Paint, use the selection tool, press Ctrl C, then create a new image, change its attributes to 1 pixel by 1 pixel, and press Ctrl V). Save it. Continue for all the strips you've downloaded.

(You may not even have to do this much. Many webcomics will have a page devoted just to a list of characters, with facial images already included. Just grab those.)

You now have a bunch of head shots. Drag and drop those into a word processing document. Print it out.

Now go to your local home improvement store and buy a bunch of metal washers; I got 3/18" washers in bags of 25. Put the washers on top of the faces in your printouts, and make sure they're a proper size. If not, adjust.

Now you're gonna make them look fantastic.

Toss your word processing document onto a USB stick or burn it onto a CD, and head down to a nearby office supply store or copier joint. Ask them to print the document out, in color, on nice glossy paper. They'll show you the papers they have; choose something really nice (you'll only be using a couple of sheets).

Now cut out the faces, and glue each one onto a separate washer, using normal glue. It'll stick just fine (though keep an eye on them; mine tend to curl up after I first apply the glue, so I have to press them down once more).

And, boom. You now have dozens and dozens of custom NPCs.

And if you're in the middle of a game and need a bunch of faceless antagonists, turn your tokens over. The undersides do very well as blank representations of bad guys.

Genius, isn't it? I just wish I'd thought of it first, in a way. Not that it matters, really, now. I want everyone to know about 'em and start using them.

I've been thinking a lot lately about eliminating unnecessary things.

This comes partly because it's about time for me to Freecycle a few things (Freecycle being a local group of folks that email the group when they have something to give away). And I've been wondering, how much do I really need?

Now, that itself is a leading question. Life is not merely a succession of fulfilling basic needs. Technically, I don't need many of the conveniences in my life, but they free me to concentrate on other things. It's not necessarily wise to throw those out.

(Do I need a microwave? No, I could feed myself without it. But I'm not getting rid of it.)

However, I have stuff that exists to fill out a bookshelf. My stuffed animals, for example: I have half a dozen of them, and they crowd into a bookshelf. I like them. They look cute. But I don't get any joy from looking at them, and they have almost no sentimental value. They look okay, but is that all I'm willing to settle for in my environment?

Moreover, I'm sure each one could be loved and cherished by some 8-year-old. Why not give them that experience? Why not do something else with that space?

And, of course, the same thing applies all throughout my environment. And my work — what am I spending time on now? How does this build me up, or build up those around me?

So I look at things to eliminate, and things to shore up. I'll probably give away several of those stuffed animals, and some musical paraphernalia I never use, and a few shirts and slacks I don't wear anymore.

I'd rather make a bold statement and live with it, than clutter up my life with stuff that, frankly, isn't up to snuff.

Ahhh, I love Seth Godin. Some folks disagree with him, sure, but I think they miss his point.

Seth's been preaching about marketing for quite a few years now, specifically about its need to change. Spewing demands to buy products at people...no longer works. People ignore that now.

And this goes much deeper than advertising, of course, which is what interests me so much. How do you Get The Word Out? About anything? Not by buying traditional ads, and certainly not by making traditional ads.

You do it by making remarkable things, and by talking about it in remarkable ways. Remark-able...able to be remarked upon. Worth remarking on, worth talking about.

I still haven't learned that lesson. With Otaku, No Video, my podcast, one of the first things I did was set up some Google AdWords. Which haven't improved our stats at all.

We need to be remarkable. Just like Seth says.

I recently finished reading something special.

Dororo is a 3-volume manga by the "God of Manga," Osamu Tezuka. It's essentially the invention of the modern samurai adventure genre.

Man, is it dark. The story opens with a young father who promises his unborn son's body parts to 48 demons, in return for land and power. As a result, his son Hyakkimaru is born as basically a mewling blob of flesh and bone, which his father casts away. Hyakkimaru is taken in by a sympathetic inventor who, as the boy grows, invents makeshift prosthetic limbs for him.

The young man trains as a samurai, and soon heads off in search of the 48 demons; for each one he kills, he will regain a piece of his own natural body.

This leads to an interesting irony. Hyakkimaru's prosthetic limbs are in many ways more powerful than normal ones: they hide weapons and can surprise enemies when he removes them. But he is profoundly grateful every time he loses one as a regular one takes place. He deeply values normal limbs, as opposed to the super-charged false ones.

And then he meets a young punk thief, Dororo, who decides to tag along with him (ostensibly to steal Hyakkimaru's katana when he isn't looking).

So it turns into an adventure series, in a way: Hyakkimaru and Dororo wandering, searching for demons, and stumbling upon many human tragedies along the way. There's plenty of supernatural horror and weird creatures, plus Tezuka's trademark musings on humanity's foibles and little triumphs.

Which makes it sound depressing. It isn't, really; Hyakkimaru may be grim at times, and he lives in a dark time, but it's ultimately an uplifting story of a young man triumphing over great adversity. Well worth the time, if you're willing to be challenged by a different kind of comic.

I'm working on a role-playing campaign setting — a whole city, ripe for adventure. I plan to publish it as one big document, complete with maps, locations, characters, etc.

I decided this setting would benefit from a few appendices that list statistics for the major antagonists, according to several popular role-playing systems. That would mean less work for gamers when they encounter that antagonist.

What systems to use? I wanted popular ones, so I chose D&D 4^th edition, D&D 3.5, and GURPS. Creating the D&D stats was easy, as there are several online character generators for that. But I couldn't find a good character generator for GURPS.

So I made my own. I've posted a GURPS 4^th edition character generator, which includes the complete list of attributes, advantages, disadvantages, and skills listed in the current edition of GURPS Lite. With this, you can roll up a character for a GURPS adventure in less than a minute.

The generator uses relatively simple Javascript, allowing you to save the webpage itself locally to your own hard drive for access if you don't always have a net connection. It generates the character sheet as a separate page in a separate window. I've tested it in Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

As always, feedback is welcome.

It's funny what disappoints people.

Years ago, David Allen created a productivity system called Getting Things Done, which I've talked about quite a lot here on the blog. He recently published a new book, Making It All Work, and the GTD community has gotten excited about what new gems of wisdom it might contain.

There's nothing new. His original Getting Things Done book is still the foundation, and explains his recommended systems and methods. Making It All Work explains the psychology behind GTD, what he discovered about human nature and his design of the system to flow with the ways human beings actually behave.

And people are disappointed. They want revelations, deep wisdom, fireworks, and drama. I suspect some of them secretly want new systems and formulae. Nope.

Instead, we get an erudite exhortation. Allen's eminently practical, and Making It All Work shows why humans need a system like GTD. In a way, it's a proof for GTD, as well as encouragement to implement some kind of lightweight, air-tight system to track your work.

And people are disappointed, because the system has no drama, no big changes. It just works.

Which is why I love it, and why Making It All Work was such a valuable read for me last week. I now deeply understand the importance and consequences of an air-tight system. I appreciate how much better life is in general when all one's work is written down, outside of one's mind, freeing the mind to concentrate on bigger questions.

Doesn't that sound good?

So, a couple of weeks ago I was in a fancy stationery store, which sells all sorts of satisfyingly tactile papers, pens, sealing wax, etc. Which was where I looked down and saw a book called the Guerilla Art Kit.

It's a celebration of public artwork, such as posters and stickers posted on public buildings and signs. More destructive forms include graffiti, but this celebrates less permanent forms of public expression.

The author points out that public spaces benefit from artistic expression. The creation of beautiful artwork, and posting them publicly, helps society. Imagine the random people who stumble upon a cheerful sticker or thought-provoking quote taped to an out-of-the-way wall.

It's also psychologically freeing. It says a lot about a person who's willing to display their homemade artwork in a public space.

The book provides dozens of different ideas for guerilla art, from the easy (chalk art) to the daring.

So, it has lots of neat idea, and it just might push a few folks to try something outside their culture zone that expands their creativity. Sounds good to me.

For those of us who actually create media, it can be really hard to find good music that you can publish as part of your own work. Whether it's a trailer, a music video, or a larger work like a film, licensing can be really complicated.

Which is what makes sites like StockMusic.net so wonderful. Each song costs $30, and you can use it effectively anywhere, for any reason, as much as you want. And they've got hundreds, perhaps thousands of songs. Downloadable in AIFF, WAV, or MP3 formats, with a free demo of every single one playable in your browser or downloadable.

A great little service.

There are so many good webcomics. And so many good artists.

The Abominable Charles Christopher updates only once a week, and it's a four-panel strip, so not much happens. It's slow. And it's beautiful and emotionally involving.

It's drawn by an artist who works at LucasArts, so its beauty should not be surprising. But the strip has a poetic, deliberate feel to it that I rarely see in Western-style stories. It has the kind of steady hand on the tiller of story that I associate with, say, Jeff Smith's Bone.

I've noticed something. Of those wonderful people who think up horrifying monsters for players to encounter during a tabletop role-playing session, many of them struggle with originality.

They strive to create thoughtful histories and almost complete ecologies for their creatures, in the attempt to create a monster that's not just another vicious humanoid.

I'd like to take a moment to say: They don't need to.

If I'm questing through a dark, eldritch forest, and something leaps out at me, I want to know how to react. Do I swing my katar at it? Do I make threatening moves? Do I very much not make threatening moves? Do I close in or keep my distance?

If I'm fighting a completely original creature, I've no idea how to react to the thing. So I usually have to resort to careful investigation ("Does it seem particularly muscular?"), trial and error ("I poke it."), or having fun with it ("I rush in and stab it, screaming the whole time!").

How much fun is that? Not much (for me, anyway). And certainly not if the same scenario occurs for creature in an adventure. I need some facts I can grab on to.

If, on the other hand, I encounter a bear with lizard-like skin, I know roughly how to react. It may spring plenty of surprises on me, but at least I have a framework within which to act.

Which is fundamental to role-playing. One reason for D&D's popularity is its medieval universe, which is familiar to all of us from reading The Hobbit under the covers as children. We know how to react to most environments in the world, at least basically. The challenge lies in keeping our characters alive and achieving their goals, which usually have nothing to do with the originality of the random creature that drops on their heads as they creep through the Sapphire Caverns.

Now, I love a well-thought-out, unusual creature. I applaud it. But if creature #5 is basically a wolf, don't worry. It'll still be fun.

My Christmases have always been quiet. I may spend more time than usual shopping or baking, but I'm able to keep up with everything.

Not this year. A perfect storm kept me busy every hour of every day for the past several weeks. I was left breathless.

After several wonderful, quiet days at home this past weekend, I've recharged. I'm back to "normal," whatever that is.

I'm analyzing these busy weeks. I've since re-negotiated several things that were holding me back, such as teaching, which I don't need to do as much of now. I've also looked at my work. I made a lot of cookies, which were great, but did I really need to make that many? Could I have made fewer, and still delighted people? Yes, and I would have better managed my time had I looked at that more closely.

Because time is precious. There are so many things left in my life that I want to accomplish and experience, and do so fully. Not rush through so I can tick them off a list, but deeply experience an autumn in Maine or a week in Japan or an afternoon at St. Paul's Cathedral.

And one key to achieving that is constant re-appraisal of your life. Trivial things constantly battle for our attention. We must fight them. And live.

I'm back from my first trip to New York City. Briefly: It was very cold, I saw The 39 Steps, and I took a lot of pictures.

Less briefly: I'm glad I went; it's worth seeing New York at least once in your life, if just for the change of pace. It's breathtakingly diverse; there's always something to do or see. One could spend the rest of one's life just sampling restaurants.

And the people are...hurried. Not rude, though that depends on your definition. They just expect everyone to keep moving. Sit down and talk with an average New Yorker, and you'll find someone as nice as anyone else.

And, to my surprise, New Yorkers stick together. Everyone in New York feels like a native, much more so than in other places I've visited.

It's a city of movement: people moving, lights moving, taxis and bicycles moving.

I'd like to go back when it's warm, and I can take a couple of days to explore some neat parts of the city. I don't think one needs a week to appreciate New York City, but one needs more than a day or two.

As with so many things.

I'm conflicted about whether I should write about the Digital Archive Project here. I don't want to get it into trouble.

See, despite TV's bad reputation, there have been a few great shows over the decades. Many of them were canceled early; others left the airwaves and have never received any other release. The only exist on a master tape in a vault somewhere in New York City, and on dusty VHS tapes scattered around the world.

Then there are shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which every single episode requires license wrangling for the original movie rights.

Enter the Digital Archive Project. Its goal is to put every episode of these great shows (except those that have had a legitimate DVD release) online. Essentially forever. All in one place, using BitTorrent technology.

If you go to the site and create a free account, then click on the Categories link in the left-hand navigation pane, you're presented with a list of great old shows. MST3K. Freaks and Geeks. Max Headroom. Cartoon Planet. Brimstone.

All of them downloadable, most in high quality. Until there's a DVD release.

Now that you know about it, go forth and watch some great TV.

Okay, so you've signed up for a Twitter account, and maybe posted a few times. How do you move to the next level?

Here are some suggestions for improving your Twitter experience:

• Go to the Everyone stream. See who's talking, and about what.
• More importantly, see what catches your attention. Observe effective use of 140 characters, so you'll know how to tweet more effectively.
• Look at who's popular on Twitter (via Twitterholic). Read their tweets. You probably won't want to follow all of them, but they are popular for a reason. I follow about half of them, for whatever that's worth.
• Get on Twitter frequently. It's really most effective when you can check it several times a day, at least. Fortunately, this doesn't take long.
• Check your @Replies often. While you're away, someone might reply to you about something you tweeted yesterday, and you may not see it in your regular stream.
• Check your DMs (direct messages) often. See above. Also, DMs function more like email, and they're very easy to miss.
• Post original content. This is a personal peeve; I see folks whose stream consists entirely of "@gozo Yeah, and you know what that means" and "@hiroyuki Oh, I know it!" Little real content. Instead, as you're browsing the web, tweet about the websites you're reading. And as you sit down to your computer and load up Twitter, think about what you've been doing, and tweet about that.
• Look into an aggregator application, like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or PeopleBrowsr. These will show all your feeds (including @Replies and DMs) on one screen, making it much easier to notice important topics.

But above all, don't go too nuts. Twitter's fun and useful, but it's not a place to spend your entire day. It's only Ones and 0s.

Hope this helps.

I believe that speed is essential to good role-playing. Think of a good action movie or an engrossing book; the story rockets from revelation to revelation, leaving you breathless. Not that a GM should rush from one plot point to the next, but there's no point in taking a plot slowly.

Unfortunately, many of the rules and resolution mechanisms in role-playing systems slow down the game as players roll dice and compare numbers. They're necessary, sure, but the time they consume needs to be minimized.

Enter initiative cards. This one of those little tricks that drastically speed up a game.

Imagine a 3x5" card that contains the following information:

• Character Name
• Initiative score
• Max HP
• Current HP
• Standard attack
• Vulnerabilities

Imagine writing up one of these for each character (player and non-player). When a battle begins, write down the initiative scores, and order the cards by that score.

Boom. You call out the name of the player on the first card. The player attacks an NPC. You pull out the NPC's card, note any damage, and slip it back in. You then flip to the next card and announce that player's turn.

And battle zips from one player to the next. No need to write down a temporary initiative list, and all vital stats are in one place.

Even better, on subsequent battles you just sort in the appropriate NPC cards. Takes about ten seconds to set up for a battle.

It's greatly sped up my games. I'd prefer to just do away with initiative altogether, but that's another blog post.

A few weeks ago, I watched The King of Kong, a documentary about competitive Donkey Kong players. Which sounds geeky, until you watch it.

It's about guys who take on these classic arcade games as a challenge. A test of skill. Those old games, like Pac-Man, Q-Bert, and Donkey Kong, were very hard; one group claims that the average Donkey Kong player will never progress past the third level (out of 22).

It's fascinating to watch grown men—very smart grown men—take on that sort of challenge. Sure, it takes a certain kind of person, but not the introverted nerd you might expect. The documentary focuses on two men, one of whom is a successful independent business man, and the other who looks like a middle manager at Microsoft. They each have a full-time job (well, one got inerested in Donkey Kong during a period between jobs), and a wife (and, in one case, kids).

They're just fascinated. It's a puzzle. A very hard puzzle that requires quick reflexes as well as a quick mind; the enemies move according to both complex patterns and random directions. Plus, the game has only four different screens; higher levels repeat the same screen, with more enemies that move faster and in more complicated patterns.

Not only is there nothing wrong with their fascination, it's noble. They're bettering themselves: their brains, their hand-eye coordination. They actively seek out new challenges and new frontiers to explore.

May we all do the same.

Every so often, a book comes along that not only follows a great premise, it fulfills that premise completely.

Legends of Literature is a collection of essays written by contributors to Writer's Digest. Famous contributors, like Stephen King, H.G. Wells, Jack Kerouac, and Ray Bradbury. There are good interviews with Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Sandburg, and George Bernard Shaw.

Much of it is writing advice, yes, but it's also a window into the minds of these great writers. We get to see their approaches to fiction, and their opinions on the writing business. Bradbury, for example, is breezy but pragmatic about the need to just sit down in front of the page and write, good or bad.

It's certainly an excellent book for writers, but it's also worth a look for bibliophiles who just want to know how writers think.

If you like Twitter, you may benefit from a more powerful interface. Some solve this through use of TweetDeck, a desktop application that shows multiple Twitter streams (your stream, replies to you, direct messages, etc.) in columns.

The new service PeopleBrowsr is a web-based application that works like TweetDeck. You enter your Twitter account information, and PeopleBrowsr displays columns of streams. You can easily add more streams, and re-arrange them, right in your browser. The interface is a little busy but highly functional, and provides a lot of information at once. Even better, it's written almost entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't depend on heavyweight frameworks like Flash.

Why use this instead of TweetDeck? Because you can use PeopleBrowsr from any computer, anywhere. It goes with you; if you have 'net access, you can use PeopleBrowsr and manage a huge array of Twitter conversations.

Very, very handy.

All right, I admit it: I play Dungeons & Dragons. This may horrify some of my evangelical friends, but trust me: there's nothing wrong with it.

You may ask, why play D&D when it has so many negative connotations? Why not use one of the hundreds of other role-playing systems out there, like FUDGE or GURPS?

First, I'll use Saalon's metaphor: D&D is like Microsoft Windows. Everyone uses it and it works okay, though it's kinda bloated and sometimes confusing.

I contend that World of Darkness is like the Mac, and FUDGE/GURPS are like Linux, but those are different subjects.

So, I play D&D because it's a standard. It provides a common context for discussing role-playing with others, and if I'm playing with a bunch of folks I don't know, D&D's a convenient default.

But that shouldn't be the only reasons. I play D&D because it's fun. It's exciting and adventurous; it feels like a big, epic fantasy action/adventure movie.

Well, the current 4^th edition feels that way. I also played 3.5 Edition, which felt more like an overly-long series of fantasy novels.

4^th Edition D&D provides a huge world, brimming with possibility. There are dozens of fascinating races, all scrambling over an ever-evolving world of good, evil, conflict, and flashing steel. You can throw yourself into combat, or negotiate with merchants, or haggle with kings.

(Can you tell that I love setting?)

The system works quite well, too. It's a heavy system, compared to all the others out there, but it works. You choose values for six core attributes, such as Strength and Intelligence. Your race and class (profession, like cleric or warlord) may improve those numbers, and will give you access to a menu of powers. Some powers can be used as often as desired, others only once per battle, and others once per day. You then choose from a set of skills, which are all affected by your attributes (a high Strength score makes you better at Acrobatics).

I'm not as crazy about the two-step combat mechanic, where you roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit, then another die (number of sides depending on the weapon) to determine how much damage you do. Combat can grind to nearly a standstill as half a dozen players roll their dice in turn.

But even that has its charm, with players picking out a shiny d8 or d10 to roll their damage.

It works. D&D is fun. It's goofy, and overly complex at times, but it's a fine way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, romping through a huge fantasy world and baring your teeth at dragons.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

This past week, I've been thinking about time.

More precisely: awareness of time. Do I know how long I've been working on an email? Drinking my afternoon tea? Reading this book in bed?

It's struck me that this is a key to productivity. If I was more aware of time as it goes by, I wouldn't turn a brief YouTube distraction into an hour-long browse of the latest videos.

And we're all surrounded by clocks. There's one on every desktop and laptop screen, and strapped to our wrists (though I've noticed more and more people without watches lately; why is that?).

So how can one become more aware of time? By glancing at one's watch more often. By keeping a little time log; just a piece of paper on which one writes, "8:33 Started watching anime. 8:54 Checked blogs. 9:02 Worked on RPG document."

And...think. Think about time. Think about how you want to use your time.

When you begin something, do you alot yourself a certain amount of time? Do you hold yourself to that allotted time? I don't. I should, if I want to be smart about my time.

So I think about time.

Before I published War in the Deep, I wanted to be sure I was publishing a good-looking, professional adventure. So I bought a few.

D&D adventures are of startlingly high quality, even those made by individuals. Of course, the official, published, $30 adventures look fantastic, though I knew I wouldn't achieve that level of quality on my first attempt.

I did have some minimum standards, though:

• There had to be maps, using standard squares, in color.
• (Thanks to Johnn Four) The colors had to be of sufficient contrast that they'd print beautifully in black-and-white. Most folks still don't have color printers at home, after all.
• The adventure had to work with a range of player levels. My players advance so quickly that an adventure designed for one level would only be useful to me for a couple of months, and even those designed for a few levels would be too limiting.
• There had to be artwork or pictures.
• The document had to start with an overall explanation of the adventure as a whole, so DMs could decide if it was right for them.
• Each creature had to have a complete stat block.
• I couldn't use a standard computer font (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.).

I satisfied all those criteria. The adventure is for characters from level 1 through 10 (the Heroic Tier), with maps created in Inkscape, and using Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos of underwater scenes. Of course, I'd like to have done more with it, like use artwork instead of letters for items on the maps, and use the two-column layout that RPGers seem to love—but nothing's ever perfect. I'm satisfied, and I learned a lot for the next adventure.

What about you? What standard elements do you need in an adventure?

A lot of educational folks who "get" the new web (Web 2.0, social networking, etc.) are excited about Glogster. Despite the annoying name, it's a neat site: it lets you quickly and easily create a poster as a web page. Essentially.

So when you go to Glogster, you get a blank page, and a simple little menu of neat things you can add to the page: text, images, clipart, video, sound, etc. And, of course, you can add your own.

Imagine a student who has to give a presentation on Benjamin Franklin. She uses Glogster to create a one-page presentation, with images of the man, biographical notes, etc, and presents that in class. Immediate multimedia presentation, without the ugliness or restrictions of a PowerPoint deck.

Or she could assemble her notes in a Glogster page, and work on it while at home, or at school, or wherever.

Of course, once you've created your glog, you can save it to an account, create new glogs, share them, etc. Here's my glog.

And Glogster's not limited to students, of course; anyone can use it. It provides convenient, simplified website development, without the limitations of FTP or wrestling with a web-based HTML editor.

Cool.

New players are a fact of life for GMs. They may have never played a tabletop RPG before, or only using vastly different systems. How do you introduce yourself? How do you lay the ground rules?

I'm still figuring it out, but I do have a few things I make sure to go through.

1. I describe my policy on character death, that while I don't actively try to kill player-characters, neither will I re-arrange the laws of physics to prevent willful character death.
2. I explain what I love about GMing. This lets players know what to expect from me. I explain that I love to create worlds, so my games tend to be expansive and original, but not heavily detailed.
3. I describe what excites me in players. I figure, as a player, I'd want to know what sort of player the GM expects. Heavy role-playing? Intimate knowledge of the rules? Whatever. For me, I love players who really get into their characters, and who are ready when their turn comes up in combat.
4. I describe what gets me angry. I think this is vitally important, yet I never see folks write about it. What are those hot-button issues? Let's get them out in the open, so they don't surprise anybody. Mine are dealing with too many questions at once, and stubborn insistence on looking up every rule even when it halts gameplay for 10 minutes. So I explain that I'll sometimes come up with a reasonable temporary ruling if a rule look-up takes too long.

I also talk about a few of our house rules and social policies, such as:

1. Cell phones should be turned to vibrate or switched off.
2. If anyone has to leave the table, they should announce where they're going. They can leave instructions on what to do with their character while they're gone. If they don't, and they're gone for a full round, we'll skip their turn for that round.
3. The GM is happy to keep character sheets if players have trouble remembering to bring them.
4. We use "luck tokens," which can be turned in to either immediately succeed on a die roll, or add one fact to the world. The only restrictions on the latter are that the new faact cannot change history, and that if a luck token is traded in to immediately resolve a fight or problem, the players get no experience points for it. Players start with one luck token per session, and win more for good role-playing.

Once I began explaining this to new players, everyone gets up to speed much more quickly, and we don't spend valuable playing time with unhappy players.

How do you tell new players about house rules and such? And what are your house rules?

A recent post on the GTD forums started me thinking about commitments.

We all have many ongoing projects. But what does "ongoing" really mean? Have we really committed to them? Or did we just put them on a list to remind us to get them done eventually?

I'm realizing that a lot of my own "active projects" are there to push myself to finish them. I haven't truly committed to them, not deeply and seriously.

This is, perhaps, no revelation to many. That's what commitment means, doesn't it? To truly decide and agree internally to accomplish something.

I haven't been. And many people don't. We create lists and map out plans, but how many of those items have we deeply, seriously committed ourselves to completing?

There's a problem here: we really can't commit to a huge workload. You can't fool your mind. If you try to commit to 50 things, your mind will start to drop the first few in the list the further you get.

The answer is, as usual, to simplify. Truly commit to a few things, and execute. Track the other things, and do them if you can. But choose a few things to deeply commit to.

And, please, choose important things.

As part of my constant quest to learn cool, new things, I bought myself a bread machine several years ago. How'd I afford it, you ask? Easy: I bought it at Salvation Army for $20. Got a few weird looks from the cashier, who asked if I'd ever use it, but that's fine.

Problem: No manual. So I hopped online, where I discovered that you don't need a manual. You can make any bread machine recipe in any bread machine, as long as you know two things: the order of the ingredients, and the size of the loaf.

First, the order of the ingredients. All the ingredients should be added in the following order:

1. Liquids (including butter)
2. Flour
3. Remaining dry ingredients (except yeast)
4. Yeast

Why? Because as soon as the yeast hits the water, the yeast will "bloom," or start to ferment. You don't want that to happen until the bread machine says so. By putting the flour on top of the liquids, the flour will form a barrier, keeping the yeast dry on top.

And that's it. Literally, you can use any recipe in your bread machine now. Unless, of course, the loaf would be too big for your machine.

This required some experimentation, but the key lies in the amount of flour. That will determine the size of the final loaf (plus a few other variables, but that's the primary factor).

So, when you first make a loaf of bread, a 2-cup recipe is a great place to start. That'll make a small loaf. Put the ingredients into the bread machine (in the order listed above), then turn it on for a normal loaf. See how much space the final loaf takes up, and you can adjust accordingly.

One final tip: If you buy a kitchen scale, you can measure by weight instead of using cups and measuring spoons. Not only is it more accurate, it's faster and requires less cleanup: You just dump in X grams of an ingredient, reset the scale, dump in Y grams of the next ingredient, and so on. I regularly make bread with about 10 minutes' worth of effort.

And here's one of those recipes now!

Bread Machine Ciabatta

Prep time 10 minutes, total time 2 hours

Software:

1 and ¼ cups (150 grams) water

1 and ¼ cups (210 grams) bread flour (or all-purpose flour)

¾ tsp sugar

½ tsp salt

½ tsp yeast

Hardware:

Bread machine

Put the ingredients in the order listed above into the bread machine, making sure to sprinkle the flour evenly over the water so that the top of the flour is dry, and put the machine on the "dough" setting. Pre-heat the oven to 450° F as the bread machine makes the dough, then when it's ready, remove the dough, stretch it into a log, and bake for 18 minutes. Voila!

When last we left our adventurers, they were swimming north in hot pursuit of Princess Teela, who adamantly refused to return to her parents until she'd wrought vengeance on the sahuagin for their invasion of her country.

Endings are crucial. I can forgive a rocky beginning, and I can push through a dull middle, but a bad ending will ruin a story for me.

The ending has to feel bigger than the rest of the story. It may not be flashier, or have more action; that depends on the type of story. But since this is a war story, I wanted this to have a big war ending. I wanted the equivalent of ending Wolfenstein 3D by fighting a powered armor-wearing Hitler.

This meant two things: a battle against a powerful enemy, and a battle against the sahuagin king. However, according to D&D lore, sahuagin kings are simply more vicious than the others; they're not inherently powerful enough to take down half a dozen seasoned adventurers.

So I could have gone in two directions. I could have increased the sahuagin king's power, by giving him some magical artifact. Or I could add a separate, powerful martial character.

I chose the second route, though I just realized that I could have tied the adventure together much better by going the first route. The sahuagin king could have stolen the magical artifact that the players are seeking from the merfolk king, and that could be giving the sahuagin king the power to raise this army. Ah well.

So I created a separate martial antagonist. Since this adventure is designed for Dungeons & Dragons, I figured I should put a dragon in somewhere if I could, so I decided that the sahuagin king is pushing a priestess to summon a white dragon to do their bidding. (For the record, this would never have worked.)

So, the players venture northward, and come upon a huge sahuagin city, which sits mostly empty as the army is down south fighting the merfolk. But a strange glow is coming from a temple in the city. This is the only distinguishing characteristic.

So the players travel there, and navigate through its twisting passages to a large, amphitheater-like room in the back. There, they find the priestess, holding an orb and murmuring a ritual, while the sahuagin king and a bunch of bodyguards stand nearby, watching. The water swirls around the priestess, and small wisps of light flash in and out of existence within it. The players can just make out the ghostly form of a dragon inside, slowly growing more distinct.

So, the players must fight the bodyguards first (who rush towards the players immediately to prevent them from getting to the king or priestess), then the priestess (who has plenty of spells), and the king (who is a very good fighter). After their defeat, the war is effectively over, and Teela can return to her father and people.

And that's the adventure: 3 to 5 encounters (depending on the number of sahuagin raiders that the DM decides to toss in), moving logically from one location to the next: the western sea, the aquatic elves, the merfolk capitol, the northern front, and the sahuagin capitol.

As you can see, my adventure creation method involves consequences. At each stage, I look for a next step that's logical and interesting. Logical because the alternative frustrates players; interesting to keep players engaged.

Works well for me. Now to design the next one....

I write a lot about self-improvement, and the importance thereof.

So, what do you do when you just have no energy for self-improvement? When you just don't feel like improving?

Take a break.

Really. Stop working at it for a while. Watch some movies, read a few books, and just relax.

Don't rest forever, of course. But I believe that a properly balanced person will instinctively know when it's time to start improving again.

Breathe.

I've been working on a D&D adventure, War in the Deep. It's an underwater adventure in which the players are transported to an undersea kingdom, where they have to rescue a princess consumed with bloodlust.

(Which, incidentally, you can buy at DriveThruRPG for $5!)

Anyway, here's how I designed it:

I started with the reason for the adventure. This was originally part of a larger campaign, where the players are seeking seven different magical stones, and the king of this undersea kingdom has one of them. So, they were going to travel there to meet him. The question was, what would prevent the players from just requesting and taking the stone back from the merfolk?

I didn't have a good answer for that, so I began flipping through the Monster Manual to get ideas for the creatures that might be in that area. That's when I stumbled on the sahuagin.

The sahuagin are nasty brutes who mostly raid coastal towns. They're basically underwater goblins: they sneak up out of nowhere, attack anyone they find, and steal supplies.

Sound like fun antagonists. So what if they're the real antagonists? What if they're attacking the undersea kingdom?

Okay, so how to get the players involved in a war between the merfolk and the sahuagin? Well, the players are traveling to see the king. What if his daughter is in danger? An easy reason would be kidnapping; let's flip that around. What if she went off in search of danger, lusting after sahuagin blood?

And there was my plot.

So then it was a matter of designing the conflicts. I wanted to expand the time spent traveling to the merfolk's central city, so I added an early encounter with a sahuagin raiding party. I then added an enclave of aquatic elves who would help the players get through that area if the sahuagin proved too powerful. I also conjured up a High Council of the aquatic elves, who could answer the players' early questions about this area of the world, and the conflict between the merfolk and sahuagin.

After encountering the merfolk king, the players then had to find the princess. I figured the king would know at least roughly where the princess was, so I made that easy; the players just traveled north to a border town. On the way, they traveled above abandoned merfolk villages (as the merfolk prepared for war, they abandoned their easily-attacked villages).

Up to now, the players had been fighting sahuagin raiding parties, so I wanted to get across the feel of a large war. So I designed the next battle was a real battle, with dozens of sahuagin and several siege weapons assaulting this northern border town. The princess is in among the fray, giving it something of a Battle of Helm's Deep feel.

Now what? How to finish this up with a satisfying ending? I'll let you think about how you'd do it, and I'll answer in part 2.

I haven't been able to keep up with this blog this week, due to the new job. Fortunately, it's calming down this week, so I think I'll be able to get back into a more normal blog routine next week.

It's weird, how much mental energy is required when starting a new job. I'm not overwhelmed with work; I'm overwhelmed with new inputs, even when those inputs are "just" peoples' names. All the change is painful.

And I'm someone who keeps telling folks the importance of accepting change. Can't quite take my own medicine, can I?

In any event, that's why I've been incommunicado this week, and hopefully everything will be relatively normal on Monday.

A little personal blogging today.

I start my new job today. I'm nervous; Pop Rocks jumped around in my stomach as I drove in. Took longer than I expected, so I got in 10 minutes later than I thought I would. Which increased my nervousness.

But this is a new opportunity. A new adventure. As I heard on Sunday: you fear that which has risk, so fear is a sign that you're risking something. And risk (when it comes from the heart) is almost always good.

So, I'm risking. And excited.

It's Friday, review day, and I'm going to talk about a very special movie for me. A formative movie.

I watched An American Tail when it was first released in theaters in 1986. I was ten years old. I was enthralled, and still remember the visceral thrill of several sequences: the storm on the ship, the singing of "Somewhere Out There," and the dockside cat chasing scene.

You probably all know I'm an anime fan. Well, that's part of my larger interest in animation itself. I watched with fascination several discs of weird Russian animated films and shorts, and have watched animated shorts from all over the world. Animation just fascinates me.

And I think I can track it all back to An American Tail.

I re-watched it recently. That's always quite an experience, returning to a childhood favorite with the cold reasoning of an adult.

The story falls apart. There's very little connective tissue to link one scene to another; the entire movie almost feels like an excuse to put half a dozen intense sequences on screen.

But those sequences are intense, and I'd put three of them on par with anything Disney or Miyazaki's ever done: the storm at sea, in which Fievel confronts a storm sweeping across the deck of the ship; the dockside cat chase, with its desperate scrambling to fire off a huge mechanical contraption; and the final search for Fievel, an amazingly quiet scene of an emotionally demolished boy.

The first two scenes are frenetic and powerful, with bold but careful uses of color and movement. Neither scene ever confused me; instead, they presented a lot of action, going in what seemed like ten directions at once.

And it sold me on its protagonist. Fievel wasn't just a boy in danger; it was a boy lost in a wondrous but confusing place. The genius of the premise lay in the fact that he wasn't attacked by cats at every turn (any more than the entire mice population). He was just...orphaned.

And I loved its representation of turn-of-the-20th-century New York (and America in general): amazing, ruthless, hectic, and truly a land of opportunity. Flawed, certainly; there are sweatshops, discrimination, and a classically crooked politician (not evil, just completely crooked).

But it quickly becomes home for the characters. Despite all its flaws, despite the tragedy of the story, America still represents great potential.

And it's saying a lot that I believe this despite the flaws in the story. The movie can be difficult to follow at times, but it gets across deeper things. Which is more than most works of art can say.

I'm certainly glad I re-watched it. It's usually worthwhile to track down those old gems of childhood, if just to re-experience them.

Twitter's great; it lets you keep in touch with lots of people.

For those of you who've already jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon, you may have heard of folks who have several Twitter accounts. I have 4 — my main account (BrentNewhall), BrentRPG for an online game I play through Twitter, OtakuNoVideo for my podcast, and Gunwave for announcements about my online game.

How do I manage them all? Through Matt, the "Multi-Account Twitter Tweeter". It's an online service where, after you create an account, you add the username and password for each of your Twitter accounts. From Matt, you can post to one, some, or all of your Twitter accounts, all from one page.

What's even more cool: Matt was built in 4 days by a development team, just to see if they could do it. See the full story.

I start my new job next week, supporting a military contract with a combination of training, configuration management, and web design. Or, at least, that's the initial charter, based on my interview.

I face a number of challenges:

1. I'll have to spend some time figuring out my real charter. Exactly what is expected of me?
2. I'll have to build relationships with several different clients, each of which will need different things from me. This will involve lots of "people skills," and some penetrating questions about what my clients really need.
3. I'll be establishing my reputation, so my work will need to be excellent (as it always needs to be, but especially now).
4. The group I'll be working with is still setting itself up, apparently, so I'll be establishing my work environment. I'll need to set up my computer for web evelopment, which requires a lot of software. Since many offices have strong restrictions on what can be installed on a system, I'll probably have to set up many work-arounds just to build a productive work environment.

Even more problematically: Much of this can't be specifically planned. While I can plan to meet with clients, I won't know who to meet until I get there, nor do I know how to deal with them.

So, while I have a basic plan, I'll need to react quickly while keeping my plan up-to-date.

And all of this must be done while I'm still learning everyone's names, remembering where the bathroom is, etc. And teaching adult ed classes every evening.

I'll be tired, stressed out, and probably cranky once I return home from my classes at night. But it's a fantastic opportunity, and by the end I'll have grown and improved.

And thank goodness for Getting Things Done.

Much as I enjoy running tabletop RPGs, I don't much enjoy playing a character.

This is partly because characters have relatively little to do at any given time. Consider combat: in a four-person party, I'll spend at best four-fifths of the time twiddling my thumbs, watching everyone else fight. Even outside of combat, I'm just one of several adventurers.

Also, role-playing is social. As quoted in a recent post on Sin Aesthetics: "Enjoying roleplaying is rather like enjoying dancing: At some point you have to throw your inhibitions to the wind, admit you might look like a fool to passing spectators and enjoy the moment. Also like dancing, which at first may seem like a fairly limited activity, roleplaying has almost infinite depth and variety in the experiences it provides."

While I can "throw my inhibitions to the wind" with good friends, that's tough to do outside of intimate groups. And my role-playing friends don't really reward good role-playing. They're good guys; they're just focused more on killing stuff and taking loot than on role-playing, at this stage.

And that's one of the big limitations of role-playing: it requires a certain kind of mentality. Now, I think practically anyone can learn to role-play, just like anyone can play a game of charades. But it's a mentality that I don't get much of a charge out of.

Part of the trouble, too, is that I create worlds. I love thinking up cities and societies and people. If there's going to be someone in the whole process doing that, why not me?

Just finished reading Frank Bettger's excellent book How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling. Bettger was a friend of Andrew Carnegie, who encouraged him to write this book after hearing Bettger's life story (a former baseball player who applied himself to self-improvement as a salesman until he became incredibly successful).

Besides explaining the principles and ideals that he began to follow, Bettger describes following Benjamin Franklin's self-improvement plan. When Franklin was still a poor baker, he decided to improve himself by writing down 13 "subjects," or aspects of his personality that he wanted to improve:

• Temperance in food and drink
• Silence in conversation
• Order (self-organization)
• Resolution to do that which one has committed onesself to
• Frugality
• Industry
• Sincerity
• Justice
• Moderation
• Cleanliness
• Tranquility
• Chastity
• Humility

Franklin then focused on one subject each week. He'd reflect on it, observe its use, and try to live it out over the course of the week. After the 13^th week, he'd return to the first, thus covering all 13 subjects 4 times each year.

Bettger chose six of the same subjects, and added seven of his own. He writes, "At the end of one year, I had completed four courses. I found myself doing things naturally, and unconciously, that I wouldn't have attempted a year before. Although I fell far short of mastering any of these principles, I found this simple plan a truly magic formula....Remember Franklin was a scientist. This plan is scientific. Reject it, and you reject one of the most practical ideas ever offered you." (emphasis mine)

I've decided to follow suit. I've been collecting "subjects," and while I only have 10 at the moment, I'm sure I'll find another 3 in the coming weeks. Here's my list:

• Speaking with a radio announcer's voice
• Diligence in important matters
• Conversation
• Calling old friends
• Money
• Processing physical items and reminders
• Remembering names and faces
• Pride
• Expressing gratitude
• Having a spirit of adventure

I'm planning to write up an index card for each subject, with inspirational quotes and such, to carry with me and pull out at odd moments.

Wish me luck!

When I first watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, my parents warned me that it was long.

Now, I grew up on the original Star Trek series. I loved it. I was willing to put up with a lot. But boy was that movie long.

I recently got the chance to watch the newly remastered and re-edited version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The original director partnered with a special effects company to restore some of the effects that were rushed out at the time.

Now, many of these restorations/special editions are attempts to improve the effects; make it look like what the director always wanted. In this case, the director and the SFX company were both very clear on one point: that all the effects had to look like they had been produced in 1979. They should look like excellent 1979 effects, but nothing modern.

They also edited down some of the longer shots. Thankfully.

And the result is a very, very strong film. While watching it, I couldn't even tell what had been changed (and I have a good eye for special effects). Even the long shots of V'ger, the alien craft, were now majestic, but I couldn't tell what had been cut out.

The plot has always been an interesting one; Kirk struggling with command again after a long absence, the crew settling into its old habits, perplexed discussions about the incomprehensibly vast V'ger, and the steady drip of discoveries about it. It's like one of the better original Trek episodes. Nothing mind-bending, but definitely an entertaining and edifying use of your time.

Kudos to everyone involved!

So, there's this Christian children's club, called AWANA. When it was founded in the 50's, its creators wanted to include athletic games in each evening's schedule. They wanted to design a system that let the kids have fun, without encouraging cut-throat competition.

So, they designed the AWANA Circle, one of the most ingenious designs I've ever seen.

It's a 40-foot square, within which is a 30-foot circle. Each side of the square is a different color: red, blue, green, and yellow. Diagonal lines (one of each color) cross the square. There's also a six-foot square in the center.

The kids are divided into four teams, one for each color, and they stand just outside the square, on their color line, facing inwards. Most of the games are running games, which involve running around the circle. So, each kid positions himself just outside the circle, next to the diagonal line, and at the starter's whistle, runs around the circle a certain number of times. After the last lap, the runner goes into the middle of the circle, where a bowling pin sits atop a bean bag. Whoever grabs the bowling pin wins first place, and whoever gets the bean bag gets second place.

Okay, seems fine. But think about this:

Because of the four-team design, kids aren't focusing on one opponent. One week, Green wins; another week, Blue wins. Kids can compete without obsessing.

Moreover, choosing colors for team names depersonalizes them a bit. There's no magic in being defeated by Blue Team, compared to being beaten by the Cougars or the Wolverines.

And because there are four teams, in a larger group with several dozen kids, that narrows down each team to a relatively small group. Kids don't get lost and forgotten in a huge team of twenty.

The system also encourages creative game design. One of my favorites is bean bag relay: one kid on each team is in the center of the circle, while eight team-mates line up just outside the circle. The center kid tosses a bean bag at each team-mate, who tosses it back, in sequence. This requires attention and precise muscle control; you can't throw it too hard or too softly. A significant challenge for an eight-year-old.

Another: bean bags are spread around inside the center square, and ten kids on each team line up just outside the circle. Each one is assigned a number. The game leader calls out a number, and that kid (on each team) runs in to grab as many bean bags as possible.

AWANA provides a number of implements, too, like batons, bean bags, and pins. But their simple nature is another important design element: kids aren't collecting anything of intrinsic value; they're not trying to grab candy bar, or win better treatment. It's all just a collection of points. And kids pick up on that. If AWANA kids lose, they're disappointed, but they shrug it off more quickly than other teams I've seen.

Imagine: competitive, physical games that don't encourage ten-year-olds to get hyper or highly competitive. What a design!

I recently looked into adopting a dog from the SPCA. It fell through, but during the transaction I was surprised by something.

The SPCA requires an in-home visit to verify that the house is safe for the dog. When I gave the SPCA representative my information, including my home address, she asked me for directions to my house. As in, turn-by-turn directions. I was surprised, but provided them.

A few days later, I received a phone call from the SPCA rep who'd actually be visiting. She asked me for turn-by-turn directions to my house.

I was floored. Could neither of these fine people use Google Maps or MapQuest? Just type the destination address in the search box, click Search, then click the Get directions to here link, type your home address, and click Go or Add Location. Boom! You have complete, turn-by-turn directions to wherever you're going.

It's easy, it's free, and it saves everyone time. Why not use it?

I love role-playing. This is odd, since I only started role-playing a few years ago. And yet I've loved it since I was a young boy.

My older brother was a role-player. He played D&D, and Car Wars, and others, I'm sure. After he died, I looked over his few remaining hand-written materials. I was amazed at his creativity, not thinking at the time about how much of his stuff may have been copied from published work. Either way, he definitely loved it. Even if it was all copied from published books, it was lovingly and carefully copied.

I was drawn to the idea of role-playing, of thinking up an adventure and living it in my mind. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy at the time, so I was naturally attracted to the idea of collectively imagining an exciting adventure.

But I was also shy, so I never had anyone to role-play with. Not until I was in my 20's, when a few co-workers involved me in a short game of Nobilis, then I found a few younger friends for whom I could run games. And when I did, we had an absolute ball. That's when I realized what I love about role-playing.

I didn't own any role-playing source books, so I found and printed the simple Sherpa rules. They're brilliant; you can easily create a character and write up him or her in five minutes. They focus on simple conflict resolution, so we spent most of our time playing around instead of rolling dice.

We played a rip-roaring game of low-level mafia thugs in a science fiction setting, which culminated in a city-wide mafia war involving giant walking tanks. Then we moved to a short-lived heroic Greek fantasy game, then a D&D-inspired game before the group fizzled out.

Role-playing requires a huge imagination and a little guts (to yell "Och, y'not be wantin' to double-cross a dwarf, laddie!" to your friends). The result is a collaboratively created story, which can have everything from pathos to action to comedy, and in which you are involved. You're actually driving the story in whatever direction you want to take it. If it's not fun, you can make it fun.

As a GM (Game Master), I present the world, situation, and antagonists facing the players. So I get to create a world—or at least simulate one—which I love to do anyway.

A fun, imaginative game where everyone is actively involved and collaboratively push each other to greater and greater heights of story and personal interaction? What's not to like?

I want to explain just why I host a Halloween party.

I mean, I do love Halloween. It's my favorite holiday. It's one of the few times in the year when fantasy and a belief in unexplained phenomena are socially accepted. It's a time when we can all believe that the world contains at least a few things that science can't completely explain.

But I don't love parties. Oh, I enjoy myself at them, but I've always been a shy person. Social interaction requires an effort for me. It's much less of an effort than it used to be, but I still groan inwardly when I imagine going to a party.

Nevertheless, the longer I live, the more I realize that we live in a social world. Our relationships matter, not just in a deep spiritual sense, but also in a hard-nosed practical sense (how many people do you know who got their jobs because a friend recommended them?). Our connections with others not only net us valuable friends and business associates; it satisfies a deep inner need to be heard and be important to other people.

So, every year, I host a Halloween party with as many of my friends as I can invite. It grows every year, and I get better at hosting parties each time I do it.

I also grow closer to friends that I rarely get a chance to talk to, and they get to talk to some of my other friends.

It's a win-win-win. Always well worth it.

Have you thought about hosting a party for a few friends? Something informal, just a chance to get together and chat. Please reply with your experience. Hasn't it always been worth it?

Okay, I'll admit it: this is pulled straight from an issue of Bon Appetit.

I'm only willing to deal with a certain amount of complexity in a recipe, and this one is right at the far edge of what I'm willing to do. The cake itself is easy, though I usually go with boxed cake.

I balked at the frosting. Which is not even difficult to make; it's just that it involves a significant amount of effort just to make...frosting. Especially when I have a foolproof frosting recipe (dump a box of powdered sugar in a bowl and add hot water in spurts, stirring, until you get a spreadable frosting).

Anyway. I made it, and it does make a delicious cake, with a surprising mix of flavors. The caramel cream cheese frosting feels pleasantly complex on the tongue, and the cake feels smooth, dense, and very dessert-like.

It's worth the effort, for me, though this will probably be relegated to the "once per year" category.

At least I conquered the frosting.

Prep time 1.5 hours, total time 2.5 hours, plus 2 hours to chill the frosting

Software

The Cake

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground ginger

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ground allspice

¼ teaspoon ground cardamom

1 15-ounce can pureed pumpkin

1 ½ cups sugar

1 ¼ cups vegetable oil

4 large eggs

2 teaspoons finely grated orange peel

Chocolate chips (optional garnish)

The Frosting

1 1-pound box powdered sugar

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon heavy whipping cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon salt

1 8-ounce package cream cheese

¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter

Hardware

Large bowl

Mixing/blender bowl

Small frying pan

To make the cake, preheat the oven to 350° F, then prep two cake pans (I spray 'em with cooking spray, and cut out circles of parchment paper and lay them inside, and spritz them with cooking spray). Whisk all the dry ingredients except the sugar in a bowl. In the mixing/blender bowl, beat the pumpkin, sugar and oil until combined, then add the eggs 1 at a time. With the mixer at low speed, slowly add the flour mixture just to blend.

Divide the batter between the two pans, and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 33 minutes (note that one layer may bake faster than the other). Cool in pan for 10 minutes or so, then invert on a wire rack and completely cool. Wash both bowls.

To make the frosting, first put the cream cheese and butter out on the counter. Sprinkle ½ cup powdered sugar into the small pan. Cook over medium heat, without stirring, until the sugar melts, then stir occasionally until the sugar turns a beautiful, deep amber color (should only take a minute or two). Carefully stir in ½ cup cream, vanilla, and salt (watch for spattering). Stir until any caramel bits dissolve. Stir in remaining 1 tablespoon cream. Strain, if possible, then cool the caramel to room temperature.

(I didn't really have anything with which to strain the caramel, so I didn't. I'm a rebel. Had no problems.)

Sift remaining powdered sugar into the mixing bowl, then add the cream cheese and butter, and mix. Gradually beat in the powdered sugar, then the cooled caramel. Cover and chill in the fridge until firm enough to spread, about 2 hours.

Now, assemble the cake. Trim excess off the top of each layer, put the first layer down, and spread slightly less than half the frosting on it. Let the frosting ooze down the sides, then firm it up. Put the top half on, and spread the remaining frosting on it. Use a knife dipped in hot water to spread the frosting; much easier.

Optionally, sprinkle chocolate chips on top.

I've saved the best for last.

I stumbled on this film on an internet search for classic horror movies. It was made in 1932, directed by James Whale (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Show Boat, The Man in the Iron Mask), and produced by the great Carl Laemmle, Jr. (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, All Quiet on the Western Front), and stars a first-rate group of actors. It doesn't matter who they are; they all play their roles perfectly.

It starts with the hoariest of scary movie cliches: a couple folks are out driving in a terrible storm, and take refuge in an Old, Dark House. At least they aren't horny teenagers, I suppose.

The house's tenants hide dark secrets, of course, which are slowly revealed over the course of the night. It feels like a stage play, at times, and I mean that as a compliment; I felt the stage's intensity as characters faced off.

One relationship shifts dramatically in the course of the night, and that was part of my big surprise. This being 1932, not that far into the talkie era, the film industry's code of decency hadn't quite solidified yet. As such, not only do we see a woman change out of a dress, wearing only a short shift beneath it, we're treated to this bit of dialogue from a girl describing her boyfriend:

Remarkable. We all know exactly what she means, but it's entirely implied.

In any event, the dark secrets are revealed, one by one. And it's done masterfully. The dread just builds, and builds, and builds, until a final climactic confrontation. There's nothing magical or fantastical about it; no ancient spells or science fiction hand-waving (though the family is said to be under a curse). It's just personalities, people, some deranged and some afraid and some grimly determined to get through it all.

A tremendous film.

Okay, this review is predicated on a surprise, but it's a surprise that happens ten minutes into the movie. So I feel justified in explaining it, since it's the core of what I liked about the movie.

The classic The Mummy begins with a group of standard British archaeologists, enthusing over a new find: a mummy (Boris Karloff) and a sealed box, of which the former was buried alive, and the latter should contain the Scroll of Thoth, which was supposed to bring the dead back to life.

The older archeologists argue over what to do, the younger archaeologist opens the box, and the mummy comes to life and grabs the scroll. Of course.

We then cut to ten years later, to the son of the head archaeologist in that scene, who is now digging in Egypt like his father did, where he is approached by...Boris Karloff. Not wrapped in mummy bandages; just standing there, physically frail but psychically overwhelming.

So the entire movie is about the revived mummy, now walking about Egypt like any man, using his powers in a desperate attempt to revive his long-dead lover. Of course, there are complications, and a surprisingly effective love story in the center of it, as is common in any 1930's movie.

Which is what makes it so effective. It's not about a shambling, dusty corpse; it's about a driven man, blessed with ancient powers, and the normal humans who try to oppose him. It's a contest of wills, and Karloff plays a man of such intense will that he steals every scene he's in. He has immense gravitas; he practically glows with it. My eyes were drawn to him in every scene.

Even the ending contains a bit of a surprise; the mummy may have succeeded in something rather horrifying.

Overall, it's a surprisingly effective movie, mostly because of Karloff's performance. A great little film.

Watching The Wolf Man was a strange experience for me.

I first saw The Wolf Man in bits and pieces when I was in my early teens. I really enjoyed the tense mood and varied characters. I was in a phase of my life when I was watching a lot of black-and-white films, so I appreciated that type of movie: simple, direct, and reasonably well-acted.

Upon re-watching it this week...it doesn't hold up. While it is simple, direct, and reasonably well-acted, the plot itself just drags in places. It's a great example of pacing problems. The story's fine; the editing and pacing just aren't tight enough.

It does play successfully off that perfectly horrible fear of loss of control. The protagonist can feel his sanity slipping away, almost as soon as he contracts lycanthropy. He's constantly haunted by it. He's a decent man, and tries to be reasonable, but he knows what he's doing. And how can a person stop himself?

Unfortunately, the plot mires itself in side stories which distract from his path towards the beast, rather than highlight or enhance it. As sweet and poignant as the love story is at times, it slows the movie down, and does little to bolster it.

But it does feature some solid performances and genuinely creepy moments. Worth watching.

Vincent Price. This is why Vincent Price is such a great horror movie actor.

You may have read the original Poe story, in which a corrupt prince holds a party at his manor, despite the raging plague outside. Price plays the prince in this 1964 film version, which has been expanded into a study of evil.

And it's a solid little story, really, as Price's character brings in an innocent young peasant woman with great Christian faith, and shows her the decadence of his life and that of his peers. He's completely given himself over to Satan, explicitly, and enjoys needling the girl with a faith completely opposite to her own.

There are a few sub-plots dealing with the girl's lover, the plague-ridden peasants outside, and another baron at the masque, which serve mostly as interesting highlights to the main story. I was particularly thrilled by the bit with Skip Martin's character—a jester-like little person—who wreaks vengeance on a noble for his treatment of Martin's character's wife. Besides Price, Martin's the best actor of the bunch.

The film was directed by Roger Corman, which I initially took as an ill omen. Actually, the film looked just fine; perfectly competent directing. That said, for such a gothic concept, I felt like it could've been shot much more imaginatively, giving the film a creepier, more intense feel. This is meant to be horror, and much of it was filmed like a stage play. That may be more the fault of the cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, though, who went on to direct some interesting things but I think fell flat here.

Despite the rather staid look of the film, it's definitely fun to watch, especially to watch Price be delightfully evil all the way through.

This week begins Classic Horror Movie Week, where every day I write about a classic "horror" movie, leading up to Halloween on Friday. Um, that's Halloween the holiday, not Halloween the movie. Anyvay. I watched all these movies for the first time this week, so you're getting a fresh perspective.

I'm starting with Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World, often called just The Thing. The basic plot involves a group of military and scientists at an arctic research station, who discover a crashed UFO, and recover a body. It thaws and comes back to life, and attacks them. Cue frenzied gunshots and general mayhem.

What's remarkable about this film is how taut it is. It's populated with half a dozen standout characters, each with distinctive personalities and viewpoints. One driven scientist insists that the creature is too important of a scientific discovery to kill, even if it's attacking them. One soldier is just plain freaked out by the thing. A reporter is always asking for information or complaining about the news blackout. The hero keeps a level head, of course, though he has his unsteady moments.

And they all interact. Some of the characters become antagonists, but never villains. They just all have different motivations.

Take that scientist. He becomes a real blockade to the hero, but his opinions make complete sense. He's not crazy; he just believes that the scientific discoveries possible from researching this alien are more important than their lives. Understandable.

Apparently, the creature never looked scary enough for Hawks, so he did the next best thing: it appears briefly, and then usually from a distance. It's effective, really, turning the movie into more of a noir piece. You fear the bad guy (whether the mob boss or the murderous alien) because the movie builds up to him.

Overall, I was impressed. It's a solid little film, full of fun, interesting characters and a taut, fast-paced plot. Like the best of the noir films, if nothing else it's an exhilarating ride.

As sung in my church last week: "O God Of Earth and Altar", words by G.K. Chesterton, melody arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry,

Our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die;

The walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide;

Take not Thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches, from lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men;

From sale and profanation of honor and the sword;

From sleep and from damnation, deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether, the prince and priest and thrall;

Bind all our lives together, smite us and save us all;

In ire and exultation aflame with faith and free,

Lift up a living nation, a single sword to Thee.

In other news, thanks to all the attendees of my third annual Halloween Party last night! A total of 12 attendees this year. The apple pie and cakes went quickly, as did the party mix. I was a bit surprised that folks barely touched the hot apple cider and mashed sweet potatoes, especially on a wet autumn night like this one. Nevertheless, 'twas a fun night, as usual.

I love seasonal food.

Of course, I'm blessed with a society that provides all sorts of food at any time of the year. If I want blueberries in February, I can get them.

But some food remains inextricably linked to certain seasons. Lemon ice cream just only tastes right in the summer. Beef pot pie requires snow on the ground (and, ideally, a crackling fire). Strawberry shortcake seems tied to spring, somehow.

And autumn is the best time for apple pie.

Now, whereas some dishes are open for experimentation, apple pie remains a specific, classic dessert. When a person bites into apple pie, their teeth and tongue come to the experience with certain very definite expectations: Tender, flaky, buttery crust. A lattice top. Flavorful, tart apples. A sweet, thick interior that holds together; no running all over the plate.

That's what this recipe delivers. And—please don't click away from this page when you read this—it even includes its own pie crust, made from scratch. I'm proud of this, because the crust takes about 5 minutes to prepare (plus rolling it out, but that only takes another 10).

In fact, despite the length of this recipe, it's really dead simple: toss the crust ingredients together and massage until it forms a dough. Chill it, then roll it out. Chop up the apples, and toss the remaining ingredients together with the apples. Put them in the crust, make the lattice top (or not), and bake it. And you've got perfect apple pie.

Prep Time 30-45 minutes, total time 1 ½ to 2 hours, plus cooling and chilling time

Software

For The Crust:

2.5 cups (350 grams) all-purpose flour

1.5 sticks (¾ cup) butter

¼ cup Crisco or other vegetable shortening

½ teaspoon salt

7 tablespoons water

For The Pie:

3 Granny Smith apples

3 McIntosh apples

4 teaspoons lemon juice

¾ cup sugar

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon allspice

1/8 teaspoon allspice

Hardware

Large bowl

Pie tin

To make the crust, melt the butter in a microwave for 30 seconds on high. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl, first with a spoon, then with your hands, massaging until it forms a consistent dough. Divide into two halves (ideally, make one half slightly larger than the other; the larger half will be the crust and the smaller the lattice top). Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, then roll out.

Preheat the oven to 500°.

Peel each apple thusly: cut it into quarters, then cut out the core using a V cut, then cut off the peel. Slice into roughly ¼" slices and put them all in a bowl.

To the apples, add the lemon juice and stir. Separately, stir together the sugar and spices, then add those to the apples and stir until all the sugar mixture clings to the apples.

Pour the apples into the crust. Cut the remaining crust into strips. To make the lattice, lay out one small piece on the far end, and another at a 90° angle to it on an adjacent side. Then lay a third, longer piece next to the first one, peeling back the second piece so the third piece can go under it. Lay the fourth piece parallel to the second piece, peeling back the first piece so the fourth piece can go under that one. Continue layout out lattice pieces, peeling back existing pieces to create the proper lattice effect.

Bake at 425° F until the crust is golden, about 25 minutes, then reduce heat to 375° F and bake until the juices bubble and the top is deep GBD (Golden Brown and Delicious), at least 25 minutes more. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack. The pie will need several hours in the refrigerator before the filling sets firmly. Then get out the vanilla ice cream and prepare yourself for some classic apple pie.

(A tip for rolling out dough: Lay the dough between two sheets of wax paper, and roll it out. You won't need to sprinkle flour everywhere, your rolling pin will stay clean, and once the dough is at the edge of the wax paper, it's wide enough to fit in the pie tin.)

So I've finally bought and read some Tintin, the iconic comic book character created by French artist Herge. Specifically, I read The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 1.

I'd like to write that I loved it, that it was a work of genius. I can't. It had fun moments, and inventive moments. It was certainly good, in a timeless sense.

But it just didn't come together for me.

According to the Tintin Wikipedia article, Herge initially improvised all his stories, throwing Tintin into predicaments without knowing how to resolve them, then coming up with a solution on-the-spot. As a result, the book features many frustrating cliffhangers of the worst sort, such as Tintin being rolled up in a carpet, shot, then thrown into a river, only to discover that Tintin had escaped from the carpet earlier (with no prior clues to indicate this).

Herge began planning his stories with The Blue Lotus, which is included in Volume 1. The planning improves the storyline tremendously; I fully enjoyed that particular storyline.

Another problem was the characters. Tintin's a plucky young man, but he lacks sufficient depth of character to make me really root for him. The rest of the cast is filled out by broad, simple personalities common to the era.

I wouldn't mind that if the stories themselves carried any depth, but most of these adventures are, well, adventures--simple mysteries and thrillers. Astro Boy, for example, has simple characters, but depth of plot. Tintin just felt...simple.

Perhaps that's his appeal: simplicity. I can appreciate that, and perhaps I'll revisit Tintin with an eye for clean stories and straightforward characters. But for now, I can't be counted a Tintin fan.

Jason Calacanis is a very interesting man.

He's a classic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He started several major websites, including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, and is currently running Mahalo, which is a sort of hybrid Google/Wikipedia site.

I first heard Jason Calacanis—literally, heard—when he was a guest on This Week in Tech, a tech audio podcast. He was completely confident, and opinionated, and threw out extremely self-assured opinions.

And this ticked people off.

Now, he wouldn't attack people directly (except when clearly in fun), and he made clear that he's been wrong before. He was also playful with his status as Silicon Alley big-shot, joking about his ability to buy things and such. But he was definitely certain of his beliefs, and dismissive of other opinions. Which he certainly has the right to be.

And, again, this offended people.

I discovered that Calacanis is rather infamous online. Apparently, people can't stand the fact that he has strong opinions.

It'd be one thing if he were nasty. He's just opinionated. Doesn't he have the right to be?

Anyway. He did something interesting a few months ago: he stopped blogging, and set up an email list. Instead of blogging to the internet, he sends an email to a relatively small group of people (750).

He pointed out that pressure from other bloggers, debates on TechMeme, accusations and comment hate, just became too distracting. As he put it, "Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it's simply not worth it. I'd rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation."

And today he posted a long, detailed entry to his email list about his decision to lay off a few people at Mahalo. He explained all of his reasons with clarity and honesty, and described the actual layoff process and what he's learned from laying folks off over the years.

It's an honest, insightful post, and I think it benefits from being sent to a "safe" group of people who've actively signed up to hear what he has to say. It changes the nature of the content, in a good way.

If you want to sign up for Jason's list, head over to his email list page. It may take you a while to get in, as you have to wait for a slot to open. But I think it's worth it.

Snapfish is an online photo printing service. Quite simply, you upload your photos to the Snapfish site, choose your print options, and pay with a credit card. Your photos arrive in the mail a few days later.

It's simple and powerful. There are similar sites, like SmugMug, but Snapfish is one of the cheapest and simplest. The site also provides basic photo editing tools (red-eye reduction, tweaking colors, cropping photos, etc.).

You can get your photos as regular prints, as well as posters, photo books, calendars, mugs, etc.

Overall, it's a really solid service. Highly recommended.

I spent Saturday at DC Game Day, a full-day tabletop roleplaying experience. I normally don't go out much, to be honest, and I knew nobody there. But I wanted to meet some local tabletop RPG players, and get a feel for games I haven't played before.

The first game involved 1936, Nazis on jetpacks, a temple in the jungle, lizard men, a mind-controlling wizard, and Excalibur. It used the Hollow Earth setting and system, which was pretty cool: You typically add together a few simple stats (points in some attribute plus points in some skill), and roll that number of special dice. If you meet or beat a small number, such as 4, you succeed; if not, you fail. Simple.

The DM clearly loved the adventure and the setting, and he understood pulp. I was playing the Pompous Professor archetype, and as soon as I yelled to the evil Nazi doctor, "You've befouled the name of science!" he laughed and threw me a Fate Chip (which I could turn in later to force a better die roll). I had great fun.

The latter session was also fun, though I felt more tired and thus didn't enjoy myself as much. It was a space pulp adventure using I think a variant on the Fudge rules, in which a group of U.S. Rocket Corps fellows crash on Jupiter, and have to face the Iron Lords, Mole Men, Mind Spiders, and Living Mountains.

Character creation used the idea of your character's novel. The back of the character sheet had five spaces: in the first you described your character's childhood, and in the second his or her role in the Great War. In the third, you summarized the plot of a grand pulp adventure novel starring your character. You then randomly pick two other player-characters, who guest-star in your novel, while you fill in the fourth and fifth sections with how you guest-starred in other player-character's novels. And for each of these sections, you list a few aspects of your personality that were formed by these adventures.

And the system had a fascinating mechanic: when attempting to use a skill, you simply compare your skill value to your opponent's skill value (or a difficulty number), similarly to the Hollow Earth setting. However, you (and your opponent, if applicable) also roll "Fudge dice," which simply have +1 on two sides, -1 on two sides, and 0 on two sides. You add the result to your total. If you're trying to hit something, then if your final result is over the opponent's final result, you subtract the difference from their health, armor, etc.

It's elegant. Your stats are directly equivalent to your enemy's, but the Fudge dice can, um, fudge the comparison in interesting ways.

I met a bunch of great guys (and some girls), many of whom I'd enjoy playing with again. Even better, I won at the raffle (twice!) netting me a bunch of old roleplaying source books (Shadowrun, Dread, Colonial Gothic, Steal Away Jordan, and many others).

I'm definitely going again in six months, if I can.

Short one today, but I want to talk about this guy.

It's rare to come across a person as nice as the Chatty DM. He blogs about D&D, amiably and reasonably, and is a great font of knowledge and perspective. He's very active on his comments and forum, too.

If you have any interest in fantasy roleplaying or D&D, Chatty's a great place to check out, particularly for his forthcoming Kobold Love adventure idea.

Several years ago, I tried to install a wiki. Back then, the most popular wiki was a horrible mess of spaghetti code, and I just couldn't figure it out. The others all seemed to require too much setup and configuration.

So, I wrote my own wiki engine. I had my own goals, so I didn't call it a wiki; I called it a Wala, which I believe is a Hawaiian word for "talk" ("wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick"). My Wala includes an "Add to this page" field at the bottom of each page, so that folks can quickly append information to a page. This creates a very different user interaction flow than a standard wiki, which requires users to navigate to a separate Edit page to change a page.

I released the code on various places, and Brennen picked it up. He went his own wonderful direction with it, and ended up with a much more powerful version. He wanted to release his own version, too.

After we discussed it a bit, he created WalaWiki.org, a website backed by a Subversion repository that hosts both of our versions of the Wala.

Wala is undoubtedly the most popular piece of code I've ever written, and I'm very happy with it: feature complete, easy to install, and easy to change, with clean code and essentially no bugs. Literally, you just have to put two files on your website, in a non-read-only directory, and your web hosting company has to support Perl.

So, if you want to install a wiki or wiki-like app, consider Wala. And let me know what you think.

This is the greatest pound cake in the world.

That may seem vain to you. However, I make this claim because I've been eating this pound cake for far longer than I've been making it.

This is the pound cake made by Helen Eppley, a dear woman that sat near me in church. Every week, she'd make a couple of pound cakes, and bring them to church and give them out. You never knew when you'd get one. But when you did, oh man, you knew what you'd be having for dessert.

Helen Eppley's pound cake is rich, buttery, and dense, without being too heavy. It goes just to the edge of heavy, to use a very strange wording.

It tastes mostly of butter and vanilla, with just a hint of lemon.

It's also fantastic when grilled and topped with vanilla ice cream.

And best of all, it's incredibly easy to make, using the muffin method (mix butter and sugar together in a blender, add eggs and remaining wet ingredients, then add dry ingredients that have been sifted together).

Prep Time 15 minutes; total time 1 hour, 45 minutes

Software

3 cups (630 grams) sugar

1 and ½ cups (3 sticks) butter

5 eggs

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (255 grams) milk

1 tablespoon vanilla

2 tablespoons lemon extract

3 cups (435 grams) flour

½ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

Hardware

Mixing bowl (stand mixer or bowl with hand mixer)

Two loaf pans, or one large spring-form pan

Preheat the oven to 325° F.

Grease and flour the pans. In the large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Mix in milk, vanilla, and lemon extract.

Separately, whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder, then add the mixture slowly to the batter, stirring as you go.

Bake for 1 hour at 325° F, and another ½ hour at 350° F.

(Mixing tip: I put the flour, salt, and baking powder in a hand sifter, then turn the mixer on low. I hold a flexible mat next to the mixer as a ramp, sift the flour mixture onto the mat, and let it slide into the mixer. The flour mixture is incorporated into the batter gradually, and I don't need a separate sifting step.)

I wrote recently about the importance of writing things down, and of reviewing them. Today I want to talk about review.

By "review," I don't mean just looking things over. I mean study. Analysis. Deep thought.

For example, when you come across a really good article in a magazine, what do you do with it? Do you read it, then toss the magazine? How do you make sure that the information in there stays with you?

This is one of the uses for my tickler (43 folders, one for each day of the month, and one for each month of the year). If I come across a good magazine article, after reading it thoroughly—and writing down personal actions from it—I put the magazine in my tickler, so I can re-read the article later. Then repeat.

Moreover, I never read (or, for that matter, watch) anything without a piece of paper or computer file on hand, with which to record my thoughts. Ideas fly at me while I read (they probably do for you, too; you just don't write them down and they fade away within half an hour).

That which I read, sticks.

How about you?

So I'm working on this tabletop RPG system, Gunwave. The goal is to make a fun group game that imitates the fast action of an anime action series with giant robots. Lots of Mega Beams, psychic blasts, and charging at your enemy while screaming about the futility of war.

A few things I've learned:

1. It takes time. Time to write, time to tweak, time to review, and time to playtest. A really clear rule set requires a lot of words, often re-arranged many times to achieve optimal clarity.
2. Playtesting is key. I thought I had a great system, until I sat down with some players. We had fun, but obvious problems with the system reared their head quickly. Every playtester has been worth their weight in fusion reactors.
3. Get lots of feedback. This ties into playtesting. At the end of every playtesting session, ask the players lots of questions. Ask them what worked and what didn't. Ask them if a particular fight was fun. Ask them what could have made it better. Ask them what they'd like to see. Ask them what could be dropped. I've also sought advice on various RPG design forums, including Chatty DM's Forums and RPGnet's Game Design Forum. Lots of people are just waiting to give you advice. Much of it can be ignored, but some of it will massively improve your game.
4. Take lots of notes. Playtesters, critiquers, and friends will toss out all sorts of ideas, especially at the end of playtests. Write them all down. Many won't work as they stand, but will give you a great idea when you review them a week later. You'll get ideas at odd moments, too (showering, driving to work, etc.) — write those down, too, and toss them into the pile. I currently have a text file with 328 lines of Gunwave notes (the vast majority of those lines contain at least one idea).
5. Expect extensive changes. The current version of the system looks almost nothing like the first one. I completely changed the dice mechanic halfway through, requiring changes to almost every page of the rule set, and a completely new look at how every dice roll worked. And it made the game fit my goals better. Speaking of which:
6. What do you want out of your system? Define it. Fast? Simple? Comprehensive? Atmospheric? Hint: "Fun" doesn't count.
7. Make it look nice. I use NeoOffice to format my documents, and I've deliberately learned a lot of neat features that make it look professional (different styles for different types of content, headers displaying the current chapter name, an automatically-generated index, etc.) Folks have commented on and gotten excited about the Player's Handbook just because it looks nice.

This is an odd duck: a bunch of Japanese animation studios each produced a short film about Batman, and assembled them into a movie. Moreover, the shorts are all connected in a loose overall plot, despite the wildly different visual styles of each short.

Batman: Gotham Knight features a Batman who is still mostly a whispered legend, even to police. Indeed, the first film is entirely about that legendary aspect, as four teens describe their sightings of Batman in hilariously different forms—to one he's literally a shadow, to another he's a relentless machine, and to another he's a vicious half-bat.

Every story deals specifically with what it takes to be Batman. In one, he tests a bulletproof energy field which turns out to be too effective. In another, we see a young Bruce Wayne training in India to purge himself of his demons (you can imagine how well that goes). In a later short, he slogs wearily through a sewer after a painful battle with Killer Croc. I rather liked a short told from the perspective of two normal detectives, who debate Batman's effect on the city.

Some of the shorts work better than others, and much of my enjoyment of the film came from my interest in the animation styles. Some are sketchy, some are beautifully fluid, and some are highly stylized. The film remains interesting throughout.

However, because each short is so different, it can be a difficult film to watch, especially if you have no interest in Batman or animation.

Still, it was a noble experiment, and worth checking out.

If you've never read Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone, well, go out and read it now. It's an inspiring call to action, insisting that we all need to build a big network of friends and associates. Not a stereotypical marketer's network of barely-remembered business contacts, but a close-knit (while also large) community.

He has a website, of course, but he's also built an online forum-based community, Greenlight. It's a place where people can talk about their problems and perspectives. Very valuable.

I must point out that it has some early-commmunity problems. Much of the content is currently requests for advice, followed by vague suggestions. A lot of folks show enthusiasm that doesn't seem to translate into specific real-world action (there are posts like "This is a great place! I can't wait to do great things here!" with no further action).

But that's normal for any forum. The site already features a variety of interesting discussions, including Simple formula for success, burnout at work - balance, and kindness a weakness at work?. Well worth checking out.

One of the neat things about the web is the way it connects people with businesses, products, services, and other people that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. There are just so many neat things out there.

And sometimes, those things are good for everyone involved.

Such is the case with WorldOfGood.com, an eBay-sponsored site of cool products made by individuals and eco-friendly small businesses around the globe. The idea: connect Brazilian farmers, African jewelry makers, Indian paper-makers, middle American housewives, and Eastern European weavers with those who can buy their work.

Everybody wins: shoppers get cool, distinctive, high-quality objects—like journals, serving bowls, and necklaces—and the producers get a good price for their work.

If you're looking for memorable gifts, WorldOfGood is a great place to start.

So I'm terrifically behind the times when it comes to computer gaming. But many months ago, I finally got around to playing the original Halo.

It's a perfect first-person shooter. Now, that's all it is, but it provides a fantastic environment in which to shoot at things. Excellent quality all around.

Until I noticed something: the character animation was surprisingly poor. By that I mean that the movement and "body acting" of the other characters, particularly during cutscenes.

The ultimate example was during an alien attack on the ship I was in. I watched through a window as an alien blew open the door to another room and shot a human technician. The scene begins with bangs and explosions on the other side of the door, and I watched as the technician screamed "Help me! They're coming in!" as he calmly straightened up from his chair, and turned towards the door. His body was ramrod straight, his arms at his sides, even as he screamed in terror. Then the door burst open and he died screaming.

How did that get signed off? Why didn't the technician at least crouch, or hold up his arms, or try to duck behind something in the room?

It made no sense, and it destroyed the believability of the scene. The game became just a computer game, no more than a chunk of code twiddling bits and causing a set of sprites to waltz across the screen.

Disappointing.

The biggest hole right now in my personal productivity system: processing physical items.

A lot of paper comes into our lives. Each item represents a potential commitment — a phone call to make, a reply to send, a book to read. So they all need to be reviewed.

Every piece of paper that comes into my life goes into my physical inbox, which is literally a black metal tray on my desk. That includes postal mail, papers I want to save, books that people give me, magazines to read, index cards with scribbled notes; everything.

Then, separately, I take some time to process my inbox. I pick up the top item, figure out what needs to be done (send an email, file it, trash it; whatever), do it, and move on to the next item. I go through the entire inbox that way.

In addition, I have a tickler file, which is a set of 43 folders, one for each day of the month and one for each month of the year. I file reminders in there for future events, articles to re-read, monthly or yearly chores, etc. Every day—ideally—I take out that day's folder, dump its contents in my inbox, and file the (now empty) folder in the back of the tickler.

But I don't do the above nearly often enough. I process my inbox maybe twice a week, and my tickler maybe once a week. This is bad—I sometimes miss reminders and birthday cards.

And I don't know how to do better. I can just purpose to process these every day, but that's wishful thinking with no external component. I need some way to remind myself to do it.

So, for now, I'm stuck. But I'm thinking about it. I may tie it to my end-of-the-workday email review, so once I'm done with emails I'll process my physical stuff. Worth a try.

A thought just sprang into my head, unbidden: If I didn't have a computer, I'd be so much happier.

Hmmmmm.

So I'm trying to figure out how to review A Clockwork Orange. And I don't know if I can.

It's certainly a remarkable film, and I use that adjective deliberately. I want to make remarks about it. I want to talk about it with others who've seen it. Because it's an intensely visual film that manages something very difficult:

Its protagonist is an amoral punk, and by the end you feel sorry for him, while still abhorring his deeds.

Alex, the protagonist, is the violent leader of a small British gang in the near future. They go around smashing up people and raping girls, with equal abandon.

Alex is eventually caught and sent to prison, where he is entirely unrepentant and does an excellent job of appearing reformed so he can get out early. He then volunteers for aversion therapy, which works (apparently; you never know how much Alex fakes), upon which he's released into society. At which point every single thing he did in the first third of the movie comes back to haunt and destroy him. Every single thing. Everybody wants revenge. And he's broken by it.

Which is the tragedy: whether he was truly reformed or not, he really did want to move on with a new life. But all of his past choices grabbed him and pulled him back into darkness.

And then the ending, which I won't spoil here. Which turns it all around.

But all of the above doesn't do the film justice. It really is an intensely visual film. Kubrick provides very specific information with each shot. This sometimes results in clinical shots, but even those have a modern elegance.

I don't know if I can recommend the film. It's dark, sparse, and filled with violent and sexual imagery. But it works.

I've had this song running through my head for the past few days: Jumbo's "Dia". It's a Mexican pop song.

The reason? An awesome Flash animation called Rush 2 from Vinnie Veritas.

Vinnie is a Mexican artist who draw simple pen-and-ink drawings, mostly set in a place called "CCC City." It's a pulp urban fantasy setting, where teens and young adults in cargo pants and halter tops carry swords and guns, chatting and fighting and running and searching for each other. It's wildly imaginative. Rush 2 features a "day in the life" of CCC City, while his other videos feature things like a sweet little adventure story (Ho te amo), a kite running amok through a city (Papalote), and a silly, fast-paced railroad chase (The Chase).

Every time I watch one of his animations, I smile. They're light-hearted, with a certain kind of innocence—nobody ever dies, despite the number of guns and explosions happening every day.

This one's very geeky.

I've written a Python script, Wikify, that will convert Wiki formatting into HTML. I actually wrote it many months ago, but only recently have I tested it enough that I feel it's ready for public consumption. It's only 116 lines of code, but it works very well now.

You can find Wikify on my Toolbox, a part of Brent's Software.

I love Halloween. A few weeks ago, as I cruised a nearby Ben Franklin for Halloween decorations, I stumbled upon an excellent little magazine of Halloween recipes, ideas, costume patterns, etc. Inside was a recipe for sweet potato apple casserole, and my goodness, every bite tastes like autumn.

Software

3 pounds sweet potatoes

4 medium or 3 large tart apples, peeled

¼ cup lemon juice

½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts

½ cup (1 stick) butter, cubed

½ cup packed brown sugar

½ cup honey

2 tablespoons orange juice

½ teaspoons ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoons ground ginger

Hardware

11"x7" baking dish

Large bowl

Small saucepan

Baking sheet

Preheat the oven to 400° F.

Scrub the sweet potatoes with a vegetable brush under cold water, then poke each potato in several places with a fork and place them on a baking sheet.

Bake at 400° for 35-45 minutes, or until almost tender (they should give just slightly when squeezed). Cool slightly, then peel and slice into 1/4-inch slices.

Cut the peeled apples into 1/4-inch slices and toss with lemon juice in the large bowl. In a greased 11"x7" baking dish, arrange sweet potato and apple slices alternately. Sprinkle with nuts.

In the small saucepan, combine the remaining ingredients over medium heat (50%). Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat and pour the mixture over the potatoes and apples.

Bake, uncovered, at 400° for 25 to 30 minutes, until tender.

Absolutely delicious.

If you don't write things down, you'll forget them.

We all know this. We've been told this by our parents. We have an idea or we suggest some improvement, and someone says, "You'd better write that down or you'll forget it."

But most people don't do it. They nod, and laugh, and they go on to another topic of conversation. And the idea dissipates. Gone.

Why don't people write down their ideas? Why don't we record all our neat ideas? Why don't we dump them in a box and sort through them occasionally, and try out a few of them?

(I certainly do; I even keep index cards and a pencil in my left-hand pants pocket at all times, just in case an idea comes to me. Once I fill up a card, I drop it into my inbox for later processing. I mean, why not?)

Last week I blogged about Geoff Smith, a "geek musician." Today, I'm going to blog about arguably the biggest geek musician, Jonathan Coulton.

He's undoubtedly best known for composing the end credits song for the game Portal, "Still Alive," though he also wrote the programmer anthem "Code Monkey." They're both great little songs.

He's written much more music than that. In fact, he's written dozens and dozens of songs, thanks to a friend suggesting that he write a song a week. So he did.

Whereas Geoff Smith has a Beatles vibe, Coulton's a bit more like They Might Be Giants. His songs are quirky, but usually have a neat twist or emotional theme despite the odd theme.

For example, "Skullcrusher Mountain" is a love song, sung by an evil mastermind to the girl he's kidnapped. There's an odd, desperate sadness to it. "Code Monkey" is about a programmer's love for a co-worker, which he can't quite bring himself to do anything about. "Flickr" is composed entirely of photo titles from Flickr, and after a while does give you a feel for the breathtaking number of hobbies and interests out there.

Best of all, he offers all his music as standard MP3 downloads off his site, for $1 each ($10 per album). You can also listen to previews of each, and he offers a rotating set of his songs free.

The songs are fun and poignant. Worth a try.

One problem with modern websites: the dependence on email. Every site wants your email address, and send you email to verify your account, and email you occasional notices.

But some of these sites give out your address to other, less...useful sites. Moreover, it's hard to keep track of all those emails.

Enter OpenInbox. When you sign up, you get your own subdomain, (your name).openinbox.com. So, I snagged brentnewhall.openinbox.com. The website gives you web-based email. Any email sent to any address at (your name).openinbox.com will show up in your OpenInbox inbox. Moreover, all your email will be listed and sorted by the address.

So, when I register at a new website, I can make up an email address just for it: kagami@brentnewhall.openinbox.com. The next one might be nagato@brentnewhall.openinbox.com. My inbox at OpenInbox will show all the emails to all these addresses, listed under "kagami" or "nagato".

Instant organization, and easy tracking of which sites use which email. A lovely solution. And it's free.

As I've been trying to set up my freelancing business, I've had a difficult time getting work. And much of that revolved around my experience.

After going through all the sites I've worked on, I realized that I only finished a few sites. And several of those were internal company sites that I could no longer access. I couldn't demonstrate my skills.

So, I designed and built a few sample sites. They don't do anything; they just showcase some of my skills.

I then assembled a portfolio of my website designs, which I host on this site. I can now direct potential clients there, to show them what I can do.

And business immediately spiked. Whew!

Today, I received a letter from "Golden Living (formerly Beverly Enterprises)." This company runs nursing homes and assisted living facilities. I twas originally sent to a "Mary Newhall" near me (and I'm from a small family with no nearby relatives named "Newhall"), but was redirected to me. It reads:

DEAR FRIEND:

OUR RECORDS INDICATE THAT YOU ARE THE OWNER OF THE FUNDS

REPRESENTED BY THE ITEM LISTED BELOW. NO TRANSACTION OR

ACTIVITY HAS BEEN NOTED FOR A SIGNIFICANT TIME. IF YOU

HAVE AN INTEREST IN THESE FUNDS AND WISH TO PREVENT SUCH

FUNDS FROM BEING REPORTED TO THE STATE, PLEASE COMPLETE

THE FOLLOWING PROCEDURES:

• PROVIDE YOUR CURRENT ADDRESS, TELEPHONE NUMBER AND

SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

• OR TAX IDENTIFICATION NUMBER IF YOU ARE A BUSINESS
• SIGN AND RETURN THIS INFORMATION PROMPTLY TO THE

ADDRESS BELOW FOR PAYMENT

• IF PERSON RETURNING FORM IS NOT THE ADDRESSEE, PLEASE

ENCLOSE A COPY OF THE WILL OR POWER OF ATTORNEY TO

SHOW THAT THESE FUNDS ARE RIGHTFULLY YOURS.

GOLDEN LIVING (FORMERLY BEVERLY ENTERPRISES)

1000 FIANNA WAY

FORT SMITH, AR 72919-4118

ATTN: T. J. STIGA

This is followed by fill-in fields for signature, SSN/tax ID, address, and phone number. Certainly smells like a scam.

What's interesting is that the company itself is certainly legitimate, and the included address is indeed the registered address of the business's headquarters (according to Forbes). It looks like one of its employees is running a scam through their headquarters.

The letter includes no other contact information (e.g., phone number) for this "T.J. Stiga," which certainly arouses my suspicions, besides the fact that disbursing funds like this should involve much more rigorous procedures than just sending a letter saying "give us your SSN and we'll send you money from this person's account."

What's even more interesting is that a quick Google search reveals a T.J. Stiga living at 2100 S V St, Fort Smith, AR, with a home phone number of 479-782-8576, as well as a Facebook page. I'm tempted to call him up.

Anyway, if you see a letter like this from "Golden Living," beware.

I first heard of Geoff Smith on TWiT Live, through his fan song I'm a Twit. It was a fun homage to the show, so I checked out his music.

The man's composed quite a few tech-oriented songs, and he has the distinct advantage of being both a good singer and a good songwriter. His songs are catchy, entertaining, light, and easy to listen to.

And most of his songs have a tech angle, from the anti-RIAA song "Set the music free" to his commentary on vicious online commentary, "Ones and 0s."

Great stuff.

Saalon and I have talked before about the future of tabletop roleplaying. It started with the fantasy hack-and-slash of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970's, followed by the introduction of generic systems like GURPS and FUDGE in the 1980's (allowing for modern games, science fiction games, etc.), and the explosion of more open and acting-driven systems with White Wolf's World of Darkness in the 1990's.

What's next? I think I may have found it.

I spent much of the weekend devouring a 400-page PDF for Houses of the Blooded, a new tabletop RPG system.

Very roughly, it's World of Darkness in the Dune universe. It's focused on helping you to play a role more than kill goblins.

In particular, players can temporarily take over as referee.

As with many tabletop games, whenever you attempt something tough and outside your character's normal abilities, you roll dice. But the dice don't determine whether you succeed; if you roll high enough, you as the player get to decide if you succeed or fail. If you don't roll high enough, the Narrator (Game Master/referee) decides if you succeed or fail.

So, no matter what you roll, you may still succeed. But there's more to it than even that. You roll a number of dice at a time, which may be more dice than you need. You can reserve any number of dice as your "wager," and roll the rest. If you roll high enough, not only do you succeed, you get to add one fact to the success for every die you reserved in your wager. So, if you're leaping out of a bedroom, and you wagered three dice, you might say "Yes, I succeeded. And there's a balcony outside, and I land on it, and it goes all the way along the building." Three facts added for the three dice wagered.

This is revolutionary. It provides a simple way for players to control the progress of the game. They're not inventing super-powerful weapons out of thin air; they're influencing the game to make it more fun.

Can it be abused? Well, anything can be abused, but the system makes it clear that 1) each fact must agree with the story so far, and 2) if you try to add a fact that helps you and hurts the other players, you're not welcome in the game. Simple as that.

It's hard to describe why I find this so exciting. It just feels right to me, and it feels like something that will help the roleplaying industry move forward.

'Twas talking with my Mom this weekend about a friend of ours; we'll call her "Betty." Betty has issues with certain members of her family, who are making some very difficult decisions that go against the grain of Betty's upbringing.

These family members are doing what's best for them—what will keep them safe and sane and healthy. But it goes against Betty's world view.

My Mom expressed frustration with Betty, as Betty just would not see their point of view. Had no sympathy for them.

Betty's also a narcissist. Now, that word's bandied about a lot without a solid understanding of its meaning: clinical narcissism means "denial of the true self." A clinical narcissist is so worried about protecting herself that she creates a wall so thick that nothing can get through. She presents a false front to everyone. It's so thick that even she can't get through to see her true self.

So it is with Betty.

I explained to Mom that Betty doesn't want to break down her wall. She can't, unless she wants to break out of her narcissism. As long as that wall is up, she's "safe," but she literally will have no sympathy for anyone who doesn't follow her own worldview. She can't imagine it; can barely even contemplate it.

Worse, as long as that wall is up, Betty can't acknowledge being wrong. Her worldview is the only thing that can exist, so by definition there are no other possibilities. She can't acknowledge the existence of anything outside her own worldview.

And so, my Mom understood. I wonder if Betty ever will.

So I watched Dead Poet's Society a couple of months ago. I'd heard it was good, but never really got around to it.

It knocked my socks off.

First off, it's beautiful. The cinematographer goes to great lengths to capture the beauty of prep school grounds in New England. From the fiery colors of the forest in autumn to a heavy winter snowfall, the movie just looks gorgeous.

Secondly, it's not about Robin Williams. In fact, he's only in a few scenes, and in them he plays a quiet, bookish, somewhat eccentric literature professor. Nothing wild about him at all.

Third, it's about growing up. It's about a bunch of boys who realize the need to carpe diem. Who realize that just doing what they're supposed to do isn't enough.

And the film's infused with great poetry. Classic poetry. Poetry to make one feel like the top of one's head had been taken off, to use Emily Dickinson's phrase.

It's a grand film.

The British group 'The Orwell Prize' is now posting the diaries of George Orwell online, exactly 70 years later. So, on September 10^th 2008, they posted Orwell's entry for September 10^th 1938.

Fascinating. His entries up to this point have mostly logged the nature and people around him. Little of surpassing genius; just a little diary of weather and such.

Comforting, in a way, to know that such a great writer penned such ordinary diary entries. On the other hand, I fully expect it to eventually tilt towards genius.

If you use the Twitter or FriendFeed services, you know that one of the most difficult things about them is remembering to check the respective websites for updates. They're all great, as long as you remember to check them.

twhirl is the answer. It's a little application that sits on your desktop and displays your Twitter and FriendFeed streams, updating them every few minutes. Works on Windows and Mac OS X.

twhirl's a bit quirky—I've had the window jump around my desktop a couple of times—but it's a perfect way to keep up with Twitter and FriendFeed.

(Side note: Today's my Reading Day; I'm spending the entire day in a chair in my garden, catching up on magazines and books that I've been meaning to read. Will hopefully get through a large percentage of my Media Debt, at least for the printed word.)

I have a friend. Her mother, sadly, has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home, so my friend manages her mother's finances for her. For convenience, my friend often answers the phone as her mother when her mother's financial institutions call. Otherwise, she spends several minutes explaining the situation to a confused phone rep.

So recently my friend got a call from her Mom's Discover card about a large charge. No problem; it was a proper charge. But then the Discover representative asked if she wanted to sign up for some extended insurance plan. My friend politely declined.

My friend was then subjected to a hard sell that went on for minutes. The Discover rep kept insisting that she really did want this insurance plan, using phrases like, "You want to be protected, don't you? You want to keep your money safe, don't you?"

My friend was frankly astonished at this tactic, which is clearly aimed at preying on old peoples' fears of losing their money. And it just went on and on. We all know how quickly one can wear down an old person's resistance. It was remarkably unprofessional, especially from a financial institution.

It's a terrible discovery about Discover.

(OK, sorry, bad pun.)

I like to open the dictionary to a random page and note down cool words, once a month. It's a good writing exercise, and it introduces me to new words. I also rediscover words that just look neat or sound beautiful.

This month's cool words:

• Faro - a card game used for gambling, its name probably derived from "Pharoah"
• Farrago - a medley or collection of miscellaneous items
• Farrow - to produce pigs
• Fatigue - military clothing
• Fawn - a young deer

I've finished my Media Fast, and have caught up on email, blogs, etc. After reflecting on the experience, I've come to several conclusions:

• I consume a lot of media. DVDs, blog posts, music, movies. Hours per day. Even without a TV.
• There's a cultural expectation that everyone consumes a lot of media. People are genuinely surprised when I mention that I haven't watched certain recent movies. Modern Americans naturally hoover up large quantities of media. It's not just normal; it's expected.
• This takes time from other things. I could be drawing, or writing, or otherwise producing something. Or I could be recharging in other ways: talking with a friend, going to a park, or browsing a local landmark. Instead, I pop in a DVD or refresh blogs. 'Cause there's always something else to watch or read.
• That said, I have a lot of media that I've committed to consuming, from books to anime to blogs. I call this "Media Debt." What to do with all that?

My plan:

I'm planning to spend Wednesday on my big to-read pile. There's just so much there, and I want to finish a bunch of it.

I'm also planning to get through one anime disc per weekday, and several discs over the weekend. I want to be free of my media debt, so that when a new book or anime series or DVD appears, I can get to it. Boom. Get it done.

Other than that, I'm going to consciously restrict the amount of time I spend on media. No more casual relaxation with media, at least not for a while.

I recently finished Osamu Tezuka's Buddha, a manga adaptation of the life of Buddha. It's about 3,000 pages that focus on the historical man, and the evolution of his philosophy, as opposed to attempts to teach you Buddhism.

I had to be careful when reading this book, as I couldn't simply pick it up, then put it down; I'd get sucked in and read through to the end. This is partly due to Tezuka's unique style: he likes to mix up a dramatic story with occasional sight gags, and keep things moving with action scenes. He had a tremendous gift for pacing and entertainment.

So the story moves quickly, and presents Buddha's life with sympathy and directness. Again, this book doesn't try to teach you Buddhism; it chronicles Buddha's life. However, one can't do that without exploring Buddha's philosophy.

I learned that the great spiritual teachers of Buddha's time mostly taught asceticism—that one must forego the pleasures of the world and punish one's body so as to free oneself from earthly desires. While Buddha agreed with the importance of discipline and abstinence, he rejected the idea of inflicting pain or otherwise hurting oneself.

In fact, he believed in hurting nothing. Radical for the time. He really wanted to achieve enlightenment, and he struggled to achieve it.

Now, the manga glosses over a lot of Buddha's later religious teaching, which gets pretty extreme by non-Buddhist standards. He claimed to perform astral projection every day, and that he could teleport.

But the manga cares less about that than about Buddha's moral journey. I gained a nice understanding of Buddha's teachings; how they evolved in response to the events around him.

So, in all, I'm thoroughly glad that I finished this. I learned a lot, and in a way that kept me entertained throughout.

Polymeme is a website devoted to "intelligent content that lies beyond the usual echo chambers of tech news, celebrity gossip or American politics."

This doesn't mean off-beat stories; Polymeme specializes in articles about subjects we care about, but from perspectives we don't normally see. For example:

• From The Independent — Solar panels 'take 100 years to pay back installation costs'
• From IdeaBlob — Designing educational math toys for US and developing markets
• From Silk Road International Blog — Where to locate your factory? I've been to Shanghai once, China looks good

The only drawback is the sheer breadth of subjects—much of it is bound to appeal to only a relatively small audience. But it's a great opportunity to broaden one's mind.

I love to draw. I can't draw well, but I love doing it and coming up with something that satisfies my (very low) standards.

Tonight, I spent a couple hours drawing hair, using Mark Crilley's YouTube videos. And I'm very happy with some of the results.

Of course, they have plenty of flaws. But I'm learning, and my flaws shrink with each drawing.

Today begins my week-long Media Fast, my twice-a-year vacation from all media. I avoid anything that was produced for an audience. No books, magazines, newspapers, movies, DVDs, TV, music, or blogs.

I stay reasonable about all this. If I walk into a coffee shop in which a TV sits in one corner, blaring CNN, then I don't run out screaming. I just ignore it.

I use my time this week in 4 ways:

1. I visit local gardens, parks, and museums.
2. I work. The Fast lets me focus on my projects more than I otherwise "can."
3. I try odd, fun little projects I otherwise "wouldn't have the time for." I might try to write a song, or make a puppet, or cook something exotic and time-consuming.
4. I observe my reaction to my Fast, and others' relationships to media. I'm always shocked at how much I crave a movie or book by the end of the week, and the vast quantities of media that we all consume.

And at the end of it, I'm glad to go back to my beloved books and anime, but I'm always glad I fasted. And I always think, "I should do this more often."

Genealogy's a big hobby. Today's site lies on the lighter end of that hobby, for those who just want to keep track of their close and extended family.

If you sign up at Famento, you can create pages for members of your family, upload photos, and write biographies for each of them. There's also a guestbook where friends and family members can leave comments. The site is entirely free.

Famento was created by two Asian friends, one who wanted to build a permanent memorial of her grandmother, and the other who wanted to record her family's histories.

I've been hearing about Last.fm for months now, but I haven't tried it. It's a website—like Pandora—where you list a few of your favorite artists, and the site plays music that sounds similar. It catalogues music by what it sounds like, basically, then streams music that matches the music you like.

But now I hear that Pandora's in trouble, and Last.fm was described as the competitor that everyone else uses. So, I tried it out.

Color me impressed: I entered Yoko Kanno (arguably the greatest living Japanese composer), and not only did Last.fm recognize her, it immediately played a piece she wrote that I'd never heard of. It then played a piece I'd never heard by another Japanese composer I love, Toshihiko Sahashi.

So I've been using Last.fm since. It works perfectly thus far. The John Williams stream plays John Williams-type music (John Barry, Hans Zimmer), without playing any John Williams music.

Highly recommended.

Just stumbled across a very odd video called Ela: Legend of Light. It's a combination live-action/CGI short film, made in Argentina, that very much evokes 1980's American cartoons. One of its directors describes it as "a weird mix between She-Ra, Tron, and Flash Gordon," a fairly accurate description.

Besides the He-Man/She-Ra feel, I noticed what I think are references to Rescuers Down Under and The Neverending Story. Odd and inventive. Neat to see weird, fun creations like this.

So I did something that might appear crazy today. I turned down a nice job offer.

I got a phone call two weeks ago from a recruiter, who put me in touch with a local company who does ASP development. I had a phone interview with one of the founders, then went in for a face-to-face interview with the other founder and a few people there at the office.

I'm trying to keep these people as anonymous as possible. I don't want them to stumble across this and be offended, but I got a stern, stereotypically authoritarian vibe from several of the interviewers. I felt like....

...okay, an example from Christianity. Christ is described as being "full of grace and truth." That's an important duality: truth represents the classic, serious Old Testament God of firm adherence to an established structure, while grace represents flexible moderation. Both are important (though not always equally important).

I felt little grace there. Plenty of truth, but very little grace.

Now, they offered me a decent salary, and I could use the money right now. I don't know where I'll get enough money in a couple of months. And I'm willing to work in a less-than-stellar environment, if the people are good and the work's important.

But I couldn't shake this vibe. I was unsure about the people. This just didn't feel right.

Silly, right, to base one's job decision on a feeling? I don't think so. Feelings are facts; they're just as real as a thought.

So, this morning, I called them back and politely declined. I'll continue to pursue freelancing for a while. It's what feels right.

My first encounter with IM was through ICQ. Over 10 years ago, the folks I chatted with on IRC encouraged me to try ICQ, and since then I've almost always had an IM client of some kind open.

I've since expanded to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk. But I kept an ICQ account open and active. Until now.

For the past year, I've gotten more and more bogus friend requests and spam on ICQ. Every single friend request has been in a foreign language, and encouraged me to check out a "100% free!!" site of some kind (the most recent purported to be for a child porn site). Every non-spam contact attempt (a small percentage, mind you) has been from people messaging random ICQ numbers (the last one, after greeting me, asked "Who are you?"). I have not received a single legitimate ICQ message or contact request in the past year.

So, I'm leaving ICQ. I don't like to close off a method of communication, but since there's been no legitimate communication through it, I feel justified in doing so.

A shame to see a useful service become so overrun with the equivalent of empty line noise.

Imagine a bunch of twenty-somethings getting their hands on a dubbing rig and a bunch of old, cheesy kung fu films. Now imagine that they threw out the old audio tracks and completely redubbed scenes from the films.

That's Uncle Morty's Dub Shack, currently airing on ImaginAsian TV. Here are a few YouTube clips to give you an idea of their humor (despite the titles, they're all clean):

• Exploding Apples
• Red Ninja Sex Slave
• The Oldest Mugger in the World
• Insomniac

Hilarious in strange, postmodern ways.

I enjoy making homemade soda. It's usually delicious, and I have no problems.

Except with ginger ale. For some reason, ginger ale gets incredibly carbonated. Explosively carbonated.

So, when I found an old bottle of it in the back of the fridge, I figured I'd do a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos sort of video. I took it outside and filmed myself opening it.

Didn't quite work out as planned.

If that weren't enough, I found a bottle of strawberry soda, and decided to open that. Which worked out even less like I'd planned.

Ah well.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have recently been cracking down on various kinds of internet traffic. Some is understandable; others interfere with legitimate uses of the 'net. Worse, ISPs often do this without telling anyone.

Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is striking back: they recently released Switzerland, a tool that will test your internet connection to see what your ISP blocks. It's still very basic—you have to run it from a terminal or command line prompt—but it can provide very useful information. Download it here to check your own ISP.

Read a fascinating book lately: Boogiepop and Others.

It's the first novel in a whole franchise, which itself takes some explaining. The franchise focuses on an entity called Boogiepop, which exists in the collective unconscious, and surfaces in certain people whenever a paranormal danger to humanity manifests. So, yes, it's something of an urban fantasy.

This first book describes the initial conflict that brings Boogiepop to the surface today: a creature called the Manticore who feeds on human souls. The franchise went on to spawn numerous novels, a live-action movie, an anime TV series, and a manga. This is where it all started, as a single (award-winning) young adult novel.

The book's split into several parts, each one told from a different character's perspective. Because of this, you often get to see the same scene from different characters' eyes, which changes your interpretation of that scene, and what was actually going on. A great hook

The whole story takes place in a high school, which is key to the franchise. Boogiepop is really about the high school years, when young people begin to solidify their philosophies on life. Each character in the novel sees life very differently, but I can sympathize with all of them to varying degrees.

As a whole, I really enjoyed it.

For the past two weeks, I've been trying to figure out how to describe the online comic North World. And I can't.

That's one of the reasons I like it. North World has elements of a fantasy story—the protagonist wields a sword and confidently fights creatures in the wilderness. But that's crossed with a very normal, modern world of cars and coffee shops. It's a modern world with wildernesses that contain spirit bears.

Not long into the story, the protagonist returns to his hometown, a place he never wanted to come back to. He left it a mess, and now he has to face it. Which means he has to face himself, and the choices he's made. And he doesn't like them.

He loves fighting in the wilderness, but he's alone. And here with his family and old friends...he realizes everyone is together and happy. And he's not. In running off to pursue his dream, he burned his bridges, and he's beginning to realize the folly of that.

An unusual sort of story, and now that I think about it, I realize it's quite similar to Zot!, which I just finished (and heartily recommend to any human). It pulls together the supernormal and the everyday, without debasing either.

An achievement, if nothing else.

I'm developing Gunwave, a tabletop RPG for playing war with giant robots. You get to play the pilot of a giant robot in the midst of a big war.

If you're not familiar with tabletop RPGs: Imagine a game of "Let's pretend," but with defined rules. The hero you play has this much strength and charisma, and that much intelligence.

You play in the traditional tabletop format: a bunch of players, and a Game Master (GM) who describes a scenario, and adjudicates the players' responses.

Okay, now that that's clear: Gunwave is designed for casual gamers. Folks who haven't played tabletop RPGs before, but want to immerse themselves in a difficult era and smash up some giant robots.

As such, Gunwave uses relatively few stats to track characters and mecha (the giant robots). Characters have:

• A few basic stats, like health and charisma
• A race (the universe is full of mutants, psychics, and aliens, if you wish)
• A specialty (spy, munitions, hand-to-hand combat, leader, etc.)
• Skills (perception, diplomacy, martial arts, hacking, etc.)
• Powers (psychic blasts, flash of insight, desperate block, etc.)

Mecha consist of a few attributes, like armor and speed, and their own powers. Plus, of course, weapons; there are 18 of them, plus various kinds of ammo.

I borrowed powers from the D&D fourth edition rules (which was a strong inspiration for Gunwave). Powers replicate the surprising spin, the leap forward to rescue a friend, the psychic blast, and the unexpected resilience of a cool mecha pilot. Some powers can be used as often as desired (they often change the rules of an attack to give you an advantage over certain foes), some can only be used once per fight, and others once per day (these usually do massive damage or provide life-saving assistance).

What's really interesting about all this, though, is the kind of story this supports. I love Gundam because of its stance on war, and showing how powerful and destructive and tragic it is. This lets me tell those sorts of stories, but in an exciting, entertaining way.

I hope.

I've been playtesting the game with a bunch of friends, and thanks to all of you who've helped me so far. It's not ready for a wider release yet, since I'm changing it so much. It's a fascinating little project.

Freelancing has challenged me far more than anything else I've attempted in my life. I have to be disciplined, and focused, in new ways.

At work, there's always someone giving you work to do. And there's always work to do. Work is structured and busy. While that carries its own challenges, I've figured out the basics of office productivity (how to organize my work load, keep email under control, etc.).

At home...I can just walk outside. Nobody will stop me. That freedom pulls at me constantly, and resisting it requires more discipline than I'm used to.

Far more than I have at the moment, it looks like.

So, I'm learning to focus. To get started on productive, paying work as soon as I'm settled in the morning. To set an alarm when I'm doing things that can suck up too much time (checking Twitter and FriendFeed, for example). To be more conscious of my paying time.

So, I learn and grow.

I'll be giving a short presentation on my Otaku, No Video podcast today. The presentation's called "Free Podcasting: How I Publish a Podcast Without Paying a Cent (Almost)." It covers the software I use to publish the podcast, and our publication process.

You can view the presentation online, thanks to SlideRocket, an awesome online PowerPoint competitor.

I've noticed that a lot of folks online don't take security very seriously. They use weak passwords (123456, their name, etc.), they use the same password everywhere, they don't change their passwords, they turn off their virus scanner; every security violation you can think of.

And I can understand that. It's annoying and time-consuming. Besides, even if you want to be more secure, where do you start? What do you do?

So, I've written an eBook that answers those questions. It includes a comprehensive plan for identifying areas where you could be more secure, and what you can do to be more safe. It includes links to solid software to plug security holes, and a complete description of my own (somewhat paranoid) security procedures.

You can buy my Smart Computer Security eBook for $9.99 at Your Online Life. It'll be sent to your email inbox within 24 hours, as a PDF file which you can read on any computer.

As always, let me know what you think of it.

I've written before about my Kindle, and how much I've used it (I read 3 books in the first week). Now that I've had it for 6 months, my passion has cooled.

I still enjoy my Kindle, and I'm glad I bought it. I like being able to read the WSJ any time I want to, without dealing with a paper. I occasionally flip it open and read a bit more of a novel.

But I only use my Kindle every week or two now. I have free books from the library, compared to paying a few dollars for Kindle versions. And I'm not as mobile as I was, so I don't benefit from having a dozen books at my side all the time. I have a thousand books right here.

But I'm still glad I bought it. It's certainly much more convenient for books that my library doesn't have, and I do believe that devices like the Kindle are the wave of the future.

Been reading some W.H. Auden lately. Breathtaking. I don't read enough poetry.

September 1, 1939

by W.H.Auden

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism's face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

'I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,'

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the dead,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

I'm 5 months into freelancing. Hasn't gone as well as I'd hoped.

I'm currently making $0. I've made a fair bit from a good friend, for whom I developed his corporate website. I've also done a little tutoring.

But that's dried up. I advertise my web development tutoring, through CraigsList, but despite a few emails from interested locals, nobody's come through. I've submitted short stories to various magazines, but none have been accepted. Every freelancing site I find is flooded with ridiculously low bids on every project, and unrealistic projects. ("For $100 a week, you must write at least 15 articles a day.")

So, I'm looking for a temp job. Just some tech work to tide me over for a few months. Several recruiters are looking for me.

I am disappointed. This startup process takes way longer than I anticipated.

There are a few reasons. It took me a while to start advertising heavily, and submitting stories, and so forth. I spent a good 3 months mostly enjoying my freedom. I've buckled down now, but I suspect it's too late to turn the tide.

I haven't consider viruses a significant threat on Mac OS X. While vulnerabilities exist, they're so rare I figure don't have to worry. Yet.

Then I read that Louis Gray, a well-respected blogger, got a Mac OS X trojan. It hijacked his computer's DNS settings, replacing the banner ads appearing on his webpages with ads for erectile dysfunction pills.

So. Time to install some anti-virus software. I researched, and found only one good, free anti-virus app for OS X: ClamXav. It's simple and sluggish, but effective. Which is all I need and want.

I'll post here if I encounter any problems. But this has taught me a lesson: be prepared before trouble hits.

"We've had a stroke of luck," Toreas said. "Someone reported some suspicious activity near Roc Sarat, a ruined fortress not that far from here. Turns out, a lot of carts have been going in and out, some containing weapons. We think this is a major storehouse for the rebels. You all will attack it today.

"So," Michael said, his voice neutral but clear, "how do we smash them?"

Toreas's eyebrows shot up. "We will not smash them. We cannot."

"You want this over, right? So why shouldn't we?"

Toreas sighed. "Because you'll be fighting our own people. Smash them and they'll hate Duke Suranta forever."

"They won't fight back ever again, though."

"Maybe, maybe not," Toreas said. "Can you predict the future?" Michael frowned, sensing an insult. "Even if they never rebel, they'll talk about Duke Suranta's handling of this rebellion until the day they die. Break a man's hand, and he'll hate you. Block his fist, and he respects you."

"I get it," Sam said, a quick grin on his face. He began to hop in place, as though his energy had nowhere else to go. "So we do just enough to keep them from hurting anyone. Should be fun to try in a big robot." Michael looked forward to seeing Sam in his Armor, working out some of that energy.

"Impossible," announced Dirk. Everyone looked with surprise at the dark-haired boy, who was scowling at the map. It was his first word all day. "Those Armors are siege weapons. They're meant for large-scale annihilation, tearing down walls and throwing boulders at armies. All we have to do is take one wrong step and one of these rebels becomes a red puddle."

"I can handle it," Sam said, meaning every word. "Didn't you feel how well we can control those things? Inch by inch. We'll be fine."

"Maybe you," Michael said. He was more firm than he intended, so he softened his tone so he wouldn't offend Sam. "Look, you can control your Armor really well. What about the rest of us?"

Dirk waved a hand over the map. "This whole thing will be even worse a year from now if we go out in those Armors," he said. "No matter what we do, it'll just get worse." Henrietta's big eyes got bigger.

Michael gave Dirk a hard look and said, "What, can you predict the future?" Dirk gave him a poisonous glare, but he shut up. Michael didn't want to tick him off, but he had to shut him up before everyone got too discouraged.

Sam looked back at Toreas. "I'm not afraid. So what do we do first?"

Toreas paused to collect his thoughts. Michael and Dirk stewed. Toreas opened his mouth, and Kayla interrupted, "Wait a minute." All eyes turned to her. "If we can't just do anything to the rebels, what can we do? How much is too much?"

Toreas nodded, acknowledging the wisdom of her question. "Destroy their resources. Prevent them from hurting others. Herd them like frightened sheep. They may not move easily, but they will move." He paused. "The Armors will frighten them. Take advantage of that, but don't provoke them. A cornered animal will fight to the death."

Michael's frown deepened. Sam was listening with half an ear, waiting for the cue to leap into action. Dirk didn't seem to be listening at all, just brooding over the map. Kayla and Henrietta were paying attention, but how much of this would they truly understand, out on the battlefield? When they look down at a crowd of angry, frightened peasants, would these girls really "herd" them?

There was only one way to find out.

I just watched the anime film Tekkon Kinkreet. I'm not going to review it.

Instead, I'm going to talk about its history. It was originally a somewhat sketchy manga, picked up by an expatriate American freshly dropped in Japan ten years ago. It hit him. Hard. Right between the eyes.

He'd just closed down his own company and moved to Japan. The manga told the story of an outsider, a kid, in a world that he no longer knew. It described this kid's dark side, and his power, and his tenacity.

This American ached to make a movie out of this. So, he worked his way up through the anime industry, getting to know folks, until he convinced the right people that he should direct an adaptation of this manga. And he got four million dollars with which to do it.

Anime films are rare in Japan. You'll get a yearly Pokemon or Naruto movie, and every so often something from Studio Ghibli, but outside of that there are precious few movie-length anime. So this was remarkable.

Then, halfway through production, the crew reviewed the movie so far. The film was confusing and muddled. Most of the animation was still incomplete. They suffered a major blow. I saw the video; they all looked like they'd just been told their mother died.

So they talked about it, and thought about it, and rallied, and moved forward.

And they made it. They released a film of beauty, depth, and emotional power. Oh, I could point out flaws; so what? He achieved his dream. And his dream is beautiful.

I realize this blog's turned into Tech and Emotion Central of late, but that's all I've felt like writing about lately.

Today's subject: Ping.fm, an aggregator site for all you social networkers out there. Basically, you sign up with Ping.fm, and you enter your username and password for all the newest Web 2.0 sites: Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Then you enter a short message on Ping.fm's site, and boom! that message is posted on all your social networks.

So, you can sign up for many of these services, and even if you don't access them often, you can still post to them. This makes you at least useful on those sites, and relatively active.

Which brings up another point: these sites have varying utility. I only visit MySpace once a week, while I hit Twitter twice a day. But why not at least post to all of them?

Am I capable of "Wow"?

Can I conceive of a breathtaking project, and then see it through?

This is important. I can think of "Wow!" projects, sure...creating an animation from scratch, writing a series of kids' books, building a robot...but can I think of projects and see them through? What projects can I see through to completion?

'Cause I can do a lot. I've been doing stuff. But I don't know if I can commit to that. It's a big step. Lots of work. I could trundle along doing smaller stuff that's more likely to get me paycheck.

But will it matter?

Worth thinking about.

You may have heard of Digg, a site where users submit stories and rate them, and the highest-rated stories hit the front page. (Slashdot and Fark are similar.)

Yahoo! now has its own version, called Yahoo! Buzz. It has a few problems.

For one, the titles are short, as are the descriptions. Most titles are 6 words or less, and the descriptions are less than 20. And since so many stories start with fluff or backstory, 17 words of description often isn't enough to elucidate the story.

Also, various links and stats on each story don't show up until you mouse over them. Which keeps the site clean, granted, but I was mystified about why stories were popular until I accidentally moused over one and "9 Votes" appeared next to it. (Incidentally, why "Votes" instead of "votes"?)

And there's a big Flash navigation bar at the top, which loaded in a full 10 seconds on my ultra-fast FiOS line, and shows stories just as cramped as those in the main story list.

Overall, it's an okay site. It's just frustrating and superfluous. I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to.

Want a blog, but don't want to spend time building a blog? Do you have an email address? Then you've got a blog, thanks to Posterous.

Just send an email, containing whatever you want on your blog, to post@posterous.com. They'll automatically create a blog, and reply with your new blog's address. Then just continue emailing post@posterous.com with new messages. The email that they send to you will also contain a link letting you set up an account, so you can edit and delete posts, change your site's name, etc.

You can attach mp3s, videos, and links to your post and it'll all show up on your blog. Note that it all shows up, including your signature, so you may want to delete that before sending.

Here's my blog, as an example. Nice, clean, and simple.

And sure enough, my depression has lifted. I spent last night at my parents' house, talking over my finances, and I've decided on a course of action.

Context: I have about 2 months of expenses left in my checking account. While I've made some money from web development, it's a quarter of what I'd need to pay my bills. I've received a few emails from folks interested in tutoring, but none of them have committed. None of my short stories have been accepted yet. I'm not making enough money to continue this, considering my savings.

Resolution: I'm going to contact a temp agency, and look for part-time or full-time temporary tech work, at least for the next couple of months. I'll continue to advertise tutoring and submit stories to magazines, in the hopes I can build that up to full-scale income by the end of November.

I don't want to give up on freelancing. However, it hasn't worked yet, and I need to give it more time. So, this will do it.

Unfortunately, it also means I'm going to have an exhausting few months, as I'll also teach all evening Mondays through Wednesdays. But that's a price I'll need to pay.

Now, to move forward.

Lack of blog updates here. Mainly because I've been depressed lately. It comes in waves, and much of the time I've felt okay. But...all is not right, internally, despite all being well externally. I've no reason to complain.

But such is life. The mind and the heart are incomprehensibly complex systems. (I hesitate to call them "systems," as that implies reducible rules.) Emotions don't always derive from obvious causes.

So, as with so many other things, I must ride this storm out, and be stronger for its passing.

Once I do, this blog will resume.

Life is "won" by the persistent.

I really love this site: Topix. It displays local news stories for your specific town or county, along with forum comments. All the comments are from people local to the story, so you'll see reactions from the parents or neighbors of those involved. You get really close to what happens.

Rather cool website out there: DonorsChoose.org. On this website, teachers ask for classroom project materials. You donate money to whatever you think is appropriate. The teacher and students then send you thanks, via email or regular mail.

You can donate as much as you want to any project. If a project falls through, you can apply the money you donated to any other project.

Simple, convenient, and with a real-world impact.

Warning! Extreme geekiness ahead, but at least it's extremely useful geekiness.

Are you annoyed with the text size on certain websites? Would you like to increase the text size on just those sites? Do you use the Firefox web browser?

If you're using Firefox, find the "chrome" directory in your preferences (location varies by operating system). Create a file named userContent.css in the chrome directory, and add this to it:

@-moz-document domain(website.com)

{

body { font-size: 16pt; }

}

Replace "website.com" with the address of the site you want to affect. Then restart Firefox. You can add more entries like the one above for other websites.

If you're using Internet Explorer, unfortunately, I don't know of a way of changing the default font size for one website. You can change it for all websites, though.

Use Notepad to create a text file named userContent.css somewhere on your computer, and add the following to it:

body { font-size: 16pt; }

Then, in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options, then select General, then Accessibility. Select the "Ignore colors", "Ignore font styles", and "Ignore font sizes" checkboxes. Under User Style Sheet, select "Format documents using my style sheet", click Browse, and navigate to userContent.css and select it.

Some websites lock their content down, so this trick won't work on every website. To get it working on specific websites, you'd need to look at their CSS (View > Source) and see which visual elements are used on the webpage.

But this should work on many websites. If it doesn't work on your favorite website, let me know and I should be able to find the offending CSS and offer a specific modification.

So Saalon came down last weekend to hang out. He DM'ed a D&D 4^th Edition game for me and some friends; a grand time was had by all. We beat the X-Men arcade game, and played Super Gem Fighter Mini-Mix, and generally hung out.

One of the friends was Nick, so while we were together, we sat down in my studio and recorded a podcast.

So we clustered around my laptop, where I pulled up Audacity, hit the Record button, and away we went. 'Twas a strange situation.

We first started talking together when we all trooped to Otakon last year. We conversed with surprising ease, and when we agreed to try recording a podcast together over Skype, I was again surprised to hear our conversation flow smoothly and naturally. We respect each other. We can disagree and challenge each other, while really listening to each others' points of view.

So this was our first podcast recorded while sitting in the same room together. And it worked. Smooth as silk.

I'm a bit perturbed by the mediocre audio, but we were all leaning in to my laptop microphone. It's certainly audible, but I wish I had a good microphone. I wish I knew of a good microphone that costs less than $100. At least my studio has carpeting and one concrete wall, so there was minimal echo.

Overall, a great success, and I'm glad we did it.

(Oh, and this means that episode 4 of Otaku, No Video is out.)

I'm now on identi.ca, a new social networking site, as brentnewhall. identi.ca is apparently attempting to be another Twitter, though I don't see a lot of activity there yet.

Still, you never know what's going to be the next popular platform. A few minutes' time will at least introduce you to them.

Software:

• 1 pound strawberries
• 1 pound blueberries
• 1 small carton heavy cream
• 1 cup of vanilla yogurt

Hardware:

• A standing mixer
• 6 glass parfait glasses, if possible

Chill the bowl and blade of a standing mixer in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Wash the fruit and slice the strawberries.

Remove the bowl and blade from the fridge and put them in the mixer. Pour in the heavy cream, and start mixing it. Add sugar to taste. Increase speed as high as you can with causing cream to splatter all over your kitchen. Watch the cream like a hawk, until it forms soft peaks, then stop the mixer.

Into each parfait glass, place a dollop of yogurt, then add a dollop of the sweetened cream, and stir gently. Add a handful of blueberries. Add just cream, then a handful of sliced strawberries. Top with cream, and one extra small strawberry slice. Serves 6.

Save the remaining cream jealously, and eat when nobody's looking.

In concert with yesterday's entry, in which I talked about the IMDb, today I'm going to talk about a really neat guy named Robert Scoble.

Robert first came to my attention when he worked for Microsoft. He was one of the first employees there to blog seriously, and he blogged a lot. Some of his posts even criticized Microsoft policies. He came across as honest and matter-of-fact. He did one of the best things you can do when blogging: he put himself into his blog.

He then left Microsoft so he could freelance. That's when things got interesting. He began joining social networks; now he's on just about every single one. He blogs, he twitters, he Qiks, he comments on Friendfeed. It's like you can't get away from him.

And that's the neat thing about him. He tries out all these services, and not just as a casual experiment. He integrates them into his daily life, and decides what works for him and doesn't. Then he blogs about his experiences.

Meanwhile, his personal network grows. He's subscribed to 28,000 people on Twitter alone. He wrote recently about how he loves the noise, meaning that he derives personal satisfaction out of sifting through metric tons of seemingly irrelevant comments to see what people are really thinking about. And he engages constantly in those comments; he's posted 2,200 comments just on Friendfeed.

He's terrifically popular, and makes money through his interviews and videos, which he gets from tapping his social network.

Really neat to see a guy making a living off of his passions and interests.

Surprised how many folks don't know about the IMDb, or the Internet Movie Database. It's a massive online database of pretty much every movie ever made, with entries for actors, quotes, trivia, etc. And they're all hyperlinked, so you can go from a movie, to an actor in that movie, to another movie that the actor was in, ''etc.'

It's not perfect; the general public adds and updates entries on the IMDb, so some entries are wrong or mis-identify an actor. But that's somewhat rare, and overall, it's a comprehensive resource.

It's what I use on my sidebar, listing the most recent movies I've seen. Including WALL-E, which I thoroughly enjoyed this weekend. Not my favorite Pixar film, but entertaining throughout and with a good message that's not preachy. Once again, Pixar can do no wrong.

I've heard good things about Neil Fiore's The NOW Habit, so I finally read the thing a few weeks back.

It's good. Didn't change my life, as it apparently did for others, but I gleaned some good ideas from it.

In particular, Fiore recommends that you rest, then work. Schedule and take breaks before you start working on a project, so you'll be rested and recharged and ready to face it. If you wait until afterwards to relax, you may not have time to, and you'll get discouraged over time.

There are other good ideas in there, too, particularly relating to his Unschedule. Worth checking out.

Saalon, a friend named Nick, and I have been working on a fun little project for the past month or so. It takes some time to get three people together on a regular schedule. Now that the schedule's stabilized, I'm now announcing our new podcast.

We're doing a podcast called Otaku, No Video, a series of hour-long conversations about the anime industry and specific anime series. We discuss trends in the industry, what we see as problems, potential solutions, and our thoughts on various anime.

Amazingly, I'm even happier with it than I anticipated. I enjoy re-listening to our talks. We have useful, interesting things to say, and the conversation bounces from topic to topic. We keep the conversation from getting too geeky, as well; pretty much anyone should be able to understand it.

So, please check it out and let me know what you think (especially now that comments work here). I'd love to hear your feedback on what we doesn't work, and what does.

(In case you're wondering about the name, it's a reference to a classic anime parody named Otaku no Video, or The Anime Fan's Video, which told the story of anime fans in Japan in the 80's. Quite funny, and an insightful look into what anime fandom was like back then.)

The huge internet storage site Akamai recently released their first "state of the internet" report, where they detail internet traffic patterns. There are some very interesting trends.

For example, while the three countries with the most internet traffic were China, the U.S., and Taiwan (no surprise), the next three were Venzuela, Argentina, and Brazil. Turkey's also in the top 10. What's going on in South America?

Web site hacks continued, and the scale just astounds me. One attack in January 2008 infected up to 70,000 different websites. Two months later, over 10,000 web pages were infected by hackers trying to steal online game passwords.

How many unique internet IP addresses are used in each country? The U.S. has the most, followed by China and Japan...then Germany.

So, there are lots of smaller countries out there doing a lot of internet work. More so than I would have expected. I wonder what that will mean for the future? How well do you know German?

I heard Leo Laporte talk about Ning the other day on TWiT Live, so I decided to check it out.

Ning's an online community builder. Think of it as a toolbox with templates for online groups, complete with forums, space for photos and videos, and all that. So, if you want to talk with a group of like-minded people, you either find a Ning "social network," or start your own. And it's all free.

Problem is, I haven't found a single active Ning social network that interests me. There are certainly active groups out there, but in the topics that interest me, all the social networks are either empty or way too specific ("This is the online space for Mr. Lennie Irvin's Summer 2008 English 0301 class.").

This may partly be a failure in their search algorithm. When I search for "writing," I get every writing group, in no apparent order. It should probably sort by popularity, and there's no way to filter results by language (I'm just not going to join any of the many Spanish networks).

That said, if you want to start an online social network, Ning seems to have great tools to support it. The technology's there, and it's easy to start using it.

Just finished—literally, just—a career management book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. It's pretty short, it's got good advice, and it's got great art. It needs to be : it's a manga.

This sort of thing is commonplace in Japan, where you'll find how-to manga on just about any topic, from medical advice to sex. So it's neat to see one on this side of the Pacific, written by a well-respected career guide (he also wrote Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind) and drawn by a top-notch American manga artist.

The advice is, as usual, simple but true. With career advice, it's all about the presentation. We all know the importance of much of this, but we need to be struck by it afresh. Which he does.

For what it's worth, the book offers this advice:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It's not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

I argue that "talent" probably doesn't exist, but the point remains. Again, this is all sensible stuff, but it's how it's presented that really makes it work.

The story follows Johnny Bunko, a recent college grad struggling to figure out why he's not satisfied at work. He breaks open a pair of chopsticks, to be visited by a spirit who gives him career advice. Sure, it's corny—and it's played that way—but it works.

Strongly recommended; I'm thinking of giving copies to everyone I know who's nearing college graduation.

There's also a great little animation at the Amazon.com site.

I've been thinking a lot lately. About a great many things.

I'm tremendously fortunate in being able to pursue a freelance career. While I don't have a lot of cash to throw at this venture, I'll be fine for at least a few more months. Far more than most can manage.

But I haven't been nearly as productive as I feel I should be. "Should" is always a loaded word, but in this case I think it's apt: I haven't worked for more than three hours on money-making work in any given day.

Granted, I spent the first two months or so in "detox," as I call it, relaxing after many years of work. I couldn't bring myself to do anything besides read, cook, play around on the computer, and putter around the house. I enjoyed my freedom the same way a tired executive enjoys a vacation: flat on his or her back on the beach.

This isn't that. This is having the mental space and flexibility, and the time, and sitting down to work, and finding yourself refreshing FriendFeed. Why do I do this?

I even wrote a long, plaintive email to Hugh Macleod, asking him how he orients himself to get his work done.

I think this phenomenon is important, and worth examining. People say they don't pursue their dreams because they don't have the time, but time's not the limit. Neither is relaxation.

Focus appears to be the limit. How can I increase focus?

One solution I'm trying now is to rewrite how I see work. I've always enjoyed writing (as far as writing can be enjoyed; I can be frustrated by it, too), but when I imagine writing as a job, it seems dreary. Partly because I see work as dreary, or at least something that one must put up with. So, when I prepare to write (or whatever), I imagine myself having fun at it. Which I usually do. But I need to remind myself that it will be.

It's working so far, though I'm only a day into it. But how strange our minds are. We think they're logical and sensible, and then we scream at the sight of a bug.

For my weekly adventure, I checked Upcoming for a list of events in my area, and noticed a carnival nearby. So I went.

Carnivals are usually much more fun in memory than in present. Carnivals should be fun, exciting, lively, with a hint of danger. You always wonder what the carnies do behind the plywood. What lives do they lead, what secrets will they never tell?

This was a small carnival, and the company's based in this state. The website promises safety and courtesy, and that's what you get: about a dozen rides, half a dozen games of chance, and another half-dozen food stands. Nicely spread out, but at mid-afternoon on a hot day, the bright sunlight bleaches away the suspense and hints of danger.

So I had a hot dog, and a huge piece of frozen cheesecake on a stick, dipped in chocolate. The carnies were pleasant enough, if bored, and it was just too small.

Perhaps I should go back at night. Everything changes at night.

Either way, here are a few photos:

www.flickr.com

UPDATE: I went back the next night, and they closed at dusk. So I only got a few more photos of the rides as night fell. Disappointing, but at least I got a few interesting photos out of it.

One of my favorite webcomics, North World, had a guest strip today by Nick Daniel of Lagend, so I decided to check out Lagend.

It's got a unique art style, and I mean well by that. Heads are mostly spheres, colors are bright but clear, everything is hand-drawn (including the lettering), and the artist has a thus-far-flawless sense of panel composition and timing. The art style appears to be a fusion of manga, furry, experimental American comics, and Vinnie Veritas.

Note that there's some strong language here and there.

Either way, I like the story and the characters, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Seems like every week I stumble on another great service offered by Yahoo!. I'm no fan of its main site, but I love many of its services, including Games, Flickr, and GeoCities.

Here's one I've been using a lot: Upcoming. You enter your zip code, and the site returns a list of events happening near you in the next few days and weeks. This includes book clubs, band performances, DJ appearances, book signings, celebrity appearances, art exhibitions, and pretty much any other public event you can think of. I'm amazed at the exhaustive listings; there are over 100 events per day within driving distance of my house alone.

You can also mark if you're coming or interested, and see how many others have signed up. Most entries list the exact address of the event, with links to Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps for that address. You can even post any event to your iCal, Outlook, Yahoo!, or Google calendar, directly from the event's page.

And, if you have a Yahoo! account, you can add your own events to Upcoming, direct people to the site, and track RSVPs online with it.

Overall, it's a remarkably well-designed site that provides a useful service.

I'm just back from writer's group, in which I received critiques on a fantasy short story of mine.

Scott, the critiquer, always gives great critiques. Here's why:

• He's detailed. As he writes, if anything strikes him as strange, out-of-place, or awkward, he immediately notes it in the margins. This is incredibly valuable, as I try to figure out what a reader understands as he or she reads.
• He doesn't rant or punish. He describes his reactions and problems, and suggests remedies, in the spirit of improving the story. His entire critique is focused on improving the story and the author.
• He's unfiltered. While always polite, he writes down every opinion and judgment as he makes them, even if they're personal or may not apply to every reader. As he says, the author is always free to ignore every critique made, but it's better to have more suggestions to think about than less.
• He marks everything with an easy-to-read red pen, in print (not cursive).
• He writes overall impressions on the last page, so I can compare his reactions as he read the story to his final impression. This is invaluable.

If you ever have to critique someone else's writing, please emulate Scott. I look forward to critiques partly because of him.

After listening to too many bad voicemails recently, here are a few suggestions when leaving a voicemail:

• Start with both names, yours and that of the person you're calling. How many times have you got a voicemail saying, "Hi, just letting you know everything's okay. Call me, okay?" Who is it? You have to infer from the voice. Not only is it nice to leave both names, it grounds the conversation in a particular person and gets my attention, so I'm able to tune in to the main point of the message without also trying to guess who's talking.
• Continue the conversation. Many voicemails are simply "Hi, this is Joan, please call me back." That's not very helpful, is it? When you call someone, it's almost always to ask a question or provide an answer, right? Please do so.
• Leave your phone number. I may have it...or I may not. If I do have it, it may be in an address book that I can't get to at the moment. Always leave your phone number, except with very close friends.
• Keep it brief. Since I started using these guidelines, I can't recall leaving a voicemail more than 1.5 minutes long. If you have a lot of information to provide, a voicemail's a poor place to put it. Leave a voicemail saying that you'll drop the person an email with all the details.

At least, that's what I think.

Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China, A Chinese Ghost Story) recently directed the martial arts epic The Seven Swords. It's beautiful. It's well-acted. It's completely incomprehensible.

The basic story is pretty straightforward—the emperor has outlawed martial arts, and a small evil army roams the countryside, slaughtering all those that practice martial arts. Someone comes to warn the village, two young people save that person, they wander for a while, then stumble upon the legendary Five Swordsmen hiding out in a mountain. They all then return as the Seven Swordsmen to kick the collective butts of the small evil army.

But the direction is muddy, and the shots are too close and don't last long enough to make clear what's going on. It's not unlike the Transformers CGI movie; even if the fights had been good, I couldn't tell what was going on.

And in an action movie, if I don't know what's going on, the movie loses all its fun. I watch an action film so I can enjoy the action. More depth than that is welcome, but it shouldn't betray its central raison d'etre.

I've been working on a project called Your Online Life for a couple of months now. It's a "web guide for the rest of us;" an explanation of current web tech and trends. It's meant to describe the latest websites and services, how to use them and why you'd want to.

My original plan was to release the site as a pay service; $50 for lifetime access and upgrades. I've been increasingly uncomfortable with that, for a few reasons.

• I don't know how to market it, or to whom. I have a few contacts, but not enough.
• While I think it's worth $50, I don't know how to convince others that it's worth $50. People expect web content to be free, unless you're the Wall Street Journal.
• I like giving things away.

So I've removed the payment code. Your Online Life is now free. Go ahead and read through it, and let me know what you think.

I've added a tip jar, and in the next few weeks I plan to offer a few detailed, supplemental how-tos for a small fee ($15 or so), covering topics like securing your computer and a comparison of different messaging services. These are topics that will benefit from a holistic approach covering many subjects, and for which I can write essentially short books of strong, intense value.

The site's future is still uncertain, but I feel better about it now.

Techie note:

For the past couple days, I've been struggling to get MySQL to run in Mac OS X 10.5. It would hang whenever I tried to start it. I finally put this updated preference pane file in ~/Library/PreferencePanes, then went in to System Preferences > MySQL and was able to start MySQL from there.

Very strange.

I keep up with a lot of different streams of input: emails, blogs, comics, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and IM. I have much to learn, but here's what I have learned:

• Skim. Don't worry about catching every bit of every email. Start by skimming, then pay closer attention if the content rewards it.
• Keep up. If you sign up for an email list, read it frequently. I read all my emails and blogs every day. Combined with skimming, it doesn't take very long.
• Reply immediately. Try to immediately reply to any email that needs a reply. Some may have to wait until you gather more information, of course, but can't you reply to most right away? And the more emails sitting in your inbox waiting for a reply, the more frustration and depression you'll feel when you look at them.
• Keep your inboxes clean. Move all emails you've read to a separate folder, or delete them. Process all your Facebook notifications (choose something to do with them). Close your IM windows when the conversation ends. Get it away from you, so you can concentrate on something else.

So, read everything at a high level to begin with, often, reply quickly, then get rid of it. Don't let it clutter up your mind.

I've heard positive things about Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, so I grabbed the free sample for my Kindle, and have been reading it over the past few days.

It's the Law of Attraction, but presented in the way that I've found true: that which you focus on, and consistently strive for, will come to life faster and easier than you expect.

While this works with just about any goal, Hill starts with money, and presents a six-step system:

1. Write down exactly how much money you want. Work out how much you really want.
2. Write down a specific date when you want to have this money.
3. Write down what you're willing to give up to get this. You can't get something for nothing. This payment can be in time, resources, short-term money, etc.
4. Write down a plan for how you're going to get that money by that date. Nothing complex. And start executing this plan.
5. Rewrite the above into a brief English description, such as "By November 30^th, I'm going to have $5,000 in the bank, by publishing thirty programming articles."
6. Repeat this description aloud twice a day, once when you get up and once as you go to bed. Fix this in your mind. Make it a constant thought in the back of your head.

So, I'm trying it. My goal is: By November 30^th, I'll be making $3,000 per month by tutoring, and writing code, short stories, and articles.

I spent the last hour reviewing short stories for submission to various magazines. Odd; I've only performed half a dozen short story submissions in the past few years, despite knowing that when you get a rejection from one magazine, you should immediately send the story to another magazine. I now wonder why I haven't been doing that.

Now to see if this works long-term. And how much money I'll be making on November 30^th.

I recently finished reading Buckminster Fuller's The Critical Path. If you don't know him, Buckminster invented the geodesic dome, and is generally considered a slightly crackpot visionary designer. The Critical Path is one of his final books, in which he traces an overview of his life and mission.

In his early 30's, he decided to devote his life to "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

So he studied energy problems and designed an efficient worldwide energy grid. He studied housing and developed inexpensive, portable housing (geodesic domes). And so forth.

My main problem with his theories: He was intensely rational. He assumed that people would adopt geodesic domes because of their efficiencies, ignoring how people like to live in traditional houses. Granted, he believed that people would adopt such things out of natural necessity, but I don't think people are that rational. People hold on to things.

On the other hand, Fuller impresses me. He accomplished a huge amount in his lifetime; far more than I have. This is a minor complaint about a giant of a man.

It's just a shame that humans can be blind like that.

This is from a book I stumbled on a few weeks ago at a used book store in town:

The disciple Kung-too said: "All are equally men, but some are great men, and some are little men; how is this?" Mencius replied: "Those who follow that part of themselves which is great are great men; those who follow that part which is little are little men."

Kung-too pursued, "All are equally men, but some follow that part of themselves which is great, and some follow that part which is little; how is this?" Mencius answered: "The senses of hearing and seeing do not think, and are obscured by external things. When one thing comes into contact with another, as a matter of course it leads (the sense) away. To the mind belongs the office of thinking. By thinking, it gets the right view of things; by neglecting to think, it fails to do this.

"These, the senses and the mind, are what Heaven has given to us.

"Let a man first stand fast in the supremacy of the nobler part of his constitution, and the inferior part will not be able to take it from him. It is simply this which makes the great man."

So, a few years ago there was this TV channel called Tech TV. And the most popular show on that channel was The Screen Savers, a call-in tech variety show in which two guys and a crew of geeks covered all sorts of technology news and trends and such.

Then, Tech TV died.

So what did they do? They dusted themselves off and looked for jobs in new media.

One of them started Digg. One of them created DL.tv.

But I want to talk about Leo Laporte, who has since started The TWiT Netcast Network. He began producing free podcasts, then looked for advertisers. He only takes on advertisers who he personally supports, and he provides a live advertisement for their services or products directly in the podcasts themselves (instead of inserting an annoying, pre-generated ad).

Then he signed up with Stickam, set up a few cameras, and began streaming live video of his shows as he records and assembles them. It required a significant amount of money, but way less than a typical studio.

His podcasts now have tens of thousands of listeners, and thousands watch his live streams. Today, he's announced that he's breaking even, and his list of advertisers grows.

He's living the dream. Not through massive financial resources or brilliant marketing or incredibly hard work. Because he dreamed of something, and tenaciously worked towards it.

I've been testing out RescueTime, a service that tracks and plots your computer usage. The idea is that it'll give you an idea of what's wasting your time.

You install a small app and let it run. Every few minutes, it uploads usage stats to www.rescuetime.com, which you can access at any time to check out your usage. It'll also email you a summary every week.

I used it for a few weeks, and to my surprise I learned nothing new. I know what I spend most of my time using (Safari and the terminal, mostly). I know what wastes my time (YouTube and Fark, mostly, which I've now blocked).

It was a worthwhile experiment, though, and you might want to give it a try if you're curious about how you spend your time. It certainly functioned well.

I've just put the finishing touches on Your Online Life. It's a web-based course in web trends and technologies, covering a large set of sites and services. You can learn about online photo sharing sites, user-contributed news sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a host more—both how they work, and exactly how to sign up with them and use them.

The idea is to provide high-quality tutorials and explanations, that are constantly updated and expanding as the web expands. It's a one-stop resource to keep you up-to-date with the web. When you hear about a site or service, you can go to Your Online Life and learn what it is, why you'd want to use it, and how to use it.

I'm offering this for a one-time fee of $50, which gives you lifetime access to the site and every tutorial and piece of information I ever post there now and in the future. It's like access to an encyclopedia of web trends and technologies.

Should be an interesting ride.

Finally got a chance to watch Cool Hand Luke recently. It's one of those films that are frequently referenced but infrequently seen.

Cool Hand Luke works mostly on the effectiveness of its actors. It's an intensely character-driven piece, with very little action. It's all about the relationships between the characters, how the bounce off each other.

I was struck by the other prisoners' reaction to Luke. He's very independent, seeing no need to observe the prisoners' little hierarchy. He doesn't try to upset it, either; he just ignores it. He wins the other prisoners' respect out of sheer tenacity and difference.

Their reaction? They follow. As impressed as they are at his independence, none of them try to be independent. It's almost like they expect him to live out their own dreams of independence. It's a terrible burden, and in the end it's one of the things that breaks him.

It's a beautiful film, too, full of the rising and setting sun, reflections in glasses, and creative shots. But that's frosting on the cake; the actors drive the film. And they drive it straight to eternity.

Some websites are informational. Some are entertainment. The Institute of Official Cheer is both. It's an archive of old newspaper ads, comic books, children's books, and strange magazine inserts. It pokes fun at the past, but with a twinkle in its eye; the proprietor (James Lileks) knows that they were just doing their best.

I bring this up because I spent a good chunk of today delving into its many, many subsites. There's just so much content here, and Lileks's writing skewers it with precision and style.

I published my Kindle Fan Guide several months ago, to quite some success. I've sold almost 300 copies so far.

I learned a lot during the process of publishing it. I had to log in to Amazon's Digital Text Platform, though fortuately anyone can log in using an existing Amazon account. I then selected the option to upload a new book.

Kindle books have to be uploaded in HTML format. This turned out to be tricky, as I wrote the Guide in OpenDocument format in a word processor (NeoOffice). My word processor could certainly save as HTML, but the Digital Text Platform only accepts a certain subset of HTML.

So, I had to save the Guide as HTML, then go in and fix the HTML by hand using a text editor. Then I uploaded it. Fortunately, the Digital Text Platform lets you preview your work; fortunate, because the book didn't look right at all. So I had to go back and tweak the HTML about a dozen times before it looked right.

Then I finished the process. However, Amazon's systems take up to 24 hours to synchronize, so I had to wait until that was done. But when it was, I had a Kindle book ready to go.

As it stands, it might be easier to save the book as plain text, then add a few HTML elements for chapter breaks and such. But at least publishing on the Kindle is a relatively straightforward process. If you want to self-publish, the Kindle's a fully reasonable choice.

Let me tell you about Ratliff.

Stephen Ratliff wrote fanfic (fan-written stories) about Star Trek: The Next Generation. I have nothing against fanfic. Most of it is bad, but most of anything is bad (Sturgeon's Law). Fanfic's a good training ground for writers.

Ratliff's stuff, in comparison, was cheesy in a way that rivalled the worst movies used in Mystery Science Theater 3000. His stuff had poor spelling and grammar, simple characters, and some of the most unrealistic situations imaginable.

For example: His recurring characters comprised the "Kid's Crew," a set of nine-year-olds who pilot and crew a starship. Yes. Nine-year-olds. And they do very well; they quickly rise up the ranks of the Federation and resolve major political standoffs.

I mentioned MST3K. Online MST3K fans learned of Ratliff and pounced. His works were perfect fodder for riffing.

Then Ratliff got wind of this. His reaction should be a model for anyone who finds this happening to their work: He sent them his work. He notified MST3K fandom every time he released a new story. He even read the riffs.

And he paid attention.

As he produced stories and the kids grew into their teen years, they started acting up. They got weirded out. They became troubled, even depressed. And one character reflected that this was because they rose too far, too fast; that all this adventure and pressure was too much for children to handle.

Ratliff's spelling improved, his characters deepened, and his stories became progressively less ridiculous. By the time I stopped reading his stories, he was producing solid fanfic. Nothing professional-quality yet, I'd judge, but he'd improved greatly.

How? By listening. By being a pro. He read a lot of stinging criticism, and he didn't take offense at it. He extracted the important meaning from it and applied it to his work. And he kept writing.

I have tremendous respect for the man.

Because a number of folks have expressed interest in knowing how one person has implemented a productivity system, I've uploaded a video where I walk through mine. I take it from writing down a note to myself, through to processing it into my system, and how my system works.

You know how sodas contain quite a few chemicals and additives, right? Wish you could drink clean soda?

I've just uploaded a new video to my Cooking with CK website, explaining How to make root beer from scratch. The same directions should apply for any kind of flavor you want to add, from orange to ginger ale.

Awhile ago, I read the original novel of Fight Club.

I surprised myself by reading the entire book in two days. Granted, it's a short novel, but normally I'm not that engrossed.

This was due to the novel's differences from the film. Turns out, the film is an excellent adaptation of the novel, but many speeches and conversations in the novel are re-arranged to condense the story. The book focuses tightly on the narrator, and the tale wanders as the narrator's mind wanders. A film can't do that. So, for example, Tyler Durden's "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake" speech is composed of observations and bits of dialogue from Tyler scattered throughout the novel.

The novel ends in a completely different way than the film. I think I like the film's ending better, though that's personal preference for the ending's style and content. The novel ends on a darker note than the film, though it's a very Black Comedy sort of dark note.

I'm glad I read it. If I adapt something in the future, I'd learn a lot from a deep study of the differences between the book and the film.

After Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended, I wondered if anyone else would pick up the mantle. They stumbled upon the formula of recording voice-over riffs of bad pop culture movies, and surely someone else would continue. The technology's easy enough.

Someone's done it: RomeoRhino.

RomeoRhino is a YouTube user who takes public domain instructional videos (and a few movies), records himself riffing on them, marries the two, and uploads them to YouTube.

He's learned from MST3K: he doesn't talk over the dialogue too much, he jokes as much as possible, he knows not to get too dark or sarcastic, and he keeps the jokes coming steadily throughout the entire video.

He posts a new video about once a week, and he's been doing it for a year, so there's plenty of material. Some of my favorites:

• The Snob
• Good Table Manners
• The Fun of Being Thoughtful
• What About Drinking?

As I prepare to bring my teaching website, Your Online Life, online, I've been fiddling with PayPal. I plan to use it to accept credit card payments, and I got lost within their documentation. But I managed to pull together what I need, and here's what I found.

First, log in to PayPal, then click on the link to your Profile, then click on Website Payment Preferences. Type in a Return URL—this is the page on your site that PayPal will send the user back to after they've paid. Turn on Payment Data Transfer and save. The page will refresh with an Identity Token.

Now for some HTML. On the page where the user will pay for the item, enter something like this:

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr"

method="post">

<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">

<input type="hidden" name="business" value="YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS">

<input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="ITEM_NAME">

<input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="1">

<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.00">

<input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="0.00">

<input type="hidden" name="no_shipping" value="0">

<input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1">

<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">

<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">

<input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-BuyNowBF">

<input type="image"

src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_paynowCC_LG.gif"

border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal">

<img alt="" border="0"

src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif"

width="1" height="1">

</form>

Obviously, change YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS and ITEM_NAME to your PayPal email address, and the name of the item your client will be buying. This will display a big "Buy Now!" PayPal button.

Now, go to the return page, the one that PayPal will redirect to. PayPal will send a transaction ID to this page, as an HTTP GET variable, named "tx". Grab "tx". Then post the following back to PayPal:

<form method=post
action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr">

<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_notify-synch">

<input type="hidden" name="tx" value="TRANSACTION_ID">

<input type="hidden" name="at" value="IDENTITY_TOKEN">

<input type="submit" value="PDT">

</form>

Plug in the value for "tx" in TRANSACTION_ID, and hardcode your identity token in the "at" field.

You should get back something like this:

SUCCESS

first_name=Jane+Doe

last_name=Smith

payment_status=Completed

payer_email=janedoesmith%40hotmail.com

payment_gross=5.00

mc_currency=USD

custom=Purchasing+cool+poster

A bit complicated, but it works.

I heard this in a recentl Manager Tools podcast: Until you've got something, you've got nothing.

It struck a powerful chord. As I chat with folks via Twitter and follow others' blogs, I realize that I have little to offer. A bit here and there: a few written stories, some credits. But precious little accomplished, in either the real or the digital worlds.

So, how to accomplish things? Rid one's self of distractions. Hole up with a bunch of food, severely limit external interaction, and work. I may not need to be quite that extreme, but I think it's important.

Which is why, today, I switched off Twitter and FriendFeed, and I plan to keep them off until I actually produce something. A finished product or service of some sort.

Heck, I may keep them off until enough of my friends get on there. Just one more distraction, after all.

When I look around at friends and family who don't seem to be accomplishing that which they want to, I notice a trend. They're smart. They even know what they want, if vaguely.

But they don't have a way of breaking down those goals into actionable steps.

Now, you can try to break down your goals into a complete, comprehensive list of steps. This will drive you nuts. This is what productivity systems are for, to advise you on how much you need to keep track of.

I'm a fan of Getting Things Done, which is just lightweight enough that I can stay productive without laboriously updating my system, while comprehensive enough to capture everything.

The core of GTD is a Projects list, a record of everything you're committed to accomplishing. Big and small. "Write novel" to "Patch paint in kitchen."

For each Project, you have to identify the next physical, visible action you need to take on it. Writing a novel? The next action may be to sit down with pen and paper and record those plot ideas spinning around in your head. And that's all you need to plan out. You can plan more than that, but you only really need the next action; once you've finished it, the following action is almost always very, very obvious.

(Why not plan ahead in detail? Well, how often have you discovered something partway through a project that completely changed your next six steps? Yeah. I bet it's more often than getting partway through a project and finding yourself completely unable to think of the next step.)

I keep a list of Actions on a whiteboard in my studio. Throughout my day, I refer to it frequently. As I make progress on a project, I update the whiteboard. It feels good to know that I'm accomplishing my goals. That I'm doing that which I set out to do.

Just finished a busy time in the kitchen. Made some icebox cookie dough (with lemon!), some udon noodles from a new recipe, and wine. Sort of ghetto wine, actually.

The recipes are from Instructables, a cool website with lots of offbeat how-tos, from How to Make an Easy Inverted Planter to Making realistic Steampunk Airship Goggles. I've spent a serious amount of time browsing it in the past couple of days.

The wine recipe is suspiciously simple. As I fiddled in the kitchen tonight, I refined it thusly:

Wine

1. Thoroughly clean a wine bottle. I washed it out with soap, then filled it with piping hot water and let it stand for a few minutes, then wrapped the top with aluminum foil while continuing with preparations.
2. Put a funnel on the bottle, and pour in 1 and 1/8 teaspoons yeast, and ½ a teaspoon of Early Grey tea (for tannins, ya know).
3. Put the bottle and funnel on a scale, and pour 260 grams of grape juice (or 1 cup) into the bottle. Swirl gently but firmly to mix everything.
4. Add 485 grams of water, or until it reaches the neck (not into the neck).
5. Lid with a balloon, and put it in a dark, cool place for 3-7 days, until it stops bubbling.
6. Take another (thoroughly cleaned) bottle and top it with a funnel, and lay a coffee filter onto the funnel. Pour the wine through the filter into the second bottle, and cork it. Enjoy at your leisure.

That's it. I'm going to bed. My fingers feel like thick Viennese sausages, unable to type a single coherent sentence.

It's late evening. I really need to write more articles for Your Online Life. But I don't want to, and if history is any indication I won't do any more work tonight. I'm used to winding down in the evenings.

However. My new mantra is "Evolve. And let the chips fall where they may." (from Jim Uhls' script to Fight Club, not the book). And so, I write.

Just finished watching several episodes of Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt, where he and a small crew travel America, off the highways, eating only locally made food (that is, nothing corporately processed or prepared).

It's amazing, watching someone passionately committed to a concept—real, carefully-prepared food—delivering on it. It's quirky and risky; you never know how it'll turn out. But the food is usually excellent.

Risks are worth it. It's inspired me to think more about my risks.

I'm also re-evaluating my routines and plans and such. After a productive Monday, and feeling a little ill today, I'm looking at my work and asking myself:

1. Is this really helping humanity?
2. How do I feel about it?
3. What can I reframe to be more powerful, effective, useful, etc.?

Questions worth asking, I think.

Back from a weekend retreat with some church high schoolers.

I won't bore you with the details, and will instead go straight to the conclusions: I learned that efforts to meet new people are usually worthwhile. And when they aren't, it's very clear and you can move right along. I learned not to trust second-hand information. I learned that the best way to meet folks in a large group is to attend one of their special functions. I learned that a true retreat is one which removes you from your routine permanently.

So I'm planning to revise my routine tomorrow morning.

Twitter, Twhirl, and FriendFeed

I've been using these three technologies for about a week now, and I definitely have enough experience with them to say that I'm hooked. Not massively so, but I'm using them.

Twitter is basically a group IM client in a website. You join, and add all your friends on the service. You and your friends' posts are all displayed together, chronologically, just like IMs. But it's a semi-permanent record; you can glance down the list, see someone's note, and quickly reply. And all your friends see your reply and can join in.

But Twitter's a website. Twhirl packages that up into a desktop IM client (Windows and Mac). Twhirl works exactly like an IM client. So you can have an ongoing conversation with your friends, over the course of days.

Now consider FriendFeed, which aggregates all your friends' Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, etc. messages, along with the ability to vote and comment on each entry. It's like a mini-forum for everyone's activity.

So Twhirl gives you a 24-hour chat channel with all your friends, and FriendFeed gives you a 24-hour forum with all your friends. For free.

FYI, I'll be at a retreat this weekend that has no cellphone or internet coverage, so I'll be completely out of touch for Saturday and most of Sunday.

Went and saw Iron Man. No, I'm not going to review it, except to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I do want to point out the benefits of having Jon Favreau directing. He got started in Hollywood by witing Swingers and directing Elf. He's a comedy and drama director.

This gives him great respect for dialogue. The actors sound like they're realling talking to each other, instead of intoning lines.

And the movie moves. Many action movies suffer from an uneven "suspension bridge" structure, where the action scenes are the towers and everything else is suspension cables. You spend most of the movie on suspension cables, waiting for the next good part.

Not so Iron Man; everything besides the action is kept interesting enough—funny, well-acted—to keep you watching.

Indie film directors can't afford to make a bad film. So give them a solid property that they like, and you'll get a solid film.

A recent chart posted by cnet shows that Facebook apps are primarily used &quot;just for fun.&quot; And there have been a number of blog posts lately (particularly The problem with Facebook) which trash Facebook, saying that the site is effectively pointless and not worth any money.

Allow me to step forward in defense of Facebook.

I know people who spend a lot of time on Facebook. Who use those silly little apps. And who are looking at the ads.

Granted, the apps haven't figured out how to make money yet. Same was true of the web circa 1995; lots of websites, most of them look-at-my-cat pages, and almost nobody was making money yet. It took a little time.

This is like complaining that Penny Arcade is useless and worthless because of its silly humor. Doesn't matter; it can still make money.

Wrote 2,500 words of tutorials for Your Online Life, my next major venture. Not bad. But I need to write at a much faster pace if I want to get this site done by Friday.

I'm worried that I'm over-reaching myself. I've started to look at other money-making opportunities, too. I may have to supplement my income with some web-based consulting work; anyone have any recommendations for good websites?

Meanwhile, I'm advertising my tutoring services on Craig's List. We'll see what happens, won't we?

Back from another great trip to see Saalon and LWQuestie (their IRC names, to presere anonymity). We watched Hard Boiled, which is certainly the best John Woo film I've seen. Though granted, I've only seen another, A Better Tomorrow.

Came back and been watching cheesy sci-fi films from the 1950's and 60's. Most are oddly earnest. They want to be true to themselves, despite the incoherent plots and poor editing.

But, for example, the one I'm watching right now features the classic slow-motion iguana as a dinosaur. Was this convincing at any point after Flash Gordon?

A recipe for toffee bars:

Combine a pound of light brown sugar and a pound (four sticks) of butter until light and fluffy. Add two egg yolks and 1.5 teaspoons of vanilla; mix well. While it mixes, sprinkle in a pound of flour and half a teaspoon of salt. Spread this mixture in a well-greased 8.5"x11" pan, and bake at 350 degrees for half an hour, until the bars are golden brown.

Meanwhile, chop up four ounces of walnuts or pecans, and get out a bag of milk chocolate chips. When the pan comes out of the oven, sprinkle most of the bag of chocolate chips onto the bars, wait a few minutes, and spread the melting chocolate evenly. Sprinkle with the chopped nuts. Cut into rectangles before it's completely cooled.

Half a bag of chocolate chips creates a thin layer of chocolate; a full bag creates a very thick layer.

Try not to eat them all in one sitting.

Long, good day. Finished copying some BBC Radio productions from old audio cassettes to MP3. Wonderful to have technology that does all this quickly and easily. Of course, that's ignoring the hours I spent setting up that technology.

It's odd. I'm still without a full-time job, and I feel none of the gnawing dread I expected. I know I can't keep this up forever, of course, but I've got months before I need to worry, and I'm not worrying. I'm just chugging along with various projects.

Not as many projects as perhaps I should, though how many "should" I do? I've been gardening and drawing and cooking and designing RPG adventures. Some work on potentially paying gigs, but...geez, why not enjoy my life? I could have a heart attack tomorrow.

Funny, that; I keep defending my lack of "productive" behavior. Shouldn't need to. This is my life.

Which makes it tough to blog sometimes. What do I really need to tell the world? Aren't my actions enough?

A local Asian bistro organizes its flow of people in a way I don't think I've seen before.

You enter on the left side of the restaurant. Along the left wall are giant menus, so while you're waiting you can choose your food. The menu is made up of proteins and sauces, so you choose, say, "chicken" along with "sweet and sour sauce." In front of you, in the corner, is a counter where you order your food and pay for it. You're then given a large red disk with a number on it, along with your drinks.

Next to the counter, and along the back wall, is the kitchen, separated from the rest of the restaurant by a low wall. So you can see the food as it's being prepared.

The rest of the bistro is made up of tables. Each table has a cylinder with chopsticks in it, and in the center is a thin pole with a clip at the top. You find a table, sit down, and clip your red disk here. When your order is ready, it's brought directly to your table.

This is admirably efficient. The restaurant needs only one server; you take your own drinks to your table, so the server's only job is to take food to tables. There's no need to print up menus, either.

The problem is cultural dissonance. You walk in, and there's nobody to guide you. You stand in a line next to a giant menu, then you get up to a counter where you're expected to remember your combination of protein and sauce. Then you're handed a disk and told to go sit down.

This is uncomfortable for a first-time visitor, and nothing will make it seem familiar. Even after the food has been delivered, the visitor will still remember the discomfort of ordering. The logic of it won't erase the emotional feeling.

It rarely does.

Just finished a very fun dinner party at my house, just my parents and a friend. If you ever need a business manager, hire Julie Brown. (If she had a blog, I'd link to it.)

These dinner parties are fun and interesting. The idea: I want to get interesting people together. My ideal would be to have each participant say during a conversation a week from now, "Oh, yeah, I was talking to someone who does that at a party a few days ago. Lemme call Brent and get her number."

Heck, I know plenty of people. And I know that because I sat down and wrote out all my contacts. Wouldn't it be nice to put 'em together and see what happens?

I'm beginning to think that the hardest part about teaching (for me, at least, right now) is figuring out where to start so that the student(s) will understand. What do you assume that the student knows?

You can't know what that student knows when they walk into the classroom, or signs up for a course. Even if they took another course, how much did they learn?

Does this mean that you should define rigorous prerequisites, and hold students to them?

I prefer that the instructor provide a lot of "catch-up" material for students who don't understand the assumed fundamentals. Have a few handouts for those who may not have fully grasped everything you need them to know.

Not that hard.

Here's the arcade game cabinet, which I've dubbed "The Machine":

And here's the full list of games I have installed and running on it:

• Asteroids
• Battle Zone
• Centipede
• Castlevania (original)
• Contra
• Defender
• Dig Dug
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Jr.
• Donkey Kong 3
• Frogger
• Galaga
• Golden Axe
• Gorf
• Heavy Barrel
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
• Joust
• The King of Dragons (Golden Axe clone, but very very good)
• Lunar Lander
• Macross Plus (vertical shooter)
• Mega Man
• Mega Man 2
• Mega Man 3
• Missle Command
• Mobile Suit Gundam (Street Fighter clone)
• Mobile Suit Gundam EX Revue (better Street Fighter clone)
• Ms. Pac-Man
• Q*bert
• Rampage
• Shinobi
• Sinistar
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Space Fury
• Star Wars
• Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
• Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix (cutesy versions of various beat-em-up characters fight each other)
• Super Spacefortress Macross (vertical shooter)
• Super Spacefortress Macross II (side-scrolling shooter)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Turtles in Time
• Tempest
• Tron
• X-Men (four-playing side-scrolling beat-em-up)
• X-Men: Children of the Atom (Street Fighter clone)
• Xybots (technologically amazing first-person game)
• Zaxxon

Yeah, I'm having fun with it. Play every day. Now I just need to get a marquee and side art. And coin slots (that wouldn't require coins). And install lighting for the marquee.

Inspired by Brennen's entry, here are my most frequently-entered commands:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf \

"%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' |sort -rn|head

216 ./die

97 vi

38 cd

34 ls

17 su

15 ./generate_homepage.py

14 ./upload.sh

11 b

9 apachectl

6 ftp

"die" rolls dice, which I've used a lot for role-playing. "b" opens my blog in vi. So, what does this say? I've rolled a lot of dice and edited a lot of files, I suppose.

In other news, the arcade game cabinet is done. Loaded with several dozen games, and sitting in a corner of my living room. Every day or two, I load up Galaga or Battle Zone and blow off a little steam.

Amazing little games. Beautiful designs.

No question, I'm enjoying my time off. I scheduled a few major projects today, but the weather was so gorgeous I finally decided to stop and enjoy it. And after a couple hours of sitting in the garden, a glass of iced tea in one hand and a book in the other, I got to work painting. So it all worked out.

Then held a Skypecast with a compatriot from Accidental Creative, and sat back and watched DVDs. I'm nearing the end of Overman King Gainer, an anime mecha series with fantastic character development. And I watched an entire classic "Doctor Who" miniseries, "The Genesis of the Daleks."

I've been a long time coming around to Doctor Who. I forced myself to watch bits and pieces on PBS during my teens, mainly because of the size of its fanbase. There was some good writing and acting, on occasion, but it was mostly pure cheese.

Then I got used to it. I realized that the cheese was okay. I could enjoy it, and/or look past it. I found that Doctor Who excels at adventurous SF. It's a bit like the Republic serials; sure, the sets are cardboard. That's not the point.

Last night, after watching a bunch of videos from TED, I had two revelations:

One: I need to cut my active creative projects down to two (one primary, one alternate).

Two: I need to play every day.

So I'm building an arcade game cabinet. In talking with a student today, I realized I haven't blogged about this at all. Whoops.

Arcade game cabinet? Yes, like in the arcades. Black, sloped, with a few rounded corners. I've already grabbed a spare computer from a closet, got a free big old monitor from a friend, and bought an X-Arcade controller pad.

The cabinet is made of three pieces of MDF, 4'x8'. I brought it all out to my parents' house. Dad and I cut two pieces—the sides—into 3'x6' sections, then cut a large 10"x10" notch three feet from the bottom. That's where the controller will rest. We cut a 2'x6' section for the front, then cut that into sections for a door at the bottom, and a hole at the top for the monitor. There's a 2'x2' platform about four and a half feet up, which the monitor rests on.

We screwed the pieces to a few 2x2-inch boards inside, to keep it stable, and added a few two-foot-wide sections on the back for stability. We put hinges and a handle on the door, and cut a three foot wide platform for the controller. In a fit of excitement, we also cut a piece for a marquee at the top (I think I'll order a custom one from MAME Marquees).

That's about it. Once the rain stops, I'll spray paint it black, bring it home, and plug everything in. And I'll have a complete custom arcade game cabinet loaded with several dozen games, from Asteroids to Galaga to Joust to Ms. Pac-Man to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to X-Men: Children of the Atom.

Paradox:

We need to get off our butts and realize our dreams. To take our ideas and goals, and make them real. Take the first class, write the first word, pick out the instrument.

We need to not be so hard on ourselves. We rush from work to a store to home, barely acknowledge our families, hang out with friends without really getting to know them, and generally yawn away our time. We live without really living. We need to slow down and appreciate life.

Which is it? It's both. We need to slow down and pursue our dreams.

Imagine a life where you're calm and focused, where you have time for everything and everything's good and useful.

Pick a goal and go for it. Just don't rush.

Oh boy, the world's in trouble. I am far more than it can handle.

Today was my last day at RC/STS. (Again.) (For now.) The head of engineering is still trying to define a job for me, which actually looks pretty solid; he wants me, and his boss wants me. They just need to figure out what I'd actually be doing to earn a paycheck.

But I am free. Which is not to say that my time at STS was lifeless servitude; I enjoyed it, and there are lots of great people. I'm surprised by my own reaction. I didn't expect to feel this free. I feel like I've been let out of prison.

And it's not because of STS. It's because I'm free of work. Of the 9-to-5 routine. I get to define my routine now. I get to create my life.

That is freedom.

OK, so I should probably explain to you all what's going on.

I'm leaving the CM group at Rockwell Collins STS. The engineering group is creating a new part-time position that they plan to offer me, which will be open in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I'll relax and recharge, and I'll pursue other part-time work.

Why? I'm thirty-one. I've learned a lot. I want to chart my own career course. I want to work from home on a variety of work, instead of living dependent on one source of income.

I want to wake up in the morning, take a deep breath, and know I'm in for an adventure today. To live by my wits. To hunt my pay.

And if that doesn't work out, I'll find a full-time job somewhere. I'm giving myself a few months to try this out, and see I can make of it.

It's worth a try.

So true, isn't it? We spend so much time posturing.

It's been a weird seven days since my last post. Lots of things going on that I don't want to talk about here, because...well, why not? I don't want the wrong people to find out. I can't think of a single "wrong person."

I'm thinking of leaving my current full-time job at Rockwell Collins STS. Planning to, actually, some time in April. Mainly because I'm bored to tears with my current responsibilities, and our division isn't winning new contracts, and several coworkers are increasingly hard to work with.

It's evolved into more than that. I want to make it on my own. I want to try freelancing, taking on part-time programming work and copyediting jobs and tutoring. I want to live by my wits and my ability to hunt work.

The idea excites me, far more than going in to work every morning and sitting in the same chair for eight hours. It enlivens me, literally.

All sorts of reasons not to, of course. And it's amazing how many people will counsel you against something like this. Like it's an affront to their own desperate need for a false sense of security. I keep reminding myself of all the reasons to take the leap. I want to feel that electric sensation of being alive, of seeing things with clarity, of not having to feel grey all day.

I watched a bit of Office Space today, and I started identifying with Peter. Something's wrong.

I'm working on a 2D short animation. By myself. Yes, I'm nuts.

I'm blogging about it at Animation From Scratch. Lots of detailed musings about animation there that don't really fit on this blog (at least, not to that level of detail). Two posts thus far, each pretty long.

In other news, I wouldn't mind a different job right now.

Busy, busy week at work. Barely had time to work on other projects.

I have decided that I'd better start measuring my various projects. Otherwise, they stay as ignored goals on the walls of my studio.

I'm leery of measurement; we live in an overly analytical world. But I think this sort of measurement is justified. A way of saying, "I'm here, and I want to be there, and if I see the gulf, I'll figure out how to cross it."

I'm four thousand words into a very rough draft of the next Giant Armors novel. I'm trying something different this time.

With my last novel, I wrote progressively longer summaries. I started with notes, then wrote a half-page summary, then a three-page summary, then a twelve-page summary, then the whole novel. I called this my shellac method, of adding flesh to skeletons.

With this one (randomly titled The Green Dawn), I started with notes, then wrote a three-page summary. Now, I'm writing a full-length draft that I plan to completely rewrite. I want to get this down, in detail, even though the details will all change as I identify themes and find apt descriptions. With this, I'm working out implications in real time. I can see a lot more at once, oddly, even though I'm working in the weeds.

This keeps my momentum going. I don't worry about getting every word right; if a phrase bothers me, I add a footnote and forge ahead. So I'm creating a fairly complete body as I go, even though it'll need extensive cosmetic surgery.

Well, I'm four thousand words in, and it's working thus far. I'm about a third of the way through, which means I need to create some subplots in the middle of the book if I want to keep this from being a novella. But I can do that, I think, as I find themes.

The most important thing, I find, is to just keep going. Get in a few hundred words a day. I set a soft goal (an ideal that I measure myself against while knowing I probably won't hit it, to see how close I'll get) of 1,000 words a day this week, and obviously didn't fulfill it. So I'll aim for 500 words a day this week.

Ah yes. I have a blog. Forgot about that for a while.

Just been busy with other things. Who has time for a blog when there's food to cook, novels to write, animations to draw, and books to read?

Books! A few book recommendations:

Temeraire volume 1, by Naomi Novik. Imagine Master and Commander, with the addition of fire-breathing dragons. Novik creates a believable world with fun characters.

By Right of Conquest, or With Cortez in Mexico. A novelization of Cortez's "conquest" of Mexico. I love this bit of history, and this book captures all the high drama in an action-filled story. This book has everything.

The Uncommon Reader, a novella in which the present Queen of England discovers a love of books, late in life. The book deftly explores her unique situation and regrets.

I thank my Amazon Kindle for the capacity for all the above books. I spent a lot on it, and I regret not a penny.

A few bits and pieces:

• Back from a trip to see Brennen in Colorado. A beautiful place, and a great guy to talk with for a weekend. I feel privileged to know him. And I'd love to see that generic document markup language.
• There's a great little article at Gamasutra about the Fun of Super Mario Galaxy (free registration may be required). It mentions the four types of fun: hard fun (beating a challenge), easy fun (exploration, manipulating the environment, etc.), social fun, and what I'll call sense-a-wunder fun (amazement and wonder at abilities, plot twists, etc.). Most games focus only on hard fun; great games include several of them. Super Mario Galaxy has all of them.
• Tried to watch The Godfather last night. An hour into it, I realized that I didn't care about any of the characters, and really didn't want to see any of them succeed or survive. So I popped out the disc.
• Also tried to watch The Triplets of Belleville. The character designs were unappealing and the movie lacked any narrative structure. After about twenty minutes, that came out of the DVD player, and I slipped in and re-enjoyed two episodes of The Critic. Amazing that I still laugh at episodes that I've seen half a dozen times.
• Classes have started again. I'm teaching two courses, and contemplating adding a third. They're only two hours long, Monday and Wednesday nights, for two and a half months, so they feel like side projects instead of part-time jobs at this point. Which is good.
• Hosted a wonderfully successful little dinner party with my parents and a few friends. The menu: Asian orange salad (spinach, mandarin oranges, crunchy Asian noodles, and sweet onion salad dressing), hearty vegetable soup, ciabatta, hearty multi-grain bread, and pumpkin pie. I plan to do a party every month or so, with a different group of four or five friends.
• I'm planning to make a short animated film from scratch. Crazy, I know, but I think it's the only way I can move forward in the animation realm. I have a plot and a high-level storyboard; I'm now drawing the full storyboard.

And that's all I can think of going on at the moment.

Can we please put Star Wars down with the rest of the sci-fi canon and stop referencing it constantly?

Star Wars remains a special part of my childhood. I respect it, and enjoy watching it.

But it seems like there's a new YouTube Star Wars parody every week. People still joke about it. The original trilogy is thirty years old now, and it's quoted more often than any ten-year-old movie.

Frankly, I'm tired of Darth Vader. I don't care about Luke Skywalker's moral dilemmas. R2-D2's kinda boring now.

Can we please move on?

More complete thoughts about the Amazon Kindle:

One's life changes when one has a device loaded with a handful of books. It can easily fit in a large coat pocket, so I take it with me everywhere. When I stopped by a nearby Chinese restaurant for some take-out, while I waited for my order, I read a few pages of a novel (instead of watching their VHS tape of Dragonball Z). When I paused at work for some rest and a cup of tea, I read a few pages of a novel. When I made lunch yesterday, as I waited to the fish to finish frying, I read a few pages of a novel. I continued reading as I ate; because the Kindle lays flat and I just have to touch a button to turn pages, it's not nearly as awkward as holding open and flipping the pages of a book.

I've now finished two novels and am well into my third, in just over a week. Moreover, there's tremendous power in finishing a novel by a good author, and being able to start reading the next novel in under a minute. It's not just impatience; it's avoiding the whole process of tracking down the author's books, finding the next title in the series, adding it to a list of books to buy, and waiting for the next time I'm in a book store.

Moreover, because of the solid-state screen, the Kindle is more robust than most devices, and stays charged for a good week.

When I first heard of the Kindle, some folks prophesied it would be the "iPod of books." I dismissed that notion, but I'm less dismissive now. Certainly, books are used differently than music; I can listen to music all day and want my entire music library at all times, but not so with books.

That said, I can see a time when a lot of folks just take a reader with them pretty much wherever they go. It's lighter than a paperback, it's darned convenient, and as Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling have proved, people will read.

Moreover, I sold 7 copies of my Kindle Fan Guide in two days. There is a market out there.

So I self-published the Kindle Fan Guide yesterday, and posted a note to the main Amazon.com Kindle forum about it. I've received eleven forum replies and two emails so far, with ideas and full-scale copyediting. I'm almost ready for a second edition, and it's not even twenty-four hours since I published the thing.

Just finished assembling and posting The Kindle Fan Guide, a compilation of tips and information on using the Amazon Kindle. After receiving one a week ago, I assembled this book in great excitement.

What amazes me is that I'm able to offer it in print form, as a PDF, and in ebook form. They were all generated in one evening.

About the Kindle? It's great. I've been reading like I'm possessed. I've devoured several sample chapters and a whole novel in less than a week.

Well, it's been a long week. My computer's hard disk died last Monday, so I've been unable to update this blog.

Not quite true. I could have updated it, but didn't feel like editing the files directly on the website. Wouldn't have updated the newsfeed anyway.

This was the last of several misfortunes: my heat pump died, and my truck had heartburn. I spent a week without heat. I believe I'll be back to normal tomorrow, with a slimmer bank balance and a calmer disposition.

Oddly, I remained content through this experience. Not depressed, at least. Oh, I ground my teeth a few times, but overall I shrugged and moved on. Fortunately, none of these problems were long-term; I didn't lose any friends or family. It was just...stuff, breaking down.

No outdoor adventure this week. Instead, an inner adventure.

I'm two days into The Five-Day Course in Thinking, a book Edward De Bono wrote forty years ago. Isaac Asimov wrote the Foreword. It's a malnourished paperback, barely a hundred pages long. The edge of the pages are that odd dusty Martian red that seemed so popular in paperbacks of the sixties and seventies. The cover proclaims "Astound Yourself! Be a Genius! Play Your Way To Greater Brain Power!"—and I don't know if it's serious.

I could read it through in an hour or two, but I've decided to resist that urge. I'm going to take my time and process it. Fully. Get my money's worth out of it, if you will.

The first day's exercise: Take three empty soda or beer bottles, and place them equally apart so that you can fit a regular dinner knife between each. Now, take four of those dinner knives, and arrange them on top of the bottles so that they form a platform that you can rest a glass full of water on. None of the knives can touch the surface on which the bottles rest.

As with most things, there's a twist to this. It's not about finding the answer (there is one). Observe how you try to solve the problem. What do you try first? What do you do?

I'm kind of surprised that there aren't more books/videos/websites/whatever about mental athletics. (Yes, I'm aware of Brain Age). Isn't this important?

Imagine a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game with...

• ...no elves or dwarves.
• ...an emphasis on player skill instead of level grinding.
• ...a vast, completely original world that the game encourages you to explore.
• ...the ability to hire shopkeepers, guards, and any other NPCs to automate things
• ...active GMs who regularly interact with players.
• ...quests tailored specifically to your player.
• ...consequences for compromising your honor. If you don't rescue the little girl, she'll die.
• ...an in-game magic system similar to programming. Spells are just like scripts, right?
• ...a cap of 400 players total.

I'd pay a lot of money to play that. Question is, of course, would you?

What's even more interesting is that none of these ideas are technically difficult, or even new. It's just that none of the MMORPGs bother to try them.

This week's adventure: a trip to Middleburg.

Adventures are never sure things. That's part of what makes them adventures. Each trip carries with it the danger of total failure. "Failure" means "nothing new," in this case.

I drove down to Middleburg, stopped just inside town, and walked around. I'd been there once before, for a book signing with Dick Francis. My parents are big fans of his; I've never read any of his books through. They're well-written; just not my cup of tea.

I remember the bookstore fondly. 'Twas an old-style bookstore. Small. Lots of wood. Vaguely musty smells. Hand-written signs. Hardwood floors that echoed every boot and heel.

It's gone now, sadly, and that robbed the town of much of its appeal for me. Otherwise it's similar to Leesburg, with a stronger flavor of Hunt Country. Lots of antique shops, high-end clothing stores, and a few hole-in-the-wall delis.

I did make one discovery, though. Walking along main street, I found what looked like a bank, but promised to be a "Traditional Butcher and Graziers."

I looked inside, and my jaw dropped. It's literally an English butcher and general store. Small and densely packed, but clean and not cramped. Everything was fresh and organic. It was apparently run by a farm, so much of the dairy and produce came from a farm a few miles away.

If Middleburg weren't so far, I'd drive down here every week and buy all my groceries here. What a pity.

This was Christmas: parents, the house I grew up in, a big tree, the dogs, and comfort.

Peace and perfection.

Yesterday I filled up my black truck Roger with gas, got out on the open road, and headed south. No destination in mind; I wanted to see what was there.

Ten minutes outside of town, I saw red-and-yellow streamers fluttering in the wind on the side of the road, near an antique shop. I pulled in at the long, low building, and stepped inside.

There's a mustiness peculiar to antique stores. There's always a whiff of antiseptic cleaner somewhere, but still everything feels half-buried in the dust of the centuries. Nothing caught my eye; the place was full of old coins, faded music scores, bent iron tools (half of which would've looked comfortable in a horror movie), and well-worn furniture.

So, back on the road. A few minutes later, I passed a beautiful old ruin of a brick building, pulled off the side of the road, and took a few pictures. It doesn't look burned out, but somebody abandonded this place long ago. What happened?

I returned to my truck and kept driving. I passed through the tiny town of Aldey, parked, and walked around the Old Mill, but little interested me there. There wasn't even a restaurant. I continued on.

Just as I neared the time when I needed to head back, a red, white, and blue flag proclaiming "OPEN" neared. Below it stood two signs, one naming the place a winery, the other inviting me in for hot mulled wine. Well, I thought, if they're going to be that polite about it, I'll accept.

I pulled in past acres of winter-bare vineyards, up to a house on a hill. According to a large sign, I was at Swedenburg Winery. As I stepped out of my truck, a collie mix barked "Hello" and wagged its tail. I smiled and made my way up to the house, accepting a few friendly sniffs as I went inside.

A beautiful foyer awaited me, and two lovely young women. For three George Washingtons I sampled twice that many varieties of wine, as well as the aforementioned mulled wine. The warmth spread to my bones. I ordered a bottle of it, and one of their ros&eacute; (marvellous, delicate flavor).

I returned home, content with my adventure, richer two bottles of wine and an hour's worth of memories.

My Wii sold for $340. I lost money, strictly, given the games that I sold with it; a new Wii is $250, each game cost $30-$50, and I had to pay $70 to ship it all next day. But it's a used system, and frankly it's one less thing on my mind. I'm happy.

I've delivered most of my Christmas cookies. If you haven't received any yet, I should be stopping by your house in the next few days.

Attended a Messiah Sing-Along concert with Mandy and Kirsten this week. Great fun. They brought their scores and sang along, and I marvelled at their amazing voices. I just stood there and listened and tried to follow along. They graciously offered a score, but I preferred to immerse myself in the river of music and swim as best I could. I think I got more out of it than if I'd been trying to read music the whole time.

I also arranged with Mandy to learn the acoustic guitar with her, and to see Enchanted this weekend. Fingers crossed on both counts.

My Nintendo Wii console is up for auction on eBay. I love my Wii, but I haven't played a game on it in months, despite owning several great games. I can do better things with the money it'll bring in.

It's funny about that. I just don't feel the urge to play video games. It's escapism, which is fine, but there are so many other ways in which I can escape (into a book, or into my raw imagination). I'd rather run around an alien planet in my mind than on a console. The challenges will always interest me more anyway.

Staying home from work today. I feel rather overwhelmed at the moment. I pushed myself to attend several social engagements in the past week. December is a busy time, and I haven't given myself enough time to recharge.

I bought myself a few toys, though: a replacement still camera, and an 80 GB iPod Classic. My only other iPod was a first-generation Shuffle, bought because it was cheap enough I was willing to experiment. I've listened to so many podcasts in the car now that I've proved its worth.

This full-scale iPod sports far more features than I need, though. Games? Don't I own an iPod so I can listen to music during idle moments?

Perhaps I'm cranky because I'm spending less time on the computer. Thanks to a wonderful conversation with Brennen, I re-evaluated my tendency to fill my spare time with computer usage. It's wonderful to spend so much of my time in the moment, cooking or drawing or gardening or what-have-you.

This also allowed me to finish Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares in a tiny fraction of the time I'd normally allowed. It's a fantastic book for any creative person. It discusses the importance of living in the moment, being self-aware, and observing what's going on around you. He recommends that, every night as you lay in bed, you try to remember as many details as possible about your day. When did you leave the house? How fast did you drive? What did the clerk say? What was the color of the car next to you? What clothes did your friend wear? When you greeted her, what did she seem to be feeling?

Since memory is a muscle, practice improves it, and gives you great oceans of material for creative projects. Think of how many inventors describe the genesis of their inventions by starting, "I just noticed that a lot of people were...." They fully saw the people around them.

May we all have such presence.

I've started baking my yearly Christmas cookies. I'll probably make my rounds of friends' houses this week, so if you come home late some evening to find a plate of cookies on your doorstep, that's why.

I came home full of purpose, ready to move forward on several projects as planned. I checked my email as I chowed down on a tuna sandwich, and noticed an email about the next writer's group meeting. I planned to present the outline for the first Giant Armors novel.

I glanced at the date. That meeting was for tonight. I had an hour to get there.

So I grabbed my materials and leapt into my truck. The fuel gauge hovered near the bottom of the scale, so I stopped for gas. I zipped down the highway. As I neared our meeting place, my eyes happened to rest on the engine temperature gauge.

It was near the red zone.

So I pulled over. This happened about two months ago, thanks to old hoses. So I popped the hood, fished a small flashlight from the bottom of the glove compartment, and checked the engine. Looked fine.

So. I drove another few miles. The temperature gauge would rise a bit, fall back to normal, rise a bit more, fall back to normal, and repeat until it neared the red zone.

So. I pulled over to the side of the road and called my parents. They found phone numbers for a few tow services; none of them were available. So. I made my way to writer's group, 20 minutes late, and nobody was there.

Called my parents again; Dad said he'd come to pick me up. I wandered Border's for a bit, then ordered some tea, sat down, and concentrated on brainstorming the ending of the Giant Armors series. Only got a few things down before Dad arrived.

So. I drove my truck to a nearby Shell station, where the friendly attendant took all the relevant information. Dad drove me back to my parents' house, where I visited for a while, then took one of their vehicles back home.

So here's the big question: Was my evening a complete waste?

I was tempted to think so a few times. In a sense, yes, In another sense, I reacted to an emergency. I didn't freak out. I evaluated options, sought advice, and resolved problems as best I could.

I decided—consciously—to stay upbeat. I didn't want to feel depressed, so I decided to act positively. Which may sound like I made myself happy. No; I was simply not depressed. I felt my frustration, acknowledged it, and let it pass.

Because, frankly, it's just one evening. Someday I'll look back on this and laugh at its pettiness. So I dealt with engine trouble for an evening. So what?

"Spirituality is not about solving your problems."

-- scribbled on a note card during church last Sunday

Warning: Musings about animation work follow.

I stumbled on a DVD at Toys 'R' Us last week: Disney Christmas collection. For US $10, it has Mickey's Christmas Carol, Pluto's Christmas Tree (the one with Chip and Dale), and Small One. I'd never heard of that last.

So I popped it in, and watched 'em. Small One had a long intro, and then the final two credits came up and I snapped to attention:

Produced by Ron Miller

Written and Directed by Don Bluth

Ron co-directed The Great Mouse Detective and The Little Mermaid, and of course Don Bluth is Don Bluth, so I immediately perked up.

It's an overtly Christian story, in which a boy in ancient Palestine tries to sell his favorite, sweet donkey, and nobody will buy it. He eventually seells it to Joseph and Mary, as Joseph's the only one who sees the use of a calm, sweet donkey.

It's a fine little concept, aimed at a half-hour TV slot. The early sequences of the boy and the donkey playing and working demonstrate their relationship beautifully. The character animation is flawless.

But this is directed by Don Bluth, so we have two full-length musical numbers in a half-hour film. The first occurs just after the boy's father breaks the news that the donkey, Small One, must be sold. The boy (who looks exactly like Mowgli) then sings a sweet, quiet song about how much he loves Small One, despite the four minutes of previous animation demonstrating how much he loves Small One. After half a minute, I fast-forwarded through the song.

The boy then goes to the city, where a guard (differently designed and animated; looked more like a Fleischer character) directs him to a nearby shop. The animation becomes creepy and foreboding in the way that late 70's/early 80's animation could be (think The Secret of NIMH or The Rescuers). Turns out this is the shop of a tanner. The sequence plays a bit longer than necessary, but it's effective.

The boy and donkey run into the street, where we hit our next musical number: the three wise men, as merchants, singing about how much they love to buy and sell things. They toss around coins, they dance, they squash and stretch in a classic Don Bluth way, and they have nothing to do with the story. The boy just watches this in shock and wonder, then moves on.

Perhaps Bluth was trying to convey the emptiness of commerce for commerce's sake. But he does this again in the next sequence, where the boy tries to get Small One into a market, only to discover it's a high-end Horse Market. The auctioneer and crowd mock Small One, looking only at his outward attributes and not his personality.

It works. It overstates its point a bit, but it's an important point.

Then the boy, in despair, wanders to a quiet area, where Joseph steps up to him and asks if this donkey's for sale. The boy sells Small One, we get a slightly tearful but upbeat farewell, and...

...we fade to a long shot of Mary and Joseph, with Mary riding Small One, then cut to a stable with a star shining down on it. The end. Oddly abrupt. We get nothing more about the boy.

It's a shame. If you cut out the musical numbers and tightened up the other sequences, Small One would be a great little film. As it stands, it wears out its welcome.

A shame. Especially considering how much more work it took to make this worse than a shorter version.

Perhaps this is a good example of Antoine De Saint-Exupery's dictum, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Observe: Charles. An atheist. A realist. If he doesn't understand it, he doesn't believe it. He'll give confusing, complicated concepts the benefit of the doubt—dark matter, quarks—but if something doesn't make sense to him, he rejects it.

If he hears about samurai sacrificing themselves for their lord, believing this will improve their karma in their next lives, he shakes his head and says, "How stupid."

If he hears of a young man attaining enlightenment while fasting and meditating under a tree in India, then quickly gaining thousands of followers, he snorts and calls it "A mystic preying on weak minds."

Charles, the world is much bigger and more complex than you can possibly comprehend. And you are poor for your so-called reality.

You are a prisoner in a dungeon, insisting that nothing exists outside of your cell.

May the rest of us avoid this trap.

(And, no, I'm not talking about Darwin.)

Maybe I've been consuming too many Japanese works lately, but I've been thinking about the importance of discipline.

I mean little daily disciplines. Exercise. Getting to bed on time. "Little" things.

They don't even really add up over time, the way that other habits can. Practice karate every day, and you'll build an amazing set of skills. Don't get to bed on time, and your life will drift out of alignment in subtle ways. You'll find yourself more irritable, more tense. But it's not obvious.

I wonder how important those little daily disciplines are. We all stay up late every so often, but what's too often?

I'm thinking perhaps I should be much more devoted to those disciplines than I am. Perhaps we all should be.

Saw Beowulf today, which was a disappointment and a joy. Joyous to see well-animated fantasy action that managed to stay fairly true to the original story. Disappointing because the story is modernized in ways that annoy me. All the problems in the film are caused by men giving in to their horniness, contrasted with the principle woman, a long-suffering virgin.

It certainly should have been "R" rated. Its status as an "animated film" exempted it, but that shouldn't matter. The material in this film is "R" rated.

This may be the movie that opens up the American market for more mature animated films.

I keep hearing about Twitter, so I decided to try it out. You send one-liners to the service, telling it what you're up to. You can see other people on there, and watch their updates, which I gather is the real power of the site — seeing exactly who's doing what, in quasi-realtime.

So I'm on Twitter now. Brennen's the only friend I can find on there; any of you using it?

So, anyone of you use del.icio.us? I've finally gotten around to setting up my own del.icio.us page, so if anyone's interested, link me or connect me or whatever it is you do on this site.

(I'm also on Facebook, if you're interested, as BrentNewhall.)

A late night, and I stumble upon a blog of hundred-year-old photos, all in startling detail. More candid than I'm used to seeing. These look like real people. People chuckle at private jokes; kids crack grins.

And they all worked sixteen hours a day.

An interesting point made on the "This Week in Tech" podcast: A billion people in India and China will be joining the internet for the first time in the next few years. And their first exposure to the internet will be on celphones, not desktops or laptops.

Imagine the money to be made by celphone manufacturers, content providers, and entertainers.

I wonder how hard Hindi is to learn....

Homemade Crackers

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Combine two cups of flour with six tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of honey, and five tablespoons of water in a large bowl. Mix until it forms a dry dough that neveretheless holds together (add water a tablespoon at a time if it's too dry).

Divide dough in half and put one half between two pieces of wax paper. Roll until the dough reaches both edges of the paper. Use a fork to punch little holes in the dough, and sprinkle on salt. Cut into strips, then cut crosswise into diagonals (a pizza cutter works great). Repeat with other half.

Bake for at least 15 minutes, until the crackers just begin to brown around the edges.

I thought they weren't worth the effort. Now that I've tasted these, I don't want to ever eat store-bought crackers.

I don't like posts like this, but: my main job is sucking up all my time and energy, and I'm spending the rest of it creatively. Which means I have little creative energy for this blog, I must admit.

So, in the past week I've plotted out the first novel in the Giant Armors series (the novel I titled Giant Armors, which I since retitled to Armor [or possibly Armors], is book zero), baked cookies, baked crackers, made orange candies, raked my backyard garden, topped up the oil in my truck, finished reading The World is Flat, and watched Samurai Fiction and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both quite good).

Writing is difficult, which is strange, because writing is easy.

Typing is easy. Putting words on a page or a screen is easy. It's keeping at it that's hard.

There are numerous potholes on the road to a complete story, and many psychological Jersey barriers. I write a few hundred words, then feel a strong urge to research, say, map making. Useful, but an obvious detour, so I stare at the page some more. Repeat until I'm Googling overstuffed armchairs.

Still, the point is what you do, not so much what you feel. For me, after ten long hours at work, I got home, cooked up some pasta, and wrote eight hundred words of fiction. Can't say I'm disappointed in myself.

A haze on the far horizon,

&nbsp; The infinite, tender sky,

The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,

&nbsp; And the wild geese sailing high;

And all over upland and lowland

&nbsp; The charm of the golden-rod, —

Some of us call it Autumn,

&nbsp; And others call it God.

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; — W.H. Carruth

Work and my Halloween party have kept me incredibly busy the past two weeks. Thus the lack of journal updates.

The party was a great success. Those of you who came: Thanks for coming, you made it a great success. Those of you who didn't: I hope you can come next year.

And now, I'm going to fall into bed.

It's been a busy week. My work responsibilities have increased, teaching keeps me busy twice a week, and I've been gearing up for my Halloween Party this Saturday.

Not a terrible situation. But tiring. I read about folks who work for fourteen hours a day, with great passion, and I wonder where their energy comes from.

Which makes me realize: I want their energy. I envy it. I want to be creating for sixteen hours a day, and I mourn my inability to do that.

And I wonder if it's a skill to be learned.

I sure hope so.

I'm watching a fascinating bit of internet ephemera: a sped-up video of a guy driving. This is not my first exposure to this type of web video; this one is genuinely interesting.

It's from Lileks, and I'm fascinated by the details. Sometimes he follows closely, other times at a distance. Sometimes he seems hurried, other times leisurely. Why? There are all sorts of little decisions and choices scattered throughout.

Plus, the soundtrack is one of Lileks' own techno remixes of a terrible song from classic Star Trek, which makes it worth watching in itself.

But I wonder: What is it about these little windows into others' lives that make them so interesting?

The second episode of Gundam 00 came out last night. My geekometer is off the chart; this is a giant robot anime series I'm downloading off the internet the day it airs because of how much I've loved previous shows in the franchise. It's equivalent to a Chinese Trekkie downloading episodes of Enterprise as they come out.

Why do I have such devotion to an entire franchise? Because so much of it is so good. It tells serious war stories. It has some amazing action sequences. It's created some of the greatest characters in anime. And, while the quality has varied over the decades, it's rarely disappointed for long.

So, I've been watching the buildup to Gundam 00, the latest series, with some interest. It has a top-notch crew (the director of Full Metal Alchemist, the writer of Trigun, and the composer for the Ghost in the Shell movies), and planned to springboard off a popular past Gundam concept: that the Gundams are rare, super-powerful war machines dropped into a gritty militaristic conflict.

I greatly enjoyed episode one, but first episodes are poor indicators of an entire show's quality. It was a solid, action-oriented, broad introduction to a large cast of characters. Episode two was a better test.

And it performed well. A narrator explained the general political situation, a welcome addition to typically politically-oriented Gundam. Several characters were developed a little, also welcome after that broad first episode.

And, you know, making any large-scale artistic work is hard. It's hard to balance characters, story, character design, setting, artistic style, music, sound, voice acting, backstory, mechanical design, and a hundred other elements in a way that keeps them all from stepping on each others' toes.

So, it's nice seeing something that works. And works well.

This afternoon I dug through the closet beneath the stairs, wiped a layer of dust off a large tin, and hauled it upstairs. I popped open the lid and pulled out my Halloween decorations.

Since I try to pack and live light, I only own a few items that I scatter around on Halloween. I have two china Jack O'Lanterns that hold votive candles. There's a great scultpure of a boy nervously holding a Jack O'Lantern on a stake while a cape billows around him. I bought a large black Halloween Tree this year, too. Plus there are the spider webs.

You can probably tell that I'm not hugely enthused by all this. I love Halloween, but I spent an hour or so skimming through Halloween websites looking for decoration ideas (particularly yard ideas).

There's a trend. I kept coming across phrases like "spooktacular" and "creepy fun" and "ghoulish delight."

Delight?

Folks are trying to make Halloween mundane and plastic. I get the feeling that they want Halloween to be handing out candy to toddlers in princess costumes holding plastic orange Jack O'Lantern buckets, and that's it. Maybe a cardboard skeleton on your door. Pardon, a "spooktacular" cardboard skeleton.

I see it in the Frankenestein's monster cut-outs that make him look goofy and cartoony. In the witches that look like church ladies wearing frumpy black dresses. In the removal of the weird in favor of the clich&eacute;--ever notice the ubiquity of the safe, abstract Jack O'Lantern? When did any merchant last mention that it held a piece of Hell?

Halloween's not plastic. It's not delightful. It's not even fun, in the way that it's often used.

Halloween is a celebration of the fantastic, of that which lies beyond, of the other. It's a tacit acknowledgment of things beyond our understanding. It is our Rational Age's last glimmer of awe at the boundless possibilities that exist outside humanity's little finite laws and models.

Nor should Halloween be a blood-soaked carnival of gore and entrails. That's missing it in a different direction.

Halloween is unsettling. It's spooky. It's a time to feel what it's like to fall from the top of the food chain.

And so, I put out my decorations, and I resolve to be unsettling this year.

:sigh: A day spent lounging around, feeling sick. I feel like I wasted the day, though I didn't; read a bit, coded a bit, watched a bit of anime.

I have a disconnect between my guilt at not being productive, and the amount of productivity I actually attain. It's never good enough.

And I got sick partway through my Creative Retreat. Still, I had fun. I read about half of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, and a few chapters of a Mechanical Design book (I'd like to understand mechanics more). I did a bit more work on the RTS game, mostly cleanup.

And I put up a big banner in my room that reminds me to accept discipline.

Overall, success.

Today begins another Creative Retreat, a weekend in which I sit back and read, meditate, plan, make, and mash-up.

Odd. My workday was chock full of training and meetings. Good training and meetings. I checked in to the PDM War Room every couple of hours to see if I could help, but they were blocked in other ways. So I always had something useful to get to.

And I came home, and I felt productive and energetic. I baked a pizza and planted some Tulip bulbs and went through five days of mail and filed some outstanding paperwork and watched some anime. And I still feel fine.

Perhaps I should learn from this, that work doesn't have to drain my energy.

Thanks to Brennen, I've decided to shut down my IM and Skype clients. They're both extra open loops. I don't need those to keep in touch with people, and they're distractions. Distractions from a huge, beautiful life that I could be living instead of typing "heh" in response to a link to a video of a dancing rabbit.

Enough. Enough. The computer is a drug, and I'm particularly susceptible.

It's an unavoidable drug, too. But I can buy less of it.

Roughed out a review of Gunparade March, based on my viewings through episode five. Tough show to watch, but very, very good.

Added a review of KamiChu!, which I finished yesterday. Nice little slice-of-life show.

Awesome! A big thunderstorm is sweeping through tonight. We haven't had a good storm in months. This one comes complete with huge flashes of lightning and foundation-shaking thunder. The rain's steady as a pair of Mormons canvasing a neighborhood.

I rolled down my window on the way back from a church group and just inhaled deeply of weather.

Finished Texhnolyze. What a mind trip. It's a perfect ending for this particular show, but it's tragic. Sad, in the sense of watching an insect get trapped in tar. You know it's not getting out of there.

It's odd. I never want to create a show like this. I don't like depressing stories, and I certainly don't like Texhnolyze. It is well-made, and thought-provoking. I appreciate it. I value it. It's a strong work of art.

There aren't that many of those in the world.

Been watching Texhnolyze. It's pure science fiction. It's dystopian storytelling. It's...true. Real.

I disagree with some of its philosophy, strongly, on a lot of levels. But that's surely part of the point, to watch and think and form opinions (reactionary or otherwise).

Nice to have something I can sink my teeth into.

Life is practice.

(Not that it is practice for something later. It's a matter of practicing things, over and over. You may never get it "right." Getting it "right" is a question for the historians, not us living and practicing.)

Just back from the first night of AWANA. Great fun. I feel centered now, like I have a much better feel for how I should act with these kids. I should focus on them, give them plenty of grace.

We all need grace.

Relationships are the wellspring of happiness.

Another long day at the office. But...

...because I'm so busy, I'm focused. I don't let time slide by. I refuse to waste a minute of my one, precious life.

I wonder if I could get used to this.

It's amazing to watch people create something out of nothing.

Case in point: the first five episodes of Space Battleship Yamato, which I watched recently. Made in 1974, when anime was still a bunch of crude cartoons for kids, this is a show with weight and melancholy. It's slow and deliberate. We spend whole episodes in almost real time. We see huge futuristic cities, empty due to the prolonged war with Gamilon.

This was in 1974. A tremendous accomplishment. All because they decided to do it.

Noticed someone on a personal productivity forum, who asks a lot of questions. This is normally good. However, this person appears to ask questions instead of doing things.

There's a difference between inquisitiveness and Analysis Paralysis. In the former, curiosity is combined with action. See: children. They open their mouths as they reach out their hands.

A good philosophy.

Just finished watching Brad Bird's short film, Family Dog (it's on YouTube). It was an episode of the old anthology TV series Amazing Stories, if you remember that.

Fascinating. It's a solid story, very funny in parts, and drawn in a very modern, minimalist style. What's most remarkable is that it isn't amazingly brilliant.

And that's comforting. Brad Bird didn't start brilliant then flame out. He's gotten better as he's aged.

A variety of thoughts:

• The most common subject in self-improvement is fear. It seems that most people don't improve themselves because they fear, oh, all sorts of things.
• I've been reading the Shortpacked! retrospective on Roomies/It's Walky/Shortpacked. I was struck by the juxtaposition of drama and humor. The artist has pointed out that he has a tendency to be too dramatic. To take a comedic situation/world/whatever and wring it for all the drama it's worth. And that that's not fair to the fans, who come for humor.
• Neat animation trick from anime: Show the beginning and middle of the action, but not the end. The viewer can mentally fill in the end.
• Which came first: the church or the New Testament?

Is this an effective way to blog, or do your eyes glaze over? Let me know.

I'm beginning to really appreciate daily rhythm. One's energy spikes and dips throughout the day. For those of us with daily responsibilities, we can observe that rhythm and plan for it.

For example, I get tired when I get home. My creative juices are low. So I watch some anime. Not much; just two or three episodes. And that's recharges me enough to let me complete more creative resonsibilities later in the evening.

Otherwise, I putter around all evening, unable to muster the energy to do much useful.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Work has been stressing me out.

Which is odd. I don't like the word "stress," as it has little meaning. It's like saying that work is "painful." Well, painful how? Stress is just pressure. What kind of pressure?

I've involved myself in a data migration project. It's complicated. It's outside my areas of expertise. But it's important, and it's getting me good contacts.

This Monday is their final, no-kidding deadline for much of their data migration. So I've received a lot of last-minute IMs, adding data, fixing problems, running scripts, etc. over the past few days.

The resulting stress/pressure/pain/whatever has exhausted me by the time I get home. So every evening, I've watched some anime, cleaned up a bit, and worked a little on a short story before going to bed. Then lay in bed for several hours.

Why? Why can't I let the work go? Why can't I drop it?

Perhaps I should meditate more.

After listening to Wil Wheaton's PAX keynote about computer games, I thought about art. In the past decade or so, two mediums have shifted in the public consciousness from cheap pulp entertainment into potentailly legitimate art form: comics and video games.

So, I wonder, what's the next medium to transition into Art? Some possibilities:

• Fanfiction
• Commercial packaging
• Advertising
• Selling
• Selling things on the street
• Sports
• Programming (the source code itself)
• Hardware/electronic design
• Exercise

Note that all of these media have afficianados. I'm wondering how many will become generally perceived as artistic media.

It's really incredibly important to my creative juices that I have all my projects in list form. I accomplish a lot when I can refer to them at any time.

Accomplished less than I'd hoped, but plenty today.

Lack of progress is due primarily to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I "took a break" to read, then paused when my stomach told me I was very late for dinner, four hundred pages later.

In reading it, I've identified four primary dimensions of fiction writing:

1. World building
2. Character building
3. Density of prose — ability to describe scenery or events evocatively
4. Storytelling — how well the story pulls you along, compelling you to read more

Frank Herbert was a master at dimension 1, Terry Prachett's amazing at dimension 2, Ray Bradbury's a perfect example of dimension 3, while J.K. Rowling's real strength is in dimension 4. Some of the descriptions are bland, her world can feel generic, and I'm occasionally confused by characters' behaviors. But I just can't put down her books.

Why? A few thoughts come to mind:

• Her stories are sufficiently complex that every chapter brings at least one new twist to the danger that confronts the characters.
• Her characters are sufficiently sympathetic. I care for them.
• Her prose style is clean and clear, so that my mind doesn't get bogged down parsing an intricate description.
• The plots are action-oriented. Plenty of stuff happens.
• Each book has a few central mysteries, which I want to see the protagonists solve.

There are undoubtedly others.

A bit of a wash this morning, but I refuse to let it keep me down. I awoke late and lazed around in bed all morning, then drove straight to my parents' house to go to lunch and traverse a nearby garden with them. Had a grand time.

Then, home for an hour so I could review my projects and generally clean up, after which I drove to Mandy for a game night with her and a few friends. Had a wonderful time there, as expected. Spent much of the night just chatting on her back porch, beneath the stars.

She lives a bit of a distance from the city lights, and I was delighted to look up and see the Milky Way. Just...right there.

And I remembered that the first line of Giant Armors (my young adult novel) begins with a reference to the Milky Way. Perhaps that's a sign that I should work to get it published.

(Which, at this point, requires half an hour reviewing my cover letter, and emailing an agent. I just always manage to find other things to do.)

I realized several years ago that, despite living near Washington, D.C. all my life, I hadn't been to the museums in over a decade. It's a common malady: you don't experience the things that are close, because they're close. They're mundane. You keep telling yourself, "Oh, I can do that any time."

So, every year I go in to D.C. and wander the museums, and today was my day for it. And it was glorious. Perfect temperatures, non-painful crowds, and the confidence that comes from several repeated attempts at something. I'm used to D.C. now.

Nothing really new, though. New pictures will be appearing on the site's sidebar, of course, but other than that, I just wandered the museums.

Which is good. I'm painlessly (joyfully!) maintaining my familiarity with my environment.

I won't bore you with a litany of today's accomplishments. In brief: I took today off work, and determined to make the day count. And I did.

Most exciting development: I attached a MIDI-to-USB cable between my piano keyboard and computer, fired up GarageBand, and was able to play directly into my computer. In twenty minutes I was able to write a simple forty-second piano melody. It's nothing impressive, but this is what you can do in twenty minutes:

Song Experiment, 31 Aug 07

Tomorrow I drive in to D.C. and explore the museums. Can't wait.

From The Accidental Creative:

That made me stop and think. So true. When we try something new, we need to reserve lots of space for relaxation and reflection, and be very forgiving of ourselves. We tend to compare our attempts against finished works of brilliance, and forget the years of worried, uncertain experimentation that built them.

Thanks to my parents, I caught ImaginAsian TV's Tuesday anime block tonight. Very interesting. Briefly:

• The Law of Ueki — Very standard shonen series. Not always a bad thing.
• Paradise Kiss — Neat little fashion-oriented show hampered by severely limited animation budget.
• Ayakashi: Classic Japanese Horror — Well-done and refreshingly mature, but as is common with classic Japanese stories, rather murky and weird.
• Kyo Kara Maoh — A pretty boy surrounded by pretty boys. Quality, but I predicted almost every event in the episode.
• KamiChu! — The warm surprise. I still love this show for its quiet, unhurried pace and realistic characters.

A fun night, despite the late hour getting back home.

I spent the weekend relaxing, pretty much. And if you believe in yin/yang retribution for goofing off, then I paid for it.

Saturday, I puttered around the house, then enjoyed the company of my friends at Guy's Night Out, where we watched Logan's Run (a film I still love) and Sahara (which is a perfect guy's movie). Great fun. Collapsed into bed at 1:00 A.M.

Then, Sunday, I slept in, went to church, had my parents over, then pulled my hair out as I tried to get some stuff for work, um, working. Pardon the horrible grammar.

Bedtime? 2:00 A.M. And I had to post the results of my labors at work Monday morning, so I simply had to get to work on time. I managed to drag myself into work at 9:00 A.M. and post the files, to discover that the day-long conference call I was supposed to be on started at 8:00 A.M. Oops. So I pressed a phone receiver to my ear for the next eight hours.

But...you know what? I discharged my duties with honor. I was able to drive home at 5:00, grab some plants and groceries on the way, dig in the plants, pan-fry a tilapia filet, do two loads of laundry, watch more Gun Frontier, wash the dishes, and write three pages of script for my current comic project, Grave Thoughts.

And, soon, I'll go to bed. Tired but content. And it will have been a good day.

Some days, you just come home and watch two episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 back-to-back, and then go to bed.

Not that your day was bad. Not that you're depressed or frustrated. Your brain just wants to be switched off and amused for an evening.

And that's fine.

(They were "Teenagers from Outer Space" and "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies," in case you're wondering.)

I just finished watching Gravion Zwei, a modern twelve-episode giant robot series.

It's ridiculous. It's over-the-top. It's full of maids, giant robot combination sequences, fanservice, teenagers screaming their attack moves, and bickering teens who really love each other.

It is a perfect example of its genre. It is clearly pushing every genre convention to its limit. It's entertaining. It's trying so hard to be entertaining. It's great, great fun.

And it's gratifying to experience a creative work that knows what it's trying to do, and does it completely and fully through to the final frame. Even if it's "just" a cheesy giant robot show.

If you were to parody Web 2.0, you could hardly do better than eSwarm.

(If you're not familiar with the term, "Web 2.0" was coined recently to describe the next generation of websites, characterized by community-driven content that uses the web as a platform instead of a destination in itself.)

I have nothing against Web 2.0 itself; it's a useful descriptor for a real trend. But it's been rapidly appropriated by all sorts of sites, and stretched so thin it often doesn't even resemble its original shape. Or it's just horribly misused.

So, I submit, with eSwarm. It appears to offer itself as a central point at which consumers can ask suppliers for stuff. Consumers go on the website and create "swarms," which are basically requests for particular goods at a particular price. Sellers and/or suppliers will then connect with the swarm and offer the goods at a particular price.

Which means that suppliers have to be persuaded to register with this site so they can to supply a handful of anonymous internet customers. And it's all centralized on the eSwarm website. And eSwarm deducts a transaction fee.

Hey, maybe it'll be the next eBay. But doesn't this look like an idea in search of an audience?

Sure enough, my block of YouTube helped me to be more "productive" today, in the sense that my leisure was directed towards things that I really care about.

I watched a lot of anime today, chugging through my to-watch pile nicely. I got through about a third of Gun Frontier, a fun show in which the Captain Harlock characters are wandering the Wild West. No SF, and no fantasy; just blood, dirt, and steel.

It's a mediocre series, though I don't mean that as a criticism. It's entertaining, without ever becoming excellent. It's rarely boring; every episode has at least one neat little showdown.

Part of the problem is that it's a western. Gunfights don't last long, so episodes are mostly about a Mysterious Woman or a Suspicious Sheriff, and lots of stand-offs and dialogue. It's difficult to do that in an outstanding manner.

Ah well. No complaints here; I'm enjoying myself.

Aaand I come down with a cold. Just in time to affect work. Great.

So I spent the day watching clips on YouTube. Wish I didn't; this evening, I changed my hosts file to block YouTube. I enjoyed myself, but I could've just as easily spent my time watching anime, which rewards watching.

I did catch a few episodes of Loonatics, the "Looney Tunes meet Batman Beyond" series currently airing. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when it was announced, and the end result is actually quite entertaining.

It's not Looney Tunes, and it's clearly not meant to be. It's a fun, light superhero show told with The Tick-like takes on Looney Tunes characters. I laughed out loud at times, and was generally entertained throughout.

Not the desecration that many feared it would be.

A perfect day. Just when the cheeks start to feel a little warm, a light breeze sweeps through, and the deep green leaves flicker.

I spent most of the day wandering around town, deeply exploring all the little shops and cafes that I usually walk by. I found lots of neat places. Finally tried out the Chinese restaurant, and discovered a fantastic tea shop.

I feel like I don't deserve a day this perfect.

I sat down tonight to assemble chapter one of Grave Thoughts, and got myself thoroughly confused and frustrated. I didn't keep track of which drawings correspond to which line of dialog, and I think I'm either way ahead or way behind. I'll probably have to work my way backwards from the end.

All because I scribbled down notes as I went, and apparently threw away my notes. Arg. I feel like I should just keep everything. On the other hand, I have so much stuff now, I feel like I should give away everything.

Which is a petty complaint, really. I have a cool little creative project here; I'm just having a tough time with it right now.

So maybe I can just sit down and finish assembling it over the weekend. Can't do it tomorrow, as I insist on having one day a week when I really relax. But maybe on Sunday.

Maybe.

Still busy. Still watching anime (more Beck and an episode of Noein). Made a cake tonight, and assembled more of Grave Thoughts chapter 1. And that's time-consuming (the comic), but it's a new skill for me. Unlike anything I've done before. So, probably useful in the future.

Or not. In some ways, I think it's more important that I'm doing something to grow. To improve myself. Isn't that what humans do?

Busy week. On a whim, I picked up the latest issue of Fine Gardening, and got inspired by an article on front entrances. So, I've been working on my front yard, adding plants and generally improving it.

The article advises that you treat your front walk almost like a series of hypnotic suggestions. You step off the sidewalk, along this stretch, around the bend, past the statues, through the gate, and up to the front door. Or whatever. It's a relaxing rhythm that can help you to feel like you're home before you even enter the front door.

So, I've been buying plants. In odd numbers, and in relatively large numbers (three to five at a time). Gardens just look nicer when there are large swaths of color, instead of just one or two plants poking out of the ground here and there.

And I've been watching anime, two episodes per night. Beck recently. A great show about a Japanese teenager getting into his local rock'n'roll scene. It's a remarkably non-childish look at what it's like to get into something new.

There's a wonderful scene in episode four, just after the main character's hit a really rough point. In the first episode, his favorite musician is a typical Japanese pop star, a girl with nice, happy music. When he gets depressed in episode four, we cut to him sitting in his room, slumped over, headphones on, listening to this pop star's music. It's light. It's happy. And it's doing nothing for him.

He's outgrown it.

Painful, in some ways. But human, and ultimately a wonderful thing. He's moving on. May we all move on.

The Old Testament is about behavior.

The New Testament is about attitude.

Today is best described as relaxation to busy-ness. Gah, horribly phrased. Anyway.

After yesterday's relaxation, I spent this morning and early afternoon at my parents' house, then bought some plants on the way home, got home, and pushed myself to really get some stuff accomplished.

Completed: two loads of laundry, a loaf of bread, a batch of cookies, planting flowers, preparing party invitations, rewriting a script for work, and watching a disc of anime. In five hours.

So now I want my bed. Which is a very good thing.

Though before I slip between the sheets, I want to write a bit about that disc of anime. It was disc two of Gad Guard, a series that almost nobody Stateside has seen. Came out a few years ago, and just caught no audience. I bought it mainly because I bought so much anime back then, and there was comparatively little to buy.

It's a joy. It's a mecha series, yes, but it's retro and fun and well-written. The characters are worried about their actions. They question their own morality. They each have different motivations. And there's a lovely action sequence in every episode. And it means something; it's a battle of perspectives and beliefs, not just fists and metal.

So wonderful to rediscover a gem.

A relaxing day today. I decided to take a real Sabbath today, so I spent the morning snapping pictures of flowers at a nearby plantation, then drove out to see a friend who's just returned from a trip to the Ukraine. Then back home to make dinner, read, and call Saalon to talk about plans for a giant robot TV series.

The weather was perfect. Mid-seventies, clear blue skies, no insects. Sadly, the plantation was completely empty; nobody else wanted to enjoy a beautiful day in a beautiful garden, it seems.

I can't imagine why not. Even when I was poring over garden books, I was doing so at a table in the garden. It was too nice of a day to spend all of it indoors.

Ah well.

There's a great, short blog post over at My Two Dollars entitled There Will Be No Flashing Green Light, OK? It excellently explains something I've found to be true: we all have big plans, but often we put them on hold because now's not the right time. But for many things there is no right time.

Which is no reason to overload yourself. But why not make a list of ten cool things you've always wanted to do, and do the first thing you need to in each one?

A respite from Thor's Hammer of Heat: a storm blew in and dropped the temperature by twenty degrees or so around lunchtime. It's positively beautiful outside, except for the gray skies and occasional portly drops of rain.

A good day at work, spent mostly listening to and commenting on discussions about processes moving forward. It's still far removed from actual profit-generating work, but it was easy and interesting and should make some peoples' work less painful down the road.

Then home, and another episode of Pani Poni Dash (a fantastic little spastic anime comedy), and one of Brain Powerd (an incomprehensible epic mecha series). Then a call to Saalon, and I waxed my living room. Which was not the terrible chore it might seem like. I can zone out while waxing. Um, so to speak. Anyway, I want to get my downstairs floor shiny, and there's nothing like three coats of wax to do it. So, I can wax half of it one night, half of it the next, etc. for six days, and it's done.

Which is a good thing.

Four hours of sleep last night means no long post today.

A good day. Got my truck back from a local auto place, getting its air conditioner repaired. With the hundred-degree heat we've had, I really wanted that fixed. 'Twas more expensive than I would have liked, but eh, I can afford it.

Now, I'll flip through the latest issue of Bon Appetit, read a chapter of Shogun, and fall gratefully to sleep.

A good, full day at work, followed by a good dinner with my parents, good conversation with them afterwards (marred only by a random phone call from someone in Maryland, whose number I didn't recognize so I didn't pick up), followed by a wonderfully cheesy movie (The Sword and the Sorcerer) and a bit of anime (Brain Powerd).

I finally trudged upstairs, happily tired, checked my phone, and found a message from the Maryland number. It was a member of my writer's group, wondering where I am. We were supposed to meet tonight, to review one of my stories.

I completely forgot.

:sigh:

Today begins a week of on-site training at work. I'm sequestered with a dozen co-workers in a classroom all week. We're running through a bunch of test scenarios with our new SAP system. My co-workers are all good people, but the experience itself is a frustrating interruption to my other work.

I'm still a little surprised at the corporate fiats that demand software integration like that. We have to use SAP now. I've personally witnessed the hundreds of hours that it's taking out of several important people just at my location. It's probably costing thousands of man-hours of work. Work that would otherwise be making us more profitable. Instead, we're switching our financial systems to different software.

Ah well. I got home and got domestic. After eating a plate of spaghetti, I made some root beer candies, did a load of laundry, and waxed some of my wood floor. This is all undoubtedly because Mandy and my parents came over after church yetserday for lunch (well, Mandy went with me to St. James Episcopal in the morning).

I rarely clean (except important locations like the kitchen). However, I've realized recently that this is because I rarely have anyone in the house. It's just me, and I can live with a little dust. But now that I have folks over occasioanlly, I want the place to look nice.

This, in turn, is undoubtedly because of my incessant pride. I desperately want everyone to feel impressed by me. Which has some useful outlets—like cleaning—but it colors so many of my decisions that I get worried.

Ah well. Perhaps sleep, the great street-sweeper of the mind, will hand me a wondrous revelation. Or I'll dream about a man being constantly electrocuted, as I did last night.

Sometimes, I want so much to figure out my motivations. Other times, I think maybe I'd be better off not diving further into the murky depths of my psyche.

Was in Giant yesterday buying a few random odds and ends, and swept by the seasonal aisle. And stopped. Shocked. They have Halloween stuff in there.

On August 4th.

Well...oh well. So I stocked up on a few things, since they had some "Fun size" candy for $1 per pack. And full-size candy bars at slightly lower than average prices, so I bought a bunch of those. Oh, yes, I give out full-size candy bars at Halloween. I'm one of those guys, the one who puts up Halloween decorations October 1 and is thinking about putting a fog machine out front.

Still, it reminded me of the Halloween party that I plan this year, which should be fun (if last year is any indication).

Saturday. My Media Fast is finished, so I spent much of the day catching up on anime: Mushi-shi, Pani Poni Dash, Infinite Ryvius, and Gundam Seed Destiny.

They were all excellent, in different ways. Mushi-shi is a set of Twilight Zone-style dramatic episodes, but with positive endings. Pani Poni Dash is a spastic, fast-paced comedy that manages to retain its speed and entertainment value throughout. Infinite Ryvius was tough to watch, because it was so dramatic that I didn't want to see bad things happen to the characters, but to my relief I was completely satisfied by the ending. And Gundam Seed Destiny I'm rewatching so I can loan it to friends. And it's just so good (except when it's not, which is rare).

Then, after making a batch of cookies, I was off to meet a friend and watch Harry Potter. But the theater changed their showtimes, so we saw The Simpsons Movie instead, and it was utterly entertaining throughout. A solid flick. I was gratified to see that the theater was completely full. The film deserves it.

Another hot day. It's been in the upper 90's all week, and it's slated to stay that way. Which is summer. Feels silly to complain about normal seasonal weather.

This is the last day of my Media Fast, and I'm glad of it. I actually broke the Fast today; watched a bit of anime over lunch, and bought and read some manga this evening. Tasted sweet.

I definitely do want to minimize the amount of media I consume in the future, though. Leave plenty of room for creativity and relaxation.

Creativity like Grave Thoughts, a comic I'm writing and drawing. Finished inking the first chapter (ten panels) tonight, and trying to figure out what to do with it. Should I start posting it now, without knowing when I'll finish the rest, or wait until I've done another chapter or two? Would posting it and getting feedback encourage me to finish it?

The main thing keeping me from finishing it is the fact that I wrote myself into a corner. I conceived it as a series of monologues given by the same person at a gravesite. But I quickly realized that monologues in comic form are boring. I need to rewrite the later chapters to include more characters, even if they're silent. But that means quite a bit more work.

Ah well, such things happen in creative projects. Better that than pumping out boring art.

I've discovered a downside to this week's media fast: as a single guy who lives alone, it's lonely. I come home from work, and I'm tired, and all I have are my projects. Oh, I could go for a walk. But even that's lonely.

Not that I'm complaining; just commenting. I was a little depressed this morning, but that passed when I got to work. And I had a good day at work; purposeful and interesting but not stressful.

In fact, there was so little stress that I went out for lunch, toting my laptop with me, and watched two episodes of anime. (Okay, okay, yeah, it's a break from my Media Fast. There are no MF Police.) Watched Lucky Star episode 16, and the second episode of Goodbye, Professor Zetsubou.

Lucky Star continues to get better. The first seven or so episodes were merely enjoyable; after that it just kept getting funnier with each episode. As funny as the Comiket episode was, this was fantastic.

And I'm even more impressed with Goodbye, Professor Zetsubou as of its second episode. The first established a terminally depressed, suicidal teacher and his perpetually chipper female student. It was a highly stylish comedy which seemed to establish its duo. But the second episode introduced half a dozen other students, created a very complicated set of relationships, and didn't resolve any of it. Apparently this won't just be individual episodes of zany hijinks. Nice, for a change.

Anyvay. After a long, slow afternoon, I stopped by my parents' house for the evening. After a brisk swim and a light dinner, we spent the evening bouncing between the foreign-language channels on the TV, mocking an impenetrable Dutch (?) film (almost as bad as Jay Sherman's student film) and trying to translate the Cantonese and Japanese news programs and dramas. Great fun.

So now, I'm laying on my bed at 11:30 P.M., typing this blog entry. On balance, I like this day.

I started drawing my next comic today. Knowing how this goes, I spent the day waiting for the dramatic event that would keep me from moving forward creatively. There's always something to dissuade one from a creative project.

I shouldn't have been surprised. There was no dramatic event, but I have had trouble drawing. Because of me. I draw for a few minutes, then find myself wandering off. Laying on my bed. Researching poses, which takes me down a rabbit trail for fifteen minutes.

I've found only one solution: I gently pull myself back to the work.

Hot today. Full-scale summer hot. Not brutally oppressive, not yet; that's for August. But when there's a good twenty degree difference between outside and outside, you don't stay out much.

Which is a shame. If I were still a kid, I'd love this weather. You can work up a good sweat when it's hot. Run around, chase a ball, play in a creek, and just let yourself get soaked with sweat. You don't care so much about comfort when you're eight.

It was a good day at work. Found out that there were some problems with the data resulting from my scripts, but that it's all due to problems in the original data, not my script. So I've washed my hands of that.

I also feel good because I have a new short story in second draft form, and I dusted off an old one and tweaked it, and I think it's worth sending out there. I'll probably give them both to the writer's group soon.

So, a productive day. Now I'm torn between diving into Grave Thoughts, my next comic, or wandering the neighborhood with my camera and an open eye. It's a good choice to have.

A grey, drizzly, London-by-Foglight morning. I felt subdued as I drove in to work, my radio silent in deference to this week's Media Fast.

Ah! The Media Fast. This is my second in as many years. I spend a week avoiding all broadcast media: TV, DVDs, movies, newspapers, magazines, books, the world wide web, and podcasts.

By the end of the week, I want to continue it forever. I feel so free and focused when I haven't been subjected to input. And then the first book afterwards: Wow. It's an intense experience.

A quiet day of heat and rain. It began with a jog in the dense mugginess of a D.C. area summer. A few clouds provided scant, thin cover for the sun. But they muscled in and eventually obliterated it. By mid-afternoon, I was back from church and my parents had come over with the dogs, and thunder grumbled in the distance like a worried dog.

Then, rain! Sheets and torrents. Bits of hail, too. It was a brief tantrum, though, followed by several hours of steady rain. My parents ducked through the downpour around dinner time, I ate some melon and bread, and made some strawberry candies in between loads of laundry.

And now, to bed. But not before my hard candy recipe:

Put two cups sugar, 3/4 cup water, and 2/3 cup light corn syrup in a small pan. Put the pan on the stovetop, and turn the burner to half power (3 out of 6, 5 out of 10, or whatever). Put in a candy or probe thermometer.

When the thermometer reads 260 degrees, add drops of food coloring until it reaches the desired color. Don't stir; it'll be bubbling just fine by itself. Meanwhile, put parchment paper in a rimmed baking sheet and spray with cooking spray (the parchment paper isn't strictly necessary, but makes it much easier than without it).

When the thermometer reads 280 degrees, add 1 tsp flavoring. You can use an extracts or a flavored oil. Lemon extract is a good start. Again, don't stir.

When the thermometer reads 300 degrees, remove from heat and pour into the prepared baking sheet. If you can, put the sheet on a wire rack. Immediately rinse the thermometer and pan in scalding hot water. The candy should melt out in a few minutes.

Touch the candy occasionally. When pressing it no longer leaves an indentation (unless you shove really hard), put the candy on a cutting board and cut into squares. It should still be somewhat soft. Don't wait until it fully hardens, because then you'll have to just shatter the entire thing (as I had to with my strawberry candies tonight).

Wrap each square in rectangles of wax paper. You should be able to put it in the center, wrap the paper around, then twist each end twice to seal it off nicely. Parchment paper can substitute, but it's thicker and harder to fold and twist.

By the way, anyone have any ideas on what I could use to make the candies white (not clear)?

This morning, a trip to the farmer's market. In My Neighbor Totoro, Satsuki compares her neighbor's vegetable garden to "a mountain of treasure." It's a childish, overwrought sentiment, but when confronted with thousands of vegetables in a rainbow of deep, rich color, I have to agree.

So, I came home with several plastic bags of apples, tomatoes, and a watermelon. And that surprises me—all the vendors at this market use plastic bags. Why not paper? Especially since most folks are buying small quantities.

Anyway. Back home, I felt culinarily inspired (no doubt due to rewatching Ratatouille). So I made a pizza, prepared and refrigerated some cookie dough, dumped some beans in the crock pot for baked beans, and set up my bread machine to make ciabatta for Guy's Night Out tonight. And washed a lot of dishes.

Then, Guy's Night Out. I was tight-lipped about the films I'd picked for tonight, which fueled some fun curiosity. I didn't tell them anything until I played the first disc, at which I announced, "One important thing to do: Turn off your brain."

Then we watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. If you've never seen it, I'm sorry; I can't describe it. I literally can't do it justice. It's weird, and fun, and truly adventurous, and wildly imaginative. Perfect for GNO.

Then upstairs for ice cream and apple pie, and back downstairs for the final film of the night: The Legend of Drunken Master. Arguably Jackie Chan's best film. Certainly some of his best fight scenes. Everyone seemed to love both films (there were a lot of "Ooof"s and "Woah"s).

And now, home, after driving beneath an arcing light show of royal gold and purple lightning, the clouds a neutral curtain backdrop to Thor's bunraku.

I've been getting mediocre, bland, cheap-American-beer sleep all week. I've been getting up late as a result, which means no time to exercise in the morning. So I'll get in a brisk walk here and there, but nothing really solid. Which may explain my mediocre sleep.

Plus, it's been hot. Well, duh; it's late July. But today's been hot and muggy in a way that D.C. natives love to complain about. Nothing's quite like standing outside the Smithsonian in damp heat, the sun radiating off the marble and concrete, knee-deep in excited schoolkids. Ugh.

I left work early today to attend a Toastmasters meeting. This is my second time at a Toastmasters event; the first was at a small club that couldn't really find members; this is a larger club (about six regular members) that's been going for months. Good people, interesting topics, and some really great speeches. I'm looking forward to it.

Why am I going to Toastmasters? As I told them:

1. Tom Peters told me to.
2. As I read about great people, I keep reading their recommendations to join Toastmasters.
3. Since I'm teaching, I want to be really good at speaking in public.

So, that was fun. Then, for my weekly "recharging the creative batteries" time, I saw Ratatouille again. I enjoyed it at least as much as the first time I saw it. Great animation.

And now, tonight, I contemplate how much I've enjoyed keeping my celphone off all day. I really do want to pull myself further off the grid. So, proposed: I will only check blogs and comics once a week. I will only check email once a day, in the early morning. My celphone will remain off except in the evenings, or when I expect a call.

Let's see how it goes.

Today, I began work in earnest on my new project at RC/STS: RCVA. It's a desktop, instruments-only flight simulator aimed at small training facilities. We build an application that contains all the panels you'd find on a given aircraft (throttle, airspeed, etc.), and sell it off.

The application development process involves copying a lot of files, running various scripts to build everything together, and lots and lots of fiddling with the instruments to make sure everything works. This is what worries me. I don't know aircraft. I haven't spent a lot of time in trainers. My mentor on this project—a great guy named Jonas—assures me that that won't be a problem; I can ask him for help, and I'll learn as I go. Still. I don't like this kind of uncertainty.

So, I spent the day installing and running the tools. Which didn't work; turns out I need access to a remote folder, which I don't have access to. So it may be a few days before I can actually build anything. :sigh:

I took a breather around noon and spent an hour with a fellow anime lover, assembling Gundam model kits. If you've never had the pleasure, imagine a Lego set that builds a detailed, poseable giant robot. Great fun, and completely absorbing.

Back home. Tired. Lazed around for a bit, then read a bit more of Michael York's great little book Are My Blinkers Showing, then took care of a few nagging projects: mending a shirt, re-reading notes for a series of Bible messages I'll be teaching in AWANA this year, putting up a recycle bin; that sort of thing.

Oh. Recycling. That may surprise a few people. I haven't recycled up to now; recycling an aluminum can requires more energy that manufacturing one, so I've heard. But it's not just about energy; it's also about physical resources. I believe Earth has plenty of resources left, but...eh, I'd like to help out a bit.

Plus, I've established a goal: one bag of trash a month. The caveat is that I'll recycle.

Which gets to the real reason I'm recycling: a flyer came in the mail a few days ago, explaining that we can dump everything into one recycle bin and leave it out every Wednesday. No sorting. That's easy enough to get me to do it. I just need two trash cans. So I set up the recycling one, and I'm good to go.

But will I keep it up?

And I'm back. And I'm exhausted. I had a great weekend with Saalon and Nick at Otakon; the con is always much more fun with friends.

We had a pretty standard experience. Watched some anime, bought some fun stuff at the dealer's room (little figurines, Gundam model kits, bags, etc.), and went to a few panels. Watched a bunch of drunk folks outside the hotel scream, "I'm at Otakon!" at 2:00 A.M.

A fun weekend, all around. But I'm very glad to be home.

Leaving today for Otakon. Probably won't blog again until at least Sunday. Do something really cool this weekend, okay?

Just finished watching The Last Unicorn for the first time.

I know several people who love this film. They all saw it first when they were kids. And I think that explains their love. I just don't think it's a great film.

Why? Well, I'm no big fan of America's music; it's okay, but it's just okay. The voice work is superb. The colors are perfect. But the animation..., well, there are several aspects to animation, and it always annoys me when people criticize "the animation" of a piece. So, let's break that down.

1. First, there's the aesthetic beauty of the art. Does it look beautiful, or does it look like Star Trek: The Animated Series? Full marks here. I admit I love Rankin-Bass's designs, but beyond that the backgrounds are lovely and the colors are just right.
2. There's the sheet count. How many frames of animation (drawings, or sheets) are in an average minute of film? More is better (generally). ''The Last Unicorn has a pretty good sheet count for an animated film. Not Disney, but not Space Ghost.
3. There's the quality of the drawings. Do the characters look the same in each shot? Are characters facing the right directions when the shot changes? The Last Unicorn is, again, pretty good in this department—there are several places where characters are pointing the wrong direction after a shot change, but generally the characters look the same from shot to shot.
4. Then there's the realism of the characters. How do people walk? Are they stiff or natural? When a girl puts on a pair of shoes, does she put them on one at a time, mechanically and obviously, or does she just slip them on without thinking? TLU's not so hot on this score. Lots of weird gestures. If I'm making a point during conversation, I don't wave my hand back and forth across my chest. When I walk, my arms aren't hanging stiff at my side.

So, the animation is mediocre. There are good qualities to it, but much of the physical acting is depressingly stiff.

Then again, most of the Japanese staff went on to make a little film called Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, which is better than this but does suffer from some stiff character movement.

The writing, unsurprisingly, is excellent. Some great lines in there. And while I was annoyed by the trite obviousness of the first two-thirds of the film, I was surprised when it pushed at the fourth wall as the characters debated meta issues like the requirements of the heroic form. Neat, though a bit jarring.

And the end was great (I'm amused that Miyazaki cribbed elements for the ending of Nausicaa).

So, overall, much as I'm sorry to say...I didn't much like The Last Unicorn.

A small voice warns me of hubris. It whispers in my ear, spinning a memory. I feel the cool air of the movie theater, and the presence of the girl at my side. I was nine years old. I was drinking in the greatest animated experience of my young life: An American Tail. If there's one reason that I've watched hundreds of animated films and series, that's the reason.

But An American Tail had many, many more flaws than The Last Unicorn. I couldn't see past them then, and I can't see past many of them now. That movie formed me.

And so, if this film formed others, who am I to judge too harshly?

Photos are back up. I bought a Panasonix Lumix DMC-TZ3 to replace my broken camera, and am very happy with it so far. The 10x optical zoom is what sold me. I just like getting close and detailed on things.

It was a good retreat. Not as full as I'd have liked, but I was shocked when confronting the idea of two and a half days of intense creativity.

I ended up reading a good amount of Tom Peters, and journalling lots of ideas. Which is not a waste of two and a half days.

Today begins my creative retreat, three days of reading, programming, writing, and generally making stuff. Incredibly important for my creativity, I've found; otherwise I feel frustrated by not having time to just go nuts and make stuff.

The first version of Project Psi, the board game Nick and I came up with a week and a half ago:

Equipment:

• One square of paper, 4.5" per side. This is the starting territory.
• Two 3x5" red index cards (or white cards colored red), cut into 1.5" squares. This is mountain territory.
• Two 3x5" blue index cards, cut into 1.5" squares. This is ocean territory.
• Two 3x5" green or yellow index cards, cut into 1.5" squares. This is field territory.
• A handful of white 3x5" index cards, cut into thirds. These are creature cards.
• Several small binder clips
• A pile of coins.

On one side of each creature card, color it red, green, or blue and write the following:

On the other side of the creature card, draw a nasty beast.

Place the starting territory between the two players. On each turn, a player may both:

1. Place a territory onto any adjacent edge of the starting territory or your own territory, OR add a coin to any of your own territories (maximum of 2 coins), OR convert two coins on a territory to a creature of the same color as the territory.
2. Move a creature OR use a creature's ability.

Ocean creatures cannot move onto land squares, and land creatures cannot move onto ocean squares. However, ocean creatures can move to any ocean square on the map. The starting territory counts as one land square.

All creatures can move one square per turn (so "double speed" means two squares per turn).

Once each player has spawned at least three creatures at some point in the game, whoever kills all of the other player's creatures wins.

Refinements forthcoming (and greatly needed). Suggestions welcome.

I have hundreds of books. Love 'em. I'm an unabashed bookworm. I get warm fuzzies thinking of a blustery winter day ten years from now, when I remember a favorite book and can pluck it off my shelves and sit down with a mug of tea and just read.

So I've been thinking. What if I got rid of all but a few dozen of my books? How would that change me as a person? Why do I want those books? Why have I spent all that money for that feeling of security?

Would I feel more free if I had only a couple dozen books? Would I feel less attachment to things? Might I be a deeper person if I weren't gripping all these things with such determination?

The great religious men of history had few possessions.

Do I fear that kind of poverty? A poverty of books?

Just finished watching disc 2 of Pani Poni Dash, a silly comedy. Boy, I needed that. Just something fun and relaxing.

Long day at work. Long, good day at work. Finished up a bunch of nagging projects, and reframed some existing commitments into projects that might make a few people say, "Wow."

Which should keep my life interesting.

Two everyday objects in my life, and the quality of their design:

Good design: My wristwatch. The leather strap conforms to the shape of my wrist, and it's light enough that I barely noticed its weight. The face is large enough to be easily seen in the dark. It numbers every other hour: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. This allows those numbers to be large. To activate the baclight, I push the little dial on the side in. Easy to do, even if my other hand is otherwise somewhat engaged.

Poor design: The tops of Yankee Candles. The lids are so heavy that I often find myself off-balance when removing the lid. I've nearly dropped the candle a few times. Lids are supposed to be light, especially compared to the baes object; all other lids are.

The second meeting of the animation club was today. We had one new attendee, Joe, and we had fun. We watched Appleseed and My Neighbor Totoro, both of which improve with a repeated viewing. Even Totoro, which I've seen at least half a dozen times.

Then I stopped by a meeting of Tangent Artists, the artists who I gathered for the now-defunct Otherspace Productions. Great to see them again; they're all doing very well. And making a comic, which is quite cool.

Then home, to chat on the phone with Saalon and take care of other stuff around the house. And, soon, to bed.

No takers on playtesting that game I mentioned? None at all?

I want to rant. To eloquently express my frustration with a DVD that contains episodes in the wrong order.

And then I realize that I want to rant because I bought an anime DVD of a brilliant, beautiful series that happens to be ordered in a way I dislike. Am I really that petty?

Why do such things upset us so? Why do we get so emotional over a slight difference between expectations and reality? Why do we work so hard to mold reality to fit our expectations?

Why not just let things be?

Imagine a game based on expanding territory. On each turn, you can lay out another acre of land; forest, mountains, or sea. Or, if the land has lain fallow long enough, you can cause creatures to appear there...fish in the sea, elk on the plains, and fantastic creatures drifting through the mountains.

But the fish are all psychic, the elk are murderously xenophobic, and the mountain creatures thirst for blood.

That's basically the game I designed on Sunday, thanks to some brainstorming between me and Nick. If you'd like to playtest it, email me and we'll work out a time.

If it's fun, I'll post it here.

Saw Ratatouille tonight. The 6:30 P.M. showing was sparsely attended, which shouldn't have been a surprise for a "kid's movie."

It was one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a long time.

Today's counterintuitive idea:

The blogosphere is much smaller than we think.

I'm on Facebook now. Brennen recommended it as a convenient way to keep up-to-date with people that one rarely communicates with otherwise. And it does seem convenient in that way.

Lots of pretty little widgets to play around with, too. Which is often a good predictor of a site's longevity.

A few months ago, I wrote up a Renewal Investment Plan (or R.I.P, ha ha). It's a list of significant things I want to accomplish in the next three months. I'm at the end of the quarter, so it's time to review.

Three new skills:

• Drawing heads/profiles, to prepare for my next comic. Done.
• Cooking pasta to al dente every time, no matter the shape. Done.
• Reading and practicing Japanese. Not as often as I'd like, but better than before.

Thirty new people to meet:

• Join Toastmasters. Complete failure.
• Keep in touch with students in my Web Design class. Complete failure.
• Go out on ten dates. I only did two.

Three new major projects:

• Kickstart Project Omega, the game my co-workers and I are designing. Done.
• The Garden Redevelopment Project. This included building a bunch of planters, repainting the fence, and laying down several truckloads of mulch. Done.
• Giant Armors written. Done (wrote the last bit this morning).

One new thing for the resume:

• Firestorm, my side-scrolling shooter for Syllable. Done.

So. I did terribly at meeting new people, which is typical for me. But that's fine. I now know how I did, and can work on that for my next R.I.P.

If nothing else, this has been a great way to keep me in touch with my bigger life goals, the stuff beyond the day-to-day projects that will make me a more interesting, well-rounded person.

Today is Make Day. Thanks to a post on the Accidental Creative blog, I reserved today just to make stuff (and plan to schedule a new one every month).

One of the results: check_syntax, a script that will check the syntax of whatever source code file you give it. Currently supports C, C++, PHP, Perl, Python, and common Unix shells (bash, sh, csh, and tcsh).

Are you an artist?

We're all capable of producing art. Many people compare themselves to world-class art. They look at their drawing or their story or their song, and they see that it's not as good as the artists they see in galleries or read in books or hear on the radio.

But if your goal is to be a world-class artist, isn't that a hollow goal? It might get you there, but you'll never be happy until you are there, and when you're finally there, then what?

Why not just create art? Whatever art you want to.

Tired. Been sleeping poorly. Ate a plate of spaghetti and freezer-burned bread. Took a load of laundry outside, and...

...twilight gilds the windows of the facing condo with pure gold. The garden is full of earthy browns and vibrant living greens. Pink flowers seem to burst from their pots. The doves beneath the bird feeder look at me.

Not a bad day.

Things are usually a lot easier than they seem.

I've been stressing out over a project at work. An influential person needed some data from me, and I had to provide it by the end of today.

But it was easy. It wasn't all easy, but my worries didn't lessen the difficulty. I could have spent the last few days enjoying the challenge instead of worrying about it.

Spent some time today working on Project Omega, the super-secret RTS game that a fewe co-workers and I are developing. And I realized that I spent twenty minutes writing and organizing status and reporting on two hours worth of work. Feels excessive to me.

On the other hand, we're just getting started. Should be faster to update once I get used to it.

We're using Assembla, a free service that hosts code projects. They provide a free Subversion repository, Trac system, mailing list, and Wiki. You can pay for full backups and more storage, but what they provide is plenty for a small project. Highly recommended, so far.

Just back from the first meeting of the anime club that Nick and I are starting. We were the only ones who showed up.

This was not disappointing. Several folks said they couldn't make it, and the others weren't firm. So we chatted and watched a bit of anime, and will organize another meeting for a few weeks from now.

Initial failure means very little. It's persistence that usually wins.

Final reminder: I need your comments on Giant Armors by midnight tonight, if you're going to send them. Thanks!

Strange, really, how I may not blog for days, and usually it's because very little is happening. My two major accomplishments of the past three days were 1. spreading a truck load of mulch around my house, and 2. installing a new garbage disposal.