Remi's Bloglet - Thursday 17 July 2003

New SecretLand episode! I'll be trying to get updates up on Wednesday from now on. _
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06:58:45 AM, Thursday 17 July 2003

I watched Spectacular Attacks, and came to the conclusion that I liked the art and the music, but not the 'poem'. It's evocative and interesting, and some of the lines are good, and it's definitely an interesting way to present poetry, but I don't know if this particular poem was strong enough to support the stuff around it. _
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03:24:39 PM, Tuesday 15 July 2003

Zounds! There is nothink! _
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03:23:48 AM, Monday 14 July 2003

Apparently the original Pixies line up still get together and jam occasionally. A reunion tour might be horribly depressing . . . but I'd go, anyway. _
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06:24:39 PM, Saturday 12 July 2003

New Frontalot song! _
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02:05:36 PM, Friday 11 July 2003

A nice little overview of Hayao Miyazaki's work on Salon, but I didn't know this:

A new Miyazaki theatrical release is expected to reach U.S. theaters next summer, however -- an adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones' children's fantasy novel "Howl's Moving Castle." I can hardly wait.

I'm sure Crestomanci fans are jumping for joy (even if it isn't a Chrestomanci book). _
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12:28:43 AM, Thursday 10 July 2003

Culture-dweeb (and one of the Terrible Three Salon movie critics) Charles Taylor writes a reasoned and sensible, if occasionally over-snarky, response to A.S. Byatt's bile-filled rant on Harry Potter. _
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03:11:28 AM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

I spent all day working on too-fat.com, and I have pretty much everything comic-related, sans Too Fat itself, up in the Old Comics section. I've got a new Secretland script, so I'll work on that, and then I'll probably have a few days to put up some Too Fat stuff. I'll need to write some sort of synopsis, because it will start right at end of the Guam storyline, which made little enough sense when you read the whole thing. _
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02:55:45 AM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

Too Fat returns! Or, at least, the domain does. I will be uploading the old Too Fat strips as time allows (it might be a little while), as well as the other odds and ends I've done through the years. This server should be far, far more stable than keenspace, and now I won't have to bug folks for space when KS craps out on me. Too-fat.com is also the new home of SecretLand. (Big up to my dad, who made this possible) _
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12:04:18 PM, Tuesday 8 July 2003

Metafilter's Matt Haughey talks a little about online comics and how they're still at the 'training wheels' stage. There are several artists (other than Scott McCloud) who are doing things with infinite canvas comics and flash comics and the like. The problem is that these comics are only good for the web. A number of major webcomics (PvP and Sluggy) make most of their money from print collections and T-shirts. Sure, ModernTales and Keenspot is a way to get some attention and money for your strips, but even then a lot of those artists are selling T-shirts and print collections. Until it becomes even vaguely viable to run a web-only cartoon, I don't think you're going to see an explosion of web-experiment strips or comics.

It's not that cartoonists don't understand how the technology could open up the form, it's that it takes a helluva a lot of work to make comics and to stick that work into a web-only format is a fairly big risk. The web is currently a form of loss-leader distribution for print comics, and I can't really see that changing. _
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09:54:47 AM, Sunday 6 July 2003

New Secretland episode! (EDIT: The files have been transferred to too-fat.com) _
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10:40:08 PM, Saturday 5 July 2003

The student newspaper the other day ran a review of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle with the headline "Full Throttle Lacks Plot, Substance". This is sort of like saying "New James Bond Movie Racist, Sexist. Lacks Sean Connery." _
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04:43:33 PM, Friday 4 July 2003

Inkjet ink costs more, on a volume basis, than Dom Perignon. _
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11:22:52 PM, Thursday 3 July 2003

"That's a hell of a lotta octopus." _
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01:13:52 AM, Thursday 3 July 2003

Okay, last entry on Secretland until I finish the next episode. Keenspace is back up, so if you've had trouble seeing the strip, you can now. I've also added the HTML pages, and they aren't much, but it should make the comic a little easier to read. _
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02:42:40 AM, Wednesday 2 July 2003

Franck Cho, of Liberty Meadows fame, is auctioning off a piece of art that Wizard, the ultra-crappy comics magazine, refused to run. Basically it's sort of a cockfighting scene, but with Blip (the Space Ghost monkey) and Gleek (the Super Friends monkey). It's called Monkey Fight Club, and it's damn funny.
Large version here _
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01:38:30 PM, Tuesday 1 July 2003

Well, I totally screwed up my keenspace account, so while there are HTML pages in my directory, there's no way for me to update it. So more clicky clicky for anyone interested in SecretLand, these are the shaded versions of the earlier pages. 1, 2, 3, 4 _
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03:56:20 PM, Monday 30 June 2003

Man, that long 'ride' at the end of The Magnetic Fields 'Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side' just gets me every time. I love it. So happy, yet so sad. _
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02:17:26 PM, Monday 30 June 2003

I just finished the first episode of my new comic (co-created with, and written by, my pal Jarad Fennell) SecretLand. 1, 2, 3, 4 _
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01:24:06 AM, Monday 30 June 2003

phew, what a week. I'm sitting in the Sudduth clan home in Huntersville, NC, hanging out on the internet, reading mail, and decompressing a bit after a week at Montreat. I cooked and told kids to go to bed, and all in all had a pretty good time. I had a lot of time alone, which led to me finishing Order of the Phoenix, The Deceivers, Sputnick Sweetheart, and Guarding Hanna. I enjoyed them all. I may post mini-reviews in comments. I also drew four pages of comics, which will be posted sometime soon. Liz was busy all week doing music conference stuff.

Oh! I also got to play 'Monkeys on the Moon', the game Mirabai got me for my birthday. It's a lot of fun, although the main part of the game, the bidding on monkeys, gets stretches the game out to a fair length. Still, the kids I played with enjoyed it a lot. A good week. _
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04:58:17 PM, Saturday 28 June 2003

We received our copy of HP this afternoon, rather unexpectedly (we had gotten it sent through the free USPS shipping), and so I spent our trip up to Liz's parents reading it out loud. We're about 120 pages in and it rocks very hard so far. _
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07:14:10 PM, Saturday 21 June 2003

HULK (No major spoilers . . . I don't think)
Just got back from Hulk, and, uh, it's really not Spider-man:Green. It's really not a kids movie, at all. It more a proof that while you can give a superhero movie to Ang Lee, it will still be an Ang Lee movie. I don't really know if I liked it, I could barely concentrate on it for all the kids running up and down the aisles and people talking loudly to each other. Usually I enjoy first-night screenings of blockbuster movies, but this was like seeing The Others again, except this time the noise succeeded in distracting me.

It's very long, and the Hulk doesn't appear until what feels like an hour has passed. I dunno, I don't feel cheated, but I don't feel satisfied, either. While Liz and I were talking about it on the way home the main thing we came to agree on was that Hulk/Bruce Banner is just sort of this guy governed by fate and his circumstances. Hulk doesn't get to do much, in the sense that he's always being pursued, he's never pursuing. Which is fine, in theory, but it made him seem marginal in his own movie. You want to cheer for him, but you end up cheering for rinky-dink stuff like punching tanks.

As for the effects, I actually liked them quite a bit, and they only broke down for me at the end of the final confrontation (the 'big bubble'), and the story is actually pretty interesting, with all the characters getting some nice little issues to work out by the end. I may need to see it again without the distraction.

Oh, and there's going to be a Punisher movie. There's already been a Punisher movie! It had Dolph Lundgren in it! It sucked! Why do we need another one?!? _
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10:09:34 PM, Friday 20 June 2003

Hey, cool! Creative Commons has made some cute comics to explain their licenses! _
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12:06:53 AM, Friday 20 June 2003

A cute kid question:
"Why are we people?"

[via Scott Rosenberg's blog] _
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11:55:07 PM, Thursday 19 June 2003

From the Raincoast Books website:
Harry Potter is Ancient Forest Friendly!
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be published in Canada on June 21st, 2003, retailing for $43.00 CDN. Harry Potter is also ancient forest friendly. The books, which include the original British text, will be printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. To read more about Raincoast�s green paper initiative, visit our Ancient Forest Friendly page.

Dang, now I want the Canadian edition . . .

[via, and with addtional information on how this once-tiny publisher landed the HP books, boing boing] _
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11:46:45 PM, Monday 16 June 2003

I'm always up for the next big thing in indie roleplaying (he's so indie that he don't own dice?), and Universalis seemed like an interesting step in the evolution of games like Baron Munchausen and Nobilis. GMless, Near-diceless, co-op gameplay. Seems pretty cool, although some of the immersion problems mentioned in this review seem to relegate Universalis to the realm of back-up almost-ran.

However, one of the creators of Universalis responds to a comment on the RPGnet message board and points out the true strength of the game. It will make a great supplement for people trying to weave complicated multi-personality stories (as in George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books) without actually running eighty characters in four different games. To be quite honest I find that idea of a sub-game in a standard RPG far more exciting than another bleeding-edge standalone game. _
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01:24:32 PM, Monday 16 June 2003

I did an almost completely nonsensical comicollage yesterday. It this me getting back into the comics swing or just an airfart of desire? Only time will tell. _
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04:32:16 AM, Friday 13 June 2003

Apparently the Segway isn't foolproof. _
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01:52:14 AM, Friday 13 June 2003

The 4th Season Buffy DVD's have a cute little 'personal note' from Joss Whedon in which he explains that Buffy is not ever going to be letterboxed because, well, they were shot in the Television aspect ratio. It's amazing to me that it was perceived as enough of a misunderstanding to warrant a fairly lengthy explanation. Of course, DVD's seem to have created a whole class of people who automatically think that 'original director's intent' equals a letterboxed presentation. _
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08:52:27 PM, Thursday 12 June 2003

Half a live Talking Heads show! For Free! _
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10:11:13 PM, Tuesday 10 June 2003

I'm really dissatisfied with combat in role-playing games. This especially applies to games going for a 'cinematic' or 'heroic' feel, but it's a problem in all games. There, I've said it. The main focus of so many games is dull. Well, perhaps not dull, but undifferentiated, only showing different granules of detail or abstracting the act of violence to its simplest form, but never straying far from the 'roll a die and you hit . . . or not' realm. While heady descriptions can make a tough battle seem more dramatic, combat ultimately seems like an easy way to occupy time, make the players feel good about themselves and flex their abilities. Is there a system that makes a fight in an RPG balletic, graceful, or intense? A system that can make battling against one opponent actually feel different than a battle against another?
Sure, there's the rush of, "OMG, I'm almost down to 0 Stun/Hitpoints/Life Pods/Sperm," but it very rarely has an impact on the character beyond more bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a pain, but combat should require LESS of it than the regular game, not more. It's impossible to play out fast-paced action in ANY system, there's always the hang time of rolling the dice, adding them up, deciding if you hit, and then announcing the result. It's frustrating, and I'm tired of it. _
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09:30:48 PM, Tuesday 10 June 2003

'cause I haven't posted in a day or so. _
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01:59:12 PM, Tuesday 10 June 2003

Saw the Matrix:Reloaded and I enjoyed it. It built upon and changed the focus of the first movie, which was interesting and much more than I expected. There were some cool fights, but most of them lasted too long with too little variation. I dunno, I want to see the next movie to see how it ends. _
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08:39:37 PM, Saturday 7 June 2003

Fat Seth, now known as Fake Red Seth, has released a new album/EP, "Even Dead She's a Looker". It's another passel of pop-rock songs with fun, bitter lyrics, some of which are posted at MP3.com. I'm not ashamed to say that the production quality is quite a bit better than the makeshift studio that recorded their last EP. E-mail 'em if you want the full album, it's worth it. _
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08:20:37 PM, Saturday 7 June 2003

I feel drunk.

[via RussCon] _
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02:03:14 AM, Friday 6 June 2003

After finishing the test scoring job I swore that I'd kill myself if I ever saw the words "It was all a dream . . . OR WAS IT" again. Chris Onstad plays with my life as other men play with power tools. Make the burning pain stop. _
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08:52:01 PM, Wednesday 4 June 2003

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