Category: Kristofer Straub

November 12, 2004 /

The problem with doing research on any old thing that pops into your head, which I do, it’s neat, thanks to Google, is that you end up with sentences of which you understand maybe two words. To wit:

“Like myobatrachines, sooglossids have a ventrally incomplete cricoid ring, horizontal pupils, winglike alary processes on the hyoid, and a divided sphenethmoid. Amplexus is inguinal.”

From a page about Seychelle frogs. I mean, I understand “horizontal pupils” but that’s about it. As has been the case ever since I read Wuthering Heights, in high school and at gunpoint, I have this dark suspicion that the narrator is unreliable–that, in this case, the author of that page is just making up words to fuck with me (Kris Straub has actually done this). I mean, “sphenethmoid?”

Now somebody comment on my Livejournal feed explaining what that is, and how I’m dumb.

October 14, 2004 /

Maria and I went to San Francisco last weekend, and it was pretty great. We left very early Saturday morning and got back very late Monday night, and although we unfortunately missed hanging out with Kris, we did get to play games and bum around with Leonard and Sumana a lot.

It was like every few hours we gained a new and spectacular privilege: aside from Leonard’s food, to which I’ll get in a moment, we discovered the mafia geese of Fairyland; we gained admittance to the residence of Kevin (more on this soon too); we got a quick-but-personal tour of Berkeley; we spent big wads of money at Games of Berkeley; and we played arcade games both vintage and new. Hell, Maria attended the national American Academy of Pediatrics conference practically by accident, and I got to have one of the first looks at Leonard’s newest awesome secret project (so awesome, he got banned from the API of at least one site!). It was that kind of weekend.

Now, Leonard’s food. It should be sufficient to say that Leonard’s fondue made me–the guy who hates cheese–like fondue, but I’m going to say more. We also got to eat his first-ever attempt at home fries, which were unfairly perfect, and his first-ever attempt at pie ice cream, which was also pretty freaking great. Leonard’s food is world peace. Leonard’s food is the answer.

As for Kevin’s house: when Ian and I were younger, we had on our 386 Magnavox computer a program called Floorplan Plus. Because we were dorks–huge dorks, the budding dorks of legend–we spent hours on that thing, designing about a million floor plans so that both of us could completely fail to go into architecture.

My houses were silly, but I always tried to make them sensible. Ian, on the other hand, was constantly reinventing a place he called Jamhouse. You can pretty much imagine what it was like: the perfect residence, as envisioned by a ten-year-old boy. And Kevin’s house is that house, but with a better sound system and more art. It is my future house’s role model.

I need to say something about Sumana too, because she was a major part of the weekend and I’ve barely mentioned her. We stopped for lunch in Berkeley at De La Paz; it was warm and we’d already walked a lot, and Maria (who is hypoglycemic) was getting kind of dizzy. Sumana got up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but first snuck over to the bar to have the lone waiter express-deliver a Coke to replenish her blood sugar. That is the kind of friend Sumana is.

Before February of this year I’d never been west of Minnesota, and now I’ve been to California three times in eight months. Two-thirds of that is due entirely to Leonard and Sumana, whose hospitality and thoughtfulness are boundless and unfailing.

October 7, 2004 /

I bet you were wondering whether, early this Saturday morning, Maria and I were going to fly out to San Francisco and visit Leonard and Sumana and Kris.

Well, GUESS WHAT!

Update 10.08.2004 0022 hrs: Possibly I am lying about Kris.

If you monitor human-human interaction, you do it on your own time, understand?

September 24, 2004 /

I’ve been thinking about my performance evaluations class (which I’m failing, but still find interesting, except for the math), Leonard’s comment on bad metrics and the concept of keystroke counters and loggers (thanks to spam). There’s a quote in the textbook for the aforementioned class, “that which is monitored improves,” attributed to “Source Unknown.” So I can’t call out the person who said it for being wrong, which it is.

Here’s a handy set of heuristics for deciding when to monitor. For you! It would be better drawn as a flowchart or tree, but I’m lazy.

Good Things To Monitor

  • Efficiency of system-system interaction, based on system output

  • Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the system, based on user-satisfaction output

Bad Things To Monitor

  • Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the human
  • Quality of human-system interaction, based on system output

Incidentally, this also covers the basis of the problem I have with standardized testing. Or the lecture-test educational system as a whole, in fact.

Update 09.25.2004 1054 hrs: Leonard has pointed out to me that I somehow copied the wrong Crummy hyperlink. It’s fixed.

September 6, 2004 /

So Modern Humor Authority posted a second issue, which I guess means they really do intend to have a web presence. It’s still weird to me to think that Kris Straub didn’t invent MHA and its frontman–or rather, that they’re based on a real human and his magazine, instead of Scott McCloud and his ouevre. But that’s the way it is.

MHA itself is pretty obviously ripe for ridicule (read the AppleGeeks review and see for yourself), but they seem to tolerate it well, since they knew about the Checkerboard Nightmare parody and still stayed in contact with Kris. That’s the impression I got, anyway. It kind of makes me want to put together some kind of parody ezine, like a massive satire of all review publications, but I don’t know. That kind of thing is getting a little played out.

July 26, 2004 /
  • Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
  • Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
  • Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
  • Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
  • Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
  • Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
  • Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
  • Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
  • Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
  • I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as

    The Greatest

    SKETCHBOOK

    Ever In The History Of Time

    which basically means I win.

I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.

July 16, 2004 /

In two days we’ll be on our way to Alton, and thence to California; I’ll finally be meeting Stephen and Erin and Kris, and a great host of other humans, not to mention buying a great many new comics. And I’ll get to see Leonard and Sumana again! And it’ll be my first cross-country trip on a train! I EXPLODE WITH AWESOMENESS!

It’s strange to think that we’ve been planning this for almost an entire year; I was investigating possible trip companions and talking about prices with Stephen before the last Comic Con was over. My enthusiasm for the trip has yet to diminish even a whit, despite the fact that I’m desperately behind on… The Secret Project.

Which Will already talked about, so I guess I can too. He, Lisa, Stephen and I are putting together an ashcan comic to sell to or throw at Con attendees–something we’ve also been planning for a long time. It’s only natural that I’m not done yet, and will probably be up all night tonight finishing my section. We investigated printing prices (Kinko’s, et cetera), then ended up buying a totally sweet laser printer and an extra high-capacity cartridge for less than it would have cost to get it done at a shop. We’re going to bind it ourselves and sell it cheap, and I’ll probably put at least my section up on this “web site” once I get back and have time. I’m drawing my part based on Stephen’s script, which is a new and interesting experience for me, and I hope I get it right.

Warning: I’m gonna talk about a lot of stupid blog stuff now

October 3, 2003 /

My RSS aggregator is now officially aggregating 39 blogs. Granted, a lot of those are dormant, but that’s still not bad for something that started as an experiment while I was bored at work.

Things I want to change about it:

  • This is a third-party aggregator, so I have to wait for it to update itself, which it does only once an hour. For petesakes, that’s a possible 59 minutes of tardiness on late-breaking bruisable news! I should either write my own or find software I can install on my own site, but I’m lazy.
  • Thirty-nine? Come on! Somebody start a new blog, I want to round it off. No, not a blogspot, they don’t let you have a feed unless you pay money.
  • (Or, if your name is Kristofer Straub, you could get on the stick already and install some journal software with feeds and also real permalinks.)

I know thirty-nine isn’t actually a particularly large field for an aggregator, but it works nicely for me. It was pretty boring when I started out, but now there’s a good chance that any hour I hit it will yield at least one new post.

July 25, 2003 /

Today’s Doonesbury, even though it’s the “Summer Daydream,” implies that Mike is interested in someone other than Kim. The original (1998?) Mike-and-Kim story, including both major arcs, is collectively my favorite Doonesburies ever. If Mike is tired of Kim, Mike needs to die.

Speaking of great comic storylines, Checkerboard Nightmare just wrapped up (I presume) probably my favorite continuous run of strips in its history; Wednesday’s edition packs more great lines into four panels than the fire marshal really allows. I talk about Checkerboard Nightmare a lot, and I still don’t talk about it enough. I was going through the archives a while back and noticed that Mr. Straub produced these three strips all within one week. Those are some of the most perfect one-shots ever committed to pixel. I can’t stand it!