Category: Pulverbatch

Brendan painstakingly imitates a Photoshop filter, third in a series

January 23, 2008 /

I will probably never love another episode of television as much as I love Battlestar Galactica, season 3, episode 9, “Unfinished Business.” And not just because it has images like this:

GET UP. We're just getting STARTED.

I’ve spent at least the last year and a half (actually, more like seven years, since my undergrad Drawing I class) being obsessed with this limited-tone art style. I called it “rotoscoping” once, and Lisa and Will jumped on me because there’s no animation involved, so I have to admit that it’s actually what people call “tracing.” But selective tracing.

As was likely very obvious to anyone in my family, and as I only realized yesterday, my playing around with tone is blatantly derived from my uncle John’s painting and wood engraving work, especially his portraits of my grandfather (which he often combines with layered collage). Mr. Olmos there has some features similar to his, like the disappearing eyes which Ian and I inherited. I hope I get to look that craggy eventually. Right now people are still asking me what my major is, despite the obvious gray in my hair.

I almost forgot to mention that this is the first thing I’ve ever inked with the brushes I bought in 2003, and although it was a lot slower than my usual pens, I completely get why cartoonists get so excited about it now. There’s a feeling of dynamic control over the line weight that you just can’t get with pens, even the brush pen with which I inked a lot of later Xorph strips. (Not that there are actually any distinct lines in the finished images below. Good.)

So I made a picture and it’s a wallpaper if you want it: the images below link to 1600×1200 and 1600×1000 (widescreen) jpegs. There’s also a browser-sized version if you just want to zoom in a bit.

Adama at standard ratio, with logo.

Adama at normal ratio, no logo.

PS Can Battlestar Galactica be back on now plz

Update 2008.01.26 0001 hrs: Naturally, UJ has a much more cogent post on the subject (the art, not Battlestar), along with one of the portraits I was talking about.

The Cryptid Epiphany

January 7, 2008 /

I know this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to smugly bury, when you’re writing, but I have this obsession with transparency? So here’s an example of how sometimes the world just drops stuff into your lap.

Almost a year ago I started writing stories about Proserpina, another name for Persephone, probably most well-known for the thing with Hades. In the very first one I threw in a remark about “her faded black tattoos.”

Later I decided to add an Australian of European descent, and only later did it occur to me that I’d set up her semi-suitor as an older man from “down there.” Right?

Then last week I decided to bring the tattoo thing back in, so I had to come up with a rationale for it. Poking around on Wikipedia led me to tā moko, traditional Maori tattooing; apparently New Zealand was becoming more economically entwined with Australia toward the end of the 19th century, so that’s a reasonable connection. Then I looked up the origin story of tā moko.

It’s about a man who descends into the underworld to find the wife he drove away. Persephone inverted.

I have traditionally viewed with skepticism the English-lit platform of divorcing the author from the work, but man, I could not have done this on purpose. The title of this entry comes from a discussion I had with Leonard a while back about his writing process; apparently this kind of thing happens to him all the damn time. I understood the sensation of epiphanic writing when he described it, but I couldn’t find any examples to hold up from my own corpus. This is about as close as I’ve come.

Mild ethical issues here: there’s a growing concern among Maori that moko is being appropriated by whites who have neither full grasp of nor entitlement to the art form, and, well, I’m kind of doing that. My defense is that I do plan to set it up with an explicit Maori connection, somehow, and to respect the source. I’m not sure whether recontextualization of a minority culture’s mythology is inherently evil or not, but I do think it’s inevitable. Origin stories are virulently memetic because they’re supposed to be. Eventually I’ll have to do a theme-post about how often I rip off and mash up mythology I don’t really understand.

I always thought Rowling gave arithmancy short shrift

December 28, 2007 /

Stories I have written that revolve around invented or reinterpreted methods of divination: Stella, Jaboullei, Rob, Shekel and Jewel. I was kind of surprised it was this few–I feel like it’s one of the structures to which I keep returning. There’s another one coming Monday, if you hadn’t guessed.

I think the reason I keep coming back to this is a variation on the existential dread I feel when considering the persistence of objects (eg the lives of sapient dishes): the amount of potential information in the world, and how quickly our ability to capture and interpret it is growing, and how insignificant that capability will always be–in an obscure way, these things terrify me. They also thrill me. Look at what we can discover! If time and distance are the universe’s crypto, divination is the original side channel attack.

I also live in constant fear of side channel attacks, by the way, to the point where I have resigned myself to much-more-likely primary channel attacks. I kind of never want to be even mildly famous, as that would destroy what flimsy comfort I take in anonymity.

Anyway, you’ll know I’ve gutted the shark on this theme when I write the one about logymancy. Meanwhile I want to do more of these little collect-and-explain entries; I think they’d be a better point of entry to Anacrusis for new or hesitant readers than just the sheer blank mass of the archives. When one of my best friends refers to my writing corpus as “a stupid amount” and my own mother is too intimidated to read them, I am pretty much failing to sell my product.

Okay look I finally wrote my fanfic post

December 21, 2007 /

Every two weeks I post a new bit of what is, I must reluctantly admit, Star Wars fan fiction. This week I made Han Solo a girl. Andy really liked that, and this started as a response to his commentary.

Luke and Leia hold at least as much mythic significance most people of our generation as, say, Theseus and Ariadne would have held to your typical Athenian. Putting them onstage applies a certain pressure of reader expectation to your plot; twisting that can have the same effect as subverting other, more generalized social norms, and has the benefit of coming from an unexpected direction. Sumana’s excellent post about slash and subversion points out that such twists can “disorient and reorient” your experience of the original work. It’s exactly what Euripides did with Medea, and Virgil with Aeneas (and Dante with Virgil).

But since our high-information society allows–indeed, legally requires–traceback to the writer who first introduced any given character into our awareness, we no longer have stories that seem to have spontaneously informed our culture. When every dollar has a serial number, there is no common coin. The consensus-approved solution is to wait until the story you want to rewrite is a) old and respectable and b) in the public domain, and right now, the former still takes longer. The problem is that the rate at which we produce stories is accelerating, and a story that fills the Western imagination one year will likely have been forgotten in the tide of newcomers eighty years later. This is what fanfic tries to solve.

My basic conceptual issue with fanfic is that it caters mostly to niche audiences; it tends to reinforce cliques and generate closed language instead of transcending boundaries and bringing together disparate audiences (props again to Sumana for illuminating that distinction, although at the time it was in the context of neo-web projects). Cross-genre fiction appeals to a unity of two groups, where crossover fanfic appeals only to an intersection. In that way I actually have more sympathy for stories written in the context of ultra-popular milieu: you can parse and enjoy Star Wars fanfic without being a Star Wars fan. If you’re alive and reading English in 2007, it very likely has connotations and relevance to you.

Of course, by the same token, the word “fanfic” has enormous connotations (and connotations of enormity) to people who’ve been internetting for a while. It’s usually either a sniveling kleptomania that must be stamped out or a persecuted child who must be defended. I maintain that fanfic is a gradient based on how well you hide your influences, that authors who deride fanfic as stealing could use a strong dose of self-examination, and that I personally prefer work on the better-hidden end of the scale because that means you had to do the work of hiding it. Lazy fiction is not good fiction, and I say that as someone who is pretty lazy, pretty often.

This is just so my grandmother doesn’t have to see the word “fuck” as soon as she opens my journal page. Wait! Fuck!

November 28, 2007 /

So I opened Facebook and saw this much of an ad on my screen:

Jennifer Aniston's face, over the text 'Help Save Her Life.'

And I was like, “What, does she need emergency reverse liposuction? I mean, obviously she DOES, but is that going to save her–oh.” Because by this point I had copied the image out and could see the first frame of the animated gif, to which it apparently never resets:

Little bald Madelyn is fighting CANCER. ASS.

Hi! St. Jude? Call me. We need to talk about this concept called “above the fold.”

Will says the logo makes him think of pickle jelly. I suggested he think of jalapeño jelly instead

November 19, 2007 /

At Lisa’s persistent instigation, Will, Kyle and I drove up to Pittsburgh on Friday to jam on games for the One Laptop Per Child Project. We actually got to handle some of the XO prototypes, which are even smaller than I expected, but also pretty neat.

We didn’t win, but we did create a complete game, albeit one that only fully worked four hours after the judging round. We also had a lot of fun, and not a lot of sleep. Some of the other projects looked great, and the winner was really polished–I have no doubt it will end up as part of the standard XO package.

I feel bad about the way the game turned out, because all the delays and problems were due entirely to my inexperience in the required tools (Python and Pygame). On the other hand, I’ve been mumbling about needing to learn Python for four years now, and now I have! Mumbled. I mean, learned.

The game (“Caketown”) lacks a lot of things (an intro, an outro, more than two levels, etc) but I’m going to post it anyway so you can hear Kyle’s fantastic music and see Will’s amazing art. What you don’t get to see is Lisa’s work as project coordinator, colorist and, now, one of the few living experts on how to install software on the XO.

Here it is as a Windows executable, in zip or gzip form (I recommend unzipping to C:\Caketown\). If you’re not running Windows, you can have the gzipped source and data, but you’ll need Python and Pygame installed to use it. You could also wait a little while, as I really do want to put together a finished and more coherent version with code that will not, when read, summon Nyarlathotep (the Crawling Chaos).

Weird footnote: unexpectedly, I recognized and got to meet a couple of people I knew or knew of from Internet (Bryan Cash and Tom Murphy). And they were both kind of startled / scared! But somebody did that to me once so it’s only fair.

Sometimes I suddenly remember I have a nonfiction blog

October 30, 2007 /

I tend to cite Occam’s Razor in arguments at the slightest excuse, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I encountered Crabtree’s Bludgeon. It fits in nicely with my current working hypothesis that what we call “sentience” reduces to the intersection of apophenia and confabulation. I know that doesn’t actually explain anything, but it’s fun to say.

I have a lot of ideas about how that all fits together, and how the Bludgeon and the Razor aren’t really in opposition (look at me conceiving coherence!), and what they mean when set against the Theravada-Buddhist concept of the nature of suffering. Lucky for you I haven’t managed to jam them into 101 words yet.

Speaking of arguments, yes, I was, go back to the beginning, I updated my personal slang dictionary for the first time in like a year–this time with a phrase I actually use sometimes. I would use the other ones if anyone would understand them, which they wouldn’t, because they haven’t read my damn personal slang dictionary.

Ommatidia cover mockup round 2 go!

September 24, 2007 / / 0 Comments
Brendan Adkins: Ommatidia

The images I wanted to use have since been withdrawn from CC license and weren’t working out right anyway; this one is from this lovely composite shot by DimSumDarren and it’s a lot subtler, I think. Possibly too subtle. Maria pointed out that those are not technically ommatidia, but she also pointed out that “eww,” which is a better reaction than anything I managed with the bug-eye attempts.

So close, guys, we are so close to a finished book. Quick poll (and yes, COMMENTS ARE ACTUALLY OPEN): how long did it take you to notice that something in the picture was a little off?

I use the word “spook” in this entry because I am currently obsessed with William Gibson’s Spook Country. I’ll write about that too, eventually.

September 12, 2007 /

The quarterly investing magazinelet I get from my IRA holder has, as its latest cover line, “The Best-Laid Plans.” Like Anse Bundren, I don’t think they know the rest.

Plans are worthless. I had half an evening free from work tonight and it confused me: I had kind of forgotten what else to do with myself. I haven’t billed a mere 40 hours since the (four-day) week in which I flew back from London; last week–of which I theoretically spent half vacationing–I billed 60. It’s all for the same hideous, endless project, the kind you hear spook stories about from people who have spent too long working with computers. It was supposed to finally launch tonight, and I–as the project lead–hit every target that was required by 6:00. At 6:02 the client decided that two more problems were worth delaying launch for. By 8:30 (with my Tuesday friends waiting in the living room) I’d fixed those too. Guess whether the launch happened!

I need a vacation; the last one I had was nice, but it amounted to what most people would call a “weekend.” I’m running bufferless in all my endeavors and I obviously haven’t had time to write anything here. I also haven’t had time to get a haircut, pick up my new glasses or practice for a fairly important test.

Boo hoo, I get paid well to work on my couch. Pretend there’s a good segue here about writing, buffers, responsibility and personal milestones.

I miss MC Masala and I’m sad to see its archives disappearing from the Inside Bay Area site. Obviously, Sumana’s still blogging, but her column was different: the early ones had a conspiratory enthusiasm, as if the author was sneaking you in to see how columns work and wasn’t supposed to be there herself; the later ones displayed an enjoyable assurance and a growing set of tools for telling stories.

I hope she posts her own digital archive soon. Or (he murmured hypocritically) perhaps a book-on-demand?