notes from underground

I’ve got a 500 word paper to write tonight, but I couldn’t resist playing around with drawn vector graphics in Flash… My tablet makes me HAPPY!

So yeah, here’s a random doodle, not particularly good or interesting, but hopefully mildy funny:

For people (none of whom, ironically, read this blog) who have asked what Electronic Writing means, I present a link to the website where my instructor, Brian Kim Stefans, explains What Is Electronic Writing?

The overarching blog that page is from, brown_ewriting, is the course blog for my class. Feel free to look around… it’s got some cool projects and links, including one I submitted to Brian about the amazing Word Disassociation music video. You may know the band who did the music as the same group that created the song The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. Then again, you might not.

Since my first project for that class is just beginning to take shape, I thought I’d post my initial project proposal here. (Warning: Adobe PDF File)

More updates later this week, but for now I have a play of a page to write and a Japanese quiz to study for.

So, instead of work, I’ve been making Windows pretty. For some reason I googled “how to make windows look like osx” in writing lab two weeks ago, and although that was not my end goal it lead me to http://stardock.com/, most importantly the programs called ObjectDock and
Logon Studio, both available for free download and unlimited use (although I believe both come in a for $$ version as well, including much more with the features).

Armed with these tools, I set out to make something of my desktop. A little tweaking and some winamp skins later, my desktop looks like this:

The background I got from Chip, simply moving elements around and upping contrast. The bar at the top, that looks like the Mac OSX style Dock, is the ObjectDock program previously mentioned. The record that says Samurai Champloo is a Modern style Winamp skin available through Winamp’s Skin Browser. All in all I like the way it turned out… running trillian with 80% or 90% transparency is another fun thing to do sometimes for eye-candy. That was all really easy to do, in the end… the hard part was the next bit.

A little earlier I mentioned that other StarDock program, Logon Studio. When I first downloaded it I tried a few of the preinstalled themes, and realized shortly that they all looked like crap on widescreen displays. A little while later, Tuesday night to be exact, I stayed up a little late to finish a paper for History of Japan. I’d been listening to the Samurai Champloo soundtrack the whole time I worked, so when I finished my paper still full of energy, I decided to take a shot at maybe making a “samuraiPod” style logon screen too. I began wandering around Google Images, looking for good starting points, but really didn’t find what I wanted, so instead I took a 5-minute detour and downloaded that Winamp skin. That done, I still had nothing but the default login screen for Windows, and that was too boring to ignore… Rather than, say, sleeping, I spent another few hours learning how the program worked and thinking about ideas for a logon screen. For some reason I ended up in an FF7 Concept Art gallery, and I downloaded a high-res desktop of Red XIII. I had a cool idea looking at the picture, so I brought it into IrfanView to play with the contrast and saturation, then brought it into Photoshop for layout and stuff. An hour and a half later I had added the shadow to the image (it was on a white background, no shadow before) and dropped in a generic gradient background behind it. I tried bringing that into Logon Studio, but I realized I still didn’t know how the program worked well enough. Just having the image was good enough for a tired Wednesday morning, so I went to bed and decided to put off finishing the project for the next long block of free time I ran into.

Tonight, in other words.

Although I’d been planning on finishing my Flash tutorials tonight, I took a break to try and work some more on this project. I began re-working the static elements of the design, but I was having layout issues… Lincoln suggested I try taking a screen capture of the login screen itself, then adjust in Photoshop. To my surprise, you CAN take screencaps without being logged in, and that gave me the material I needed to finish THIS:

So, yeah. I like it. Comments?

The slight revisions to the theme and design of this site now work for sure in all major browsers except for Opera (untested) and Internet Explorer. In IE, I’ve tested it, but none of the text appears. Do not ask me why. Still, for a blog nobody reads, not bad, right? I still hit some 40% of my nonexistent readership ^_^

I’ll make this a short update, but if I leave it any longer to talk about the webcomics panel and the keynote I will forget everything. The webcomics panel was, expectedly, semi-organized chaos, starting with Randy Milholland writing the following on the board:

All You Need to Know about Webcomics
1) Start a fight with someone else
2) Pete Abrams does bad things to puppies (WINK!)
3)Quit the Internet — twice
4) (boobs+cock joke)/wacky sidekick+sprites=OMG FUNNY!

It just went downhill from there.

Quotes
(note: RM=Randy Milholland, M=Mookie, TB=Tim Buckley [or Tuberculosis], JJ=Jeph Jacques, and C=Cristi, who came with Jeph)

On the distribution of dropouts and non-dropouts on the panel: “It’s a dropout sandwich!” - RM
On character inspiration: “Stupidity gives me an erection” - RM

“I only rape crystal meth addicts” - JJ
“I love Rape!” - M

“I used to be a keenspotter” - M
“You had it lanced?” - RM

“Some people liked it, some didn’t, but I don’t care” - TB, with Artistic Purity

“I wanna see Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter” - Mookie

“Who writes Jesus in the first person?” - C
“Anne. Rice. Anne “JESUS CHRIST” Rice! - M

“My bladder is so spaciously vacant” - RM

“Badger Badger, a Love Story” - RM

“Mickey Mouse and Snape??” - JJ
“Show me your wong!” - RM, in a Mickey Mouse voice

audience - “Can you comment on internet fads?”
“SNAKES ON A PLANE, BITCH!” - JJ

There were actually a lot of good webcomic links thrown around, i think I caught most of them… I’ll update my links list later this week, and post some of them. In the meantime, the keynote speech!

Fiction and Why We Read it, Keynote Speech by George R. R. Martin!

“Most people read, few read for pleasure… we are a minority”
The keynote speech centered around what it is in fiction that keeps us interested, and why it is a necessary genre. Why do we remember it so well, get so involved, and what can we learn from the fact that we do?
What makes fiction memorable, he said, is not words. “For those who really love words… poetry is the ideal vehicle.” Perhaps a natural human need for stories, then. A part of us reads, quite understandably, to find out what happens next, but that’s not all. Human character is at the heart of fiction: the best fiction is based on good characters, and it is to understand character (both the characters themselves, and a more universal human character) that so many of us turn to fiction. That rang true to me, as I’ve always felt “great” literature is all character– we KNOW Raskalnikov, and even The Tale of Genji makes us feel the characters in a visceral way. To return to the speech:
Science Fiction, specifically, is the literature of ideas. Asimov’s first story was built on a small scientific nugget about the boiling point of water, but the story was really about two characters who felt they were going to die. It was a powerful vicarious experiance. That’s what fiction does. Memories are ephemeral, changing and fading as we age. In the end, “what are we but the sum total of our memories?” Human beings are masters of self-deception. Is a strong memory of an event from a book any less “real” than a distant memory of real life? Whether it happened or not, whether read, remembered or even misremembered, it is part of what makes us who we are. The people we meet in books, those characters, stay with us. “I won’t remember you,” he said, “but I remember Sam and Frodo… I remember these books and I’ve forfotten my life.” Which one is real? Does it matter?
His response to the accusations against fiction of “escapism,” as opposed to “ture” literature? “Bullshit. All fiction is inherently escapist… I prefer to use the term ‘vicarious experience.’” Everybody needs to escape, that’s part of who we are too. There are worse places to turn than books.

I will end with a quote. The most powerful thing Mr. Martin said was about reading fiction when he was growing up. He grew up in a small town. His family never went anywhere, but he read. “We may not have had a car,” he said, “but I had starships, and time machines.”

Already behind in my posting, but Chaos shall be my excuse. This past week’s been crazy.

Last weekend I’d no sooner finished shopping my friday courses (Japanese Language and Japanese History) than I packed up my bags to head to Boston for two nights. Vericon is the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction [& Fantasy] Association’s fantasy, gaming and anime convention, held annually in late January. Katie and I went with some games house people last year, and had enough fun that we decided to go again this year. The guest of honor was George R. R. Martin, a fantasy author I really enjoy, and the artists of Questionable Content, Control-Alt-Delete, Something Positive, and Dominic Deegan were all speaking as well. I really enjoy all four of those webcomics, and although I’d seen Mookie (the author & illustrator of Dominic Deegan) and Tim Buckly (of Control-Alt-Delete) at Anime Boston, I was really excited to see them again and sit in on the panels they were doing.

We didn’t end up arriving in Boston until late, after some of the panels I’d hoped to go to, but Friday night wasn’t hugely busy anyway. Katie and I met up with our host, a Harvard student named Noam Lerer who’d offered us crash space, and then spent a little while wandering with Sean, Albert and Nitsan. The con was bigger than I’d remembered it from last year, with more videogame rooms, larger board gaming and common rooms and more panels. After we’d registered and settled in a bit some of us went to get pizza at the local pizza place, Pinnochio’s. Quite tasty.

We stayed up pretty late playing games (Apples to Apples, in my case), but we got Noam to let us into his dorm to sleep so that we could wake up early in the morning. The webcomic panel was great, Jeph Jacques of QC and Randy Milholland of Something Positive talked about the process of drawing and posting a webcomic, then Jeph demonstrated by drawing a sample panel of QC featuring Faye and a dinosaur. It was pretty awesome to see him draw… I figure that if I drew the same characters several times a day, five days a week, I’d get pretty good at it too, but it’s still insane how fast he was.

Some great quotes from that panel:
Randy Milholland
“I drink soda… because I never… drink… alcohol…… in theory.”
“Well my readers are just dicks”
“‘Cause you know, I’m all about respecting people”

Next panel was called “All You Need is Love,” and was hosted by George R. R. Martin, Elaine Isaak, Marie Brennan (aka Bryn Neuenschwander), and Michael “Mookie” Terracciano (the creator of Dominic Deegan). It was pretty interesting, dealing with how love and romance are treated in fantasy, how they should be treated, and what the authors on the panel thought about it all. It also ended up being a magnificent source of quotes.

George R.R. Martin:
“Comfortable? I don’t think it’s my job as an artist to make my audience comfortable.
“Our purpose is not to advance the plot… there’s more to novels than advancing the plot, the point is enjoying the journey.”
“There’s something… I just can’t imagine elves having sex, Tolkein elves.”
“It could be amusing to see Conan’s Aunt show up.” (discussing heroes with no visible family)

Marie Brennan:
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.”

Mookie:
“Oh, my god, there are so many orphaned heroes running around, who need LOVE!”
“Brokeback Mountain… Mount Doom… Brokeback Mount Doom?” (re: Sam and Frodo)
An old writing teacher told me once, if there are no tears for the writer there are no tears for the reader.”

I’ll post about the webcomics panel and keynote address a little later today, I really need to actually do some work this weekend, but a quick recap of the remainder of the convention:
Right after the love panel I ambushed George R. R. Martin and got my book signed (!YAY!), then saturday afternoon I sat in on the All You Need to Know About Webcomics panel. Katie and I followed the artists to a local bookstore for free sketches and signings, then had some dinner and went to the keynote speech by Mr. Martin. It was a really great speech, mostly about why we read fiction, but like I said I’ll talk about that once I’ve finished my reading.
We weren’t able to find Noam to get back to the dorm, so we went to a storytelling session and heard a rediculously funny story involving a small elephant who demanded the toasted remains of George R. R. Martin. It was told one word at a time, alternating between two people: the moral? George R. R. Martin is a pirate.
The costume ball was pretty uneventful, mostly the same as last year’s, which is kind of too bad. The skits were really funny at the beginning, but if they’re all the same skits, what’s the point? We played some games afterwards, but went to bed around 1am to make sure we’d be up in time to leave the next day.

Katie and I went to the art show on Sunday, which ended up being much more stressful than we’d expected, but Katie did end up winning a great picture of a cat with wings. I paid for half of it as a kind of early birthday gift. After playing Soul Calibur III with Sean for a while, we met up with Matt Webber, some other FGS-ers and Matt’s mother for lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant. Very tasty, and Mrs. Webber treated us to lunch!! Very generous of her.
It was beginning to rain by that point, so after a quick run to the anime store in the Garage, we piled into Nitsan’s car and headed home. After some chaos trying to escape Boston, which ended in my calling Owen for Google maps backup, we got home, and promptly freaked out about not having done ANY work. Exciting weekend.

Yay! Now I’m only a week behind.