April 2004 Archives

So my good man Christopher Baldwin (of BRUNO fame) posted a new sketch this week which is basically comic characters superimposed over photo backdrops. This is something I've been thinking about doing for quite a while. Hmmm. I really like the way it looks in his version. That just might work.

(Okay, so I should have been working this morning, but instead I wound up jotting down a few ideas, which then grew into a full essay, which I'm including below and will be cross-posting over to my personal site for future reference. It's geeky as hell, and dorky to boot, but I hope you enjoy it and are moved to argue with me!)

On Action Figures and Transmedia Storytelling

Everywhere you look these days, it's an 80's revival. The causes of this are clear: the members of my generation who grew up on G.I. Joe, Ghostbusters, My Little Pony, Care Bears, Transformers, Masters of the Universe and a ton of other neon-colored and sticker-covered pieces of plastic are all sitting in the sweet spot for nostalgia marketing. We're of an age where most of us are gainfully employed and have a little disposable income to play with, we're rapidly gaining on 30 and psychologically grappling with what it means to be really and truly over the first quarter of our lives, and some of us even have small children that now need toys of their own. Therefore, it's no wonder that many of us are plunking down our credit cards to replace the toys Mom and Dad coldly chucked out, to pick up the one figure we'd never been able to track down the first time around, or to grab some newly-sculpted versions that more closely resemble the fantastic characters we held in our heads. All across America new pieces of expensive plastic are cluttering up bookcases, cubicle shelves and monitor tops. (Well, for those of us who still use those giant, clunky CRT displays. I could go off on how the advent of the LCD display has become a serious threat to cubicle toys, but that's something for another essay.)

What interests me is the role these characters play in our psychological lives. I mentioned why they're coming back into vogue for us now, but why were they ever so popular in the first place? After all, they really are little more than colored pieces of formed plastic. Why do action figures hold such appeal? I think that, for me at least, the attraction is twofold. First, though, a little recent history.

Geek Love

A couple of years ago, Hasbro began reissuing updated versions of the Masters of the Universe figures. These new versions were sculpted by a team of artists known as The Four Horsemen, who are a bunch of refugees from Todd McFarlane toys. Now, I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan, which means that I think that Todd McFarlane is a bit of a dick. (Do a Google search on Gaiman vs. McFarlane and the rights to the Angela character to find out why.) Still, I can't dispute that McFarlane Toys makes the most detailed action figures currently on the market. When I would make my weekly trip down to my local comic shop, I'd see these incredible microstatues up on the shelf, with tiny chains, intricate outfits and exquisite paint jobs. They were amazing. Whoever was responsible for these things clearly had a deep love for the characters they were molding, down to the last hair or dent in their armor. Now, I've never been a huge Spawn fan, so I'd always managed to resist their allure. When I heard that these guys were going to be tackling Masters of the Universe, though, a cornerstone of my childhood, I was ecstatic.

When they hit the market, I sheepishly began sneaking off to my local Toys-R-Us to pick up the villains. (The villains were always cooler than the good guys, and I rationalized it to myself that if I was only picking up half the collection, I wasn't a total dork. You hush now.) It started with Skeletor, the bone-faced ultravillain. Sure enough, the detail on him was amazing. The original figures were big, chunky, squat globs of plastic. The new versions were lean, superdetailed, and totally bad-ass. As weird as it sounds, if these characters were real, this is what they would look like. And I knew that the guys making them were just like me – guys who grew up with these characters, whose mental images of them went above and beyond the crude little plastic blobs. There was real love there.

Again, why?

The First Attraction: Philosophy Tokens

One by one, my desk was overrun with the villains from Masters of the Universe. First Skeletor, then Beast Man (who was huge, just the way he should be), then Mer-Man and Tri-Klops and Trap Jaw and Two Bad and Whiplash... Every time a new villain hit the market, I would track them down. I finally gave up this little scavenger hunt around Christmastime this year, partly because I was realizing that I had a problem (both psychologically and with desk space) and because I felt guilty that I might be depriving some kid of the #1 item on his Christmas list.

Not only did I quit stalking the toy aisles, I also cleared off my desk. I put all of these guys into a box in my closet, where I was storing the clutter that used to fill my cube at my old day job. Skeletor, Beast Man, the whole posse went into the box – except for one. Trap Jaw stayed on my desk, over in a corner under my lamp. I have three action figures on my desk now: the homicidal cyborg Trap Jaw, the gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem from the Vertigo comic Transmetropolitan, and the young Lex Luthor from the WB's Smallville. Gone are my Sandman figures, my little General Kael from Willow, and the other stuff. All that remains are these three. Why? Because I identify the most with these three, and having them out helps me keep certain things in mind. As a journalist with his little laptop, Spider reminds me to write everyday, even if it's only in this weblog. As a businessman, Lex reminds me to stay on top of my finances. And as a monster that's more machine than man, Trap Jaw reminds me to close the PowerBook every so often and get outside. (One could argue that a Darth Vader figure would do the same thing, but I think Trap Jaw just looks cooler. All you Star Wars ubergeeks can please put down the torches and pitchforks now, thanks.)

In a way, these guys are the rough equivalent of the little Saint Christophers that some Catholics would install in their cars, or the little portraits of Jesus that some Christians keep by their desks, or even the frogs that feng shui disciples keep by their workspaces. They all serve to keep a certain philosophy in the back of your mind while you're slogging through the daily grind. It's like the juror who wore the Star Trek uniform to the Whitewater trials: no matter how geeky, these cultural artifacts serve as philosophy tokens. If you want to find out about a person's value system, sneak into their work area sometime and check out the crap on their desk and on the walls. We spend a mammoth percentage of our lives locked in our work areas, so it's not surprising that we expend a good amount of time and energy getting those cages just the way we like them. Pictures of our families, postcards from places we want to revisit, even models of the sportscars we're saving up for – they're all there. I have all of this stuff around my work area, including a 1:18 scale red Mini Cooper S. They're little extensions of who we are and what we're working for, to help remind us why we're there.

Which actually brings me to my second theory.

The Second Attraction: Story Tokens

In creative writing, a "story token" is another term for a MacGuffin, the object or objects that a character is searching for. These items then drive the rest of the story – and, in fact, don't really matter that much at all. The definitive example of this is the Maltese falcon. In the abstract, the object in question is utterly useless. It's a stone statue of a bird, as equally worthless as a small glob of shaped, colored platic. One could argue that toy collectors are only in it for the hunt, and therefore the figures really are MacGuffins. I only bring this up, though, to clarify how I'm going to use a slightly different definition for the rest of this essay.

Here, I'm going to use the term 'story token' to describe a small object to which certain characteristics are ascribed. That is, an object which is given certain personality traits based on external stories or actions of one's imagination. Action figures are perfect examples of this. Children do not collect action figures because they're pretty pieces of plastic – they do so in order to live vicariously through them, to use them as starting blocks to trigger imaginative exercises. Again, the Masters of the Universe example. When I was a kid, each Masters of the Universe figure had a small painting on the back of the card, depicting who this character was and what role they played in their fictional universe, a sci-fi fantasy mishmash world called Eternia. He-Man was the big barbarian hero whose main mission was to stop Skeletor, the evil villain who was constantly trying to conquer Eternia. Weirdly enough, neither side ever managed to completely wipe out their opponent. No one ever died in Eternia. It was like a strange set of basic checks and balances was in place in order to make sure neither the right wing nor the left wing completely overtook the land... (Ahem. Sorry, that's something for another essay.)

The point is that what made these characters come alive were the stories. Between the tales on the cards, the comic books that came packaged with every figure and the little weekly cartoon stories spun for us by Filmation and DIC (two of the premiere syndicated cartoon companies of the 80s), we weren't buying the figures for the figures, we were buying them for the stories we could tell once we had them in our collections. I still remember getting all excited every time Grandma or Grandpa would go to their closet and pull out a new action figure for me to play with, as a surprise or a treat. I would rip open the package, plunk myself down with the comic book, thumb eagerly through it and then introduce that character to the rest of the set. It wouldn't be long before I was mixing and matching the accessories from one character with another, or even making new weapons or helmets out of paper or whatever else I had lying around. Kids are fountains of ideas, their little brains racing along at 110 miles an hour to learn about the universe and fill in the gaps of their knowledge with bursts of imagination. By handing children these characters at such a young age, they will forever associate them with the best stories in the world – not the ones in the comics or on the TV screen, but the ones we would tell each other as we met for recess and acted out huge epic battles on the playground. Whether we were playing with the toys themselves in the shade under the giant pine tree out by the basketball courts or if we were ourselves pretending to be the characters, running around madly and screaming "Pow pow pow!" at the tops of our lungs, these characters were alive for us, and played huge roles in our young lives.

As another example, I think this is why the new Star Wars movies don't feel as good for us older folks. The cheesy Jar Jar dialect is just as silly as some of the stuff in the originals, but the new stories that Lucas is trying to tell just aren't as cool as the ones we made up while flopped down on the floor of our living rooms with our 3.75" Artoos and Threepios. The stories we tell ourselves are hugely important, and the toys we play with are merely sparks to get those stories going.

So if we take these ideas into account, how can we build better toys for our kids?

Action Figures and Transmedia Storytelling

Lately, the idea of transmedia storytelling has been gaining some ground both in the ivory tower and in the business world. The most recent example of this, as introduced to me by Dr. Henry Jenkins of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, is the Enter the Matrix video game, which was released between the second and third Matrix movies. The idea was to tell a story set in the open area between films that was somewhat apocryphal – you didn't need it in order to understand the larger narrative, but if you played through the game you could enjoy a clearer picture of the larger mythological tapestry. This sort of technique is called transmedia storytelling because it extends a specific story across different types of media. This differs from the old-school approach of telling tales in different media (like the Masters of the Universe comic books and TV shows) because the video game chapter had a very specific place in the larger story's timeline. In the standard episodic approach enjoyed by things like Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, or even adult cross-media mythologies like Star Trek or Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a story arc that begins in one media usually stays in that media. Tales can be told in comic books that are hinted at in the TV show, but usually the primary media doesn't ever go back to acknowledge what's happening in the secondary media. That is, since Buffy The Vampire Slayer is primarily a TV show (ignoring its cinematic roots for the moment), the spinoff comic books will tell stories based on throwaway hooks and characters in the show, but the show will most likely never acknowledge any original stories that occur in the comic.

If you combined the story token aspect of action figures with true transmedia storytelling, and threw in a good dash of modern technology, you could create a genuinely cool form of collectible-driven narrative.

Modern Masters of the Universe figures come embedded with a chip in their feet which, when introduced to a receiver in the modern Castle Grayskull playset, causes the playset to "speak" in the character's voice. This is neat, but pretty rudimentary. Imagine if the playset itself came with a small screen or a hookup to a computer or television, and a small hard drive filled with episodes that were either preprogrammed into the machine or wirelessly downloaded into it from a remote server based upon which collectible figures were introduced into the set.

In this model, say you had a Castle Grayskull playset and a lone He-Man figure. If you touched the foot of the He-Man figure to the Castle Grayskull, the playset would acknowledge that the He-Man character had been added to the collection and, therefore, unlock the He-Man requirement for all stories that included He-Man. There would be a few stories with just He-Man, of course, so you could then choose from a TiVo-like interface which story you wanted to enjoy – "He-Man's Lone Journey of Self-Discovery", for example, or "He-Man's Discovery of an Ancient Scroll in the Castle Library Which Leads Him to Find the Sword". In short, stories that don't really require a second character.

(Note that these stories aren't the only stories created for the series – a TV show or comic books are also good ideas, but I'll get to that in a moment.)

If you then added a Skeletor figure, you could then unlock:

• all the stories that require only Skeletor


• all the stories that require only He-Man and Skeletor


• the He-Man and Skeletor requirements for all the stories that require both He-Man and Skeletor and character X, Y or Z

In this fashion, the purchase of additional figures would unlock more and more of the larger narrative. Alone, this is a pretty cool gimmick that could drive the purchase of more figures (and warrant higher prices, since there's more enjoyment value, which could then help cover the cost of the additional content creation). Where this gets deeply cool, however, and adds even more drive to purchase additional pieces, is by closely hooking all of these stories together. The Spider-Man comics are infamous for including little editorial boxes at the bottom of panels which reference earlier stories, using notes that say "In Amazing Spider-Man number 322, true believers!", or something along those lines. By using hooks like that, which could appear at the bottom of the screen or at the end of each episode, you could instruct collectors which toys are necessary to unlock certain recipes, in order to enjoy the missing episodes of the narrative. This "recipe" approach could extend across media as well – one of He-Man's allies, Stratos, could show up at the beginning of an episode, and, when queried as to where he'd been, he could reply "Off hunting the Bird Monsters of Feathertron – oh, and by the way, King Beak was killed by Trap Jaw," which could then trigger the desired "What?" response in the viewer. An option would show up which could say, "To view the epic story, 'The Death of King Beak,' please plug the Stratos and Trap Jaw figures into your Castle Grayskull playset! To order these figures now, please go to www.giveusyourmoney.com..."

Wham! Instant commerce.

Philosophy, Technology and Business

I've just given one example on how to use technology to further one half of the appeal of these characters. The next question becomes how to extend that notion to the other half. Of this, I'm not certain – how do you use technology in order to accommodate the use of philosophy tokens, not just smart tokens? If I set a President Bartlet action figure down on my desk, would it wirelessly speak to my system and hook me into a database of the political philosophies of Aaron Sorkin? Would that even be necessary, or beneficial? Is it, perhaps, a matter of choosing which philosophy tokens to place on your desk? If you had a box of small colored stones which represented the kinds of work you needed to do that day, would the digital environment then detect the RFID tags embedded in those stones and provide a work environment designed to accommodate that combination? Say, two blue stones and a green one would say that you needed to focus on finances today, but were also in a cool, mellow mood, and the system would bring to the front your financial statements and fiscal software, and cue up some sweet piano music in the background? Instead of stones, do you pick out certain action figures from your bookcase and bring them to your smart desk? So for the previous scenario you might have little effigies of Alan Greenspan and Norah Jones?

These are some fun examples, but it's obvious that by combining digital storytelling techniques like these, it's possible to catch a glimpse into – at the very least – how we might spark new stories the imaginations of the next generation. And this is only a start – as the technology becomes more affordable, it will be fascinating to see the new opportunities for digital narrative that emerge. I haven't even addressed the idea of real interactivity in this scenario. I've been reading this book called Hamlet on the Holodeck by MIT's Dr. Janet Murray, and it's obvious that real, true interactivity with these toys will be the key to the next level of play – although one could argue that's already built in. Just ask the kids sitting under the big pine tree, shouting "Pow pow pow!" at the tops of their lungs.

Time will tell. As with any good technology, the answer, I'm sure, is to just keep playing.

I want to be a gonzo journalist, riding my homicidal cyborg into the sunset!

Man, I need to sleep more.

Ask and ye shall receive. It's not any of the artists I was whining for earlier, but there's a new album out from Diana Krall, called The Girl in the Other Room. What's great about this album is it has new songs. Usually Diana's albums are all covers of jazz classics, but this one features all-new material, penned by the lovely Ms. Krall and her newly-minted husband, Elvis Costello (!).

By the by, I would like to hoist the union of these two up as evidence that even kind-of-frumpy, funky, geeky guys can get hot chicks. Attaboy, Elvis!

One of my clients is a startup medical practice up in Boston called Renaissance Health. We're working on putting together their full website, but even the placeholder site I threw together is kind of pretty. Ah, Italy!

In this morning's New York Times, they ran a story on Steve Stanzak, an NYU Creative Writing student who claims to have been living in a subbasement of the library because he couldn't afford university dorm housing, much less an apartment in New York. I believe it. When I was looking into grad programs at NYU, even university housing ran over a thousand dollars a month.

This is yet another demonstration that America is failing its students. It's one thing to deny a student to a university due to his academics not being a good fit – if you don't have the grades to get into the Ivy League, it's too bad, but you had control over that – but if you just don't have the cash, that's where the government should step in. And not just to the tune of a federal loan, either. I'm talking reasonably deciding what the person needs. The government needs to do the math to calculate what a realistic living expense is for those conditions and then step up. A student should be able to enroll in the best school they are able to be accepted into, regardless of financial status. That's how, as a country, we defeat international competitors like Japan. Our "education president" needs to put his money where his mouth is. At the moment, he's going down in history as the president who gave the finger to the United Nations and hauled our country into a second Vietnam in order to look good for daddy.

Argh.

I wonder if Mr. Stanzak would have had this same problem if he'd been a math major, or an engineering major, instead of doing a "fluffy" major like creative writing. Or, for that matter, if he'd been African-American. Or even a woman. Instead, he's a white male from a divorced family somewhere, and his only "minority" spin is that he's gay, which, of course, under this administration wins you zero points.

Of course, there is some speculation as to whether or not Mr. Stanzak's story is actually true. Check out the story and decide for yourself: The New York Times > New York Region > Yes, Some Students Live in the Library (But Not Like This). One way or the other, we've got to see some major improvements in the education system in this country. I wonder if Kerry will do anything to fix that.

I am hereby bummed because neither R.E.M., Counting Crows, Tori Amos, or any of my favorite groups have new albums on the immediate horizon. The Crows have one track on the Shrek 2 soundtrack, Tori has another B-sides collection coming out, and apparently R.E.M. just released some new live DVD, but I want albums, dang it.

I was sitting in the car in the rain, listening to the B-sides from Tori's Under the Pink, remembering high school and my favorite stuff, and feeling myself coming back to that old mindset. It was like slipping into a pair of comfortable slippers. The tooth-and-nail competitiveness of D.C. was gone, the smell of spring rain was everywhere, and I found myself daydreaming of the farmhouse in the country where I could write and monkey with media ideas again, instead of constantly running against deadlines and hounding deadbeat clients and trying to make ends meet and becoming necessarily alpha and so nasty.

I love days like this. I need more of them.

Sometimes the Lord sends just the right kind of day at the right time. Today was a green, beautifully rainy day. No violent thunderstorms, just spring showers. I did some work, listened to some Norah Jones and Pat Metheny, updated my personal timeline, snuggled down in one of my favorite soft sweaters and hung out with the cats. Buster, our longhair, is curled up sound asleep on my bed right now.

It's a good day for jazz and being sweetly mellow.

You know how Alex Trebek still doesn't look quite right without his moustache? Yeah, it's the same thing with the beardless Salman Rushdie. Weird.

My brain tonight is bouncing from one piece of media to another, in part due to the recent infusion of Tarantino's Kill Bill Volumes I and II. I missed the first one in the theater, so I rented it this week as background noise during the workathon, then caught the sequel with Nick Ferraro in the movie theater under Union Station on Friday night.

In the same way that Kill Bill cut from black and white to color, from widescreen to square screen, from live action to anime, my mind is leaping around like a Brazilian tree frog on cocaine.

Tonight, I went to a birthday party for my old friend Hillary Tisdale, where I got to hang out with Hill and her family and David Seitzinger, who has been out of town for way too long. A wonderful time was had swapping war stories and catching up, and playing a couple rounds of video games afterward. Thanks, H & K & D, for a great evening. I wish I could have seen Phoebe.

This week I broke off a friendship with someone that I used to be very, very close to, but who has since become less than a stellar friend. It's strange, because while we have grown apart to some degree, I always felt that the connection between us at the base, at the core, was still strong. She was someone I felt I could count on, but in the last eighteen months (since the bad times that went down last January), she just hasn't been around. In fact, she sort of turned her back on me when I was having trouble. Since all that noise went down, I've lost three friends, all of whom are sort of the same "type" of women. That really makes me sad. The first one that left was a girlfriend. The second one was a friend from college, and third was a friend from my year spent abroad. All three are very driven people, people who I respect a great deal, and were people with whom I thought I shared real bonds. I was wrong on all three fronts. That's got me a little blue. Tomorrow I'll take her picture down out of the frame on my wall.

This week I have had very high days and very low days. The very high points came after meeting with clients and feeling like we were doing great things to change the world, and on days where I got to speak with old friends and relax in the company of my social family. The low points came also after client interactions that were excruciatingly frustrating and confusing, and interacting with people who have coldly extracted themselves from that family.

It's been both a very long week, and a very fast one. I rolled out three projects (The Virtual Book Tour, Stephanie Aaron Voiceover, and Barbara Figgins Voiceover), did a huge amount of hammering on three or four more. I'm standing on the precipice of being able to completely fiscally separate myself from the previous fiscal year, my first totally-freelance year. I'm getting ready to move to Chicago around the middle of next month. I'm laying the groundwork for some new clients out that way, and already making plans to hang out with some old friends and family. I'm considering taking an extended road trip late this week to take care of business. I've restarted my exercise program in earnest, and done something like 70 miles on the exercise bike this week. I should have a decent-sized number of client things up and running this week as well, knock on wood. Business is going well, and is also threatening to kill me.

It's 1 o'clock in the morning here in Washington, D.C. My dad had his fifty-seventh birthday this week. I am twenty-six years old, and it feels like I'm a hundred and ten.

Miles to go before I sleep.

So apparently the casino garage collapse that killed four construction workers and injured twenty others was the result of last-minute design changes to speed the job and save money. I've dealt with this same problem over and over again with clients. I love making magic happen with limited funds. I'm the king of making miracles happen on shoestring budgets. But when you try and cheat the old adage of "Good, fast, cheap, pick two," you wind up taking it in the ear. Or worse, as this story proves.

Those of you who might ever be in the position to hire one, listen to your designer. They're not housepainters, they're consultants, goddamn it, and if they're worth anything they won't just throw up their hands and say "the client's always right" until they've been pushed too damn far. You wouldn't dream of whining and complaining about what your doctor or your lawyer tells you to do – that's what you went to them for in the first place. (Of course, my pharmacist mom will certainly post something snide to point out how patients will hardly ever simply listen to their doctors, but whatever. I did it for you, mom, so you don't have to bother.)

If you don't listen to your doctor and you get worse, it's your fault. If you don't listen to your lawyer and you get sued, it's your fault. If you don't listen to your designer and your building falls down and kills people, guess whose fault that is?

I'm just waiting for the lawsuits to start on this one.

I've been working like a mad fiend here these last couple of weeks, and it's not going to be slowing down too much very soon. Keep an eye on this space for new announcements!

So I'm sitting here working like crazy, and I fired up Barenaked Ladies' "Another Postcard" in iTunes and then launched another app. I'm staring at the dock, and damned if the app icon wasn't bouncing in time to the rhythm of the song.

It'd be a ridiculous waste of processing resources, but how neat would it be to have that actually happen all the time? To time the activities of the machine according to the beat of the music? It'd be like working in a whacked Moby video...

Yeah, that is a pretty dumb idea, isn't it? ;)

My friend and lawyer Mike Wasylik has the cutest kid. Especially when he goes "Waaasssuuup???"

Courtesy of yet another meme stolen from SarahScott:

he name of Geoffrey has given you good business ability and a high regard for proper standards of conduct. You have an appreciation for good music, literature, art, drama, and philosophy, and you could be creative in those fields. An outdoor life also appeals to you and you could find much enjoyment in the beauties of nature. In the business world, your reserve and outward placidity command respect for your authority. However, in your personal life, this reserve and reticence are often mistaken for coldness and lack of feeling, with the result that others find it difficult to understand you.

Scribble scribble scribble clunk clunk clunk.

Two hands falling off, followed by my head.

So I've been working on this project for a new client – it's going to be a big project, which is cool, but it's going to have to be built extremely quickly, which is slightly less than cool. In order to help determine the amount of time necessary to build the site (which has dynamic elements out the wazoo), I'm hand-drawing a set of bluelines. (Bluelines, for the uninitiated, are basically sketches of each page with notes as to what link goes where.) It's an awesome visualization tool, it (theoretically) takes a lot less time than HTML coding, and helps to get everyone on the same page as far as the scope of work is concerned. I'm having a ball doing it – it's been a while since I've hand-drawn anything and been able to bill for it – but I did this for almost seven hours so far today and I still have a long way to go yet tonight. Oy, my drawing hand!

The title of this post? That would be the sound of said hand falling off. :)

Another reason I want to go to the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT: check out calendar item 18.

Things like the New Funnies Lecture Series are why I want to go to MIT. Oh, and more importantly, things like Theory and Practice of Non-linear and Interactive Narrative. Wow.

Becuase it's there: KHAAAN!

So I don't know when Doonesbury.com got swallowed up by the Slate empire, but Doonesbury@Slate is worth checking out for the dancing Uncle Duke that greets you at the front gate. Make sure you have your sound on for the full effect.

Oh my gosh. I was just clicking down through my daily clicks list and I hit today's Doonesbury. Oh my gosh.

This is one of those moments where you don't know where it's going to go. Trudeau has criticized our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan many times, but it's been often written off as Trudeau being, well, Trudeau. How do you up your attention? How do you shake that up?

Read the strip.

One more little tidbit. If you go to the Motion homepage and look down to the image of the G5 (this one, if this link continues to work), if you look closely the display in there has weird feet. Rounded feet, like the G5's. Like the image that was making the circuit on the rumor sites there a while back about the new Apple Cinema Displays. Hmmm.

If it is indeed the new display, I've only got one thing to say: It's about freakin' time. The buzz has been out for months about how Apple's got newer/cheaper/bigger displays in the pipeline, but apparently component shortages and insistently high LCD prices have been keeping them in the wings. Personally, I think it's about time that Apple let these babies out of the bag, and really did some neat stuff with them. The bevels on the existing displays are too damn big for those of us who want to have multiple displays on their desktops. Alas, it doesn't appear that said bevels have shrunk that much on the one in the picture, but a man can hope.

Also, a radical price drop would be a wonderful thing. $699 for their little 17" displays is ridiculous in today's market, as is $1299 for the 20" and $1999 for the 23". Now, I can't speak to the price of components, but as a consumer I'd love to see the 17" for $499, the 20" for $799 and the 23" for $1299. I have a hard time justifying even $1299 for a monitor – thirteen hundred dollars – but they are such beautiful displays. The ability to buy two 17"s and a 20" for under $2000 would be a dealmaker for me. As it is, that little setup would run you about $2700. Ouch. That might be chump change for the guys out there doing major bling bling video work, but for the wee shops like mine, that's some serious money. I know Apple stuff always comes at a premium, but I'd love to be able to assemble a personal desktop command center for under $4000. C'mon, Apple, whaddaya say?

Ho-lee... In a special Sunday announcement today, Apple whipped the sheet off of Final Cut Pro HD, Shake 3.5, a beta for something new called Xsan (Storage Area Network), and – here's the cool part – Motion, a new product which seems to be a direct shot across the bow of Adobe After Effects. Now, it doesn't seem as fully-featured as After Effects, instead sitting somewhere between Shake and LiveType, but for $299 it delivers such sweet little morsels as particle effects, and it's tightly integrated into Final Cut Pro. Nice. Looks like the last piece of my Adobe video arsenal may be on its way out the door.

Hey, whoa – the woman behind Wonkette is hot! Check out the story on her in today's Times, First With the Scoop, if Not the Truth.

Just goes to show that we political/tech geeks can be cute, too. ;)

Am having one of those days when the work is piled as high as my ears and none of it looks very inviting. After a couple very large holes were blown in my week (taxes, my main computer breaking down and having to be lobotomized and then hauled into the shop, and finally blowing a flat on the way to said shop), I'm running about seven days behind. Am currently wondering exactly how many hours of sleep will need to be sacrificed, and how many 2-liters of Mountain Dew will need to be chugged, in order to catch up again. Yuck.

And I was so looking forward to having a weekend right now. Rats!

One of the preeminent philosophers of our time, Peter Singer, has a new book coming up called The President of Good and Evil: Taking George Bush Seriously. The British newspaper The Guardian has just interviewed him about it. I don't know if I'd read the book or not – it sounds like it would just be more of the same intellectual griping that I hear day in and day out from my friends. It is, however, nice to know that the minds of others are following the same paths.

Wow. The new Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is scheduled to open on May 23. The place cost a whopping $165 million dollars. $165,000,000. That's positively inspiring. My question, though: is its bravely modernist architecture something that will stand the test of time? Check out this slideshow of the new building as it's being developed. It's beautiful, but also weirdly dated, just like those big crumpled-paper buildings by Frank Gehry.

Don't get me wrong, buildings like these are architecturally beautiful, but I wonder whether or not such great works of architectural art are best suited for public use. Do buildings so adamantly designed, not as a purely functional work but as something very clearly artistic, only bait the fiscal conservatives out there to rant and roar about the misuse of public funds? The populace of Seattle is a very liberal bunch, and they voted in the tax increase that paid for it, but I wonder about the ammo this provides to the opposition, all those people out there who snarl and snap about the NEA and the NEH. Should such artistic constructions be restricted to the homes and private buildings of those who are willing to pay for them, or are they better suited to be considered public works of art, which cannot be bought and sold?

Okay, so she may or may not ever get around to reading this, but I wanted to share this with y'all because it's so cool. My friend Laura Thomas was just accepted into the JET program for next year, so she's going to be headed over across the pond this summer! Wow. I've never been to Japan. Looks like I might have to rectify that sometime next spring. :)

So I'm not that annoyed about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban being released on June 4 – I mean, it's kind of cool that we won't have to wait until the winter to see the next one – but I still think of the HP movies as something best enjoyed around the holidays. There's something wonderful about coming out of one of those movies just as the snow is beginning for fall, or going to see one with your younger relatives after a big holiday dinner. That's why I'm happy that next year, according to this story at scifi.com, Harry Potter and the Epic Wait for a Potty Break Goblet of Fire is set to be released on November 18. Yay!

Ask and ye shall receive: from The New York Times, Campaign 2004 > Kerry Unveils College-Tuition Assistance Plan. Now that's Presidential behavior.

Anyone with a college education who watched the President's news conference last night – heck, anyone with any education – should now understand why the President got such lousy grades at Yale. Whenever he was presented with a question, he yabbered on for a minute or two, repeating the same things he'd already said ("Before 9/11, the country wasn't on a war footing – now we are") over and over, no matter what the question was. The reporters fielded some great questions, like "Do you feel you owe the country an apology?" and "Over the course of this whole state of affairs, you have never once admitted you were wrong – why is that?" And every time he didn't answer the question, only rephrased his previous answer.

The academics in the crowd will recognize this behavior. When you take an essay test and you don't know the answer to the question, you rephrase what you do know in order to fill up the white space. At one point in the press conference, the camera cut to Condoleezza Rice in the first row, and she was furious. Now, whether she was angry because the President was deviating from the talking points memo that he'd been assigned, or if it was because the reporters were fielding questions that they hadn't prepared for, I don't know. Regardless, the way that the President got up there and dodged those questions was positively – dare I say it? – Clintonesque. The only thing he could have said that would have been slicker:"Well, that depends on what the definition of the term 'WMD'..."

Look, I'm a registered Republican. I'm from Ohio, a classically Republican state. My parents were Republican. That said, I take a very moderate position on politics, and I believe that both the extreme liberals and the extreme conservatives have their heads in the sand.

I believe that the President of the United States should be someone who cares deeply for the basic human rights of all individuals, regardless of religious persuasion or even their nationality. If the U.S. is to claim the role of the new Roman Empire, which we were sort of doing before all this nonsense broke out and we lost the support of pretty much the entire world, then we need better leaders.

Do I think that John Kerry is that leader? I don't know. I'm uninspired by Kerry – in fact, I'm uninspired by pretty much all of the candidates being fielded this year, and I don't see any great ones on the horizon, either. If Kerry fails this fall, then the Democrats will most likely field Hillary Clinton in 2008, which I'm not sure is such a good idea. Her character issues aside, consider the questionable impact a female President would have on the respect held for the position by countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. If your religion insists that a woman should be covered in a burka and be subservient to the menfolk, how badly would you chafe under the leadership of a woman in pants?

What America needs is a someone to stand up and take the middle back. America needs someone who will stand up for what America was designed to be, a place where all people are created equal, regardless of religion, race, sex, or sexual preference. While we may be "one nation under God," I believe that phrase should mean "one nation under your God," whether that's God or Allah or Ra or even the atheist/agnostic god Science. Our President has been quoted as saying that perhaps atheists and agnostics should be denied the vote because America is supposed to be "one nation under God".

This is not Presidential behavior.

The President of the United States should be a unifier, not a divider. He or she should inspire those under them to greatness as a role model for the youth of America, if not the world. They should be a prime example of what education and intelligence and moral strength and courage can accomplish. They should consider the needs of everyone equally, and given those concerns, navigate a course to the future with a strong, confident hand on the wheel. These are all the characteristics of a leader.

How many of those phrases do you think describe our President? How many of those phrases do you think describe any of the political candidates we've seen in the last twelve years?

Oh, this is too much fun. And eerily accurate!

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

I'm utterly flattered that I have been chosen to join the ranks of the geek liasons. If anyone needs me, I'll be over at the bar with Agent Mulder, grilling him for war stories.

Heh. I am inordinately amused. Plus, I'm not sure whether to be entertained or terrified by the fact that SarahScott is 2% geekier than me.

(Thanks for the break from the taxes, Kasi – I needed that.)

According to an article in The New York Times this morning, Around 770 Die in Recent Iraq Fighting, the number of dead is skyrocketing. In the last eight days, by an AP count at least 62 US troops, 2 non-US soldiers and around 882 Iraqis have been killed. It's easy to shrug this off as the cost of war on both sides, until you hit the fourth paragraph:

Hospital director Rafie al-Issawi said most of the 600 dead in Fallujah were women, children and elderly. But he refused to give their exact numbers, saying that doing so would suggest that the remaining dead -- young, military-aged men -- were all insurgents, which he said was not the case.

According to U.S. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt:

"The coalition casualties since April 1 run about 70 personnel. ... The casualty figures we have received from the enemy are somewhere about 10 times that amount, what we've inflicted on the enemy," Kimmitt told a news conference.

"In terms of civilian casualties, there is no reliable, authoritative figure out there. We would ask the Ministry of Health, once Iraqi control ... is allowed back in Fallujah, they can get a fair, honest and credible figure and not one that is somehow filtered through some of the local propaganda machines," he said.

This is insane. People are dying every day over there – Americans, Iraqis, military personnel and everyday citizens just trying to get by. Most people in these circumstances just want to wake up, eat, work, play with their children, spend time with their significant others and go back to bed. These people want to live their lives. And we, the great American Empire, are doing jack to actually improve the quality of those lives. Instead, we're actively working to end them.

Congratulations, President Bush. The media is now getting hold of the very numbers you've fought so hard to quell. How does it feel to go down in history as the man who started the new Vietnam?

(Cross-posted from my writing journal.)

It's been a while since I've done any major writing on this journal about Bones of the Angel, and it's worth a quick update to discuss what directions the story is currently taking as it slouches towards Bethlehem.

It's funny – while I've always wanted to tell stories, my interests in video gaming, film and visual design all have me trending away from straight-up fiction. I love reading and writing, but I've been finding myself getting bored with pure text. A while ago, a friend asked to see some of the different story ideas I was currently working on, so I hauled open the top drawer of this huge antique mahogany filing cabinet I keep in my bedroom/office and pulled out a couple dozen overstuffed white envelopes. Essentially, each story idea I have gets jotted down somewhere on a piece of blank white paper (I can't stand the lined stuff) and then stuffed into one of these big white envelopes. Notes, sketches, concepts, all of it goes into the envelopes, which are then brought out as each project demands.

Anyway, I pulled out these envelopes and started flipping through them. What we found is that they were primarily drawings of the characters with notes scribbled around them. My friend looked at this and sneered, "This is great writing. Have you ever thought of being a cartoonist?"

Sarcasm did not become her.

It did get me thinking, though. Instead of viewing my continuing arc towards visual storytelling as a failure as a writer, I should start researching other ways to tell these stories, as film or videogames or comic books. What concerns me, though, is that the directions in which my work is trending may be a little too arthouse and not enough Hollywood. Hence, this list of recent influences, in order to get some of these ideas squared away.

Religion

First and foremost, I've been doing a lot of thinking about religion over the last ten years. My relationship with religion has always been a difficult one, having grown up in a superconservative small town in Ohio. I was forced to examine my beliefs when I was pretty young, after having gotten laughed out of Sunday School for believing in the Big Bang. I began to suspect that there may be a growing rift between God and the church, and I decided to take my relationship with God elsewhere. It may be the height of arrogance, perhaps, but I do not believe that I need a procession of men in big pointy hats to act as a translator between me and The Man Upstairs. I now consider myself the religious equivalent of a free agent.

I've had a lot of brilliant conversations with incredible people about religion, and that's where Bones of the Angel is going to get weird. There are scenes in the story where two characters are driving somewhere in a car, or sitting in a bar somewhere to collect their thoughts, and they start talking about religion. There are a series of main characters in this book, and I want to have my narrator/avatar talk to each one of them, one-on-one, to explore some of these different ideas of faith.

As you can imagine, this is making the plot pretty herky-jerky. There are some interesting scenes of the old ultraviolence, as Anthony Burgess might say, but these are weird little flashes in what is otherwise sort of an art-house flick. Lots of dialogue and philosophy. It may mean that it won't sell, but this is still what I want to be writing now.

Hayao Miyazaki

I've been getting into Japanese animation lately, in part due to the excellent recommendations of my friends Aaron and Laura. Some of them I obviously appreciate more than others – for instance, I loved Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust but didn't appreciate Neon Genesis Evangelion as much as I would have expected. While this may be considered heretical, I thought Armitage: Dual Matrix was cool but Akira was just a little over-the-top. (Although even Armitage's moral at the end was, again, pure Velveeta.)

So what is it about Japanese animation that I really like? I like the way you can do anything, I like the blend of technology and traditions, and I love the way it's literally art in motion.

Most of all, I love Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki's films are the epitome of what I love about Japanese animation. His cinematography and his use of light and color are just flat-out beautiful. The flight scenes in Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky are so perfectly graceful, as is the train scene from Spirited Away. Most of all, though, I love the way his characters are so rarely "good" or "evil." I love that. That's so much more real than the terrorists and supervillians that tend to populate so much American animation and film. Even the villains have motivations, often fairly justified. That's something I'm trying to incorporate into my own work.

Again, more arthouse than Hollywood, but what the hell.

Et Cetera.

Other things that have to be included in my influences:

• Jeunet and Caro", especially Jeunet's Amelie.


• Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.


• Jonathan Carroll.


• Umberto Eco.


• Gabriel Garcia Marquez.


• Monet and the Impressionists.


• Robertson Davies.


• The Final Fantasy videogames.


• Alex Robinson, "Box Office Poison"


• Scott McCloud


• Joss Whedon, especially his use of humor. (Damn you, Fox.)


• Jim Henson and Frank Oz.


• Brian Froud.


• Nick Bantock.

I may well update this list as more of those "Oh, yeah, and those guys too" moments hit me this week, but that's where I'm coming from now.

So how can I use new tech to build out on these ideas? There's a lot of cool stuff going on out there with Bluetooth and 802.11b, and sooner or later someone like me is going to write a novel consisting entirely of multiple weblogs maintained by each character. I'm seriously considering trying out an animatic for Bones of the Angel, something sort of like an animated storyboard with character voices and music, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be a pain to watch a long story told in that format. (Although it might be useful as a pitch to turn it into a full-length something else.) I could do something cool with transmedia storytelling, doing short films interspersed with playable levels and extra components, like a book bundled in with the other media to use for clues... But, I'm not sure that wouldn't just be annoying.

Hm. I need to get into a Master's or doctorate program to try and play with some of these ideas with some other like-minded folks, and then maybe tie them into some bigger campaigns (like, doing that story idea with the weblogs for a big film, kind of like what they did for A.I., perhaps). Working on it.

It's been a while since I've done any major writing on this journal about Bones of the Angel, and it's worth a quick update to discuss what directions the story is currently taking as it slouches towards Bethlehem.

It's funny – while I've always wanted to tell stories, my interests in video gaming, film and visual design all have me trending away from straight-up fiction. I love reading and writing, but I've been finding myself getting bored with pure text. A while ago, a friend asked to see some of the different story ideas I was currently working on, so I hauled open the top drawer of this huge antique mahogany filing cabinet I keep in my bedroom/office and pulled out a couple dozen overstuffed white envelopes. Essentially, each story idea I have gets jotted down somewhere on a piece of blank white paper (I can't stand the lined stuff) and then stuffed into one of these big white envelopes. Notes, sketches, concepts, all of it goes into the envelopes, which are then brought out as each project demands.

Anyway, I pulled out these envelopes and started flipping through them. What we found is that they were primarily drawings of the characters with notes scribbled around them. My friend looked at this and sneered, "This is great writing. Have you ever thought of being a cartoonist?"

Sarcasm did not become her.

It did get me thinking, though. Instead of viewing my continuing arc towards visual storytelling as a failure as a writer, I should start researching other ways to tell these stories, as film or videogames or comic books. What concerns me, though, is that the directions in which my work is trending may be a little too arthouse and not enough Hollywood. Hence, this list of recent influences, in order to get some of these ideas squared away.

Religion

First and foremost, I've been doing a lot of thinking about religion over the last ten years. My relationship with religion has always been a difficult one, having grown up in a superconservative small town in Ohio. I was forced to examine my beliefs when I was pretty young, after having gotten laughed out of Sunday School for believing in the Big Bang. I began to suspect that there may be a growing rift between God and the church, and I decided to take my relationship with God elsewhere. It may be the height of arrogance, perhaps, but I do not believe that I need a procession of men in big pointy hats to act as a translator between me and The Man Upstairs. I now consider myself the religious equivalent of a free agent.

I've had a lot of brilliant conversations with incredible people about religion, and that's where Bones of the Angel is going to get weird. There are scenes in the story where two characters are driving somewhere in a car, or sitting in a bar somewhere to collect their thoughts, and they start talking about religion. There are a series of main characters in this book, and I want to have my narrator/avatar talk to each one of them, one-on-one, to explore some of these different ideas of faith.

As you can imagine, this is making the plot pretty herky-jerky. There are some interesting scenes of the old ultraviolence, as Anthony Burgess might say, but these are weird little flashes in what is otherwise sort of an art-house flick. Lots of dialogue and philosophy. It may mean that it won't sell, but this is still what I want to be writing now.

Hayao Miyazaki

I've been getting into Japanese animation lately, in part due to the excellent recommendations of my friends Aaron and Laura. Some of them I obviously appreciate more than others – for instance, I loved Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust but didn't appreciate Neon Genesis Evangelion as much as I would have expected. While this may be considered heretical, I thought Armitage: Dual Matrix was cool but Akira was just a little over-the-top. (Although even Armitage's moral at the end was, again, pure Velveeta.)

So what is it about Japanese animation that I really like? I like the way you can do anything, I like the blend of technology and traditions, and I love the way it's literally art in motion.

Most of all, I love Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki's films are the epitome of what I love about Japanese animation. His cinematography and his use of light and color are just flat-out beautiful. The flight scenes in Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky are so perfectly graceful, as is the train scene from Spirited Away. Most of all, though, I love the way his characters are so rarely "good" or "evil." I love that. That's so much more real than the terrorists and supervillians that tend to populate so much American animation and film. Even the villains have motivations, often fairly justified. That's something I'm trying to incorporate into my own work.

Again, more arthouse than Hollywood, but what the hell.

Et Cetera.

Other things that have to be included in my influences:

• Jeunet and Caro, especially Jeunet's Amelie.


• Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.


• Jonathan Carroll.


• Umberto Eco.


• Gabriel Garcia Marquez.


• Monet and the Impressionists.


• Robertson Davies.


• The Final Fantasy videogames.


• Alex Robinson, "Box Office Poison"


• Scott McCloud


• Joss Whedon, especially his use of humor. (Damn you, Fox.)


• Jim Henson and Frank Oz.


• Brian Froud.


• Nick Bantock.

I may well update this list as more of those "Oh, yeah, and those guys too" moments hit me this week, but that's where I'm coming from now.

So how can I use new tech to build out on these ideas? There's a lot of cool stuff going on out there with Bluetooth and 802.11b, and sooner or later someone like me is going to write a novel consisting entirely of multiple weblogs maintained by each character. I'm seriously considering trying out an animatic for Bones of the Angel, something sort of like an animated storyboard with character voices and music, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be a pain to watch a long story told in that format. (Although it might be useful as a pitch to turn it into a full-length something else.) I could do something cool with transmedia storytelling, doing short films interspersed with playable levels and extra components, like a book bundled in with the other media to use for clues... But, I'm not sure that wouldn't just be annoying.

Hm. I need to get into a Master's or doctorate program to try and play with some of these ideas with some other like-minded folks, and then maybe tie them into some bigger campaigns (like, doing that story idea with the weblogs for a big film, kind of like what they did for A.I., perhaps). Working on it.

Apologies for the radio silence in this journal lately. I've been doing a great deal of client work, as well as some just general thinking. I have some plans and new concepts, but they're not ready for "prime time" yet.

For more news and updates, please refer to my regular weblog at www.inkblotsmag.com/voice/totq/. Thanks!

So there's a neat New York Times article today called Out of Hollywood, Rising Fascination With Video Games, which talks about these big directors making the jump to videogames. This is kind of cool, but I suspect that there's going to be a lot of bad games rising out of this first. Eventually, though, I think this could be a good thing, especially for the concept of transmedia storytelling. Definitely something I'd like to play around with myself. Hmmm.

Hot diggety. If this thing drives and rides as well as its press release reads, I'll be the proud owner of one of these babies come the end of the summer. Check out the new Ford Escape Hybrid SUV.

Update: Oh, I just found the full Ford Escape Hybrid site. Oops.

Nice Flash there, guys. Sexxxy.

My friend Kasi just pointed out that the first result on a Google search for 'jew' is a hate site. That ain't right. So, Jew.

Oh, no. Nicked from Scott Andrew: the horror that is Beatallica.

That is wrong on so many levels. I love it.

Wow, that took forever. Last summer, when Blogger "upgraded" their servers, something got completely FUBARed with Ken Schultz's "The Thin Guy Diaries," which was a staple of Inkblots' Voice section. I went in and tried to fix it, but to no avail. Since then, I've been trying to resuscitate the damn thing whenever I got some spare time (and y'all know how often I sit around twiddling my thumbs). Long story short, last night I gave Blogger the finger and did a new Moveable Type install, whipped up a revamped logo, and relaunched The Thin Guy Diaries by Ken Schultz. I backed up the archives, so one of these days I'll be able to bring those back, but at least Ken, like the Cubs, is back in business.

Welcome back, buddy. Sorry it took me so long!

Nice. Nicked from k10k, the beautiful little trailer for Garden State, written and directed by Zach Braff, the neurotic lead guy from NBC's "Scrubs". Check it out – there's some great cinematography going on here.

Yo, Chicago folks – where are all the great art house theaters?

I find it greatly amusing that the ads for The Matrix: Revolutions is being pitched with the simple catchphrase, "complete the trilogy". Uh, yeah – because the only people who would buy that piece of schlock are the completists.

Which, unfortunately, probably includes me. One of these days. *sigh* Maybe someday they'll release a Super Secret Special Apology Edition that, y'know, doesn't suck?

Yeah, I know. A man can dream, though.

I'm working on bringing Ken back online – stay tuned.

While I'm a little behind on the announcement of this one, my friend (and {fray} alum) Tom Bridge just rolled out a new project, The Four Corners, which appears to be an ambitious weblog celebrating the way everything intertwines. I'm very impressed, and am scouring through my personal notes to find something I could submit. Good on ya, Tom!

What did I do with my weekend? First I had a fabulous Saturday night with Nick F. and SarahScott and her friends Jesse, Adam and Steph, which resulted in a conversation that lasted until 4AM. Love those. Then, on Sunday, I started working on the idea of doing some more character illustrations for my novel, Bones of the Angel.

And here our revels began.

The trouble I'm having is getting my narrator to become a fully-realized character. I know how I want him to grow and change over the course of the story, but I don't really have a good grip on who this guy is yet. Being the largely visual guy I am, I've resorted to doing character sketches and storyboards for parts of the story, to figure out where it slows down and how to get some of these characters to be a little more 3-D. So I broke out some of the comic books I've been reading and started to look for characters that had an element to them that I was looking for. Haven't nailed down the troublesome character yet, but I did come up with a pretty darn good rendition of one of the other main characters, Michael Coldman. Check it out.

The most influential artist du jour was hands down David Finch, who has been doing some amazing pencil work on Ultimate X-Men for the last little while. (Yes, I'm a comic book geek. When you combine passions for the visual arts and storytelling in one head, of course you're going to like comics.) What's interesting is that this is the same character that I previously drew over here. It's remarkable how much one man's art style can evolve over the course of a year – I'm moving away from the more rounded, Disneyfied edges and over towards the more angular, sharp edges of Finch and his lot. It's interesting and exciting, actually – I'm going to try and render all the characters of this story in this maner and post them to that characters page.

Watch this – the problematic Mr. St. John will be the last one up there, I just know it.

Back when I was the Web Producer for The Advisory Board, and it came time for me to bail, and I had to interview candidates for my replacement, my boss gushed about how the guy who would eventually replace me had thirty websites on his resume. At the time, I remember being rather impressed as well.

Then tonight I started updating the links page over on geoffreylong.com. Ho-lee cow. Now, sure, a good number of these are little one-page deals I've done for Sound Advice, but there are forty-three links in the "sites I've built" category, with another four over in the portfolio section which are no longer around, and another three nearing completion. Oh! And of course the list doesn't include geoffreylong.com itself. So my site list is skyrocketing up towards and over fifty. Jeez!

Do I get some kind of "qualified lame-ass" award for this, or are the bags under my eyes and the ghastly white pallor reward enough?

Well, now, this is certainly interesting. Photographic and documented truth that our President is a big fat liar – not just about the whole WMD state of affairs, but about all the lip service he's been paying to the firefighters, the children's hospitals, the retirees, the education sector... One damn lie after another.

Oh, and in case you're going to start complaining that this was whipped up by some leftist whack job, check out where this is hosted. Yes, it was assembled by Democrats, but it's the Democratic Appropriations Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bush lies, folks. He lies. Forget the 9/11 tearjerker ads, forget the attack ads, forget the ol' Texas bumpkin charm. Examine his record – it's riddled with awful, horrible credibility gaps so large you could pilot, oh, say, a banner-carrying aircraft carrier through it.

I'm not one of those fanatic leftists who foams at the mouth at any mention of tax cuts or whatever. I'm a registered Republican, for crying out loud. In actuality, I'm a centrist who adamantly believes in the separation of church and state and takes a global view on peace and prosperity. I don't subscribe to this "if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists" nonsense, I don't believe in his erasure of the line between church and state, and I don't believe that marriage is an inherently Christian practice any more than it can be an inherently Muslim, Buddhist, or even athiest practice. I don't believe that a state has any place to force a church to recognize a marriage, but the state shouldn't be able to force a church not to recognize one either – that's what separation of church and state means.

Oh, and all this fooferall about "civil unions"? They're marriages. If we're getting our panties all up in a bunch about terminology, which seems to be the case, let's go all the way and insist that the only institution capable of conducting marriages is the church, the Christian church. Representatives of the state shouldn't be able to conduct marriages period, if they're an "inherently religious" state of affairs. Call all state-conducted weddings "civil unions", and it'll be equal. Call a heterosexual bond a marriage and a homosexual bond a civil union? Why? What's the point? If you insist that it can't be a marriage because that's what the law says, ask why the law says it. If it goes back to it being a Biblical edict, that's a violation of the separation of church and state, and should be thrown out. I believe saying that a bond between two people of different sexes is X and two people of different sexes is Y is just as discriminatory as saying that a bond between two people of one race is X and two people of another is Y. I don't see any other way around this argument, without resorting to the Bible, which the foundation philosophy of this country explicitly states is not an option.

It's time to call a spade a spade everywhere. Civil unions are marriages, and George W. Bush is a liar. Period.

Henry Jenkins of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program weighs in with a new Digital Renaissance column, Look, Listen, Walk, which is all about the concept of augmented reality. Basically, you know all those people who use their cell phones to turn on, tune in and drop out? Imagine using devices like the iPod to augment your experience with the world around you, instead of blocking it out?

It's not a new idea. With the rise of technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, some cutting-edge digital artists have been making installation art out of public parks and boulevards by installing kiosks that transmit wireless information to portable devices. Another example of this is geocaching, which is kind of like a digital version of letterboxing, where hobbyists engage in a worldwide treasure hunt to find rubber stamps that other letterboxers have stashed away in secret locations, which they then collect in small journals. (I haven't done it yet, but it's one of those things I'd love to try.)

Dr. Jenkins gets into geocaching on the second page of his article, and then he starts discussing some insanely cool things that his CMS group is working on at the moment.

Every time I read about things going on up there, I want to go play. I need to start spending some more time in my mental lab, and then start doing some more playing around. Maybe this weekend.

Well, it looks like Meg Hourihan and her crew have taken the wraps off their secret project. Kinja, the weblog guide has entered its public beta phase, although one wonders about the wisdom of launching a public site on April Fool's Day. The site, which is essentially an aggregator for weblog feeds, is already peppered with weblog posts crafted by untrustworthy, smarmy, Barnumesque charlatans.

And no, I HAVEN'T forgotten or forgiven your stunt from last year, O Mr. Hollywood Bigshot. You're still A-number-one on my target list.

Just realized that about the shared initials, which one has to wonder about, but whatever. The lovely Ms. Trott has just launched Mena's Corner, a personal weblog from inside Six Apart, which I think is a great idea. Two of my favorite weblogs lately have been Jewelboxing, the behind-the-scenes blog for the new product from Coudal Partners (which I intend to use for the next round of Dreamsbay deliverables, as soon as the dust from Tax Day clears) and Everything Basecamp, which is the equally behind-the-scenes weblog for Jason Fried and our friends at 37signals. I'll be interested to follow along to see what's going on over at Six Apart.

(Oh, and incidentally, I'm working on building a blog into Dreamsbay.com as well, but having difficulty getting things properly configured on our server. Ah, for an XServe.)

Next up on the Finishing Season lineup is the client I mentioned earlier today. My friend Jim Frazier out in Chicago owns his own audio engineering studio, and he asked me to give it a facelift for him. I was happy to oblige – in part because it finally gave me a chance to create a website using wood grain. A while ago I had this idea on how something like that could look really cool (this was before seeing GarageBand for the first time, thank you) and now I've made it real. In the words of the mighty Saint Hannibal, "I love it when a plan comes together." Check it out!

I'm pitching an idea I've wanted to do for months to a client this morning. I'm hoping he goes for it – wish me luck!