A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Today's the final day of Zarf's Kickstarter drive. It hit 300% funding weeks ago, and we're vying to get him over $30,000 (and nearly 400%!) before midnight.

I wrote more about this over on The Gameshelf. Summary: supporting this work isn't just a pledge to help improve the state of modern interactive fiction. It also helps prove that passionate (read: obsessed) game creators really can turn their dreams into reality without starving to death, and in so doing enrich the world with more and better art. Art! That's right, I am dropping the A-bomb here.

Now's the time to help wrench videogames out of the mainstream doldrums of adolescent power fantasies, inspiring independent creators to redefine the medium while the world watches. Even a just couple of bucks will help. Play the (eminently safe-for-work!) teaser, and then check out the Kickstarter page (featuring a video directed and edited by yours truly).

Thanks!

Dig this crazy WWII propaganda poster gallery from Life magazine. I thought I was well versed in the genre - indeed, ol' Rosie is represented here, as is the famously gruesome "This is the Enemy" series - but I have never seen most of these before, including several from Axis powers.

I love the first page's poster where the artist - who signed the work with a Nazi SS sigil - caricatures the incoming Americans as being murderous lunatics headed by the Ku Klux Klan. Or this one, encouraging American soldiers to surrender now so they can score with the ladies later.

(Also: Life magazine still exists as a discrete entity? I did not know that. Good on them!)

I am amused, based on observation, that the outdoors temperature is exactly at the spot where one would consider it too cold to walk around without a shirt on, except for the Significantly Tattoo Covered, who are like ahhh, finally.

Some friends of mine are puttin on a multimedia art thingy Saturday evening in Union Square. Here is a FAQ assuring us that there will not be bad cheese. I'll be there! (Also cthulhia needs easels apparently.)

This looks like it might be worth my while to come to and bring some Jmac's Arcades. Anyone wanna come with? I feel antsy that I haven't made any in three months, even though I have the inspiration for the next one; the other pillars just win out in the continual fight over motivation. So this might give it a little boost.

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Speaking of the automated dorkiness implied by the subject line, xach strikes again with another wigflip toy, this one letting you make your own "lolcats"-style images without Photoshop. I started to show my appreciation by taking pictures he's posted of himself and his little son and putting I CAN HAS JUICEBOX or something on it but it didn't feel right, so I'll just talk about it here instead la bla.

Oh, and since it came up in conversation today: you have probably already seen loltrek, which I was amused to discover was by Stephen Grenade and some of the other interactive-fiction people I vaguely know. Good job, guys.

This week is Blank Verse Blog Week, an invention of my dear friends, the Freaks. They've been at this for several years; I don't do it coz I'm lazy. We're already a couple of days into it, but it's not too late for you to start, if you're into that sort of thing.

My colleague Zarf has started a Sourceforge project about Boodler, his wonderful soundscape generator. Several years ago he developed it up to a point where it was useable if you wanted to monkey about with Python-based command-line interfaces and manually manage your own sound libraries. I found the program's output sufficiently nifty that I would go through the ordeal - much of Perl & XML was written with its ebbing and flowing rainstorm module as background sound - but of course most people can't hack that. He and some other folks are now working on making the thing more accessible. There is a mailing list.

What other projects should I know about?

Heh heh, Mr. Burgund used a piece of the recording I made at his ICA sound booth for an audio pull-quote on a blog entry about the event.

I'll make you try to guess which one it is. (If you don't know my voice, it's the one where the speaker is describing a piece of functional sculpture that he owns.)

Also there is dictator555's Tapas of Catan.

An interesting morning outing to the new (f)art museum with cthulhia, as I predicted would happen in an earlier post. It was mobbed to such a degree that we didn't actually manage to get in, and we missed the animation show that was our goal - we woulda hadta practically camp by the doors in order to have a chance, it turned out. But we still had a fine time.

First of all, I got to ride the Silver Line for the first time, whee, and saw the Government Center station, which is actually very pretty now. Then we hung out in a giant woo-woo party-tent thing that Target had set up to house people waiting to get into the museum; they were admitting people in packs of 100 via a numbered-ticket system that was clearly going too slowly to give us much hope for timely admittance. However, it was kinda fun to mill around there anyway. Free snacks, and we ran into one of Cth's old neighbors and I got to talk about Jmac's Arcade and feel stupid that I didn't have any of my personal bizcards on me. (I wrote my URL on the back of a Volity card.)

We also participated in Halsey Burgund's project, where he's collecting sound samples of people answering questions from a sheet of printed questions while standing in a little wooden sound booth. Apparently he's going to mix it into music or something. He was wearing a Creative Commons T-shirt and looked like the sort of person who wears a Creative Commons T-shirt. Good time. Cth said that it was something you'd find at Burning Man, and talked to him about Todd Rundgren.

When it became clear that we wouldn't get into the museum unless we waited another hour or two, Cth got a case of the wackies and started making faces at people in the restaurant and bludgeoning passers-by with her Santa hat, so I guided her into the calming safety of Boston's financial district. I discovered that it is creepily quiet at noon on a Sunday, all looming skyscrapers and (almost) no people or noise. Her context shifted, she showed me a really neat brick alleyway where there's hidden surprise art embedded into the ground. If you're ever downtown with me, ask me about it, and I shall endeavor to take you there. But I will get lost and we'll end up wandering around until we give up and then we'll have ice cream or something, OK?

I note that we did get to see the fart mural through the lobby's plate-glass windows, so: mission accomplished.

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Now it's sunset and I haven't really done any code today, and I doubt I will, as my motivation fueler dips under the horizon for the evening. As fun as this was, I think I am going to have to set a policy of declining morning events in the future, at least during the shorter days.

Grunt, I really do have a lot of work to do, too. Let's see what I can manage.

Here is a QTVR of the new mural that greets visitors to Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. (If you can load the image, you can then drag it around to rotate your view. Whee!) As the corresponding boston.com article notes, it's titled "The Divine Gas", but that's the artist's second choice after "The Divine Fart". I kind of wonder why it isn't called "The Divine Wind" which would be about 10 times funnier than either of those, but whatever.

I should really plan a trip to this museum with certain member or members of my flist who I strongly associate with both museum trips and fart jokes. who could that be