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

I like to hear people talk about their jobs, if they enjoy them. Here is a survey of people on my friends list whom I know mainly through an admiration for their work, and who have blogs where they often talk about what they do. (Are there others I ought to be reading?)

jwz runs a nightclub in San Fransisco, and frequently posts of his adventures, often including a copious amount of his photography. Occasionally posts something that draws from his cred as the maintainer of xscreensaver or the brash alpha-hacker responsible for much of Netscape Navigator, back in the day. Grumbles about macs sometimes (he is maybe the most famous Mac user known to the Slashdot crowd, besides Jobs and Woz I guess). Most of his posts, though, are either fascinating links or crazy photos and movies. His tastes in non sequitur are quite similar to mine, I suppose.

grrm is still writing the Song of Ice and Fire series, that thing I repeatedly declare that I hate forever and then continue plowing through. Posts infrequently, but often enough to assure us that he's still there. Likes SF cons and football.

tmcm is a cartoonist most famous for Too Much Coffee Man and whose cartoons haven't really been all that good in a long time. But I love his posts and photographs about his life otherwise, including his recent adventures in producing an opera based on his famous character. He posts all of his finished cartoons, as well as many preliminary sketches and doodles. Sometimes he gets the blog involved: in a recent post he grumbled about not being satisfied with a particular punchline, and ended up replacing it with one that a fan suggested in comments.

urbaniak is an actor living in New York City. He's most recognized for his roles in the film Henry Fool, which I have not seen, and Venture Brothers, which I adore (he provides the voice for Dr. Venture). About half of his posts are bizarre, slow-paced flamewars with (so far) two particular LJ users who might not even be real people. These are not very interesting. Much of the rest is stories of being an actor in New York, and are great. His fans enjoy making animated gifs of his babies beating each other up.

officialgaiman is Neil Gaiman. Much of the content is public responses to fan mail, which gives it a very different feel than the other journals listed here. Most of the comments are the ladies swooning every time he posts a picture of himself, which is often.

(Was going to add zarf for the yuks "gee he's been quiet lately" but he doesn't actually use his website as anything remotely like a blog, so.)

There's been a lot of good PKD stuff linked from BoingBoing over the last couple of days, but my favorite is this eight-page R. Crumb comic adaptation of an interview he gave near the end of his life. I guess I didn't quite realize that the events he wrote about in "Valis" actually happened to him, at least according to his own perception. These included his conviction that the Holy Spirit or Elijah or A Pink Space Laser or something had zapped him and given him powers, such as the ability to live in A.D. 50 Rome and 1970 California at the same time, or to mishear Beatles lyrics as an alarming medical diagnosis regarding his son (which turns out to be accurate and saves the boy's life).

I would have so liked to meet this man. I think that among my little fantasy worlds is one where he survives his stroke. Years later he meets my brother Ricky and they become close friends, and his family with our family. Creepy, jmac.

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It's interesting timing coz I was thinking with daerr how much I'd love to help plan a PKD-themed mystery hunt, specifically one that blended a lot of tropes from his earlier fiction.

It would start by welcoming all the new colonists to Mars, and assigning them to their workgroups in the mining company's information sector. As the teams worked on their initial task units, the company president would issue frequent video updates and its staff would make occasional personal visits to make sure that everything was running smoothly. But soon enough, the workers' perception would start to change...

I have some more specific ideas which I think I'll hold off on writing about for now. Suffice to say that I really like radiotelescope's notion of putting an actual story, a real narrative, around the hunt. Sure, it wouldn't be as smooth as a better IF game: it would still be a frame around siamese cryptics and duck conundrums and so on. But I love the idea of hunting not just to unlock more puzzles but to see what happens next, and maybe even feel like the team (being, as a whole, a character in the story) is making choices to guide the story forward, despite knowing that the story's necessarily on rails.

I also have some ideas making these "narrative interfaces" work in a puzzle-hunt setting, and tried sharing them only to decide upon writing them down that they wouldn't actually work, and instead just annoy the players. It would be really tricky thing to do right. But I'm sure it's possible. Indeed, it's probably already been done; what the hell do I know about this stuff, I'm a newbie. If that's the case, I'd love to hear about it.

and I still feel like drawing... this is what I think I look like when I am not looking at myself.
( Whee )

Feeling flush with the arrival of another advance check, I picked up a new Wacom Graphire2 tablet from Micro Center last night. This replaces the monstrously huge Wacom I got last year, the one that neither fits anywhere on my desk or lap, nor works with OS X (for it uses an ancient ADB connector). I had been pleasantly surprised to catch myself doodling again while working on the book, and in the last month or so have been receiving a smattering of random ego-massage that has been encouraging me to mess around with cartooning again, so I figured it was worth dropping a c-note on the thing, especially since I should be able to recoup most or all of that by eBaying the giant tablet.

Design kudos to Wacom for building the penholder directly into the tablet, rather than relying on a separate, freestanding penholder thingy which I would permanently misplace minutes into ownership.

I haven't played with it very much yet, but you will probably know, once I do.

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Got up a little after 9, due to the fact that I am a little sick with a cold or its functional equivalent. That's not too bad, but I should make it a goal to be outside my bedroom door every morning before my housemates have all left for work. That is the cue that I'm slipping again.