Kris Straub (kris at krisstraub dot com)

http://musicforants.com/blog/?p=5216

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:37:23 -0500

Here’s a good article that makes it unnecessary for me to write my thoughts about Sufjan Stevens’ EP “All Delighted People.” There’s a thematic/lyrical similarity to Zero-Sum from NIN’s “Year Zero” (I don’t like Nine Inch Nails much, and I thought Year Zero was better conceptually than as an actual album of music). I feel like Trent Reznor can’t handle the weight of a topic like the end of the world and the ultimate, crushing judgment of a superbeing without turning it into some sour-faced anthem of teen regret and angst.

Stevens on the other hand leaves it a little vague and plugs right into a Judgment a lot of us are already afraid of, and an idea that I have been thinking about a lot lately: if you love someone, does it matter how little time you get with them, if any amount of time is already too little? What if forever was insufficient? Is it enough to know you found them while the world self-destructs around you?

Another song that handles the small side of this topic is Death Cab’s “I Will Follow You Into The Dark,” but again I feel like “All Delighted People” covers the bases fully. For an 11-minute song it never strays too far from its purpose and never wears out its welcome. It somehow makes the aforementioned songs look like they’re the ones late to the party. Super recommended.

Time Friends 1

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:13:00 -0500

Time Friends 1

PAX 2010

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:26:00 -0500

I will be at PAX this coming weekend! I’ll have a booth with Scott in Bandland at PAX, and I’ll be on the following panels:

Pitch Your Game Idea

Saturday, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Pegasus Theatre. You’ve got 45 seconds to deliver your idea to our panel of experts. The top three pitches will be picked for prizes and swag! (Please note that this is an open forum — there’s nothing keeping anyone, judges and attendees alike, from stealing your ideas! If you’re not comfortable with this, please don’t pitch your idea!)

After Hours with Scott and Kris

Saturday, 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM, Pegasus Theatre. PAX welcomes its first official late-night talk show featuring Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub, the talent behind PATV’s Blamimations. After Hours with Kris and Scott promises an hour of laughs, celebrity interviews and maybe even a musical guest — it’s a show so spontaneous, we won’t know what’s planned until the show’s over. Concert counter-programming at its finest!

Blamimations ALIVE! with Kris and Scott

Sunday, 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM, Pegasus Theatre. PA: TV veterans Scott Kurtz (pvponline.com) and Kris Straub (chainsawsuit.com) take you deeply behind the scenes of their hit Blamimation series for one magical hour. Will you help come up with the next breakout hit character? Will you watch it come to life? Will you see Kris and Scott BS for 55 minutes? No, maybe, and yes.

I will have the F Chords book, as well as a couple copies of the Tweet Me Harder book (in addition to my usual merch). If you don’t find me at the booth, be patient and come on back; I’ll again be serving as PAX’s media ambassador and potentially running around the show floor. See you there in like six days.

I just spent the better part of two hours trying to get the old Halfpixel database up again so I...

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:47:37 -0500

I just spent the better part of two hours trying to get the old Halfpixel database up again so I could look at my old work on there, from when I was making Time Friends, Origin Story, Bad Cop Ineffectual Cop, and adding to that blog. I remember that being just an enormous clot of work that vanished.

Looking at what was recoverable, I found that it was a lot less than I thought it would be. It took on this mythical aura in the years since 2006. I don’t know whether to be disappointed, or relieved that I didn’t spend thousands of man-hours on something that would go away.

An old favorite

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:00:00 -0500

An old favorite

This broke me into little pieces. We should all be as fortunate...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:32:48 -0500

This broke me into little pieces. We should all be as fortunate as these two. If you’re like me, don’t watch it at work. (via @kmcshane: If this doesn’t make you tear up, you’re not human: http://bit.ly/9pllxJ)

This is incredible, obviously NSFW lyrics

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:15:45 -0500

This is incredible, obviously NSFW lyrics

Scrapers

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:25:00 -0500

I would have submitted this to Webcomics.com as an article, but this is directed at kind-hearted, well-intentioned developers, not the producers of comics. There are a lot of scraper websites and apps being produced at any given time. A scraper looks at HTML on a page (or possibly in an RSS feed), locates the salient content — in the case of webcomics, the comic image for that day — and either hotlinks the image or copies it to some other server. There, readers can view all the day’s comics without having to see blog posts, comments, ads, logos, anything.

I’m not saying “stop scraping” because that will never happen. There will always be people who do this as a hobby or as a service and they don’t care about ownership or what’s happening. That’s why we always recommend having your URL in the image itself, so at least there’s that. You’ll never prevent that kind of sharing (and there are even occasions where you don’t want to).

But the kind I think that’s preventable is scraping done out of ignorance. Who doesn’t want a place or an app that’ll strip out all the noise and just deliver your favorite comics to your phone without having to visit eight different comic sites? I get it from a reader standpoint. And I get that it’s a neat project from a developer standpoint.

I think though that that kind of developer doesn’t see the harm in it — and even, with some amount of pride, will approach a cartoonist and say “check out this app I made that lets readers get your strip on their phones!” There’s three problems with allowing that though, and three reasons why I say no.

1) Sites are elaborate for a reason. Webcartoonists provide content that is free to read. But a couple things make it worth the cartoonists’ while.

One is advertising across the site and trying to foster a good connection between advertisers and audiences. I pulled near-pornographic ads from my site; generally cartoonists don’t callously run whatever is going to make them a fast buck. On the contrary, readers’ interest drives successful advertising. If it’s a sci-fi strip, it stands to reason (unobtrusive) ads for a sci-fi book or movie would be relevant to their interests. They are potentially useful for the readers too. I wish I could block all the dumb smokeless cigarette ads out there because my audience doesn’t care about that. As a content provider you need to engender that kind of relationship.

Another is all the connections to other facets of that strip, like the community forums, or blog posts with relevant news or con appearances, and ways to contact the cartoonist. All that stuff gets taken away by a scraper.

Finally, site branding is eliminated. Ideally the website should fully support the tone of the content. It should be an experience that enhances the content and draws a reader further in. A scraper kills all that branding effort — or worse, replaces it with the scraper’s own brand.

2) We’ve already provided a trimmed-down way to view the comics. It’s RSS, and in most cases, it delivers the comic image (or a link to just the comic) to every reader that wants it. If that’s how a reader insists on receiving the strip, then here it is. There was anxiety about RSS killing websites and advertising, but at least RSS still lets the provider control some of the secondary goods. Blog posts show up in comic RSS feeds for a reason, as does the occasional ad. It is a compromise, but it’s a good one.

3) It wasn’t opt-in. This one is the biggest sin to me, and it’s important even if you don’t care about (1) and (2). Typically no permission is given for a comic’s inclusion in a scraper app. So the cartoonist hears about it second- or third-hand. And the cartoonist then sends an e-mail to the scraper and asks to have their work removed.

The developers at whom this write-up is aimed at are often apologetic, and polite, and remove the comic immediately, and they have my appreciation. I know they are well-meaning; they just want to use their talent to provide a useful tool. I just wish a little more research was done beforehand, before they went to all the wasted effort!

The trouble is, if you make an app like this opt-in, you find that almost no cartoonists want to participate. So the app dies for lack of comics in its stable. I’ve heard pitches from more idealistic and impassioned developers, who talk about blog access and even revenue sharing. But that’s not the cartoonist sharing in their ads. Those ads are running on someone else’s content. That would be the cartoonist sharing their revenue, and there’s no reason to do that.

So be smart, guys. Don’t spend all that time coming up with the coolest app ever — and some of them are really cool — only to get in trouble later and make a bunch of cartoonists mad and end up with no content for your service. Even if you totally disagree with my other points, cover them bases and ask permission first!

There’s a livestream of Tweet Me Harder this evening, but...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:09:34 -0500

There’s a livestream of Tweet Me Harder this evening, but get caught up with last week’s show, the highlight of which was John Allison reading aloud TMH fanfic he wrote for the show. I was certain it would be terrible and hollow as all things from other English-speaking countries are, but it really spun me around!

tweetmeharder:

SHOW 56: Bad Machinery / 59min / August 11, 2010

Kris and David stare down the promise of immortality, defer their physical pain, hear tales of machinery gone awry, and world-famous fanfic author John Allison has a rare treat for the fellas.

Download the MP3

Just minutes ago woke up from a dream. A remote orbital station above some forbidding planet. Cut to...

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:57:06 -0500

Just minutes ago woke up from a dream. A remote orbital station above some forbidding planet. Cut to an interior: a huge, empty, hangar-like room, like a cargo area. Huge picture windows looking down at the planet. A single turbolift door in one part of the room.

Familiar blue chyron titles in one corner of the view: “Cause of Death.”

An ensign, unsure, hesitantly exits the turbolift. He looks around the well-lit, empty space. Mounted in a corner of the ceiling, a viewscreen. It turns on, showing an alien wearing a Starfleet uniform. A superior officer.

“Ensign. This is the room where it keeps happening.”

The room isn’t completely empty though: a podium-like wooden pedestal stands next to a long jewelry-display-case like object, large enough to hold one person inside. On the podium on some kind of holder, sticking straight up, is a syringe with the needle pointing into the air. It is full of something. A little bit lower on the podium is a severed alien hand, complete with frayed Starfleet uniform cuff still at the wrist.

“The creature came up with one of our early shuttle runs, that much is certain. Everything else we know about it: it is completely invisible, soundless, undetectable via any means we have. We have reason to believe it’s susceptible to the tranquilizer in the syringe.

“We can’t explain why, when it kills, it leaves the left hand.” The hand belonged to the last ensign to enter this room.

“We’ll give you four hours. Good luck.” The screen switched off. The doors shut and locked.

Now I was the unsure ensign. I approached the podium in the deathly-silent room. The floor was carpeted, so I made no sound; not that anyone understood how it hunted. I pulled the syringe off the stand and held it out in front of me like a weapon. I began to methodically sweep the room.

My pressure points shirt on G4, as pointed out to me by...

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:29:51 -0500

My pressure points shirt on G4, as pointed out to me by @RedCrow7

There is a confluence of themes in this song that just destroys...

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:31:16 -0500

There is a confluence of themes in this song that just destroys me. It’s an auto-tune dirge that does even more for the concept than Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek, which was really, really significant to me when I listened to it. Here I think auto-tune is used similar to how Kanye West did in 808s and Heartbreak — not so much to cover that he can’t sing (which he can’t) but to imply a distancing from humanity. I always take repetition to mean insistence in music, and with only four phrases repeated, I interpret it as a bell connected to an alarm system no one can find anymore, let alone disconnect. In a story about being paralyzed at the precipice of some required action, Lovecraft wrote of the North Star twinkling: “[it] strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.”

I am a sap for dense harmonies; I made a hobby out of learning all the parts to a three-part harmony and here they come five, six, seven — too thick to dissect. By the end of the song Bon Iver has built a pleading, crystalline, snow-litten aural cathedral that is as real as any church I have been inside.

"Mr. Cobb, I’d like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative."

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:45:05 -0500

“Mr. Cobb, I’d like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative.”

- Inception, after credits

Please Say Something and the quanta of dreams

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:32:51 -0500

I think it was Jung who disagreed with Freud as far as who gets to assign meaning to objects and events depicted in dreams. Freud makes sense on the surface, and then it falls apart as (it seems like) Freud exorcises his own demons within his theory.

I’ve been thinking a lot — more like worried, a lot — about Please Say Something, an animation by David O’Reilly. It’s deconstructionist in the same way the video game Braid is, but this film deals more with traveling down multiple paths and changing what happens, as opposed to Braid’s Memento-like revelation of a true past by letting things play backwards sometimes.

Please Say Something uses dreamlike repetition and an almost fractal-like theme that develops over the course of its ten minutes, but emotionally remains the same. In the earlier parts, it jumps around wildly — the duality of the mouse as both abuser and loving husband (the presence of which is noted by color overlay!) — and we don’t really know if we’re looking at a whole narrative or fragments of several.

What does it tell us about our perception of reality when our dreams are meted out in conceptual fragments the way they are? Whether a good dream or a nightmare, the dreamer is presented with some inconstant moment in time to deal with, and a powerful or evocative dream usually leaves us to deal with it only when we’re awake.

Consider the nightmare of watching a loved one die. That moment is completely discretized, self-contained — it’s non-evolving, unlike an event in actual time. It’s an impulse, a derivative of an actual event. You don’t get to see in the dream any progression of dealing with grief, moving on, the whole cycle. It’s just an implacable constant, an emotional quantum: they are now dead.

Even seemingly developed scenarios in dreams are presented in these digestible (and often in-) quanta. Imagine a dream where you need some note from home to go on the class trip, and you can’t find it. The dream doesn’t usually resolve to a state where you don’t get to go and your class leaves. If the dream is centered on the anxiety of being unable to find something sought after, you will be looking for that note in some fashion until you wake up, or the dream shifts to some other vignette.

The repetition of dreams themselves (and repetition within a single dream) is a powerful tool for the subconscious to subvert expectations. One of my favorite dreams from childhood was a nightmare, and it presented me with a scary robot that entered my room, harassed me, then left — only to signal the arrival of a much larger robot. The larger robot wouldn’t have been nearly as frightening to me without the implication that my subconscious was trying to set up that pattern, trying to make it go from bad to worse.

The scene in Please Say Something where the cat throws open the door to find repeated awful outcomes (the mouse has hung himself; he has gone mad waiting for her; he has moved on; his head grows inexplicably large) really resonated with me as an example of that kind of dream logic. Finally, the cat throws open the door only to find another door, and another, and so on — now she is denied even the unsatisfying “closure” of finding the end condition of these awful dream fragments. Now the quantum is the act of being unable to resolve the quantum!

That scenario also evoked one of my other long-held childhood nightmares, which was the inability to wake up from a nightmare. It’s not that there was a monster in my room and I couldn’t wake up from the dream — no. In my nightmares, I would wake up, and find myself in bed, with the light filtering in through the curtains as it would in the early morning, only to find that I had just traded one bad dream for a completely different one. I would “wake up” four or five times, each time being more realistic, but ultimately collapsing due to some detail that my subconscious had placed there to be discovered.

For example, I had woken up (three times by this point) and my mom was getting ready for work. I started to get dressed for school when I noticed a skeleton’s hand lazing beneath the edge of the covers. I asked my mom what it was, and her response was “that’s just the skeleton that lives there.” Up to that point I thought I had been awake.

Like I said at the beginning, Jung believed that it was in the hands of the dreamer to interpret his own dream symbols, and I think that’s largely true. Some elements seem to be more universal (examples: losing one’s teeth is common in bad dreams, or showing up naked is hard to define as anything other than anxiety over being unprepared and judged), but I don’t know of anyone whose dreams deal so heavily in metamechanics: the repeated false awakenings, the shifts to worse but otherwise identical situations, inability to convey thought, the existential horror that everything is fine but Something Is Wrong.

Originally posted in 2008

Target’s branding for its housewares even works when...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:37:38 -0500

Target’s branding for its housewares even works when inverted, going from “up&up” to “dn&dn”

Photo

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:57:36 -0500

See me in San Diego, booth 1228

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:08:03 -0500

All of the image below is true. I hit the road to San Diego in eight hours. See you there!

These were in Starslip book 1, but here’s the first...

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:29:18 -0500

These were in Starslip book 1, but here’s the first renderings of Mr. Jinx

Remember this tender offering?! I did these prints at home, the...

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:27:54 -0500

Remember this tender offering?! I did these prints at home, the Canon i475d was a cheap workhorse

Some late-model Chexes, before his death

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:25:47 -0500

Some late-model Chexes, before his death