The Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie

I'm still working on Bad Gods, but the process has been slowed down by a number of unrelated factors, including the aforementioned column and correspondence. Another factor is that I saved many of the more complicated clips for last, including clips with more extensive animation and interaction, so I'm coming back up to speed.

I showed a couple clips to friends and discovered some tricky incompatibilities between older versions of Flash and the current one (Flash 8). I'm torn between providing a Flash 6 version as well as a Flash 8 version, with the usual Javascript trickery serving up the appropriate one, or just playing the donna comma prima and forcing everyone to upgrade or suffer.

I'm also thinking iPod and PSP. Most of the clips are non-interactive or only marginally interactive, so they can be safely encoded as a movie and sent to your favorite portable movie playing grown-up toy. Haven't had a chance to get into the details of that one yet. I'm starting to feel like an awesome wave is cresting and I'm just sitting here waxing my longboard.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've gotten some mail from people congratulating me on the column and saying that they may have to subscribe to Wired now. Just to be clear, the weekly column is going to be at the Wired News Web site, just like my reviews and other articles. So while I'm sure the fine folks at Wired Magazine would appreciate your subscription, my columns are going to be appearing online. I'll be linking to them as they go up.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man. It's been a big few days. Aside from turning out that last bit of reviewership and machinima, I've been approached by three editors in the past week about writing for them. Two are still in the initial stages of discussion, but the third is just a signature away from happening, so I feel comfortable announcing it.

Starting Wednesday of next week, I'm going to be writing a weekly humor column for Wired News. No particular format, just 600-700 words, presumably on topics of interest to geeks. Because topics of interest of geeks are generally topics of interest to me, that shouldn't be a problem. Very exciting, at least to me. Well, to you too, really.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My review of the game The Movies is up at Wired, along with a little movie I threw together under deadline.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a startling display of my marketing savvy, I've put mugs back up at Non-Zero Chance and the stores back up at Lore Brand Comics nearly a month after Christmas.

Or maybe...eleven months early for next Christmas.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I didn't spend much time during my Arcata vacation working on Bad Gods, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about it. This can be problematic, as I have a long and majestic history of thinking about things rather than doing them.

The main subject of my brain debate was photography versus illustration. When I first started working on Bad Gods, it was going to be almost entirely a mix of photography and clever use of Photoshop. Shortly into the process I realized that it was going to be impractical to use photos of people for my animations for two reasons.

First off, while there are plenty of Creative Commons photos of people, most do not come with model releases. This makes things legally murky. What it comes down to is that if you're going to make an animation of someone orally pleasuring common livestock, it's wise to get a model release.

(Note: I have no current plans to have livestock fellatio on Bad Gods. I cannot, however, in good faith, rule it out.)

I could, of course, take the pictures myself and get model releases, but that leads to the second problem: it would be a huge pain in the ass to recruit models, costume them appropriately, then take pictures or film them doing what I need them to do.

Currently I'm working with drawn characters over photographic backgrounds, similar to Rudolph: The Lost Scene or Microsoft: The Verdict. Over the weekend it occured to me that this is probably still a bit more work than just drawing things. I need a photo of a car dealership, for instance, and I've wasted quite a bit of time trying to find an appropriate one from the right angle in the Creative Commons. It would have been less work if I had just gone out and taken the photo myself, and still less if I had just drawn it from reference material.

So I've spent a good deal of the last week thinking about drawings and photos. Why are comic strips almost always drawn? Why do most of the YTMND sites use photos or photomanipulations rather than drawings? Would Photoshop contests be funny if they were drawing contests? Are they funny in the first place?

I came up with a lot of answers, but they didn't really lead me to a decision. Then I remembered that the whole point of starting Bad Gods was to have a new format with which to experiment. It was the creative equivalent of realizing that you can't find your glasses because you're already wearing them.

So, fuck it. I'm combining photography and illustration as if I had no fear of God. I'll just throw my clips out there as if they were engraved bones in some primitive oracular ritual and we'll see what they augur.

Augur, I tell you!

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got home pretty early yesterday, sacked out for a bit, played some World of Warcraft, watched some DVD, and went to bed early. An hour spent sleeping in a hotel only seems to count as 3/4 of an hour for me for some reason.

No witty observations about the ride down, so I'll leave you with this unrelated thought: in Animal Crossing, when one of your little animal buddies asks for a new catchphrase, tell them to say "in bed." It's sophomorically delicious!

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent most of today in a small town called Garberville, waiting to hear whether I'd be able to continue down 101 and home. Apparently it's a little landslidey up here. Eventually a local radio station DJ informed me that I wouldn't be able to get home tonight. "You are where you're supposed to be," she reassured me.

They say every freeway-blocking landslide has a silver lining, and the upside here is that I had a truly astonishing breakfast. My standard order at roadside diners is the chicken fried steak; I figure that if it's not necessarily going to be good, it may as well be deep-fried. The Paradise Grill in Garberville has, far and away, the best chicken fried steak I've tasted outside of Texas. The eggs and home fries were also excellent. They were a little under-salted, but that's easily corrected and they were otherwise wonderful.

So I'm back in Eureka now, hunkered down in a Best Western on the south side of town. The only room they had left was a double queen bed with a fireplace. I had a vision of racing around town trying to beat the rest of the stymied tourists to the remaining rooms in town and ending up either sleeping in the Corolla or listening to someone else's television through the thin walls in some shanty inn, so I took it. I guess I'll make a clever pillow-Lore in the other bed to throw off the Nazgul.

More marijuana observations! Apparently my knowing snickers over the MJ WC at the brew pub were naive. Just in the limited time I've spend walking around out here I've run into three groups of people smoking pot in public, two of which were just standing out there on the sidewalk. I feel like a country boy coming to the city for the first time and saying "Golly, those ladies sure are dressed skimpy for a chilly night like this!"

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning I went down to the Samoa Cookhouse on the recommendation of reader Stefan Jones. Thanks, reader Stefan Jones! It's a sort-of recreation of an old lumberjack cookhouse, and you eat what they serve you. The food was okay, a bit Dennyesque, but the place itself is very cute and fun. A lot of people say the food is good, though, so I dunno, maybe they're better at lunch.

It's too rainy to walk, so I went for a drive instead, up the coast past Trinidad and back down to Eureka. I'm currently at the Lost Coast Brewery enjoying a nice serving of fish and chips and a truly astonishing beer. Newcastle was long been my beer of choice, but Lost Coast's Downtown Brown ale is right up there with it.

This morning I saw the most amazing thing I've run into in my trip: the parking meters behind Lost Coast. Parking is a nickel an hour. In Berkeley, a nickel gets you about the amount of time it takes to reach in your pocket and grab another nickel. If you want to get ahead of the game you have to use quarters. I bought five hours of parking because five hours of parking may be the best thing I've ever bought with a quarter.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's overcast and a little rainy today, which as far as I'm concerned is perfect beach weather. I'm not much for the lounging and/or splashing aspect of beachgoing. I just like to walk along the sand and stare off into the distance like I'm considering asking my doctor about name-brand prescription medicine. So I drove out to the Humboldt Municipal Recreational Shoreline Sand Park or somesuch and did my thing.

Afterwards I went to a brewpub which will remain nameless because of what I'm going to say about it: Whoa. I got the biggest contact high from walking into the restroom. It was unoccupied, but judging from the smell a hemp convention had recently gone in there and played disc golf for a while. The waitress later explained that I had ordered my food just in time, because the cook had just disappeared. "Sometime he just goes off somewhere. I don't know what he's doing." My guess based on a careful examination of the available evidence is that he's getting totally fucking high. Good beer, decent wings.

After that I stopped into a vintage goods shop across the way and bought an Atari 2600 with five games. Then I came back to the hotel to sober up before I bought anything else. But, hey, I have Circus Atari in my hotel room, which is more than you can say.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey, I made it. I'm currently ensconced -- ensconced! -- at the Hotel Arcata right off The Plaza, a hotel so quaint that they have you use small, flat, carved pieces of metal as "keys." It smells fine and the wireless works, so that's 80% satisfaction right there.

I'm originally from Santa Cruz, CA, a small costal town where Interstate Hippie meets Highway Dippy, so I'm right at home here. The Plaza in question is a little park in the middle of approximately fourteen independent bookstores and twenty-eight independent record shops, and a great Italian restaurant called Mazzotti's that reader Christopher Halskov recommended to me. Thanks, reader Christopher Halskov!

Do you know how in certain parts of cities every shop that can possibly justify it has an advertisement for international phone cards in the window? It's like that here, except instead of phone cards they have the Buddha.

I haven't decided what to do with my evening. Logic would dictate that I explore the night life of the area, but cable!

A note from my trip up here. At one point south of Eureka on 101, a sign explained that the lack of trash on the road was thanks to "Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians." All of them, I guess. Then, later on, I passed a section of highway cleaned by "The Humboldt Area Pagan Network." Isn't this how holy wars get started? With clean highways?

Anyhow, gotta go. I am told that there are people who love the Eighties.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been wondering if anyone's taken an interest in these little musings. I was even going to ask. But Fleen linked to the latest one, and by God and country, that's good enough for me.

Here's a peek at the character in question:

He's still in the first stages of design, though, so he may or may not end up looking like that. I've decided, in the spirit of my Creative Commons experiment, to call him Glen Free. He just looks like a Glen.

I'm taking a little road trip over the next few days, which will probably slow down my preparations. I'm heading to Arcata, California, mostly because I've never been there and don't know anyone there. I'm just going to chill out, check out the beach, hit some coffee shops, and enjoy the hotel room. I like hotel rooms. If for some misbegotten reason you know the names of some good restaurants in Arcata or Eureka, my e-mail's down in the corner. Much obliged.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 09:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First Time

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I think about releasing my little animations under a Creative Commons license, only one thing troubles me. I'm not bothered by the idea of people redistributing my clips, heavens no. I'm not concerned about losing control of my artwork or my ideas; it seems like one of the lessons of the Internet is that such control is largely illusory.

The one thing that gives me a little twitch, however, is giving up stewardship of my characters. I've finished twelve clips, and now I'm working on one that's almost all hand-drawn. I like this clip enough that I'm putting some work into designing the main character, because I want to reuse him. So I'm drawing this guy, trying to decide on a hairstyle, kind of working out his personality in my mind, and I suddenly realize: anyone will be able to do anything with this character. In other people's hands he could be given a completely different personality and made to do horrible things.

Should I even be worried about this? I mean, it doesn't take much skill with Google Image Search to find cartoon characters doing horrible things that the creators never intended. But those are owned characters. If Calvin and Hobbes was part of the Creative Commons, then there wouldn't be such a thing as bootleg Calvin merchandise. Calvin peeing on a Chevy symbol would be as legitimate as "Revenge of the Baby-Sat."

Or maybe it wouldn't. The open source community recognizes official releases of things like Mozilla and the Linux kernel. It's possible that even if my as-yet unnamed character gets pulled into all sorts of bizarre offshoots, my clips will be considered the canonical incarnation.

At any rate, it's way too early to try and figure where this is headed. Qualms aside, I'm as keen as anyone -- and more than most -- to find out exactly what "Attribution-ShareAlike" means in practical terms. I'd rather throw stuff out there and see what happens to it than try and play some sort of "Well, you can use my characters but my version is real and your version takes place in a different dimension of alternate reality so there" game.

To facilitate this laid-back, loosey-goosey, hippie-dippy attitude, I'm going to withhold my previously-established characters. (All, what, six of them?) So no Lore Brand Lore, or Eisley, or Evil Overmom, or what have you. But hey, this gives me a chance to create some new characters, so that they can one day betray me.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote a guest column over at Wired News: Game Year in Review: 2010.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A reader says of Killer Robots from Space: "Is it just me, or are at least half of those comics funnier if you don't scroll at all?"

I suppose it depends on how wide your browser is. I set mine to just show the first two panels, and you know, it reads a lot like Overheard in New York.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm enjoying the webcomic Killer Robots from Space. It remains to be seen whether I like it enough to scroll sideways. I'm just...I'm lazy. I'm a very, very lazy man.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I Find

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Generally, the whole idea of a preview is to whet the appetite with a sampling of delights to come. Instead I've been providing wordy musings on the nature of comedy and intellectual property. This is because it's difficult to provide a representative sample of a ten-second bit of humor without giving away the joke.

So, in lieu of actually providing a sample of Bad Gods, I'm going to provide a sample of something Bad Gods samples.

"Crap Dracula" is my favorite of the songs I've rounded up for inclusion in Bad Gods. "Favorite" in the context of background music for a humor clip, but I do in fact listen to it on its own every so often. The artist/band has a Web site, of course.

Posted by Lore Sjöberg at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)