PostSecret collects postcards with peoples’ “secrets”. Depressing and yet car-crash fascinating, like distilled droplets of LJ.
Month: April 2005
Categories
Javascript and Paint
Edit in Place with JavaScript and CSS – this is cool. So is his Drag & Drop Sortable Lists.
Here’s a parody of Paul Graham that’s sort-of related to Javascript (few people have looked beneath their natural revulsion to find Javascript’s deeper flaw: curly braces
). He’s also written a more serious rant about Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters essays, which contains some gems of snark:
The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.
- Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.
- Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.
…
Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings – in fact, any slapdash attempt at slapping paint onto a surface – will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk.Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.
Categories
Link dump of comics stuff
These are sites about making (with a bias to writing) comics:
- Down the Tubes.net: Comics Writers and Artists Resources
- Creating Comics resource site by Dave A. Law
- Scryptic Studios writing resources.
And for artists, here are scanned copies of several art instruction books by Andrew Loomis, a fine illustrator from the 40s and 50s.
Categories
Link dump of roleplaying stuff
Assorted roleplaying links, to clear out my bookmarks.
What is Romantic Fantasy? by John Snead – The developer of Blue Rose defines the sub-genre of his game. Interesting thoughts on a whole swath of Fantasy writing that is usually looked down upon, but which pretty much defines many of the basic assumptions of “generic” fantasy. Proves my old point that RPGs are habitual scavangers of the corpses of sub-genres, i.e, that once a sub-genre has been defined into a shape you can do as an RPG, it has hardened into a list of cliches and trademark ticks.
Which is a problem for something like Cyberpunk, which has lost all novelty from it’s eighties snarl, but not for Fantasy, which thrives on comfortable familiarity.
The Primeval Games Press website has a series of interviews with indie roleplaying game designers. Here’s one with the interesting Vincent Baker, (whose game-theory blog is worth looking at) but it’s interesting to compare it to others on the site, in particular to that with the one with Chad Underkoffler, who’s much more “traditional” in outlook.
Finally, Darkpages claims to be a roleplaying game, but so far is a set of short fanfics, trying to set the mood of a dark, occultish super-hero world, similar I think to what I tried to do with “They Fight Crime!”.
Oh heck, I’ll stick this in as a PS: a summary of a talk given by the head of Guardians of Order to a group of Amber Diceless gamers about GOO’s plans for ADRPG.
Via Warren Ellis, I found an interesting site called Ethnopoetic Soundings, which has assorted weird ethnic music in MP3 format.
(Because I use Firefox, and installed the Greasemonkey extension, and installed this cool inline MP3 player script from the script repository, I get a cool little flash button next to each mp3 link in a web page, which can stream and play the file when you click it. Very cool for browsing something like that. Or reading
Warren Ellis also points to Blind Shrike, a (free) novel by Richard Kadrey. From Kadrey’s introduction:
Back around 9/11, when I saw such disparate fantasies as Hellblazer and Preacher, American Gods and Carrie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Donnie Darko living together in happy harmony in friends’ homes, I thought it would be a swell idea to write a little fantasy novel in a modern American prose style.
Damn, was I wrong.
Talking of music and free stuff, there’s also an unpublished Fiona Apple album you can download. And also a Kleptones album which photomatt has mirrored. I like Revolverlution best, I think.