So anyways, Terry Cavanagh’s game, “VVVVVV” – yes, that really is the name, six Vs – was released on Steam today for $5, which got me thinking about some other retro/lo-fi games out there. The two big games I am looking forward to are Air Pirates by Cactusquid:

Which for some unknown reason, is still unreleased after being “basically finished” since 2007. E4 was supposed to pick it up but it never made it to their website.

And then this game, which has a “Legend of Zelda” vibe to it, but with a completely new asthetic, Sword and Sorcery EP, also unreleased, by SuperBrothers:

And then of course there is Super Meat Boy, or SMB, alluding to Super Mario Brothers. Really looking forward to this one whenever it’s released. Apparently it is “content complete” as of Aug 29th and will be debuting at PAX in September.

I found a fantastic fix for my Proflex rear shock. Go to your local Ace Hardware or plumbing store and ask for 1 1/2 inch test plugs, or they might call them pipe plugs. Take the wing-nut off, remove the bolt, then take the washers off from both sides. You should be left with a chunk of rubber that has a center hole that’s almost exactly the same diameter as the elastomer was. I used a little soapy water and mine slid right on the shaft the elastomers were on. 3 of these did the trick for me and it’s holding up just fine.

Here is what it looks like in the store, and the final product (click for bigger):

In other news, it looks like a bike shop in New Hampshire has used my inner tube fix on a customer’s bike. I’m glad I was able to help!

So what was the peak of computing in 1989 capable of? 10 GFLOPS. But computing moved by leaps and bounds in the mid-90s, right? So a Pentium 2 should have eclipsed the Cray 2 in 1997. In theory. Well it turns out we only recently broke the 10 GFLOP barrier in home computers that people actually buy (not talking high-end workstations/gaming computers). The Core Solo (in the very first Macbooks) barely pushed 2 GFLOPS. My Core 2 Duo pushes about 20 GFLOPS, and a more modern Intel i7 950 will push just north of 55 GFLOPS according to Intel’s website. They were designing 30 GFLOPS computers by 1990, so 2010 consumer technology is just now catching up with 20 year old state of the art commercial technology. Of course, we’re comparing a room sized set of vector CPUs against a single general purpose physical processing unit with multiple cores, but there is still a valid comparison to be made.

The ETA10 10GFLOPS supercomputer, circa 1990 vs Intel Core 2 Duo 10GFLOPS consumer processor, circa 2007. Pretty wild.

Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. Or so the saying goes. True art and writing don’t share a whole lot in common. That philosophy however, applies to a many many great things. I’ve been bouncing a few ideas off the wall for a while now on some book ideas. I’ve always liked the idea of a story on the road, the great trans-continental trip filled with self discovery and many different events in many different locales. Shakespeare’s plays all take place in one city typically, with a very tight plot in which each character is very specifically linked to every other character. That doesn’t really work with my story ideas.

Most of my story ideas involve, surprise surprise, going through the midwest, or travel by train. They all occur in the 1850s-1920s, sort of a steam or diesel punk era, but less stylized. An orphan traveling from the east coast to live a life on the west coast. A pair of hooligans as bank robbers in Colorado. A man fleeing his life to begin again in Mexico.

I really like making things modular. I wrote a two page article on making modular maps for TF2. If you can make 3D spaces that people move through modular, you can make a book modular as well. Surprisingly, for as much writing as there is on the internet, there is not a lot of good (and free) advice on how to write books. I have been able to glean a few truly good bits here and there by doing quite a bit of googling on the subject. There seems to be two camps when it comes to writing fiction: those who plan it out, and those who freestyle the entire thing. Those who plan it out tend to be lauded for excellent plot and an engaging storyline. Those who wing it (and are successful) tend to be lauded for their storytelling abilities. The two compliments tend to rarely cross-pollinate.

Well, I am not a particularly good storyteller, so I am going to have to lean on an engaging and complex plot to write a good book. There are three ways to organize the plot; come up with a good plot on your own, borrow (steal) someone else’s plot, or build one out of note cards — sort of a combination of the first two. I pieced together a few ways of creating an outline for my book; this is what I am currently up to. First I decided what kind of novel to write. An epic novel seems like a good way to start off learning to write books. Why not.  Second I found synopsizes of every epic story I could find, and picked the most interesting parts of them, and pasted them roughly in the order that would make the most sense. If you’re going to rip off someone’s plot, you might as well steal from the best. Look at how O Brother, Where Art Thou? worked out at the box office. Can’t argue with success. This gave me a wide variety of scenes to start off with and shuffle about as I saw fit. I knew how the structure of The Aeneid worked, with nested stories inside one another. I also realized that Dante’s Divine Comedy created an excellent structure to place my scenes in. For a 100,000 word book, I’d need about 50 scenes of 2,000 words each. No problem, I told myself. I’ll just pull all my favorite scenes from each story and string them together in a plausible order.

Hopefully I’ll have picked quality scenes that will make for en engaging book. Some of the things I have read suggest that many scenes can be told in any order; only a few key scenes need to be specifically placed. We’ll see how true that is. Also, that is what the second draft is for — building up scenes, stringing secondary plot lines through them, adding/deleting characters and generally cleaning up the storyline. Fixing the first draft is much easier than writing it.

But back to modular story telling. In an epic story, many of your characters will not cross paths for a very long time. This means individual actions won’t have an effect on the other plot lines directly, or at least not immediately, allowing you to place the characters into interesting or unusual situations without disturbing the overall plot. So you have an idea of who your main character is, and where they are headed, but you have a lot of empty space in between. That’s good! Pick and choose your favorite scenes from your favorite stories, and plug them in the gaps. Each scene should be around 2,000 words, giving you 4-8 pages of content. String enough of them together and you end up with a book. This is where the note cards come in. Having individual scenes written on each card makes it very easy to figure out what order things will go in. You can also place the note card on your keyboard and give you something to focus on while you pump out 2,000 words on the subject.

Besides interesting scenes that build your plot, you need interesting characters. I ran across a book that does a good job of describing great, interesting characters, but that is the only one. People online don’t like to share their generic characters that they build theirs from for some reason. Then I ran cross this book, “45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters” by Victoria Lynn Schmidt. Luckily, my local library had a copy and I swung down there the next day. Little did I realize (it’s obvious now in retrospect) that the library had two whole shelves devoted to writing, plot tips, how to write novels, how to sell your novel, and most importantly, how to build interesting characters. I also picked up the book “Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes & Heroines: Sixteen Master Archtypes” by Cowden, Lafever, and Viders.

Now that I’ve plotted out my major plot points, the scenes associated with them, I made lists of all the characters I needed to flesh out for the story. I have a few character cards with names on them, but now I need to go back and determine which personality and motivation fits which character. At that point, I can start writing the book. Not counting the months I’ve spent collecting scenes, plot and character ideas, I’ve spent about 8-10 hours rearranging the plot and getting everything to fit. I’ll probably spend another 20 hours tweaking it as I start writing. November National Writing Month wants you to pump out 40,000 words in 30 days *(1300 words a day), I am looking at writing one 2,000 word scene a night to ultimately write 100,000 words in 50 days. Considering the prepwork I’ve done, I don’t anticipate it to be much of a problem… That’s what they all say of course. We’ll see.

One of the more interesting experiences I had on my trip was leaving Rio. I had picked up a bug, which turned into the flu a few days later. I’d grown weary of the poor conditions while stuck in Rio and was looking for the first bus out of town. I had planned on seeing Sao Paulo, but the idea of visiting an even larger and even poorer city than Rio was not appealing. I was looking for a ride to Porto Alegre, a large but not enormous port city, somewhere between here and Uruguay. The other option was Pyrate Somehow I ended up buying a ticket to Florinopolis; the hostels wanted big bucks to stay at Paraty, and Ilha Grande was mostly only accessible by boat, and had just had a mudslide that had taken out most of the island. Earlier that morning I’d left behind a beautiful Brazilian girl who I’d hit it off with on New Years, without saying goodbye. I simply couldn’t take the humidity and the city any longer, got up, took a shower and hit the road by 5:30am. I went to see Copacabana beach on the way out of the city. I was supposed to visit the beach with her the day before, but I ended up going to see Christ the Redeemer in the afternoon without her instead.

Leaving the city, there’s only two ways out for a traveler – by air or by bus. Air travel in Brazil is expensive and when I left that morning I didn’t know exactly where I was headed so I decided to leave by bus. In addition to the normal transit system, Rio also has a series of blue express buses that run between the two airports and the bus station, and along the main subway line. The central part of Rio is a canyon by the way. In reality, much of downtown Rio is simply a strip of concrete and grass squeezed between mountains and ocean. 10 story buildings on either side, two blocks deep; to the north (felt like the west) is another block of trash and the homeless, side streets are brothels with men waving at you to come inside.  In the other direction, past two blocks of buildings is an enormous park that stretches all the way to the water.

So I ended up at the bus station, which is shaped like an enormous two story horseshoe. You enter on the lower level, which is a teaming mass of people with their entire life packed in two bags, headed every which way, sort of like the Mos Eisley Spaceport on Tatooine.

Ended up buying a ticket to Florinopolis, an island the size of Manhattan off the coast of Brazil about halfway between Rio and the Uruguay border. Beautiful, rich city with lots to do. I was fighting on and off with the Flu but managed to take the island bus around the area, tried to rent a moped (they were sold out), hiked across the island from beach to beach. Since it was peak tourist season, if you made reservations, they wanted something like $30/night USD, with a minimum of a 7 day stay. I figured that they would waive the 7 day stay if I just showed up, and they had plenty of rooms avalible. My bets paid off and I ended up paying $20/night with no minimum stay. Bonus: excellent wifi! Finally it was time to move on to Uruguay after 2-3 days there.

The bus ride from Florinopolis to Uruguay was something like 22 hours. I thought it was going to be 8. Kind of hard to get off when you have no idea where the next major stop will be. Here’s a shot of the Brazilian countryside from the bus heading south to Uruguay.

We ended up stopping in the city of St. Johnsbury, VT, near the New Hampshire border, where we took some pictures and walked around for a bit. There are two major, parallel streets in town; Main Street and Railroad Street. Hopping into a nearby bookstore to use their bathroom I noticed a large, plexiglass device by the front desk. After browsing through a couple of asiles I walked past the machine a second time and asked the guy behind the desk about the device.

Turns out not only is he printing off books to sell (and fill) on his bookshelves in the store, but he is running a publishing company from his bookstore as well, providing a full range of services from copy editing to book design and cover art, ISBN numbers and more. I was running late and didn’t get to see what kinds of authors he had there but he had at least two local authors whose books he was publishing in the store. Interestingly they claim that the books are published with 93% carbon neutral electricity. There’s a hydro-electric dam not too far from the city.

The device itself is pretty simple. There are three main pieces, two printers (making it partially modular); a B&W laser printer on the left, which prints the bulk of the book on standard size, double-sided 8.5×11″, a color printer which prints the cover of the book on single sided, heavy (vellum?  88lb? not sure) paper with I think some sort of smudge-resistant color ink. In the middle is a large, plexiglass enclosure that the two printers sit on, and appears to have three distinct lobes; the collating unit, which collects the pages and applies the “perfect bind” glue, combining the cover with the pages. Next it drops down into the lower lobe where it is pressed and cools, before shifting left where the book is trimmed to size.

It’s interesting; the press is capable of printing up to full size (think hardcover) books, but if your book is sort of short, you can choose to go with a smaller size (think paperback) to get more pages without having to include two stories in one book. I noticed they had several out-of-copyright(?) books on the shelves; they had been scanned in by the google books project, and included the original font type and any dust marks or library stamps from the original out of copyright volumes.

I’m working on notes for a book I’d like to write. Printing copies of my book on something like this sounds like a very good option. Being in a fairly rural community Scott is able to print books on demand for customers, rather than having to order them from a warehouse in New York.

So what am I doing looking at microphone cartridges? Well from previous research, I know that the Green Bullet is the top third of what is lovingly called “The Dispatcher”, commonly used (I presume) in police stations, and more commonly seen, perhaps, in school offices. I knew what the old style looked like, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw a more modern one at my college’s advising office. Turns out it uses the same microphone cartridge as the Green Bullet – it just has a base with a momentary switch, and costs about $70 shipped. That’s not a bad deal. A little more than half the cost of a green bullet, with most of the functionality. It looks like they’ve welded the “bullet” to the base unfortunately. Which means you’ll need a hacksaw to use it the way you want to. The ebay bastards are pretty smart, they market it as a “Green Bullet” and want $70 for one. If you troll the Ham radio boards you can pick one up for less than half that used.

Also, it turns out, when you comment on youtube videos, sometimes people respond! Someone had linked to this video, I guess commenting on the variety of ukes (4) he used to do a cover of some song. What caught my eye was the red, “Green Bullet” looking microphone he was using to record. It sounded good, and had the right shape. It’s got a confusing name, it’s a Cardinal (red) brand, Blue series microphone. Check it out here.

In my opinion the amp is more important and is what will keep you playing. A shitty, tinny sounding amp is going to make you want to bin both your guitar and amp. Try this: go to a Guitar Center, find a shitty $150 squier brand guitar, go plug it into the smallest amp in the store. Sounds shitty, right? Now go find the biggest, baddest amp not sealed off behind glass. Go plug that guitar into that amp. Sounds amazing!

The amp is as much a part of the instrument as the guitar. Ten years ago a $150 guitar was something that would shred your hands apart and sound horrible, go out of tune and eat strings like no tomorrow. Nowadays brands like squier are producing incredible guitars for under $200. Hadlock’s rule for amps is “Buy an amp that is 60% the cost of your guitar, or at least $140, whichever is higher”.

Anyways, recommendation:

Guitars:
Yamaha Pacifica (Fender Stratocaster knockoff) – $179
—-Second option, Squier Stratocaster (Fender Strat knockoff) – $179
—-Third Option, find something pretty that you like from Rondo – $119 to $400+

Amps:
Vox VT15 amp, 8″ speaker, lots of built in effects, very easy to use, proper 8″ speaker, includes an analog “tube” in the preamp – $169
—-Second option, Crate 15 watt amp, full size 12″ speaker. Supply your own effects pedals. – $99 (I own one of these)
—-Third option, troll craigslist and lowball someone on a good looking amp that gets good online reviews.

Cable:
Monster instrument cable, 12′ – $20 (I own many, many of these)

I recommend the Yamaha simply because Yamaha doesn’t make bad instruments. It’s a rule. Otherwise you can get a Squier which will be roughly the same price and quality, with roughly the same resale value. It’s a Strat(ocaster) style, which means it should be able to reproduce most any sound you ask of it. The Vox valvetronix amp comes highly recommended if you read back a few pages. I don’t recommend below a 10″ speaker, but an 8″ speaker will get you started and have enough low end to at least make it sound like a real guitar. The crate amp has a 12″ speaker, I own one of these and have converted it into a speaker cabinet for a different amp head. It sounds really good and has a lot of excellent low end response. And of course you’ll need a cable to connect the two. Monster makes trash products at markup prices, but their instrument cables have a tendency to not fall apart or need repairs so I recommend them in this case.

Other notes: Get a Telecaster if you like the style they are roughly equivilent to a Strat but are slightly more “twangy”. The other style is Les Paul, which is a bit more rounded and tend to have a higher starting price ($250 and up). You’ll have to ask someone else if you want to get into heavy metal guitars, but Ibanez is a good place to start…

I don’t recommend a Microcube. The microcube is a relic from 10 years ago when there were no other good, moderately priced amps. The microcube has a pair of 4″ speakers which are never going to sound very satisfying compared to the speakers in a real amp, which only costs $20-40 more, depending on where you shop.

is there an anti-twitter? i realize twitter is embracing the 30 second soundbyte generation, but I think some of us prefer a format with a

-submit-

minimum of 500 characters. flesh out your ideas, provide reasoning and thought behind your position on the subject. somewhere between

-submit-, deep breath,

a paragraph and a one page essay

-submit-, roll eyes.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like twitter. I have a twitter account. I even use it on occasion. I like the concept behind twitter, the execution is near-perfect for what it advertises to do. It is an excellent format for expressing brief nuggets, no, bits, of information. But that’s also the problem with twitter. Too short. Designed for the 30 second soundbyte culture. But I won’t bore you to death with that rhetoric. You’ve heard it before and it sounds terribly pretentious.

Some of us prefer a more long-format discussion. Email is great for this, but is a little outdated. I think google wave attempted to address this problem, but ran into some integration and privacy issues. Google Buzz and Google Reader sort of address this problem better, gets towards a good medium to share and discuss information.

more below the cut…

Internet forums are very important for discussion, however there are a lot of problems with internet forums:

• There are many forums, each one requires it’s own user name and password
• Username/passwords cannot be shared between forums, only subforums
• The largest, most important forums don’t offer email notifications
• You can’t notify certain users about a discussion (@JohnSmith) to get their opinion

Email allows for quoting, but not with the same amount of control that vbbs allows. Gmail, yahoo and hotmail have finally introduced smileys but their selection is rather shallow. Email also means sharing your email address with potential strangers; using a third party service obfuscates your email address to some degree, and also allows you to somewhat anonymize yourself.

I emailed my buddy about starting up some sort of anti-twitter, with some general guidelines. A much longer minimum length, and the ability to include inline URLs and images, along with bullet points and a subject. Some people might have trouble filling 500 words about a subject they care about, but 500 characters is barely enough to explain the situation, your stance on it, and why you think that way, let alone any history on the topic. Throw in a single URL and you’ve just topped 1000 characters.

The world is full of carefully crafted 30 second sound bytes and one liners — let’s expand beyond that and add some context to our reality and put some thoughts into our decisions and views.

I came across Woofer today in my research. They’re largely just a parody site of twitter, requiring 1400 characters, 10 times the maximum amount allowed by twitter, and copying their GUI exactly. I’d like to see something closer to a 300 minimum, maybe 500 characters. Add in some very rudimentary formatting features (bold/italic/underline, unnumbered bullet points, inline images, inline URLs, subject lines) and you have something like a long-form twitter or a short-form blog.

Reddit and Metafilter are vaugely similar to this idea, but you end up with a hive-mind mentality and for whatever reason, Reddit attracts typically terrible people. I guess Twitter isn’t much better but annoying trends don’t tend to get “voted up” with lots of inane discussion. Slashdot has remained relevant with a careful balance of editor picked stories specific to their audience, and have sorted out their moderation algorithm well. Forum posts on slashdot (depending on the story, of course) tend to be at least 300 characters and often cite (or even link to) external data rather than just personal experience.

Kuro5hin was an attempt to expand and improve slashdot towards a more academic slant. Somewhere along the line however the community imploded and turned into a wasteland. Kuroshin took the slashdot model and attempted to cast a net too large. Digg was briefly relevant but is rapidly collapsing into irrelevance due to the digging abuses and poor quality of it’s comments section. Fark has a very strong forum community and even stronger editorial staff.

If you were to draw some sort of wild venn-diagram, it would include

• Ease of use
• Strong editorial staff
• Wide variety of topics
• Topics relevant to the users

Facebook sort of does this. You can pick your own groups to join, share links with others, view friend’s updates and links etc. Probably the strongest feature of facebook is their underutilized “Notes” section. However notes aren’t weighted as strongly as say, a youtube video or a link with a picture. You can tag friends in a note but once conversation dips off the main friends news feed, discussion dies. That usually happens in 30 seconds-45 minutes depending on a lot of factors. Small talk or a “thanks!” in the comments but nothing more. Even the “thanks!” comments have been replaced simply by a “Like” button – a basic acknowledgement that the note exists. Even then, as soon as it’s wiped from the front page of the news feed, it’s over. There’s no point in sharing anything of great length with your friends there.

BoingBoing has a great readership base, but has no idea what their readership wants, and their editorial staff is lacking leadership. Cory Doctorow is too busy promoting his books and trying to convert his BoingBoing blog into a literary blog that he doesn’t realize that most of his readership doesn’t find his DRM and copyright agenda very interesting. The lack of comments on the subject (thrice daily, minimum!) is deafening. Slashdot does a far better job and has a much better pedigree for that sort of thing than he ever will. I’ve called him out on being sensationalistic, and the headlines are getting better but again, a weak editorial staff with a poor focus results in few comments and even less real discussion. I think the minimum and maximum width of a column makes a tremendous difference in the length or brevity of a website’s content. Slashdot is approximately 30% wider than WordPress or BoingBoing’s article column, and the comments are approximately 200% longer on average.

Anyways, there is room for a directed, edited and expanded version of twitter. 300-500 minimum character posts, with 1-2 links and 1-2 accompanying images per link and a few paragraphs of analysis, along with a VBB style forum comments. In all honesty it wouldn’t be much different than Woofer – it would encourage longer posts, but not a comically large post. Give it a better, cleaner, more professional GUI and you might attract the facebook of users, leaving the myspace crowd behind on twitter.

It sounds an awful lot like a wordpress blogging account. It is, more or less. But we’re rewriting the interface and making it more accessible to the mobile crowd, with some twitter tie-ins. The academia of twitter?

push Alt+F2

type ‘gconf-editor‘ without quotes, push enter

go to apps->metacity->general->button_layout

delete the old value field, replace it with this: menu:minimize,maximize,close