“No idea,” I replied, “I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do, I wouldn’t give bears lasers. They’re already dangerous enough as it is.”

[Actual conversation 4:52pm on a Tuesday afternoon]

Chips AND Lens Flare!

“Tyler, are those chocolate chocolate chip muffins?”
“Shit yeah they are.”
“Then I shall have one.”

Editor’s Note – the lens flare makes this post 73% more J.J. Abrams approved.

I don’t think anyone is really happy with Bon Iver winning the Best New Artist Grammy last night. However, following the previous year’s awarding of Album of the Year to Arcade Fire, I think I’m seeing a trend emerging from the Recording Academy. Someone over there is a troll.

Let’s breakdown last night.

Bon Iver’s win:

• Irritated fans by ripping the band from obscurity to the mainstream with the opening of an envelope
• Irritated non-fans because they’d never heard of the band (as evidenced by this twitter account)
• Irritated Bon Iver because they will forever be referred to as “Grammy Award Winning”
• Irritated indie music listeners who will tell you that Bon Iver put out their first album in 2008 and it was arguably better than the winning album last night, but that clearly means that the Recording Academy doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “new.”

You see that? Managing to irritate so many groups so quickly with such little action? That’s a master troll.

Many, many years ago, back before “the Internet,” I belonged to a BBS called Top Gun. On said BBS there was a member who would pop on every now and again continue a lengthy, very funny, serial story.

Each episode of said story would end the exact same way, “…and then the squirrels attacked.”

Every damned episode.

It’s been almost twenty years and I still can’t bring myself to steal that line.

Also, props to anyone who can find the book and/or story that the above image belongs to. My interest is, how you say, piqued?

Look at that filthy mime hipster

“I had the most epic post-apocalyptic dream ever last night,” Matt said, typifying any of a million conversations held in or around our office.

I turned and asked the most obvious question possible, “Why are you dressed like a mime?”

The conversation thus descended into a post-apocalyptic mime scenario.

Mimes as Road Warrior.

Then, mimes as zombies.

By next week, I wholly expect a fully designed Mime-zombie movie poster complete with the tagline “Only The Silent Survive!”

Click to purchase the print

I grew up in a pretty damn good period for video games, catching the dawn of the golden home video game age – the return of the Atari under the 2600 Jr moniker and the dawn of the 8-bit era. I stayed with consoles until I caught the dawn of the FPS on the PC. And thus began the fate of the PC gamer – the never ending cycle not of keeping up with the Joneses, but of continual hardware replacements to stay one step ahead of the graphics and processing arms race so that games run at a passable rate.

And man, that was a money suck. A fun one, but damned if it didn’t get expensive. So, as I grew into a poor twentysomething the console gaming fell by the wayside. Eventually, I moved back to consoles because a couple hundred bucks on a new console every five or six years is a lot easier to manage than a couple hundred bucks every year on a new video card.

And it looks like I got out right around the perfect time, because as PC game manufacturers have taken the normal methods of DRM – disc must be present, users must type in a special code during installation – to the illogical extreme.

In an effort to fight “piracy.” videogame publishers have adopted techniques that started with the game periodically checking into a remote server while playing to requiring a constant Internet connection *. And while that might not seem to bad on the surface, as just about everyone who wants broadband internet has it now, that means you can’t play when the internet is down. Or when you’re traveling. Or, worse, when the company you legally purchased your video game from decides that keeping that server – the one the game has to check in to – online is just too much money.

And publishers will eventually turn those servers off. All servers eventually get turned off. Or moved. This little fact of internet life means that a legally purchased game has an expiration date, after which it cannot be played again. However, the pirated version of game that came with a crack to route around the DRM scheme? That illegal version of the game will work forever.

What’s worse is, publishers typically don’t tell potential buyers that the game has an unplanned obsolescence date. I mean, why would they? Of course, as a potential video game buyer, this makes purchasing any video game either risky or research intensive. Buyers must either: read reviews, meet minimum standards and research a publisher’s DRM scheme or throw down $60 and take a gamble on a publisher treating the customers with at least some measure of respect.

The entire ordeal is so goddamn frustrating that I’ve got half a mind to chart out which publishers should be avoided and the respective titles, tossing the entire mess up on a website.

But I’ll probably just read a book instead.

*And we’re not just talking about multiplayer games. Major publishers are slapping this kind of DRM on single player games with no other online aspects.

However, after some recent chiding, both from friends and that wall in the photo above, I decided it was time to get back off my ass and get to editing. Again.

If you recall, I’d started the Blue Pen (story, flow, pacing) edits of my novel ages ago. Then life got busy, or editing got hard or whatever excuse I want to come up with. Damn, that was two minutes? Okay, so, long story short, I stopped. And I stopped for a long time, like the better part of a year.

But I’m back now. And I’m cruising through the Blue Pen edits as quickly as I can. That way I can get through the Red Pen edits and then start shopping this book about.

And writing the next.

But, in order to do that, I’ve imposed a strict communications blackout each night. Two hours of solid editing. No Googling. No Twitter. No text messages or phone calls. Just me, that massive timeline above, and Scrivener.

Okay, three minutes. Time to start the tea.

Oh, before I go. I’ve got a title. It’s no longer Project Kingdom. The book is now called “A Heresy In Flames.”

What a day. Here’s a rundown.

Apple Announced iBooks2 and iBooks Author

The news came, as expected from early rumors, Apple was going to revamp their eBooks to support more interactive elements. The software is nice, feeling a lot like a robust Keynote that outputs Epub files. I haven’t had time to dig through the output code yet to see just how good it is (I have serious misgivings about code produced by WYSIWYG editors after seeing work done by Front Page and Dreamweaver). However, before jumping head long into pumping out books via iBooks Author, there’s some sneaky BS hidden in the EULA.

Perhaps people really did learn from the Human CentiPad episode of South Park?

Perry Out, Endorses Newt. Newt Attempted to Endorse The Wrong Open. Iowa Flipflops

Perry, after a lifetime of swearing he has never quit, well, quit. On his way out, he endorsed Gingrich. Almost at the same time, news leaked that Gingrich essentially asked his second wife to have an open marriage, admitting that he was sleeping with his now third-wife. And, 8 districts in Iowa’s votes showed up, switching the winner from Romney to Santorum. Fantastic.

Who Needs SOPA?

Remember on Wednesday when everyone really expressed their concern with the government attempting to enact Hollywood-written legislation which would allow for easy censoring of the internet? Well, the DOJ proved they don’t even need that just the very next day by taking down cyberlocker site MegaUpload, indicting 7 and arresting 4 individuals all the way in New Zealand.

So…if Hollywood needs new legislation because they can’t get rogue sites, I think reality showed that either they currently have those powers or they’ve got enough pull with the DOJ and DHS (by way of ICE) to carry out broadscale censorship without new laws.

At least Archer comes back tonight…