After some thought I think I hit upon the important underlying aspect of the secret identity rules. There’s an idea, that a stable society requires and is built upon some members of  the society taking actions, which the rest of society can’t tolerate, and as a result they become ostracized from the society. This to some degree is hardcoded into our dna. So the person taking the action, knows that they do it at the cost of becoming a pariah, and have accepted the cost. Superheroes are sort of the ultimate expression of this. When they put on the costume, they give up the idea they will ever have a normal life.

So now to tie it back to why they don’t tell friends and family what they are. In this context “society” means friends and family.  So they can’t really tell them what they are doing, even though they kind of would like to.  But they don’t because it wouldn’t be responsible, in that in doing so, you will have forced them outside the societal structure with you, and they aren’t super human so what exactly are they going to do then?  Its kind of selfish in a way.  The hero chose to step outside the structure so he could protect them, but the people he would tell can’t really do that. Plus he’s taking on the responsibility in the first place so that he can create a world where the people he loves don’t have to worry about the crap  he fights against.   Telling them might actually be counter productive to his goal, because he would be making them worry about the exact thing he is trying to prevent them from worrying about.  I personally now believe any reason above this that a hero gives for cloaking his identity is merely him justifying his position which he already reached by instinct.  An instinct put in their position I would probably follow.  I would at least realize it was retarded, but I would still follow it.

In a related note, a super hero will be more likely to tell another super hero their identity, because they both under a similar burden.  Its a secret they want to share with someone, and they don’t have the same instinctual aversion to telling this other hero, even though from a risk/reward position, telling them is stupider then telling a true friend. But human instinct isn’t rationale.

I hope I explained this all well enough for you to understand Nikki. I don’t know why this took so long to write really… the words were being very elusive on me.  I’ll make another blog entry to wrap back to the female superhero part of this.

I love assassin’s creed 2, but Ezio is no Altair.  But Altair never punched and then strangled a pope, so there’s hope for Ezio yet.

I’m pretty sure thats not her soul thats bleeding amirite? boom.

I think some of my ole creative instincts are coming back to me. I’ve missed them dearly.

Over the weekend I caught part of a documentary on comedy during the turn of the century.  specifically the history of vaudville.  It was fascinating.  Mostly because its a form of comedy that I still enjoy even though its dead and buried now.  Its probably something I would pick up at somepoint if I can find it for sale because it was a subject I am infinitely facsinated by.  I mean I couldn’t help but get into comics.  One day I hope to do an indepth study on the history of comedy.  Its right up on the list of things that I would sit down and do, because its something I want to see done bad enough.  wikipedia’s entry on the history of comedy is only one paragraph in the larger entry of comedy. sad.

I think my favorite moment in the documentary, was a clip from an old sketch comedy from the very early days of television.  In it two men, dressed as women, discuss how one of the ladies husband was buying them a new 10″ TV and how it was going to be just like being there.  I believe that may just be the perfect clip to sum up the way todays culture works.  I’ve seen the joke done to death in the other direction,  but some how seeing it so far in the past makes it work better in my opinion.  its just more absurd.

I do have things I want to write about, but I haven’t found the level of focus it takes to write semi-cohesively, so for now I will just post this sketch I did.  It isn’t super great but I’ve been trying to practice more drawing what I see accurately to help make my comic style art better.  Will be posting more of these as I do them so I can have a record of my progress.  Not setting a schedule for it because CLEARLY that doesn’t work.

Chris wants an ebook reader

picture taken of a sony reader touch at my local borders.  It is a pretty fun toy, and I am gonna get it soonish once I get the money together for it.  maybe I’ll wait til I get my Christmas bonus from work in a couple months.  I’m pretty sure if I had it I would read more if only to justify the expense.  At the very least I’ll goof off with the doodle feature forever. I had fun with that.

Shamelessly stolen from slashdot cause whatever.  Personally I think that the video highlights pretty well how stupid and annoying the more and more agressive attempts to get people to switch browsers are.  I know when I see them I get annoyed because 1. ie7 and 8 always work well on the sites that try to ban them (granted there going after 6 in a ham fisted way but still makes me angry) And also because I CAN”T USE ANOTHER BROWSER AT WORK. therefore your advice = fail and actively worse then fail because now I’m frustrated at you(great customer experience guys, for serious).  and people who could use other browsers don’t even know what you are talking about and only use software that they have at work cause thats what IT gives them and those guys know about computers. :/

I guess that’s all I got to say, venting complete.

One app, which i sorta accidentally purchased, was pretty interesting.  It was a virtual closet app.  So you would take pictures of your clothes, and then you could use this app to manage all your outfits and stuff.  Its a pretty nifty idea and because I’ve started to begin taking a little bit of effort into my wardrobe potentially useful.

But it gave me more interesting ideas for a website me and nikki have kept threatening to each other to build.  This journal is mostly just written to put a stake in the ground, so we can start working on its design in a slightly  more productive way.  What we want to build is an internet fashion site that doesn’t suck.  Some how fashion sites are the place that the internet has forgotten.  They are ugly, impossible to navigate or set back in web design sense at least 8 years.  which is weird for a category of site that should care most about the way they look, right?

What I would like to do for a fashion site is to rethink the idea of a fashion site online.  I would like to start with a really in-depth look into the history of fashion, and compare the fashion styles to what was going on at the time to drive people to dress like that.  Stuff like this: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/32657 .  From there I’d like to get virtual closet concepts added in, where people could share there outfits and style sense. the obvious way to monetize would be to get affiliate links with all the clothing manufacturers and then inventive people to make outfits and then sell them.  The one thing I know the site WON’T be is a gossip site, or talk about runway models and stuff. that stuff is kinda boring, and there is enough people covering that, and that way lies madness.  I don’t want to end up with a myopic veiw of the world where I view everything through the lens of clothes.

So I guess the easy part would be to transform the comment I never left at Nikki’s blog and turn it into part of this. Her blog was about what she wants to do with her life, you know simple easy stuff.  But I’m sure everyone thinks about that stuff, and people who have stopped thinking about it are boring and not worth talking about. or even to, anyways.  She wants to be an eternal student, but not a starving artist, I think I would like just the opposite personally.

The life of an artist is something I’ve always wanted, but never given myself real permission to do.  Its always felt like thats the easy way out. But I’m still not sure what else I would WANT to do with my life.  Meanwhile no matter how hard I try I can’t get away from comics. Perhaps, its time to admit that it is my true passion. I can be a successful comic artist, and what I’m scared of is the amount of ego it takes to say that with confidence.  Sure most comic artists online never make a profit, but thats because, even discounting people not trying to be great, everyone else really freakin sucks.  And I won’t be so self deprecating to say believe that those idiots are on an equal footing as me.

Maybe I’m wrong though and I’ll end up starving to death for my art, wouldn’t that suck. But I don’t think I will.  I guess this means I have to start prepping to do 5 comics a week in addition to any weird random side comics I’d like to do.  But I’ve been working a little towards that this week and I am beginning to think that doing 5 comics a week may be paradoxically easier then 3 somehow.  at the very least not updating 5 times a week is as easy as not updating 3 times a week.

I am growing more confident in this decision every time I think about it.  I know I can be professional, because I know how I want to be treated as the reader.  I’ve also been listening to web comic creators talk having found a few more web comic related podcasts, and I’ve realized that people with no confidence in there own work are boring to listen to. so theres no point in falling over yourself to be humble.  It actually comes off as a little insulting, to people who are listening so theres no point in it.  I really enjoy my comics, and would probably enjoy reading them if I wasn’t the artist. I don’t think theres any reason to be ashamed of that is there?

I also got other plans some involving this blog related to this.  I might put some piccys up of the apartment tomorrow if I can get a set of batteries that work.

Theres been a lot of buzz on the internet recently about a growing trend that I, as an anti-social hermit, really am happy to see. Theres a growing trend of at least amoung the super web savy, about stoping this crazy out of control love for social networking, and pulling things back home where you can own it.  The idea being that participation in these things is great, but at the end of the day, why should strangers control your online identity. STRANGER DANGER!  Mostly this has been kicked off by that massive DDOS attack on a bunch of social networking sites after ONE GUY pissed someone off. Personally I never wanted to give up that control but, everyone else already had and I want to participate in the online society so I did what I had to. But now I can start hoarding all my data again and be seen as cool.  thats what we in the conflict management business call a win/win (win, because the negotiator also wins).

The question then becomes how to I aggregate all my data back here then?  I’ve already got friend feed set up as my agreggator of all of what I do online, but I really don’t want to trust them now that there future is uncertian post buy out from Facebook, a company I personally don’t like.

The hardest problem I guess is twitter.  The easy solution is to just have it pull in all my tweets as a  big infinite list. but thats pretty worthless so why bother? Honestly so few of my tweets really need to be archived that its probably not worth doing. but I wanna. I just don’t know how it should look yet and once I figure that out how to make that work is still a mystery.

Then theres a second class of content to figure out, things like my delicious bookmarks and the shared items from google reader.  feeds that say things that Im finding thats cool that I dont really have a lot to say about (sometimes I do but thats an extreme exception)

I guess what it all comes to is that I want my blog to not be “just another wordpress blog”.  Man I hate that stock tag line. why dont you just kick my creativity in the nuts wordpress team?  I want to make this more then a blog, without losing the good stuff of blogging. I want it to be a place to facilitate my creativity, and let me have conversations around it.  I want it to let me start weird projects and see where they lead. Setting up a tag for the project doesn’t quite do enough, theres a lot of metadata about a project that is hard to surface.  I still am trying to solve this issue.  what normally happens is that the metaness of the project site being a project makes the whole thing collapse.

I do like talking about creativity, even more then actually being creative sometimes. Which is why I really enjoyed Scott’s new podcast “Surviving Creativity” If I were to do a podcast (unlikely) it would be on that subject.  though I’d have to rope you in nikki, cause that would give me the edge on the competition.  Instead of having a bunch of dudes say hey if only a woman was here we wouldn’t have to dance around this issue about what a womans perspective might be.  What a pathetic conversation to have nerds.  Just take a break for 5 minutes and talk to a girl and then come back. -_-

But I digress, and after I made such a clean segway too. On the first episode of the podcast, which was about writers block, Scott brought up this ladys talk from TED. I’m too lazy to find the talk but essentially her advice is that you HAVE to externalize the creative whatchacallit unless you want to go insane and end up in a looney bin.  I found her talk incredibly annoying, personally. The idea that you’ve got to create an imaginary friend in order to not go insane is RETARDED.  I don’t give a shit if thats what the greeks believed, thats not proof its a good idea.  If you are going to invent an imaginary person to blame when things suck, then that means they get the credit when things go well.  So who needs you at all?  You made yourself irrelevant to the creative process.  why not go get a normal job and enter numbers into a database.  Its such a shame because her underlying points were actually compelling but thats not the discussion that comes out of her talk.  Instead everyone talks about how super cool there magic fairy is.

Meanwhile the interesting things to discuss get ignored. That being 1. don’t worry about losing this precious magic idea.  You’ll have another that’s equally good later when you can do something with it.  and 2. don’t wait to be inspired to do work, do the work until the inspiration comes.

I don’t pretend to understand the Greeks very well, but from what I’ve read about them, if they knew what we know they wouldn’t believe in “geniuses” or whatever you want to call the magic elves that make your art good.  They weren’t so knowledgeable about the way the world worked by just thinking that people from thousands of years ago were the real smart people and everyone after them was stupid and got everything wrong.

c’mon really guys? I mean I understand that we as nerds tend not to have much experience talking to women, but still, how could you think that was an acceptable potrayal of women?  Here’s a hint if you can have a suprise twist in the plot by making your character not hate the thing everyone else in the comic is into, then you have a sucky character. thats just regardless of gender.  people in real life are friends because they get along. That seems to be a step people forget when creating characters… Giving the characters any reason to hang around each other, other then there is some mysterious force outside the bounds of there universe compelling them to do so.

Which is why I’ve more and more been grudgingly accepting that I am in fact a “writer” as much as I already consider myself an artist.  I’m a pretty terrible writer, but being terrible never stopped me from calling myself artistic. so I’m a writer in the sense that I aspire to be a better writter.  Some guys gotta prove that writting a mixed gender cast isn’t some impossible dream right?  One time someone had told me that my character of Navi was a believable lady, and that really stuck with me and bugged me. I love navi but “she” is an insane robot, who was completely smitten with a 2-3 year old girl.  Navi’s percieved love for things were merely mirroring Missa’s intrests. I can do better then that, and thus I should.

I’ve been reading a series of books by Tamora peirce I’ve got through the first one and enjoyed it quite a bit. well except one teeny bit where Alanna got her first period, which weirded me out a bit. a fact that nikki enjoyed immensly.  But any small insights into the other sex is useful to help me write more realistic characters.  I mean I already know that the first big secret is that men and women aren’t as different as people make out. A lot of the differences are just very minor and subtle and thats what makes figuring them out fun.

I have  a lot more to say about this topic, but I gotta figure out how to get it organized better in my head.  I’m posting this bit now ’cause otherwise nikki would win our contest and I suspect that would be the end of both our blogs.  at the very least it would be the end of mine XD

It was a fun thought expiriment to try and come up with things I could add to the mmo space rather then merely copying WoW like most other places. There is one thing I think you’ll see companies start doing soon, though I can’t think of anyone who is doing anything close yet, and thats improving the out of game experience.  The fact that its a little “out of the box” to use a horrible horrible phrase is probably why it hasn’t really been done.  Its probably a little counter intuitive or even counter productive for the smaller mmo companies to implent stuff that doesn’t directly make the game part of the game more fun.  Which is why blizzard will enevitably deliver this first and  leave everyone else to wonder wtf to do now. After all Blizzard has already done a lot to add value to players when they can’t play, with there Armory a site where you can go to compare your characters and those of other players based directly from the server data of your characters.  You can view your calendar, and add items to it, so that you can better plan when to do events with your guild. (you can see my main character Emilea here.)  they even have a convient iPhone app, so you can do it on the go.

But I don’t think even Blizzard is going far enough to get the real value out of the offline space.  They veiw it always as a game first and any other use the players use it for second or third.  the second and third priorities Blizzard likes to let the player base take care of with add-ons and fansites.  If a use becomes popular then they absorb it into the game proper.  But I think it misses what the bigger trend on the internet is, social networking.

MMO’s are the perfect social networking framework though and I think there could be real value in strengthening that aspect of it(social networks are notoriously hard to quit because thats where your friends are, the business model for MMO’s is trying to get people to not quit). For starters lets extend the concept of guilds to a place out of game, by establishing guild forums so you could have asynchronous chatting with your fellow guildies.  Blizzard already has forums set up for public use that you post using your character’s identity, this would merely be extending the system to a locked down area where you don’t have to see all the regular idiots of the game just the people you chat with.   The only way of asycronous chat available to people currently is the in game mail system, but thats in game and is only person to person (and provides all the joys of snail mail).  its not really ideal to getting to know your fellow guildies and planing out guild events.  Which is why most decently sized guilds have their own website. but that puts smaller guilds at a disadvantage.  I haven’t even talked to most people in my guild and I’m fairly active in the game. Theres probably some non-zero infrastucture costs to adding a forum to every guild, but theres no reason you couldn’t lock it down into managable chunks that would be unlocked by the guild so that larger guilds would unlock the most features, while smaller guilds aren’t wasting resource.  sort of a guild achievement system, because Achievements are awesome.  It  would even make it better, because it would be a bonding experience for a guild.

Well time to finish playing catch up so I can push foward for a better tommorow, because today is almost over.

Before the blog took a hiatus I was struggling to decide how to take my comics from the sketches which was the part of the process I enjoyed into final artworks. The finishing it part was always more of a pain than anything.  The problem I think was a problem that a lot of people like myself, tech enthusiats, fall into.  The idea that if you don’t involve a microchip then you have failed, and the tech enthusiast police are gonna come and lock you up!  The truth is that theres still a lot of room for non-digital tools. With some encouragement from Nikki I gave inking comics by hand a shot.  I have had lots of fun with it.  Theres something about it that is really satisfying. Its definately nice to have something finished in my hand that I can look at and enjoy.

So here’s a preview of the first comic I finished inking by hand.  I’ve gotten a little better since then as I get some practice and figure things out but I am still fairly happy with how this came out.

Read blog for full size

So yeah, sometimes computers AREN’T the answer.  I know, it scares me too.  Its ok though, I have a couple other blog entries where computers are the answer to restore the status quo and reclaim my place in the world as a tech enthusiast.  In fact I’m going to get down right geeky.  and hopefully I’ll get back on the ball with my comics.  I’ve been putting off doing them for awhile as I got absorbed with other things, mostly WoW. But its given me some new ideas so overall worth it I think.

Number of comics I am theoretically behind on: 21 (yeah I’m holding myself to having done comics on a semi arbitrary start date of the first monday in june which is vaugely when I started this backlog.  I’ll keep posting this number and hopefully guilt myself into catching up.  worth a shot right?)

I’m keeping this update just to the announcement of doing updates again.  This weekend I’ll sit down and finish some back entries of topics I wanted to talk about previously to get this place caught up with where I’m at then I’ll start in on some new stuff I’ve been thinking about.  so hang tight a little longer folks, its not much longer now.

( read post for full size )

This is the first Digital integration strip to enter into my buffer. Gonna build up at least 30 before I relaunch digital-integration.net. Probably should have more knowing me but thats a bridge to cross later. My goal is to launch with a M-W-F update schedule from the start instead of doing one and then hoping one day I could do more. Also I don’t think they’ll be sketches when I post them to the site. Ideally it would be full color but I still havent figured out what I’m capable of doing on a time crunch, and what process won’t bore me to death doing it. I like breaking out the wacom tablet occasionally but that half second lag really frustrates and disorients me. If those cintiqs weren’t so damn’d expensive I’d give them a shot but I can’t be sure it would solve the issue I have with coloring… I guess I should bombard Nikki with questions about it to see if I’d get my money’s worth out of it.

(Read entry for full size)

The third entry in the Monocle Lad comic series. I rushed this one to completion a little bit and it kind of shows. This might be the last Monocle Lad strip for a little bit so I can get back to focusing on Digital Integration and getting that going again. These comics have been pretty helpful in getting me in the right mood to make comics though so you’ll be seeing more comics from me.