Diary of a Supervillain
This should be a familiar scene to dads who have sons (and probably a few who have girls):
Had the Midget shootin’ out the other end once, too. Painted the wall. I wrote “warning: contents under pressure” on his diaper to give the Wife a heads up for the next change.
Been thinking about picking up The Pack: Winter Kill? What are you waiting for? It’s a crime thriller with supernatural horror thrown in, and so far fans of each have been happy. I’ve got folks nagging me for book 2, and that hasn’t been happening for a long time now.
If you need to hear it from someone else, check out the Bedlam Book Report by Ron Earl Phillips on James Melzer’s Unleashed podcast. The Bedlam Book Report starts at the eight minute mark, but give the rest of the episode a listen as there’s a good interview with The Wire’s Jermaine Crawford about his Code Blue campaign for homeless teens.
There are plenty of reviews on Amazon as well, and a solid review landed in San Francisco’s City Secrets. “Short, snappy, and about as sweet as a chewed stogie.” How do you argue with that?
Would it help if I said please?
I had a new remixed trailer pointed out to me this week, Gone with the Wind with Vampires:
Clever and well done. Ask me, this is the way it should be done.
Yeah, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
I was supposed to participate in a black belt promotion ceremony called a kamiza at the Academy of Okinawan Karate tonight, but the combination of winter weather and a sick child conspired against me. Not only did I miss out on what would have been a great event but I missed out on a great Photo Friday opportunity.
I decided to mimic that opportunity tonight. The kamiza is held by candlelight, and every karateka in the ceremony carries in their own candle. I had my candle at home, so I lit it up and started playing with the camera.
In the dojo, or in the living room?
Something I learned from this pic is I need a remote. I kind of like the pic, but the focus could really be better, especially since I used a low aperture resulting in a very narrow depth of field. I may retake this one when I get a remote, and play with the exposure to capture the flame.
Bonus pic:
I like the halo around the flame
While I was playing with the camera and the distance, I caught this picture. I did a quick crop, otherwise it’s straight off the camera.
Here are a few things said recently about The Pack: Winter Kill:
The Pack: Winter Kill is a page turner with fast action, succinct dialogue and short chapters. Mike Oliveri races you through the book and you clamber to turn the pages fast enough.
– Ron Earl Phillips, 52 Books
Winter Kill is an action film made word. Sticky blood. Smart violence. Real characters. This is the kind of book I like to read.
– Weston Ochse, author of Empire of Salt
Why haven’t you bought your copy yet?
Write a single like Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” and have several companies hijack it for commercials.
I’ve heard it on commercials for the Borderlands video game and TNT’s Leverage, and I feel like there’s at least one more.
Too bad books can’t go viral that way.
I’m posting a day late, but this pic was actually taken last night at the Academy of Okinawan Karate’s graduation.
Judo mocks your silly gravity
Judo is something I hope to work on myself, soon. There is just enough Judo in the Shuri-ryu curriculum to give karateka a taste, but the AOK offers a dedicated Judo class as well. Once I make Ikkyu (first-degree brown belt), I hope to hit more of those classes.
Punch Dub, Slug Bug, Punch Buggy. Whatever you call it, you know how to play the game. Now VW has picked up on it and has turned it into an advertising campaign:
My favorite punch buggy incidents occurred in Los Angeles back during the first 4×4 tour. Brian Keene, Mike Huyck and I were all riding in the back of Ann Laymon’s Cherokee on our way out to Dark Delicacies. Geoff Cooper and his girlfriend followed in a car behind us. At one stoplight, we spotted a punch buggy and commenced to beating the shit out of one another, while the guy next to us shouted encouragements.
Next stoplight, we spotted another. Brian and Mikey jumped out of the Jeep and headed back to Coop’s car. He helpfully rolled down the window so they could deliver the punch buggy blows. Brian and Mikey ran back to the Cherokee before the shooting started.
Good times.
What’s your best punch buggy story?
Back on Christmas Eve, I blogged about the things I’d like my comics to do in the future.
Yesterday, Apple gave us the iPad, and I believe it’s only a matter of time before our comics will do all that. The examples in the keynote made it clear that the days of static pages are over. I don’t think there’s any reason to go fully animated for comics (that’s what cartoons are for), but creators will be able to take advantage of slick transitions and other effects that can really enhance the reading — or even the entire storytelling — experience. Guys like comiXology have their app zooming and panning around a comic, but that’s just scratching the surface.
I’m not convinced this will replace the Wife’s beloved Kindle
I wonder, too, what it will do for short prose fiction. If magazines and newspapers are going to go all out developing for this thing, why not anthology magazines or fiction websites? Grab something like the new Crimefactory zine and read it on the go, just like you might for the Kindle. With the iPad, editors could also post video interviews and other extras you may be able to post to the web but you just can’t do on a Kindle.
I don’t see the iPad replacing my laptop (or desktop, for that matter), but I can see it being a great supplement. I love my iPod touch, but I still can’t edit docs on it. With Pages available for the iPad, I can easily use it to edit files, or even create in a pinch while on the road. I’d have to play with the keyboard dock and/or a Bluetooth keyboard to give any real thought to long-form creation on it, such as writing an entire novel, but the real problem is I need the multitasking to be truly functional on it.
That said, the multitasking isn’t a deal killer. I don’t need multitasking on the road, or if I’m lugging it around at a convention. I can prop it up on a table and let it display artwork all day on a 10-hour battery, or hand it to an editor and let him flip through art or page samples. I can also hold and use it like a clipboard with little effort while walking around a con floor or waiting in line somewhere. These would be unwieldy at best with a laptop, even a netbook.
Kiss netbooks goodbye, for that matter. For $100 or so more, I’d much rather have an iPad. Netbooks are underpowered, for the most part, and you’re still wrestling with a laptop form factor only tinier. True multitasking would bog down the iPad, just as it does most netbooks. If I didn’t have a MacBook at work, I’d purchase an iPad for myself and use it as the supplement to my iMac rather than spending double or more on a full-size laptop. I’d much rather carry the iPad on a plane, too. Laptops are a tight fit on those trays, especially if you’re a larger person or if the guy in front of you leans his seat back.
As an educator, I’d much rather put an iPad in the hands of my students in a 1:1 environment. Why?
Some say printing may be an issue, but I say no. Just ten years ago, Palm wanted every student to have a Palm device and beam their papers, etc., to the teacher via infrared. If the iPad will dump files to a server store for the teacher, that’s all they need, and is more efficient. This saves on paper (not to mention toner, which, believe me, is a huge expense for a school district), and is less junk for the teacher to haul home to grade.
Our coaches will kill for sports statistic apps on one of these. They carry it along the sidelines and tap a player’s name to tweak their stats. Little to no typing would be required if it’s handled right. Heck, with the right app and programming, they’d have quick access to plays, replays, and field/court diagrams.
As for some of the other criticisms, I think people are being a bit harsh.
Take the bezel, for example. Yeah, it’s pretty big, but given the size of the thing your thumbs will have to overlap the screen to hold it properly, and you’d have a lot of accidental input. Saying you won’t buy this thing because of the bezel is like saying you wouldn’t sleep with Shakira because she has small tits.
No camera? Yeah, kinda sucks. But Apple’s not stupid, so I think there’s a reason for this. I decided to test out a theory and set my MacBook Pro in my lap so the screen would approximate where I’d hold the iPad. I fired up the Photo Booth app, and the following is the first picture I took while holding the screen in a way I can read the display.
Talk about negative space...
Tilt the display so I can see my whole face, and parts of the screen start looking dim. I wouldn’t be able to see the person talking to me very well.
That was taken holding the screen in landscape mode. I turned it on its side and tried again. This one’s a little better…
I can see my brain!
…but you can see right up my nose. It’s not exactly the most flattering angle in general. So why include a camera if the only way you can use it is to hold it straight out in front of you? Users would be bitching about their arms getting tired in no time. Yeah, it would work on a dock, but you know most people aren’t going to be buying docks.
A camera on the back wouldn’t be much better. Something that big would be unwieldy to aim, and probably introduce more shake than you’d want with what would amount to a cell phone camera. Again, it would be an opening to more gripes than compliments. You want a tiny, portable camera off your phone? Try a Flip or an iPod nano. Or a real camera like an Elph.
Then there’s the name. The jokes are already all over the Internet, but MadTV already covered this one for us:
“Vaginal firewall protection” indeed. Smooth, Mr Jobs. Tablet or Slate, with or without an i in front of them, would have been much better.
Next there’s the AT&T thing… Even Hitler’s not happy about that one. But can you blame him? We couldn’t get decent AT&T coverage where I live if our lives depended on it. You would think Apple learned their lesson with all the iPhone complaints. But hey, at least they found people a cheaper data plan. Dump a USB cellular modem and the iPad pays for itself in about a year and a half.
Another reason I think this thing is going to do well is the interface. I’ve played with an iPod touch for a while now, and it still amazes me how easy it is to use. I taught the Midget to use it in all of ten seconds, and he in turn taught the Squirt — who was four at the time — how to do the same thing. With no input from me, they were switching apps and playing games like pros. Even my three-year-old daughter effortlessly dumps pygmies off the island in Pocket God, then creates more so she can do it again.
The interface is what killed previous generations of tablets, whether we’re talking about the Newton or the round of tablets the PC industry tried to foist on us around 2000-2002. (They tried to foist them off on the education sector, anyway.) They were unwieldy, heavy, buggy, and in many cases you had to have a stylus, which itself was just an afterthought bolted on to Windows. Handwriting recognition may have been huge in its day, but you had to learn your way around its idiosyncrasies, especially when they revamped the input alphabet like Palm did. Handwriting recognition was just too inconsistent from user to user, but anyone can learn to swipe.
That said, I’m still intrigued by Microsoft’s Surface. It shows they’ve put a lot more thought into touch technology, and if they integrate the touch features into their new tablet devices, I may be willing to give it a second glance. It’s just tough to be positive after the horrible (IMHO) WinMo interface on most of their mobile devices. (5 minutes with a Sprint Mogul was enough to ensure I’d never go anywhere near one again, and I just needed to make a phone call.)
I know there’s probably going to be a better version out within six months of releasing this one. I know I’m paying into a closed system. But damn it, I want one of these.
Pass the Apple Kool-Aid.
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