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Back in January of 2001, I made this animation of a robot.

This was my first experience with 3D animation, and it probably shows. I used Infini-D, a package that was obsolete even then, but easy to pick up. The effort-to-reward ratio was high enough that I was able to delude myself into thinking I had the patience for 3D animation. This turned out not to be true, but the experience was useful: when I saw the trailer for the Jimmy Neutron movie, I could tell based on a certain wall texture that the movie was totally made with LightWave.

I think this animation is pretty decent given my lack of experience, but looking at it closely (using a higher-resolution version than YouTube allows) I’m realizing how much I approached computer animation as an engineer. I’ve never had a good sense of aesthetics, and I thought of 3D as a way to sidestep that: just drop some objects and lights in your scene, point a virtual camera at them, and voila! Instant Toy Story. Needless to say, there’s more to it than that. Even though you’re working in 3D, the finished product is still going to be a 2D image, and you need to have that final image in mind the whole time you’re laying out your scene.

Some of the ways I flagrantly ignored this:

• Nearly everything in the animation is reflective. Mainly, the R on the robot’s chest, the robot’s eyes, and the floor/ceiling. This is dumb for two reasons: one, it’s visually distracting and unnecessary (you don’t need to see the checkered floor in the robot’s eyes, and in fact you can’t — see below). Two, it makes the scene take way longer to render, since everything visible in the reflection basically has to be rendered twice. But I did it because it was easy (just click the “mirrored” checkbox!) and what says “hey look, I’m making pictures with the computer box” more than a reflective checkered floor?
• Excessive camera motion. Again, because I could. Again, distracting and unnecessary. I later learned that moving camera shots, in real life or virtual, should start on something and end on something. Kind of obvious when you think about it, but think about how many features you abused the first time you used a camcorder.
• Details you can’t see. The robot has two transparent spheres on top of his antennae, which fall off when he goes through the floor, but they’re nearly invisible. The green columns have a weird noise texture that looks like TV static when the camera moves. The point where the robot falls through the floor is marked by a particle fountain, but the red particles are hardly visible over the red floor.
• Pointless textures. The robot’s butterfly wings have the same texture as the walls in the second scene, but they don’t look particularly natural on either. The checkerboard floor is kind of a 3D cliche, and when you’re seeing it from a low angle the distant checkers look weird. I’m really not sure why the table has that hideous tie-dye pattern, but I actually did another robot-on-table animation later and the table in that one was even uglier.
• The last scene. I’m not sure if this was a rookie mistake or just a tough thing to storyboard, but switching to a completely different camera angle for the punchline of the animation wasn’t the right choice. I think the surprise still works, but it could’ve been much better.

That said, I did stumble onto one time-saver: robots are excellent for animation. If they move stiffly, no problem! They’re robots! You can also blow them up without being too macabre, and that made Robot Disaster kind of a 3D equivalent of those flipbooks you drew as a kid where a stick figure dude gets eaten by a dinosaur. I’m also kind of pleased with the way that poor robot breaks apart at the end. He’s kind of dumb, too — he sees the end of the table, and he has wings. His destruction is his own damn fault.

I just got an email from my gas company that seems to be offering me a chance to win Red Sox tickets. I say “seems” because the email doesn’t say “Red Sox” even once. Here’s what it says instead:

Subject: “KeySpan Wants to Take You Out to the Ball Game”

“Let KeySpan Energy Delivery Take You Out to the Ball Game! Complete a Quick Online Energy Survey for a Chance to Win”

“[…]you will be entered to win one of 12 pairs of tickets to a game in Boston*.”

That sounds like “free Red Sox tickets”, right? But they don’t actually specify. I’m left to wonder. Is there some legal reason they can’t say Red Sox? It wouldn’t surprise me. Are they trying to cover themselves in case they can’t get Red Sox tickets, and send people to see a minor league team or perhaps Somerville High’s lacrosse team? But the fine print clearly says “home game” and “professional baseball”.

It’s probably the legal thing, but I’m fascinated by all the circumlocution. “Fill out this survey and you could see a baseball team play in Boston, if you catch our drift.”

I like rap music, and I especially like when a rapper slides a really ridiculous line right past me. This is not too hard, because I often don’t pay close attention to the lyrics at first, and even when I do there are more of them per verse than in a rock song, so there are more places to hide something silly.

This is how I was able to listen to Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” dozens of times before noticing the following lyric:

A million dollars in it, cold hundreds of Gs
Enough to buy a boat and matching car with ease

Wait, what? Run wants a matching boat and car? Buying a boat and car is thinking a little small if we’re talking about a million dollars, but this is a matching boat and car. Like a gift set, maybe? I don’t even think that sort of thing is available for purchase.

I’m not even sure how well you can get a car to match a boat, since they are pretty fundamentally different vehicles. You could get the same color, but unless you keep your boat in your driveway they won’t often be in the same place, so I’m not sure anyone will notice. My DS Lite matches my Wii, and I didn’t notice that until I wrote this sentence. Although now that I think of it, if you could get a Mini Cooper boat, I’d buy that set. If I happened upon Santa’s wallet, I mean.

I also like this more convoluted example from Masta Ace and Biz Markie’s “Me and the Biz”:

Cause I’m able to rock a crowd without a cable
Or a Cuban link and… [yo, Lincoln wasn’t Cuban!]
So? I still produce def jams like my name was Ricky Rubin

Some other surreptitiously ridiculous lyrics: Ice Cube’s “makes a man cook ‘em in a pot like gumbo”, Nate Dogg’s “Now they droppin’ and yellin’, it’s a tad bit late”, and the fact that anybody listens to the Streets.

It looks like the Death To The Extremist Wikipedia entry has been un-marked for deletion. I don’t know why. The next time you try to look up some useful information and get my entry instead, feel free to shake your fist at the sky and shout MICHAEL ZOOOOOOOOLE!!!

One of the complaints raised in the deletion discussion was that there wasn’t much in the entry that you couldn’t discern from the DTE site, and that’s a valid point. I’m not going to edit my own entry, but if anyone wants to flesh it out, I can provide additional information on request. David Malki of Wondermark interviewed me a while ago, but I don’t think he’s put it up yet. (Which is a shame, because I have a great tirade against the term “webcomic”.)

In other news, I’ve received 736 spam comments in my first three blog-months. It started out slow, but now I see what all those blog-people have been talking about. Please yell at me if one of your comments gets tagged as spam, I’ve got a Roomba in there doing it and it’s not that great.

So, the Death To The Extremist article on Wikipedia, which for the record I’ve never touched, has been “marked for deletion” because DTE is apparently not notable due to a too-low Alexa rank.

I wouldn’t really mind, except this seems to be part of a mini-vendetta against articles about Web comics. Comixpedia comments on the deletion of the article on Attitude 3 (which DTE was featured in) and Jeff Rowland, who is notable just by virtue of being incredibly awesome, also has some good things to say.

This could spark a larger discussion of what constitutes notability in today’s world, but mainly I can’t believe web comic article are being considered for deletion while Wikipedia has a 3000+ word article on Donkey Kong’s animal buddies (complete with a discussion on why Yoshi is not technically an animal buddy). I’m a rabid gamer and I didn’t even know Donkey Kong had animal buddies.

I was just poking around Amazon and I saw a book called “The Beck Diet Solution“.

Apparently this is a diet where you start out by eating all kinds of weird stuff, like a Quarter Pounder and a glass of champagne for lunch, and for dinner, eggplant parmesan and an old boot. Then, every few years, you pick someone else’s diet and replicate it with some tweaks.

Zing.

I hope to avoid using this blog to gripe excessively about things that annoy me, because a lot of things annoy me, and I no longer have a comic where I can get it out of my system in a potentially funny way. But this is something that needs to be brought up, so we of the blogosphere can talk about the blog issues that affect our blog community. I’m talking about the increasing use of irrelevant-ass pictures in blog posts. Take a look at this post from Gizmodo:

It’s a post about a site that helps you find radio stations or, if you are using an iPod FM transmitter, unused FM frequencies. OK, cool. Why the hell is there a picture of Candace Cameron as DJ on Full House (from the show’s Big Hair Era, no less)? Oh, because it’s about a site you might need if you’re DJing up some tunes in the car. Get it? Of course you do, but it’s still not funny. This is what we in the business refer to as a “reach”. Sometimes we just refer to it as “not funny”. The DJ/DJ joke was funny when Homestar Runner made it in 2002, and you could probably still get some comedy mileage out of it, but you’d have to not want it so bad.

You see this in more subtle ways, too. Sometimes Gizmodo will be talking about an unreleased MP3 player or something. Lacking a picture, they’ll include a picture of another MP3 player by the same manufacturer. This seems more useful than slapping up a picture of John Stamos, but in some ways it’s worse, because seeing the picture provides you with negative information; the text of the post then has to inform you back above zero, or the blog post will have been an unmitigated waste of your time. Not unlike this one.

But there’s a bigger problem at work here. I realized, looking at DJ’s expression of possibly-Gibbler-induced dismay, that the good people of Gawker Media feel like they have to be funny, in some token way, every time they write a post. And it’s not even really humor: it’s more like snark, which is funny in the same sense that pictures of food are delicious. Why do they do it? I think the dirty secret of Gizmodo and other blog empires is this: they don’t really know anything we don’t know. They aggregate links on a particular topic and add their reactions, which generally line up pretty well with their reader’s reactions. Then a fight breaks out in the comments section. Recently I started pointing my RSS reader at Engadget to see if it would be any different, but nope, basically the same blog.

I don’t mean to come down on professional bloggers; no doubt they take their blog jobs very seriously, even when they use the word “jive” when they mean “jibe“, which makes me fly into a homicidal rage. But I think my personal preference is to read blogs written by a particular person, rather than blogs on a specific topic with a rotating staff of contributors. What do you, my handful of readers, think?

Although I wrote Death To The Extremist for almost seven years, I’ve never thought of comics as my field. I was always more into music, and that kind of seeped into DTE in the form of many references to various bands. I was afraid to do this too much (more on that in a future post), but I was curious who I’d ended up referencing and how much, so the other day I sat down and made a list. It took about two hours, which is time I could’ve been using to do something else. I’ve included the list below, if that’s the sort of thing you’d be interested in.

What I learned: I’m a big nerd who references They Might Be Giants and Devo a lot. This may be tempered by the fact that I reference Dr. Dre just as much, or it may just underscore why people associate me with Michael Bolton from Office Space. Also, I should point out that the number of references is not necessarily a reflection of how much I like the band, otherwise Shonen Knife and Veruca Salt would be on there like 16 times.

Legend: Direct references (i.e. name-checking a band) are in bold. References in the subtitle (hold your mouse cursor over the comic) are in italics. Some of these references are kind of obscure. If you’re curious what the hell I was thinking, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can explain.

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I’ve been meaning to learn how to cook for way too long, and that scary “processed food will make you fat and dead, you uncultured Cheeto-stained American” article in the New York Times has somewhat spurred me into action: tonight I am going to make something. And I’m going to get all Web 2.0 on your asses and liveblog it.

I’m making Chicken Marsala, not to be confused with Chicken Masala, although I’ll happily eat either. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that I’m making it, though: I’ve got a packet of chicken and a jar of Marsala sauce from Trader Joe’s, so there is some prepared food involved, but the ingredient list on the sauce is pretty short, if you ignore the paragraph-long parenthetical after “SEASONING”. The bottle even has instructions — I wouldn’t quite call it a recipe — on the side. If I’m understanding this right, I’m to “cook boneless chicken until done, add sauce and saute until heated through, about 10 minutes”. I’m planning to add pasta to the whole deal, to make it at least sort of like the Chicken Marsala I’ve had in restaurants. So let’s get started.

7:10. We have a shitload of spices on the shelf above the stove. In the old apartment we had more cupboards so you couldn’t see them all at once. I’m not going to be using any of them, but damn. OK. Cook the chicken. I remembered to take it out of the freezer this morning, so we’re on the right track. Oh, right, pasta. I’ll have to time this right. 10 minutes to saute, 8 minutes to cook the pasta… shouldn’t be too hard.

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I’ve always wanted to make video games, but that hasn’t worked out yet. However, I’m very accomplished in thinking up video game titles. A while back I came up with “Hold Still While I Kill You”, inspired by the little “Finish Him!” interludes in Mortal Kombat, and more recently “I Punch Things”, which would of course be a game where you walk from left to right, punching things.

It hit me recently that this could be a great opportunity for catharsis. If you pay attention to the news, which I don’t recommend, you’ll eventually start to think that the world is full of unsolvable problems. What we need is a game where you can solve all the problems of politics, the environment, and general human misery the way we solved the kidnappings of martial artists’ girlfriends in the 80s: by walking from left to right, punching things. “I Punch Things” is that game.

I PUNCH THINGS

a video game by M. Zole

Level 1

SECRETARY: Lance, moveon.org is on line 1.
LANCE: Hello?
MOVEON: Lance, we’ve got a problem.
LANCE: Talk to me.
MOVEON: President Bush is abusing his executive power, eroding the separation of church and state, and leading us into an unwinnable war in Iraq!
MOVEON: We need you to walk from left to right, punching dudes.
LANCE: Got it.

Level 2

BUSH: Darn it, Lance! You punched so many dudes in level 1 I got kicked out of office! I realize now what a jackass I was.
LANCE: …
BUSH: But we’re still in an unwinnable war in Iraq. Can you do it, Lance? Can you walk from left to right and punch dudes?
LANCE: Iraqi dudes?
BUSH: I’m not sure it matters. Bill, does- OK, they can be pretty much any dudes. But the background needs to look vaguely Arabian.

Level 3

BROWN: Lance! Oh, man. I’m in over my head.
LANCE: What’s up, Michael?
BROWN: It’s like this… I’m the head of FEMA, and I’m supposed to help people recover from major disasters. But I have no idea what I’m doing! New Orleans just got hit by a huge hurricane, the levees broke, and now thousands of people are homeless and starving. And I’m going to be late to my restaurant reservation in Baton Rouge.
LANCE: So you need me to walk from left to right, punching dudes?
BROWN: Would you?
LANCE: Sure.
BROWN: You’re a pal, Lance.

Level 4

JON STEWART: Lance, thanks to your dude-punching skills, thousands of hurricane victims have had their lives un-destroyed. But the American people still suffer from malaise and apathy; voter turnout is abysmal, everyone has become more and more isolated, and not enough people are listening to Shonen Knife. We need you to get to the root of the problem.
LANCE: By walking from left to right and punching dudes?
JON STEWART: Good man.

Final Boss

LANCE: So, it was you all along!
PARIS HILTON: That’s right! I was at the root of all America’s problems! My tiny dog was at the root of some of them.
LANCE: Your reign of mediocrity ends here!
PARIS: Probably not! Your punching dudes style is no match for my Vapid Head Tilt!
LANCE: We’ll see about that!

(4500 punches later)

PARIS: Noooooooo!
LANCE: Gasp! You’re actually Hitler!
PARIS/HITLER: That’s right! And I would’ve gotten away with being a shallow media whore if you hadn’t walked from left to right, punching dudes! (dies)

THE END
(peppy end music)