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If there’s anything I like, it’s forcing my musical taste onto others in the form of the beloved mix tape. Like so many things, the Internet has made this easier. When I was younger it was a huge hassle: dubbing CDs onto tapes track by track, finding a girl to have a crush on, etc. Now we’ve got Muxtape, which introduces innovations like easy one-click streaming and not letting you include a piece of notebook paper where you explain what each track means to you.

So because I can, I bring you Just a Minute, a collection of songs longer than 60 seconds but shorter than 120. Further mixes will follow as I feel like it (and that’ll remove this one, since Muxtape only lets you have one at a time), and the track list is archived after the jump.
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When I started a blog I promised myself I wouldn’t apologize for not updating. I hate it when people apologize for not updating their blogs. If your blog is mediocre, and statistically speaking it probably is, it’s pretty damn presumptuous to think that anyone was really missing it. And if your blog is really good, then it’s free reading material, and nobody has any right to hold you to a schedule.

That said, I feel bad for letting my nascent blog collect dust for over a year. But I promised. So how about this: I haven’t updated my blog, and fuck you.

It’s hard to write a good blog. My respect for the people who write interesting posts on a regular basis has gone way up since I gave it a shot. When I was doing Death To The Extremist it was easy — well, possible — to churn out updates on a schedule, because I just had to pick a topic and think about it until something funny emerged. With a blog you have to actually say something interesting and new about the topic. Or I guess you could also just link to something interesting and new and then say something lazily snarky about it.

Actually, the bigger difference between publishing a blog versus a comic seems to be getting readership. This is the behavior pattern I’ve noticed in myself, and I suspect it’s common: if someone links me to a particular installment of an online comic, I’ll read it and then I’ll read a few more strips in the archives. If they’re all pretty good, I’ll probably come back to that comic. But when someone links me to a blog post, even if it’s really good and I add it to del.icio.us and everything, I will invariably close the tab after I’ve read it and go about my Internet business. The only way I’ll ever see that blog again is if they write something else that gets linked around. Only then, and only if I remember the blog from before, will I then add it to my RSS reader. I guess that kind of serves as a quality/notability filter, but it makes me an awfully tough audience.

I was super fortunate to have carried over some readers from DTE, and I’ve probably lost all of them because of the radio silence. I’m OK with that, though. Part of DTE’s undoing was that I started caring too much about the amount of readership I was getting (or not getting, I guess), and that’s too much dang pressure. So if I’m still on your RSS reader, look forward to more posts and even more relaxed standards of quality! There’s also a surprise or two in the pipeline. Okay, not two. One, tops.

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 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?

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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Apparently Viacom wants to push Spongebob Squarepants on the Japanese market, and they’re having some success. I used to be a big Spongebob fan, although that kind of tapered off after the movie came out, and I also watched Japanese children’s shows for my Japanese class in college. Thus, I feel qualified to point out what you already know: Spongebob and Japan are kind of a weird match. I like their strategy, though:

1. Appeal to trend-setting young women
2. By saying, basically, “Look at this whacked-out character from America”

That’s the way it looks, anyway. The article mentions parents using the show as an introduction to English, which is totally not what I care about: I want to hear Spongebob dubbed in Japanese. YouTube is no help.

Last year I went to Ecuador with my girlfriend to visit her family there, and not knowing much about South American culture, I was most surprised by the proliferation of Spongebob (”Bob Esponja”). He’s huge! Sometimes literally, in the case of Año Viejos (papier-mâché dummies burned on New Year’s Eve) we saw that ranged from small to colossal. The fascinating part is not the exported products — this is America, of course we’ll push our culture on anyone who doesn’t specifically forbid it — but the fact that people were making their own unlicensed stuff. I didn’t get a good picture of any of the Spongebob dummies, but here’s a bunch of kids loading a giant Mumra into the back of a pickup. Apparently even retro is an international language. Just to be clear: those kids are going to burn Mumra later.

Then there’s the matter of the actual show, which was dubbed, and it seemed to maintain its charm in the process. While I was down there I also saw dubbed versions of two of my favorite shows, Mythbusters and Home Movies, which was interesting since neither of those shows is scripted. That means that whenever Adam Savage singes himself on camera, some Spanish-speaking voiceover actor has to dub the yelp. On the downside, the Spanish version of the show is re-edited in a way that manages to take all the fun out of the proceedings: only one myth per show, and the peppy music is replaced with placid acoustic guitar. Also, the episode I saw did not have Kari Byron in it.