zole.org

Brevity is the soul of rock

Zole — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:32:19 +0000

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.

Self - Better Than Aliens
Andrew W.K. - It’s Time To Party
They Might Be Giants - Rest Awhile
Beulah - Hello Resolven
U.V. Protection - Human Technology
The White Stripes - Fell In Love With A Girl
MF Doom feat. MC Paul Barman - Hot Guacamole
The Pixies - Allison
Liam Lynch - United States Of Whatever
The Tourettes - Something
Ramones - Judy Is A Punk
Elastica - Vaseline

Reports of my death were pretty spot-on, actually

Zole — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:03:14 +0000

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.

Robot Disaster: lessons in 3D animation

Zole — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:00:57 +0000

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.

How to win free $LOCAL_SPORTING_TEAM tickets

Zole — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:18:14 +0000

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.”

Stealth absurdity in hip-hop

Zole — Tue, 01 May 2007 03:43:55 +0000

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.

Wikipedia update

Zole — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:40:04 +0000

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.

Wikipedia, DTE, and Animal Buddies

Zole — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:58:59 +0000

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.

The Weight Loss Information

Zole — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 23:10:40 +0000

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.

Unnecessary DJ

Zole — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:32:41 +0000

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?

Death To The Extremist musical reference index

Zole — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 01:54:29 +0000

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.

2pac - 397
50 Cent - 294, 316
A-Ha - 348
A-Plus - 421
Arcade Fire - 356
Ashlee Simpson - 460
Backstreet Boys - 1
Beastie Boys - 350, 364, 394, 477
Ben Folds - 306
Blur - 353
Bow Wow Wow - 124
Breeders - 175
Bruce Springsteen - 207
Busta Rhymes - 336
Butthole Surfers - 459
Cake - 80, 168
Cargo May Shift - 135
Cibo Matto - 153
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - 373
Clash - 333
Creedence Clearwater Revival - 369
David Bowie - 25
Del the Funky Homosapien - 476
Devo - 145, 423, 437
Digital Underground - 512
Dr. Dre - 305, 362, 477, 481
E-Rotic - 221
Elvis Costello - 59
Elvis Presley - 59, 479
Eminem - 425, 522
Eric B & Rakim - 458
Eurythmics - 134
Franz Ferdinand - 402
George Harrison - 472
Geto Boys - 434
Go-Gos - 472
Green Day - 43
Guided By Voices - 148
Gwen Stefani - 268
Huey Lewis and the News - 342
Hum - 304
Jack Johnson - 423
Jadakiss - 237
Jennifer Lopez - 196
Jimi Hendrix - 306
Joanna Newsom - 529
John Coltrane - 59
John Lennon - 41
Juliana Hatfield - 420
KRS-One - 361
Kelly Clarkson - 320
Killers - 493
L.L. Cool J - 499
Led Zeppelin - 69, 482
Li’l Jon - 313
Liz Phair - 152
Los Del Rio - 472
MC Hammer - 462
MC Paul Barman - 271
Madonna - 239
Mars Volta - 319
Men At Work - 264
Metallica - 124
Missy Elliot - 442
Motley Crue - 59
My Little Pony - 7
N.W.A. - 288
Naughty By Nature - 187
Neutral Milk Hotel - 402
Nirvana - 138, 472
Notorious B.I.G. - 434
Oasis - 472, 476
P. Diddy - 258, 353
Perry Como - 319
Pixies - 402
Poe - 317
Postal Service - 281
Public Enemy - 136, 218, 328
Queen Latifah - 442
Radiohead - 498
Ramones - 466
Red House Painters - 59
Reel 2 Real - 441
Right Said Fred - 472
Rockapella - 116
Run-DMC - 55, 146, 266
Sage Francis - 358
Salt-N-Pepa - 246
Shonen Knife - 137, 427
Sigur Ros - 227
Sir Mix-a-Lot - 32
Smiths - 267
Snoop Dogg - 347, 477
Snow - 472
Sonic Youth - 463
Soul Asylum - 459
Spin Doctors - 459
Spinal Tap - 137
Starship - 209
Sugar - 140
Tag Team - 183
Temple of the Dog - 38
The Game - 294
They Might Be Giants - 61, 357, 486, 500
Tori Amos - 346, 361
Usher - 373
Veruca Salt - 186
We Are Scientists - 505
Wrens - 306
Wu-Tang Clan - 456, 462
Traditional - 334
Ska bands in general - 416