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My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI 99/4a, so when I heard about the rapper T.I. that’s what I thought of first. But it turns out his moniker is actually short for “The Internet”.

Update: Sadly, Muxtape is no longer with us. It is survived by a spiteful, myopic record industry.

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.”