Brighter Flames Arrayed

1. One of my friends just started a cross-Mongolia journalism project. The goal is that she’ll visit every province in Mongolia on a horse with her camera and computer and it’ll be a crowd-sourced and funded project that is paid for by the Internet for the Internet. It’s pretty ambitious but sounds amazingly awesome.
2. I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading Fables. It’s possibly the best comic series I’ve been reading recently. The downside is that since I’m on the West Coast temporarily every volume I buy right now will need to be transported across the country when I head back east in a few days. Also, I’m reading at a rate where I will run out of new Fables TPBs in a week or two. But that’s okay, because then I finally have time to catch up on Ex Machina before the final book comes out.
3. Today I wore a pair of girl jeans that I got for two dollars on sale the other day. They are exceptionally comfortable. My biggest complaint about boy jeans is that it’s too tight around the hips and too loose around the ankles. These pants have the exact opposite problem, which is both refreshing and more comfortable.
4. For the first time in over two years I’ve been invited to a wedding. This means that I need (semi-)formal wear as I don’t have much wedding-appropriate clothing and what I do have is not accessible before the wedding. I just realized how bad I am at picking out (dress) shirts and, worse, ties to go along with them. Sadly, this is not an occasion that I can go to with a work shirt over a patchwork/gypsy/cargo skirt and a pair of work/snow boots; this is what I pretty much always wear, by the way.
5. I’ve been getting into programming for Android phones lately, partially as an excuse to finally learn Java and to determine whether it is a good language for teaching programming. It isn’t; not where there are better alternatives around. But it’s fun to have time to program again and to remind myself of all the stuff that I’ve forgotten.
6. This is the first blog post I made about clothing and the first one in a while without a “teaching” tag. It’s only going to go downhill from here because every other post will be about new bags or something.

Wing :: Aug.03.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

1. Since writing my last post I have learned how to grill a good steak on a charcoal grill and almost got rabies. Those two incidents are not related. At some point (probably once the semester is over) I will tell the tale of how I almost got rabies on here.
2. If you didn’t know about it already, Information is Beautiful. It’s also a web site that has a ton of infographics and is the blog for the book of the same title. Some of the graphics are more graphical than statistical but it’s still pretty awesome.
3. Todd Goldman, who has stolen artwork from a bunch of artists on the Internet from the past, has stolen a design from awesome artist Jess Fink (again). And selling prints of it for $1200. This is rather sad.

Wing :: May.20.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

I have bookplates! This has been a project I’ve been planning for over a year now but I only really got around to it in the last few months. Here’s a picture of what it looks like adorning my copy of Livingston’s Knot Theory.

The art was a commission from local comic artist and craftswoman Megan Baehr. Basically I just said “hey draw me a cat sleeping on some books” and she drew this wonderful picture for me. I then traced the hi-res bitmap (with super-low tolerance) into a vector format and rescaled it and added the lettering to make it fit the labels I had. These were then printed on clear Avery labels that we use for gallery and museum signs and then pasted into my books. The good thing about the clear labels is that each book retains its own unique paper coloring; the bad thing is that it does not work in books that are printed in the inside of the covers. For example, I have not been able to label my Scott Pilgrim collection yet.

It does look very good over the map of Creation in my Exalted Second Edition core book, though.

Too bad I don’t actually have a copy of my book yet (it’s being shipped to me as we speak; the only copy I had was on the west coast and I gave it to someone there) so I can’t, you know, put my own bookplate in it.

Incidentally, my copy of the Sacred Harp is actually unlabeled; well, currently it has a post-it note with my name on it inside. I’m thinking about commissioning someone else to draw either a larger plate for it or to draw directly in it. I don’t have an idea of what to put in it quite yet but I do have a person in mind for the job…

Wing :: Sep.03.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Excitement! A friend and fellow Amherst alumnus wanted to put out a collection of poetry, plays, music and comics both to raise money for Amherst and because it’s awesome. He asked me to pitch in some comics from my vast archive of Interweb comics, and so now there are six comics from my archives printed in this collection. It’d be awesome if you bought one—there will likely be only one printing of 1000. You can buy it at Poetry Slam Inc., or perhaps Amazon.com. I’d recommend avoiding Amazon.com since they seem not to be very good at keeping stock and filling orders quickly.

Speaking of comics, you should head over to mathbunnies.net and read my webcomics, one of which is out of hiatus and updating regularly again.

Wing :: Jul.27.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Right now I’m packing for a week-long writing retreat that I do with some students every year. No internet for four days! The horror! Before I shut off my last laptop—I have three laptops, which is a fact that warrants a post of its own—I thought I’d do a short post of really cool things and people I’ve discovered recently…

Scott Pilgrim, who has a precious little life that he must fight the world for or he’ll fall into infinite sadness. This is a comic book series about a twenty-something Canadian boy “between jobs” who has to play in a band and defeat his dream girl’s seven evil ex-boyfriends in mortal combat. It’s kind of the voice of my generation and it’s certainly the best comic book I’ve ever read. More on Scott Pilgrim later.

Gideon Freudmann opened for Tim Eriksen at the Iron Horse in Northamption last Thursday. I had no idea who he was except that one of the folks who went to the concert with me was his biggest fan ever. Turns out he plays the electric cello while controlling some crazy synthesizer drum machine thing with his foot—or maybe it’s some realtime thing that plays off his cello? His music is pretty damn amazing.

Henry Hatsworth is an outrageously British professor who goes on a puzzling adventure to save the world. It takes the Nintendo DS to its logical extreme: a platformer on the top screen and a block puzzle on the bottom. You switch between the two using the X button and each screen affects the other. Kill things on the top and you send them to the bottom screen. Let the bottom screen pile up and more enemies appear. Removing blocks from the puzzle charges your super attacks and makes your projectiles more powerful. The game is also pretty hard; in the second half of the game you really need to switch back and forth charging your special attacks and powering up blocks by killing things with said special attacks. The best thing about the game though is that it’s unfailingly British: by charging up your combo meter you unlock TEATIME and turn into an invincible British Battling Robot.

Wing :: May.10.2009 :: Posts :: No Comments »