Eight doodles for your viewing pleasure.

Information Economy

World of Warcraft has some interesting trades... You can cook, tailor, fish, mine, and many more. The end result of which are always physical goods. These are fun and all, but I really want to make media.

Let me buy a camera. As my skill increases, give me new lenses and different types of film. Also provide a very simple mechanism for creating a newsletter. After enough training, the Pressman would allow me to print x number of copies that I could either give away or sell. At higher levels, I could have a magazine with a staff (much like a guild) and regular subscribers.

The result would be an extra layer of player created depth brought about through a greater sense of history and a broader perspective. It would also allow for a new play type that is less focused on combat. For example: someone who isn't interested in building a lvl 50+ character could still follow high level players into a raid, trying to get the best shots of the action without getting killed.

Friendly Contact

Even though the game is designed to be very social, there's never any physical contact between friendly players. Players should shake hands after a trade. Races can have custom greetings - Two drawrves could go up to each other and do the one armed shoulder to shoulder tough guy hug. When a gnome uses the follow command on a non-gnome, he should get up on that players shoulders. The contact can extend beyond cute and fuzzy things too... By allowing linked attacks popular in single player RPGs. Such as two Mage's casting an area effect spell by standing back to back with arms linked.

Character Weathering

Level 60 characters (as high as you can get) are stunning. The art direction in WoW is all around impressive... Especially so when it comes to the way clothing and unique items come together to create the look for high level characters. Except that they all look fresh out of the auction house showroom. I want my mage to show wear and tear. After x number of fire spells, my cloths should be discolored from smoke. After x number of arcane spells, my hair should start showing grey streaks. My face could age with deaths. Not only would this add more unique identifiers to characters, but it would also give a better sense of the things they've been through over time.

Other wishlists:
Gamer Matters - Weapon history
Grumpy Gamer - Information paradise

A life of Flow, one of the most beautiful things, and one of the rarest. A human life like a mountain stream? to move lightly and easily with life and yet to remain deep and silent inwardly is to live a life of Flow. Each moment of our lives we stand at a crossroads: we can reduce the profound to the mundane, or we can intuit the continuous and vital mystery through which we move.

The waitress was surprised to see us.

Our demeanor gave everything away.

We should have been bowling.

According to AudioScrobbler I've listened to Subtle 221 times in the last 6 months. That's more than twice as much as their closest competitor on my top artists chart: Dj Krush.

I like those guys. They're up to something different.

Subtle = Doseone + Jel + Dax + Marty Dowers + Jordan Dalrymple + Alexander Kort. Doseone and Jel form the core of the Subtle equation, but the band is also greater than the sum of its subsequent parts. Hailing from the Bay Area, the Subtle sextet are intent on home-recording their way to the far side of music employing electronic drums, kit drums, electric cello, 3 keyboards, 3 samplers, guitar, and Doseone's dazzling and unclassifiable vocals. Subtle describe their songs as: "re-sampled and re-approached improv" and the terms rock, hip-hop and electronic all apply here but are by no means exhaustive. - Slims-SF.com

Friday, March 18th they're playing an all ages show at Slims. Tickets are 15 bucks. If you miss it you'll be very sorry.

Especially in my neighborhood. Walk into any restaurant on a Friday night and you're guaranteed to see at least one guy in a t-shirt. Maybe every guy. If you ever see anyone in a suit, they're a Mormon.

Except on the good Saint Valentine's Day.

The Mission is full of dudes in collard shirts. On the streets. In the bars. Everywhere. Full on Jcrew check style. With packaging wrinkles. 1990s JCPenny style picked up from Mission Thrift. Tacky polyester. Your classic white. Anything that buttons up the front and rubs on your neck gets love.

Creeped me the fuck out.

Even though I was out looking for Valentines flowers for my lady, I didn't make the connection right away. It was like accidentally wandering into a Midwestern funeral, except everyone in attendance was the rarely seen cousin from out in California.

The shareware man is keeping Ev down:

Just to pick on one (but this happens all the time), a few months back I read about and installed a Mac outliner application called Process. I ran it once, but didn't have time to delve in. I just fired it up to try and look into it a little more, and I was told that my 7-day trial was over, and now it wouldn't do anything unless I paid for it.

I just ran into a similar problem. I have a very large outline in OmniOutliner 2. I like the ole v2... But the outline has passed the point of hard to manage. Maybe the new row background color options in OmniOutliner 3 would help? As much as I love v2, the interface looks a bit wonky in 3... I was hesitant to buy it. Instead I grabbed the trial to you know, give it a trial run. Except that the trial will only let you edit outlines of less than 20 lines - At least 80 lines short of the document I want to try it on.

I'm not willing to pay $40 for something that may not be a big improvement over what I already have... Or even a downgrade. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I went on the internet and downloaded Serial Box - A collection of registration numbers for Mac shareware. I found one for OmniOutliner 3, registered it, and proceeded to color my document.

It worked. The colors really do make it easier to manage.... But the UI is in fact wonky. I'd almost go as far as to say crappy. I don't want it. Maybe I'd be more willing to buy the upgrade and work around everything I don't like about it, if I did not need to jump through so many hoops to try it out. Or maybe not. Either way, I'm restoring version 2... And continuing to look for something better.

There's a lot of excitement about the new MP3Tunes service ...and rightly so. It's bucking the iTunes/Napster/Rhapsody trend of offering Digital Rights Managed music - Which is music that restricts you to considerably fewer rights than you're allowed under Fair Use and reserves the right to further restrict what little you have at a later date (Apple has already done this once with tracks purchased from the iTunes store).

MP3Tunes isn't the only game in town though. There are two alternative, and considerably better, options:

Bleep.com - Launched a little over a year ago by the folks at Warp records to sell their own music, it has since expanded to include a number of small and medium sized independent electronic and hip hop labels All Bleep mp3's are 192kbs VBR, DRM free, and run about $1.35 per track. The site it's self suffers some major usability problems... like it's nearly impossible to link to the page for Boom Bips new album. The Bleep folks are promising a redesign early this year, along with an expanded catalog.

Audiolunchbox.com - Almost two years old. They also focus on small and medium sized labels of all genres. Tracks are available as 192kbs VBR (and often time Ogg Vorbis too), DRM free, and run about $.99 each. While not as bad as Bleep's linkless framing, Audiolunchbox also places form well ahead of function. The site is heavy and can be slow to respond (watch in awe at the crazy page draw while search results wait to load), but all in all it works. Notable offerings include the new Sage Francis album: A Healthy Distrust and the entire Matador Records catalog.

So I canceled the drawing class. I'm in the middle of some crunch time at work... Leaving there by 5:30pm and not getting home till 10pm every Tuesday in order to develop skills that aren't directly related to anything isn't worth it right now. Even if they're good skills to have.

I'm still hanging my retarded ellipses on the fridge though.

...has launched and it's output is gorgeous. Driving directions have never looked this pretty.

Check out my neighborhood:

Not doing work over the weekend is easy when you have Resident Evil 4 to play. I don't normally go for that sort of game. I can't remember the last time I played something where a primary mechanic was shooting people in the head so that it explodes in a bloody mess. It's not really my style. Which is a good enough reason to check it out when distraction calls. IGN nearly shitting the bed in excitement (they gave it a 9.8, awarded it game of the month for January, and posted an article where editors from other IGN properties talked about their experiences playing it) sealed the deal. Pinpoint aiming is not a gaming skill I've developed. My first few encounters with towns people looked like the bar scene in Shaun of the Dead. I shot walls... Floors... Place settings... Pretty much anything that wasn't the creepy ass dude standing directly in front of me. When I managed to get a lucky shot in, it was a little weird. Shoot a guy in the knee and he falls down. Shoot him in the neck and the next time you aim there (Spaniard hillbilly monsters can take a surprising number of bullets) he may cover his face with his hands. This sort of AI isn't new to games... But it is new to me. Having characters that react directly to violence is a little off putting. They don't want you to shoot them. Even for mutated monsters in peasant cloths, it's kinda understandable. My first response was that I shouldn't shoot them. Unlike the recent Metal Gear games, that isn't an option here. The peasants are smart. Run and hide in a building and they'll surround you... Climbing in through windows and kicking down doors. You have to shoot them. The faster the better.

I got used to it surprisingly quickly. I'm not sure why it was such a surprise... It is only a game after all...

In the last two weeks I've made over 100 pages full of flow charts and wireframes. Which is dope. The best part about my job is visualizing all the parts and interactions of an application in order to tease out potential problems. And then create solutions for them.

I'm getting a bit over-saturated though.

Last night I had a dream where my two oldest friends, Goldman and Aaron, came over to my place with a big flow chart that explained how Goldman was actually Aaron and Aaron was actually Goldman. Hard to believe... I know. The thing is the chart was damn impressive. It blew my mind - I was hurt - I think I fell down. I started questioning who everyone I knew, or thought I knew, really was.

I won't be doing any work this weekend.

The class wasn't what we were expecting. It's less here's a way to quickly get your thoughts across with simple drawings and more here's how to draw realistic things - if you work at it long enough someday you'll be really fast too.

O-well. It's not what I was looking for, but there's still a lot to learn there.

The drawing style advocated is the complete opposite of how I draw now. I'm all about a tight slow dragging of the pen accross the page, relying mostly on my hand for movement, and making up for it's lack of range by constantly turning the page. It's very slow and a little tedious, but I really enjoy it. ...At least for drawing abstract things. I couldn't draw so much as a sauce pot realisticly.

In the class we're being taught to draw the more traditional (and a thousand times better) way of holding the pen perpendicular to the page and using your upper arm as the main point of movement. It's hard. It might take me 2 minutes, but I can draw a mean elipse my way. This way I'm lucky to get a retarded jelly bean shape. I often found myself cheating a bit and using more of my hand.

I'm going to need a lot of practice.

Tonight I start a class called Previsualization: Ideation Sketching at CCA. It's an extended education type course that's all about sketching out the beginning stages of ideas. Me and some co-workers will be there for 2 1/2 hours, 1 night a week, for the next 12 weeks.

That's a lot of school for someone that doesn't do so well with school. Even though it sounds fun, I'm a little nervous. I haven't completed a real class since graduating high school 11 years ago. And completed is more a matter of official terminology than any real view of how I spent my last two years there - Despite what my grades might show, I did very little of what I was supposed to. I was just doing what I could to not go crazy until I was deemed free to go. Eventually I was and I did... But the stomach sinking feeling from anything related to school has stayed around.

Even when it comes to an occasional class of no consequence about doodling.