fuck it, I’m a character in a Bruce Sterling novel.

Peggy
August 31, 2013

I’ve been keeping an eye on Bitcoin for a while. Pretty much every time a story about it crosses my radar these days, I kick myself for not just starting a Bitcoin mining client running on my machine the first time I heard about it, back when it was easy to mine buttloads of BTC.

I briefly thought about trying to hop into the new generation of ASIC-based mining hardware, but estimating the ship time on the currently available boxes and eyeing some online calculators that factored in the expected rise in difficulty of mining, the cost of electricity, and loose estimates of Bitcoin price rises, made me decide that’s not worth it unless I sink like $5k into the project. Which would theoretically give me about $14k back but I really don’t feel like taking that risk right now.

So instead I went to Coinbase and bought 4BTC. My plan is to follow the traditional draconic investment plan: put it in my hoard and sit on it. We’ll see what happens. I’m at a financial point where I can easily afford betting $500 on the chance that life really is turning into a Bruce Sterling novel.

And I think I need to figure out a way to let people pay for Rita via BTC. It seems appropriate to pay for a comic book full of half-assed cryptography references with a currency based on wasting electricity to perform very complicated calculations.

project idea I’ll never do

Peggy
August 30, 2013

Pinball Wizard pinball machine. With some way to sense the position of the ball, and little motors to vibrate this into your fingers. Bonus: LCD glass that can be blacked out, while all non-mechanical sound ceases.

Who wants to make this? I can't. But it would be awesome!

phew

Peggy
August 27, 2013

I spent all damn day hacking on the web site. Went down some blind alleys, learnt a few things that I’m sure I’ll promptly forget. But it now subtly adapts the size of the pages if your browser is a little too small for them to fit on screen, urges you to scroll to the right with some big arrows, and if you’re one of those people who thinks using anything but your up-and-down scroll wheel to scroll is Just plain Wrong, you can click on the pages to smoothly scroll to the next one.

Now is the time when I collapse in the bean bag chair and blow some imaginary shit up.

the dream of SHARKBOAT!!!!

Peggy
August 26, 2013

Me and a dream companion had driven up to the besieged house. Outside was dangerous here; monsters might pop ut at any minute. We went in. I turned left, accidentally being rather rude by cutting between a piano-player and his piano; neither he nor his waiting audience noticed, but I knew I’d committed a major faux pas.
Through what was described by the narration in my head as a series of darkly comic misunderstandings, it was determined that I and my companion were there to perform a memorial service for several dead dogs that were lying about in the middle of the room. As my companion prepared to do this, I felt a prickle in my hand: it was one of the large cats that roamed about the house, politely but insistently demanding I move over by a… bicycle? I think. The cat mewed; I looked at the bicycle? and found an obvious loose nut on the stem?, which I tightened as best I could with my fingers. This seemed to satisfy the cat, who stalked off without a thanks or even a nod. Just “you have hands, come fix this thing, okay it’s fixed I don’t need you any more” kind of attitude. Which I found oddly endearing somehow.
Then there was a fish outside, swimming in the air low to the ground. In a gravelly voice just made for trailers, it said, “THE ATTACK OF THE SHARKBOAT!” as it swum towards the house, with menace in mind. Nothing horrible happened; instead, it bit on a baited hook that pulled it into a stream that ran beneath the house. My viewpoint followed it, where I saw it get flung off the hook into a tunnel full of rushing water that drew it inexorably into a large cartoon mine. Which exploded, shaking the camera some, and destroying SHARKBOAT!!!. The force of the explosion seemed to function to reset the trap.
And then I woke up. With that trailer voice repeatedly saying “ATTACK OF THE SHARKBOAT!” in my head.

I should note that “SHARKBOAT!” contained the concept of “it’s a boat, and it’s a shark, it’s twice as menacing as either by itself!” within that compound word. It’s not a boat for sharks, it’s a boat that IS a shark. Like a particularly low-budget SyFy movie of the week. Or at least that’s what the doomed idiot monster-fish wanted people to think was attacking.

stuff done on a saturday

Peggy
August 25, 2013

Today, I went down to Fantagraphics’s store to say hi to Brandon Graham while he was signing stuff. I gave him an USB key with a copy of Secret Collab Project, and got a copy of his sketchbook collection and a collection of ‘Barnaby’ by Crockett Johnson. (Best known for ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’.) I was tempted by some other stuff in the store but I really didn’t want to haul a giant-sized collection of Polly And Her Pals home on an hour-long bus ride.

On the two hours I spent on the bus, I fooled around with some website design. A webcomics creator site I’m on featured Rita for crit last week, and looking at the overall trends of the comments made me decide I really need to make it more obvious that This Comic Flows Horizontally without a “how to read this comic” page, and make the chapter views more front and center. (There were other overall trends, but that’s the one I’m addressing right now. Time will tell whether I’ll do anything about ‘worlds 2 and 3 are very close in color’, and I’m pretty sure the only thing to do about ‘this is some really dense SF that confuses me’ is to shrug and say ‘yeah it kinda will if you haven’t learnt how to enjoy diving into the deep end of an alien world by reading tons of other SF’.) I’m gonna pretty much completely ditch the single-page presentation in favor of whole chapter views, if all goes well.

And now I should go to bed. Hopefully I will manage to make it to that wedding tomorrow.

this town

Peggy
August 21, 2013

I ran out to the hardware store for some goggles. I want to do some sanding on that Nyan Cat projector/Pi housing. I ended up having a brief conversation with the dude behind the counter on the sanding HE needs to do soon: re-working his Boba Fett helmet for Steamcon, which involves a lot of patching it, then covering it with canvas and adding a spike to the top. Pith helmet Fett, why not!

Yep. That sure is a thing that would happen in Seattle.

edit. I spent about fifteen minutes outside cutting and sanding before the dremel’s battery ran out of power. Got one corner vaguely rounded and a decent start on the first cut of the other three corners. I’m fine with that as a start; this thing’s been languishing for a good while.

wow

Peggy
August 20, 2013

I love living in the bleak cyberpunk future. While trying to figure out the best way to properly tweet the in-game screenshots Saints Row 4 can take, I discovered that their web backend seems to be from a company that provides multiplayer video game backends as middleware.

This… this is a profession I couldn’t even begin to imagine explaining to someone in the early 1970s. God damn we are fucking Eloi. You can have a decent living (I’m assuming, from the size of the accounts Agora lists on their site) building the e-plumbing that helps people sit on their asses and share escapist dreams. Maybe sad if you think about people falling into video games over everything else. Maybe not. It’s complicated. And it’s also awesome that we are so far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that we can actually devote resources to making this sort of problem to worry about.

Okay back to being a cartoon President of the United States who runs around punching people into the stratosphere.

mission drift

Peggy
August 19, 2013

Hah. Instead of doing anything relating to Rita, I got stoned and finally hot-glued together a replacement for the staring holographic eye hat bangle I lost, using the other half of the staring holographic eye glasses. My hats will be more stylish again.

I got distracted in that project for a while by pondering making it have some LEDs behind it, but after pondering the methods and materials for a while I finally tested holding it in front of the magic sword’s lights and found that really didn’t work. So I just went ahead with the cardboard and hot glue thing. But I also discovered that oh, hey, I have some super-tiny Arduinos kicking around, appropriate stuff to program them, and some LED pixels for another project. And a clear plastic gift-wrap bow to use as a diffuser. “Yay! I can make TWO hat powerups tonight!”, I said to myself. Except then I realized I only have one breadboard to throw the circuit together on, and it’s chock full of magic sword stuff I don’t want to disassemble. So I ordered some cute little breadboards, and the next time I have this urge drop by, I will actually be able to make a COOL LITTLE THING. I even have a housing waiting: the grinder cap off a jar of pepper, which is pretty much the perfect size for little things like this, and should be reasonably watertight after suitable application of hot glue…

tl;dr: peggy got baked and fucked around with physical things for a change.

slow day

Peggy
August 19, 2013

It was one of those days where I woke up late, after waking up early from funky dreams and going back to sleep. I went out for some errands and tried to get some work done on Rita, but couldn’t seem to make myself focus. I came home and realized I needed some FOOD before going to aikido class, and that I was too short on time to manage it before I needed to run off to class, so I’m punting on aikido tonight.

But on the other hand I do now have names for all the tiers in the Rita kickstarter. I’ve decided I’m going to edit in some imagery for the video, and I kinda wonder if wanting to do that in the back of my head is why I got so little done while out at the cafe – when my brain Wants To Do A Thing, it’s really hard to make it do anything else. I might work on that now that I’m at home instead of in a place where making lots of repetitive noise will drive people crazy. Oooh, and I also need to draw the cover for book 2 so I can use it as the still image for the KS video.

Also while digging around for ideas for tier names, I ran across a rap song about Alice and Bob.

I wish I’d managed to come up with an appropriate tier for the name “Bruce Schneier Facts” but some things just are not meant to be.

Four pages left to draw before book 2 is done. I’m seriously thinking about taking a break for a couple weeks after that happens, so I can have something like a vacation. Especially with (a) a trip to New Orleans coming up and (b) Saints Row 4 coming out. yes I know I’ve talked about how I generally try to avoid games that are about Pushing The Hurt Button for days and days of gameplay, but how can I resist a game with a dubstep cannon. Not that said vacation won’t have the Kickstarter hanging over it, but I’m reasonably confident that the second time around will be a LOT less stressful.

Rita’s Row

Peggy
August 17, 2013

I’ve been fooling around with the Saint’s Row 4 character generator. I decided to do what I’d done with SR3 and play as Rita. I’ve got several versions up on the site; if you have a desire to run around Steelport as Rita, check ’em out.

Rita Perelmann, all dressed up for being the president.
Rita Hatt
Ritamyriax yes this is what a dragoness wears when she’s president, are YOU gonna argue with her?

And while I’m at it here’s the version from SR3, which I only played as Rita 1.
SR3 Rita Perelmann
SR3 Rita Perelmann #2 (after I downloaded the vampire DLC; most of the time at this point I ran around with the tit size a lot closer to max)