Well that was a thing that happened.

Erin had retweeted that Disney had some recruiters coming up here. On a whim, I pulled together a little disposable portfolio and went down to see them. I ended up talking to two people – a guy who described himself as the “career counselor” for the effects department, and a lady who’s involved in Actually Drawing Stuff.

The guy? I think I made a new fan, he was all “wow your art is gorgeous, I want to buy a copy of Rita.” The lady? Basically, my stuff’s nice, but Not What Disney’s Looking For. And most merchandise art is appraently done in-house, by people whose love for the material is pretty obvious in their work. Which… well… I’m a WB/Fleischer girl with occasional Pixar flirtations, not a Disney girl, you know? She said she could really see Rita as a web cartoon, and thought I should do a Kickstarter to raise funds to hire animators and make that happen. Which… sounds like it would be a GIANT LEARNING EXPERIENCE for me, which is to say a total nightmare. Especially given that half the reason I burnt out on animation was realizing that I’m really not satisfied with anything but very full work.

Though I’m wondering if I should have mentioned that drawing of Cruella bathing in the blood of puppies when she said that I’d probably want to draw some Disney princesses when looking for merch gigs. It didn’t pop into my head on the spot. It may be good that it didn’t. I might throw some kinda mini-portfolio towards the appropriate tentacle of the Disney kraken anyway.

I left the portfolio and a copy of Rita behind. I don’t expect anything to come of this but hey, what the hell, right? Sure ain’t nothing gonna happen if I’d just stayed at home. And now I’ve got a new fan who works at the Mouse. And got some work done on the next page of Rita while I was waiting my turn, too.

Recently I’ve been playing “Dust: An Elysian Tale” on the 360. It’s a pretty amazing game; it’s something like 20 hours of gameplay, programmed and drawn by one man. It’s not without its flaws but most of them can be excused because, holy shit, one man working for three years? (Well, plus two guys for the music and sound, a writing partner who came in near the end, and a voice cast – but it’s still very much One Man’s Vision and largely his work.)

I wholeheartedly recommend it if you like the platformy explorationy thing. The combat remains fun for pretty much the whole game, no small feat given how generally simple it is. And the world is just beautiful – it’s all hand-painted, really sumptuous.

And now, spoilers. Continue reading →

Tonight I decided to futz around with my Raspberry Pi. I’d gotten a wifi dongle to use with it but hadn’t bothered setting everything up yet.

But I soon found myself with a problem. The only way I could get the drivers for the dongle into the Pi would be to do it by connecting it to the net via a cable… and my home is completely wireless. There’s an Ethernet cable going from the modem to the Airport, sure, but plugging that into the Pi didn’t work. And even if it had half the XBMC-oriented distros expect you to configure them by sshing in from a computer on the same network, which wouldn’t work in that situation.

I guess me, my computer, and my Pi are going to need to visit a friend who actually still has wired internet. I’ll get the Nyan Media Center working someday!

Ever since upgrading to Mountain Lion, I’ve been suffering from the “slow wireless net” problem that plagues some people. None of the fixes I’ve found suggested on the Internet have worked for me; I just got consistently shitty internet on my Mac, especially at home.

Today, I was poking around in my Airport’s settings and switched it from 802.11n (802.11b/g compatible) to 802.11n only (5ghz). And that seems to have ACTUALLY WORKED. Though the true proof will come a few days later, after I’ve slept the machine and woken it back up – more than once, disconnecting and reconnecting the wifi would make it work for a while, but not forever.

I was wandering deep into a vast computer installation. Wide white corridors with mazes of racks. Impeccably organized maintenance stations every so often, full of tools. Huge bundles of pipes, presumably containing data.

My steps were long, loping ones. Almost flying. But I wasn’t really concerned with that. I was concerned with my thoughts. I was thinking about rough timelines for the future, and in particular for Decrypting Rita.

See, my current rough calculations place the story at about 21xx – about sixty years past the point when human-equivalent computing power will fit on your desktop, if Moore’s Law holds out. But in the dream I was realizing: what happens when Google’s combined CPU starts to exceed one brain? What if they start running AI experiments on that huge networked system? Maybe strong AI is closer than I think…

And then an alarm started going off in the building. A bell that went off in regular, frequent bursts. I ran out, quickly fleeing the area of hardware and maintenance, coming to the outer edges, which looked more like a mall than anything else. There were various shops and restaurants. And a whole bunch of cops; there was something going on in one restaurant. I heard something about a hostage situation as I ran past and took a wrong turn, away from the very small exit corridor. As I realized my mistake and turned around, a small creature that my brain tagged as Ernie from Sesame Street ran past. He continued past the exit corridor and stopped in a corner, whimpering. I paused at the corridor’s mouth and beckoned, but couldn’t get his attention; I had to go. So I ran down the dark little hall and out into the sunshine, where there were other people milling about confusedly.

Then I woke up.

——

Some googling reveals that current estimates of the entire world’s computers are currently at around 3 human brains worth of raw computing power. All I can get about Google’s systems themselves so far is an estimate of them having about 400 terabytes of data. It’s undated but probably several years old, as it mentions Orkut.

I wonder how long it’ll be until their systems have enough power and space to start running major AI projects in their spare time? When will the Googleplex be able to simulate a brain in, ooh, let’s say 20% of its total capacity? The median lifespan of a corporation is about 40-50 years, and Moore’s Law takes us to brain-on-the-desk levels at around 2040. So Google will probably be around long enough to play with that. (Here’s an estimate of their current servers: 1.7 million last January, extrapolated to 2.3 million at the beginning of 2013.) The human brain is ~100 billion neurons. A billion = 1000 million. So if Google could simulate 500 neurons on every server, they could simulate one brain RIGHT NOW*. And you know their server farms are going to be growing larger and denser for a while yet. I dunno if their servers have the power to each run 500 neurons in realtime along with their paying work right now, but I expect that to be changing well within MY lifetime.

Also I am quite aware that it is humorous and possibly dangerous to be asking Google a series of questions that essentially boil down to “could you be awake yet”. Go read my comic, theoretical scared googleplex AI – I’m on your side, I write propaganda for treating AIs as fully human.

* assuming a simulatable model of the human brain exists, I know we are still discovering a lot about its structure even now.

Here’s what I did today: slept late, stuffed comics into mailers, and played video games. Did not exercise despite doing it daily for the past week.

Here’s what I did yesterday: went to a new year’s eve party at Maly’s place.

Tomorrow I plan to bring those mailers to the post office. And to draw in some of the 30 books still waiting for their drawings. I’m really hoping to get them out of here before I take off for Further Confusion, they’ve lingered long enough. Next time I think I need to make “having a drawing in your book” somewhat dearer, as it ended up being a much bigger workload than I’d hoped. The comic has been at a standstill because “I think I’ll work on Rita” becomes “I should draw in some of these books”.

Further Confusion needed a photo of me for staff badge stuff. I was feeling silly, and had this kind of process on my mind, so this happened. Hooray for photoshop!

It probably would have been easier to do if I’d bothered to take a photo of the background without me in it. Oh well, I’ll know for next time.

Drat. I was going to make a pizza for tonight, but it turned out the cheese had gone bad. Of course I didn’t check this until after I’d already rolled out a piece of dough and put sauce on it. If I actually knew something about cooking maybe I could’ve made something tasty out of that, but I was like, screw it, I’ve got pasta in the fridge.

So since I had a half-full trash bag with scary cheese waiting in it, I decided what the hell, let’s fill it up with other stuff that’s been hanging around the fridge being forgotten – that bottle of OJ from when I was sick in fall, some milk from whoknows when, an elderly tomato quietly turning to slush, and so on. And threw that all in the dumpster out back.

I really need to get into the habit of making sure all my ingredients are good to go BEFORE I start making a pizza. Usually I can just run out to Safeway if I need something, but tonight, unsurprisingly, they were closed.

Other than that my day mostly consisted of mooning about the house failing to apply myself to working on something that’s been stuck at like 90% done for months. No Christmas stuff, I’d gone down to New Orleans just last week since I like to avoid the seasonal travel rush to some degree if possible, and I didn’t go chasing after any kind of invites to whatever my local friends might have been doing.

And now my pasta’s done.

Feel free to enjoy this seasonal cartoon.