dsandler.org

It’s good to be around Chris again.

Chris: It doesn’t do that.

Dan: It must. Illustrator must be able to do it, we just haven’t found the right way yet.

[Chris regards Dan skeptically.]

Dan: It’s like, we’re Superman, and we haven’t thrown the right crystal out into the deep snow, and instead of getting the Fortress of Solitude, we keep getting the Starbucks of Solitude.

[Chris chuckles.]

Dan: “Iced Mochaccino?” “NO!”

[Chris guffaws.]

This MeFi thread about the Hearts of Space radio program compels me to tell you all about the winter of 1995-1996.

❧ ❧ ❧

When I left for Rice the previous fall, my parents left as well, moving from Maryland (our home of thirteen years or so) to Augusta, Maine.

Despite being the seat of state government, Augusta is a tiny, tiny town. (It is utterly dwarfed by its southern cousin, Portland.) I had spent a few days there for the Thanksgiving break, but the winter recess was my first real sojourn in the area.

I didn’t know anyone in town, of course, and had precious little to keep me occupied. I took to staying up very late, in a room on the sub-ground floor (the lot sloped down away from the street out front), nominally “Dan’s room” but more of a computer room and office.

I would sit at my mom’s drafting table, perched on a high stool, smudging graphite and ink all over my hands, late into the cold Maine night. I tried desperately to reconnect the wires and terminals in my brain that had allowed me to part with my pride and perfectionism long enough to create Captain Jim in high school; I had so many ideas, so many new stories to tell, so many new shapes and forms to commit to paper. I just wanted to unclench and let it all escape from the electrons in my brain, to be reborn as carbon atoms lodged in an angry sea of bleached cellulose fibers. I always found this bizarre process came more readily in the middle of the night.

The night in Maine is as quiet as it is cold, however. A dry, bony silence wrapped the house that wasn’t home, crushing my ears like wind chill. And so I turned on the radio.

It’s tough to find good radio in the Augusta market; stations are predominantly country and religious. I found myself returning to two stations: WCYI/WCYY broadcasting out of Lewiston-Auburn, and WMEH, Maine Public Radio. MPR (not to be confused with Minnesota Public Radio, also excellent of course) carried some NPR programs, some PRI programming, and classical music.

And, in the middle of the night, when college freshmen may be trying desperately to keep themselves awake (not, perhaps, yet having discovered the sweet taste of coffee) to try to seize the slow rhythm of those precious alpha brain waves, harnessing their mysterious power for both good and evil, before sleep inevitably conquers all … that is when Hearts of Space came on.

❧ ❧ ❧

And all this flooded to mind at a quarter to Midnight on a Saturday night. I quickly turned on KUHF, just in time to catch just the last few minutes of tonight’s HOS program.

marcone points out a Ha’aretz article:

Bush said: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Um, what?

A lot of other bloggers have already commented at length so I’ll just do the Jon Stewart thing and stare, dumbstruck, at the audience.

…

Fight Club? Or Calvin and Hobbes, the later years?

Hey, RFID tags being embedded in every product we buy could be really, really cool.. (Another quality post from Slashdot.)

The national Do Not Call Registry opened for business today. Unsurprisingly, the registration site is completely overloaded.

I need to force myself to draw more.

My line of work and time commitments have reduced me to doodling on the sides of source-code printouts and on Post-It notes.

This has got to stop. It’s just not right.

I have proof that I’m letting this part of my brain go to seed: I’ve had the same sketchbook for almost three years. You’re supposed to go through them faster than that. At least, I’d like to go through them faster.

For your viewing displeasure, and my unending shame, I took some truly miserable photographs of select pages and drawings from the book. The autogallery is set to preserve the order, so you can see the progression from eVilla (2000) to dieselsweeties sketch (2001) (cf. the finished product), to some figure drawings (2002) (1, 2, 3, 4), to the arrival of the Zelda Master Quest (2003) (0, 1, 2).

You win some, you lose some. Internet is back up — has been since midday — but digital cable is out again. Well, I won’t be disabusing Time-Warner of the notion that I’m experiencing a complete outage; at least, not until they come out tomorrow morning. It’s like Darryl says: do not tell tech support the truth if you want service.

From Jenny. I pass it on without further comment.

Hmm.

Red 6/26/2003 7:21 AM TW-HOUSTON

Road Runner is currently experiencing issues with the cable network. Subscribers in the affected area(s) may experience a loss of connectivity, usually indicated by flashing modem lights and/or a loss of video services. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Cable modem still out; TV service going in and out. (Sometimes we have nothing; sometimes we have analog only; sometimes we have digital stations too.) The “CABLE” light on my cable modem (Toshiba, PCX2500) alternates between dark and slow-blink, both of which seem to mean “badness 10000″. I’d like to think that all this variability in the behavior of the network is the sign of technicians hard at work at this very minute. (Deep in my heart I know that this is not true; that, instead, things are so horribly wrong that they can’t quite decide just what kind of wrong they are.)

Erin and I just had a little epiphany. Yes, the cable is out; yes, the internet is down … but our TiVo will gladly play back all our saved programs for us. Yes, yes.

Aregh. At 5:30 the link light on my cable modem went dead, and all the TVs turned to snow. Since it’s not an “outage” (I’m sure it is, but I’m the first to report it, because who’s at home using cable at 5:30 in this part of town?) I have to wait for the Time Warner dude, who won’t be here ’till Friday morning.

Until then, it’s dialup time!

Penny-Arcade and the Order of the Phoenix.

Python 2.2 (#1, 07/14/02, 23:25:09)
[GCC Apple cpp-precomp 6.14] on darwin
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> from objc import *
>>> from AppKit import *
>>> myApp = NSApplication.sharedApplication()
>>> SB = NSStatusBar.systemStatusBar()
>>> SI = SB.statusItemWithLength_(32)
>>> SI.setTitle_(”Hi”)
>>> M = NSMenu.alloc().initWithTitle_(”foo”)
>>> SI.setMenu_(M)
>>> myApp.run()

The dead dot-com album documents the outcome of my move to California: be.com, eVilla.com.

Got back a couple hours ago from the welcome party at Reckling Park. The headline from today’s Chronicle: RICE GUYS FINISH FIRST. (I wonder how long they’ve been waiting to use that lede?) Even the New York Times had a nontrivial article on the Rice victory (in addition to the game summary and in-depth on Wayne Graham). More links: RiceOwls.com, Rice Alumni’s article roundup, Rice.edu’s roundup.

WOOHOO!

Rice’s first national title, ever, in anything. Rice over Stanford, 14-2, in game 3 of the College World Series.

The Apple Store is still having problems, but the Power Mac page is pretty responsive (and has all the dirt on the new Power Mac G5). Be sure to check out the page of the design on the G5’s case.