The Masked Retriever

We cannot walk lightly on the Earth.

Sun, 18 May 2008 03:29:14 GMT

When the ice age ended, our kind stomped through the Americas and wiped out untold numbers of species. When we found Australia, we did the same. When we found Madagascar, the result was inevitable.

Earth had made a creation greater than all her previous ones. From our first breath, all of nature has been at our feet.

Now after twenty thousand years of dominating the globe, we begin to realize that perhaps merely dominating the other animals is not a task worthy of us. And in so realizing, we are forced to answer a Question. Perhaps even the Question: If being able to kill any other animal on the planet is not a worthy test of us, what is?

One honest suggestion has been to fold ourselves into the background and become a ghost race-- renouncing substantive influence upon the world and watching what happens if we do, retaining only intelligence and memory, that we may watch the beauty of this world as it would be without us noisy young gods stomping through it.

Even this path, though, cannot be mistaken for "walking lightly". Leaving the Earth to the plants and animals presently here is as momentous a Choice as any we might make. The Earth is ours to save, or destroy, or reshape.

Making a quiet choice does not deny that it is a choice. Ours. The question is not, has never been, "Will we keep from changing the world?"

Rather: What changes will we decide to make?

Wed, 14 May 2008 03:24:22 GMT

Of all the animals that have been domesticated, I pity man the most.

However, I should clarify that I do not side with anarcho-primitivists who say the same thing. Where by "domesticated" they mean that we eat and sleep in a way dependent on others many times removed from ourselves, I mean only that we have been made so that we are no where near as dangerous as we should be.

From the GMail User Agreement:

Fri, 09 May 2008 01:38:23 GMT

"8.4 You understand that by using the Services you may be exposed to Content that you may find offensive, indecent or objectionable and that, in this respect, you use the Services at your own risk."

See, there always has to be an ass-cover note in any user agreement. However I appreciate tremendously that Google chose to word it as "it's the Internet, sparky-- eye-bleach-inducing nightmare fuel is part of the experience" as opposed to the typical "well, our terms of service, *cough* forbid posting obscene or offensive materials *cough* NOTOURFAULT *cough* so, *cough* ONYOUROWN *cough* if someone sees something they don't like, well, we did say you couldn't."

The Parallel Port

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:39:47 GMT

When I took EE478, also known as the Digital Systems Course of Doom, we were given a deceptively difficult assignment: get information from the PC serial port. Seemed straightforward enough, write a program to send bits, read bits, easy. But reading the serial packets meant synchronizing a timing circuit to the stream of bits, shifting them into a register, then reading them out in serial, a task that took about a whole breadboard, and I'm not talking about the little ones. I'm talking about the four strips tied together, make sure all the power lines are connected, mammer-jammer breadboards.

So, when I started looking into using the parallel port, I steeled myself for the worst. I was expecting signals that appeared, then disappeared. I was expecting the libraries to control the thing to be pages of impossible navigations just to get a single bit to flip. I was ready for agony.

Thing is, however, the parallel port is remarkably straightforward. Pins 2 through 9 can be rigged, rather cleanly, to direct output bits, which, and this is the really neat part, just stay there. Like, even if the program exits.

The bit rate's also pretty respectable, provided you don't want to send large files over it. Run at "full rate," that is, without any wait statements between one number and the next, my scope tracks a bit at 1.5us, for a bit rate of almost 700kbaud.

What can I do with this? Well, it'd be easier to list what I couldn't do with it. The first thing I did was make a cheap-ass LED counter where, instead of wiring up flipflops, I just hooked three outputs of the parallel port to some LEDs and wrote a for loop. Next I discovered something delightful: connect a speaker between bit zero and ground, and you can program sounds. SO AWESOME.

So my linux lappy and me are nearly ready to start off into that deliciously murky area between software and hardware-- all that I need now is some more software for programming microcontrollers.. aaaaaaaand some actual microcontrollers.

Well maybe I'll work out some way to muck with those Z80's I have lying around.

Edit: You know what I can't do? PULSE WIDTH MODULATION. Yyeah, whenever the OS thinks to itself, "well, that byte can go to the parallel port NEXT cycle," the PWM sputters. My PWM LED *tries* to do that cool Macintosh fade-in-fade-out thing, but ends up looking kind of sad and pathetic as it sputters uuuUUuUUUuuuUUuuUUuup and dddDooOOoOOoOOoOoooOOoown in brightness.

The Benefit of the Doubt

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:01:16 GMT

I'm known to be charitable in my evaluations of people. I consider it one of the better things about me. Given a situation where someone is acting badly, I try to imagine the circumstances that could lead a basically rational, basically well-meaning person to end up acting in such a way, then I assume that this is what has happened.

It's amazingly useful in dealing with people, I've found.

But I've also discovered that there are a few cases where this useful self-programming utterly fails me. There are some things which will cause me to switch gears entirely and begin on a personal mental crusade to vilify a person whose infraction in no way remotely deserves it. I'm not talking about things where it might be justified, like, say, punching someone. I'm talking about extremely minor gaffes in conversation, which many people might not consider gaffes at all:

1: Displays of social conservatism. And I'm not even talking about the crazy redneck stuff. I'm talking about, for example, a guy saying he's vaguely distressed by people on the bus with massive tattoos, piercings, and/or metal plates stuck into their heads. In fact, anyone who shows any evidence of having a reaction less positive than "wow, I could NEVER do that to myself but it sure does look DIFFERENT" is in for a round of me trying to deconstruct them into anti-change fucktrolls.

2: Appeals to authority. If anyone ever says anything to the effect of "well person A says it, and person A is really sharp," I will immediately append to this sentence, in my head, "and I'd rather agree with A than be right". And then I'd start thinking of them as a totalitarian suckup dickhead.

3: Appeals to superior experience. If anyone ever says to me "I've been doing this for X years and I know it is so" I will immediately replace this in my head with "I do not remotely know whether this is true, but I'm hoping to intimidate you with how very LONG I have managed to avoid learning this." Label mentally applied to the above innocent gaffer: luddite dipshit.

So this is a real problem. I'm very lucky to work in a place where very few people display ANY of these qualities because I'm pretty sure I'd hate everyone inside a week if they did. I'm actually trying to at least partially de-program myself of this behavior, because while I still believe quite fervently that social conservatism and appeals to authority or experience are wrong, I need to train myself to understand that many people don't have as visceral a reaction to these things as I do, and may indeed use them as a kind of shorthand for more rational thoughts.

But naturally this will take a while.

The Mads are BACK!

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:45:16 GMT

Mad Science Attack in Miami.

Any rumors you may have heard concerning an "Allan the bubble professor" being involved are purely unconnected with me. I assure you. I mean seriously, I'd have to be really mentally unstable to develop that kind of weaponized detergent.

(Crossposted from maskedretriever.com)

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:15:59 GMT

I've never been to a comics convention in my entire life, for what it's worth.

In this, my first year, I'm volunteering to help out with goodness-knows-what, for the very practical reason that it will keep me from chickening out. I have a terrible track reccord with this sort of thing and knowing that I'm on someone's list of resources always gives me a big boost in terms of motivation. Being counted on counts for something.

I'm trying to figure out what to do for a 'zine to bring with me-- I want to have some paper to show people the level I'm on. The reason for that is that is that I just read The Escapists and that book is designed to make people form Superhero Teams of Comics. Utterly engrossing artwork and a story with punch and enough grit to masterfully suspend disbelief pull you in and quiet any sense you might have that this "couldn't really happen," and all the while the over-arching story that is whispered into your ear is one of abject idealism: You CAN make a great comic with a few friends. There will be hard times, but it will be transcendentally beyond worth it.

And honestly? I already really really wanted to believe that.

Poor Hillary.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:13:08 GMT

She got asked a REALLY hard question on the debate tonight, and indeed, Senator Clinton had to admit, she didn't have an answer on hand. So I thought I'd help her out.

The question:

"Senator Clinton, you spoke of using former presidents to serve both as ambassadors and advisors-- what role do you imagine the current president taking?"

So I thought I'd provide some answers, which I have compiled with the help of marco262. Not the EASY ones, you know, the ones where we tie him to a tree for all the little children to throw vegetables at him, or just send him to Iran with a name tag and a briefcase full of playboys and ham sandwiches, but the ones that, conceivably, you could really get away with using. And here they are:

10: Emergency Beer Disposal
9: Ambassador to the fraternities of American college-age males
8: America's collective aerobic coach
7: A modern Yogi Berra
6: The official whitehouse tour "greeter"
5: "King" of America, in the same way that britain has a Queen: someone with the illusion of importance for the tabloids to obsess over. (Hey, he looks the part.)
4: Presidential golf instructor
3: Whitehouse pinch hitter for those presidential ball games so it won't be obvious that either A) Obama throws like a girl or B) Hillary Doesn't.
2: The new center square on Hollywood Squares

And the number one use for ex-president George W Bush:
1: Official advisor for what NOT to do as President of the US of A

My last name bugs me sometimes.

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:18:25 GMT

So about a hundred years ago, my father's side of the family had a name that presumably came from some ancient pagan tribe of Czechoslovakia. That name was Hudeczek. My great grandfather or so took a whiff of the way the winds were blowing in Austria and decided not to have their names sound like they were, indeed, something other than nice locals. So a name was picked.

The name was the name of the street they lived on. That name was not a proper noun as it turns out. It was the word "corner". So began the Ecker family.

Now, being a post-modernist, I know not to judge the actions of my ancestors out of context. Things might have been bad enough for Czeks that this was a vital move. I can't and shouldn't presume to understand. But being a Nietzsche reader, I can call a lost end of a power struggle when I see one. Whoever that last generation of Austrian Hudeczeks were, they backed down.

My name has "backing down" built into it after a fashion.

Pure Trope

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:25:14 GMT

So doing Simon got me really thinking hard about the Way I Do Comics and I started to really start attacking myself on a collection of fronts, because where Simon succeeded were places where usually I fail, and where it failed it smelled an awful lot like it was failing the way my other stories have failed.

And I started gnawing on myself.

What's with all the science fiction, man? What's with all the tropes? Why the word play and base comedy and stereotyped Hero Shots and Adventure Runs and mimicry of Star Trek plots? Isn't all that stuff the very stuff that's keeping me from doing good and original work?

So I stewed over a few new ideas, and started mumbling to myself "give up the Epic, give up Firefly with Bunnies-- they're crap. Trope-soaked crap." I started thinking really drastic stuff like "no more science fiction" and "write what you know-- write what you FUCKING KNOW" And in this haze of eerily mingled self-loathing and megalomania I picked up Alan Moore's Writing for Comics and started reading. For a few pages Alan Moore confirmed everything I'd been chanting to myself. IDEAS, man, he kept saying, that's what you need to seed with, and I started plotting my transformation into some kind of weirdo post-modernist literature comics artist-- until I put down the book for a moment and abruptly remembered that Watchmen is a great heaping pile of superhero tropes.

It swims in superhero tropes. They ooze from its very pores. But Watchmen is still way better than 99.998% of all comics, everywhere, because lurking just beneath all those tropes is a story that rocks, and beneath that is a devastating thought-- that maybe it's all bullshit, and our only hope of not going crazy or killing each other is to pointedly ignore that very real fact.

So no, I don't have to stop writing science fiction or drop one adorable nod to Firefly from FWB. But I do have to look underneath the fun gags and neat-o moments and figure out what I should be saying with it. Because doing that won't just make me feel better about writing furry science fiction. It'll make said furry science fiction better.

Assuming I'm not just having delusions of grandeur. That seems to happen to me a lot.

Holy WOW.

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:43:09 GMT

http://www.inchwormds.com/tutorial/

Look. At this shiny.

This is so. Freaking. SHINY.

Drawing on the DS. AMAZING drawing on the DS. Like, better than a lot of the big-dog programs for PC drawing on the DS. GO AND BEHOLD THE SHININESS OF IT!

You get onion-skinning and animation! SO AMAZING

I worry a little about the DRM likely to befall something linked to a centralized website like that, But at least for comics you've got screen capture if worst comes to worst.

WAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant.

Charge.

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:43:11 GMT

The energy's flowing oddly. I'm trying not to waste it.

It's the fault of the bad sleep schedule, the symposium, lots of little things coming together. I have right now a head of too little creative output, too much stimulation, and restless energy that can only be created by trying and failing to be useful for the better part of a week.

Dead Like Me is entirely too brilliant. I'm almost a good enough writer that when I get inspired by something it isn't horribly derivative. For those of you who saw Stranger than Fiction with any proximity to reading Simon, YEAH, SORRY ABOUT THAT. Have an idea that came from DLM... trying not to kill it is hard.

Better keep moving-- internet eats my creativity like it was friggin' popcorn.

No, I hadn't forgotten.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:31:15 GMT

Uberhouse has indeed moved and updated, SINNERS.

Back to work with me.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:56:40 GMT

Boy, that didn't feel eerily like Simon's typical work day at ALL. :B

UH2 ~totally~ delayed...

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:55:12 GMT

I'm frantically trying to scan my 24-hour comic which ended up being only 12 pages but it's a pretty decent (if rather screwed-up) story which I intend to post in lieu of today's UH2 update.

When I get the gorram thing inked that is.

Wait--

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:32:21 GMT

WHAT.

Money's no problem as long as ya got some.

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:10:10 GMT

Yesterday after I got my taxes done (I owed this year but not ~too~ much) my car wouldn't start again. Had 'er towed to the Toyota dealership, signed her in and walked to the train. After work today (usually ride the train to work anyway) walked back to the dealership, signed her out, and drove off. The computer had died, and the swap out was under warranty, but I had them do routine maintenance because I'd been planning to do this eventually anyway.

I know not everyone can afford to be as easygoing about stuff that costs the kind of money this costs. I'm glad I can afford engine trouble. Also glad I have trains.

I am totally blaming the fact that UH2 is going to be late tonight on my having to deal with car-related stuff for a total of six hours over the past two days, even though this never would have been an issue if I had a buffer.

So there.

The Pocket Universe Office

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:42:34 GMT

I can't remember my "infraction" or whatever it was that landed me here-- something about time travel, I think. Time travel is always trouble.

"Time Out" is an empty, inky void of a universe. There are no stars. I'm not sure what the atmosphere is or how the local physics work but for whatever reason the feeling is of somehow not being weightless but at the same time not being able to touch the floor. Needless to say, this is tremendously disorienting.

Also odd: your eyes never adjust to the dark. I know this because when the sliver of light abruptly opens up in front of my face I am not blinded in the least. Or perhaps the lighting in the Office of Extropic Affairs really is as bad as its employees say.

The Office of Extropic Affairs exists in little patches here and there-- it is not a centralized building, as this would render its services impossible. To process the some thirty million sophonts per year who are discharged from their respective realities they need to be everywhere, and everywhen, at once.

My patch is tiny, perhaps six rooms. The waiting room is actually the smallest. It's also where the door is. Remember that part about not being weightless? Comes in real handy stepping through that door, let me tell you.

This isn't my first time at the Office of Extropic Affairs, but it is my first time at this branch. I can't remember when exactly my last time was but this is all quite familiar.

"Fill this out," says a squat man in his forties, handing me a clipboard. I start filling the form out. There are a lot of fields with "if you don't know what that is, don't bother" written under them in small writing. I don't fill out much of the form.

"The thing I don't get," I say to nobody in particular, "is, what IS all that outside?"

"What, that," the squat man opens the door again and for the first time I notice there's a faint howling to the blackness, "it's nothing. More or less literally." He closes the door again, never once showing the slightest indication of surprise or alarm at the howling void. He sees it all the time. I hand him my form.

A scrawny, acne-scarred youth in oversized spectacles waddles in under the weight of a heavy cardboard box-file with folder tabs, each with little shoddily handwritten names on them. The youth, I think his name is Dennis, sets down his burden and accepts my clipboard from the squat man, who has added a few stamps and checkmarks to it.

Dennis picks through the box-file with his chewed-short fingernails and in a single, practiced motion opens the clipboard, pulls the top sheet off, and slides the remaining carbon-papered forms into the file box. He hands the top sheet to the squat man and waddles back to the filing room.

The squat man puts my topsheet into a binder and sits down next to me in one of the three seats immediately adjacent that door to the howling void. "Let's see what we got here," he says with no serious emotional attachment, perhaps as one might say when flipping over a stone at the beach. His eyes narrow a bit as they pass over my records, "Ah," he says, faint disgust rising in his tone, "an adventurer."

"Hey, I'm not an adventurer," I protest, "I'm a scientist!"

"Tomato, toh-mah-to," says the squat man dismissively. "You're a digger. And diggers are always hard to satisfy."

I'm actually a little heartened by that. "My satisfaction is a goal here?"

"Well, the goal is to keep you out of the hair of certain extropic entities and down in levels of reality you're equipped to handle."

"Oh," I say, any hopefulness quashed. This seems to satisfy the squat man.

"I'll have you talk to Bretta. She's better at dealing with adventurers."

"Or scientists."

I get only a derisive snort in reply. The squat man fiddles with his office phone for a bit. I hear one end of a conversation: "Got an adventurer here. ... Yeah. ... Fine." The squat man hangs up and sits down. Before I can ask him what's been decided, a female voice beckons me out of the waiting area and through a short paper-file-crowded hallway into a marginally less claustrophobic office area. Awaiting me is a woman of mixed African and European descent who regards me with the warmest emotion I've felt in this place yet: pity.

"So I guess you're wondering-- what is this place?"

This is the first time curiosity has been acknowledged as a possible reaction to this place, so I nod eagerly.

"Well it's more or less nowhere." Bretta (I assume this is Bretta, anyway) strides over to the window. The window is more or less a mirror due to the darkness outside. Bretta slides it open, showing off the same blackness I'd met at the doorway. And that same howling, perhaps even louder than before. "This office is an illusion, Allan. We're your case workers and so to you we appear as you'd expect case workers to appear."

"Okay... so... all the paper files? They're just-- representations of the others who've been here? As I'd imagine them?"

"Right."

"And in reality, we're all still floating in the void right now, in empty blackness."

"Right again."

"Okay, wow, so... the kid with the filing papers-- he doesn't really keep all that stuff in his head, right? There's some kind of apparatus allowing all this to happen, right?"

Bretta only smiles.

"So what now," I ask, not really remembering what had been done about my presence the last time I was here.

"Well, we could put you back where you came from or we could put you somewhere else. It doesn't really matter to the brass upstairs where you end up so long as it's, shall we say, a lateral move."

"Somewhere else," I echo. "Is that, like, anywhere of my choosing?"

"Let's get you to the catalog."

"I get a catalog. Nice. Uh... the last time I was here, why didn't I pick the Somewhere Else option?"

"How do you know you didn't?"

It BEGIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINS

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:15:15 GMT

http://www.maskedretriever.com/uh_remaster/

Updated a little early today so I could test everything out. Counting the thrice-weekly schedule of the UH Remaster project, that's five updates a week!

I do eventually mean to make a dead-tree book out of Umlaut House, but to do that I have to re-scan and post-process all 300+ comics, which is a monumental undertaking. To give me some sense of nominal in-between goals, I'm turning them into updates, which will hopefully keep me scanning.

Amazingly enough, I'm not dead.

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:46:32 GMT

So I woke up this morning feeling dizzy, feverish, coughing up phlegm, and having a pounding headache. I informed work that I was going to be dead for a while and would try to get back to them as soon as possible. I then went back to bed. I got up, woozily ate lunch, then went back to bed again. I sat on the couch and read three pages of Guns, Germs and Steel and then went back to bed.

I've walked perhaps 40 steps today, most of which have felt like massive physical efforts.

About an hour ago, in a blurry, delirious, overheated moment of self-supposed clarity, I became intensely aware that the Singularity was going to start in the Philippines because of the east-west axis of the Asian continent, the direction of Earth's rotation, and the fact that they had sugar cane. And then my fever broke.

Now I actually feel-- okay, not better but only like I've had the ever-loving shit beat out of me and not like it's currently happening. 24-hour nightmare illness. I AM SO GLAD THAT IS OVER.

Crossposted from MaskedRetriever.com

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:07:57 GMT

Starting March 10, I'm going to be running Umlaut House again, on mondays, wednesdays and thursdays-- in short, any weekday there isn't a UH2 update, there will be a remastered Umlaut House comic added to the archive. The reason? I need these comics scanned and saved to 300 dpi if they're going to look anything but horrible in a book. To keep the fire lit under my ass to get them all scanned (a herculean task considering the 370+ comics that need to be processed), I'm imposing this schedule on myself.

Now, if I scan three Umlaut House updates a week, it'll take two years and change to get them all in. This is longer really than I want to take, but with the remastered strips having due dates on the net, I figure three a week will be my minimum rate. I'm pretty sure this rate is doable-- I sat down and did six in an evening tonight. The due dates are just my way of reminding myself.

And maybe feed some comments, which as we've established keep me from vaporizing.

Comment System for the Archives

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:45:25 GMT

I've added a JS-Kit Comment System widget to my templates for Umlaut House, UH2, and Unit Zero, and plan to do so for the other small comics as well. Assuming it doesn't turn out to be evil somehow this should definitely encourage comments.

dID yOu kNoW? Comments on my comics are actually the only thing that keeps me from drying up and crystallizing into dust on contact with sunlight.

It's true!

First sucessful auto-update to the new site!

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:23:31 GMT

http://www.maskedretriever.com/uh2/

Updating at 9PM on monday and thursday, so as to be up Tuesday and Friday.

Hey! Some forumite in South Africa found the UH2 forum!

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:58:44 GMT

It's now at:
http://forums.comicgenesis.com/viewforum.php?f=220

Various links being updated........

Crossposted from MaskedRetriever.com

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:34:15 GMT

For the first time since High School, I have a personal website. It's presently being hosted by a generous friend of UH2 who has even gone so far as to provide a replacement auto-formatting script for my webpages. Here's what I intend to do with this space:

For starters, I'm going to get the complete Umlaut House and Umlaut House 2 archives in place in the "comics" section, and as an added bonus, they will include some new support pages: cast pages, strip-related articles, and possibly a bonus arc or two. My other comics projects, such as the 24-hour comics, Unit Zero, and hopefully a few new comics, will be lowered into the site as well. Now that I have better control over the site, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to deliver more content, with better supporting html.

As to the "articles" section, I hope to elevate things that get put in here above the status of mere blog posts. If I decide to make something into an article, I'm resolving to put at least as much effort into it as I might if I expected to pass it in front of one of my old critical writing professors. What will the topics be? One of several things: Political Theory is one. I've taken to reading books on political and historical science, and writing articles on the topic may help me clarify my thoughts on these matters and possibly be of use to others. Another topic is my hobby electronics. I've been tinkering in the workshop off and on lately and posting here as a kind of lab journal seems like a good idea. In general, a thought I have worthy of discussion will end up being an article if it doesn't make sense to make it into a comic.

Speaking of discussion, I don't yet have any way for readers to respond directly to things they see on this site, but I'm considering options. For now, interested parties may reply to the LiveJournal Crosspost of this article.

Anyone can speak of future deeds with confidence, but I can say with some sincerity, I truly mean to use this site as a platform for some of my greatest creative efforts to date. Here's to the future.