Alaska Robotics

I’m still on the road in Seattle so putting together this comic was a different process than usual.  I left my laptop at home and thought I would just put together a pen and ink strip this week.  Unfortunately I didn’t have any pens or ink so I just went heavy on the pencil and used my point-and-shoot digital camera to “scan” the results onto Sarah’s laptop.

I liked the scraggly lines and paper texture the camera captured so I just did some minor touchups and painted in the colors on an underlayer.

I bought a really bad hip hop CD on Friday.  It had decent production value but it was obvious crap despite being so close to success.  I kept trying to figure out why it sucked and the theory I came up with is that is fell into the uncanny valley of music.

The uncanny valley is generally used to describe humanoids that look and act so close to actual humans that they become eerily creepy and repulsive.  I think the uncanny valley exists outside our perception of humanity or perhaps our perception of humanity includes those things that feel human rather than just look human.  It’s a movie that could or should have made a real human connection.  It’s so close to greatness that you spend the rest of the night obsessed about the few out of place details instead of the all the clever successes.  I’ve seen it in books and music and I think most of poetry falls into a vast pit of near greatness.

I’m not sure how an artist can hop over the uncanny valley on the way to greatness or avoid the far greater void of mediocrity further from the top but I’m sure there are little tricks… like practice.

I wish I knew where I could find one of those bumper stickers, I’ve always agreed with the sentiment.

So.. yeah.. wow.  Big news this morning.  The McCain/Palin ticket is going to shake things up in Alaska.  It was a brilliant move on McCain’s part since Palin can connect him with more women voters, smooth over the religious right and dish out big spoonfuls of sugary charisma.

Obama chose a running mate with deeper experience and more international perspective to balance his ticket and McCain, who already had those qualities, picked someone popular.  It’s going to be a big, messy, wonderful election and no matter who wins it won’t be George Bush.  America might be less in the crapper than I usually think.

Our governor, Sarah Palin, is trying to move up the food chain. Crazy stuff.  I guess Obama pretty much has to give up on winning Alaska now…

We’re in Seattle today trying to prepare for Bumbershoot.  Arlo and Oksana were on our flight last night so I had a chance to see some of his underwater video footage and talk about his idea of a True Fan Boost.

Brad Weber hosted us last night and helped bring me up to speed on my pop culture and video game current events.

I finally got a chance to play Braid which was really clever and gets me excited about the future of indy gaming. It gives me hope that consoles will open themselves up more to home brew games and that review aggregation sites like Metacritic will help those developers succeed.

I’d love to develop a game again some day but I think that’s probably several years down the road. The last game Aaron and I worked on was an Oregon Trail style game based around the 1925 serum run to Nome. It was an educational game intended for middle school students in Alaska and we sent out copies to a bunch of different school districts but I’m not sure if it ever got any play. I think the game was a little stiff and kids usually shy away from anything that looks educational.

The development was haphazard since it was a college project but we actually finished and released it which felt like quite an accomplishment at the time. I think we still have a working version around somewhere, I’ll post it online when we get home in case anyone wants to check it out.

I’ll warn you now, it’s no Mega Man 3.

Unstoppable Zombie Stevens

The primary elections are winding down tonight and the headline tomorrow should read “Ted Stevens Kicks Ass.”

That’s really all there is to it. The man is 85 years old and he’s been indicted by a federal grand jury but he still walked away with 63% of the votes. To top it off he beat out his closest competition by THIRTY-SIX percentage points.

Our last governor, Frank Murkowski, always reminded me of Frankenstein’s monster and Loren Lehman, his Lt. Governor, looked a lot like Count Dracula.

Halloween is just around the corner and I’m hoping Ted Stevens will decide to go as the commander-king of the unrelenting zombie hoard. He’s unstoppable.

• Frankenmurkowski
• Count Lehman
• Unstoppable Zombie King of Alaska