A busy Easter weekend. Yesterday was pretty much just relaxing, eating good food, and hanging out.

Saturday I spent working on a screenplay with my brother. He’s trying to finish it under a pretty tight deadline, so we talked over a lot of plot points, character arcs, and structure. Got Act One outlined and some of the major events of Act Two figured out. Act Three is minimal, but we did figure out how we wanted things to resolve for the main characters.

Collaborating is a lot more fun than writing alone! It was still hard work, but was enjoyable to bounce ideas and possibilities off of someone else instead of staring at a blank page.

Decided to try out bloglines.com to keep up with various blogs and news sites rather than having to visit each one individually. Right now the service is free, though it appears text ads are looming in the near future.

It works like a news reader, except that it operates through your standard web browser. You just subscribe to whatever blog feed you like as long as it’s RSS or Atom compatible (and most are). Then you get all the updates in one place. You can still click on the link for an entry and visit the original site.

So far I have to say it’s pretty cool and will probably keep me from compulsively visiting all these different sites throughout the day.

It’s the little things sometimes. Queries about “Mike King” with terms like “cg consultant”, “artist”, “writer”, and “blog” start listing my site now. It also helps a lot if the names of movies I’ve worked on are included. I’m not the first entry, but at least I’m on the first page of results.

Hey, google used to not list my site at all except for some of the Salad Bowl pages.

Okay, so the query must be super-specific and nobody is going to find me on a random search. But that’s probably a good thing. All this really means is that people looking for me specifically can have an easier time finding my site.

It’s like if google doesn’t know about you, you don’t exist. I don’t know why it matters, but I feel validated somehow.

Having helped to run a business myself, I’m always interested in other people’s experiences. Here’s the story of a video game studio that went under and the lessons learned by its founder, James Gwertzman.

Excerpts:

We had an all wrong idea of what we were going to do. We thought it was all about making the best game in the world, but in reality it’s all about making your publisher think you’re making the best game in the world.

Back then, we believed that demo material was a waste of time, but we now know that this was one of the reasons our game got cancelled. But that’s easy to say now.

We (the founders – ed.) often chose to work without pay, and therefore used up all our personal savings, leaving us with nothing when disaster hit. Instead, we should have fired the least qualified of our employees, so that we could have paid ourselves first.

Remember that life is too boring if you don’t take chances. My advice to you, though, is to have one paranoid member of your team and to keep listening to him.

Full article is here.

Amen, brother.

’nuff said. Get on over to Comedy Central and get cracking.

…recognize that it’s not a choice. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s an orientation.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/rauch.htm

A few things that stuck with me today:

Possible background info for a story…
Dead zones in the ocean
The spread of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in the oceans, a graveyard for fish and plant life, is emerging as a threat to the health of the planet, experts say.

Thought provoking stuff over at David Brin’s site.

A book review The Progress Paradox
A challenge to the cliche that our wisdom has lagged behind technology.

Another David Brin article, mostly talking about the Matrix. The key concept here is that that we are all sheep programmed to believe we are individuals. A quote:

You have to sit there and accept one of the most galling things that a bunch of dedicated individualists can ever realize — that you were trained to be individualists by the most relentless campaign of public indoctrination in history, suckling your love of rebellion and eccentricity from a society that — evidently, at some level — wants you to be that way!

“I believe licensing usually cheapens the original creation. When cartoon characters appear on countless products, the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it…I don’t want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor’s voice, and I don’t want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don’t want the issue of Hobbes’s reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip’s world is diminished. CALVIN AND HOBBES was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.” – Bill Watterson, CALVIN & HOBBES

Finished my last shot for the star wars fan film. Hopefully they’ll like it and it won’t require any revisions. Life has gotten to be very busy again after a brief lull. I think it was my starting to relax that lowered my defenses and allowed me to catch a cold. When I’m in work-mode, I very rarely get sick. That kind of thing is reserved for weekends and vacations.

Finally got a chance to work on my last fx shot for the Star Wars fan film. Hopefully this week will give me enough time to polish it off.

I’m zonked on Nyquil, but am starting to feel better. Looks like I’ll be kicking this cold soon. I probably shouldn’t have tried to work on the shot, I suppose. But I didn’t push myself too hard. And even though I’m tired, I think I’ll avoid a relapse.

Things are getting busy and I don’t want to leave the filmmaker hanging. So I’m really trying to finish the shot for him this week.