end user blog: the slacker media player (or, the good kind of nostalgia in the palm of your hand)

This month’s column for the End User Blog is now online for your enjoyment:

Kids, I want you to take off your jetpacks, and step out of your flying cars for a minute. Come sit down over here, and let Old Man Wheaton tell you a tale of a time when television didn’t have a pause button, renting videos meant actually going to a store – during hours that they set – and listening to the radio meant hearing the same 27 songs every two and-a-half hours, with ten to eighteen minutes of commercials every 60 minutes.

Now, I realize that some of you think I’m just making this up to scare you, but it’s true. We didn’t have any control over how we got our entertainment back then. We couldn’t skip songs we didn’t like, and we couldn’t tell the radio how frequently it should play certain songs. It was a different time, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them and the King of England would just show up at your house and expect you to make him a cup of tea.

Those of you who have grown up in a world where you have unprecedented control over your media (DRM, which is beyond the scope of this story, notwithstanding) may have a hard time believing that we who came before you would actually wait for a song we hated to go away, or sit through loud and obnoxious commercials and DJs because we knew a song we loved was coming up. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true; that’s just how the world worked back then, and we accepted it without question.

Then it gets weird. Well, not really, but I can’t think of a better segue. Anyway, give it a read if you want to know what I think about the Slacker portable media player.

Warning: it’s way longer than I thought it would be, probably because I spent so long fighting my brain to actually let me write it, and once I beat my brain into submission, I couldn’t turn it off.

my first episode of family guy airs on march 29

I guess the air date for the Star Trek episode of Family Guy was announced today, so the long wait for everyone who has been excited to see this (that includes me) is nearly at an end.

My Google Alerts thing has been sending me e-mails about it all day, including this one from THR.com:

A member of the "Trek" cast let some of this news slip into the blogsphere awhile back, but Fox has now confirmed, announced the cast and set a March 29 airdate.

Nobody is stepping down hard on my foot, so I'm not entirely sure, but I think he's talking about me. If he was, here's the post Captain Lazy McCantgoogle was referring to:

Seth MacFarlane directed my session, and when I met him, I said, "Okay, I'm not even going to try to pretend to keep it cool. I am a huge fan, and this is more exciting for me than I can quantify."

Yeah, I said quantify. I say stupid shit like that when I'm giddy and excited.

"Well, if you're going to do that," he said, "then I'll have to tell you that Next Generation is my favorite of all the Star Treks, and I've seen every episode about a thousand times. The First Duty is just great, man."

I did my best not to faint.

We had a meeting of the mutual admiration society for a few minutes, and then I went into the booth to record my lines.

[…]

When I was finished recording, I asked him if I could talk a little bit about my episode on my blog, without giving away too many details, and he said that would be fine, so . . .

I play myself, in a story that you could call a tribute to Next Generation. Pretty much everyone from the cast is on board for the episode, and holy shit is it funny.

Anyway, the good news, everyone, is that the show airs on March 29 on FOX, and if it's anything like the script I read, it's going to be an instant classic.

As I said after I worked on the show: I can't divulge any specific story details, or give away any jokes, but there's a gag with me that, if it makes it to the final cut of the episode, could quite possibly be the funniest thing I've ever done on television.

in which i send a naughty d20 to the “fuck off” bag

The second episode of the Penny Arcade D&D podcast is online, so if you've been shivering with antici…pation since we rolled for initiative last week, grab yer boots and get ready to dance:

Part 2 continues with a roll for initiative!

Acquisitions Inc. gets the drop on the sheltering guards (with faces painted like skulls), opening up with a brutal tide of iron.

But the armed guards are not without their backup, and soon enough the fight is joined in full. Overwhelming strike, (Jim's) magic missile, scorching burst, and even the legendary d12 are all employed in the battle… to various degrees of effectiveness. How well does the newest member of Acquisitions Inc. perform? Well, everyone has trouble their first time.

But in the end, they learn how fast minions fall… and why you bring Jim Darkmagic to the party!

If you're subscribed to the podcast in iTunes, you won't miss a single episode, but if you don't go to the homepage at WotC, you'll miss the awesome artwork that Mike and Scott have made to go with each episode, and nobody wants that.

just paint what you see

Five (Three sir!) Three quick Sunken Treasure items:

1. I was interviewed for the Lulu blog about the book. Fun fact: It was while I was writing the answers for this interview that I sent Twitter the fateful question about $5 DRM-free PDFs. I finished my answers and sent them back right before I put the PDF version on sale, so the incredible success and overwhelming response to the PDF isn't reflected my answers.

2. Speaking of the PDF: Sometime overnight, the total PDF sales exceeded the total print sales. I've still earned more via print sales, though PDF is rapidly catching up. Here's something cool about the gap between them: whenever it looks like PDF is going to overtake it, a bunch of people (presumably because they read the PDF) buy the print copy, and it leaps ahead. I wish I could do an animated visualization of the sales, like a little horse race, because it sure would look awesome.

I never would have done this if Cory Doctorow hadn't put the idea into my head (and so many other heads) years ago. I see some chatter around the 'tubes giving me credit for blazing a trail, and I'm really not; I'm just walking the path Cory told us was there all along, if we were just willing to take it.

Still, I really hope my story about this little book and how I've released it inspires other indie authors (and big, successful, mainstream authors, too) to do something similar. I don't know what it would be like for other creators, but it's been an unqualified success for me, and I want all of you who have been involved in this to know how grateful I am. Because you've chosen to support my work in the past and especially with this release, I'm going to do a bunch of original stuff this year that's above and beyond what I already do on my blog. A big part of Operation Crazy Idea was to find out if I could make Kevin Kelly's model work, and for the first time since I got the crazy idea, it feels like it's a real, tangible, I-can-almost-see-it-just-over-the-horizon possibility. I am incredibly optimistic about the potential for the other projects I'm working on right now, and if they work out the same way Sunken Treasure has, 2009 is going to be The Year When It All Happened. \m/

3. Finally, Val Trullinger, who created gorgeous flyers and banners for The Happiest Days of Our Lives, created some gorgeous flyers and banners for Sunken Treasure. Feel free to grab them and use them however you'd like, if you're into that sort of thing. Small request: please don't hotlink them; bandwidth is expensive.

Small banner:

Sunken_treasure_small

Big banner:

Sunken_treasure_large_banner

Both banners and a PDF flyer:
Download Sunken_Treasure_Promos (1MB Zip file with both banners and PDF flyer)



drop down, reverse direction, increase speed

I told my wife, "You know, I haven't gotten past the first screen of Space Invaders in at least 20 years. I think I need to practice more." I thought for a second. "Train for it, I guess, is what I'm saying."

She looked at me. "Train for what?"

"Oh, um." I said, "you know, just to get better."

"Because?"

"Because I haven't gotten past the first screen in 20 years."

I have this Space Invaders T-shirt that I wear from time to time.

I don't wear it as often as I'd like, because it's filled with errors, like the score is all wrong for the number of invaders that have been shot, the shots in progress are all wrong, and … well, look, it's just nerd shit, I guess. It's still a cool shirt, and normal people can't see anything obviously wrong with it.

I had it on yesterday, when Anne and I went to the grocery store to pick stuff up for dinner, and the girl at the register commented on how much she loved to play the game when she was a kid.

Anne, Nolan, and Ryan have all told me that I should just keep my geek to myself in certain situations, but sometimes (read: all the time) I can't help myself. This was one of those times.

"Oh, yeah, I love this game," I said. "And I saw this T-shirt at Threadless.com earlier today that – " this is when she totally glazed over and got really interested in scanning our items.

"She's tuned you out! Shut up!" My brain screamed at me. Anne, polite to a fault, gently squeezed my arm.

I ignored them both. "It was so cool. It was one of these little guys," I pointed to one of the invaders on my shirt, "standing in front of several rows of these other little guys," I pointed to other invaders on my shirt as Anne tightened her grip, "and it was like he was a general, showing them the battle plan, which was a little dotted line going in this kind of 'move to the side and then drop down' direction!"

She and Anne shared a look. I couldn't tell who was more sympathetic to the other, but the message passed was clear: I am so sorry.

She totaled up our order, Anne paid her, and we walked out of the store. As the door closed behind us, I think I heard a loudspeaker say, "Clean up on register 5 … someone got Geek all over the place."

For the record, here's the shirt I was describing, which you can purchase from Threadless:

A Simple Plan - Threadless, Best T-shirts Ever

I know, right? Awesome.