#333 - Link-o-llection and life updates.

I've had this link-o-llection lying around for almost a month now. orz

Best. Soda. Display. Ever.

Steampunk duel on YouTube. It's like Victorian-era Gundams duking it out!

yhlee talks about merely convincing your reader that a complex, multi-layered world exists, as opposed to SHOWING everything to the reader:

If you are trying for a certain kind of mimesis, the trick is in hinting: instead of playing the fool's game of trying to generate everything pixel by pixel, provide instead the key stuff and then a bunch of--best analogy I have here is fractal generators. Something small that generates something complex; and you are offloading a lot of world-generating functions to the reader (or gameplayer, etc.), who will take that fractal generator and produce the pixels for you.

jimhines offers up a list of Neil Gaiman "facts".

cleolinda explains that the problem with working for yourself or working freelance is that it's task-based as opposed to time-based, which changes how you perceive yourself to be "done" with work.

Should there be a manga canon?

***

Been getting used to a school schedule again. Finding myself dealing with less and more problems than I thought.

I recently finished a project for my 3-D Foundations class in which we had to create a "chair" using only two pieces of cardboard and hot glue. I put "chair" in quotes because, as the professor put it, it didn't have to look like a conventional chair, but it did need to function like one, supporting one person's weight. My initial idea was something involving a weird 3-D star-like form, but after hearing the professor discuss the architectural concept of a "decorated shed", I decided to be lazy and apply that concept to my project.



In this case, the place where you sit - the top of the main gear - is merely a 6"x6" square column that's 18" high and reinforced by an X-shaped structure on the inside. Everything else is just chewy, papery icing.







I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, actually. The problem is trying to figure out what to do with this thing once it's graded and I have to bring it home. I don't want to just chop it up and throw it away, but it's not like I have any room anywhere for that thing.

#334 - The Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks.

I touched briefly upon my love for the first book in a previous LJ post, but I've since plowed through the second and third books, and have been very, very impressed with it. I love the conflictedness of Weeks' characters (well, most of them - I had no love or interest for any of the irredeemably "bad" characters), and the pacing is intensely fast, with more twists than a Twizzler. The "hoshit!" moments are genuinely surprising (to me, at least), and yet they fit with the story overall and heighten the stakes and tension.

Unfortunately, the fast pacing necessarily means that there are trade-offs, most notably the worldbuilding but also including the many storylines of the various groups of characters. The effect was akin to taking a high-resolution .RAW photo from a digital camera and converting it into a .JPEG: both are still generally very high-quality files, but in the compression of .RAW format to .JPEG, there's still some information that's lost which lowers the quality of the photo, ever so slightly. However, if you're not actively looking for it, you're not really going to notice the loss of information. Assuming that the original file is skillfully taken, it can be appreciated whether it's a .RAW or .JPEG. In this case, there were many points in the second and third books of the Night Angel trilogy that I felt deserved to be fleshed out more, though if that had happened the books would have been substantially longer. I kept on imagining how this trilogy would've looked as a more drawn-out series; I kept on seeing mini-plots that could've filled an entire book by themselves. Nevertheless, Weeks provides enough to satisfy the reader and to convince the reader to care about the characters and their story.

Interviews I've read say that Weeks has a non-Midcyru standalone novel slated for publication in 2010, and that he does plan to return to Midcyru for another trilogy at some point in the future. I look forward to both, and in the meantime, I need to snatch up copies of the Night Angel trilogy for my own personal collection...
Also, have I mentioned that I love the covers? :D Seriously, those covers were part of why I was intrigued by the series in the first place. Book covers: DOIN' 'EM RIGHT. I hope I get to learn more about designing book covers in one of my design classes.