Archives for the month of: April, 2004
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Sideville Comic

April 26, 04 //
6

sidevillecomic.jpgI’ve decided to let the cat out of the bag and make a pre­lim­i­nary announce­ment for Sidev­ille, my web­comic in the works. The rea­son for this early announce­ment is mainly to modi­vate me to the extent that I will actively pur­sue this project with­out drop­ping it by the wayside.

Sidev­ille will be based on an inde­pen­dent stop-motion ani­mated film of the same name that I was co-creator of. The basic premise of the story is as follows:

> A 12-year old boy named Trevor runs away from home and on his jour­ney hap­pens upon an unkempt pirate vil­lage called Sidev­ille. He learns the inhab­i­tants of the vil­lage are retired cir­cus performers/pirates who have gath­ered together in an effort to hide from the soci­ety that shunned them, thus form­ing the com­mu­nity of Sideville.

sideville-concept1.jpgThe comic is as men­tioned still in the pre­lim­i­nary stages, but I expect to update the Sidev­ille site with con­cept sketches and fur­ther details on the char­ac­ters and story development.

As I flesh out the char­ac­ters I will be post­ing their respec­tive con­cept sketches and other infor­ma­tion per­tain­ing to the comic. I’m hop­ing this will pave the way for the offi­cial unveil­ing of the comic sooner than later.

For now I need to work out the design of the Sidev­ille web­site which will be built with Mov­able Type in order to main­tain the data­base of comics. I’ve nar­rowed down the webisodes to a total of 3 per week (updated every Tues­day, Thurs­day and Sun­day). Since this isn’t a punch­line comic nor does it fol­low the con­ven­tional lay­out for­mat of 3 – 5 boxes (i.e. Mel­on­pool) it will free me from try­ing to com­pact the sto­ry­line in order to meet the deadline.

Regard­less, as I’ve noticed, many (or should I say all) web comics evolve since their ini­tial debut. It’s amaz­ing to see the evo­lu­tion of the draw­ing style, sto­ry­line and over­all qual­ity of a web comic over time. I’ve taken this into account because in the past I just wasn’t sat­is­fied with the out­put and gave up. Now I real­ize that web comics only get bet­ter and not worse.

As always, stay tuned.

Imagination fosters civilization

April 26, 04 //
0

> Imag­i­na­tion has given us the steam engine, the tele­phone, the talking-machine, and the auto­mo­bile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became real­i­ties. So I believe that dreams — day­dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machin­ery whizzing-are likely to lead to the bet­ter­ment of the world. The imag­i­na­tive child will become the imag­i­na­tive man or woman most apt to invent, and there­fore to fos­ter, civilization. — L. Frank Baum

Is there an Expert among us?

April 23, 04 //
4

In response to the arti­cle ‘This Pisses Me Off’ on phark​.type​pad​.com I wrote the following:

After read­ing Zeldman’s Design­ing with Web Stan­dards, Eric Meyer on CSS and a slew of other books I’ve been pick­ing up on CSS and imple­ment­ing it accord­ingly. To be hon­est, how­ever, I learn some­thing new every­day and for some­one to even con­sider CSS to be chal­leng­ing.… well, I’d explain to them that any­thing is chal­leng­ing — at first.

Any­one can read a book on Rocket Sci­ence and if they devoted enough energy and atten­tion to the sub­ject they could eas­ily learn to become a rocket sci­en­tist. The unat­tain­able is for those peo­ple that don’t feel the need to learn about the sub­ject or don’t have any interest.

I chose to learn CSS (albeit grad­u­ally) to break my HTML “spaghetti code” habits. I real­ize how bloated and non-semantic the code was and had an awak­en­ing if you may. Never would I quote on my site that I’m an expert because I feel that noone is an expert in their field no mat­ter how many cer­tifi­cates you have hang­ing on your wall.

To me, we are con­stantly learn­ing and hon­ing our craft. Be it a hobby that we picked up over the week­end (bikini belly danc­ing or what­ever) or tak­ing the time to learn CSS, we’ll never become an expert. Any­one that claims to be should take a step back and real­ize that learn­ing is part of life and it’s some­thing that will never cease.

I’ve been in debate about this for the past cou­ple of years. Show­ing peo­ple that any­one can learn what­ever they please but please remem­ber that even teach­ers and idols are human beings and peo­ple that are learn­ing as well.

The guy who wrote that arti­cle doesn’t have a clear idea of what he is writ­ing about. It’s like these reviews of video games or movies wherein the reviewer (or critic) spends about 3 min­utes with their sub­ject and then spend 2 hours writ­ing an arti­cle explain­ing their dis­plea­sure for said subject.

It’s easy. Spend time, hone your craft, con­tinue learn­ing and enjoy life. Our skills are never per­fect and nei­ther are we.

Meme 23

April 22, 04 //
0

A follow-up to the page 23 meme;

Ryan told me to:

  • Go into your blog’s archives.
  • Find your 23rd post (or clos­est to).
  • Find the fifth sen­tence (or clos­est to).
  • Post the text of the sen­tence in your blog along with these instructions.

>It’s really a treat and makes you truly appre­ci­ate how far the indus­try of video games has progressed.

Taken from The Story of Pong in which I dis­cuss.. well, the story of Pong of course. What else?

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