“Thrilling Tales” Kickstarter Update and the Fall of a Mighty Monitor

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Mostly because my Kickstarter update has scrolled off the front page of my blog and, well, I just can’t have that… here it is again.

You don’t get much historical perspective here since the image updates while the pledges roll in… but let’s see. My last Kickstarter update here was six days ago. At that time we’d raised almost 20% of the goal – while today we’re at 32%. That’s almost a third of the way, in 22% of the time.

That’s great progress!

As I predicted, though, the traffic at the Thrilling Tales site is tapering off since its incoming links have begun to grow stale. I figure that’ll continue and I’m sure it’ll affect the rate of new pledges.

This is happening alongside my discovery that the eyestrain I’ve been noticing lately has a cause: my Once-Mighty Monitor has entered a new phase in its long, slow decline. A phase in which focus has become a relative thing.

Since a monitor of mine has got to have unusually good specs (contrast, color fidelity, sharpness), I’m now cheering on the Kickstarter project with a whole new level of enthusiasm. Though I hadn’t exactly factored in the cost of a new Mighty Monitor when I launched at Kickstarter.

So: life, lemons, check. Next?

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, kickstarter, fundraising, illustration, art, raygun gothic, interactive fiction[/tags]

Stalking Made Me Who I Am

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking

Sometimes, when I see the increasingly litigious ways we deal with one another, I think about the things we’ve lost. Oh, I don’t mean disputes over property lines or breach of contract or any of that. I’m thinking about the way we now use law to set our personal boundaries and criminalize bad behavior.

It’s not that I don’t despise things like sexual harassment. In fact that’s one I especially dislike. Sexual harassment is the sort of thing that makes a thinking man angry. I mean, a few overgrown infants make the rest of us look pretty bad by association, just because we share the same kind of plumbing.

But as we’ve relied more and more on labelling behavior, and on laws to regulate it once it’s labelled, and on punishments for it once it’s regulated, we’ve lost some of the skills that people need just to deal with each other in groups. Skills that we actually used to have.

A lot of bad behavior is more unfortunate than it is criminal. Once upon a time we’d have dealt with it through deflection… or by hauling the offender out behind the tobacconist’s and knocking out one of his teeth.

Case in point: stalking. Once upon a time some forms of stalking were not only permitted. They were necessary. I wouldn’t be here typing this if my grandfather hadn’t stalked my grandmother. And there wasn’t a creepy thing about it.

My grandfather – who, later in life, appeared in the terrifying photograph above – first saw my grandmother on the Vaudeville stage. She would have been about sixteen at the time, right about the time her photo below was taken.

This was the musical comedy act of Noodles and Elsie Fagan. My grandmother Blanche and her sister were each part of their parents’ act. Family legend has it that Grandmother even managed the act from the age of eleven because everyone agreed she was the most sensible one of the bunch.

So when Reuben Smith saw her on that stage she’d have been singing, lit romantically by the stage lights. And that did him in. The moment he saw her he decided that this was the girl for him.

But what to do? In that day and age you wouldn’t get anywhere by approaching a young woman and introducing yourself. You’d do more harm than good. An action that forward was an implied insult: by acting improperly, you’d be suggesting that she was improper and that, as they say, would be Game Over. Out behind the tobacconist’s for some quick dental surgery, bub.

One of the interesting things about what my grandfather did do was that it’s closely paralleled in Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, in an episode set at about the same time. Lazarus Long, in that story, travels back in time to meet his own family. And he does just what my grandfather decided to do on the night he saw my grandmother on Vaudeville and followed her all the way from the stage door to her front door. In the dark of night. Stealthily, I bet.

Grandfather started to hang out in her neighborhood. He started shopping there; he ate his meals in the neighborhood restaurants; he hung out there long enough to make some friends, and once he was a fixture in the neighborhood, someone introduced him to my grandmother. The rest, if not history, is my history. And – probably because of the way things turned out – even that bit of stalking under the streetlights doesn’t seem sinister. It seems charming.

I’m fascinated by the fact that Heinlein had his character adopt the same strategy because it suggests that my grandfather wasn’t the only one. I really wonder if someone Heinlein knew in the 1920’s hadn’t told him a family story a lot like mine.

Chances are that if my grandfather tried this clever plan today he’d end up in jail, and as a result there would be no me to tell his story.

Now one reaction you might have to this tale is that in a repressed and rigid society people are forced to deceive and scheme in order to lead a normal life. I think that’s absolutely true. But after half a century in a less repressed and rigid society I haven’t noticed that people have given up deception and scheming. So, I say, phooey.

And when I think about those stiffer, more formal days I also think that when we hand over our personal relationships – even the unpleasant ones – to the law… well, we’re formalizing those things in a different, impersonal way. Society hasn’t abandoned its rules and manners. It’s just delegated them. How weird is that?

[tags]stalking, society, mating rituals, law, robert a. heinlein, time enough for love[/tags]

“Premake” Trailer for “The Empire Strikes Back”, Circa 1950

Filed under Found on the Web

YouTube user whoiseyevan presents this re-imagined "premake" trailer for The Empire Strikes Back as a 1950 movie serial. Warning: if you think about that for too long you’ll fall into a self-referential quantum singularity. But great fun – I’d much rather watch this than the actual movie.

But wait! There’s more! whoiseyevan’s channel also streams other premake trailers for thrill-packed movies like Ghost Busters with Bela Lugosi and Bob Hope, or Raiders of the Lost Ark with Charlton Heston and Peter Lorre. We’ll just have to wait for Connie Willis’ Remake to come true before we can see the whole thing.

Kickstarter Names My Thrilling Tales Fundraiser Their “Project of the Day”!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Hey, what a great surprise!

As I prowled through the Thrilling Tales stats this morning I found that Kickstarter has named my fundraiser their Project of the Day!

That’s wonderful news for all sorts of reasons. The Thrilling Tales fundraiser has gotten off to a good start in its first nine days – we’ve got nearly 20% of the target amount pledged and plenty of time, at that rate, to meet the goal.

Of course I’m a worrier, so I’m thinking grimly ahead. As far as I know, this week saw the last of the big site links to the Thrilling Tales site and so I expect my traffic there to taper off over the next couple of weeks. Naturally I don’t know about every incoming link, so something big could still be on the horizon. But, like I said, I’m a worrier and so I figure that the huge boost in traffic I’ve seen at the site has already peaked. That’ll make it harder in the coming weeks to get more excited eyeballs looking at the Thrilling Tales, buying books, and pledging to the Kickstarter drive.

But the news has been pretty good to date. The site’s had over 60,000 pageviews, for example, and the trailer has been viewed over 4,500 times (!).

That hasn’t converted to a lot of sales or support since these are mainly casual browsers looking at the Title-O-Tron, or even reading the first story… but then moving on. Most of my brain expected that – the whole idea behind a project like this is to offer free content as a way to draw in lots of visitors, and people who are happy to find things for free don’t necessarily become people who want to support those things. Like I said, most of my brain expected that. It’s currently explaining the facts of life to the rest of my brain, which was more optimistic. It’s a goofy, romantic thing.

So anyway it’s great to be featured by Kickstarter – the fundraiser is going to make a big difference to the next phase at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual… so long as we reach the goal. I’d cross my fingers but I’ve found from experience that’d make it really hard for me to type this.

Five Words That Should Never Appear Together

Filed under Hodgepodge

ELECTROLUMINESCENT FLASHING BATTERY OPERATED FLAMINGO

Ten Questions from the World, Ten Answers from Felicia Day

Filed under Found on the Web

Reddit solicited questions for Felicia Day to answer, and that’s what she does, right here in this video. The questions range from the thought provoking to the baffling (see #8) and the Incomparable Miss Day fields ’em all.

If you’ve somehow missed her web series The Guild or don’t realize that she was the all-singing, all-laundering female lead in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog , well, shame on you, and you really ought to thank me now for fixing that.

She’s the Web’s poster person for doing what you really want to do even when nobody knows they want you to do it. If I could have an awesome niece she’d be just like Felicia Day.

Good stuff here for anyone who’s interested in creating and promoting their work on the Web… and great material for designing Imaginary Awesome Nieces.

John Scalzi Threatens the World With My Title-O-Tron

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So as I write this, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual has seen almost 39,000 page views since its launch, just over two weeks ago.

I’ll take all the credit I can for that but the ball didn’t really start rolling until the site was mentioned at Dark Roasted Blend and Mental Floss. Nice!

As you might expect the Pulp Sci Fi Title-O-Tron is the most popular link and the most popular page, too. It’s been fun to watch the incoming links appear and to see where they’re coming from – often from conversations on forums.

I hate to pick favorites, but I will: there’s a fun conversation going on at Metafilter where people are posting random titles they like… to the point where they’re mapping out an actual series based on the titles. They seem to like a "Midshipman" trilogy that ends tragically with Lament for the Celestial Midshipman. But hey, folks, it doesn’t really need to end there: because with more titles like Gods of the Lieutenant of Phobos and Avenged by the Captain of Twilight there’s a clear path for promotion.

But this is why the Metafilter page stands out for me: John Scalzi chimed in with this:

I’m going to take one of these titles and write a science fiction story out of it.

SHUT UP I TOTALLY WILL.

You’ll see. You’ll ALL see.

posted by jscalzi at 6:56 AM on May 9

But which would it be? The Dancing Professor of the Worlds? Pursued by the Quivering Accountant? The Night of the Tentacle of Terror? or… The Song of the Accordion of Doom?

Fundraising at Kickstarter for “Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual” – My Very Own Pledge Drive

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The Thrilling Tales project is a lot like a web comic – the content’s available for free on the web or for purchase as printed books. The biggest difference is that because the stories aren’t linear I can’t post updates a couple of times a week. And going by Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves, those updates will be months apart.

For that reason I’m planning to add linear illustrated stories with updates once or twice a week. Although that will delay the big updates even more, it’s about the only way the site can build up its readership.

Of course… that means that the next Toaster With Two Brains update will be even later than it would have been otherwise. And on the practical side I’ve been supporting my many months of work on the Thrilling Tales with nothing but the sales from my web sites. Out of the nine months beginning in July 2009 there was just one month when I worked on anything else.

So here I am, gearing up for the next illustrated story – which now is two stories, one interactive, and one linear – while the web site is still percolating across the web and trying to draw an audience. This is where a corporate startup would look for what’s called "bridge financing" – investment to tide the company over until it grows into its market and can walk on its own tentacles. I’m not a corporate startup, of course, and so I’m rolling out a fundraiser at kickstarter.com.

(more…)

Vocal Torture, or Demented Brilliance? You Decide

Filed under Found on the Web

Yikes! An in-home recording of the "Diva Dance" from one of my favorite movies, "The Fifth Element".

This seems so punishing. It reminds me that I once saw an analysis of Cab Calloway’s vocal range. The conclusion was that it wasn’t possible. Go Cab! And go Laura, whoever you are.

New deals on my Archival Prints, and a shipping special for them

Filed under Works in Progress

The prices on all my archival prints have just been reduced and a lower flat rate shipping special is on for the next 90 days.

DeviantArt (which prints these for me) has just done a soup-to-nuts reorganization on their prints program. That means that you and I each get a better deal! The price reductions vary by print size but they’re usually 20% to 33% lower. So for example one of the big 20 x 30" prints that used to be priced at about $70 is now $48 … while the smaller ones like my new Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves prints have dropped from around $61 to $40. Nice!

And for the next 90 days there’s a cap on shipping no matter how many prints you order. If you’re in the USA you won’t pay more than $5 for shipping on an order of prints… and if you’re elsewhere you won’t pay more than $10. Also nice!

This applies to my Retropolis archival art prints and also to my Celtic Art archival art prints.