Chapter 6 Page 3

by on August 3, 2011 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Chapter 6: The General and Shankar

Interviewed

By Peter

Recently Amanda and I were interviewed by Tyler Roush from the newspaper The Voice, which is put out by a non-profit called Neighborhood House. The Voice goes out to residents in Seattle public housing, including Yesler Terrace. Tyler was really fun to talk to, and I was pleased that he read through the entire thing not once, but twice, and it seemed like he read all of my blog postings. (I am always happy to hear when someone actually reads my blog postings. I don’t feel like I am nearly as exciting as the strip itself.)

We’ll let you know when his article is written and published.

 

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Chapter 6 Page 2

by on July 27, 2011 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Chapter 6: The General and Shankar

Recommended Graphic Novel: Chickenhare

By Peter

Chickenhare by Chris Grine is on its third volume, and while the first two were published by Dark Horse and were in black and white, this one is in color and is online. It’s hard to describe the plot, where the main character is a rabbit with chicken feet, but it’s beautifully drawn, humorous, and totally off-beat. From the website, the plot synopsis starts with: “Chickenhare and Abe (a turtle) are being sold as pets to an insane taxidermist named Klaus who lives near the north pole and has enough emotional baggage to go on a very long trip…”

I highly recommend it. Start by finding the first two volumes at a bookstore or library.

 

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Chapter 6 Page 1

by on July 20, 2011 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Chapter 6: The General and Shankar

Project Wonderful

By Peter

If you’ve ever done a Google search, you’ve probably noticed the advertising above and to the right of your search results. You may not realize how they work. People create a text or image ad, and then they bid on how much they are willing to pay to have it shown when people search on certain phrases. (And you only have to pay if someone clicks on the ad.) The winning bid gets the top position, and lower bids get lower positions. If you don’t bid high enough, then you could easily end up on page 10 of the search results. It’s the number one money-maker for Google.

However, Google is not the only form of online advertisements. A really interesting one is called Project Wonderful, and it’s been adopted by the webcomic community as the most common form of online advertising. Its bid system is a little different. You create an advertisement as an image, and then you bid how much you are willing to spend per day to advertise on a specific site. The highest bidder wins, and their ad shows up on the site, wherever the webcomic owner wants it to go.

Last week, Amanda created some ads for us, and soon they’ll go live on Project Wonderful. The beauty of advertising on other webcomic sites is that I know that people who like webcomics will be seeing it.

 

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Filler (Brain Computer Interaction)

by on July 13, 2011 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Chapter 5: Teapot

By Peter

This week is a filler week between chapters while Amanda does some work to help me with publicizing the strip. Last month’s issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (Don’t you love that name? Straight out of the 19th century!) featured articles on Brain-Computer Interaction. In other words, how can you control computers with just your brain? One way that people have been using for years now is to put an implant in the brain. Needless to say, the only people who have that done are ones who are very seriously disabled and have no other way to communicate.

However, people are looking into electroencephalogram (EEG) technology as a non-invasive way to do this. The picture above shows what the technology looks like today. (This picture is from the Danish Master’s program in Medicine and Technology.) It’s not that far from what Joshua has on his head in the last chapter.

Of course, it’s quite a step from detecting brain waves to putting images in our brains. That, I’m afraid, is still only a figment of my imagination.

 

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Chapter 5 Page 9

by on July 6, 2011 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Chapter 5: Teapot

Collaboration

By Peter

This marks the end of chapter 5. I am especially pleased with this page because I didn’t write it. I was talking with Amanda about how one aspect of Joshua’s mom’s personality was not coming out much, and that was that she wasn’t really the greatest parent. (It’s kind of a cliche to have a brilliant scientist dad who doesn’t know how to connect with his kids, so this is similar, but it’s a brilliant scientist mom. My script jumped from “And this just the beginning of this DARPA project” to “Oh, Mom, where did you go?” Amanda had the idea for everything in between. She captured exactly what I was looking for.

You know who I’ve been missing? Shankar and the General. They come back in the next chapter. Shankar has been mulling over how an animal could be on Space Station Tesla, and he attempts to get information out of the General, who is never happy about giving out information.

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