Today, along with our usual bill of fare of my personal musings, mumblings, stumblings, and other assorted nonsense, I will also present some of the science and tech stories I didn’t get around to yesterday but which I can’t quite stand to throw away.

So consider today’s entry to be a kind of savoury goulash, easy on the goo. And the lashing.

In My Little World

In my little world, things are going fairly decently. Had a pleasant evening with Felicity and Joe and Julian last night. Our usual Friday routine… dinner and conversation at Denny’s, and then back to the apartment to watch various videos.

First up was a tape of four episodes of the Punky Brewster animated series. Bet you didn’t even know such a thing existed, did you?

For what it’s worth, you are not missing much. It’s a highly generic 1980’s Ruby Spears cartoon, where Punky has a highly irritating talking magical pet (named Glomer) with ill defined magical powers and that god awful Frank Welker squeaky high idiot talking voice that he also used for such roles as Rubik the Amazing Cube (argh) and most famously, Slimer on The Real Ghostbusters (die die you stupid thing in an otherwise intelligent show).

(I don’t blame Frank Welker for all of that. He’s an actor, and work is work. Besides, how could I hate the voice of both Megatron and Doctor Claw? But I still have a very negative association with that god damned voice from my 80’s childhood.)

Still, it’s very 80’s, and we had fun watching it.

After that, we watched the X-files episode “The Red And The Black”. A decent episode, but the show still has the power to enrage me with how much it sets up and then doesn’t pay off in terms of explaining what the fuck is going on.

That’s what made me stop watching the show in the first place. I felt like the show was, basically, a completely and total cocktease. But now, I am watching it on DVD with my friends, seeing most of the episodes for the first time.

Lastly, we watched an above-average action thriller called (for not apparent reason) Ricochet. It had Denzel Washington (always good, one of the best faces in Hollywood) as the good guy, John Lithgow (one of the best villains in Hollywood) as the bad guy, and Kevin Pollak (one of the funniest guys in Hollywood) as the good guy’s best friend, who sadly (spoiler!) dies near the end.

It’s written by the same guy who wrote Robocop 2, and what makes it an above average action thriller is that John Lithgow is an extremely intelligent and ruthless villain, both because of the script and his excellent performance, and it really pushes the action forward and keeps you on the edge of your seat, wondering what he will do next.

But enough review. SCIENCE!

Kick Start My Art?

This is the big thunder news on the Internet in the last few days : video game company Double Fine puts up a Kickstarter page to solicit investment in their next game, and does rather well, to the tune of $800,000 in a little over a day.

And half of that was in the first eight hours!

Needless to say, this has kind of caught my attention. I have been pondering giving Kickstarter a try, and see if I can write a proposal and get enough funding for the skit comedy series I have in mind, entitled “This Show Is Already Canceled”.

Evidently, there’s lots of people out there who are potentially interested in throwing a few dollars towards a worthy project, and well, I would like to get me some of that.

I doubt I would need $800K to bang together a pilot episode. But to be honest, I don’t really know. I have not the slightest idea what these sort of things cost.

I know what my ideal would be, and that would be to have enough cash to do everything professionally. Professional actors to be my skit comedy performers, a professional producer, an actual television studio, and so on, with me as executive producer, head writer, maybe assistant director.

Presumably, that would cost a whole shitload (maybe even a shitload and a half) of money, so the other end of the scale would be just enough money to bang together something that looks and sounds professional with camcorders and volunteers and so on.

So who knows? Maybe I will get my own Kickstarter account, and give it a shot.

Late to the Lan Party

It kind of amazes me, given my lack of connection to the mainstream and my general obliviousness, when I am way ahead of the mainstream media about anything.

But I am on the Internet with the Twitter and such, and sometimes I really do catch the wave early. But not this early.

Seems Popular Science is only now getting around to talking about gamification.

This strikes me as odd, because it was already a subject I was quite familiar with and excited about when I attended a panel on it at Vcon, way back in October.

Incidentally, in my dream life, I would travel far and wide (first class, of course) in order to attend conferences, symposia, and other intellectually stimulating events, and feed my mind like I am stuffing a turkey for Thanksgiving for a whole Mormon clan.

Anyhow, I am glad to learn from the article that the gamification world is exploding with products and interest and growth. I hope this all provides enough rocket fuel for the whole thing to really take off, but there is a lot of hard deep intellectual work in order to turn this into the force for the future that is could be and should be, and that’s a hell of a gravity well.

My fear is that instead of the world changing force I want it to be, gamification will just be one of those passing fads like virtual reality that gets a lot of attention and funding when it’s a hot subject, but just piddles out and dies when it fails to produce real, substantial results.

So work like hell, gamification programmers. Find ways that, say, gamers can help big money people solve difficult financial problems. That will get the money flowing no problem.