Comics as Literature, Part 5: Impolite Dinner Conversation

As Linus van Pelt once put it, “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” Well, I probably won’t devote an entire post to the Great Pumpkin, but there are plenty of comics out there that deal with the other two. And if Ghandi was right — “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is” — then the two are pretty intertwined. So, although these may not be the best topics for polite dinner conversation, they do make fertile ground for some really fantastic comics.

I’ve already mentioned a few comics that also touch on religion in the previous posts: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Will Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue stories. Here are a few more.

Genesis by R. Crumb

The Book of Genesis — R. Crumb

Robert Crumb is a giant of the underground comics (or “comix”) scene, and has achieved a lot of recognition for his comics even though he has entirely worked outside of mainstream comics. He was the first artist to illustrate Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. A lot of Crumb’s comics featured sexual themes and he’s well-known (and controversial) for drawing very sexualized women. So I was somewhat surprised when, back in 2009, Crumb published a comic book version of The Book of Genesis (through W. W. Norton, no less) — he wasn’t exactly somebody I would’ve expected to illustrate the Bible. I remember in an interview in The New Yorker that Crumb said he’d originally thought about doing a satire — but that the text seemed so bizarre to him that he decided in the end to approach it as a “straight illustration job,” letting the text speak for itself. And since Crumb illustrated the entire book of Genesis (including the lengthy genealogies), with plenty of research, the irony is that this artist who does not believe the Bible is “the word of God” has probably spent more time with the book of Genesis than many who do.

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Catching Up with Caine’s Arcade

Caine Monroy

Caine Monroy, owner/builder of Caine's Arcade

In April of this year, Caine’s Arcade became a viral phenomenon; Nirvan Mullick’s short film has so far gathered almost three million views on YouTube and more than that on Vimeo. It seemed that everyone was fascinated by the story of the inventive nine-year-old and his cardboard arcade. I got Mullick on the phone for a short conversation to follow up on what’s happened with Caine and his arcade since the story broke.

MacQuarrie: I thought we should do a follow-up since I know there have been a lot of appearances and awards; can you tell me about some of those?

Mullick: Caine spoke at the USC Marshall School of Business; the youngest entrepreneur ever to speak there, a lot of well-known entrepreneurs have preceded him. He went up to Sacramento and got the Latino Spirit Award. His arcade was taken up to the Exploratorium in San Francisco; he also went up to the Maker Faire and led a workshop with kids, teaching kids how to make their own cardboard games. And we’ve started a foundation, the Caine’s Arcade Imagination Foundation.

MacQuarrie: When I visited Caine’s Arcade, there were an awful lot of people coming up to George (Caine’s dad), all kinds of Hollywood types, all trying to get their hands on something; are you policing that?

Mullick: We’re working together with that, and I’m working with an agency now, and we’re sorting that out.

MacQuarrie: That’s good. It’s nice to be getting all this attention, but I know there are a lot of predatory people in the industry.

Mullick: There is an incredible number of sharks, but fortunately this story is so positive that it’s repulsed most of them.

MacQuarrie: It’s a self-selecting crowd..

Mullick: So far, so good.

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The Future of Sheet Music is an iPhone App

TabToolkit on the iPad is gorgeous.

As many home guitarists can attest: Tab is a godsend for learning songs. If you’re like me, you’ve hit up the internet looking for user-generated tablature sheets, paging through variations and permutations of musicians trying to reverse engineer popular music and posting their results online. There is no standard for the format of these files, nor are they ever complete enough to learn both rhythm guitar, bass or other ensemble parts should your band want to cover any of these songs. So it’s in this environment that Agile Partners launched their iOS app, TabToolkit, and completely changed the game.

TabToolkit, with its recent 2.0 release in the App store, is your one-stop shop for sheet music for popular music. Employing an a-la cart method, you can browse in the embedded Tab Store and buy the music for individual songs from artists ranging from Blur and the Beach Boys to Wilco and Wham! and a lot of bands in between, crossing nearly all genres of music, offering a few songs from each artist. Each song is $1 and fully licensed by the publishers. You’ll find a good mix of music on par with what you’d likely find in your local music store’s sheet music racks. It’s a good start for the store, offering a breadth of artists which I hope they deepen over time.

The sheet music itself, and the related functions of the Toolkit, are where the app really shines. On the iPad, the screen fills with a gorgeous rendition of tablature notation alongside standard notation. An image of a guitar neck runs along the bottom of the app, and when you tap a chord on the sheet music, the fingerings for that cord will appear on the neck. Press the play button and a MIDI rendition of the entire song will begin with a play head moving through the charts, illuminating the notes and chords as the song plays. It’s an extremely effective interface, especially if you’re like me and don’t read time signature changes or count out beats in your head.

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Great Geek Debates: Kirk vs. Picard

kirk

image: CBS Studios Inc.

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve surely considered the differences between the captains in the various series, even if you don’t have a favorite. And, while Sisko, Janeway, and even Archer have their fans, the quintessential Star Trek debate has been, since TNG premiered nearly 22 years ago, who’s the better captain: Kirk or Picard?

I wrote earlier this month about ten ways, and then ten more ways, to provoke a geek argument, and lots of people mentioned the Kirk vs. Picard conflict in the comments. The only reason I chose not to list it is that you never can tell which way any given geek is going to swing on this topic, unless they happen to be wearing a t-shirt that reveals their preference.  You could say “Jim Kirk is nothing more than an arrogant, womanizing jerk,” and they might agree with you! Or you might say “Jean-Luc Picard is a Frenchman with a British accent—how ridiculous is that?!” and they might raise their fists and shout “Yeah!”

So, who’s really better? There have been countless articles and lists written on the subject, so I’m not sure how much new territory there is to cover here. What I will try to do, then, is distill the argument down to five key subject areas, then compare and contrast Kirk and Picard (I’m only considering the original, William Shatner, Kirk here, incidentally, because otherwise this gets way too complicated):

1. Leadership Style – Kirk is brash; Picard is contemplative. Kirk takes bold actions that frequently result in him getting captured; Picard takes sometimes bold, sometimes subtle actions that occasionally result in members of his command staff getting captured. Kirk listens to Spock’s advice, but nobody else’s; Picard listens to lots of people—though only occasionally his barber. While Picard could sometimes use some of Kirk’s boldness, it seems to me that his style is, if I were staffing a starship, more like what I would want than Kirk’s. Advantage: Picard.

2. Difficulty of Success – I mean this from a character point of view: Captain Kirk only had to deal with being compared with Dr. Robinson from Lost in Space and captains from old sci-fi movies; Captain Picard had to handle being compared with Kirk. On the other hand, Picard would never have existed if it hadn’t been for Kirk’s (eventual) success as a character. Advantage: Kirk. Continue Reading “Great Geek Debates: Kirk vs. Picard” »

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Choose Your Own Adventure eBooks Deliver Excitement and Functionality

CYOA_SpaceBeyond_Ethumb

Image: ChooseCo.

Two months ago I announced that Choose Your Own Adventure books were now available in the iBookstore. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to try out one of the books on my iPad. I have to say, it is great. The transition to the digital medium works very well. Though I hadn’t read one of these books since I was a kid, the experience hadn’t deteriorated over time, and the new interactive features made turning pages much faster. Also, I didn’t accidentally see some of the other storylines.

The book I got to try out was Space and Beyond, which, after The Cave of Time, was my favorite of the books when I was a kid. (It’s nice to know that my love of all things time travel started from a very early age.) I only owned (and still own) the first five books in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, at least the ones that were marked 1-5 thirty years ago, but I used to read them over and over. These days The Abominable Snowman replaces The Cave of Time as the first book in the set.

The Space and Beyond eBook says right on the front that there are 42 different endings. When I read these books long ago, I only seemed to experience a few of the endings because I couldn’t bring myself to make any choices that I wouldn’t make in real life. These days, though, I am more systematic and try out every possibility eventually. And the built-in interactivity of these eBooks makes that easy. No bookmarks or fingers-in-pages necessary. Continue Reading “Choose Your Own Adventure eBooks Deliver Excitement and Functionality” »

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Soda Bottle Water Rockets for Summer Fun

When it’s hot, and you need some excitement, it’s time for water rockets.

Yes, you can buy a really cheap version for $5 and it works fine. But real geekdads show their kids how to hack one using discarded soda bottles. It will take longer to launch, but the possibilities and variations are endless.

Coloredwaterrocket

Water rockets can be quite complex, and their physics are detailed. You can learn a lot by making them. The world record for highest altitude for a water rocket is almost 2,000 feet.

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Would You Like to Write for GeekDad?

The GeekDad Community

The GeekDad Community

We get quite a few people asking if they can write for GeekDad. I think they assume it’s some fancy, high-paying gig, with masseuses and a nice dining room, like Google.

It isn’t.

GeekDad is a bunch of dads and moms around the world who are geeks, and parents, and like to blog about the stuff that interests them. There can be a (very) little money in it, but mostly it’s done for the fun of it. There is some measure of exposure (we are on Wired.com after all), and we all get a bit of attention from the PR folks, but really, we’re here for the love of it.

We don’t want pros. We want real people, who want to write about their geeky interests and their families. And the GeekDad Community is how we intend to find you.

Want to write for GeekDad? Write at the GeekDad Community. Write blog posts, and add projects, and pictures, and video. Contribute to the forums. Become an active member of the Community, and we’ll notice. We’ll feature your posts there. We’ll promote them to GeekDad.com. And perhaps we’ll invite you to become a regular contributor. But we need to see the fire in your eyes (or keystrokes, as it were) first.

Start by reading the guidelines, and get a feel for how to post. There’s a certain look and feel to a GeekDad post, and if you can show an understanding of it early on, you’ve got a leg up. Then start writing. Make yourself at home. Be one of us, and hopefully then, you can be one of us.

And before you click away, assuming that it can never be you, let me tell you this one story: In early 2007, I found a blog called GeekDad, that really fit who I was. Its editor, Chris Anderson, put out a call for new writers. I was (and am still) a full time engineer, who wrote Star Trek fanfic as a hobby. I applied, and was accepted. And then I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Being a geeky parent was my passion, and I expressed it. And as a result, Chris asked me to become Editor of GeekDad.

Anything is possible.

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768 Planets and Counting

Image by Randall Munroe


As is his wont, Randall Munroe has once again produced an amazing visual representation of some bit of science or nature that puts things into awesome perspective. This time, it’s a rather beautiful graphic showing the relative estimated sizes of the 768 currently-known planets in the universe. Did you know we’d found that many? I didn’t. Go see the original, and give Randall some clicks.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for June 21

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle, and the previous day’s answer (in invisitext) posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

What does the best conductor of heat and electricity do to water?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (mouseover to see):

Search [immortal animal] to find, Turritopsis nutricula, a type of hydrozoan jellyfish. Search [Turritopsis nutricula native region] to learn that it’s native to the Caribbean.

 

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First Look at Monsters University Trailer

With Brave releasing this week, it’s easy to forget that Pixar has another big movie on the horizon. Monsters University tells the story of how Mike and Sully met at the University of Fear, before 2001′s Monsters, Inc. The movie is Pixar’s first prequel and features Billy Crystal and John Goodman as the returning voices of these lovable monsters. The cast will also include some new voices, including Dave Foley, Julia Sweeney, and Rob Riggle, when the film releases on June 21, 2013. Watch the trailer, then check out the other variants on the film’s Facebook page.

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