Trick or Treat

Every year, I've seen less trick or treaters come to my door: it seems like fear of terrorists and other such "boogeymen" has driven this holiday to nearly a halt. I spent too much of my evening while awaiting children [I was dressed up as Jack Sparrow myself...] online, and saw a dismaying number of people engaged in facebook Mafia and Scrabble. Rather than join them I grabbed a friend and we went trick or treating ourselves. We saw perhaps 20 or 30 other people out during our wanderings through the neighborhood and encountered the rare outpourring of Halloween spirit in the form of a costumed man waiting to chase children out of his yard or a nicely decorated house with moving ghosts in the windows. But mostly these were blips in a generally dismissive scene.

The virtual world holds its counterpart to the more traditional Halloween. It's possible to go "trick or treat" within World of Warcraft: visiting the innkeepers in any town and passing the virtual pumpkins and apple bob my character can possibly get candy or be transformed into a costume for a while representing another race [or even a ghost!]. Sometimes the virtual innkeepers are feeling mischievous, and then my character might end up hopping around helplessly as a frog for a while. The spirit of Halloween even continues in the form of quests, from taking orphan children around the smaller villages to a very high level quest to defeat the Headless Horsemen. I can trick or treat within Facebook, too, visiting friends for Bloodtinis and other such goodies.

Second Life doesn't feel like a place for trick or treating: it's a costume party year round, and I didn't get the sense of much different in the world for Halloween. Perhaps somewhere more was happening, but mostly it felt to me like Halloween is too generic a metaphor for daily Second Life existence to be of much particular interest to the Second Life denizens. The trappings of Halloween, however, seem to be everywhere. I see people dressed as beasts or bunnies or strippers or pimps. In many ways the more wild outfits in Second Life wouldn't be at all out of place in a costume shop. There's even some of the same focuses I've seen in the transformation from children's costumes to "adult" costumes as sex replaces both cute and evil as the defining characteristic and everything from pilot to french maid is recast in objectified extremes.

What is it that's killed Halloween? Is it fear of neighbors as pedophiles and candy as poison? Or is it that we spend so much more time now in virtual masquerade that the real thing has lost its magic?

Mirages of Cuisine

I've got an article up on CinCity today: The Culinary Arts: A Gourmet's Appreciation For Film. Writing that piece, I've been doing a lot of thinking on how food is presented to us in media: the Internet's even made it so online ordering from restaurants and the grocery store ala PeaPod can allow for the coveting of food through a virtual image right through delivery. Seems to me there's something lost from the experience of going to a grocery store--or better yet, a farmer's market--and selecting the perfect parts from which to craft a meal. I won't be surrendering my food purchases to a clickable shopping system anytime soon.

Comic Relief

There's a charming bit of generational web humor in Doonesbury this weekend. I read it in print through that archaic method of home delivery, but of course now it's one click away online. Second Life enterprenuership is apparently alive and well, and Jeff Redfern is doing well for himself. Everything I need to learn about American political and social history of the last few decades I learned reading my mother's Doonesbury collection. I've followed the iconic representations of presidents and watched Zonker convince a gullible reporter that the next generation is following a national trend of casual drug use.

I still love my daily dose of Doonesbury, but now it's accompanied on my reading list by dozens of other comics, none of which are found in the appalling selection of the local paper. The newsprint comics have remained stagnant and inoffensive: even when some well meaning editor trys to get rid of Peanuts reruns or Family Circus, there's a protest among the older set who don't want they're comfortable status quo challenged. Thus to find socially intriguing comics today I look beyond print and end up squarely on the web.

There are many great moments of twisted social commentary going on around the web today. My personal favorite is Something Positive, Randy Milholland's dysfunctional twenty-something strip. There are also fabulous niche strips, like PhD Comics for all of us grad students and PvP and Penny Arcade for the gaming geeks.

There's a new exhibit opening up in New York at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art that'll have several of these webcomic artists featured. The exhibit is called Infinite Canvas. The name Infinite Canvas is a reference to a concept of the web as providing an unending space for a comic to fill: with paper, comics are always limited to the presentable surface, but online a comic can transcend these boundaries. The last course I designed over at the Corcoran was in Sequential Art, and we ended with looking at Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics, his graphic work exploring the potential future for comics within this infinite canvas world.

Scott McCloud envisions possibilities for graphic novels online that break the traditional frames of the page. One of these, "The Right Number", uses a framework of continually embedded images to create a different order for a story: the panels are linear in their construction, but they are within eachother, not next to eachother. McCloud also created the idea of linear panels that don't take into account the monitor size: instead, you scroll down the document to follow the images further and further, as in his further essays on comics, "I Can't Stop Thinking!"

McCloud's ideas offer the notion of a place for webcomics that transcends the traditional boundaries of the page. However, the comics I mentioned previously and those that will be featured at this upcoming exhibit don't have any of the excitement of design that McCloud envisioned. These traditional web comics work just as well printed onto paper as they do on the screen: they follow the same general format of what you'd see in a graphic novel or the newspaper.

Thus, we have a form with all this amazing potential--and a few experimental works trying to take advantage of that potential--but even in the artistic world of the museum, all that's being recognized is the same traditional style of encapsulated panels...

More on 3D Printing

Fabathome.org is home to a fascinating diy movement dedicated to allowing anyone with the tech know-how to "print" in 3D. The home creation of 3d knick knacks is interesting, but generally the replicas are without any great function. Finally, there's a practical use for these toys: Candy Fab chronicles a printer that makes candy, fueled with sugar as its raw material. How far can we be from the dream Neal Stephenson presented in Diamond Age of the matter compiler, which like its Star Trek counterpart functioned as an easy way to create objects and food programmed to the user's immediate desire? It's not quite the era of the transporter, but it's a start...

[As a sidenote, with Halloween only a few months away, isn't it time to start decorating ala Evil Legos?]