Yep, Benign Kingdom hardcover, in today’s mail. I also got a copy of Evan Dahm’s individual book in softcover which I might be tempted to give away on account of it’s all in the hardcover, but there’s a place inside for a monster-huge sketch and MoCCA is just two weeks away, so … maybe. Also, the hardcover has a friggin’ ribbon bookmark, an innovation in comics previously seen only in things as nice as the BONE hardcover. What I am basically saying here is that the four creator teams and George kicked at least twelve separate asses in the production of these art books and you should all buy them all. The end.

Except, no, not the end, because — in a spectacular act of lede-burying — I have not yet told you that Meredith Gran will be the latest creator¹ to take a whack at comics dealing with the Land of Ooo, as she produces a new Adventure Time spin-off miniseries starring Marceline the Vampire Queen and Princess Bubblegum and their band. Bleeding Cool got the launch story, but Gran has graciously agreed to an interview with me, and we’ll be bringing that to you as soon as her schedule permits.

If you’re paying attention to calendars you might have noticed that yesterday was 15 April, meaning the long-awaited launch of The PhD Movie is now available for you via streaming and optional download.

Don’t use that link, though. Use this one. It takes you to the same movie, the same ability to download, but it does so for 50% off, meaning that you can watch a feature-length movie that Jorge Cham and his cohorts put together with tremendous time and expense for five dollars (American). Seriously, we are into Louis CK territory here, with nothing standing between the creator and the audience but an entirely nominal sum of money.

In the absolute worst case, you don’t enjoy a movie for a couple of hours, it costs you and everybody around you a total of five bucks², and since you’re watching it at home instead of in a theater³, you can get completely drunk while watching if you want. Hell, since an actual theater probably costs like twelve dollars and you have to drive to it, you’re actually saving money to find out you don’t like the movie. Anything less negative than that counts as a triumph, and still only costs a fiver.

And if you totally love it (or know anybody in grad school, who will surely love it), you can get the DVD version for US$17 plus shipping, which is still less than this week’s craptacular Hollywood releases. That’s what they call a win-win-win in the movie biz, so you’d best get jumping if you want your share of the winning.

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¹ I have literally lost track of how many webcomics people have a hand in the Adventure Time comics now, but the list includes Ryan North, Braden Lamb, Scott C, Mike Krahulic, Becky-n-Frank, Elena Barbarich, Emily Carroll, James Kochalka, and Lucy Knisley so far.

² So you get one less 1200 calorie drink at Starbucks this week, which maybe isn’t such a bad idea when you think about it.

³ Adding insult to injury, the theater is probably full of the sort of people that you find in theaters these days — the sort determined to make the moviegoing process as miserable as possible.

So, what are you doing this weekend? Me, I’m watching the countdown timer for the release of Jorge Cham’s The PhD Movie, which now under one day, nine hours, and 30 minutes. Perhaps you are the sort of person that would like to engage the laugh-chuckles that come from recognition of your own graduate studies¹? Alternately, you may be the sort of person who would like to engage in some good old-fashioned Schadenfreude at the expense of your joyless, suffering, gradschool-attending friends². Perhaps you would even like to have these bouts of amusement while simultaneously saving money?

That’s where you’re in luck, Sparky, because The PhD Movie people³ have gifted us with a coupon which is good for 50% off the cost. We’ll be posting that on Monday, so come back then and we’ll give that sumbitch out. Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, Jorge Cham has graciously given me access to a stream of the movie for which I thank him, but I’ll most likely be buying a copy of the DVD anyway on account of I think my niece might need a copy as a late birthday present, to help stave off her own thesis madness. Um, if you’re reading this, ignore that last part, Heather. Thanks.

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¹ In which case, they are probably of the laugh to keep from crying kind.

² That would be the cruel form of laughter. Dick.

³ That is to say, Jorge.

Here are some excerpts on work done by various scientists on the subjects of where life on Earth came from and also dinosaurs:

[A] second paper published last week in the Cornell Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Journal suggests the trillion-ton meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have blasted off small bits of dinosaur DNA out into space. And quite a lot of those bits of dino-carrying rock will have landed on amenable planets, say the paper’s authors.

Breslow laid out evidence that unusual amino acids were brought to Earth by a meteorite four billion years ago and kickstarted life on our planet. He examined whether these putative space rock amino acids set the pattern for the L-shaped amino acids that make up most life on Earth and investigated whether those could lead to D-sugars of the kind present in DNA.

He cites evidence that L-shaped amino acids were found on a meteorite that landed in the 1960s.

The Cornell boffins have worked out what quantities of Earth matter would have been kicked out by the force of the impact and where that matter landed. They estimate that bits of Earth matter will have headed into the red dwarf Gliese 581 system some 20 light years away, which is thought to have a super-Earth orbiting at the edge of its habitable zone.

And of course if life from Earth was spewed into space by meteorites, then of course the life which arrived on our homeworld via meteorites must have come from somewhere else – somewhere perhaps filled with super-dinosaurs with iPads, satellite telly and Star Wars-style Death Stars.

Now take a look at these pages from the Dr McNinja story arc, Space Savers. Coincidence? The story in question deals with time travel, and I feel that its perfect matching-up with these latest scientific findings — despite having been drawn and published in 2010 — offers no other explanation than the immutable fact that Chris Hastings is a time traveler. You heard it here first.

Being a time traveler, he’s probably in a better place than I am to answer this comment/question from yesterday’s post:

Heya, lead producer on the McNinja project here :) I’m curious about your thoughts on how we could overcome the rewards issue for the low end, as we’ve had the same thought kicking about our heads. We definitely want to keep it free to play, or rather, an indefinitely large demo with a pay what you want model backing it, but how do we engage with people on kickstarter still? Thanks for the write up, by the way :)

First of all, let me congratulate lead developer [edit: see below] producer Hunter Thomas on having an awesome name. Hunter Thomas (or, more likely, Hunter Thomas) is the name of a person you want working at your side, because things are going to get done. Secondly, let me emphasize that my discussion of reward tiers on the Dr McNinja game represents the start of an analysis on a fairly complex problem, and everything that follows is entirely speculative.

Since the game is intended as free-to-play (or as near as possible), that takes away the most logical reward on the low end/no distribution costs end of the spectrum: the game. The low end is now skewed to people who think that power-ups/additional content (not yet produced) will be worth 10,000 or 100,000 points of credit for future in-game use. I see a couple of challenges and one very good decision in those rewards.

Let’s start with the good decision: the 100,000 point reward is US$15, and the 10,000 point reward is US$5; for anybody that has an interest in points, this is naturally going to drive them to the higher dollar figure because you get ten times the reward for only three times the cost. Our brains are hardwired by modern consumer culture to respond to that perception of bargain, and (as of this writing), the 100K backers are outnumbering the 10K backers, 25 to 17.

That’s the first challenge: all of those backers together only contribute US$455, and they make up six out of every ten supporters. The low tier cannot sustain this challenge without a ten-times increase in warm bodies, if proportions stay as they are. If the higher-value backers remain where they are now, it’ll take a thirty times growth in the bottom tiers.

There’s a great deal of reward variety at the upper tiers: there are nine US$100+ tiers, including three separate US$500 rewards, but as of right now, nobody’s biting — there is literally one backer at the US$50 level, with zero support above that. The entire support of the project is in the six lowest tiers; right now about 50% more thought appears to have been put into the high-support tiers (nice when you can get them, but don’t count on it) than the low and mid ranges. If as much variety had been put into the lower-value reward structure as the high-value, I think there’d be more backers. Again, from everything I’ve seen in Kickstarts, the US$30 (or so) to US$75 (or so) is the sweet spot.

Another challenge: Jon Rosenberg had a theory on merchandise pricing some years back that I think holds true in almost all cases: for fans of a thing, US$20 is the basic quantum unit of money. You need to price a lot of your stuff at the US$20 price point, because US$20 is the mental threshold for I’m spending money. It’s probably because ATMs spit out twenties, but if somebody is going to buy anything at all, they’ve prepared themselves to part with a twenty dollar bill; the idea of getting change back doesn’t enter into it. If you give them too many opportunities to part with less than twenty bucks, they’re going to spend less than twenty bucks. Sure, there’s a need for low-value items, especially if they can be produced cheaply, but not having your most attractive mass-market item in the US$20 range is leaving money on the table.

Translation: I think that that 10,000 points reward could have been bumped to 25,000 and gone for US$15, easily. US$20 gets you 100,000 points, which appears to be an even bigger bargain (10x benefit, for 1.3x cost). That mental calculation is based on both an advantage and a challenge: nobody knows what a point is worth. You sure do get a lot of them for twenty dollars, which ties into the bargain hunting drive, and that’s good. But what will you get for your points? Nobody knows yet, and that’s bad.

Yes, it can be used for power-ups and future content, but the system isn’t implemented and nobody knows the exchange rate for points yet. The US$20 I proposed for 100,000 of them is based on that fan crossing the purchasing threshold, but it’s really a leap of faith. Having even a rough description along the lines of We haven’t finalized costs, but we envision power-ups to cost between 1,000 and 10,000 points depending on how cool they are, and future expansions equal to at least half the size of the original game to go for 20,000 to 30,000 points would have let people make their support decision with a bit of economic reasoning. It’s still a leap of faith, but that bit of reasoning is also a way for the on-the-fence backers to talk themselves into dropping the money, because they’re now convinced as to value.

I’m pretty sure doing these things would have driven almost everybody at the current US$5/US$15 tiers to US$20, and allowed pricing for the present US$20 to US$50 tiers — which feature actual stuff — enough higher to get us into the aforementioned sweet spot. Naturally, this is all Monday morning quarterbacking, as we’re barely 30 hours into the campaign.

Since the tiers can’t be redefined at this point (if I understand Kickstarter’s TOS correctly), the best bet would be to clarify the value of those points and see if it’s not possible to make this a low-tier success by getting a hell of a lot more people interested. Also, since the game preview is playable, I have a feeling we’ll see surges of interest as more people actually play it. In a little more than three weeks, we’ll see how it all turned out¹.

[Edit to clarify] A misreading on my part identified Hunter Thomas as lead developer, when he is in fact lead producer and always was. Fleen regrets the error.

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¹ No footnotes? That’s unpossible!

Advice for aspiring comic artists:

Before the Internet, I would have had a totally different set of rules. But now people are putting their work up on the Internet and getting a response, so that might be the way to go. Can you discipline yourself to turn out work on a regular basis?

Many people can’t do a syndicated strip for more than three years. People not my age are programmed to want change, to want excitement. They’re not embarrassed to leave a job to move to a new city. They’re not likely to stick with the same thing for 30 years. With that kind of itchy-feet need for change, it’s difficult work. It’s not like you do a doodle in the morning and then you’re free. They realize the pressure is on. You’re working evenings, weekends, in hotel rooms, on airplanes. And you can’t turn out work that’s not your best, because you have to fight for that real estate in the paper. A lot of people can’t do it more than three years.

But if you can do it every day for a year online, disciplining yourself, getting honest feedback from readers —- well, some miserable dough-heads don’t deserve a voice, but you’ll also get good feedback from honest readers. If someone says, “I don’t get it,” that’s your best reader.

Lynn Johnston of For Better or For Worse, in an interview this week at The Grindstone. Her strip may not have been to everybody’s tastes (particularly as it approached wrap-up), but nobody’s ever said that Johnston phoned it in or didn’t put in the many, many hours across 30-odd years in syndication.

I trust you’ve seen this? Radical Adventures? Videogame? Starring Dr McNinja? It’s got an interesting dilemma, as the game is free to play, so what to offer in the way of backer rewards at the low levels, which are traditionally filled with things like You get a free copy of the game?

Answer: credit for in-game power-ups and future content updates, which is pretty clever when you think of it, and which presently is what most backers are opting for. At higher levels there are things like custom McNinja soda packs, original art, and inclusion in the game (as an enemy, to be killed again and again and again). At the very highest level, you get a pizza party with Chris Hastings, who is an excellent dude to eat pizza with. They don’t say where the pizza is from, but if you get that prize I’d suggest asking for the the corner pub-looking place near where the giant feral raccoons¹ scurry between the power substation and the cemetery, haunting Brooklyn with their sinisterly dexterous² hands. The pizza there was awesome.

Anyways, less than a day in and approaching ten percent of goal, which is a bit slower than other recent Kickstarts for webcomics-type properties with built in fan bases. I’m attributing this not to a dearth of desire for a cool videogame that features Dr McNinja doing awesome things, but rather because the rewards hypothesis I’m working on identifies low-dollar-value pledge rewards as a particular challenge.

As of this writing (too early to draw strong conclusions, to be honest), some 57% of backers are at the two lowest reward tiers, in for US$15 or less. This can work, especially considering the zero cost associated with distributing the rewards at these tiers, but you need a whole lot of people to make up for the low incremental dollar value each contributes. I’m going to keep my eye on the third through sixth tiers, with dollar values up to $US50, and see what kind of growth occurs there; that’s going to be where Dr McNinja’s Radical Adventure makes goal, or obliterates it with awesome punchings.

I was experimenting with horizontal rules yesterday to give The Bradster the pull-quote treatment, but now I’m quite liking them. Could I at long last be shucking off the yoke of bullets and unnumbered lists?

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¹ All together now: Aaaaaahhhh!

² I swear to dog when I wrote that I wasn’t intending to make a pun in Latin.

I have a question for you: Who’s the webcomicker with the tricks that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?

Brad!

Ya damn right. Brad Guigar is well known in the world of webcomics, and having recently made the jump from working for The Man, we at Fleen sat down with Guigar (via Google Chat) to talk about how he made the shift, what he’s doing now, and what we can expect to see from him in the future. First thing he did was to find the smiley functionality:

Fleen would like to thank Brad Guigar for taking the time to talk with us. As a final note, please enjoy this entirely out-of-context quote that didn’t make the final edit:

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¹ They say this cat Brad is one bad mother …²

² Shut your mouth!³

³ I’m talkin’ ’bout Brad.

⁴ Not to be confused with the Greystone Inn.

⁵ He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman.

⁶ For the full effect, readers are encouraged to click here and skip to about the 7:40 mark.

⁷ I didn’t get it for him for his birthday.

According to that unimpeachable source, Brad Guigar is 43 years old today. In honor of the Bradmastide season, we will feature an interview with Brad tomorrow, provided I can figure out how to work the digression about the Great Unmedicated Bipolar Pumpkin into thing without it looking like we’re both a pair of loonballs and/or drunk. No promises. In the meantime, how about some other happenings from around our corner of comics?

• The Hugo Award nominations hit over the weekend, with an odd shift in the universe of sci-fi awardsdom; that faint silence you hear is the lack of a nomination for the fine folks at Studio Foglio, whose work on Girl Genius has literally owned the Best Graphic Story category in all the prior years of its existence. The Foglios graciously decline nominations this year, leading to the following slate:
  • Digger, by Ursula Vernon
  • Fables Vol 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham
  • Locke & Key Volume 4, Keys to the Kingdom written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez
  • Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication written and illustrated by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton
  • The Unwritten (Volume 4): Leviathan written by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross

  Two webcomics, three comic book collections; let’s address Schlock Mercenary first. There was an … unfortunate comment left at The Beat¹ that decried Howard Tayler’s inclusion on the list and stated he was only nominated because he was “whoring” (that’s a quote) his audience to get nominations. Leaving aside the rather obvious flaw in the logic², one should note that Tayler did ask his audience to support a number of eligible works by other creators. Of the works Tayler was advocating for, he was involved in two and not involved in five, and one of the two he worked on got nominated³. If he’s whoring, he’s the least effective whore ever.

  Not content to impugn the quality of Mr Tayler’s work, the commenter went on to idly speculate that Ursula Vernon engaged in similar, whorey practices. Leaving aside the well-documented fact that I loves me some Digger, ten seconds with Google would show that while Ms Vernon has spent the (roughly) one year since Digger wrapped writing frequently about her garden, interesting birds, amphibians gettin’ on in her garden, oversized turkeys (both free-ranging out by the back fence and in the roaster for Thanksgiving), mulch, mulch, and more mulch, and spoofs of Regency romance novels complete with ninjas, not once did she ask for consideration in any awards.

  Look. We all have our favorites. We all think our taste is impeccable. We all love what we love⁴. But before you accuse a creator (of whom you are barely aware) in a manner that is unseemly at best and incredibly dickish at worst, perhaps just a smidgen of due diligence? Awesome.

• Rounding out the nominations in Best Fan Artist, we find that Randall Munroe is again recognized. It’s a weird category, but as long as Randall keeps cranking out things that make me think like today’s update, I don’t have any problems with him being nominated for everything up to and including Science Cartoon Pope⁵.
• Not related to the Hugo Awards, but within the realms of engineering: Angela Melick is having a launch party for her second book in Downtown Vancouver on Saturday, 14 April. It’s in a bar, which can only mean fun times. And the very next day, Jorge Cham’s The PhD Movie goes on sale, with a newly announced five percent of profits going to support Endeavor College Prep in East Los Angeles. Proof positive that engineers are the best people? Possibly.

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¹ I’m not calling out the commenter by name; while his words were rash and unwarranted, I’m more interested in taking the behavior to task than the person.

² Namely, that if Tayler were capable of whoring himself so effectively, I’m sure his wife would prefer he use his whorish powers to bring in some money for things like groceries and mortgage payments, rather than a small statue of a rocket. It’s a very nice small statue of a rocket, but I’m pretty sure the local Food o Rama would prefer cash.

³ He also shares a nomination (along with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Jordan Sanderson) for the Writing Excuses podcast in the Best Related Work category, but did not advocate for it as far as I can find in a cursory search.

⁴ C.f.: previous graf, where I loves me some Digger.

⁵ Rest of the nominees in no particular order: Aaron Diaz, Zach Weiner, Dante Shepherd, Tony Piro, David Morgan-Mar, and Darryl Cunningham. Honorable mention to Jon Rosenberg for Cartoon Neil DeGrasse Tyson With A Jetpack.

So the Eisner nominees got announced the other day, and I was pleasantly surprised to see some of the work that was recognized, along with unpleasantly surprised to see some of what was omitted. In other words, a completely typical year. Let’s start with the nominees for Best Digital Comic, which we will recall are:

[O]pen to any new, professionally produced long-form original comics work posted online in 2011. Webcomics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form.

That would be represented this year by:

• Bahrain by Josh Neufeld
• Battlepug by Mike Norton
• Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant by Tony Cliff
• Outfoxed by Dylan Meconis
• Sarah and the Seed by Ryan Andrews

They are, respectively, a piece of comics journalism (16 pages), a serialized fantasy story (ongoing), a serialized adventure story (wrapped at 118 pages, second story forthcoming), a fairy tale from the POV of the participants (22 pages), and a macabre story reminiscent of Momotaro (5 infinite canvas installments, equivalent to approximately 100 pages). Bahrain is the only one new to me.

The nominees provide a nice glimpse into both the the strength and the weakness of the category — there’s an incredible variety of work, but it’s just as hard to decide what the requirement of “long-form” means. Serialized ongoing story? Check. Done-in-one? Check. Seemingly anything that’s not a continuity-light gag strip or single panels would qualify, but there’s still a conceptual difficulty in seeing works that are five to ten times longer than others in the same category. Still, if I have my questions about things that might have been nominated (top of my list: anything Emily Carroll did in 2011), it’s entirely down to preference; there’s nothing on this slate to be embarrassed about.

Speaking of missing, I understand that the nominations are mostly drawn from submissions sent in by the creators themselves (or their publishers), but I’m wondering about some things that were left out. While the submission policies don’t explicitly say that the judges can include overlooked works that weren’t submitted, I have to believe that such discretion wouldn’t be frowned upon either¹. All this to say, no nomination for Hark! A Vagrant for either Best Humor Publication or Best Graphic Album — Reprint? Kate Beaton was everywhere in 2011 (and deservedly so), inarguably one of the two or three biggest stories in comics², and likely the one that reached the most people outside our rather insular community. Her absence is baffling.

That being said, having been on the inside of an awards process this year — and having taken some lumps for it — I can say with certainty that I have much more sympathy for Jackie Estrada and the Eisner committee than at any prior point in my life. It’s an imperfect set of nominations, because no process for choosing and no people involved in that process can be perfect. I trust that everybody involved did the best they could with honest intentions. Nor could I be annoyed with any nominations list that includes the likes of Dave Kellett (for Best Humor Publication), Colleen AF Venable (Best Publication for Kids (ages 8–12)), or Vera Brosgol³ (Best Publication for Young Adults (Ages 12-17)). Congratulations and good luck to all the nominees.

• In other news, Brad Guigar has taken an idea and run it in a new direction. Rich Stevens messed around with releasing a month or so of Diesel Sweeties strips as an e-book (mostly to play around with iBooks Author), which Guigar is also doing right now with Evil, Inc., but with a twist. Brad’s download lets you see into the future. The entire month of April’s storyline (and please recall that today is only the sixth day of April) is packaged up and can be yours for a buck and a half.

  I’ve seen webcomics collections hit print with a few strips at the end still to run online, but I can’t recall such an example of sneak peak access before. Approximately 24 hours after announcing the deal, Guigar found the response strong enough that he’ll be repeating in May, and hints at further developments. For those wondering what he would do with all that extra time, Kicking his buffer in the ass appears to have been at the top of the list.

• Jeph Jacques is heading to the entirely classy environs of Yale University on Thursday, 12 April, for a Master’s Tea, which (as noted previously) is a Big Damn Deal. Not noted in print previously — but believe me I noted the crap hell out of it privately — Yale does a really terrible job of providing any public information about said Teas. We’re six days out and the only schedule I can find only goes up to the 10th. There are many colleges at Yale, and this tea might not be held at Pierson, or maybe it will?

  Basically if you want to go, I’d advise hanging around the Pioneer Valley on Thursday morning until you see a large man with tats and piercings and a Great Pyrenees headed south towards New Haven, and follow him.

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¹ The guidelines do say that the judges could add, modify, or delete entire categories (and it’s my understanding that happened this year), which to me is a much broader power than merely including additional works for consideration.

² NB: not just comic books.

³ I told you Anya’s Ghost was the best comics of the year. Also, disclaimer: stuff that I wrote appears in Kellett’s book.

Things got in the way; come back tomorrow and I’ll have some thoughts on the Eisner nominations.

I had a revelation on my morning commute about chef Grant Achatz and molecular gastronomy in general. Bear with me.

I have never previously gotten the appeal of molecular gastronomy and the mad scientists that pursue it. Sure, they have food experiences that sound unique and creative, but I’ve always wanted a meal that didn’t just transport me, but which was recognizable as food.

Food is made of basic ingredients and skill and can be recognizably reproduced by anybody with the time and patience to practice. I will never have access to the ingredients or sense of flavor or even the knife skills of a commis in a top flight kitchen, but I can roast a chicken; the differences between my roast chicken and the best roast chicken in the world will be obvious, but it’s still a roast chicken.

For me, the Grand Unified Theory of cooking revolves around the fundamental forces of heat, moisture, salt, and time; they can be manipulated in fairly fundamental ways, arranged by some fairly basic tools¹ and techniques, all of which go back through the history of human endeavour to keep ourselves fed with something that tastes good. The most commonly-used implement in my kitchen has not changed its basic structure in millenia.

This philosophy is why dinner tonight will consist of flour + water + yeast + salt, thrown on a hot rock with tomato and cheese and mushrooms, which will transform itself into something simple and satisfying and delicious. I’ll probably drink a wine made by a retired nuclear physicist who, for all the modern equipment at his disposal, utilizes techniques as old as civilization and operates on a small scale so that he can be sure that everything he produces is as good as he can possibly make it, but doesn’t want to be precious about things. He wants his wine to be shared with food by people that enjoy each other. Simple.

Topic shift: my favorite restaurants are owned by a pair of guys that have provided me more good times than I can recall². They’ve passed me more free nibbles and drinks than I can count, graciously entertained friends old and new, and at least one of their bartenders is a genius. They also do a podcast that’s really good, and their latest show features Grant Achatz, perhaps the maddest of America’s molecular mad scientists.

I won’t even get into Achatz’s frankly amazing history, from working at the fabled French Laundry to founding molecular temple Alina to the now God’s just screwing with us level irony of his cancer diagnosis — cancer of the tongue, which destroyed his ability to taste. None of that’s important right now. If you want an idea of the sort of stuff that Achatz is doing, the stuff that I just didn’t get, Lucy Knisley did a comic about the experience which you should go read now. How do you get so far from food, I’ve always wondered.

Halfway through the podcast, I was starting to get my answer. Achatz does these things not because he’s in love with technology for its own sake, but because he’s got crazy ideas and wants to see which of them might stick. Prime example: having a tablecloth made of silicone that can have food prepared directly on it and used as the servingware was a crazy idea. But it changes the interactions of diners with the food, and with each other. We’re still in Crazytowne³, but I’m understanding his POV a whole lot more. Then I got to the segment of the show starting about 43:19, and lasting around ten minutes. Go listen to it now.

See, Achatz’s major project these days is called Next; every three months, it changes to something new. The opening menu/decor/concept/everything was about recreating a classic French meal, circa 1906. Then it became for three months an exploration of Thai cuisine, just because that’s as far from classic French cooking as you can get. There was a period that explored Achatz’s youth, mid-70s in Michigan (lots of mac ‘n’ cheese and peanut butter & jelly, I’m told), and so forth. There’s no reason to keep changing what he does except he can, and it forces him to continuously up his game. He has taken an act of creation and instead of resting on success, responds by chucking it all when it gets well known and starts over again.

I heard that and names started to pop into my head: Gurewitch. Onstad. Beaton. The nimbleness, the reinvention, the metaphor of culinary creativeness as webcomic stretched beyond all credible boundaries and what the hell is wrong with you Gary. The he told the audience what he does when a three month rotation at Next closes.

He gathers up all the recipes, compiles them into an e-book, and sells it through the iTunes for seven bucks⁴. He’s made his mark, he’s not going to repeat himself, and he wants to put it out there for everybody for damn near free. This is the very model of the independent creator as driven, screw what I’ve done what can I do next obsessive.

Now I get him. Grant Achatz works in food (sometimes down to molecules). Webcomickers work in images (sometimes down to pixels). They have an infectious enthusiasm and a restless energy and a desire to share it as widely as possible. Hell, if you listen to the end of that segment and hear about the concept of “Last”, he’s even got the possibility of the equivalent of a content scraper.

So yeah, that’s where my brain’s been today. Still not enough to go eat at Alinea, but damn if my conceptions of creativity haven’t expanded a bit. And if nothing else, the bit in the podcast about the duck press was hilarious

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¹ Like Alton Brown, I have only one uni-tasking tool in my kitchen.

² Also, if you can keep two restaurants afloat for a combined 27 years through the greatest recession of the past two generations, you are a steely-eyed businessguy of Khoo-like proportions.

³ The conceptual-slash-performance art district.

⁴ And you know what his seven dollar recipe collections won’t call for? Diode-pumped lasers in the hazardous power ranges to break shit down into its atomic components so you can put it back together in an arbitrary shape. I’m back from the molecular brink, because I can guaran-frickin’-tee that the nitrogen cooling system for that laser is the goddamn definition of a unitasker, and it is not going to appear in a recipe book made for the edification of anybody that wants to screw with the recipes. This is the culinary equivalent of a Creative Commons that permits derivative works.

Who likes numbers? Sure, we all do, but what numbers should we talk about?

• From the wilds of the Pacific Northwest comes the news that Penny Arcade are shifting publishers, with Oni Press getting the nod this time. On the one hand, this shift¹ could lead some to wonder if Mike and Jerry are capable of forming long-lasting bonds of commitment. It’s not you, baby, they tell Random House imprint Del Rey, it’s us. Alas, the trail of broken hearts is long, with other exes in their history, but considering one of them was a vanity press that screwed Jerry and Mike sideways, maybe a little fear of commitment is a good thing.

  On the other hand, Oni Press means that they’re getting the love and attention of a good man — the best man — in the person of George Rohac. Besides shepherding the Benign Kingdom project to Kickstarter superstar statues, George is a man who cannot be destroyed except that he returns under his own power. His smiles last through anything, and good thing too for us all. He reserves his hatred for forces of nature and his punchings for problems². And Yuko. What I am saying is that Penny Arcade are likely in good hands.

• I think I can be forgiven for missing the date (especially seeing as how the creator missed it as well), but Help Desk turned sixteen years old on three days ago. Granted, a chunk of that history was in print, or subject to occasionally-lengthy hiatuses (hiati?), but it’s been there in one form or another, finding new variations on the theme for 2065 comics³ and counting. Happy (belated) birthday to Help Desk, and happy stripperversary to Christopher Wright.

  Edit to correct: As Mr Wight points out in the comments, Help Desk was never in print and I am an idiot; it was originally published as part of an online magazine. Fleen regrets the error.

• If there were only 72 websites in the world that you should pay attention to in 2012, what would #61 (alphabetically) be? TopatoCo. From the Maximum PC list/declaration/manifesto:
  

  Topatoco Web artists make our lives better by publishing their work on the web for free. You can make sure your favorite artist has food, shelter, online access, ink, paper, and other necessities of life by shopping at Topatoco; buy T-shirts, books, coffee cups, and lots of other art-emblazoned goodies.

  All of which are valid points, but which I think might miss the most wonderful thing about TopatoCo — the customer service experience, which is snarky, informative, timely, and offers the opportunity to interact with members of the Great and Bountiful TopatoCo Empire in curious and wonderful ways. Well done, you crazy, magnificent bastards.

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¹ By my count, this would make Oni the fourth publisher of Penny Arcade books, but I’ll have to check my bookshelf when I get home.

² Which wisely decide it’s a good time to be elsewhere.

³ Which is equivalent to one comic every 2.83 days on average across the total time period.