Ain’t It Cool News has two new posters for the new Transformers movie:

There’s a MySpace page as well, and director Michael Bay is posting messages about the incredible special effects and action in the film.

Strange to see 2007 technology applied to a 1987 toy and cartoon line. But, as long as the movie has big robots fighting and transforming, it should capture the entertainment value of the original.

I’ve been playing with K2, a fancy WordPress theme that makes certain functions easier on the blog.  Unfortunately, if I installed K2 on this iblog, I’d have to strip out the current theme, let K2 handle stuff on the back end, and modify my theme to match K2.  I imagine a lot of the plug-ins I’ve installed would break as well – when I tried K2 the first time, it gave me an error message that I only removed by turning off a WordPress Widgets plugin after a quick Google seach.

K2 sounds good in theory.  However, I’ve noticed that when I play around with the technology, I stop worrying about the design.  That’s why when you go to the front page of my personal site (www.jobriga.com) you see a bunch of broken images – the images were located in a portfolio directory that got overwritten by a Drupal installation.  As a result of installing (and trying to master) Drupal, I have no images on my front page.

In general I’ve noticed that the more I try to implement technology on my site, the less creative I can be.  I might be able to install a fancy Drupal-based portfolio, but I’ve already spent too much time worrying about the programming behind the site and not enough time worrying about what users see.  I also want to get back to the creative aspects of web design – getting a page to look like what I want, when I want it.

It’d be nice to have some consistent design between pages on the site, but I think my attempt to master technology is limiting my creativity, rather than enhancing it.  I do think one can serve the other, but this year I’d like to adopt the philosophy of letting the design determine the technology, not the other way around.

Got two more rejection letters on my story, though neither really felt like a rejection.

Paradox (The Magazine of Historyical and Speculative Fiction) didn’t provide a rejection letter, but did say they weren’t accepting submission. Apparently the magazine “is temporarily closed to submissions from October 1, 2006 through June 1, 2006,” but “you are welcome to re-submit your story once the magazine opens to submissions again.”

No big deal – in truth, I don’t think they’d accept the story even if I resubmitted it. However, I appreciate the fact that someone opened my story, added their form letter, stuck it in the self-addressed stamped envelope, and mailed it back to me. A small gesture but appreciated.

Hadrosaur (aka Tales of the Talisman) sent a very encouraging rejection letter. It began with the statement “With regret, I must inform you that we’ve decided not to purchase this work at this time.” It didn’t say “your story has no plot” or “we’ll never buy it” (though that’s kind of implied) but now’s not the right time.

The letter continued with a checklist of”the more common reasons we are forced to turn stories away:”

• The plot didn’t fully engage us – either this is a variation of a plot we’ve seen too often or the conflicet simply didn’t grab and hold our interest.
• The characters didn’t work for us. Better dialogue and description is often the cure.
• The use of language – grammar, spelling, word choice and/or sentence structure – was weak.
• Not enough science fiction or fantasy content.
• Technology, magic, devices not well utilized – i.e. the “tools” used by the characters were either not suitable because they seemed too derivative of other SF/Fantasy universes or didn’t strike us as believable.
• Story too violent for us – i.e. too bloody/gory, involved violence to children, or we simply felt was too strong in tone for this publication.
• Sexual content inappropriate for us – we do allow sexual content, but it’s our call whether it was sufficiently tasteful and appropriate for Tales of the Talisman.
• Story was over 6000 words. We will occasionally consider slightly longer, but please query at the address above before sending.
• We are currently overstocked and closed to all submissions. We will reopen on ______. If possible,please check our website for updates.

Only the first item on the list was checked off. By inference, the story has the following things going for it:

• My characters work
• I kin spell good!!
• Just enough sci-fi
• Technology “tools” utilized well
• Not too bloody/gory
• Not outright pornography
• Under 6000 words
• They’re submission doors are wide open

The checklist is an interesting commentary on the other submissions they may get (I envision lots of gory, misspelled, vampire porn). The comment “The plot didn’t fully engage us” sounds reasonable – The Magazine of Science and Fiction also commented that the tale didn’t grab their interest.

Hadrosaur’s letter continuted with a nice handwritten note, assumedly from editor David Lee Summers:

I liked your exploration of AI’s, but I’m agraid the overall plot didn’t grab me quite strongly enough to buy. Best of luck with “The Perfect Toast” and please feel free to try again with another.

The note may have taken less than a minute to write, but I appreciate the fact that someone actually read my story, considered it, offered helpful criticism, and took the time to write a note.

The letter continued with a nice conclusion to let the author down easy:

Note: We receive far more stories than we can use during our reading periods. As a results, we have to turn away quality works simply because of limited space. That said, please continue to write and submit. Just because this submission did not work for us doesn’t mean that it won’t work with another market or that another submission of yours won’t work for us.

Kind of the “It’s not you, it’s me” of writing rejection letters.

The criticism on the “overall plot” is something I’ll have to work on. I think for my next story I’ll try outlining the bare bones of the plot (1. David wakes up, 2. David meets with coworkers, etc.) before writing – just getting the “who does what” straight in my own head. I worked on this story so much I think the plot went awry – could’ve been reorganized to be more interesting.

Only a few more “rejections” to go, and this particular story will have run its course. Got to get going on the next one!

The top of this journal, About, and Sandbox have been updated. Took most of Sunday to create a new design for the blog section (see the current mockup, below) which will serve as the basis for an overall look and feel for the site.

Next up: removing Drupal from the Portfolio section and replacing it with WordPress. (My decision to turn off Drupal is the subject of another post.)

This is the stuff I love – the simple unfettered creativity of setting up a new web site. Tweaking some stuff and seeing how it appears in a browser.

Looking forward to the upgraded design!

South by Southwest (or SXSW, for the cool) is an annual meeting of designers, web developers, and other creative types. They put recordings of some of the talks online at podcasts, at http://2007.sxsw.com/coverage/podcasts/. I’ve heard the talks went well in general, but I think the “podcasts” demonstrate why podcasting is not always appropriate for broadcasting information.

Take for instance Kathy Sierra’s opening remarks. A coworker who attended Kathy’s talk in person said that the talk was worth listening to, and I’m sure the talk went well. However, when you listen to the podcast you get sections like this:

Speaker (at 6:14): “If you are a designer, then this quote probably makes sense to you.”
Audience: [laughter]
Speaker: “So if that’s you, stand up right now and stay standing.”

Obviously the speaker was showing a Powerpoint, and must have shown a funny quote on the overhead. However, since the quote is never read aloud, there’s no way for someone listening to the podcast to be in on the joke. If this were a “vodcast” (video podcast – fancy!) then the online audience would see the quote in the video, but as it is the quote gets lost in translation from speech to podcast.

Speaker (at 7:55): “So, right now, I want you to just take a minute… and I want you to introduce yourself to two people who were not in the group you were in… I’ll give you just a minute and that’s it.”
Audience (8:12 to 9:08): Sounds of shuffling around, buzz of the crowd, time being killed
Speaker: “Thank you! You can stop now; you have the rest of the week.”

Clearly the audio is an unedited recording of Kathy’s talk, and as a result the full minute of people shuffling around is recorded. I imagine a few people in the crowd made new connections, but it adds nothing to the information being transmitted to the “podcast” listeners.

The fact is, the word “podcast” implies audio without visuals or transcript. I tend to be a more visual learner and a quick reader, so when I want to learn something I prefer to read it on a blog or view it on YouTube. I think that the SXSW’s “street cred” benefits from having podcasts of their events, but the presentation loses something when the listener at home can’t obtain crucial pieces of information, such as a visual that causes the audience to laugh.

In general, I think that podcasts are better suited for rehearsed broadcasts of audio-only content rather than recordings of live presentations. More suited to songs, radio type shows, and interviews, and less suited to Powerpoints. Oddly enough, SXSW has more songs and interviews posted to their video feed, and more talks posted to their “podcast” feed.

Hopefully next year SXSW will switch it around, and suit the broadcast technology to the content.