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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:16 pm on 7/3/2011
Another do-stuff-for-a-month project, this time in short fiction-y bursts. K and I made up some characters last year for a webcomic we may yet do, set on a space station; I decided to spend some time with them. They’re shitty first drafts, but they’re a bit fun. I put them over on Tumblr, just to test the platform out. You might enjoy them.
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:20 pm on 1/1/2011
That’s right, I’m doing it again. Here’s part one. No one accompanying me (yet), so we’ll see how long I last.
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 1:38 pm on 12/16/2010
I’ve continued to think about web forums, the problems with them, and how to get them to support better, more human conversations. Lately I’ve been pleased to find that some folks in one of my enthusiast-communities are thinking about it too. (Historically, the clientele at the story gaming forums I frequent have taken the attitude that, despite Clay Shirky’s oft-linked and oft-repeated insistence that “software” and “social” can’t be taken separately, forum software can’t do anything at all, not even the littlest bit, to lessen social problems on forums. Seems like an odd stance for a bunch of people who generally reject gaming’s cherished notion that all you need is a great GM, and the game system you use doesn’t even get a vote as to how your game goes.)
Specifically, a group of some gamer friends of mine wanted to try an experimental structure they called Storycaravan. In Storycaravan, blog posts made by members of the group would be echoed onto a central, forum-like site which would give each post its own, separate comment thread. Commenters would have to formally register with the site, and when someone made a new comment, the post on which the comment was made would pop to the top of the page, like on most forums.
It dawned on me that WordPress could make just about all of those things happen already. The only piece I would have to supply was the sort: the means to bring a post to the top of the page when it got a comment. (WordPress already has a Recent Comments widget, but it turned out not to be very reusable for this purpose, for a lot of wacky reasons.) So here it is: Blogcaravan, my first WP plugin.
There’s a huge amount it doesn’t do, and it may be doing even less in the near future – I may be able to do a better job of filtering the functionality to leave pages alone when appropriate. But I love the notion that by keeping functionality narrow, I can support a lot of unexpected new combinations. (For Storycaravan we’re blending it with the FeedWordPress aggregation plugin.) I hope it will be of use to people who want to do forum/blog hybrids without starting from forum software.
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 5:07 pm on 10/18/2010
My girlfriend drew it, and I wrote it. (That means it’s a product of the Soft Sciences, bitches!) It’s called Dangerous Aromas and it’s about intrepid coffee buyers who will stop at nothing to win the Bean of Excellence competition. It’s rad. Check it out.
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:57 pm on 8/26/2010
Think Again, My Friend! I’m the host and producer of this new comedy podcast in quiz-show drag. Learn while you laugh while you listen while you learn.
The Soft Sciences, the name of my comics collaboration with Kalina Wilson. We’ve made a silly adventure comic that’ll be online soon.
I am really oddly satisfied that I was able to get those two domain names.
