BoingBoing reader and Battlestar Galactica fan Matt Dukes says,

I turned 31 today, and we had my birthday party at my place. We didn't know if anybody was bringing cake, and we had 25 people coming, so we knew we had to make several. Naturally, I came up the only logical solution to the problem -- a fleet of Battlestar Galactica cakes!

When it was all said and done (5 hours later), we had the Galactica, the Pegasus, a Cylon Ressurection Ship, and cupcake squadrons of Vipers and Raiders (my personal favorite). We tried to make Cloud Nine, but, um, it blew up. :)

Here's a link to my Flickr photoset with the cakes in it. Hope you like it!

Like it? Matt, your Galacticakes are frakkin' awesome. Speaking of which, I spotted this t-shirt on blogging.la author Jay Bushman at a BSG premiere party a couple of weeks ago: Link (Thanks, Spencer Cross!)

Update: Here's a silly music video cobbled together by BSG fans: Link (Thanks, Craig!).

Reader comment: Sean McGettigan says, "This is a video I threw together using youtubed BSG footage, and of a friend of mine singing a tribute to the lovely Starbuck (Kara Thrace) of Battlestar Galactica: Link."

Serious BSG fan Jeff says,

"I plan to travel across Canada and try and convince the powers that be to hire me on Battlestar Galactica. I'm in Halifax (on the east coast) and BSG films in Vancouver (on the west coast), so I'm trying to scrape up money for a cross country trek, and then somehow get them to give me a role on the show when I get out there (anything will do!)."
Link to Jeff's website. Jeff: if you succeed in your valiant quest to make it to Vancouver, do try and make sure you arrive while the show is actually in production, not on hiatus or on a between-season break. :-)

On Friday, I posted about artist Paul Szauter's beautiful Maine Mystery Beast sideshow banner that was to be auctioned off this afternoon. I suggested that the winner might donate it to cryptozoologist Loren Coleman's International Cryptozoology Museum. Whaddayaknow! Journalist and blogger Rogier van Bakel won the banner and says he'll do just that. What a generous, wonderful act-of-cryptozoological-kindness. From Rogier's post:

Kids — who knows what goes through their minds. Earlier this week, when I was reading a children's tale to my four-year-old daughter, she stopped me halfway through the first chapter because it was "too scary." The book: Paddington Bear...

Today she surprised me again by immediately taking a shine to an acrylic-on-canvas sideshow banner I'd just bought at auction...

As a longtime Fortean and a fan of Fortean Times magazine, to which Coleman contributes (as have I), I found Pescovitz' request pretty compelling. So I do indeed plan to donate the banner to Coleman, for public display. Next time I make it to Portland, I'll pay his place a visit and drop off his prize.

For now, my daughter loves the painting and has it on loan in her room. Good thing it doesn't feature Paddington Bear, or she might not be able to sleep at night. Link

As soon as Rogier emailed me, I called Loren to tell him. "Loren, I have wonderful news. Guess what!" His half-joking response, "You found a Bigfoot!?!?" Ummm.... Sadly, no. But great news nonetheless! From Loren's email reply to Rogier:

Many, many thanks. I am overwhelmed with joy to hear it was picked up by someone that understands.

I've just finished reading Julian Dibbell's astounding Play Money, a gripping memoir of his year spent trying to earn his living buying and selling virtual artifacts in video-games.

Dibbell is a sharp writer and a sharp thinker, and the book is dense with ideas so skiffy and weird that it probably contains the germ of thirty science fiction novels (my story Anda's Game, about virtual Mexican sweatshops, was inspired by his original reportage of this phenomenon). Dibbell's charm is that he loves the game and loves gamers -- their trash-talking camaraderie, their furious grudges, the ticklish surreallity of an entrepreneurial strategy that needs to take account of where the scariest in-game monsters are, which arcane pseudo-medieval trades are likely to contain the largest quantity of exploitable, undiscovered bugs, and whether the IRS will class the in-game ore your bot mines for you as taxable (because it is like a prize on a game-show), or exempt (because it's imaginary) -- and whether the fact that you sell some of that ore for hard currency makes a difference.

Dibbell's quixotic journey (in one year, earn enough from in-game trading to truthfully report to the IRS that he's making more as a virtual-goods broker than he ever has as a freelance writer) is fascinating and terrible. His marriage collapses (he insists it's unrelated). His friends tell reporters that he's become gold-obsessed. He is ripped off by hackers in Malaysia and identity thieves of unknown origin. His teenaged mentors come to him for advice on their love lives or desperate to unload some gold for cash so that they can score some weed in time for their birthday.

The other brokers are the most fascinating part of the book -- some of them driven loons with dozens of computers in racks, some semi-anonymous Chinese "biotech executives" hoping to start a Chinese gamer-sweatshop with Dibbell as frontman. They're aggro teenagers or retired software engineers -- all of them doing this ineluctably weird and wonderful thing, turning games into bucks.

Games may exploit some deep evolutionary leftover that causes us to be mesmerized by the steady brain-reward from constrained tasks with measurable goals and the need to groom other primates to achieve them. Exploiting that seems a little -- well, mercenary. But perhaps the same can be said of all our trades: music, visual art, storytelling, these answer a human need that originally evolved to keep us in harmony with our fellow monkeys, or to keep us striving for better foraging ground, or to keep us in the running for prime mating opportunities. If turning a buck off of the compelling nature of play is cheap, is it any cheaper than turning a buck off the compulsion of a good story? Link

As you might have guessed, both Mark and I are big fans of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy comic strips. However, I had never seen this excellent 1988 essay How To Read Nancy. It was written by Mark Newgarden, co-creator of the Garbage Pail Kids, and cartoonist Paul Karasik. Not only does it give a bit of insight into Bushmiller's brilliance, it's also a great, concise educational essay about visual storytelling through the analysis of a single strip.

From the essay (ignore the OCR type-os):

To say that Nancy is a simple gag strip about a simple-minded slot-nosed kid Is to miss the point completely. Nancv only appears to be simple at a casual glance. Like architect Mies Van Der Rohe, the simplicity is a carefully designed function of a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by the designer. To look at Bushmiller as an architect is entirely appropriate, for Nancy is, in a sense, a blue print for a comic strip. Walls, floors, rocks, trees, Ice-cream cones, motion lines, midgets and principals are carefully positioned with no need for further embellishment. And they are laid out with one purpose in mind - to get the jag across. Minimallst? Formalist? Structurallst? Cartoonist!

"Gag it down" was Bushmiller's off-spoken credo and the gag was the raison d'etre of Nancy. Characterization, atmosphere, emotional depth, social comment, plot, internal consistency, and common sense are all merrily surrendered in Bushmiller's universe to the true function of a comic strip as he unrelentingly saw it: to provoke the "gag reflex" of his readership on a daily basis.

Link to PDF

Dig these dirty hippie halloween costumes, from Becca's "30 Days of Halloween Costumes" series on her No Smoking In The Skullcave blog.
Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Legendary game designer Chris Crawford has disclosed some information about his next big project, an interactive storytelling platform called Storytron.

I saw a demo of Storytron this weekend, given by sf writer Laura J Mixon (author of the early cyberpunk classic Glass Houses), who's working on the project. It seems like there's a lot of potential there -- it's basically an engine for describing autonomous game-AIs that exist to move a story forward. The toolkit is simpler than learning LISP, but harder than rolling up a quickie avatar in WoW -- the kind of thing you're going to have to care about before you get good enough to see much in the way of results. I think that code examples and libraries of user-created characters can make the hump a little shallower -- but this is a tool for storytelling, and there's no getting around the complexity of that task.

Mixon described her aha moment with the technology -- she'd defined some characters and set out to "play" or "solve" the story they inhabited. She happened upon these little automata, going about their daily round, and then watched slack-jawed as the two characters improved a totally spontaneous argument that made perfect sense in the context of the story she'd set out to "write" in her design, but which she had not anticipated, written, or hinted at. The game took on a life of its own and inserted some reasonably good dramatic fooforaw at just the right moment -- the computer was telling her the story.

Now, that's pretty cool.

CC: I will not claim that it is superior to conventional algorithmic notation. We simply won't know that until people start using it. I'm playing a hunch here. Perhaps the most useful observation is that we don't have to be locked into algebraic notation.

DDJ: How else does SWAT accommodate nontechnical types?

CC: The storybuilder does not get to create types. I create the types. And every [datatype] is color-coded: Booleans are black, actors are blue, quantifiers are purple. I think this is useful for amateur programmers. Another thing: Runtime errors are survivable. It happens by virtue of the design of the system that runtime errors only occur when we are considering an action or changing something, and when that happens, we say it poisons that calculation. This invokes a system called "Poison" that logs it for future reference. "Rehearsal," our testing feature, plays the storyworld one way, adjusts a random number, does a thousand passes, and then presents you with a statistical analysis. You had this many poisoned events. Looping cycles. Thread killers.

Link (via /.)

Paul E. Martens's story, "What Dead People Are Supposed to Do" appeared in last week's edition of the horror podcast Pseudopod (I'm just catching up with my podcasts after a week teaching the Viable Paradise science fiction writing workshop on Martha's Vineyard) and it's fantastic. Perfect for Hallowe'en.

Brad is a gormless single manager in a telemarketing firm whose father died in debt and was therefore revived and turned into a telemarketing zombie who works to pay off his credit card bills. Iris is Brad's ex, who is trying to make Brad understand that their relationship ended because Brad just doesn't care about anything. Spurred by a need to impress Iris and by the impending repayment of his father's debt (with concomitant switch-off) he decides to show his zombified father a good time.

It's funny, it's got heart, it's sick -- what more could you ask for?

My dad sits in his recliner. He doesn't talk, or eat, or breathe. He watches TV. He comes home from work and he watches TV. I don't know if he knows what's on, or if he cares. We sit in the dark and the light from the TV screen flickers on his already greenish skin, reflected light and shadows lending his face the only animation it's capable of. It looks unnatural, which, of course, it is.

But what is natural these days? Talking monkeys? Dogs that go shopping? Designer diseases? Crops that pick themselves? Gene-jockeys and bio-mechanics have tinkered with so many things that I've lost track. Maybe it's a good thing that there are still laws about what they can and can't do to people. People that aren't dead yet at least.

Iris said it was wrong of me to have Dad brought back from the dead to work off his debts. But I didn't ask him to run up the balances on all those credit cards. I think a son should be entitled to inherit something from his parents. Am I wrong?

Link, Podcast feed link

The MP3 players that McDonald's Japan is giving away in a Coke-sponsored contest reportedly come loaded with QQpass, a malware app that spies on you and sends your personal information to some anonymous hacker. Link

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (bus-ads with pictures of beautiful, but heavy, or old, or off-average models) has posted a video called Evolution. It depicts an attractive -- but blemished and drab -- model being prepped for a bill-board, from the makeup to the photoshop. It's a very effective short film.

Regrettably, it's a stupid Flash video without a pause button, volume control, or fast-forward/rewind buttons. Argh. What a dumb way to do advocacy. Link (via Plasticbag)

Update: Here's a Quicktime of the video. Thanks, Michael!