Patchwork Earth

Other Patchwork Earths: Inspirations & Synchronicities

The “Patchwork Earth” concept was not a wholly original one even when I created it (with due credit to Matthew Pierce, who first coined the name and has since allowed me to run wild with it). One of the reasons I spent more time of late focusing on the metaphorical possibilities than the literal ones was the sheer number of similar concepts that had started to pile up all over. Some had been around for ages and I only heard of them after the fact, some had inspired some of my early ideas, and some were just other people knocking around in Ideaspace, marking their own spots of the country that I’d made my home. Also, the term lended itself to other ideas; I find myself sharing conceptual real estate with wildly different uses of the phrase.

But I’d be remiss if I never mentioned any of these, if I claimed ignorance of similarities. So let me introduce you to some of my brothers and sisters, most of whome I’ve never spoken with. As always, my own Creative Commons license is at the bottom of this page - one reason I offer these ideas freely is my awareness that some of this ground has been tread before.

This site is patchworkearth.net - The .com address was already taken by this Patchwork Earth, a hippy vintage clothing creation outlet. I could never begin to host a collection of links that use the phrase to descrive quilting - that’s where the “patchwork” term comes from, after all, and they’re far too numerous.

My good friend Justin Isis, who once wrote a funny little commentary comparing me to Anne Tyler, might be horrified - if he isn’t aware already - that Tyler wrote a novel called “A Patchwork Planet,” which was given a lukewarm review at Salon.

One early influence of the PE concept was the Battleworld created by the Beyonder in Marvel’s original “Secret Wars” comic book. When fellow writer Matthew Pierce was musing on the idea, he drew some inspiration from the template of the “Rifts” role-playing game series. This is where much of the “leyline” concept was originally drawn from, though it’s been adapted heavily.

The concept was used, in its own way, in a very well-known independent comic series called “Grimjack,” which I perhaps-surprisingly didn’t really know until after I’d been traipsing around PE for some time. I only just this past week purchased the first of IDW’s “Grimjack” reprints, and I plan to talk about it a bit later.

I also just now found this description of “Legacy,” from Image Comics, which sounds similar - but can’t really find a lot about the book, otherwise.

I enjoy Jonathan Lethem’s work a great deal - Fortress of Solitude is essentially the work I have to compete with as I write my current novel, and his short story “Access Fantasy” feels to me like a PE tale that I didn’t write. So imagine my shock when I discovered his book “Patchwork Planet,” co-created with Kate Milford (words and pictures!), about his beloved Brooklyn and gentrification.

People keep stumbling on the same ideas. I just found this little piece in someone’s Livejournal.

There have also been a lot of Patchwork People - the Patchwork Man is a Swamp Thing villain, and the Patchwork Girl a character from Oz. The latter inspired one of the most well-known works of hypertext, Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl,” which was also inspired by Mary Shelley’s own “patchwork man,” Frankenstein’s Monster. Talk about your synchronicity - Shelley Jackson is also Lethem’s ex-wife! None of this is to be confused by the “Patchwork Girl” story by Larry Niven.

You can also find “Patchwork Earth” art comix at this site.

Arthur C Clarke’s “Time Odyssey” series, intended to be for time what “Space Odyssey” was for space, brought all times together in what readers consistently call a “Patchwork Earth.”

And here’s one of the biggest ones: YA author Rhiannon Lassiter created a very similar role-playing project to my own in Patchwork Universe, and what’s more, we did so at nearly the same time, unaware of each other. Rhiannon, in our brief conversation, came off as a kind and thoughtful woman who understood instantly the oddness of our situation, as well as the nature of PE as such a useful meme:

“It seems the patchwork is one of those inspiration particles that can hit more than one person.”

Yes, ma’am, it seems safe to say that.

The Wire Opening Credits Challenge

One of my favorite entries on the terrific The House Next Door weblog, a site for television and film criticism, concerns one of my favorite television shows. My love for “The Wire” is rather public, of course, as I’ve been evangelizing it fairly heavily - since finally submitting to my friend J. Christian Leblanc’s own evangelizing.

“The Wire and the Art of the Credit Sequence” is an essay by Andrew Dignan (and be sure to read the comment section) on the opening credit sequences of the first four seasons of the show, the only seasons available at the time of writing. Breaking each sequence down to show how it highlighted the season’s themes while essentially telling a miniature narrative, he goes into each sequence at length, highlighting the reasons behind many choices. The Wire’s credit sequences are some of the best opening credits in television history, and they’ve earned the nuanced look.

One integral thing about the sequences, though, each set to a cover of the Tom Waits song “Way Down in the Hole” - they’re love letters to the city of Baltimore, both the good and the bad, the high and the low. And Baltimore, in the series, represents American cities as a whole, each of them victims to their own corruption, their own vices.

So I started thinking: you know what I’d like to see? “The Wire” credits for other cities. Short films by ambitious young filmmakers around the country, with Tom Waits covers in hand - many more people have done that song - showing their love for their cities, with sharply critical eyes towards the entrenched problems of their institutions. Vicious, heartbreaking little two minute clusterbombs. What Boston viewer, say, can’t view the opening credits to season three and not picture The Big Dig?

I challenge the filmmakers of tomorrow to grab their cameras and hit the streets, bring ‘em back to YouTube or whereever, and show us your cities!

Inform 7 & “IF” Games

I am a big fan of adventure games, both graphical and text-based. I will go at length about the wonders of the old LucasArts and Infocom games, beyond anyone’s patience level. But I know I’m not alone on that front, and programs like ScummVM have enabled gamers to continue playing these ancient wonders long past their compatability with current systems have passed.

We’re in a resurgence of adventure games of late, with the “casual gamer” resurgence (do not get me on the subject of that divide) and the Nintendo Wii’s ability to transfer point-and-click to the console, as well as the ever-burgeoning “IF” movement. “IF,” that is, “Interactive Fiction,” is the current term for text-based adventure games, which are increasingly being used as tools for unique narrative rather than primarily as puzzle gaming, which I consider pretty fab. I dislike the term itself - “Interactive Fiction” is a very general term, and could apply to comics (cf. Scott McCloud, “closure”) or other types of video games or things like ARGs. But past that, it’s a movement that I wish I was able to follow more closely these days, as I’ve always wanted to design an adventure game of my own.

I have always, always been interested in designing games. My desk and closet in my childhood home were overflowing with notebook pages and posterboard covered with room layouts, walkthroughs, inventory lists, and puzzles. I designed side-scrolling platformers, adventure games, and RPGs, both with friends (it was one of our favorite pasttimes in grade school) and alone. Sometimes it was very seriously, with an eye on a career in game design, and sometimes it was for entertainment only, something to amuse my cousins with or to challenge friends on the school bus.

I eventually went into college with an eye half on computer science with the goal of getting into game design, but the actual programming, the layout of code, was just too frustrating for me, and my math skills are maybe above average but nowhere in the right realm for the codework.

Now, though, with IF being such a niche art form and one practiced by inexperienced coders, some people have finally developed the tools to enable text-based game development by amateurs with some writing skill.

Inform 7 looks amazing. The interface is designed to layout your text adventure one room or dialogue element at a time, with lots of graphic flowcharts and organizing lists to keep yourself on track. What makes it so fascinating (and I haven’t yet had time to play with it, so I may rescind some comments when I’m able to make a proper review) is that it’s designed to parse “normal language” - declarative statements, rather than computer code. You lock in your prose and specify your items and choices simply, and it does the heavy-lifting.

How amazing is this idea? I would never, never disparage the work of programmers in game development, I know exactly how difficult it is; but enabling game design - even simple text-based game design - to fall into the hands of the artists is a minor revolution. Oftentimes, game writing suffers because of the disconnect between the writers and the developers, and this bridges that gap. To get games taken seriously, the narrative needs to take a stronger hold of the design from an earlier stage, and this is starting to happen here.

I’d like, over the next year, to play with it a bit, and see if it’s as doable as it appears. I’ll report back when I’ve some knowledge under my belt.

Casulo - Home in a Box

Weburbanist, quickly, becoming one of my favorite sites, put me onto this.

I have moved a lot of people in my day, including myself. When I was young, it was my family that was called upon to help tote furniture around, and it’s a trend that’s carried on into my adulthood, where I’ve been a go-to guy for most of my friends as they scuttle back and forth across the city or further. In truth, I often enjoy it - after moving myself so many times, back and forth across the country from Mass to Illinois and back, I’ve gotten fairly good at it. It’s a symptom of my inability to really place roots anywhere, but there’s something comforting to the ability to pack yourself for an efficient move in mere hours, even with all of the unnecessary crap that I own.

One thing that isn’t really fun, though, is furniture. Nobody likes moving furniture. It’s rarely shaped well, it’s frequently heavy, and just largely unpleasant. This is not news. I’ve often spoken, particularly while actually moving, of how I could design furniture that operated like Ikea’s easy-build stuff but with the addition of concealed handles, for easier toting. I’ve never met someone who didn’t like that principle.

However, I’ve been seeing a lot more these days in the way of more clever ways to solve the problem. My recent fascination with modular design has led to finding a lot of neat ideas, from sturdy papercraft furniture to fold-out and “transformer” furniture.

The Casulo, though, is the ultimate. An entire room - really, an entire studio apartment - that can fold into one box which can be not only toted, but shipped.

Another long-standing minor obsession of mine is the idea of “kits,” ready-packed groups of things for any situation. Whether it’s a starter’s tackle box, and all-in-one tool kit, or a well-stocked first aid kit, the idea of one box carrying the supplies needed for an exact situation is something I really groove on. I take one character to the extremes of this in the book I’m working on now, in fact, a collector of kits for situations that he never gets into. When I was a kid, I would make my own kits: a “perfect” starter art set maybe, or a specific collection of G.I.Joes and accessories in a fold-away box for a “jungle adventure” or to fit a certain storyline that I’d written.

This furniture box is an amazing example of the principle - I want one, and I have furniture! Be sure to check out the video of it in action! Quick assembly, efficient design, it’s such a cool thing. And think about disaster relief - if these things turn out cheap enough to make, they could be used to resupply folks whose homes have been damaged by fire, flood, or other with easy furniture.

I know I’m not the only one who gets off on stuff like this - the response to the Casulo has been pretty strong, considering it’s in the concept stage. If the expense is kept low, it could be a real game-changer.

“The One That Hooked You”

Over on Newsarama, JK Parkin posted a collection of responses to James Sime’s informal Twitter poll from yesterday about the comic that hooked you - the one that convinced you that you’d be a comic follower forever. One of the responses was mine.

Allow me to elaborate a bit on my selection.

Read the rest…

New Logo

Woo-hoo! Only took us six months!

Special thanks to Angela for putting this thing together. She was driven absolutely bonkers with all of my “can we make the leyline a little thicker?” comments, and she did a yeoman’s job (for free, to boot!). There’s still a little touching up to do, of course, making the puzzle pieces a bit more obvious at the small size, making the pulses flare a bit more… but it’s suitable for showing, and it adds a nice little flourish of color to the slate gray of the site’s current theme.

This site’s finally starting to look like, you know, an actual website that people would visit.

Now to generate more content…

WW Chicago Write-Up: Pride Parade

Wave your freak flag high, dammit!

It’s fitting in its own way that the Sunday that marked the final day of the convention was also the day that Gay Pride Parade was going on downtown in Chicago. Because what con is for many people is nothing but a public outing, a banner raised high with “Geek” or “Nerd” or “Fanboy” or “Otaku” or whatever your preferred stolen term for empowerment may be. So before I get into the events of Saturday, Sunday, and my final thoughts, let’s take a moment to salute the craftsmen and -women of the Comic Con, who were consistently astounding in their skill, or their ability to spend more than was necessary on an outfit that would no doubt turn heads, but one that would rarely leave the closet when the weekend had passed.

Like Halloween, many women found this an opportunity to be a little more… overtly sexual… than they perhaps were during the rest of the year, and for that, as well, I salute them. (Ha, ha.)

One last note before we get to the image barrage: Saturday was the day of the costume contest, for which the prize was I believe a grand. I remarked to Dale that many of these folks probably spent close to that on their damned costumes, and that they would be fighting solely to break even.

And then I realized: What better metaphor for our comic industry in 2008?

As always, you can find more commentary from me on the photos in my Flickr set.

Read the rest…

WW Chicago Write-Up: Day 2 (Part Two - Friday)

Okay, does everyone remember where we parked?

This write-up threatens to run longer than the actual convention did, I know. Thankfully, Saturday is largely just a costume parade, so we’ll move through that briskly, I think. But first…

Friday was the first proper day of the show, and my compatriot Dale and I managed to squeeze in more than a few incidences of bad timing, even as I was going through my allotted supply of cash like nobody’s business. The real crowds started to filter in today, and there were many booths set up that were not present on the preview night.

Read the rest…

Artistic License

Very briefly - my inclinations (as evidenced by the whole Oneironet project, and the CC license found at the bottom of this site) are towards copyfight, or copyleft, or however you prefer to term the movement for loosening the reins on as much of your “intellectual property” as humanly possible. “Intellectual property,” like you can sign a deed to real estate in ideaspace or something…

Anyway, I’ve recently seen a number of instances of artistic licenses - that is, as actual cards. BoingBoing linked to one example, and folks who share my personal interests may already know of David Mack’s own interpretation, which spins off of his larger ideas of the War of Art, propagated by Invisible Friends (sort of one facet of what I’m advocating myself). He acknowledges through the character of Akemi, for instance, that receiving credit for your work is the least important - and sometimes detrimental - part of the art-making process.

The cards are a little silly on the one hand - nobody needs an artistic license, unless they live in Cirinist territory. But then again, the idea (at least how Mack sees it) is that if you need an excuse, or permission, to create what you’re going to create, then by all means print it out and hold it up proudly - and if you don’t, you’ve got the license already, without the paper copy.

And on another hand - with the number of photographers (for instance) being suppressed around the country, and around the rest of the world, for taking mere tourist shots, or for artistic purposes, or for journalism - maybe a little faux-official card isn’t in order, as a declaration of rights as an artist. Most of those security chuckleheads will turn back at the sight of a laminated card.

But if you feel the way I do about your work, and the way that Mack to some extent does, then perhaps it behooves you to append this little sticker to your Artistic License - or even your actual driver’s license. Even if you believe in copyright, what purpose does it serve withholding those rights seventy years after your death? Be an IP donor. To some future artist, it may be as life-changing as a liver, a kidney, or a lung.

WW Chicago Write-Up: Day 2 (Part One - Commentary)

Early in the weekend, Warren Ellis (this year’s guest of honor) looks absolutely tired of signing books. His line was steady, though not crazy. I hear his late night Friday panel was very active. After the cut, take a gander at the mob scene there for Alex Ross, and we’ll talk a bit about why Chicagocon was and is so damned frustrating…

Read the rest…