Nathaniel Payne's Blog

"That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:50:53 -0400

“That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.”

- Nick Hanauer speaks an uncomfortable truth, and it’s something many of us in the middle class have screamed about over the years. But we’re drowned out by the voices of our very own politicians and the wealthy upper-class businessmen who fund their campaigns and line their pocketbooks. They continue to believe the rich should be taxed less, and the lower and middle classes should be taxed more. Eventually, when they’ve finally taken all of our money, and there’s only a handful of incredibly rich people and a vast majority of incredibly poor people left, no one will remain who can buy their products and services and help them maintain their comfortable lifestyles. Only then will they fully understand what they have done.

But by that time, it will be too late for everyone.

Via the National Journal

This is unfortunately, painfully true.

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:58:38 -0400

This is unfortunately, painfully true.

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:48:48 -0400

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is:

Brilliant metaphor for a new generation of privileged white dudes from the mind of John Scalzi.

"Apparently he has a book where there are two cities and they, like, overlap. That’s what I heard..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:32:42 -0400

“Apparently he has a book where there are two cities and they, like, overlap. That’s what I heard anyway, and if someone else had written it maybe that would matter.”

- I used to respect Jerry Holkins’ opinions when it came to book recommendations. I’ve added to my library substantially over the years according to his suggestions. I would never have started reading the “Kingkiller Chronicles” series if not for he and Mike gushing about “The Name of the Wind” on their site. But I was genuinely surprised by this revelation today.

“The City and the City” is easily my favorite novel of 2009, and still ranks in my top ten favorite novels of all time. Now, I’m not someone who regards China Mieville as a god, (I stopped halfway through “Kraken” because I got bored with the story) but I haven’t found a novel as beautifully constructed and told as “The City and the City”. I have never felt this supposed “smugness” that Jerry seems to feel when reading Mieville’s works, but I can’t help but think some portion of that is projected as opposed to interpreted.

I can understand someone saying they don’t like a work, or that a particular author isn’t appealing. Sure. Fine. I can absolutely accept that. The same goes for me regarding a great many novels and authors. But for Jerry to suggest that a certain novel is somehow irrelevant just because he refuses to wrap his mind around it takes a level of arrogance that I simply cannot fathom.

tl;dr - No one gets to crap on “The City and the City”. Not even Tycho.

(via Penny Arcade)

I just bought my very first Apple product. I feel dirty.

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:13:13 -0400

Now, just to clarify, I’m no Apple hater. I don’t have the trademark intensely-burning dislike towards the company that my fellow Windows and/or Android-centric acolytes seem to share. But I’m not a fan of their closed nature, and I promised myself long ago that anytime I was given the option, I would always work to choose the one that provides me greater control over my technology.

But I have to admit that the iPad is indeed beautiful and immensely functional. And my wife really wanted one. It dovetails nicely with everything she needs to be able to do for our family and her personal business. This is especially necessary, since every laptop she’s ever owned seems to sputter out and die within a year (it doesn’t help that I’m a stingy old bastard, and tend to gravitate towards cheap laptop deals). And when I discovered that I was able to score an iPad 2 using my ridiculous amount of business travel miles, the choice was simple.

So, Happy Mother’s Day to my wonderful wife, the fantastic matriarch of our busy little family! Now please excuse me while I go take a shower to wash off the hideous realization that I now have to install iTunes on all of our computers.

The terribly good advice from the terrible mind of Chuck Wendig

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:34:54 -0400

The terribly good advice from the terrible mind of Chuck Wendig:

If you have a notion to be a writer and you’re not reading Chuck Wendig’s blog, TERRIBLE MINDS, you are completely missing out on some excellent free advice on storytelling, story construction, audience manipulation, and general writerly need-to-know’s.

Case in point: today’s post on 25 things you should know about creating mystery. Genius stuff, friends. Hilarious, intelligent, and a bit tawdry at times, but honestly, what good caffeine and alcohol-fueled author isn’t?

Why do I even bother to pretend I know how to play video games anymore?

Fri, 04 May 2012 22:21:23 -0400

So, should I be annoyed or proud that my son has beaten Super Mario Galaxy 2 before me?

I watch him fly through the end levels with the ease of a practiced expert. Gliding over obstacles, jumping and careening through danger with no more care or consideration than a buzzing bee floating lazily through a field of flowers. He’s masterful in his precision, moving with grace and confidence. A skill forged through the fires of tireless repetition and an incredibly patient trial-and-error persistence.

Did I mention he’s only six? ‘Cause he’s only six.

Yeah, I think I’m going to go with proud.

Torchlight II Pre-orders are Live

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:13:12 -0400

Torchlight II Pre-orders are Live:

Anyone want to go in on a four-pack together? Or maybe you might want to just provide me with a free copy because I’m awesome and you’re generous?

I’m just saying. That’s always an option.

(Via @RunicGames)

On my bucket list: I need to jam with Steve Martin. Him on...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:20:49 -0400

On my bucket list: I need to jam with Steve Martin. Him on banjo, me on guitar, playing a sweet double-timed version of “I’ll Fly Away”.

Preferably sometime before he dies, of course.

So, this is pretty awesome. Somebody went and created a Frogger...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:18:37 -0400

So, this is pretty awesome. Somebody went and created a Frogger game using real-time data from 5th Avenue in New York City. A webcam tracks the movements of the cars, and a program maps those movements into virtual cars in the game. That. Is. CRAZY. And absolutely fantastic. I would love to play something like this. Check out the video and then you can find out more at 5thavefrogger.com.

(Via Joystiq)

thinkamancer: League of Legends and Fez. I can’t even properly...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:23:34 -0400

thinkamancer:

League of Legends and Fez.

I can’t even properly explain how I imagine this to be. Impossible to balance, to begin with.

I don’t normally do these, but I couldn’t resist this one. Probably because the last two games I played were Xenoblade Chronicles and Angry Birds.

Xenoblade Birds takes you on an epic quest as a young avian researcher working to discover the secret of a very powerful weapon, the Monado, which is, of course, a highly aggressive and unstable form of bird. The world you explore is on the bodies of two ancient slingshots, killed while locked in combat with one another eons in the past. Your enemy are the dreaded Pigs, a foul and soulless tribe of monsters that reside on one of the slingshots. Can you successfully unlock the hidden abilities of the Monado Bird? Can you retrieve the sacred Xenoeggs? Can you do it all before the Pigs invade in full force and wipe out all civilization on your slingshot?

Maybe? I guess? Who knows. This is a pretty strange amalgam we got going on here.

I gots it! Can’t wait to start playing it. Sometime next...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:45:09 -0400

I gots it! Can’t wait to start playing it.

Sometime next Tuesday.

Or thereabouts.

Tomorrow is Xenoblade Chronicles day!

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:02:45 -0400

Which for most people will result in something resembling the following:

Pick up Xenoblade Chronicles
Go home and play Xenoblade Chronicles

But, unfortunately, for ME at least, the process will actually look something more like this:

Pick up Xenoblade Chronicles
Work the rest of the day (periodically flipping through the art book, of course)
Go out to dinner with the wife
Bed (I’ve recently cut soda out of my diet, which means I’ve been going to bed a lot earlier than I used to)
Help my sister build a fence all day Saturday
Bed (because, man, I’m likely going to be exhausted after that)
Easter service and family stuff on Sunday
Stare longingly at my lonely copy of Xenoblade Chronicles every time I pass by, wondering when I’ll get a chance to play

Mind you, I’m not complaining about any of the things I’ve got going on this weekend — especially date night with the wife, which is always a wonderful time. Just a bit of poor planning on my part which results in a fantastic, highly-anticipated new RPG game sitting quietly on a shelf awaiting its moment to shine. Hopefully, it won’t be waiting long. Unfortunately, unlike Skyward Sword, I likely won’t be able to play Xenoblade around the kids. Which means it’s automatically relegated to the post-bedtime hours. So, there’s that.

And yes, I’ve tagged this first world problems, because, yeah.

Help me name my new car! So, earlier this week, I went and...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:04:44 -0400

Help me name my new car!

So, earlier this week, I went and bought me a car. It’s a shiny red 2010 Chevy Aveo, and it’s a pretty little thing. Exactly what I was looking for: reliable, fuel-efficient, small, and affordable. The perfect little commuter car for the 400+ minutes I spend on the highway every week.

The only drawback: she didn’t come with a name.

I can’t very well go driving around all day in a car with no name. That’s just shameful. But I’m having a hard time thinking of a quality name that suits the car, myself, and our combined personalities. So that’s where I turn to you, FACELESS INTERNETS, in an effort to crowdsource a better nom de plume (nom de guerre?)

The car’s personality is malleable, because, well, it’s a CAR. An inanimate object by design. I’m free to project whatever personality I see fit onto the machine, in accordance with my relevant interests. As far as tying the car to my personality, well, that’s a different matter altogether. I’m essentially your standard archetypal nerd. To be more specific, here’s a list of some of my interests:

Comics (any major title, though I’m partial to DC)
Nintendo (except Pokemon - never really got into that)
General scifi and fantasy nerdery (D&D, Magic: the Gathering, Munchkin, that sort of thing)
Shows like Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, IT Crowd, and Walking Dead
Novels by Kurt Vonnegut, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville
Other nerdy things? I guess?

Armed with that knowledge, I can only assume someone (not me, obviously) should be able to come up with a fitting name for my car. I’ll leave this open for a few days, and come back to select a winning name.

Wait, “winning name”? Yes, did I forget to mention that there’s prizes involved (such as they are)?! I’ll go through all of the suggestions and select the one that I feel is the MOST AWESOME. That suggestion will, of course, become the name of my car. But in addition, I will also create a custom drawing for the suggestioner, of their own choosing, and ship it out to them. Various other entries that I feel are pretty awesome in their own right, but not necessarily awesome enough to be the actual name of the car, will receive some smaller drawings of my own design, as a little thank you for being NEARLY but not quite ALL-ENCOMPASSING AWESOME.

Suggestions can be submitted in a multitude of ways. Through a Tumblr reblog of this post, a Disqus comment, my ask box, my message box, an email, a comment on Facebook, or @/DM me on Twitter. I’m not picky.

Also, feel free to reblog, tweet, like, or otherwise link this post out into the wider internet. I’m not necessarily looking for traffic or anything (it’s just a personal blog, you know, it’s not like I’m doing business here or anything). But the more people who see it, then (potentially) the better suggestions I’ll receive.

I’ll give you all a week or so? I guess? I don’t know. I’ve never done something like this before. Let me give it a few days, and see how things go.

Okay, I think that’s it. Ready? SUBMIT!

captainnaustralia: robin-boy-wonder: When Mabel’s mother...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:55:56 -0400

captainnaustralia:

robin-boy-wonder:

When Mabel’s mother asked her what she wanted to be for Halloween, she said, “Batman Princess.” And that’s the costume she got.

B A T M A N P R I N C E S S

And suddenly all the Robins were jealous.

Sweet! I’m going to see if my daughter wants to be a Batman Princess for Halloween!

I cannot WAIT to play Xenoblade Chronicles

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:32:10 -0400

I cannot WAIT to play Xenoblade Chronicles:

I was already seriously excited for this game, and then I read this Siliconera review, and my excitement was compounded by at least double, if not more. I haven’t looked forward to a game this much since…I can’t recall when.

Friday cannot come soon enough.

"I tell aspiring writers that they should write. It’s the only real advice I have. If you think you..."

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:34:18 -0400

“I tell aspiring writers that they should write. It’s the only real advice I have. If you think you have talent, then write. You’ll find out if you’re any good. And you’ll also find out that it takes a lot more than just talent to be a writer. You have to be willing to write on the days you don’t feel like writing, for a start. And you have to learn to finish things, and to start the next thing.”

- Neil Gaiman makes a living saying excellent things in excellent ways. This is just the latest example of his advice that I will attempt to take to heart in an effort to finally become a published author.

Okay, time to get caught up on creative projects

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:19:59 -0400

Are you ready? Here we go.

I’ve got three new drawings I’ve worked on over the past week.

I did a drawing of my boys playing video games. This was one where I spent a significant amount of time working on getting a style to play out organically. I love how lanky Caleb (on the left) looks. He doesn’t really look like that while playing, but the characterization of him looks fun and appropriately “cartoony”. I like how it turned out. But I was really blown away by how I portrayed Alex (on the right). With his arm hanging limp and his head resting on the table, and his feet moving around at weird angles. That’s actually fairly accurate. I love how he turned out. This was a fun drawing to make, and really shows the direction I want to take my style of art.

This drawing fulfills my missing week seven.

Diverging greatly from the last drawing, the next ones were minimalist Nintendo heroes drawn in some sort of strange non-standard stick figure style. This was just something to play around with. Not a style I’ll be sticking with, but it was fun to try out for a couple of drawings. Using these together as my week eleven (last week).

Next, I’m still working on PHP mobile web apps. I’m able to bang out out in just a few hours now, with some extra time included to tweak usability and CSS. So in the past couple of weeks I’ve added four more apps to my list. Bookmarkable, a bookmark app (with an accompanying javascript bookmarklet for quickly saving sites to my app); TV Time, which is where I can save YouTube videos for watching later (also with a handy bookmarklet); Notably, which is a note-taking app (not linked because it isn’t publicly available); and most recently, Phototally, a photo-storing/sharing app (still in progress, hasn’t been uploaded to my live server yet).

Let’s just go ahead and split the four of these into two packs of two and log them as my week twelve and week thirteen projects, shall we?

And as of now, I’m all caught up! Now to relax for a couple of days and start dreaming up the week fourteen project (read: procrastinate for another six to seven days then throw something up here at the last minute).

Two more of my domains going away

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:10:35 -0400

Just shut off auto-renew on two more domains of mine that are coming up for renewal within the next couple of months: nerdflood.com and nerdshelf.com.

The slash-and-burn clearing of my internet house continues.

And the dude abides.

eschergirls: lesstitsnass: You punch like a girl,...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:46:29 -0400

Original and fix

Current line of action

Why it doesn't work

What it should be

Roughing it out

Antic and follow-through

eschergirls:

lesstitsnass:

You punch like a girl, Masochist.

Seriously, that kind of posing on a punch is pretty much only drawn on girls. You’ll likely never see a punch done this way on a man. No, a man puts his back into a punch. There’s follow-through. This girl here, she has a weak punch because her back’s going the opposite direction, and her waist is swiveled in such a way as we get to see both her butt cheeks and both her boobs at the same time. There’s also the fact that the artist chose to draw the moment the punch connects, rather than the follow-through of the punch, which makes it look like a tap on the chin rather than the impact it should be. And this is the big no-no in all “How to draw comics” books when drawing a fight scene: if you want your punch to look like it actually caused damage, draw the follow-through.

I’m going to concentrate on the full body posing here. See the first small image? This is the current line of action for Masochist. The punch is a secondary action to the body posing. Here’s the first hint of weakness. If you look at the original, the artist drew speed lines from Masochist, trying to tell us that Masochist is running really really fast to hit good ol’ Supes. In the second one, you’ve got Superman’s line of action added in, and as you can see, the speed doesn’t work because it’s not flowing in the same direction as Maso’s line of action. Weak!

Third drawing shows what the line of action SHOULD be on her. And how it impacts with Superman’s own line of action. This is a strong action! The full force of the body’s in there. So before I actually roughed out the drawing, I got up and mimicked a hard punch to the face, took note of my body, spine, back, hips. I took in account the fact that she was running first, so as much as we twist at the waist when punching in a standing pose, when running, the whole body turns with the punch. Then I slapped down really rough lines to get my motion in.

In order to understand this motion better, you really need to think of what’s happening to this character before the punch actually happens. There’s a wind up, an antic (short for anticipation) of the movement: that line of action is curved back, and whips forward with the punch! There’s a moment of pulling back her fist as far as it will go to be able to bring it forward to cause the most damage possible. Since she’s running, think of her RIGHT leg hitting the ground, the whole body twists as the LEFT leg pushes off the ground and that whole velocity carries enough kinetic force as to make Superman’s head snap back. (Art fixed! Thanks Anonymous!)

But instead we get a boobs and butt swivel-waist and a tap on the chin of our hero. And speed lines that make it look as if she was zipping forward, frozen in that pose. Yeah.

I love this breakdown because one of the knee-jerk defenses is “so, she’s punching” but the choice of HOW she’s punching is up to the artist and as you so brilliantly showed, it’s not even a really effective or realistic way to be following through on a punch either. That’s part of the problem of a lot of the “action” poses in my blog, the women may be punching or attacking, but their motions are really limited and constrained, generally to show more sexiness, or to have them posing, and it ends up with them not looking particularly aggressive. (In that example, Artemis’ arms are in FULL extension which means she has no more leverage to be hitting Diana with and her sword isn’t even close to hitting her, and that’s not even getting into Diana’s posture.)

In the original picture, you can tell she’s punching, but the way her body is, it looks like she’s already as far extended as she can get and so the punch doesn’t look that hard except that Superman’s reacting to it, however your punch looks WAY more powerful and also adds so much more dynamic to scene. It’s not “Masochist is punching Superman”, it’s “WOW MASOCHIST JUST PUNCHED SUPERMAN!”

Going into what it would look like in a wind up is a great idea too. I don’t draw that much, but I do write a lot, and when I do an action scene, I always act it out in the mirror so my descriptions are logical, and doing this for art seems very sensible too. :)

Beautiful de-construction of art from a recent Superman issue demonstrating that the “New 52” artists are far more concerned with showing a girl’s sexy bits than they are with actually drawing good action poses.

I’ve been a fan of a lot of the New 52 stuff, but some of their decisions (either editorial or artistic) regarding their portrayal of the female form have left me scratching my head. Sacrificing quality panels for the sake of displaying some T and A is a way to ruin a franchise, in my opinion.