X Prize Cup

One of the coolest things about living in New Mexico is that we've got the X Prize Cup, the civilian spaceflight competition. With wide blue skies, mild weather, high visibility, and wide open spaces, New Mexico is perfect for pioneering spacecraft, and as plans for the New Mexico Spaceport get underway, the talent, the industry, and the excitement of space travel are really starting to build.

Few things exemplify the scientific achievement, the teamwork, the vision, and the courage of humanity like the space program. The yearning to reach out and touch the stars has been the dream of people since the beginning of recorded history, but only recently have we managed to make space flight a reality. But look how far we have come in such a short time! We have put a rover on Mars that let us explore the red planet. We have sent a probe to the furthest planets to gather and send back spectacular photos and scientific data. We have built massive radio telescopes that can see so far that they can take pictures of the origin of our universe. We have walked on the moon.

America is hurting nowadays. We have suffered multiple disasters, our culture is increasingly divided, and we are disillusioned with our leaders. A pallor of mundanity and helplessness is settling over our country as our thoughts turn to economics, war, and tragedy.

And yet, there we were, out in the middle of the desert, thousands of people from all across the country, with rockets, cameras, and fingers pointed up into the blue sky to share the promise of space flight.

I stood on the pavement in the warm Las Cruces sun, holding my young son in my arms, and watched as a rocket-propelled aircraft took off only a few hundred yards from us. As I watched that plane roar by us and climb gracefully into the sky, I couldn't help but smile from all the butterflies. And as I pointed at the wheeling white dot in the sky, my son was pointing at it too.

It was breaking a world record that day, for it had flown before not two hours earlier. Until today, no one had been able to reuse a rocket that soon. Why is that important? Because if space travel is ever going to be more than the realm of the select few we choose to carry our dreams to the heavens for us, rockets need to be quickly reusable. Today's achievement was a step towards my son growing up in a world where space travel is an opportunity that is within reach.

I will never go into space, never feel the crush of acceleration to escape Earth's pull, never feel the buoyant high of zero gravity. But maybe my son will. Someday, maybe, my son will look out a window and see the round, glowing horizon of Earth floating below him and feel the exhilaration I will never feel.

To fly is a dream we all understand, even the youngest among us. That's why these efforts are worth supporting.

To see photos of the X Prize Cup, visit my flickr album.

Halloween Progress

We've gotten a lot done over the last two days. Several people have come to help out, and we've got a lot of our foam flats routed and painted (the photo shows what my garage generally looks like right now). My buddy Matt, a talented illustrator and animator, designed the look of the frontage for the mausoleum, and we're busy getting everything detailed.

A crew of friends toiled over our small army of bluckies which will inhabit the mausoleum. They are now done being corpsified - they look nice and dessicated now.

A friend of ours from my wife's stand-up comedy days has joined our team and is going to work his stagecraft magic on our talking pirate skulls.

Byron, Jen, and I worked some more on the script for Madame Sarita's Spirit Parlour, and boy, do we have some cool visuals for this year's show, to go along with the stronger script ideas that Byron and Jen brought to the table this year. The kids are in for a treat with this show!

And I got a message from Daniel that the mausoleum frame is now complete. The shelves behind the crypt doors are installed, and everything is ready to go. The only problem is that it is too heavy for him and his wife to move themselves, so we're going to get a crew over there to move the Blackwood Mausoleum over here.

I've added a few photos to our Halloween 2005 flickr album.

The Jedi Outcast

My nephew, who gies by "fizznick" online, has long been a Star Wars fan, and has spent a lot of hours learning the art of 3D modeling and animation, visual storytelling, art, and music. Recently, he conscripted some fellow family members and friends and began work on his own Star Wars fan film. He has released the trailer for his film, and wow, does it kick a whole lot of ass.

The film he's working on is called The Jedi Outcast, and it looks like it's going to be pretty damn good. It shows a lot of sophistication for a fan film in several areas, from its action choreography, actor direction, visual effects, and even its raw sense of drama. I'm impressed. And I'm already waiting for the final film release. Be sure to check out the trailer.

Steve Ince on Interaction Density

Steve Ince, an adventure game development veteran who worked on the venerable games Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky, has written an article on what he sees as the problem with modern video game design: the lack of Interaction Density.

Interaction Density is his term for measuring how much the player has an opportunity to do.

If we look back to the early 1990s, much of the size of a game was limited by the fact that they were published on floppy discs. This meant that every location or level in a game was made to work hard for its keep. For an adventure game, each of the labs, bars, shops, alleys, etc was filled with items to collect, characters to talk with and background objects to examine. Gaining access to a new location was always such fun in itself because the player would spend time simply interacting with the environment and everything within it. When this exploratory interaction was combined with the actual gameplay of working through the developing story, it meant there was always plenty the player could find to do at any given moment. Even when the player became stuck on a puzzle, they generally knew that the solution would be fairly close by because there were only a handful of locations you were likely able to visit.

Yikes.

The BBC is reporting that Bush is saying god told him to go to war. Yikes. Double yikes. Here we have a man running the country who thinks god speaks directly to him to go kill people, and then acts on it. I can't help but think that's not all that different from the guy who thinks Jesus is speaking to him through the neighbor's dog telling him to go kill his family. (Link via Boingboing.)

Jolly Roger digital puppet

Today I released a stripped-down version of a Jolly Roger digital puppet for Mac OS X. Unlike the Magic Mirror, though, this one doesn't contain any bells and whistles. No microphone input, no performance recording, no key customization, no PC support, etc.

I'm releasing it because I've gotten a lot of requests about it, and I want to make sure people at least have this baseline capability. If I can get a version with more features out, I will, but, well, Halloween's coming, and we've got a lot of things to do before the 31st. (Whaddya want? It's free!)

News Radio

What a great weekend - I discovered that the first two seasons of News Radio is finally out on DVD. I've been waiting for this for a few years now, checking the stores every couple of months, so when I saw it, I bought it on the spot. News Radio was easily one of the most underrated sitcoms of the 90's, and it's just as good as I remember it. Dave Foley is the best, and only gets better when backed up with the likes of Maura Tierney and Phil Hartman. Well worth the money, and I'm looking forward to picking up the other three seasons on DVD.

LASSIE Adventure Studio

A hobbyist developer has released a freeware Director and Flash based adventure game creator called LASSIE, for "Lingo Adventure Scripting System and Interactivity Engine. The demo seems pretty robust, but not immediately intuitive (read the directions at the bottom of the screen). Once you figure out the controls, however, it's quite straightforward and usable.

He also has taken the curious step to allow online versions of the game, but he has to compile them into .dcr files (for a fee). Not sure why he doesn't just write a loader for the Lassie files as a .dcr - he's going to be doing a lot of re-publishing for people as bugs are found in their online games.

But either way, it's nice to see a hobbyist give back to his community. For multimedia developers like me, I can roll my own and not be limited to the decisions he makes for his game engine, but there are a lot of hobbyists out there who could easily make their visions come true with a tool like this. Seems like a worthy effort.

More work on the Mausoleum

Well, we had another meeting where we corpsified and detailed foam. We've got two wall panels marked out and routed, and all the corpses have now been hit with the latex and cotton batting. Matt sketched out a concept for the front of the mausoleum and started sketching it out, and we came up with a cool way to do the lights on the front of the structure. Earlier today, I got the rest of our garage cleaned out, so we now have a workable workshop area, which will allow me to get stuff done during the week. Things are starting to accelerate!

Long day

Spent eight hours today cleaning up our garage in preparation for tomorrow's mausoleum-detailing and corpsification party. I ended up building three sets of shelves, reorganizing practically all the storage in the garage, and set aside a place for the mausoleum flats to be stored year-round. Thanks to the new shelving units, we have more storage now than we have stuff to store, so maybe I'll take a trip to Spirit Halloween store tomorrow. Just kidding. It's getting to the point now where we build everything ourselves and don't buy things, which is a good feeling, but it's sure a lot harder.

I did have several neighbors walk by today asking what new things we're cooking up this year. I hope the mausoleum lives up to the expectations I have for it...