Month: June 2018

The sonorous opening narration of Jim Henson’ s The Dark Crystal proclaims, “another world, another time, in the age of wonder.”

This isn’t about that. There is another Age of Wonder coming to a close soon, as Project Wonderful has announced it is shutting down after over a decade of operation. Their farewell message might be visible to members only, so I’ll quote it here:

Thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful! We wanted to inform you of some sad news:

But all good things must come to an end. When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you’d want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn’t track readers, we didn’t sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet – because our technology simply wasn’t built to allow for that. We let you place an image and link on a website, and that was it. And we filtered the ads that could run on our network, so our publishers knew they could trust us.

We’d hoped that would be enough, but in the past several years, the internet has changed. Large sites like Facebook do all they can to keep readers on their network, rather than sending that traffic out to individual websites. As such, many readers – who used to visit dozens if not hundreds of websites a day – now visit only a few sites, and things like the indie “blogosphere” (remember that?) are disappearing. We’re hopeful that individual creators can adapt – either by embracing these walled gardens in a way that protects themselves, or by finding other ways to draw attention to their work – but as a network founded on supporting independent websites, our options were limited. Some advertising networks have held on by adopting more and more invasive user tracking, forcing their publishers to sign binding contracts, or by trying to train publishers (and readers!) to expect that “sometimes a bad ad will sneak through”, but that’s something we always refused to do. We believed – and still believe – that you deserve better. We believed – and still believe – in a world where an ad blocker wouldn’t be an obvious thing to install, because advertising would be good, interesting, and non-invasive.

Unfortunately, we’re no longer in a position to supply that better option to you.

We know this may come as a shock, which is why we’re giving everyone as much notice as possible. Here’s the Project Wonderful shutdown timeline:

• June 11th, 2018: We announce our shutdown phase. No new accounts can be created, and no new publishers will be added to the network. Members are contacted to let them know to spend or withdraw their funds before August 1st.
• July 11th: Ad serving is turned off, so our ads will no longer appear on anyone’s websites, and any existing bids are suspended. No new bids can be placed on Project Wonderful – but of course people can still withdraw their funds.
• August 1st: This is the deadline for anyone to do anything they want with their Project Wonderful accounts before they close!
• August 6th: After a few days of grace for any stragglers, and after 12 years, 6 months, and 12 days of service, Project Wonderful’s servers finally go offline.

We want to thank you all: from the publishers and advertisers who have been with us since day one (and there are hundreds!) to those that joined somewhere along the road to today. We’re so proud of the artists we’ve helped support and the good we brought into the world – and we still hope that we’ve managed to bring some change into an industry not typically associated with “decency”. And to the readers who clicked our ads, and in doing so discovered new comics, new work, new ideas, new art, and new people through the simple act of peer-to-peer advertising: we think you’re great too.

It really was a wonderful project. And it couldn’t have happened without you.

– Team PW.

So within a few weeks, our Zombie Ranch page will be looking a lot more austere as most of the ad displays we’ve had running for years go bye bye. It’s not catastrophic, we never really made more than a few bucks a month off of them… but it was something, and it is mostly sad to see PW fold since I agree with their statement that they were among the good guys.  In that sense I suppose I’d rather they pull the plug than end up in a repeat of our shitty experience with Google Adsense. In our eight years being part of PW we never had shenanigans like a redirect ad or a problem withdrawing (or reinvesting) the money we’d earned, no matter how much or how little, whenever we wanted to do so. And there was never a feeling like you weren’t welcome in the network, from the biggest sites pulling in hundreds of dollars a day to the smallest startups.

Alas, the good guys are finishing last.

Anyhow, I know some of you out there are fellow webcomic authors who may also have used the service, so heads up that sometime between July 11th (when the ad network shuts down) and August 1st (when accounts are frozen) you’ll want to make your final withdrawals. The Great Disjunction comes.

I’ve had a habit of singing praises of various movies and video games in this blog based on early impressions, some of which pan out and some of which don’t.

Well, who am I to break with habit?

I mean wow. WOW. I’m late to the party on this one (it debuted in its entirety on Netflix back in February) but if you’re any kind of fan of cyberpunk style science fiction or just science fiction world building in general, and you haven’t seen it yet, you should give Altered Carbon a go. The two episodes I’ve watched probably shouldn’t be enough for as strong a recommend as I’m making here, but again. Habit. Just from a writing perspective I’ve been thoroughly impressed with how they’ve handled the exposition and presentation of a world both familiar to and wildly different than our own. It reminds me of how I felt reading Asimov, but turned up to 11 and splashed into fully audio-visual format without losing any of the thought-provoking underpinnings of the philosophical consequences of advancing technology.

This being Netflix there’s also no shortage blood, butts, boobs and harsh language to go around, so it might not make for the best family viewing–if for no other reason than being stuck explaining to your kids all the gratuitous gratuities adults take for granted–but again there’s a feeling of deep thoughts beneath that surface sheen and even the sex and violence has angles of approach that are not what you might be used to experiencing.

And that’s all I’m really going to say because I knew nothing about this series going into it and I think it was all the better discovering it fresh with no preconceptions of what it could or should be.

Okay, one spoiler: Poe is awesome.

I leave the rest of the opinions to you.

Warfare is certainly known as a time where man’s inhumanity to his fellow man (or woman) is often on full display. But we don’t necessarily dwell on this question in the history books: if we’ll commit atrocities on another human being in the name of King and Country (or equivalent), what would we be willing to do to an animal?

Well, it’s not a pretty subject to delve into. Nowadays if you google up “pigs and landmines” you’ll get articles about pigs being trained to carefully snuffle them out, rather than the darker accounts of herds being intentionally driven onto suspect fields, which I suppose provided not only mine clearance but a good source of pork for dinner so long as you didn’t mind a little shrapnel in your bacon.

Barbaric, sure, but on a scale of one to mass graves, poison gas and ethnic cleansing, these sorts of considerations can fall by the wayside. No doubt there are soldiers who dealt with the horrors by clinging onto some code of conduct where they’d shoot an insurgent but draw the line at killing a dog (at least a dog that wasn’t actively trying to bite them) but would you hesitate at tossing a grenade into a sniper’s nest because some birds might be nesting there, too?

It’s a time and place where estimations of Right and Wrong can get as muddied as a French field in WWI. Is it worse for a human that understands what’s happening or an animal that doesn’t? Do even the humans understand what’s happening half the time?

But all in all I’d say it’s the traditional pet animals like dogs or the otherwise stereotypically “cute” critters that have the best chance for some modicum of mercy. Rats? Rats don’t have either going for them and tend to be considered pests and disease carriers, besides. No one sticks up for rats, or certainly doesn’t on the front lines. Hell even in peacetime we just about make a hobby of injecting them with cancer-causing chemicals and otherwise being less than copacetic. That they survive at all in a war is probably testament to them being as cussedly determined and adaptable as us. And of course breeding like… well, rats.

In a feature film I tend to believe that getting on with the story is job number one, since you’ve got a limited time window to tell (what should be) a complete tale. If you’re world building you drop just enough detail to assist that and no more. The original Star Wars has its famous opening crawl  and then gets right to the action, and as it goes along is constantly peppered with throwaway dialogue about Sand People or Jabba or the Emperor which hits just the right balance of intriguingly vague and supportive of “Oh okay, now back to laser swords.”

Here, we move at a more leisurely pace. Literally so in that the story is being told at a much slower pace as first presented, but also formatively in that we can take breaks from what’s happening directly to Suzie and co. and fill in some of those intriguing bits of the setting I may have had a character mention or may just be something you were wondering about. Like, what sort of tactics did the military come up with to fight (our particular brand of) zombies?

I suppose Star Wars trained me well for this in that I’ve spent probably a far too big percentage of my life wondering about the its intricacies and implications, so now that I’m developing my own setting I’m inclined to think about those answers and details long before a reader ever asks about them. And every so often, I get the chance to present those bits and pieces. Sometimes they’re even thematically relevant to the story at hand and that gets me perilously close to me thinking I might be decent at this.

Excuse the flippant self-deprecation, it’s an artist thing. Unless perhaps you’re someone like Kanye, but all in all I’d rather be me.