More recently, though, Josh has begun work on Chokeville, a bizarre, serialized, sort-of-cubist account of a seaside town that has already taken the form of a series of short stories, a Twitter account, a Tumblr, a handcrafted RSS feed, and an email listserv. It’s shaping up to be one of the more interesting creative projects on the internet that we’ve seen in a good long while, and he apparently hasn’t even gotten into the music or fake corporate logos yet.

Whose Fault Is That: According to Fireland.com, you’ve been writing online since 1995, which is pretty well before such things gained widespread acceptance. What prompted you to store your writing online back then?

Joshua Allen: I actually launched it fifteen years ago this week, which is alarming to think about. I’d just gotten out of college and was trying to figure out what I wanted to write, and saw the web as a way to have people read my stuff, even though there were only like 12 people back then. I don’t know, Once I realized how easy HTML was, I wanted to make my own site, and all I had were these little stories, so that’s what I used it for.

WFIT: Was there a point when you realized that your writing had started to gain some sort of relative notoriety?

JA: Well, pretty early on I knew there were people reading it — people beyond my mom and two friends. But notoriety is pretty relative considering how small the web was back then. You’d think you were hot shit because fifty people came to your site.

These little communities would form, as they always do, and for a long stretch, maybe up until the turn of the century, it was all about just trying stuff out in your little community, collaborating on projects, trying out new ideas, and seeing what the response was from your little corner of the internet. Within those groups, I had some notoriety, but again, that was a little ghetto over in the corner. most people were at Yahoo, I guess.

WFIT: How would you say things have changed since then?

JA: It’s hugely different, just because nowadays everyone is online and people finally figured out how to make money online, so the culture and attitude is different. That being said, I feel like you can see a return to the wild west days here and there, because the barrier to entry is so low, and tools exist that make it really easy to put up a site or whatnot, so you get a wide range of people just throwing stuff out there and seeing if it sticks, which is how it was when I got started.

WFIT: What are some ways you think your writing has changed or improved since then?

JA: I think overall, working online (and as a copywriter) has made my writing much more concise and casual. which is maybe a bad thing, but it’s how the internet has shaped my style.

WFIT: Would you say that trend in your writing is what led you to Twitter as a medium?

JA: Yep. That was the whole thing that drew me to Twitter — the character count limitation. I didn’t care about the social aspect of it, I just liked working within that little box. I deal with word counts all the time at work, so I felt right at home.

WFIT: I remember being particularly interested in your post-MaxFunCon “end of side one” tweet, and its accompanying blog post. I was wondering if you’d go into that thought process a little bit more.

JA: Part of it was Twitter-related. At MaxFunCon there was this thing where you could do standup comedy in front of a little audience, and I’d never done it before but am a huge standup fan. So, I basically just took a bunch of my twitter posts and performed them. It went okay, but I realized I was tired of my sick jokes. Performing them out loud really drove that home. One guy there said “Oh yeah, you’re the ‘throw the baby down the well’” guy.

I wanted to take a break from that, and figured I’d stop with the Twitter for a while and then start up Side 2 with something new. which I didn’t, really.

The other part was that agents and editors and whatnot had approached me because of Twitter, and for a year or so I was pitching ideas for comedy books and the like, and they were all corny and didn’t go anywhere and it was kind of bleak, so I decided to just ditch all that and work on Chokeville, which was my long-in-the-tooth novel that’d been gathering dust for a couple of years.

WFIT: Aside from actually getting the ball rolling on it, what effect would you say the “end of side one” era had on what would eventually become Chokeville?

JA: The main thing was that I decided to not think of it as a novel, and not think of it as something to get published. I was tired of trying to give publishers what I thought they wanted, which was usually wrong, and just do my own little thing exactly how I wanted to do it. and of course that meant online since that’s how I’ve always done these things, for better or worse.

WFIT: What would you say is the difference between “something to get published” by a proper publisher and “something to get published” online?

JA: Just the hoops you have to jump through. I feel something like Chokeville, which kind of meanders through different genres, would be a hard sell to publishers, and maybe the end result wouldn’t be what I had in mind.

I decided that if Chokeville ever actually got published, assuming I ever actually finished it, it wouldn’t be a huge money maker and it wouldn’t have a huge audience. I figured if I put up a site, I’d probably get more readers than if it was sitting in a bookstore. and by that point, I’d stopped thinking of it as a novel and more as an ongoing, organic concern. All this is null and void if someone offers me a book deal tomorrow, of course.

WFIT: Ha. I was about to ask you to what extent you’re interested in taking your writing offline in general.

JA: The thing is, every single thing I’ve written in the past fifteen years has been online. It’s basically all I know. I have some vague plans of carving off little chunks of Chokeville into print versions someday, or some kind of deluxxxe version with maps and diagrams and whatever, but I’m at a point where I can’t write something and NOT put it online. It’s like it doesn’t really exist until I put it out there somewhere. I actually wrote the initial draft of the book online, on a little password-protected site, because I was incapable of working in isolation.

WFIT: What were some other projects or works you had in mind when you were conceiving the form that Chokeville (as it exists now) was going to take?

JA: One really cheez-ball influence was The Wire. the whole idea of telling the story of a city by zooming in on different people and institutions, and then seeing how they interconnect. That kind of helped me just toss the idea of one single narrative about one main character. As far as the stories themselves, though, it’s really just a mishmash of a lot of genre fiction. taking the bits of noir or fantasy or action movies I like and putting them together. Although I’m not a Joss Whedon superfan, I really look to his stuff as a model for how to create characters that are real and funny and interesting, while in the midst of crazy genre action.

WFIT: So, in spite of it being told serially, would you say Chokeville is an experiment in something with broader scope? Had you ever written anything like that before?

JA: Not as one big thing, no. Although I’m starting to think of Chokeville as a platform, where I can do the things I’ve been doing for years — random little stories, plays, dialogue, podcasts, creepy music, fake logos for fake companies, blah blah — and just shove them all into this world. I’ve been very scattered for a while now, and the whole “Side 2″ thing was saying: Okay, dude, seriously, find a project and stick with it. So, I’m trying to make this thing a big box where just about anything can go in it.

WFIT: Do you foresee leaving yourself much time for shorter, one-off pieces in between chipping away at Chokeville?

JA: No. I think if I come up with some random piece I’ll see if I can shove it into that site somehow. I was actually thinking I might start using Tumblr like a normal human being and just write about actual non-fiction things, since my Fiction Quota will be met with Chokeville.

WFIT: What type of non-fiction interests you? Would it be like going back to the House of Wigs days, or something like that?

JA: Yeah, exactly. Just the usual blog stuff. Maybe get past my crippling fear of saying anything honest or true. I think the internet needs more people talking about their day.

WFIT: You might be the first person who’s ever said that.

JA: Yeah, I forgot to put a wink at the end.

WFIT: Gotcha. Speaking of chronicling your day-to-day life now versus, say, House of Wigs, at what point did anonymity stop being a concern for you with your writing online?

JA: Ha, yeah, I wonder about that myself. I was really freaked out about anyone connecting House of Wigs to me. I didn’t say anything terrible, but I’d feel bad if someone read something where I was making fun of them or whatever. Anyway, at that time I was very secretive at work about all my online goings-on, I just didn’t want those two worlds to meet, but some point in the last couple years I just stopped worrying about it. I’ve been online way too long to hide my tracks, and anyway everyone’s online now so there’s a lot of noise to hide in. My boss follows me on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Tumblr, so there’s no point in being coy.

WFIT: I guess that’s sort of the tradeoff for the tight-knit communities you mentioned before.

JA: Yeah. I have some friends who still use Livejournal (!) because you can block people from accessing it and just have a little group like the old days.

WFIT: That’s pretty funny. It’s like privacy online goes hand in hand with “the old days” in cases like that.

JA: Yeah. I wonder if you’ll see more and more closed-off communities as a response to that, or if everyone will just get used to the idea that everyone knows everything about everybody.

WFIT: I’d like to think there’ll end up being a happy medium. I think Tumblr is a pretty good example of that.

JA: I think Tumblr is what we all wanted in 1995. Or what I wanted, anyway.

WFIT: In that case, what do you envision the online writing community looking like ten or fifteen years down the road?

JA: Jesus, I dunno. I’m pretty sure the online writing community will BE the writing community. that’s where all writing and reading will happen. And then you can download a story to read later onto a cyber-suppository or whatever we’ll be using then. Probably zero barrier between writer and reader. Probably fanfiction, mostly.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Joshua Allen in October 2010. Chokeville can be found here, Josh’s Twitter is here, and links to the rest of his work can be found here.

I talked to Betty Kelly, Kellies’ bassist, about this whole rigmarole and a bunch of other stuff. She also does time in the Cumbia group Betty Confetti y Su Conjunto Tropical.

Whose Fault Is That: Could you describe the origin of Las Kellies? How did your early shows go over?

Betty Kelly: Kellies started 5 years ago when Ceci Kelly met Sil Costa at a friend’s gig, through mutual friend, and then first Kellies bassist, Titi. Their boyfriends and male friends all had bands, and they decided it was their turn, so they borrowed instruments and amps, took them to Ceci’s garage and within days had written 3 classic Kellies hits, that we still play today.

Later Titi left, Jose took on the bass. And they played gigs for a couple of years, the three of them. I went to their first gig and was astounded. At first they were totally shameless in their naivety, forgetting cables and asking each other how to play the songs on stage, knocking back whiskey, and egging the audience on. But from the outset it was clear that they had some great songs, were really fun, and that they had some kind of crazy drive to make it all work. They finished the first gig, surrounded by fairy lights, Sil wrenching out a cover of Devo’s “Mongoloid” on the bass, and I leaped with laughter and pride.

Then Jose left to explore Berlin for a year, in which time I grabbed the bass. There was still a certain insecurity in playing live, but it was brilliant. We were constantly at the point of falling, but somehow the songs kept us perky. Now Jose’s back, and we’re a cuartet. Ceci on guitar, Sil on drums, Jose plays percussion, and I play bass. We all sing.

WFIT: You mentioned the band being ‘perky’ and having ‘crazy drive’ – One of the most infectious and endearing things about your music is the sense that you’re all good friends, with the band as a natural extension of your friendship. That’s a difficult thing to pull off. How do you preserve the sense of fun for yourselves?

BK: I guess we’ve never taken ourselves too seriously. The music we make is about having fun, even when everything that surrounds it gets heavy. That attitude is kind of implanted everything we do, and it makes it easier to have a giggle together at the end of the day.

WFIT: What were some early experiences that made you think playing and being active in DIY music were things you wanted to do?

BK: Ooooo. My granny and her brother were musicians, I guess they were classically trained, but there was nothing they’d enjoy more than a “Knees up Mother Brown” kind of get-together. Granny Molly played Scottish traditional anthems on our old Pianola, and my Great Uncle Harry would get the accordion out at big family gatherings to play Morris dances when we played pass the parcel and musical hats. I think that’s why I bought my first guitar at 15 and started learning sea shanties. I didn’t really get involved in music till I moved to Buenos Aires, other than playing gigs. Here it just happened naturally and I didn’t think about whether it was a good idea or not.

But at first I played noise and was into more experimental and conceptual music. Eventually I enjoyed it more when people interacted with the music, and dancing is an obvious way to interact, but it’s the best feeling, when something really moves you to shake your hips.

WFIT: Would you say that the interaction and sort of natural-ness came from the Argentinian scene itself, compared to things you had encountered before?

BK: I don’t think the Argentinians are more interactive than the Europeans, but they’ve got a motivation and positivity, and a kind of humility that I hadn’t encountered before. They don’t say, well this and this has been done before, or, there’s so much of this that it’s not worth it. They just play and get on with it with enthusiasm. And there’s a “!QUE BUENO!¨ culture that gives you instant feedback. If nobody likes the music, you know about it because no one says ¨Que bueno.¨

WFIT: That’s awesome.

BK: (Laughs)

WFIT: If you were somehow given an infinite amount of time and resources, what form do you think the band’s music would take?

BK: Right now if we had money we would buy a drum machine and get some dirty beats going, a keyboard. There´d still be a bass and guitar. We´d employ someone to come up with some costumes that look really cheap but are actually made entirely of diamonds…

The music itself is separating off into 2 directions, punk rock, and soul-infused postpunk. With time and resources we´d end up making a kind of austere dance punk. Well, just like now really.

WFIT: What would you say has caused the separation between the two styles?

BK: Listening to more and more music.

WFIT: Who are some artists you’ve been getting into lately?

BK: As a band this last year has been about ESG, B-52s, Tom Tom Club, Humpe Humpe, New York No-Wave stuff, Grandmaster Flash… There´s also been a heavy Dub and Dancehall infiltration, Althea and Donna, Sister Nancy.

This last year or so has been all about Cumbia for me, Gilda, Los Angeles Azules, Pibes Chorros, Juaneco y Su Combo.

WFIT: Do you see any common threads between Cumbia and the post-punk stuff you mentioned before?

BK: This last year has been about getting back to some idea of roots, music of African origin, I guess that´s the connection, because Cumbia is really a Caribbean beat, and those important bass and drum sounds in the No Wave stuff have more to do with ¨black¨music than overconceptualized rock and indie music.

But we´re trying to reach the point where all of those things meet. Like in the Peruvian Chicha where you have a species of Surf rock, prohibited by the dictatorship, which then evolves into a really fun hybrid of Amazonic sounds, ¨negro¨ beats and rock´n´roll.

Hmm, I keep adding more and more bands into the post punk basket that it all starts getting a bit blurry.

WFIT: That name’s gotten to be sort of a mess. I’ve heard that NYC stuff referred to as ‘mutant disco’, which seems as good a distinction as any.

BK: Oh yeah, I like that a lot more. “Mutant” is a great suffix to put onto anything instead of “post-” or “neo-” or “prog-”. Think I´ll steal that.

WFIT: Absolutely. Add “proto-” and “-core” to that list, too. What, if any, would you say are the long-term goals of Kellies?

BK: We really just want to be able to play and travel. The big dream is to play in Japan, it just feels so far away and exotic. We also want to be able to tour South America, and go back and tour Europe all over again. But basically anywhere that will have us and help us along in our travels. We won´t rest until we´ve got a couple of vinyls out. Play more instruments, get more people dancing, and keep making music for the whole worrrrld, heehee.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Betty Kelly in September 2010. Kellies have a Bandcamp profile here and a Myspace profile here. As far as mailordering their music goes, they don’t have an international distribution setup per se, but if our experience is any indication, if you contact them they will be extremely nice about working something out.

Whose Fault Is That: What types of movies were you trying to make when you first started out, as a kid? What would you consider to be an early filmmaking success that motivated you to stick with it?

Carson Mell: The first movies I made, like everybody else, were just parodies. Stuff shot on VHS, edited in camera. I think the first real success with filmmaking I ever felt, were some of the scenes from this guerilla sitcom my cousin and I made together, Rodericks. Even though it looked really bad, I was proud of all the actors’ performances and the jokes, and that’s what’s most important to me in comedy.

WFIT: What do you mean by ‘guerilla sitcom’?

CM: That’s just what we call it. Just show up with props and a little wardrobe, shoot without permits, everything’s improvised. It’s sort of like Dogma [95] without ever having read the rules behind that. We just shot it however we could, and literally didn’t allow ourselves to worry about how it looked.

WFIT: At what point would you say aesthetics and form entered into the equation?

CM: I don’t know. I feel like when you’re shooting with friends helping for free and don’t have a big budget, you have a certain amount of capital to spend on the movie. If you spend it making it look nice, then you might not get the performances you like. If you can get both that’s great, but you have to prioritize. I think it’s all about striking a balance, and I always think of GoodFellas when I think of a perfect balance of both.

WFIT: Do those sort of monetary and prioritization concerns play a part in your decision to work alone on most of your projects?

CM: Yeah. I started making cartoons when everybody’s lives got to busy to help. I’ve written a lot of epic screenplays that I just can’t make, so now when I’m writing a screenplay it’s important to me that it’s something I can actually make. With the cartoons, I think fifteen minutes may be as long as they can get by myself without me going nuts. So to make the transition to feature length I’m going to start working with other people, whether I do animation or live action. This is something I’m excited about though, I really like the social aspect of film and the process of making the cartoons is a little too monklike sometimes.

WFIT: What relationship, if any, do you think that kind of creative process might have with any recurring themes of solitude in your work, like Bobby Bird’s loneliness in Chonto, or the stranded and lovelorn protagonist in Field Notes From Dimension X?

CM: That I’m not sure about. I do spend most of my day alone, but I actually really enjoy being alone.

WFIT: Another interesting thread I think runs through your work is the way it tends to be referential to general conceptions of, say, rock and roll or science fiction without grounding itself in references to particular artists or writers. Who are some of the people whose work you were hoping to evoke?

CM: It’s nice to hear you say that, because I don’t necessarily want to evoke specific folks with Bobby Bird. I borrow from a lot of musicians for him, but even though Michael Jackson had Bubbles, I don’t think anyone thinks of him too much when watching Chonto. Or at least I hope not. With Field Notes I haven’t actually read much science fiction. I’m more interested in the covers of the books, really.

WFIT: I think I understand your point about the book covers. I feel like I’ve seen lots of old sci-fi paperbacks and magazines that have covers featuring really bizarre imagery that tends to go well above and beyond the contents of the (relatively boring) actual stories. Those sort of images come up a lot in Field Notes and The Writer.

CM: Yeah, when Field Notes is done I want it to feel like a succession of those covers. And it’ll probably be illustrated to some extent, so that’ll help with that feeling.

WFIT: Is there anything specific about the myths of rock and roll or science fiction that interests you as a backdrop for your stories?

CM: Anything with music I like because it’s an art form I am bad at and have never even dabbled in. I know a little something about the rest of them, but music is still totally mysterious to me. I like sci-fi just cause you can do anything with it. It can be heady and full of monsters at the same time. But that said, I don’t think everything I do will be about these things.

WFIT: Have you considered any specific genres or you’d like to work in going forward? On a similar note, have you thought about any stylistic deviations from the monologue-based, first-person pieces you’ve created thus far?

CM: Yeah. I want to make a horror movie soon. And I don’t think much of my work will have so much narration later on. I really like narration, but I like third person stuff just as much.

WFIT: What would you say made Saguaro turn out as a novel rather than another short (or a few other shorts)?

CM: There was too much material to animate. That’s the main reason. I would have been alone in my room for five years and would have left it thirty pounds overweight and thinking I was Bobby Bird.

WFIT: That makes sense. I’ve always been sort of in awe of people like Don Hertzfeldt who seem to just sort of disappear for months or years at a time and suddenly reappear with a movie that’s as much a feat of endurance as it is an actual animation.

CM: No kidding. I don’t have the ability to do that, but I really like Don’s stuff. Actually, seeing his movie at Sundance in 07 made me want to scramble to keep up. I made Chonto because of that feeling, and that was five months out of my life.

WFIT: Do you think your projects will increase in scope from here on out?

CM: Well, the next project is a novel three times the length of Saguaro, and I want to make feature length cartoons and movies. But I’m also doing a two minute movie/animation for Birdhouse skateboards right now with James Dirschberger. I like making short stuff, too, especially after spending a couple of years on just one thing like I did with the new book.

WFIT: What’s something you’d like to accomplish with these new projects that you haven’t with your previous work?

CM: I don’t really know. Always, I’d like to reach a bigger audience and make work that people connect with more and more. The more laughter and/or crying I can help get going, the better.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Carson Mell in August 2010. Carson’s website, complete with links to each of his shorts and a link to buy Saguaro, can be found here.

Enter Scott Nicholson. Scott is the steward of Board Games with Scott, a series of online videos explaining and, more recently, analyzing board games. In addition to his videos, Scott has also conducted original research regarding the way games can effect the way we learn, as well as designed his own game, Tulipmania 1637. Scott’s mix of crazy game intelligence and goofy humor make us feel a lot better about our intensely nerdy pastime, and there aren’t many better ways to kill an afternoon than to watch a few of Scott’s videos and then kill about eight thousand subsequent afternoons playing Puerto Rico or Carcassonne.

Whose Fault Is That: What would you say are the most important ways that the type of games you cover differ from the games that an average suburban family might play while they’re on vacation?

Scott Nicholson: Well, I do cover some of the types of games that an average family might play while they’re on vacation. The big thing about the games that I look at, though, is the concept of meaningful decisions. In a lot of the videos I try to pick games, and I enjoy games, where the decisions that you make in the game are meaningful, and that they’re interesting decisions to make, as well. For example, in a game like Monopoly, when you roll the dice, you move around and your decision is “Do you buy the property or not?”. Basic strategy is that you always buy the property if you can. So really, there aren’t many meaningful decisions or interesting decisions going on in that game. And that’s true for a lot of lighter games.

Now, the question is, “Does that matter?”. Because there are also a lot of games I like that don’t have a lot of meaningful decisions. Dungeon Quest, for example, is a great example of a game that tells a story. And in that story, you know, you’re making a few decisions but it’s more about experiencing what’s going on with your characters. So that’s another piece that I like in games that we don’t see a lot in these family games: The concept of narrative, or story. These are things that I like to see.

I could go on with some specifics. Player elimination, like you have in Monopoly, we don’t have in a lot of these games, but when it comes down to the core of it, it’s about games that allow you to create interesting or meaningful decisions, or games that have a narrative component. These are some of the big differences.

WFIT: If you had two rounds of five hours of gaming to get someone hooked on board games, which games would you play? Why?

SN: What I would actually do is figure out is what that person’s interested in. Remember, I’m coming from the library background, and a big part of what the library does is something called “reader’s advisory.” And in reader’s advisory, what you’re trying to do is match a person to the books that match their interest. You’re trying to match their information need and their information interest. If you can make that match, you can get someone inspired to read. If you have a bad match, you’re going to have someone that doesn’t want to read.

The same is true with games. You need to match the games to the players. You need to find out about their backgrounds, their areas of interest, their gaming background, what sort of things they like to do in a game, and then bring out games that match those. So I can’t give you a generic laundry list. Sure, there are the gateway games that people talk about, things like Settlers and Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne and games like that, but the reality is that if those don’t match what someone is interested in doing, like if someone likes narrative more, then those games are not going to be a good match. You might want some adventure games, or a Pandemic-type story game where you’re really getting into what’s going on, or a dungeon game or something like that.

My answer is really based on the people that are sitting down to play.

WFIT: What would you consider to be a particularly underrated mainstream board game? Conversely, what would you say is an overrated Eurogame?

SN: Why, Tulipmania 1637 is an under—sorry. (Laughs). Let’s see here. Overrated eurogame. The term ‘overrated’ is a difficult one and not one that I would actually use. There are some popular games that I don’t like, games like Stone Age. I don’t like that one. Would I make the statement that they’re overrated? No. I respect that there are different types of people that like different types of things. I don’t think I would call anything overrated, because I don’t think that’s a term that I would use. I don’t like Dominion very much, and that’s a popular game.

As far as an underrated mainstream game, I think Scrabble is underrated by a lot of people. One of the things I like about Scrabble is that you can play it with someone who has a strong word knowledge or you can play it with someone who has a strong strategy. And those people can enjoy playing against each other. In fact, my partner and I play together that way. He understands words, he’s got a great vocabulary, and when we play we come out about even. And that’s great. You’ve got a couple of paths to winning. Of course, you’ve got players who have both strategy and the word knowledge, and they are double-goodness. Is that a word? I don’t know, but maybe I can use all my letters with it.

WFIT: What led you to enter the video blog fray? Was there a specific edition of BGWS that made you think it was something worth sticking with?

SN: At Syracuse University, I teach online. So a lot of my students are at a distance. I wanted to provide them with some video content, and I knew the only way I would be able to get good at producing video content is to practice it. That’s what I’ve found is true for any technology stuff. You have to take something and use it in a real-world context. And once you’ve done that, you’re going to start to get better at that technology.

Video editing is a huge hurdle to work through, and I knew I wasn’t going to get good at it until I did it on a regular basis. That’s why I decided to start it. I said “Well, I’m gonna start by taking my hobby and making some videos about board games. And I’m going to use those skills to make more video content for my classes.”

Last summer, I taught an entire class about games and libraries and posted it on YouTube. You can still find a 30-video series out there on games and libraries, if you want to learn about that.

And you know, it wasn’t any one episode that made it worth sticking with. It’s the response I get from people. The main reason I’ve always played games and liked games is because I get to interact with people, and having Board Games With Scott has made it much easier for me to find people to interact with. I now can go traveling somewhere, send an email out or a notice out on boardgamegeek, and find a gaming group. And the folks there are interesting in meeting with me and chatting with me and showing me their games, and that’s really cool. I really like that.

I think that if I had the money and the time, I would like to do a travel show based around board games. I would travel to places, I would meet the local gamers, and play some of the games that are from that area. I think that would be a lot of fun, and something that would be really exciting to do. So if anyone out there has connections to the travel channel and they’re looking for something new, how about “Board Games With Scott Around the World!” or something like that?

Actually, for a show like that it wouldn’t just be board games. You’d look at all sorts of gamers, and learn about local games as you travel. Underlying games is the concept of play, and play is a very important thing to us in society. Even as adults, we need to play on a regular basis, and having that element of play is critical, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in helping to promote games that promote good experiences, because that play is a pretty important thing.

WFIT: How, if at all, would you relate your academic interest in distance learning and library science to game theory? Have you ever thought about composing any academic work that related to games directly?

SN: My work for the last three years has been purely about how libraries use games to bring people in, to get them engaged with each other, to promote literacy, to promote learning. That’s been my work, so I’ve got my book Everyone Plays at the Library, which is actually about games and libraries. Now, where that’s moving and where my research is moving is into game creation on two fronts.

One is working with folks to actually make games. Libraries are places of education. They really are the only places of free education after high school. It’s one of the few places that offers education to adults and seniors for free, so looking at ways of using games to teach things that libraries typically teach is one possible research path I’m exploring. Another research path I’m exploring is what happens when you help people make games.

I see the library as becoming a place where you can learn how to make games, because neat stuff happens as far as motivation, learning, and creativity that happens when you create a game. That’s where my research is moving. So, you’re going to see more from me. I’m going to be more engaged in game scholarship, looking more at the angle of how people behave when they create games.

As far as using research to actually make games for the general public, I don’t know that I’ll be making that connection. I’m in an information school. What we do in an information school is that we’re interested in how information is used and viewed and the impact it has on society. I’ll be taking a similar scholarly approach to games: How are they used? How are they viewed? What is the impact that games have on society? That’s more of the research path I’ve been taking. Does that mean ever? No, I don’t know what’s in the future. My research changes and flows based on my interest and what’s going on in society, so who knows where things will go.

My next few years are going to be spent looking at what happens and the things that happen when someone creates a game, and how libraries, especially school libraries, can facilitate game creation programs to help kids learn new topics.

WFIT: Have you ever thought about going back and re-covering, say, Settlers of Catan or any of the other, more popular games that you may have glossed over in the early BGWS days?

SN: Well actually, I talked about Settlers of Catan in episode 67, my last episode, which was about dice-based resources. So what I’m doing now with this new form, I will certainly be revisiting games that are older and out of print and things like that. That’s one of the reasons why, is that I wanted to—I got tired of just running around trying to cover the new hotness. That was what I was doing with the show was trying to cover games that were new, and that people were excited about, and teach people how to play those.

Now there are lots of people that are doing that, so I don’t feel the need to do it anymore. I’m doing something different. I’m taking a much more academic approach to my show. I’m taking a topic and exploring that topic area and understanding how these games relate to each other. It is game scholarship, that’s what I’m doing with Board Games With Scott. I perceive my new show as like a college class on board games. In each lecture I’m taking a topic and covering it and presenting examples. And that’s how I visualize the show, now.

WFIT: How would you compare your taste in video games to your taste in board games?

SN: I don’t like playing online with people I don’t know, but that’s actually true with board games, too. So I’d say that’s a similar thing. If I play a videogame online, I much prefer to play it with people who I already have a real life connection with. People that I know, or people that I’ve become friends with on the internet, or something like that.

I don’t enjoy video implementations of board games. I find that it loses a lot in translations, that the tactile sensations are gone, the face-to-face social interactions are gone. There are a lot of things that disappear. As an example, when they made an online version of Tulip Mania available, I found the game would just encourage you to click through things quickly and not really analyze what was going on. So, I found that people click-click-click, and say “Oh, I’m done!” and not really understand what had happened. Playing with a board game slows down that pace, and forces you to consider what’s going on.

I really like adventure games. Diablo 2 is probably the game I’ve spent the most time with, followed by World of Warcraft. I actually broke that addiction awhile ago, but I have played World of Warcraft since it started, and I still have characters there, and for me World of Warcraft is interesting only when I’m playing with people who I know. Then I have that social space, and it’s basically a chat with something to do. Although I will pick up the new expansion and play it and see the content, I imagine, but once I’ve worked through that content I will step back from it for awhile. But really, I look for those personal connections.

I don’t care for real-time strategy games on the computer. I find that my mind doesn’t work too well for that. When I’m playing electronic games, I tend to move towards the adventure games, the fantasy games. I enjoy that sort of exploration; I enjoy that sort of thing. I also enjoy a good round of Halo.

WFIT: What inspired the episode-65 schism between purely positive reviews and more analytic, critical content?

SN: It really was because I looked around and said “There are a lot of people who have taken my model and are using it.” And I realize that’s going to sound like I’m egotistical, but that was the reality. I looked, and saw that there are a lot of people who are using this model of teaching games, so I’m not needed to do that anymore. I see what I do as a service. I have to, because I’m not really getting much money for it. It’s a service for folks, and I look around and I don’t want to compete with people who are doing fine video reviews, and who are teaching games already. We don’t need one more video of something that’s been covered. Once it’s been covered three or four times, another voice in that fray doesn’t matter. And I also thought about what I was doing as a scholar, so I said “All right, I’m going to take a more scholarly approach, I’m going to step up a notch from just explaining a name and taking a more humanities approach to the study of games and how they relate to each other.” So that’s what I’m doing.

It’s not always going great, I’m learning from it, again. For me, I want something that’s challenging. I also found that it was easy for me to put together an episode of Board Games With Scott where I talk about a game. The challenge was gone. It was not exciting for me to do, it was mundane. I wanted something that would challenge me. And now, looking at games and thinking about games in a different way, and thinking about how they cross and how they connect, that’s a new challenge for me, so I’ll explore that for awhile. When I get tired of that, I’ll move on to something else, I’ll imagine.

For me, it’s because I wanted a new challenge, and to present a new product to the market, something that wasn’t already being done, and that tied into my scholarship a little bit more.

WFIT: If you could change one rule of one mainstream board game (Monopoly, RISK, et al.) to make it more interesting, what would it be?

SN: I think that one of the rules (laughs)—With Monopoly, I would just ask the people—play by the rules. (Laughs). There is no free parking payout. That is not there. All that does is artificially add time to the game. So in the game Monopoly, I’d suggest that you read the rules before you play. You might find that the game plays better, there’s more balance. It’s shorter with the rules as they are written.

One rule I would suggest people play with in the game of Sorry!—If you ever find yourself sitting down to play a game of Sorry!, play with a hand of cards. A hand of three cards, for example. You have three cards, you play one, you draw one. That small change makes Sorry! a much more interesting game. So if you get stuck in a game of Sorry!, suggest it. The game becomes much more interesting.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Scott Nicholson in August 2010. Scott’s website, and links to all the episodes of his video series, can be found here. He also participates in the podcasts On Board Games and Games In Libraries. Scott’s new book, Everyone Plays At the Library, is available now.

Letters appealed strongly to our base love of all things Poké before we even had a chance to think about it, but after a little while we realized that Odomo’s got quite the interesting and personal piece of pop art on his hands, and that his other comic work was great, besides.

(I don’t know where else to cram this fact, but Odomo is also a proud vegan. I haven’t yet made his recipe for tofu scramble at the bottom of this interview, but it looks good to me. — Joe)

Whose Fault Is That: What is it about illustrating as a medium that captivated you, originally? Do you have any early memories of illustration or cartooning that you think might serve as turning points?

Maré Odomo: I consider myself a cartoonist first, and an illustrator second. So I’m just going to pretend you said “comics” instead of “illustrating”. Because that’s going to be a more interesting answer anyway.

You don’t need fancy equipment to make comics. It’s just paper and a thing to draw with. You don’t need expensive software or render farms or whatever. Anyone can make comics. Not everyone should, but they can if they want to.

WFIT: Sorry about the comics/illustration distinction. This might be well-worn territory for you by now, but what would you say are some significant differences between the two?

MO: Oh, well it’s just that comics are (usually) a combination of words and pictures, and illustration is more about making an engaging standalone image. It’s not that comics rely on the story or the writing. But they work with it. Illustration is straight-up PICTURE and you have to grab people’s attention in a different way. That’s about it. I’m just not as confident in my illustration skills.

WFIT: Would you say standalone writing is something that interests you?

MO: Oh yeah, definitely! I wrote a lot in high school, because I was self-conscious about drawing, and I just like typing in general. There were lots of bad poems and short stories. And I blogged a lot back then. I wanted to be a writer for a while, but I gave that up for some reason. I don’t use fancy grammar. Didn’t do well with essays. And that’s all they teach you in high school.

The first comic to get me excited about making comics was James Kochalka’s “American Elf”. That was my initial big turning point. I was like, “WHOA. YOU CAN MAKE COMICS ABOUT REAL LIFE?”

I love all kinds of comics, but autobio was so digestible and fun and empowering. There’s a reason so many people do it.

WFIT: Elf Comics, particularly the early years when he and Amy were just dating, is killer. This is pretty much strictly for me (see also, the forthcoming Pokemon Snap question), but do you have any recommendations for good diary comics that might slip under an average reader’s radar?

MO: Yeah, it’s crazy to see Kochalka’s relationship pan out. When he starts having kids, that was really special. I was worried about him… changing. But he’s still the same dude, for better or for worse.

WFIT: Definitely. My favorites are still the really simple comics of his that aren’t really about anything.

MO: Um. John Porcellino falls under the radar a little. He’s been comicking since ’89, though.. He’s still pretty underground. Gabrielle Bell? She’s blowing up, though.

WFIT: Drew Weing’s was really good when he had it going back in the day.

MO: Oh, yeah. I used to follow his stuff for a bit. His wife’s really talented too, Eleanor Davis. They both deserve a lot more attention. Oh! Laura Park had a recent run of really touching autobio comics.

WFIT: What are some other artists, popular or relatively unknown, that you consider to be the best working today?

MO: Katie Turner, Angie Wang, Hellen Jo, Shaun Tan, Jillian Tamaki, Michael DeForge. I got a chance to see Dustin Harbin‘s inks in a photoshop file, recently, and it totally blew me away. Same with seeing Paul Pope originals in-person. Kate Beaton is a funny lady. And Ryan Pequin is a funny dude. And Anthony Clark of Nedroid, he’s awesome. Corey Lewis is amazing to see draw, too. I should stop here. This is getting too long. I could go on and on, though.

Oh, but hey. Let’s throw in some non-comics people too. Like Frank Chimero and Olly Moss. Those dudes are rockstars.

WFIT: Have you taken inspiration from any unexpected areas aside from videogames? If so, which?

MO: I want to make a comic about “You’ve Got Mail” eventually. And Gilmore Girls.

Part of my thesis project was about trying to make comics adaptations of hip-hop songs. Trying to capture the style and the feeling. I feel like hip-hop gets a bad… rap. (God, what a terrible pun. I didn’t mean to say that, I swear.) It’s not all gangster gangster and top 40 junk-in-the-trunk-stuff. It can be sensitive and intelligent and political and powerful. If I were a rapper, I would make… the best raps. About Pokémon and… other cool things. I was trying to freestyle through comics for a little bit, but they were so bad.

Also, I wish I could b-boy. Breakdancing is so cool.

My writing style is very much a result of all the time I’d spend on the internet, though. I try to write comics like a twitter update. Short and sweet.

Kevin Fanning was a big influence on me, in a lot of aspects, including the self-publishing/web-publishing thing. That dude just GOES FOR IT. And he freakin’ KILLS IT. I’ve been reading his stuff since I was like 14.

WFIT: Lots of the comics you post on your blog are more abstract (content-wise, if not art-wise) than Letters to an Absent Father. What would you say causes you to find your work leaning one way or the other?

MO: I stopped making daily comics a while ago, to make more time for bigger projects like “Letters”. But my brain is still wired for composing little comic poems about my day.

WFIT: What in particular do you find satisfying about them?

MO: I’m picky about what words I use. So it’s like a little puzzle that I have to figure out. And there’s no right or wrong answer because I’m the only who’s really going to care. I do the same thing with tweets. I spend too much time writing and backspacing for 140 characters.

What I love about twitter is that the character limit makes things so bite-sized and accessible. And these little things add up and you can really get to know a person that way. I appreciate good tweets. They can be sad or funny. Whatever. It’s a powerful medium.

They stay in my head until I put them on paper. So I just jot them down real quick. Get them out of the way. And it’s nice to be able to work on something that isn’t going to be criticized and spread around on the internet. It’s low pressure.

With things like “Letters”, I don’t post a strip until I’m either really happy with it, or I’m sick of working on it. It’s a multi-day process. I’m a slow worker. And it’s not that I care so much about how other people are going to respond, it’s more that I don’t want to see it being posted in other places and having to live with all my mistakes.

WFIT: What’s your favorite piece of illustration you’ve ever done?

MO: The fake MC Paul Barman poster might be my favorite. It’s so wonky and weird. I was still figuring out how to use my tablet. It was good learning experience. Honestly, though, I’m a cartoonist first and an illustrator second. It’s still difficult for me to make a drawing interesting without relying on words or the context of a story. And I normally draw at a really small scale. Working too big is awkward for me.

WFIT: What’s so cool about Bulbasaur? With all due respect, he’s my least favorite of the original three.

MO: One of the things I like most about Bulbasaur is that he’s got those crazy long vines, which were pretty useful in Ash’s adventures. They caught things during tornados, or slapped things around, or acted as a bridge. And in Japanese, his name is “Fushigidane”, which basically means “I’M WEIRD, YUP”. (This is the best thing ever. — Ed) He’s freaky but he’s cool about it. He embraces it.

Plus, he was my first pokémon. And like Ash, I have abandonment issues and an irrational sense of loyalty. So there’s that.

WFIT: On a scale from one to ten (ten being the most), how much do you want a new Pokemon Snap game?

MO: Hmmmm. Well, I’d rather they made a game where you just went on adventures with your pokéfriends… and didn’t even battle. But if they made a new Pokémon Snap, I’d probably buy it immediately. Especially if it’s for the 3DS. And it has some augmented reality feature. Sometimes I don’t know I want something until someone tells me I do.

WFIT: When you were creating Letters to an Absent Father, did it occur to you that it might take off in the way that it has?

MO: No way! I had no idea. It was Vonnegut or some dude that said “write for yourself”. Or something like that. Like, don’t try to please anyone but yourself. So that’s what I did. I combined three things that are important to me (Pokémon, daddy issues, and comics) and didn’t expect anyone else to care. I don’t consider myself a normal person, so it’s freaky that so many people can relate to what is basically my life. It’s a little sad, but it’s beautiful too.

My comics teacher/mentor, Ellen Forney, said that it’s sometimes the specific details that are the most relatable—probably because they feel more real—and I guess it’s true.

When it started taking off, though, I was surprised at how little backlash there was. I keep expecting hatemail, telling me to get over it and grow up, but I haven’t gotten any yet.

WFIT: Have you considered longer-form comics? The serialized Letters work well, it seems, but would you ever consider telling a single, long-form story?

MO: I have, but I’m real bad at working on things for longer than a few days. I lose interest. It’s probably just that I haven’t hit on a good idea, yet, though. I need to read some books on creative writing or something. It’s definitely something I want to try.

WFIT: Give me a quick example of a vegan recipe I can bang out as a lazy and often-broke herbivore.

MO: TOFU SCRAMBLE:

1 block of extra firm tofu
& whatever. (Veggies and oil and stuff)

SPICE MIX:

2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon thyme, crushed with your fingers
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon tumeric
1 teaspoon salt

Okay. So you take this tofu. And squeeze it a bit, over the sink. Get some moisture out. And then wrap it up in a towel or some paper towels and put something heavy-ish on it. And just let it sit.

While that’s happening, you chop up your onions or whatever. Put them in a frying pan (don’t forget the oil!), medium-high, get those dudes sizzling.

Add some more veggies. Mushrooms, and broccoli. I like using the frozen bags of pre-cut peas & carrots & green beans because it saves me a lot of time. And they’re cheap. So you’ve got all those veggies. Oh, leeks are good, too. What else? Spinach? Kale? Potatoes, if you’d like. But that’s gonna take a little more preparation, probably. You can figure that out on your own.

So the veggies are going. Add some garlic. When that’s lookin’ pretty good, add all those spices at once. And mix ‘em in for 15 seconds. Then add 1/4 cup of water. And set the heat to HIGH. This is called deglazing. It’s fancy.

Don’t burn your food, but wait until there’s not much water before adding the tofu. There’s going to be some moisture in your tofu still, and you don’t want the scramble to be too wet, unless that’s what you’re into? (But if it’s too dry, you can add more water.)

And don’t keep it on high. Go to like… medium high? It won’t take too long to finish the scramble, but, like I said, I don’t want you to burn the tofu.

So when you add the tofu, you unwrap your block from the paper towel cocoon or whatever, and start crumbling it with your hands over the pan. Then mix it all in and the spices will make it all yellow and magical. That’s pretty much it.

The recipe that this is based off of also adds “the juice of 1/2 a lime” but I never have limes handy. So I don’t know if that’s good or not. And 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast, but that’s not really my thing.

It also mentions guacamole and salsa. Which are good things, but not necessary, and kind of a hassle. I like having some toast with my scramble, though. Because it’s easy.

You should also throw some flax seeds on that stuff, though. FIBER. Get your Omega 3 and 6 on. Yeah buddy.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Maré Odomo in August 2010. Maré’s website can be found here, his Tumblr can be found here, and you can follow him on Twitter here.

Whose Fault Is That: This interview has been in the works for way too long because of my serial procrastination and your move to Berlin. Tell me something interesting that’s happened since we first spoke.

Petra Cortright: there have been so many things since we first spoke i dont even know where to begin!

WFIT: What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?

PC: the most fun always involves the beach/swimming in the ocean

WFIT: What’s your favorite video on youtube?

PC: the one of me scratching my dog olly’s head the webcam was very fucked up and recorded this weird sped up video and it looks like im scratching him really fast and he is licking really fast, but the vidoe makes me miss him so much i can hardly watch it anymore he’s a bug

WFIT: What were some early experiences with internet culture that you think led you to the art you’re making today?

PC: i fell in love with google image search the first time i used it in 5th grade, my first search was “trees”, i also talked a lot on aim a lot it was a bit pre txt msg for me like in 5th/6th grade i didn’t have a cell phone yet and i loved the emoticons and the chat culture and that has really stayed with me

WFIT: You’ve done a lot of moving around. How have reactions to your art changed from location to location?

PC: the work has 70% suffered 30% flourished from all the moving. i love traveling, i hate moving. i’m not a good mover. i have nightmares baout my baggage being too heavy (always is), flight delays, cancellations, losing boarding pass, showing up at the airport on the wrong day, my computer equip getting broken, security checkpoint, customs, lugging bags around, losing bags, layovers, just — ungh. and hey guess what!! i’m @ the airport right now!!! i;m at LAX flying to frankfurt and then to back berlin. the 70% suffering has just been exhaustion,,stress,,anxiety,,depression which provides no room for creative energy or work ethic. in the end i think the work gets better when youre settled and have support and time to explore new things and really push yourself. i dont think i am at that point yet but im getting closer. the 30% positive part is obviously all the new worlds/landscapes/countries/cultures i have gotten to see. it takes time to process what i have seen and it takes time to seep through into the work.

WFIT: What is it about animated gifs and webcam videos that attracts you?

PC: i try to be better at this but i am a really impatient person. gifs and webcams are so fast, low file size, load fast, they are almost scraps. i like not having the commitment of working with hi def vid/images. it just sucks how serious you have to be, it requires too much thinking. gifs are lil treasures of the internet, its so great when you stumble onto a huge unknown index that you hadn’t seen before. i like working with things that i find, but i also like making gifs myself but the ones i make myself are usually pretty heavy file-size wise. for webcams i like the challenge of limitation with the “default” effects. anyone could use the webcam software i use so i want to be the one to do it first and do it weird and do it unique. there are plenty of videos on youtube that have the exact same effects that i have used in some videos but there is such a huge different with those videos and what i am trying to do with my videos.

WFIT: One of our favorite parts of your work is the way it highlights the generation gap in a really roundabout way. Have you considered or observed your art’s effect on people unfamiliar with internet culture?

PC: there are a lot of aspects of my work that address internet culture but i would also like to believe that a lot of the pieces can stand alone purely on beauty and aesthetic grounds alone. sometmes in net art things are too smary and smart ass-y internet jokes that 99% of everyone is never gonna get. even if the internet references pass over some heads all my work is so extremely visual and people can enjoy it on that level alone.

WFIT: What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?

PC: this is a silly answer cus its smiths lyrics and im already loling as i type “IT TAKES STRENGTH TO BE GENTLE AND KIND”

WFIT: Name one thing you wish you did more of and one thing you wish you did less of.

PC: more exercise less worrying

WFIT: What would you say is your most ridiculous fear?

PC: i’ve been near panic attacks worrying about all the things that could happen to our chihuahuas milo and olly. they love to sleep in the bed curled up right by our sides and i read somewhere or actually i think my sister told me that people have rolled over on their chihuahuas and crushed them during sleep. also our neighbor has this huge stupid hummer and my mom said olly almost got hit by it one time. our cat bon bon was eaten by a coyote and i guess if a coyote was out during the daytime and the dogs were roaming in the yard that could be really dangerous.it all makes me sick i dont wanna tlak baout it anoymore!!!!!

WFIT: What’s something you think I might be missing out on that I should check out?

PC: if youre living in new york youre missin out on a sensible quality of life

WFIT: In another interview, you refer to my current home of New York City as a “stain on this earth” and say it “brings out a real sickness in people.” I’m not entirely prepared to disagree, so where do you suggest I move next?

PC: yeah, i have said nasty things about new york. lately i’m trying to be more positive so i will try not to go down the nyc complaint list in too much detail. i was disappointed that it didn’t work out for me there. i fought hard to try to be comfortable there but i ended up paying deeply for all the disasters, both financially and emotionally. my close friend recommended that i read julia child’s my life in france which i started/finished on the flight over here. (im in the frankfurt airport now anyways the book is about how she fell in love with french and found her lifes passion (late in life (late 30s!!!) in cooking. it is nice to feel the energy and zeal she felt from being in a place that she loved with many people that she loved doing what she loved. new york was never a place where i was full of that kind of love and energy, i grew bitter and apathetic because i never felt comfortable there and i wasn’t as inspired as i wanted to be. the lack of landscape was very draining for me. there are not enough trees for me in new york, also the species of trees are so boring. the city parks are so boring. the deciduous forest is so boring. it is the same 3 trees over and over, and sort of low compact forests and you cannot see more than 5 ft. i went outside of new york only a little but it was unimpressive. i feel so inspired when i get to drive around california, everything is so vast and so many beautiful and different landscapes. berlin is so green, there are so many trees. there are lots of huge cool secluded parks and a short train outside the city and you are in real nature with lakes and wildflowers and hikes. it’s hard not living by the ocean but i am excited to check out the south of germany as well. this answer got out of control so in short i suggest you move somewhere that is inspiring with lots of friends and cool landscapes, wherever that happens to be for U

WFIT: If you had to guess, where do you think you’ll be a year from now?

PC: I;ll be getting marrrrrieedddd in santa barbara, california!!!

Joe Bernardi interviewed Petra Cortright in July 2009. Petra’s completely awesome website can be found here, her youtube videos can be found here, and she can be found on Twitter here.

Whose Fault Is That: When did you first discover world-building?

Chris Wayan: Science fiction and fantasy. The term is common in sf circles, though of course they usually mean building a world entirely of words. On the physical side, I think I was most influenced by Poul Anderson and (more recently) Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars books; they showed how planetary-scale factors interact to shape quite local matters–even the shapes of bodies. On the sociological/cultural side (and also presentation and style!), Le Guin and Tolkien were my role models. They all kept it just words on a page, though.

Only Tolkien had decent maps–books like Red Mars, Green Mars and The Dispossessed disappointed me on that level. So imaginary maps were a logical step and I started doing that in my teens. Then in the seventies I saw an an art-magazine article on two Italian metalworkers who built a skeletal alien planet several meters across, with girders for meridians, seas of empty air, and continents of steel. I can’t remember their names now–one was Remo, I think, because they named a continent Remolia. What got me wasn’t their world’s features or plausibility, it was just that they built their imaginary world on such a big scale. It felt almost pornographic, dangerous to me–to parade your fantasies so openly, so solidly. Out of the closet!

Then in the nineties, in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences built a walk through time. Each geological era had a room of its own, with fossils and dioramas and a globe showing Earth as it had been in that era. They were terrible! Puffy continents colored battleship-gray, with vague mountain ranges–they looked like moldy bread dough or scabs or wet cement. No icecaps, river systems, or hints of climate or vegetation, so they didn’t give you any sense of the times–was the world hot, cold, wet, dry, covered in ice? Couldn’t tell by these suckers. But they were art, not mere maps–for they DID express emotion. INSTITUTIONAL emotion. They expressed fear. The fear of making a mistake, or offending someone’s pet theory, or suggesting knowledge where there’s only guesswork. The fear of looking unscientific! The result was more misleading than any opinionated speculation could ever be.

That was a deep lesson. I wanted to build a better planet, a vivid, specific, opinionated planet…

WFIT: When did you realize it was something you could do? What was your first planet like?

CW: Well… you didn’t ask for a whole history, but you got me curious. Never thought about the project historically, didn’t make many project-notes. I do keep a general journal, so I’ve reconstructed the history from casual mentions there.

One weekend in late 2001, I biked by a flea market behind Cellspace in the Mission District. I bought a globe for a few bucks. At home I started playing with it–pried it off its stand, tilted it so the tropics turned polar and poles turned tropical. Suddenly an intellectual problem snapped into focus: “We have one pole on land, one under the sea. So we have one cold pole–Antarctica–and one mild. Could Earth be tilted so we had two Antarcticas, or none? ARE there orientations where land or sea is under both poles? How would all that ice–or lack of it–affect sea level and climate?” It turned out there were a couple of solutions for each. So I got out my drill…

That first globe became Seapole. With no polar land to build up big icecaps, just sea ice, it was a warm place, almost a vision of Earth as it will likely be in a few centuries–yet the climate changed purely from geography, not from high CO2 levels! Surprised me.

Found an old globe in a thrift shop, and built Shiveria–land at both poles. These two were a paired study in contrasts. Done fast, with relatively simple painting and relief.

I was hooked. I did three more alternate Earths–Turnovia, Jaredia, and then Dubia, which took much longer since it’s by far the most accurate and detailed projection. I knew it had to be since it was so explicitly political, people would nit-pick if it wasn’t exact. It burned me out. By late 2002 I was ready for something different.

I’d just read Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy and wished it had a decent map… so I did Mars Reborn.

I thought Venus Unveiled would be similar. Wrong! A much harder project because NASA’s maps were relatively rough, its features were little-known and needed more explanation. Also, the terraforming was hell. Mars rolls over and begs; Venus spits acid in your eye, you know? But because I invested so much time in the research, I wanted to show it off with detailed, ground-level tours. It grew into the first true webmaze, the first novel-length site. Became the model for all the rest, really.

In 2004 I tried an imaginary landscape: Serrana. But I gave myself training wheels by making it a tribute to Le Guin’s anarchist world in The Dispossessed. Geologically and ecologically it’s different, but the coastline and general layout are recognizable–the Anarres that Le Guin might have conceived today, with thirty years of advances in planetology. Serrana focused more than Venus on evolution, species, culture; and I started drawing and tossing in way more sketches of landscapes and creatures. I have a lot of affection for that one. But then I’m an anarchist; they’re kindred spirits.

The first purely imaginary worlds were Lyr, Tharn and Pegasia, all conceived around the same time, but done gradually over several years. The detailed Venus-style tours took much longer, Lyr especially, where logistics were a problem: finding flightways that covered the planet but had sea-crossings tourists could handle. Pegasia of course is still in progress since it involves reader participation–design a species!

Xanadu was a little side project, a break from the immense complexity of Lyr. I did a burst of work on it as data about Titan poured in, but when we didn’t find ethane seas but just lakes I was disappointed and slacked off. I’m waiting until the poles are properly mapped and then I’ll go back to it, I think.

After painting that giant globe of Lyr, with oceans seven times the area of Earth’s, I was so getting really tired of blue. So I decided to sculpt a relief globe of Io for fun. Wow, those colors. Lilac, white, rich browns, black, mustard, brick red, even lemon-yellow (sulfur is weird chameleon stuff). The sculpting was fun too–mountains 11 miles high! Second only to Mars, and way steeper. Spectacular if you could stay alive long enough to see it. Io’s the first straight realism I’ve done. Well, Io lacks hi-res mapping in spots, so there’s some interpretive guesswork, but it’s basically scientific portraiture. I haven’t even photographed it yet since it’s not Planetocopian; no what-if premise, and no life. Just color.

The Caprice series (Siphonia, Abyssia and Inversia) are half-done and it’s hard to say what’ll happen there. I’m slaving away on Siphonia’s regional maps and tours at the moment, feeling a bit constrained because it’s just Earth 90,000 years from now, on the rebound from a surreal catastrophe. So the land’s fascinating–undersea formations–but the creatures and societies can’t be as fanciful. I keep feeling grumpy that I can’t change the gravity and make up exotic critters…

Abyssia will be next because I have the globe all ready for final painting–all the research and relief is done–and it’s a relatively easy world with fairly small landmasses to map and tour.

And I need an easy one before tackling Inversia, which will be a toughie. 2.5 Earths-worth of detailed landscape to describe, and my mental model of Earth leads me astray–on Inversia, mountains are valleys, lands are seas and so on. On the other hand both Abyssia and Inversia have counterfactual premises, so while the geography and the climate are constrained, their evolution is wide open. I get to invent species freely…

WFIT: It’s extremely impressive how complex these scenarios are, what kind of background do you have in the sciences?

CW: Spotty and mostly self-taught. Courses in anthro, botany, zoology, but I didn’t major in them. I constantly read ethology (animal behavior studies), but I ignore theory and just want stories from the leading fieldworkers so I can draw my own conclusions. I follow the exoplanet hunt with interest, but the astronomy is mostly extrapolating from our own planets and moons. Close study of their surfaces has really paid off–NASA has some good map sites; google “planetarynames”, all one word. I’m finally learning to consult Wikipedia on physical chemistry, where I’m weak. The math? Mostly by hand. Just a few dozen core facts let me estimate most parameters of other planets. Our atmosphere’s greenhouse effect is about 15 degrees Celsius, surface temp increases as about the fourth root of insolation, gravity by the cube root of a world’s mass (assuming the same density–fat chance!); air pressure on Mars Venus and Earth vary by 10,000:1 while gravity’s range is barely 2.6:1, so postulate way more atmospheric variation than gravity… And so on.

Academic courses don’t focus on what you need to build plausible planets; you have to glean these bits and apply them.

I did audit a lot of environmental science classes at UC Santa Cruz, not for credit, just because I was fascinated; though that was decades ago when the science was primitive.

A turning point for me was Ken Norris’s class on marine mammals. One day he described a couple of puzzles about sperm whales. Why such a gigantic “melon”–a huge chamber in the skull full of tons of oil. Yes, it’s an echo chamber, generating a long train of clicks, but why’s that better than single sonar pulses? And why do sperm whales have such long jaws they can open incredibly wide, at right angles to their bodies? Can’t get great leverage like that and it’s a hydrodynamic drag.

In a flash I saw that click-trains of that sort would be unique–each whale’s slightly different in size. If you had a directional antenna that was exactly the same length, it’d resonate preferentially to your own click-train; other click-trains, even slightly off, would damp out. The long jaw matched the length of the “melon”, the resonator, almost perfectly! The jaw may be a directional antenna! It wouldn’t amplify so much as tune out OTHER whales’ sonar. In a pitch-dark melee of whales and giant squid that could make all the difference…

I mentioned it to Ken in passing, but I was just a humanities student sitting in on his class after all. I realized if I wanted to prove it, I’d have to switch to environmental science, spend the next decade fighting to convince professors I was serious, struggle for grants, build models and/or get cold and wet for a few years, to test my solution. Or I could leave it for others to verify, and get on to the next puzzle! I was better at pattern recognition than follow-through and I suddenly knew it. I just didn’t have the patience for science. What I was, though I couldn’t articulate it then, was an artist whose raw material was science.

WFIT: On your website you state you’re not human. What effect does that have on the worlds you build?

CW: A lot. By that I meant that both my self-image and my orientation–sexual and nonsexual–are not (very) human. Such declarations are common among furries, and though I guess they sound extreme, there’s a lot of truth in it. I identify with other species more readily than most humans since I can’t see a gap between animals and me. I find it easy to imagine how I’d behave if I had to rely on sonar, or I had a light-triggered migration instinct, or a strong estrus cycle, and so on.

But I mean it in a non-furry way too. I’m mildly autistic–my own sensory and mental world is very different from the average human’s. For example, I recognize people mostly by their voices and movements not their faces–I can’t recognize friends or even relatives that way. Normal human brains have a subroutine dedicated to distinguishing and remembering faces. Not mine. On the other hand, patterns–music, art, even puzzles–leap out at me.

Temple Grandin describes the results very well in her book Thinking in Pictures, and to some extent in Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human. Not all autistics understand animals especially well but I happen to be more like Grandin than most–and she’s used her autism to help her build animal care facilities. My mentation seems a lot like animal thinking amped up–an animal that’s learned to use human language as a sort of pidgin, but who feels his way to solutions along very different lines. Even when I do math I don’t use formulae; I sniff all around it like an otter, hop all around it like a nervous raven. Lots of wasted motion in human terms but I need a feel for the whole situation.

I generally read and understand animal emotions better than human ones.

What it all means for world-building is that I don’t struggle to step outside my culture and species. I’m already half-outside. Sometimes I peer in the window enviously like Peter Pan, but not often. So crowded in there! I’d get claustrophobic.

WFIT: When developing a new planet you paint on the oceans, spin the globe and let your unconscious work out the complex systems like climate. What is that like? Can you describe what’s happening or simply how it feels?

CW: It’s strangely like interpreting a dream. Or the early phases of songwriting. This mental state, is not unique to the arts; it’s also how Darwin assembled his case for natural selection, I think. It’s not the “Aha!” phase but the slowly bubbling stew before it. Data collection in which you deliberately refrain from premature theorizing, coming up with a too-simple answer. In a complex system, there are so many variables interacting there’s no logical way to solve the equation–if you single out any thread you’ll lose the others. You have to suspend judgment and just sit with the whole, visualizing it all as vividly as possible. Slowly pieces of it, usually around the fringes, come clear. You feel your way into the center. It’s slow. Like untying a knot…

WFIT: How do you relate to your planets? Pride, love, something else? Which one are you most proud of/do you love the most, etc.?

CW: I imagine living on them, of course; I can’t build them if I don’t.

Love? I always love the one I’m working on the most. Or hate it. The obsession can get frustrating. I got tired of building Pegasia–all those empty continents crying out for species–but a few months ago I started adding some regional maps and better tours, and fell in love with it again. Now I’m doing the regional tours and maps for Siphonia, and fixing the globe (chipping and resculpting, I mean, not just theory); so I’m in love with it now, for its sheer scale and diversity (well over twice the land surface of Earth; by far the most ambitious world so far in that regard).

But over time I get perspective. What am I proudest of? Venus, Lyr, Tharn, Serrana perhaps. Not Dubia though I get so many comments on it. But anyone could have done Dubia; I’m puzzled they hadn’t already, since it’s such a persuasive shock, seeing in detail just how different Earth will be if we go on. Seeing your home town under water. But the more exotic ones are closer to my heart.

Love… where would I live, if I could? Oh, somewhere I could fly, with lots of different peoples–terraformed Venus, or Lyr, or the trenches and crater-oases of Tharn. Or Pegasia, if only some readers would submit some simpatico natives to inhabit it (Plenty of room still, hint hint! So far they’re all kinda lizardy… nobody I’d date.)

WFIT: What kind of responses do other people have to your worlds?

CW: What are the most common? Lemme think. In random order:

1: Enthused, clueless gamers. “Great maps! Where are the guns? You can’t kill hardly anybody! Your aliens need bigger breasts!” A minority ask to use the landscapes and maps to base (usually war-) games on. Kinda missing the whole point. But the truth is, if asked, I still say sure, go ahead. Why not? There’s a culture in David Brin that has glyphs for certain truisms–they have one word for “boys will be boys.” I won’t rain on anyone’s parade, even if it’s a military one.

2: Readers who resonate with one particular planet or species. Lots more closet centaurs out there than you’d think. I find their comments quite insightful–and I suspect it’s because they come from the same place my building the planets comes from. I’m not objective–I see myself there and feel my way into what my urges and loves and hates and habits of thought ARE as a tree-squid or taurlope or lebbird. It’s fun to talk with readers who do the same–experience it from the inside. Personally I think these people are the ones with the potential to become interesting f/sf writers; technical skills you can build, but empathy’s vital. Without it, you get stiff dead models, just a blueprint.

3: People who just find the orbital photos beautiful. They often want to know what computer program I use to generate them. Heh.

One curious quirk: quite a few of these readers find the planets lovely but a little unconvincing because I show so many coastal deserts. Don’t I know that rain comes off the sea and deserts are inland? I puzzled over this a long time. Earth has lots of coastal deserts, so why would so many people deny their existence? My best guess: because almost no one lives there. Southern California’s about the only heavily settled coast and the real desert’s to the south. I’m sure my Baja readers, all one of them, believe in coastal deserts! And gdye to y’all down in the Kimberly, and the Namib, and Western Sahara and Atacama… But city people really don’t live on Earth. They live on Human Earth–a much smaller world.

4: Requests for help from other planet-builders, or fantasy/sf writers wanting maps or help with existing lands that don’t feel right. I love these requests, they’re so interesting. But I’m slow to answer, cuz I often have to feel my way into the problem and that takes a while. So be patient, I WILL come through…

5: Suggestions I fix errors, about half of which I decide really are errors. The worst I’ve made was that on Tharn and Pegasia I extrapolated carelessly from Jupiter’s system (self-taught, remember?), got caught with my orbits down around my ankles, and had to rewrite whole tours… I still have doubts about nutation and tides there, though I think they’ll be far less that some physics-literate readers have warned; they forget that the warm rock of these giant, tectonically active moons is very flexible. Continents will bulge too. Tides will be only a fraction of the theoretical amounts–but those are huge, it’s true…

An error several readers want me to correct is my claim that the dim red light of small suns will tend to evolve bigger eyes. Wavelengths of visible light are so much smaller than retinal cells that readers assume this couldn’t possibly matter. But retinas are incredibly inefficient; in mammals only about 1% of working retinal cells send signals the optical system recognizes as useful! Lens problems, too, tend to make eyes blurrier than they should be for their size. It’s not easy making cameras from goo. So eyes are often about a hundred times larger than you’d think they need to be for a given “pixel resolution.” Strong evolutionary pressure–as in small birds, who need to keep their head-weight down–can force efficiency and shrink them some, so it’s debatable. But my assertion wasn’t idle.

Anyway, a lot of folks write in with comments and suggestions based on their specialty. They’re often pretty fascinating even if it’s really too late to rethink the whole thing, as is true with most of the older worlds. The ones still in progress are the ones you can affect the most.

6: Readers who either love or hate the furriness. Too pinuppy, too cute, or they like it, the sensuality feels welcoming… Maybe the split vote here has more to do with whether you like to mix sensuality and emotion with your intellectuality, or keep them separate. Or maybe it’s just a question of taste. Is your sexual orientation and identity strictly human, or not? The split has a long history, long before the word furry came up; before science fiction really addressed sex and sublimation at all. Golden Age sf was split between “A galaxy full of humans and humanoids”–the Star Trek model, though of course it was the make-up costs that limited them, not philosophy… versus “a galaxy of weird beasties with weird viewpoints. And rayguns. And tentacles. Lots and lots of tentacles. Oozing, slimy, dripping…”

I fall in between: I do “weird beasties you’d rather hang with than the jerks next door.” I disappoint the claw-and-tentacle fans, I’m afraid. My designs don’t go for novelty at any cost. I do appreciate that art, and there’s a lot of it out there; much thought goes into some of those designs. I know my limits; I can’t compete! They’re like race-car designers; at most, I’m modifying stock designs. But I’m not going for bizarre but viable organisms. What really turns me on is the behavior and worldview of my creatures, and daily life on my worlds–not exoticism per se.

7: Critiques on the evolution of other beings and societies. These can be fascinating. The most notable strand: readers (so far all male, interestingly) who feel my worlds are too peaceful, too cooperative, too nice to be true. (Maybe I’m repeating myself and these are just the smart end of #1, above). “Serrana” consciously argues my theories around this. How to summarize this debate?… Here goes.

Wishful thinking? Sure, Planetocopia’s partly that. But it’s an art project, not pure science. I build possible worlds I like; I don’t deny more dystopian worlds are possible. They are; we live on one. I just don’t think they’re stable; and in deep time, unstable things are rare.

Beyond the question of whether Planetocopia’s a representative sample, I just LIKE pacifism, feminism, animal rights, free love, low-tech utopias; I gravitate toward scenarios that interest me and that I don’t see much in science fiction today. Sf caters to a human audience raised in a monospecific culture that thinks violence is fun and machines are where it’s at. But building dog-eat-dog worlds is neither challenging nor original. I build hippie utopias partly because others don’t. (And I build deeply forking hypertexts, rather than write sf novels because webmazes lets me cover landscape and ecology in ways that are hard for commercial writers with their linear narratives.)

But I can’t deny that writers (of both books and games) building harsh worlds are perfectly justified in doing so; they have a model at hand. But… how many worlds-at-war or singularities up at their crest are we gonna see out there, really? They can’t last. Punctuated equilibrium makes more sense to me… and culturally, equilibrium has to be mostly cooperative or at least tolerably peaceful.

Anyway, this issue is one that comes up a lot, in various guises and flavors. The lack of violence bothers way more people than the sex. So I’ll probably keep creating make-love-not-war societies; it hits a nerve.

WFIT: Finally, what’s next for you? More Planetocopia? Other projects?

CW: Just finishing the planets on my plate now–populating and writing full tours for Pegasia, Siphonia, Abyssia, Inversia–will take a couple of years at least. Inversia’s so damn big…

I need to know more chemistry to do Xanadu (cold, methane/ethane world) and Blisteria (a hot but still water/carbon world) properly, so they may wait a few years.

Planetocopia still takes more time most days than any other creative project, but I’m also:

1: Songwriting and playing in a surrealist band, The Krelkins, as we slowly record our first full CD.

2: Building the World Dream Bank. Dream stories, poems, pictures, songs. I’m trying to contribute at least one piece a week myself, and edit and post others’ dreams as they come in. Send me your craziest dream!

3: Trying to figure out how to print and distribute a finished graphic novel, Dreamtales. About 250 pp of bizarre dreams–furry, pacifist, erotic, Planetocopia-like dreams. Full color. Better art and tighter writing than Planetocopia. Funnier, sexier, weirder. I’m proud of these stories and hope they’ll be out soon.

4: Drawing new post-Dreamtales comics, a few dreams but many not–my first non-dream comics. Slow, slow, slow. The world’s slowest cartoonist, grrr.

5: Doing a series of paintings straight out of my dreams. Razi and the Holy Wino of Shasta is a good example. In fact, I’m writing up this here interview to avoid emailing some JPGs to a local gallery to propose a show…

6: Mulling over a Planetocopia book. Frank Jacobs of the Strange Maps site is doing it now, and our sites have parallels. Suggestions anyone? What would you do like, how would you focus it–what’s in what’s out?

7: Sculpting a set of furry dream-figurines, including some Planetocopians, like a Tharnese lebbird. Currently finishing a wolf-ballerina made of (drumroll please) spackle.

Current non-art obsessions:

1: The San Francisco International Film Festival. Of planetocopian interest: I rather liked the world-building in BATTLE FOR TERRA despite its scientific silliness. Ooh, pwitty art nouveau pwanet! Wish they’d spent more time on Mala’s life, culture, town, world before starting the war. I’ve SEEN a war, thank you. Haven’t we all.

Also liked: NOMAD’S LAND. Weak start & end but the hour in the middle’s amazing. People like the Kalash are very much like the societies I’ve been portraying. They DO exist. And for most of history and all prehistory they were in the vast majority.

2: Getting solar panels up on our house. Already installed CF lightbulbs, efficient fridges and heaters, and I bike most places. When I have to drive I get 35-40 mpg. C’mon, people, at least insulate your house and switch to a scooter or an old Civic or something! Get outa that big ol’ oil barrel! Y’want a livable planet? Then act on it!

David Cole interviewed Chris Wayan in May 2009. Spend a few hours getting lost at Planetocopia and the larger World Dream Bank project.

Whose Fault Is That: How would you describe your job as it relates to S-S, Z Gun and any affiliated ventures?

Scott Soriano: To start, I hope I never consider what I do with either S-S or Z Gun as “a job”! The record label is my baby and I am responsible for everything from birthing to changing diapers to teaching it to make a Scotch and soda for daddy. The zine has two mommies – me and Ryan Wells. We share in our responsibility to create a horror child.

WFIT: Were there any records or specific experiences that galvanized your interest in underground music or, more specifically, running a label?

SS: As a teen, I was snorting speed and playing football with fellow neighborhood shitbags, when one of them started singing the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies.” Hearing “fuck” sung three times in one line, followed by the word “abortion” sent me off on my bike to Tower Records, where I lifted me a copy of “Never Mind the Bollocks.”

It literally changed the way I heard music. Real anger was okay. Smart and primitive could exist side by side. It killed pretty much every piece of received wisdom about music that I had trapped in my teen mind. Hearing Ornette Coleman, Blind Willie McTell, and Folkways Ethnic records taught me that raw energy existed in more than underground rock & roll.

I also realized that while genres are good for trying to communicate to others about music, to approach music as a set of genres restricts how I heard music. Chum that into a philosophy and it probably has something to do with how I approach the label.

“Pushing Buttons” by Nothing People

WFIT: What were your motives when you began putting out records? Are they any different now than they were then?

SS: I’d like to give you some high minded reason for starting S-S (with Sakura Saunders, who is no longer involved), but really it was sitting in on Chris Woodhouse’s first sessions with the A Frames and thinking “I want to put this on a record.”

The second release (a 7″ by early 80s synth punk band The Decay, nabbed from a cassette) was also something I wanted to put on a record. I’d like to say that one motive was to crash the stupid genre ghetto walls that punk and underground music seems to love, but that might have come a bit after the fact and is never the main motive. The main motive is “I want this to be on a record.”

WFIT: As the proprietor of a predominantly-vinyl record label, editor of a print-only zine and longtime employee of a used bookstore, how would you explain your type of archival impulse to an audience accustomed to digital immediacy and convenience?

SS: Vinyl & print archaic? Bah! The digital world convenient? By what measure? Too many assumptions in your question that, while might be status quo, are crap. Analog and print seem natural to me. Analog sounds better than digital and it lasts. Print still dominates the book industry and will for years to come. If the format changes and (more important), it is better than what it replaces, no need to resist it.

WFIT: Have there ever been any records you’ve desperately wanted to release but wound up being unable to?

SS: The only “dream project” has been a Fugs box set. The stuff is all out there on different labels but it would take an entity like Rhino to pull it all together. Too much legal bullshit for me.

WFIT: While most of your record label contemporaries tend to focus on a niche, the stylistic variations across the S-S catalog speak for themselves. Aside from matters of personal taste, how do you reconcile the wildly differing aesthetics of bands like the A Frames, Hue Blanc’s Joyless Ones and Les Club Des Chats under the S-S umbrella?

SS: I guess if I listened to just one style or genre of music than I’d think that the artists I release have “wildly differing aesthetics”, but I don’t. They don’t sound the same, sure, but only shitty labels put out bands that sound all the same, and I don’t aspire to have a shitty label.

Perhaps if I was putting out Los Llamarada, Puccini, and the Carter Family, I’d have something to “reconcile”, but, even then, I am sure I’d worm my way out of justifying what I do.

“Cola Ohne Coka” by Krysmopompas

WFIT: In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Matt Whitehurst from Psychedelic Horseshit refers to Terminal Boredom as the new Rolling Stone and claims that “the bigger heads on Terminal Boredom are ruining music today.” I’m not about to make any claims regarding Matt’s sincerity or sobriety in that interview, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about TB becoming a strange and increasingly accurate arbiter of what will appear on, say, Pitchfork within six months or a year.

SS: Ha! I think you mean TB predicts what will be covered on Pitchfork by a year or two! Listen, this is nothing new. Fan-based media such as print zines, web zines, fan blogs, message boards, etc. are always going to be out in front of the professional music media. It doesn’t matter if it is the mid 70s with the zines Back Door Man or Bomp! trumping Rolling Stone or later with Sniffin Glue and Search & Destroy embarrassing NME or Crawdaddy.

If you want to find the interesting stuff going on in the 80s you turn to Flipside and Forced Exposure, not Circus and Spin. Well, today you have Terminal Boredom being more timely and relevant than Pitchfork. Of course, Pitchfork is going to pinch ideas from Termbo! It is either that or rewrite one-sheets given to them by record labels, which is pretty much standard procedure for pro music press.

That said, nowadays, the influence of the music press, whether it be fan-based like Termbo or industry based like Pitchfork, is overblown. There are just too many sources of opinion to turn to, too many ways for fans to interact with each other, and many more options for music fans to immediately sample music without the music press acting as gatekeeper.

Hype on Terminal Boredom might be able to sell out a 7″ pressing of 300 but that is hardly the influence of Rolling Stone of the 60s & 70s, and to think otherwise shows that you need to expand your world. At best, Termbo is a tip sheet. You find people you trust (the bigger the head the better…or at least the bigger the hat) and use them as a buying guide until the stuff they rave starts to suck. And you find out before the herd. That’s what fan media is supposed to do.

WFIT: In In a climate where the only other print music zines are catch-all monoliths like Razorcake and MRR, what led you to produce Z Gun, a sporadically printed zine with scattershot subject matter?

SS: When we created Z Gun, Razorcake and MRR didn’t even enter our minds. I am sure if we would have thought of them as “monoliths”, our first impulse would be to attack them. But MRR is like an old friend who is starting to babble to himself and Razorcake? I didn’t know it still existed! It does? Well, congratulations Razorcake!

So I guess you can say what led us to produce Z Gun was lack of anything that framed punk or underground rock & roll or outsider music or “scattershot subject matter” or whatever you want to call it, as one single, uhhhhh, sound spirit. “Sound spirit”, listen to me. Next comes drum circle theorizing.

“Miaou-Miaou” by Les Club des Chats

WFIT: Do you see the internet as a threat to the very existence of print media and physical music, or do you think collectors and enthusiasts will persist and endure?

SS: When the phonograph was invented, John Philip Souza claimed that it would lead to a “marked deterioration of American music and music taste, an interruption of musical development of the country…” and that the musician would be replaced by “the mechanical device” and that all would stop singing.

He ranted, “Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?” Oh pooh on “threats to very existences.”

WFIT: S-S has a history of reissuing awesome records by bands that have been passed by or otherwise slept on. Assuming you can’t breathe new life into every gem that comes along, what are some near-forgotten acts of the recent past that you think merit similar treatments?

SS: Nothing in particular or rather too much in particular to note. I’d like to see something (beside Mutant Sounds blog) documenting the DIY cassette underground of the Seventies & Eighties. Or recordings of the National Chest and the National Throat.

WFIT: Aside from merely staying afloat, do you have any long-term goals for either S-S. or Z Gun?

SS: With S-S. and Z Gun, I don’t think about the long term and don’t think about “staying afloat.” It is all about what records or issue I am working on at the time. Beyond that, it is for the soothsayers to see.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Scott Soriano in April 2009. S-S records can be found (and ordered from) online here, with Z Gun’s online presence here. Scott also blogs about rare and strange records at Crud Crud.

Whose Fault Is That: In case there’s anyone reading who might not have lent much thought towards something like game design, could you briefly describe what you do?

GW: Sure. In short, I make video games. Most of my games are written in a language called Actionscript 3 for the Flash platform, so they can be played in a web browser. I’m responsible for the graphics, the programming, and the design of the games. My most well-known work at the moment is probably (I Fell in Love With the) Majesty of Colors.

WFIT: What would you guess it is about (I Fell in Love With the) Majesty of Colors that made it more well-known than your others?

GW: Well, I should begin by saying that I’m very new to actually making games. I’ve played with game development in the past, but Majesty was only the second video game I’ve released, except for a piece of interactive fiction or two in college. But I think that Majesty’s appeal is that it provides a very unified aesthetic, and makes players feel what it would be like to be a titanic, tentacled horror from beneath the waves who really only wants to be loved.

WFIT: It’s interesting that you mention Majesty having a unified aesthetic, because I was going to ask you about how your games all feature radically different visual styles from one another. Could you go into why you’ve opted to do that? What would you say informs your artistic choices across the various games?

GW: Well, what I try to do is fit the art to the game. Majesty is really a very simple game, with simple controls and a simple-minded protagonist, so I went for blocky pixel art, which is both easy to make and evokes a simpler era of video games. With Bars of Black and White, I wanted the strong black-and-white aesthetic combined with sketchy line drawing to reflect the fact that the protagonist’s perceptions of the world are not entirely… accurate.

Exploit‘s graphics are meant to evoke the way we all imagine hacking should be like: neon geometric symbols, binary streaming past, and simple vector art on primitive displays.

WFIT: Considering you place such a strong emphasis on the unique graphical identities of your games, do you have any background in visual art or anything like that?

GW: I don’t have much art training. I took occasional art and cartooning classes growing up, and I did a weekly comic in my college newspaper called “The Absolute Sum of All Evil”. So I suppose I would consider myself an experienced amateur.

WFIT: What was it that attracted you to game design?

GW: I’ve always loved video games. I grew up with them, and I’ve always wanted to make my own. I’m a very creative person; my head’s always full of ideas. I’ve done some fiction writing, some cartooning, and a few other things, but I find interactive entertainment the most interesting. There’s this huge potential in video games, and we’ve only cracked the surface of what they can do.

WFIT: What are some of your favorite examples of game design, past or present? Things like experiences in games you thought were great, standout features, or narrative methods.

GW: Wow… that’s a tough question, since there are so many. I highlight a lot of stuff that I find interesting on my blog, Ludus Novus. But let me think of a few:

Shadow of the Colossus for the Playstation 2 was an incredibly emotional work. It’s a game where you’re battling immense creatures called Collosi in order to resurrect your dead love. The game is just effused with sadness. It makes you feel awful for killing these majestic creatures, while still motivating you to keep doing it.

Planescape: Torment is a classic roleplaying game for the PC based on Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike most D&D games, though, you spend most of your time having conversations with people instead of fighting. Planescape: Torment continually asks the question “What can change the nature of a man?” It gives a lot of answers over the course of the game, but never holds one up as the correct one.

Knytt is a small, freely downloadable game where you control a little furry animal who’s exploring a strange landscape. It manages to create better atmosphere with a few hundred pixels and some sound loops than any multi-million-dollar triple-A video game title. I could go on and on. I write a column twice a month for GameSetWatch called “The Interactive Palette” where I highlight an interesting technique in some interactive work and examine it in detail.

WFIT: It’s interesting that you mention Knytt’s simplistic, intuitive appeal versus a more mainstream game. I realize this is something of a broad question, but could you highlight what it is that you think such mainstream games are missing?

GW: Well, I definitely don’t want to come across as one of those people who are impotently scornful about mainstream gaming. There are some amazing works being done by big companies: Portal and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time are two of my favorite games in recent years. But because mainstream games are money-driven, and because the current state of the art is so complex, big game companies can’t afford to take too many risks. In order to keep huge game studios and publishers running, they need to make games that appeal to a broad spectrum of customers, and they need to avoid alienating too many of the fans.

The strength of independent game development is that a 2D game can be made by a couple of people over the course of a year or two and can be totally innovative and amazing. That’s World of Goo. Or you can make a whole bunch of rapid-fire games that don’t take long to code, and might not appeal to everyone, but they’re unique and clever and weird. Cactus and Increpare are two amazingly prolific developers who make some really cool stuff.

WFIT: I know this is a subject you’ve gone into a bit elsewhere, but what would you say it means to be an “indie” game developer?

GW: That’s a controversial topic. In my opinion, an independent game developer is one who can make games independently, without having to worry about the influence of a publisher or client dictating what they should be doing.

Of course, by that definition, Valve (the creators of Half-Life 2) is an independent developer. So my definition might be a bit flawed.

WFIT: I know you’re particularly fond of the sponsor-driven revenue model that sites like Kongregate have adopted. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about things like this, but I’d have to guess, then, that Kongregate stays out of your creative hair even though they have sponsors to worry about?

GW: Definitely. The way all my games have worked is that I have made the game from start to finish first, and then offered it up for sponsorship. Effectively, Flash portals competitively bid to sponsor finished games. That means that I get to maintain creative freedom, although it does introduce uncertainty. I’m never quite sure if a game is going to get sponsors interested at all.

One thing that I’m seeing more of is established indie game developers moving into the Flash platform. It’s a great way to make actual money for making free games.

WFIT: Could you ever see that sort of bid-based revenue model moving into other media, like print or video?

GW: I’m not very knowledgeable about the business side of things, but it’s definitely possible. It’s very similar to how fiction publishing works now. Many authors finish novels before submitting them to publishers. The thing about print and video is that there’s much more involved in publication. I don’t have to wait for a book to be printed and distributed; I can accept a sponsorship for a game, have the sponsor’s logo in the introduction, and have it up on their site in under 24 hours. But with the increased popularity of digital distribution for all forms of media, I can see the Flash-style sponsorship model working for other stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Youtube or Hulu sponsoring some independent films or shows, and I think it’s already happening some with shows like “The Guild.”

WFIT: That’s true. I’d like to switch gears a little bit and talk about your podcast. On the podcast, your style of speech seems somewhat stream-of-consciousness. Has that intellectual exploration ever produced ideas that you ended up working into a game?

GW: My brain definitely works in an intuitive, random-access fashion. I’ll often come up with an idea that’s just a flash of an image. Majesty started that way. I keep a list of one-sentence game and story ideas that come into my head as I’m struggling with insomnia or taking a shower. A couple of examples: “Game that simulates a talk show, w/ player choosing topics & callers,” or “Sad game, sad like Randy Newman. Player character is Death?”

WFIT: Those are solid ideas. Would you ever consider developing a more traditional longer-form game for, say, a console?

GW: I’d definitely consider it. Nintendo recently made an announcement that suggested that WiiWare games might be able to be implemented in Flash, which would fit nicely with my workflow. However, for a game to be well-received on a console, it needs a lot of work put into it. We’re talking years of work. At the moment, I’m happy making a game in 1-2 months. It lets me experiment with different things and avoid getting bored with an idea.

But if anyone’s offering me a position as a lead designer, I might consider it.

WFIT: Aside from your game-a-month project and continuing the podcast, do you have any other plans for the future?

GW: Hmm. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say, but I’ve been talking with a portal about doing games exclusively for them. Some of those would probably be some of my monthly games. Apart from that, my April game is going to be a piece of interactive fiction, which I’m finishing up right now. Although the piece I’m doing won’t exactly be a classic-style text adventure. It’ll be a little weird.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Gregory Weir on March 18, 2009. Links to all of Gregory’s games, as well as his blog and podcast, can be found at Ludus Novus.

Whose Fault Is That: I’ll cut to the chase: where do these incredible photos come from?

Superbomba: Can I tell you instead about one of my favorite places to find photos? It’s this store that is so stuffed full of junk that only one customer can fit in there at a time. You open a drawer and it’ll be full of buttons or matchbooks or old bits of paper. There is even stuff hanging from the ceiling — if you look up there’s a small old rowboat, ice skates, Simpsons toys, airways bags, cameras. This old guy owns the shop and he just buys everything he finds, I think. The first time I met him he told me about how he has 6 storage garages full of stuff he couldn’t fit in the shop. The last time I saw him he told me that he’s now got 12 of them. I can’t even imagine what they contain — nothing he has is very well maintained but you can find incredible treasures there. He must be a secret millionaire or something because I can’t understand how he would make enough money to afford more than a loaf of bread and a few bottles of whiskey each day. He doesn’t care if you just want to sit there for a few hours and look through the hundreds of old photos, which are all jumbled together and usually pretty filthy. I’ve found so much amateur smut there, too. The only thing I don’t like about the place is that I’m always scared he’ll die on me.

WFIT: What do you look for in a photo?

SB: I like extremes. Really boring or really interesting. Full of nothing or really over the top. I like anything where a person looks sad or awkward or nuts. I like anything creepy but most stuff seems sinister to me when taken out of context. I love faces! I’ve so many photos of people with really odd features and messed up hair, like they were made of out spare parts or something. Anything excruciatingly mundane or banal. Ultimately I look for whatever entertains me or captures my imagination somehow.

WFIT: Have you ever had any strange responses to your photos?

SB: Not really. Some people get a bit hostile about them, like I’m trying to do something other than just have a bunch of photos I like. The best response was a comment left on Flickr by some guy who obviously thought I had uploaded a self portrait – “i like ur boobs its big and sexy”

WFIT: What do you do with your time besides post amazing photos on the internet?

SB: I like to look at photos of baby animals on the internet. I also like having disco parties in my lounge room, sleeping, anything involving rollerskates and hosing things. Oh, I have a job too, which takes up some of my time.

WFIT: If you were going to the moon for an extended stay and you could only bring three of your photos, which ones would they be?

SB: The one of the poodle looking at the poodle cake. The girl falling off the cliff. The kids with Scooby Doo. I think they would all suit the moon.

WFIT: What do you think about when you look at those photos?

SB: I could get so corny and philosophical about this but I’ll try to restrain myself.

The dog cake photo is kind of a cautionary tale for me. I mean, baking a cake in the likeness of my dog and then sharing the cake dog with the real dog is something I would consider. Seeing that idea in photo form kind of makes me remember to not get too mental.

The cliff girl is perfectly imperfect. I want every photo I take to look like that. So much is wrong but that all makes it right.

The Scooby Doo kids are just silly. It was taken in 1984, before I was even born, but I can remember being that age and how ace it would have been to be on a fake TV with Scooby and Shaggy. I think it would feel the same for me now, at 22. I hope so.

WFIT: If you could hang out with one person from your photos, who would it be?

SB: The little guy in this. He kills me. I love him.

WFIT: Lastly, and most importantly, do you like Super Bombad Racing for PlayStation 2?

SB: Oh whoa, that actually exists! And it’s about Star Wars?! I feel ripped off.

David Cole interviewed Superbomba in March of 2009. Please, please view her entire, ridiculously large collection online.