MCM's Blog, page 66

RollBots PreCap: 110 “The Do Right Module”

This week, I’m trying something different by giving you a PREVIEW of the upcoming episode, rather than recapping at the end. I won’t be giving away spoilers, but it’ll give you some fun things to watch as the episode airs. This Saturday’s episode is one of mine called “The Do Right Module”, which should have an acronymmy subtext that many of you will enjoy.

The episode’s idea is this: Mayor Aria gets the Tensai to build chips that keep people from breaking the law.  A very strict interpretation

The source of 99% of my guilt

Many moons ago, I wrote a little joke article on Push the Third Button Twice entitled “Unlock Dark Castle on your iPhone/iPod Touch“. It was a parody of other how-to’s I’d seen, where people gave you stupidly complex instructions about how to do strange things with gadgets, most of which probably didn’t work. So I went out of my way to write the most absurd article I could, promising the classic Mac game on their slick new phones.

I honestly didn’t think anyone would take it seriously.

Today I w

Useful tool for writers: tag clouds

I’m probably very late to this game, but I’ll write it anyway. I was reading this wonderful post about common mistakes people make while writing, and began thinking about word frequency in my books. I know I have word crutches that I fall back on regularly (even in bloody blog posts), so I want to try and kill them off with stunning efficiency. That made me think of tag clouds, which usually show you the frequency of the use of website “labels” for a particular site. But one service, TagCrow

Nearly-Mid-April Update

[image error]Want to know why free books are great?  I’ll tell ya: today, there’s a revised version of TorrentBoy: Zombie World! out.  I call it 1.1, and it’s 100% thanks to kdnewton, probably the most consistent and persistent contributor to the project.  Thanks to his keen eye, I was able to fix a bunch of typos and other glitches that needed fixing.  The PDF and .epub downloads you get are now fully patched, and ready to go.  If you happen to buy a paper copy before the new version is integrated at Lightn

RollBots Recap: 109 “Two Left Feet”

Every week, I’m going to try and give you some inside information about episodes of RollBots, so you can see the things that went into producing each story. You should probably watch the episode first (probably won’t have a choice, since these posts won’t go live until after the episode airs).

109 is one of those episodes that I dreamed up early in the production process, when I was trying to imagine what kinds of silly problems RollBots could get in to. Initially, the idea was to have OddBall m

On Agents and Publishers

Recently, I was asked how much I hated agents (the literary kind), given my self-publishing tendencies.  I think I was supposed to rant for a while, but I didn’t.  I was actually pretty supportive of agents.  And it got me a stilted reply.

Here’s the thing: I think agents are probably largely useful.  A lot of people think they’re parasites, but that doesn’t really fit.  You have to look at this objectively: agents make money when you make money.  To make you make money, they will push you toward

RollBots Recap: 108 “Crontab Trouble”

Every week, I’m going to try and give you some inside information about episodes of RollBots, so you can see the things that went into producing each story. You should probably watch the episode first (probably won’t have a choice, since these posts won’t go live until after the episode airs).

Those of you know know what a cron job is will probably get the meaning of this episode right away.  For those of you who don’t I’ll refer to the Wikipedia definition…

cron is a time-based job scheduler in U

TorrentBoy Update: Coding is Hard

Stupid feature creep.

I’m building a system for managing TorrentBoy creations right now.  It’s a pretty simple beast, but the theory still makes my head spin.  While it take a break from breaking things, I will give you a quick rundown: from now on, creators upload their work to the site by filling out a form.  As part of it, they define a royalty value for the work, which is IN ADDITION to the 20% the Project takes.  So when you’re looking to make a shirt, you can browse the list of images in th

Interesting Philosophical Predicament

The TorrentBoy Project is doing well so far, and over the weekend we got the first of the not-created-by-me artwork submitted by the prolific kdnewton.  At the same time, I’ve fielded a few questions related to submitted content that bring up an interesting question that I want to contemplate publicly, because it’s a vital part of the equation.  The problem goes like this:

Let’s say you’re an artist.  You draw a picture over the course of a week, and submit it to the Project.  Because you created

TorrentBoy Milestone: First Not-Me Sale!

I was expecting things would move slowly at first with TorrentBoy, but I was wrong.  Sometime overnight, we sold our first t-shirt from Zazzle, earning rdawson a whopping $3.52!  Now that doesn’t seem like a huge amount, but it’s still an important milestone for the Project.  We’ve sold our first merchandise!  I celebrated by sending rdawson a PayPal transfer this morning, which I hope he spends on a celebration of some kind.  Or, you know, coffee.

So!  If you had doubts about the feasibility of