Yup, it's true.

I've been reading The Long Tail, a book about the new economy evident in the online marketplace. It takes a book to explain it if you aren't a digital storytelling student, but here's a good example: (link) The "long tail" comes from the sales graph (say, from iTMS) where online sales peak with the predictable popular hits, then drops off sharply with the less popular songs. The graph never quite hits zero, though, and those low sellers add up like mad after a while. Niche markets hold more sway than they used to. The aforelinked article shows this, where casual gamers make up an estimated %76 of total game sales. This figure is broken down further, but the vast majority of people aren't as committed to gaming as the people video games are marketed to. This is interesting to me, anyway.

It's new comic day today. I got some good ones, the standout being Doc Frankenstein, a comic written by the Wachowski brothers that hasn't come out in nearly a year.

The mass influx of denim-clad academic acolytes to this jerkwater burg signals the start of the Fall semester once again. I've seen a few people I know walking around, and I can't help but notice the looks I get suggesting that people had thought I graduated. Not yet, kids- I'll be leaching off the state until December. In the meantime, I have plenty of projects to keep my busy, many of which will be documented online.

The last couple of times I've been to Best Buy, I've noticed an alarming trend in the music section. The employees are getting agressive now. It used to be that they'd troll the aisles and make their presense known now and again, similar to sharks off the coast of Hawaii. For some reason, they're now in full-on South-African-great-white mode, aggressively pouncing on anything in or near their territory. The first time it happened, I was digging through the middle of the alphabet in the rock/pop section. A blueshirt came up to me and asked me if I needed help finding anything. I said no without looking up, thus upholding my end of the social contract to at least the minimal standard. He pressed the matter, asking me what I was looking for, and I said I didn't know. He then asked me what kind of music I'm into, as if the Metalica-fan circa '93 hair/beard combo wasn't at least a clue. I'm pretty good at blocking out people I don't want to deal with, but this one actually tripped my old "don't talk to strangers" reflex. I looked up at him, said "lots of kinds," and moved away from him.

The second incident in recent memory was a week ago. I was looking for the Metric album that got a good writeup in the New Yorker, when someone came up behind me and said "hey, how 'ya doing?" Students had been filtering back in all week, and I figured I would see somebody I knew in public at some point, so I stood up and turned around to see a complete (albeit cute and female) stranger standing there in a BSU shirt. It threw me off, as her nametag was partially concealed by her hair. The faux-familiarity seemed presumptuous, and I gave her a weird look, as I was genuinely thrown off by her manner. I walked out of the store a little mad about this. The guy at the independently-owned Villiage Green didn't bug me when I ultimately bought the CD I was looking for in the first place. I like owning physical media, but iTunes and Amazon don't take the piss out of me when I purchase online.

My first attempt at 3-D modeling in Second Life:


I had to fight it a bit because the shapes can only scale down so far, and the ability to make 2d shapes is conspicuously absent (a low poly-count is desirable, one would think), but I'm happy with the result so far. For those of you who haven't read Warren Ellis's early-career Transmetropolitan comic, the odd-shaped glasses are a prominent character feature of the protagonist. I'm not %100 happy with this yet, and I may just break down and pay the $.34 to upload a 2-D image of the glasses. Thus far, I'm really impressed with Second Life.

Oh, how I want a burrito now.

The new apartment is quite nice, though I'm not totally settled yet. I'm working more until the semester to finish a couple big things at work, so I'm usually tired when I get home and end up going to bed early in order to catch the first MITS bus I can in the morning. The bus isn't bad, and the human menagerie is entertaining enough. I'm lucky to be on a line that stops right by the building I work in.

I opened the door the other night to find a huge spider web across the top left corner, complete with a large spider. The little bugger had spun the entire thing in the span of a few hours since I had last opened the door. I cleared it away, but the web was back the next morning for me to walk through. This was a formidable spider, with exponentially more legs than me, so I waited until it turned around (thus exposing the belly) and then clobbered it.

One more thing- I tried out Second Life to see what the character creation options were like. Here's my avatar after some rudimentary tweaking:

I think I'm happy with it. Now I just have to make some clothing textures.

This is intentional, don't worry:
Read that last line carefully: why would the IRS need a copyright? I found this spam in the BSU question/comment e-mail account that I've been working in. I don't normally read spam, but this one caught my eye because it was funny. Also note the processing time of 6-9 days. I don't think the IRS can change a coffee filter that fast.