No Media Kings Updates

Karrrrento Brothers!

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

[Hey, I'm going to Sundance next week -- drop a line if you are too & want to hang out!]

Check out the introduction of Anton and Toph Karrento, the Silk Gatherers, the latest clip from my lo-fi sci-fi feature Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

This is actually the segment I directed, and although I did it reluctantly (I figure my real skill sets are producing/writing), it was a joy to work with these two super-talented guys. Fantastic at improv, they totally internalized the 2040 world in a way that just floored me. And I felt they nailed the dysfunctional brothers dynamic. After we wrapped I made a text adventure game starring them that you can play here, just so I could spend some more time hanging out in my head with them. Is that weird, bro?

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Q. What do you do with the babies?

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:45:00 GMT

A. The only thing we could do, really� trash the defectives and start pumping out a new batch.

Check out the introduction of Gary and Karen, the Baby Makers:
http://ghostswithshitjobs.com/babymakers
The latest clip from my lo-fi sci-fi feature Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

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Meet the Digital Janitor

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:57:00 GMT

This month we're releasing the first 5 minutes of the new lo-fi sci-fi movie, which introduces the digital janitor. Each of the following three months we will be introducing a new character from our mockumentary. Check it out here.

It's also a part of the Celtx Seeds program, where we've additionally posted a little quick-and-dirty interview with a couple of us. We focused on a tips/how-to approach rather than, y'know, our motivations and artistic aesthetic. Not that that's irrelevant, but since Celtx is a scriptwriting app we figured most of the people watching would be fellow filmmakers.

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The Difference Engine Initiative

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:31:00 GMT

Last year I was speaking at the Game Developers Conference and saw Robin Hunicke‘s excellent microtalk (see it here at minute 24) about the continuing gender disparity in the games industry. Many talks of this type are documenting the ongoing systemic oppression of women, which is important and valid work. But Robin’s talk channelled Rosie the Riveter. It had a “this is broken , let’s fix it” attitude that was totally inspiring.

Mare Sheppard and I decided to start the Difference Engine Initiative.

As part of the OMDC-supported TIFF Nexus, the Hand Eye Society will be running two gamemaking incubators for women in Toronto, one in August-September, and one in October-November. By introducing new gamemakers from under-represented groups into our community, the Difference Engine Initiative aims to diversify what kind of videogames are made. Our first focus is women…

Find out about next week’s info session and how to apply for this free program over here.

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e-books and interviews with death machinery

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:58:00 GMT

My E-books, Available By Donation

How much do you charge for digital products? For a decade my answer to that was “nothing!” It was freeing to be able to give away stuff, unhampered by material costs of production. I’ve been giving away e-books since 2000, and I’ve benefited from this in a number of ways.

However — in case you missed it — things have changed in the last decade. The print book market has been becoming less viable, and the digital becoming more so. Also the e-book reading experience is becoming more and more comparable to the print one. At a personal level, I’m reading as much on my phone as I am on the page.

So: I’ve decided to charge something for them now. But how much?

That’s up to you. Whatever you think is fair and whatever you’re happy to pay.

If you’re looking for examples or to buy some, read on.

David Malki ! and Ryan North Interview

I’ve recently been inspired by the amazing long-form interview WTF podcast to revive the Inspiring Creators Series here on No Media Kings. The thing I love about Mark Maron’s style is that he is the opposite of the objective reporter — he’s a confessional, personal, self-obsessed egomaniac, and you end up loving him for it. I think when ever I was doing these interviews in the past I felt like the noble thing to do was to make it all about the person I was interviewing, when really I was most interested in having a open discussion with my peers and fellow cultural workers.

But anyway: Machine of Death. A smart and funny crowdsourced science fiction anthology self-published by a bunch of webcomic creators becomes a #1 best seller on Amazon, is publicly denounced by right wing pundit Glenn Beck and generally flies in the face of every scrap of received wisdom about publishing. Rethinking publishing is something I know a thing or two about, and what’s even better is I know these guys, so I thought it’d be a good way to try out this whole conversational approach. David was in town for TCAF and he and Ryan nicely made their way out to my place overlooking the railway in the Junction. We chatted for about an hour and a half and I cut thirty minutes out.

Listen to it here.

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A Graphic Division of Labour

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:14:00 GMT

A lot of people find quantifying the creative process to be distasteful somehow, but�I dig hour logging -- I keep track of how much time I'm spending on most of my projects. It gives me a way to predict timelines for similar projects in the future, and there's something geekily satisfying about all that addition at the end of a day. It didn't really work with the movie project I'm working on, too many�people and too many working styles, but it worked well with Shannon and I on the Sword of My Mouth graphic novel.

[Shannon, by the way, is currently on tour on the west coast -- she's doing a book launch at Lucky's on Aug. 24th in case you live in Vancouver!]

So here's a breakdown of how much time we each spent working on the book.

Read the rest of this post �

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Build Your Own Indie Arcade Cabinet

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:30:00 GMT

Last year I organized a project where we gutted an '80s era arcade cabinet and filled it full of indie games. Jph Wacheski, the chief retrofitter, wrote the article below for people wanting to do the same in the most recent Broken Pencil.

Lots of people are making their own games these days -- point-and-click tools like Scratch and GameMaker are making it more accessible for non-programmers, and it's easy to get your game out there via the internet. But wouldn't it be even cooler to get you and your friends' games out there on an old-school arcade cabinet?

The old cabinets are generally made to play one specific game, but you can re-fit it with a PC and a display and wire up the existing controls to make playing new games possible. Many people have been doing this to run emulators of the classic games -- MAME cabinets can run hundreds of old games on a single cabinet. The Hand Eye Society, Toronto's videogame culture collective, wanted to do a similar thing, but with locally made games. They debuted the Torontron, which plays six hand-crafted games by Toronto indies, at the last Canzine. Jph, who did the retrofitting, takes us through the steps he took.

Read on...

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Roundsdoctors and Hexslingers

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:43:00 GMT

Two recent book trades that I felt I got the better deal of -- A Dream on Two Wheels and A Book of Tongues.

Wheels is a smart and whimsical cyclist alternate reality written by Sarah A. Chrisman, who not only handmakes her books but also a selection of hats you can wear while reading them. Lovely!

Tongues is a baroque masterpiece. The worldbuilding is as dense and rich as China Mi�ville's, and the cowboy sex smells of�Jean Genet's forbidden machismo. The fact that this outlaw confabulation has come from a debut novelist from Toronto and a Toronto publisher of excellent weird spec-fiction just makes me extra-excited.

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Promoting the Hell Out of It

Tue, 04 May 2010 01:16:00 GMT

Hey, we're putting out a graphic novel treating the Rapture irreverently -- we're damned anyway, might as well get the word out about Sword of My Mouth! First up -- science-fiction powerhouse io9.com is running a contest where you can win a copy of the print edition by rewriting my dialogue. It's had a hundred entries in the first six hours, but there's 18 hours left!

Secondly -- what with the urban farming theme and spring being here and all, we figured it'd be fun to make seed packets marketed for the post-Rapture world -- ones that don't need the light of God to grow. (The first twenty people to bu y a copy of Sword of My Mouth at the Toronto launch get one.) So Scott made a nice design and Shannon went to take some pictures "in context" as it were at a garden centre. The photo and the altercation that followed with the manager follows over here!

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Roofed, a Preemptive Spin-off Game

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:06:00 GMT

I made a text adventure videogame for the jayisgames interactive fiction competition that you can play now. Because they're on my mind -- Tate's making steady progress on the rough edit for our new lo-fi sci-fi feature -- it features two characters from the upcoming Ghosts With Shit Jobs movie, the Karrento Brothers.

So if you're up for a bit of transmedia fun, you can play the game before the movie's released.

You and your brother's job -- scouring the city's highest spots for a rare building material in the year 2040 -- is already hard enough. Now Anton's gone and gotten you trapped on a rooftop. Your acrobat bloodline will help you with the deadly heights, and your brain will figure out the genmodded plants -- but will you be able to cope with having the most annoying big brother alive?

Play it now.

The jayisgames Casual Game Design Competition #7 gave people two months to make a text game with an "escape-the-room" theme. It's got a cash prize of $1000, pretty high for a IF comp, and an engaged audience of game players. I'm looking forward to checking out the other 30 or so entries!

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Wrapped!

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:52:00 GMT

We finished shooting Ghosts With Shit Jobs, the new lo-fi sci-fi feature I wrote, just before Halloween. We're currently looking for volunteers to help with post-production duties such as:

soundtrack composition

special effects and titling

colour correction

audio post and ADR

If you or someone you know are into finding out more, drop us a line! We unfortunately can't pay up front, but click through to see if you're excited enough by what we've shot so far to help us out anyway.

In 2040, a generation of Torontonians have grown up after the economic collapse of the west. The movie consists of episodes of a documentary series popular in mainland China about the bad jobs some white people have � the plucky and resilient souls unlucky enough to be born into the slums of North America are both amusing and moving to the Chinese audience.

Oscar is a digital janitor, and has to manually cover up logos for copyright reasons in the future's answer to Google StreetView maps.

He doesn't really know why he's on a show about bad jobs, because he thinks his job is pretty great � he gets to see history come alive in front of his eyes, like the garbagemen who fancy themselves like archaeologists.

But the long hours and loneliness are getting to him, especially since the death of his mother.

Gary and Karen are babymakers. They assemble robot baby dolls for the children of the wealthy in Asia.

They're so indistinguishable from real babies that the crying, diapers and feeding of a half-dozen units at once is driving the couple a little crazy and straining their relationship. Both of them are hugely overqualified for the job, but while Gary has a reasonable ten-year plan, the more ambitious Karen would do anything to be making battlebots now.

Anton and Toph are silk collectors. Twenty years ago a herd of gigantic spiders ran amok over the eastern seaboard after a genelab outbreak, leaving behind buildings swathed in spider web silk.

Although highly toxic and difficult to collect, people like Anton and Toph risk their lives to get it � it's worth its weight in gold as an ultrastrong building material.

Anton, the enthusiastic and delusional older brother, loves the idea of becoming famous for collecting the Tower silk. Toph, the more intelligent younger brother who actually does the collecting, knows it's a deathtrap.

Serina is human spam. She makes a living by mentioning brands and products in casual conversation, and is credited based on their status and wealth.

Because of the life she's chosen, she's disconnected from friends and family but protected by a lipstick-sized tazer and her �people� in the Nigerian cartel.

A chameleon and professionally skilled at reinvention, her good humour and friendliness is only skin deep � beneath it is a cold and ruthless survivor.

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