Toonbots message board: My name is Michael and it's been 391 days...

Emsworth Sun Oct 15 13:32:44 2006 Re: My name is Michael and it's been 391 days... > I hope you all appreciate the immense amount of work that went into the > making of the latest episode. It took me roughly 0.5 seconds to > conceptualize, 15 minutes to cut out Sluggo and do a little rebalancing of > colors, 2 minutes to write an "episode", an hour and a half to > realize the Toon-o-Matic hasn't run on the last two machines I've owned > and install up-to-date components (ImageMagick, Ghostscript), another hour > to find and fix the code that spins the SVG, since ImageMagick's SVG > rendering defaults have changed, and a day to remember to reboot my > machine so my FTP client would stop sticking at the connect. Well, to be frank, with 391 days away from it, I admit, the amount of labor and time involved seems minimal to how long we've sat and cursed your name. But seriously, I was astounded just now to check the page, as I have by now been addicted to doing even though I've lost all hope of seeing any change in Mao's dead eyes, when whoops, there's Sluggo, a new debt, slightly altered text, and so on. Plus, the collective amount of time you spent is actually less than I spent on writing an old-time radio article for Muppet Wiki, and even less than I spent dealing with the nut who insisted that if Cookie Monster was renamed in England, he would be called "Biscuit Beast" and then went into a rant about "The Knock You Up Monster." So no admiration for the amount of work that went into it, but incredible, pleased astonishment that you did that work! I no longer expect any semi-annual respite in "hiatus" to actually lead to anything (or even revive the mostly dead Jihad, though that's moderately more likely), but I'm very very very glad it's there. So moderately enthusiastic cheers to the metacartoonist.

Michael Sun Oct 15 17:33:17 2006 Re: My name is Michael and it's been 391 days... > "Biscuit Beast" I like that one. A lot.

Emsworth Sun Oct 15 17:50:20 2006 Re: My name is Michael and it's been 391 days... > I like that one. A lot. Yeah. And when we kept telling him we didn't include imaginary names for characters, he called us Nazis.

Michael Sun Oct 15 18:29:10 2006 Re: My name is Michael and it's been 391 days... > Yeah. And when we kept telling him we didn't include imaginary names for > characters, he called us Nazis. You mean he wanted to include "Biscuit Beast" as an actual documentary name? That's ... unbalanced.

mouse Wed Oct 18 17:10:13 2006 well, drat. just last week, i reorganized all my cartoon bookmarks, neatly seperating those that update daily from those that update mwf, and i had put the message board in "sporadic but still updating", and finally moved the toonbots link to "dead", and what do you do? you go and revive it. you just do these things to be evil.

Michael Wed Oct 18 22:41:02 2006 Re: well, drat. > you just do these things to be evil. For all I know, it was your moving Toonbots to "dead" that woke the Muse. No. Actually, paradoxically, my stress is down. Turns out there's nothing current medicine can do for my son. You'd think my stress would be worse -- but instead, it means I don't have to worry whether or not to do what the doctors recommend. They don't have much to recommend. Oh, not to say they've stopped recommending things. It's just that he's probably got FSGS (focal segmental glomerulonephritic syndrome) and there's no actual cure. At best they can slow down the progress towards renal failure, dialysis, and transplant. Until now, it was probable that a course of steroids would help him. (Most of this stuff in kids is inflammatory, i.e. no actual damage unless it runs for years, and steroids suppress that.) We tried it, though -- his protenuria shot up to twice his worst level ever within a couple of weeks. So it's clear that whatever it is he has, it's not "steroid responsive." Which is unfortunate -- the prognosis would have been much better. Although: I have had an allergic reaction to prednisone myself. It's my thinking that he could, too -- and his classic allergic reaction happens to be protenuria. One nephrologist has agreed that it's plausible, one thinks it's a metabolic effect, and the third thinks the steroids simply had no effect, plus or minus, and it just happened that the natural course of his disease caused the rise. (Now, really -- after two years, it just happens to go up when we try steroids? How plausible is that? But this guy is otherwise very smart, actually listens and comprehends when we speak, and spent two and a half hours off the clock explaining every possible alternative he thought might apply to our son, so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt for now.) So, the kid's off the steroids. If his values go back down, we will have greatly surprised two nephrologists and mildly surprised the third. Over the summer, we had a lot of luck with varying his diet, avoiding food-allergy foods. Now we're looking more closely at diet, vitamins, touchy-feely stuff like Chinese herbs and stuff. Why not? Bloomington is thick with liberals; we might as well get some use out of that lifestyle. But anyway, paradoxically, I'm feeling more relaxed about life. And I guess my creativity is kind of kicking in. I'm working on the Toon-o-Matic code even, for the first time in five years. I'm moving it to Unix. (And of course after that, I open it up to the unwashed masses and retire.) I've got some kind of neat ideas for extensions, but the big one is that instead of just sticking with SVG, instead T-o-M v2.0 will write a big Makefile for the toon, allowing it to use all kinds of different tools to build the toon -- including random text generators or text manipulation tools, alternative graphical manipulation tools like Postscript again, stuff like that. I think it's going to be quite promising. Quite promising indeed.

mouse Mon Oct 23 01:38:06 2006 oh dear i'm sorry to hear about your son. i'll keep a good thought. and there's something to be said for diet and the like. i work in cancer prevention; we have a big study looking at the impact of diet in reducing recurrance of breast cancer (and now another doing the same with prostate cancer) - and eating right does seem to help. i guess it makes sense - you give your body the stuff it needs to keep healthy, and it stays healthier. don't know about chinese herbs, but a lot of medicines come from plants - there are, after all, just fool of chemicals. i'll hope you hit on the right ones.