Psycho Java

In a lull of client-sponsored agendas, I have been able to focus on writing a javascript app that will present the webcomic. I am mega-pleased with the result! The basic idea is to have a series of animations that represent dialog balloons and subtly shifting environmental details that are triggered by clicked on arrow keys that go from each ‘statement’ into the next. Of course, all of this has the backdrop of the basic piece of art for that day’s ‘episode’, but there is no need for absolute scene-frames or even a particular left-right up-down reading order…which gives me precisely the language/culture-bias free framework that I have been striving for.

While I was working on the prototype I had a sudden insight aimed at the analogy between the perspective of comics – that of a reader looking at frozen time with an inner sense of narrative flow layered over and under – and that of the higher ‘fast’ time realms of the story. A person who experiences a million years for every year of ‘normal’ time (and 11.5 days for every second!) sees the whole world of ‘slow’ consciousness as a kind of frozen, comic subject.

Working on the code was, in itself, full of artistic weirdness and reflection. My way of doing this task is very hard to describe – but its success usually surprises even me. Basically, I stare at a coded primitive of some algorithm that I have cobbled together as an initial guess. I do this for a couple hours. Then, in a very brief flash, without almost any conscious oversight, I type out a thousand lines of code which is usually fully functional without debugging. Occasionally, like all coders, I run into some deeply mysterious malfunction which is inevitably the omission of a comma or the improper capitalization of a variable and I then spend 80 to 90 percent of all my project time chasing down some awful minutia and/or bug in the software environment I am working in. The inspiration, meditation cycle is deeply creative; the debugging is one of the most profoundly yucky tasks ever devised by the human race. Pure torture…a sense of wasted hours and wasted life. But that’s code.

Anyway: everything works – “so all’s well that ends well”. Now I just have to figure out how to turn this script into a unit of input in a Drupal-based blog and away we go Web 2.0 style. Of course, now that I have empowered animation layers, I have to get my moving image chops back on line. Have been practicing using Camtasia (a screen to video capture tool) and MCell (cellular automata) to create some very compelling gnarly chaos movies which will make just the kind of layer detail I need…I cannot wait for y’all to see this stuff. It is wicked strange, and borders on wonderful from time to time. Will link you up when I can get the prototype properly hosted outside my cozy little sandbox.