Interworld

Ever wondered what it would be like to have a front row seat for a television series pilot that shows a lot of promise yet ultimately wasn't picked up by any major network? Well, that's exactly what reading Interworld is like -- and not just because Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves admit as much in the book's afterword.

It's an interesting premise, for sure: teenager Joey Harper somehow has the ability to "walk" across parallel dimensions, and each parallel dimension has some alternate version of himself. All these dimension-walking Joeys (who aren't always teenagers nor necessarily male, naturally) are both hunted and hunter: the former because their abilities can help fuel the technology of at least one empire bent on interdimensional conquest, the latter because they have banded together in the "Interworld" as a neutral cabal working against such forces to maintain the balance among worlds.

Unfortunately, as a novel Interworld is little more than a proof of concept. The plot isn't nearly as thoroughly developed as one would expect from the authors in question, the choice of language is at once too basic for advanced readers and too sophisticated for the "young adult" readership the book is classified under, and the overall finished product feels altogether rushed and rough around the edges. But these aren't entirely negatives. In the end, the Interworld can probably be described best as straightforward popcorn entertainment -- light, fluffy, and no frills -- that leaves one wondering about what might have been had that proof of concept been allowed to develop further.

Live. Work. Blog.

It should be fairly obvious by now that this blog gets by only to the extent that I frontload some articles. Sure, every so often I get to write in real time, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Really, it's when I have idle time or am confronted with a long break that I manage to prepare a number of posts and schedule them for release accordingly.

So here I thought that what I'd cobbled together over the Christmas holidays would allow me enough lead time to prepare some other missives on the fly, thereby posting something new every three days or so. Alas, I was wrong: I ran out of material, yes, but not before running out of time.

What can I say? It's been a stressful past few weeks. Between the wedding, the dissertation, and the things to do at the office, I've had no time to sit and write. Anything decent, anyway. It's rather strange to see the list of articles I'd filed away for subsequent posting suddenly grow shorter while the list of things I'd noted to write about become longer and longer. And longer.

Of course, this has happened before, and probably will happen again. But it troubles me all the same.

I'm funny that way.

Trying to draw something positive from my situation, I've opted to use this as an opportunity for some introspection. What I've come up with, so far, is this:

There is life.

There is work.

There is the blog.

I guess I have my priorities straight after all.

BBFI Corporate Presentation [Presentation Thursdays]

Here's a presentation I prepared for the Bato Balani Foundation (BBFI):



This is the first presentation I prepared after reading both Presentation Zen and Made to Stick. Compared to my earlier presentations, the aesthetic is much simpler and (in my opinion) much more elegant. Further, the combination of visuals and minimal text allows for the flexibility to tell stories about what the foundation does at greater length by expounding on the pictures. For instance, the picture on the sixth slide is from a MOA signing between BBFI, Enrique Zobel Foundation and Ayala Foundation-Gilas. That C-130 (?) airplane on the tenth slide is from a book donation program where we brought our books to Clark Air Base for them to be flown out to deserving schools in Mindanao. And so on.

Back to the finer points of the presentation: I had to custom-design the template because I wanted to make a presentation using pictures within curves. At first, I thought it would be possible to do this using large circles offset on the slidespace, only to learn that Keynote couldn't display the pictures correctly if I filled the object with the picture. I resorted to laying out a sample slide with a blank oblong object, saving it as an image and editing it in Photoshop to make the oblong transparent. The result: a slide template with a "hole" in it where I could send a picture behind in order to frame it within the curve. When I added text to the same slide, I just faded the picture to give it a watermark effect.

The net effect...you be the judge. On the plus side, it makes for more visual slides, and allowed me to experiment with a more stylish "navigation bar" along the curve (on the presentation, they are all live hyperlinks). In the minus column, the curve wastes a lot of space, and it becomes a challenge to keep text within the picture area.

The later slides were recycled from other presentations I'd made in the past, which is why they have a very different feel to them. Also, the presentation was deliberately structured the way it was so that it would make use of the simplest possible animation: a fade transition from slide to slide.

[About Presentation Thursdays: Every now and then, on a Thursday, I post a presentation from my archives and include some accompanying commentary not just about the content but also my thoughts on designing it. The presentations can also be viewed and downloaded from my Slideshare page (Creative Commons license applies).]

The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy has many things going for it that should appeal to a modern day comic book fan. It's a superhero book. Published by Dark Horse Comics. Written by a rock star. Et cetera. But its real appeal -- the reason it's come out of nowhere to become a critical success -- is that the comic is surprisingly good.

Maybe it's the off-kilter take on the genre, what with a superhero team composed of dysfunctional adopted siblings banding together in time to save the world. Maybe it's the way artist Gabriel Ba's artwork just suits the story to a tee. Maybe it's the way that the characters come across as having a deep and well-developed backstory, despite being a new title.

And, yeah, maybe the fact that it's written by Gerard Way, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, has something to do with it too.

Whatever it is, The Umbrella Academy is a breath of fresh air, and a fun title to boot. The first story arc, Apocalypse Suite, has already been collected in paperback. The second, Dallas is currently underway and already looks to be quite the charmer as well. Anyone who's ever wondered what The Incredibles would have been like had it been edgier and darker would do well to see what The Umbrella Academy has in store.

A Murakami Missive

Last month, the wife-to-be gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, for my birthday. It's a book I thoroughly enjoyed, and I do sincerely hope to get around to writing about it. In case I don't, allow me to share the following quotable quote from within its pages that happened to grab my attention:

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can't pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.

It's because of gems like these that I enjoy reading Murakami. The guy just gets it, and has the knack for framing even the most innocuous subject in such an elegant way. That observation of what it's like to be sixteen is right on the money. I particularly love the observation about being "proficient at strange, pointless skills." I know I had my fair share at that age. Still do.