Robin Sloan

Tales from the N.E.R.D.

So, when you arrived at the Annabel Scheme launch party on Sat­ur­day, you were pre­sented with a piece of evi­dence from Scheme’s col­lec­tion. They were all dated and tagged in ziploc bags; they were all very strange.

Your mis­sion: come up with the story behind the evi­dence! There was a Nar­ra­tive Evi­dence Research Data­base col­lec­tion sta­tion set up, off to one side of the party, to cap­ture these sto­ries. Here’s just a taste of what peo­ple recorded:

(Note to par­ty­go­ers: My Mac­Book seems to have become some kind of unsta­ble quan­tum com­puter, because the sound on sev­eral of the clips got zapped. So there were some truly excel­lent stories—well, they looked excellent—that I couldn’t include. Argh!)

Huge thanks to N.E.R.D. col­lab­o­ra­tor Dan Bouk, who helped gather, pre­pare, and dis­trib­ute the evidence.

Music to read by

Aaron’s work­ing on gen­er­a­tive music (!) for my book read­ing on Saturday.

Postmodern dance in Denton, Texas

I’m in Texas this week­end to see my sister’s big dance per­for­mance. She and her col­leagues spent weeks observ­ing (spy­ing on?) patrons in a pop­u­lar cafe here; then they used all those bits of lan­guage and motion as raw mate­r­ial for chore­og­ra­phy and impro­vi­sa­tion. It was a forty-​​five minute show, and way cooler and more com­plex than any YouTube clip could com­mu­ni­cate. Lots of indeli­ble moments and—best of all—lots of laughter.

Yes, every project has to involve a laser somehow

A cover that moves and sings

Not so much a book trailer as an ani­mated book cover… and a love let­ter to my Kick­starter back­ers. (And you can see it even big­ger on YouTube.)

I said this over on Kick­starter, too, but for those of you dis­cov­er­ing it here first: As you watch it, imag­ine some future e-​​book with this ani­ma­tion lit­er­ally built into the cover, writhing on your book­shelf. I want that.

If you’re new to this: You can still join up! The project closes on Octo­ber 31.

The sound­track is Demonic With Horns by Boy Eats Drum Machine, a.k.a. Jon Ragel, who “spins breaks and sur­gi­cally inserts sounds while jug­gling vocals, per­cus­sion, and sax­o­phone” and is one of my cur­rent favorites. Another of his tracks, Ross Island—free to down­load—has been in heavy rota­tion dur­ing the whole writ­ing process. Here he is on Ama­zon MP3. Thanks, BEDM!

The visu­als were gen­er­ated in Pro­cess­ing.

Nerd note: after the rush of this book is over, I need to change the way I do Pro­cess­ing projects. Right now it’s totally strung-​​together, totally depen­dent on weird system-​​specific file-​​paths and vari­ables, which makes it basi­cally impos­si­ble to share the code. And I would like to share it! So that’s on the to-​​do list.

First glimpse of Fog City

I read a small sec­tion from the story-​​in-​​progress into the cam­era over at Kick­starter. Watch closely; there’s a clue.

(Also, I made that sound effect myself, and I’m pretty proud of it!)

Also: Cara Pow­ers writes a nice post about the project.

Simulated luckdragon

I just had this vision and felt com­pelled to make it. It’s some recom­bi­nant ver­sion of this guy, I think. Built and ani­mated with Pro­cess­ing. (Check it out in HD!)