No Media Kings Updates

Full House for GHOSTS World Premiere

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:26:00 GMT

I was lucky enough to attend the world premiere of our movie, Ghosts With Shit Jobs, with a sold out crowd in London's Piccadilly Circus last night.

Sci-Fi-London was just an amazing fest for it to have its debut. Here we have programmer Louis Savy introducing the movie with his trademark profane charm. Louis is a real advocate for DIY filmmaking and he and his team have been building a diverse and open-minded science fiction movie audience over the past decade.

Here's me doing my best to answer the smart questions from the host and the audience.

Even the lobby of the theatre was terrific, a great place to have a drink and chat about the movies.

Thanks to everyone who made it happen! Off to Berlin today for the next screening, and looking forward to our Toronto�debut at the end of the month. If you're not in these towns, there's still ten days to grab an advance copy for $10 and support our continued theatrical tour.

Thanks to Derek for the pics.

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Kickstarted!

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:51:00 GMT

Fantastically, we reached our goal of $5000 in three days, and it's still climbing. Thanks to everyone who pledged or told their friends.�Thanks also to the Kickstarter folks who made us a staff pick�on their blog.

Now we get to decide where we go!

If you have any interest in seeing us bring Ghosts With Shit Jobs to your town, please drop a line. We're looking for people who're willing to spread the word in their community and in teaming up with like-minded organizations or collectives (or mythical constructs) to make it happen.

Some interesting stats: approximately 25% of the money funded came from Kickstarter inbound links. The platform more than earned its 5% cut.

I recognized about 25% of the names of the donors, and the rest were lovely, generous, strangers to me -- but probably many of them were familiar to our large cast and crew.

For those who haven't pledged yet, you have until May 18th to get a DRM-free copy of the movie direct from us for ten bucks.

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Hating The System While Loving Systems

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:16:00 GMT

A big part of the reason I like community organizing, beyond the social and cultural aspects, is that it allows me to design systems. Beyond their cleverness and elegance, systems are great at automating routine things and I find this useful in a number of ways in my life.

Read on...

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Weekday Warrior

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:18:00 GMT

I got to work with one of my favourite gamemakers, Paolo from Molleindustria. He had an idea for a game depicting the day in the life of a drone pilot.

Now you get to play the newest kind of soldier: one who remotely drops bombs on foreign soil during the day, and at night goes home to his family in the suburbs. In Unmanned, the conflict is internal — the only blood you’ll shed is from shaving cuts. But is there collateral damage in this new way of waging war?

I did the writing for it. We went out to Sundance for its debut, and now you can play it online here.

“Unmanned‘s a sharp satire that highlights how video games can circumvent traditional modes of political discourse.” — Kotaku

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Weekend Warrior

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:16:00 GMT

I got to work with one of my favourite gamemakers, Paolo from Molleindustria. He had an idea for a game depicting the day in the life of a drone pilot.

I did the writing for it. We went out to Sundance for its debut, and now you can play it online here.

“Unmanned‘s a sharp satire that highlights how video games can circumvent traditional modes of political discourse.” — Kotaku

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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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