The arrival of my daughter Corita has only taken up five months or so of my time, so obviously it is something I have been postponing/procrastinating for longer than that.
A large portion of my creative energies go towards the continued study of printmaking in its many forms. Most recently I have been studying lithography, a rather complicated process with many steps and procedures. That accounts for about 1/7 of my time, or one day a week.
Associated with printmaking are my occasional efforts to sell my artwork, primarily on eBay but also through wetcanvas.com (very Beaux-Arts) and Deviant Art. Investing a lot of time in any of these three sites seems to produce limited results, as advertising channels they are all highly saturated.
Anyway, this New Forms Manifesto has been on my mind a lot lately, so look forward to some new thoughts soon.

I doubt that White Chamber took over a year to produce, short of some significant setbacks. I can only speculate.
At one point in Viridian Room you can peer into the Crimson Room, establishing a satisfying relationship between the two puzzles. At the end of Viridian Room your “soul”, in the form of a skeleton, is freed from the rooms. The narrative structure of the two rooms is self-contained.
White Chamber is less ambiguous, and consequently less evocative than the Crimson Room puzzle. It takes the “locked in a room” idea as an established cliche. At the same time, it makes less use of forced perspective tricks to hide the items for which you are looking. Previously, these forced perspecive camera views provided most of the challenge — you had to click at the edge of the bed to see that area. Decyphering the navigation was most of the puzzle.
The main prop in White Chamber is a motorcycle. Navigation around this motorcycle is somewhat infuriating, because the different views aren’t always mutually connected. Here is a map of the ten views of the motorcycle, and the navigation (perhaps 90% accurate) between them:

There is no way to navigate a path that starts with a black circle. You can’t move from the right side rear tire to the front suspension — not that this path makes much sense in either direction.
White Chamber contains one puzzle that breaks with the “click to solve” convention of the previous games. This is one of the final puzzles, in which you must drag items to the right locations on the screen.
There is nothing unusual about this kind of puzzle in the adventure game genre, but it is not characteristic of the previous puzzles by the creators. (Consider Myst, where the interface was entirely point and click. Drag and drop is a different kind of interface, as is a draggable scrollbar.) In addition, the purple block puzzle is an uninteresting variation on a previous puzzle in the same game, which makes the change in navigational styles even more disappointing.
See also: Algorithm for constructing locked room puzzles
A personal note: As a graduate student, I once got into a bit of hot water when I spent several weeks working on a locked room puzzle. The game used Quicktime VR with a Director plugin, so you could navigate a 360 degree view and click on hotspots within the image. During a critique, one of my reviewers was an architect-turned-3D modeller. When I asked him what he thought of the interactive quality of the project, the only thing he could talk about was the lack of molding (cornice and base molding) in the model I had rendered.

3. [Avoid] nondescript posting titles: Aside from the occasional musings, I think most of my titles are evocative of the contents. I’ve certainly seen more cryptic headlines on Backwards City.
4. Links say where they go: Yes.
5. Classic hits are not buried: They aren’t buried so much as they predate the blog as it currently exists. People who come to this site for something besides the blog are probably looking for the Echidna game, or information on the “Dr. K— Project”.
6. More than calendar navigation: Yes, I’ve got category links and search.
7. Regular publishing frequency: I think Nielsen misses the mark with this one. Things like rdf and syndication and aggregation make regular publishing schedules superfluous.
8. Don’t mix topics: Again, syndication and aggregation, were they to be set up effectively, make this a moot point. Admittedly, it would be better for me to create a “game channel” feed for the game blog aggregators (like game*blogs), and a different feed for the lit blogs, and so on. But this is a suggestion to keep things narrowly focused, which creates unnatural ecologies.
9. Remember that you write for your future boss: I’ll take this as a point to not get too personal lest people think you have a personality. I think this applies differently in different situations, as the convetions for academic discourse are much different from those of movie reviews.
10. Own your own domain: Yes.
After a quick tally, I’m good for 4+ out of 10, and not in total agreement for 2 of the suggestions.
I guess I will go work on my biography.

One thing that makes me sad about the IBList is the book rating system. Once you register, you can rate books on a scale of 1 to 10 (a type of range voting). And, like IMDB, the ratings are weighted to compensate for some books being rated more often than others.
If you think about how your rating will affect the rank of a book, and if you want to maximize the influence of your opinions, you will quickly conclude that the logical thing to do is to give any book you like a score of 10, and any book you dislike a score of 1. Your opinion will be mixed in with that of dozens — or hundreds — of other voters, and making a nuanced choice between “8″ or “9″ is just a waste of time; a difference of 1 point lumped with 10 other voters has a net effect of .1, and with 100 has a net effect of .01.
When you rate only 1 or 10, this becomes a form of approval voting. A nice feature of approval voting is that the distribution of votes is a binomial distribution (although range voting looks like a bell curve, it is not binomial), which makes it extremely amenable to statistical methods. Standard deviations can be calculated with a simple formula, and these deviations can be used to compare entries with different sample sizes, without having to rely on an artificial weighting mechanism.
But the IBList people have chosen range voting, because that is the popular rating scheme that everyone else uses on the web. Everything ends up with a 7, or, on Amazon, every book gets 3.5 stars. These ratings provide no information.

Harry Potter fans are the adults, with and without children, who enjoy reading the books. They claim if the books enourage more children to read on their own, then this makes the books even better. The Harry Potter critics say that the writing quality is poor, that it distracts both children and adults from more worthy books. “How did we ever come to this situation, where a children’s book is a bestseller?”
Harry Potter and GTA are very unalike, in their content and their audience. One is wholesome, or at least of some educational value, while the other is intentionally unwholesome and pandering. But the champions of both Harry Potter and GTA are alike in the way they defend their opinions; they honestly enjoy the works, and make arguments to insist that, given the proper audience, these are both works that can enjoyed by lots of people.
From the critical side, there is a problem with the “proper audience”: it is an abstraction, it doesn’t exist. Whether or not someone is part of the proper audience doesn’t prevent them from taking a book or game off the shelf. In the case of computer games, yes there are restrictions on who can purchase a game (the ESRB), but these restrictions only apply in some, and not all, cases where someone picks up a game. In the case of a book, there is no sign on the bestseller shelf which says: “Warning: children’s book”.
Without a “proper audience” in place to regulate who consumes which product, there is no “parental supervision” and no “suggested rating” — these are only temporary situations which will fade quickly, while the products remain solid.
The result is that we end up with a lot of copies of these books and games, they become pervasive, and, by this pervasiveness, tomorrow’s readers will assume these things are of value. Kids and adults will both read Harry Potter and play GTA, because they are fun.
This is the responsibility that most champions remain unaware of. Are these the things you want to see on the library bookshelf? If getting kids to read is a good thing, is Harry Potter the kind of reading you want to encourage? Personal taste aside, aren’t there more memorable and more meaningful books out there?
And for the GTA defenders, this will only lead to more games oriented around sex and violence. It doesn’t matter what the critics and watchdogs say; having a copy of this game on your shelf is a stronger endorsement than any amount of parental supervision can overcome.
We all want our opinions to be heard and considered. Yet when we listen to other people’s opinions we consider them collectively. You can’t have an opinion about every book and every game, because no one has enough time to examine every one of them. So we’re forced to accept the collective opinion on these things. In the case of both Harry Potter and GTA, the collective opinion says “thumbs up, we recommend it.” Special conditions mentioned by individuals — “but not for children” — get lost in the mix.
…

Contrast this with a more contemporary science fiction story, such as The Matrix. While the Matrix universe is rich in backstory, the individual characters have almost no backstory at all. In particular, one doubts that Neo was ever a child, that he ever had parents or went to school. He is simply a character who, like many others in his world, is searching for a way “out”, for no clear reason. As for the action of the story, it is mostly exposition: first Neo learns the truth of his world (by escaping the Matrix), then he learns his role in world (by visiting the Oracle). Finally we get some adventure, Neo becomes the One and defeats his nemesis all in one long explosive scene. End of part one.
In the second Matrix film, a new part of the backstory has to be developed: the assorted “rogue programs” who also reside in the Matrix universe. The entire second movie consists of plot devices to get to the climactic scene, which turns out to be yet more exposition — by the Architect — on how the Matrix universe works. There is seemingly no story here at all, the action is just a slow setup for yet another movie where (hopefully) something important will happen.
So here are two approaches to telling a thematically similar story (the Hero’s Journey), one of which is, in my opinion, far more engaging. (This is not meant to be a novel versus film argument.) In one sense, the second Matrix movie represents the time between important actions, the equivalent of the twelve years that are intentionally elided from the Dune story. But in another sense, having the events of the second and third Matrix movies fall so close on the heels of the first movie diminishes the story of the first movie; when does Neo have time to be the hero he has become? When will he use his powers? If he doesn’t use his powers (his powers within the Matrix) then what was the whole point of having them?
In contrast, Paul Muad’dib is allowed to use his powers “off screen”. And not just Paul; all of the characters, friend and foe alike, get a chance to act behind the scenes.
I feel I’m not quite making the point I wanted to make. I’m trying to avoid talking about sequels, the way that a successful book or movie can spin out into a series of books or movies. Sequels have their own special features, they have more than just a basic backstory (hidden story), they have an explicit background story (the previous episode), and the interstitial backstory (what happened between episodes), all of this in addition to the original backstory.
So what is important about sequels is the way they divide a story into episodes, and the space between those episodes. The story made up of these episodes is an overarching story; now, the question is, how big should this overarching story be? Should it consume the entire backstory, as I feel The Matrix does? What if the story is small in comparison to the backstory? I think both cases are subject to historic trends. There are also trends in how much interstitial backstory is created between episodes.
Take the Harry Potter novels, for example. This is a story that leaves very few gaps in the action, every important event in Harry’s life is detailed here. The story is also constructed around the revelation of the backstory leading up to Harry’s orphanhood. If there is any doubt as to the importance of the overarching story vs. the backstory, look at the verbosity of these books. No background element is so small that it doesnt get at least a paragraph of exposition.
Take another example, the original Star Wars trilogy. Here we have a sophisticated backstory which remains largely untapped after three movies. But then look at the new Star Wars films — their sole purpose is to expose the backstory which supported the original trilogy. If you ask me, more interesting things happen at the other end of the story, some time after the Jedi victory. The production of the two trilogies span the change of trends, from large backstory to large, uh, forestory.