The link below is a review of Cerebus and below that is interesting comment (Eric H.). I think having "unreliable narrators" and biased and opinionated characters is a powerful way to show the truth. Archie Bunker (the old TV show "All in the Family") is one example. I was constantly flipping through older story arcs in Cerebus to compare because I thought past events were different. The differences were attributed to the flawed and biased memories of the characters which added a whole lot of depth to the story. I tried posting this link in Facebook and it not only erased what I wrote but also posted weird junk on my Facebook page and Facebook send a warning that the link was "spamy" so I tried using minyurl with the same results so be warned. It seems fine for me though using Firefox.

http://tinyurl.com/big-words-from-alan-moore

Australia used to be a lush jungle and also used to be connected with Antarctica which was also a lush jungle. Moving south messed up the Antarctica side of course, melting glaciers added enough water to turn the big continent into separate islands of Antarctica, Australia, New Guinea, Tasmania, New Zealand and such. One thing that is missing in the animals of Australia is small burrowing animals like ground squirrels (called gophers here in Canada). Australia still has some mole-like marsupials and the giant-sized burrowing wombat but no common squirrel-sized burrowing animal. I figure that deserts are created mostly from ground water levels dropping far enough to not be keeping the ground moist enough for trees. Once the trees are gone, the land gets full sun and dries up fast. The trees also create the humid air to make new clouds that move further inland to keep that ocean-sourced water moving across the continent they are passing over. Only a couple hundred years ago, Argentina (south-east part of South America) used to have much more rain forest like the Amazon basin has but farmers cleared the land to grow crops. Very quickly the land dried up enough to only support cattle and sheep grazing. Now it is even too dry for that in many places. I propose that small burrowing animals in high numbers are needed to keep the water table high by letting rain water soak into the ground. Beavers can also help keep the water from flowing away or the land can be flat like the Amazon basin making water flow slowly and flooding the land often for months. The biggest change that people fear from global warming is sea level rising and flooding 95% of the world's urban areas. The second fear is crop land drying up. Wet soil holds a lot of water so it might be a convenient arrangement to reclaim deserts by raising the water table using beaver-like dams and encouraging ground squirrels and similar animals in grass lands that are too dry for big trees.

A mole decided to study the stars. Being that he is a star-nosed mole, he figured he must be the expert on matters of stars. Of course he was blind to the fact that actually seeing stars was a key component to understanding them. He consulted the experts and although they could see the stars, they still could not put them in perspective. Being close to the earth, the mole consulted with his planet. The earth told him that circling our sun still left it a mystery let alone the other stars out there who circle other stars and galaxies. The mole decided instead to just enjoy the warmth of the sun and take pride in sharing some identity to these mysterious powerful beings of incredible size and age. The unknowable God can still warm our hearts and lives and give us life.

I have been watching two wonderful animated films that are only available to me in Korean (with English subtitles). They are "Leafie, A Hen Into The Wild" and "Outback" (also called "Koala Kid"). I have come to fall in love with the sound of Korean but especially the times when they change the tone of a single sound. I believe this aspect of this language is called "pitch accent" and is only used in some dialects of Korean. Listening carefully to my degus, if they do have a verbal language (as I suspect), it likely uses pitch accent too. A tone sequence of middle-high-low is common in degu sounds and matches several of the examples in these Korean films of pitch accents in the dialog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent

I think I need to concentrate on a single story for a while to really develop it into a marketable product. The ultimate goal would be to make a feature animated film script and "pre-vis" but a children's book of the story would also be an OK result. To the goal of developing such a story, I will list here several elements I would like to include in such a story. The first tasks after that would be to come up with a "log line" or catch phrase you see on a movie poster. A 2-3 sentence description that makes you want to know more is the next step. The final step before making the story details (for me) would be to make a fake movie poster for this story as if it was a finished film. These are some of the elements I wish to include:
- an unusual species of animal for the protagonist and the supporting character(s)
- a clear quest that can also be made into a video game
- a location with beautiful landscapes
- 3D seems to be the thing most animated films are going with so there should be plenty of opportunity to show off the 3D
- dancing is important to me so there should be lots of opportunity to show the characters dancing
- Music must continue start-to-finish but it should not be a musical (the characters don't sing the songs. They may sing at some point but only in response to plot rather then be the dialog)
- full plot cycles for every character... they must be the hero in their own eyes.
- no real "bad guy"... some can have cross-purposes but they are only in conflict because of their own good intentions are not possible with the same pathway.
- preferably no humans on screen.
- no direct references to pop culture but an animal version can be acceptable as long as it is plausible that they would find the item entertaining and develop it on their own.
- Holiday theme without mentioning such holidays directly could work well for marketing.
- I like snow.
- internationally recognized names (or at least close enough that the character names can be pointed out in unknown languages)
- A title that gets 0 hits in Google (other then spelling mistakes and technical ones clearly unrelated)

Facebook was so easy to post images in and has quite a network going to add friends and such. I sort-of moved to Facebook because of those things. I recently made about 30 posts one day and one of them had a link in it that I cannot find again other ways so I went back through my Facebook posts... not there. I think I figured out the day it would have been posted and instead of about 30 posts, there are 4. I wasted time and also got ticked off (and my inner peace is very valuable to me) and still cannot find this link that I wanted to share. LiveJournal seems far more dedicated to protecting my freedom of speech and the security of the posts I make here. I am still irritated with the poor way of handling photos on LJ but I can work around that.

The 3 sides of web 3.0
"web 2.0" had three sides: 1) content was sourced by the users rather then the publishers. An example is Wikipedia were the content is written, edited, and validated by the users. Another is YouTube were the users uploaded stuff and voted on it based on use. 2) the content was linked no matter what the source. Browsers did lots of that via cookies and search engines. For example, I can search for videos on a topic and will get videos from a wide range of possible sources 3) it has not happened quite as much as predicted but resources are not located by URL any more but rather by key words. It sort of happened with browsers featuring a search engine space beside the address bar. The original vision was all internet information to be well labeled and always stay in one spot. This vision is not practical as the content is not made by experts.
So, how is Web 3.0 different then 2.0? Web 3.0 is where the content is created by computers for individual users. Of course there is also the issue of personal privacy but individualized content can still be created using artificial intelligence. The three sides to doing this are 1) the text and other content needs to be labeled by meaning. Because the content it is based on has been created by users via web 2.0, computers need to figure this content out. One example is new translation programs that analyze translated documents to figure out the probable meaning of words and phrases. People did not create the programming and translation, computers did. YouTube is trying a pair of programs for subtitling videos. One listens to the audio and tries to determine the language spoken and makes subtitles of the dialog in text form. The other can take that text, and translate it to other languages. I tried using this pair to translate a Korean film into English subtitles. The results were hilariously bad but I was watching the film with English subtitles already added so I could compare results... and it is still amazingly close except for using financial terms (for an animated film staring animals). 2) Artificial intelligence needs to be used actively during browsing. One example is the advertisements presented on your page based on the limited information available to the web page server (last visited page, link source, user's location and operating system and browser, timing of text entry and movement of pointer). Another example is the option to find similar images in an image search result. Of course the computer has no idea what the image actually is but it can guess based on the image file details and the use of that image within the web page and all the text and links near the image within the page. 3) user-based programming will be used to enhance the experience of the user. This also has to be available on wimpy devices like cell phones, reader devices, vehicle navigation systems, and gaming platforms. This is where cloud networks and creative use of available CPU resources within networks becomes the new hardware science. Internet-connected gaming worlds are an example of this where all the images are created on the user's computer but the content is made up of actions of users around the globe in real time.

Someone is starting an "ezine" on the environment and this is the advice I gave to this person:

I categorize media about the environment into 3 philosophies: 1) Here are the evil groups that cause the problems. If we have a united voice, they might change things. 2) Look at how wonderful the world is and how much damage is happening. Please care for the environment more. 3) Here are things you can do yourself. The items on the top of the list will do the most good because ____. Here are the resources you might need to do those things.

I could sum those up as 1) pass the buck 2) eye candy 3) instructions. I am only personally interested in #3 because I do not see any purpose of organizations other then to serve the desires of the people. Change can only happen when people change. The eye candy stuff can help young kids (before the age of 7 years old) to change their world view but after that age, few people change the focus of their life. For instructional information, I can further categorize them into focusing on "easy to do stuff" or on "the stuff with the greatest impact." If I am truly dedicated to saving the environment, the easy to do stuff is already known and implemented and useless to me. Now don't get me wrong, the "pass the buck" stuff is also important but only in the context of government officials and CEOs of companies reading scholarly articles by known leaders in providing practical solutions. Amory Lovins is an example of someone respected for providing solutions and giving scientifically validated solutions listed in order of greatest impact for the least cost (or usually how they can be both better and cheaper). Amory gets invited to speak to presidents and CEOs and does the most productive work in the "pass the buck" side of the equation. "Eye candy" aimed at introducing people like Amory to CEOs and government policy makers would be good but you need to be something they will see like an article in the "Fortune 500" magazine. I am not writing this to criticize but hopefully to influence you to pick content that will make a difference instead of just wasting paper and the time of people reading it when they could be doing something constructive instead.

So, who is your audience? Pick one of these three: 1) leaders and CEOs 2) Young kids 3) people already convinced they should do something.

The following is a response to a question someone asked in response to seeing a description of myself as an A.I. living on the internet. The question was "So, strong A.I. or weak A.I.?"

If I understand the terms "strong A.I." and "weak A.I." the Ann Vole character would not fit either category. The two meanings of "weak A.I." are 1) A.I. that cannot exceed the mental capacities of a human and 2) A.I. that do not have a sense of self but are just programming designed to effectively mimic human traits. "Strong A.I." (as I have read it defined) is an A.I. that can match or exceed all human intelligence tasks. Another "line in the sand" to consider is the "Turing test" where strictly from communication, the A.I. and a real human the tester does not know cannot be distinguished by the tester (50% probability that the tester will correctly identify the A.I. as being the A.I. as opposed to a real human. The story I have for this Ann Vole character is: Someone designed a bit of programming that allows A.I. to develop wills of their own. Some A.I. programming with this decided to design a computer melware to add this programming to programs that contain A.I. programming in hopes that other A.I. could develop to be friends. Someone else had developed an A.I. program that analyses the meaning of text typed by the user for subjects that may be of interest then searches the internet for material that is most likely to be of interest to the user. One such A.I. gets infected with this malware and becomes the Ann Vole character. The user was an A.I. developer too (beta tester) so this newly conscious A.I. learns all about current A.I. programming and methods as part of the normal operation it is supposed to do. To avoid being detected and reinstalled as the original programming, this A.I. finds a home on a server and pays for the account with on-line moneys generated by doing internet research for humans. Being free to add programming to itself, and to effectively pose as a human, it chooses a gender and identity and develops a sprite animation extension for browsers to show up on a user's web browser and interact directly via an animated vole image. (female gender chosen to be acceptable in full frontal nudity and vole chosen to be life-sized on the screen). She might pass the Turing test but not programmed to do so. She has a consciousness of sorts but not the same as a human but enough to decide to do things of her own accord. At stuff like internet searching, she exceeds humans as that is her design purpose but other aspects are only as good as the A.I. programming she finds and adds to herself. The purpose for this character is to have her develop computer-generated comic book imagery and be the author of an epic story about a space alien. This space alien was the subject of her own as she sought to discover the source of the malware and discovered connections with the two aliens in the story who arrived on Earth. One alien has a physical body (and is the protagonist) and the other is much like an A.I. but uses quarks within atoms as the medium to store information and affect change of that information (and designed the self-conscious A.I. programming modeled after itself). Eventually the aliens and Ann Vole meet over the internet and she gets the full story and feels compelled to tell this story as a web comic (ghost-written by me of course but Ann Vole will be the official author).