Emptyeye

This is really stretching the definition of progress further than I have to date.

But in any event, some time ago, I ordered business cards. The intention behind this is that I’ll have something to hand out after my Gobble-Con panel, in case someone had a question that didn’t get answered, or they just wanted to get to know the person behind the panel (Besides an e-mail address, my website URL is also on the cards). Today, they came in. The conversation was actually kind of amusing, in that Silver got the cards from the mail, and promptly texted me:
Silver: “You have a package. Can I open it?”

Emptyeye: “Sure, I guess…does it say who it’s from?”

Silver: “Nothing obvious, which is why I wanted to open it.”

Emptyeye: “Okay, go ahead….*suddenly remembering I had ordered business cards three weeks or so ago* OH! I wonder if they’re my business cards.”

Silver: “Business cards?! When the hell did you order those?”

In any event, you can see what they look like just below:

Silver says that they look “bland”. I disagree–they’re basic, sure (And yes, that’s my actual AIM name), but they serve the purpose as something to hand out after the panel, and the visuals aren’t unnecessarily complicated (One thing I definitely don’t have is an eye for aesthetics; better to do the clean text on a solid background and not have to worry about that part, at least). My main concern with them is actually that the text is small and kind of hard to read, although that’s not obvious by the picture.

Nonetheless, actual progress and rehearsal will commence once again in the next couple days.

-EE

I didn’t do much with this today, thanks mainly to being out most of the afternoon and evening. The only real progress I made was in finishing up the outline I mentioned yesterday, and printing it out. It came out to 4 pages, which sounds like a lot until you consider I printed it out in 24 point font. The reason for that is that it has to be big enough for me to quickly glance down without making it obvious that I’m doing so.

Today I managed to begin attempting one of the weaknesses I had when running through the presentation for the first time–namely, not knowing what was on my slides (Or, more accurately, not remembering their exact order). I quickly learned that, while the “black slide” concept makes a lot of sense, you had better damn well know where you’ve put them before you go up and make your presentation “for real”. Fortunately, I have plenty of time in that regard, especially now that Silver has a part-time job, a side-effect of which is the apartment to myself on some nights (I do plan to eventually rehearse this in front of her, and probably some other people too. For now, though, I feel less like an idiot without an audience, especially as I work the kinks out of exactly when I have to click from one slide to the next).

How I did this was to begin writing an outline of my presentation that I’ll have, with (Click) interspersed through the outline to tell me when to click to the next slide. I don’t plan to read from the outline by any means, but it’ll be nice to have so I can occasionally glance down at it and note where I am, what’s coming up, etc. I’ve gotten about 2/3 of the way through it so far, and will probably finish it up tomorrow.

-EE

This doesn’t really count as “Working on the panel” per se, but I took some time to check out laptop speakers today. I did manage to find one set of speakers that is, sadly, sold out at Best Buy. Maybe I’ll try and see if I can order them somewhere else.

Also, even though I’ve yet to actually beat the game, I’m having serious second thoughts about speedrunning Flying Warriors. It’s just a seriously cheap game; I’d go so far as to say that Flying Dragon is actually better designed in that regard. I am still going to go ahead and beat the game though, if for no other reason than to add another game to my trophy case, as it were.

Today was the first real “test run” of the presentation. As with running through it in the car on my way to Newington, once I got started and got used to feeling of talking to an empty room, it was surprisingly easy to get through the whole thing. Unfortunately, I don’t quite have my actual slide deck memorized–or written out, for that matter. As such, the whole thing was kind of awkward, as I’d click onto slides too soon, not use the black slides I had put in the presentation, etc. Still, I got the whole thing done in 50 minutes or so. I’m fairly sure I can hack a few minutes off of that, if by doing nothing else than actually knowing what’s going on in the slides behind me, and a 45-minute presentation plus 15 minutes of Q&A would make a nice hour-long panel.

Other stuff to improve:

• Actually mentioning the fact that there will be a Q&A earlier than I did.
• Being more aware of what I’m doing with my hands–I slipped one of them into my pocket on occasion.
• As mentioned above, actually knowing my slidedeck a little better.

What did I actually do well?

• I felt like I didn’t really “um”, “er”, etc. at all, although I would need to actually record myself giving the presentation to be sure.
• Similarly, I felt like my actual command of the material was pretty good. If I had to give the presentation without any visual aids whatsoever, I think I could do it.
• Finally, I think I did a good job keeping my head up. In other words, if I actually had an audience, I would’ve been making eye contact with them (Or at least faking it).

Again, I feel like this is really starting to come together. Since I’m now at the stage where I can’t really tinker with the slideshow anymore, this will likely be the final daily update on the panel. I’ll make sure to continue trying to at least make some kind of daily post, though, as that way you’ll keep coming back (And I’ll actually get some value out of the fact that I have the site paid up for the next 2 years). And I’ll continue to update on the panel whenever I actually do something, rehearse, etc.

-EE

So I did, indeed, come up with an opening for the presentation. And I also added one more black slide to it. The rest of the slideshow aspect is pretty solid, I think. If nothing else, I’m avoiding the major trap of reading text-heavy slides to the audience, and I feel like what text is on them is there to reinforce what I consider to be especially important in the presentation.

Tomorrow will, in all likelihood, come my first “dry-run” of the content with my cool little slide advancer thing that I bought at an Officemax a couple weeks ago. That’ll give me a rough idea of how much time I need for the presentation on its current form. From there, I can ask Don at Gobble-Con for that block of time, and he can either give it to me, or tell me “That won’t work, you’ll have to cut some stuff out.” (I suppose “We’ll actually need you to fill more time than that; can you come up with some more material?” is a third option, but it’s not one I’m counting on, and to be honest, it’s not even one I’d particularly want at this point, although I’d deal with it if it came up).

This is really starting to come together!

Today’s progress on the panel was mainly finishing up the slideshow to accommodate the remaining videos I have for the presentation. I have permission from all the runners save for “linner”, who hasn’t logged into Youtube since I sent the message. Tomorrow will likely be spent writing up an intro and outro, and maybe adding some more “black slides” to the presentation.

-EE

I was hoping to finish up the slideshow aspect of this today. Unfortunately, Linux’s Openoffice is being uncooperative, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. I did manage to get the Double Dragon II video in, though.

21 days in a row (Kind of)? Really? I’m pretty sure this either ties or beats my record for most consecutive days with at least one post.

Anyway, my main activity today was overcoming my own ridiculously verbose writing style and asking linner for permission to use his F-Zero X Fire Field run in Japanese (Well, whatever babelfish calls Japanese anyway) as well as English. Hopefully something will come of this.

The other thing I did was finally make the decision to add Level 9 (And about 35 seconds) to my Double Dragon II run snippet. I do still have to redo the title card for it to reflect that update, though.

Let’s hope I actually remember to press Publish this time.

In F-Zero X run permission-getting progress, I got a way to get in touch with linner via his (Apparently linner is, in fact, a he) Youtube channel. There are some issues, though. If you scroll down a bit on that page, you will note a “Sorry, I can’t speak English.” More pressing (Yes, even moreso than the language barrier) is the fact that linner has apparently made himself scarce on the Internet of late, meaning that he may not even get the message until after Gobble-Con (Which is where I’m presenting the panel, and where you should go to check it out, wink wink nudge nudge.). UchihaSasuke noted that linner is a nice enough guy who would probably not mind me using the run, but I’d still like to try and send him something asking permission nonetheless. I’m now trying to find out whether Uchiha actually knows Japanese, or just machine translated something from English to relay messages back and forth.

If it’s the latter, I have an interesting challenge ahead of me. If you’ve ever tried to use Babelfish to translate something from a foreign language into English, you know that the results can be…amusing. This is especially true when going from an oriental language (Chinese, Japanese, etc) into English, where you almost need a translation for the translation (And this is without going into things like Multibabel, which passes the input back and forth through Babelfish repeatedly until the result is an utterly hilarious non sequitur that would make any self-respecting English teacher scream “WHYYYYYYYYYYY”.). In short, I’m not holding out a lot of hope that Babelfish handles going in the other direction any better than it does going in the direction a lot of people in the English speaking world use it for. This means that when I ask for permission in English, I’m going to have to really simplify the message in order to at least give myself and Babelfish decent odds of producing something linner can read. If you know my writing style, and you should, you know I’m in trouble here.

One person I realized I don’t need permission from, at least directly, is Mr. Ryan North–his About Page more or less says “As long as you’re making a profit off of the comics, do whatever you want with them!”, which is awfully nice of him. So I’ve integrated that into the slideshow.

The other thing I’ve integrated into my presentation is the concept of the Black Slide. It’s what you would think it is–a blank, black slide that you put up when you don’t need a slide behind you. The point of it is basically to keep the audience’s attention off of whatever you’re projecting and on you. Check out the blog post (And the comments) for why I’d want to use such a thing, as well as how it differs from just using the “B” key in the presentation software of your choice.

-EE