My cousin got mar­ried this week­end (con­grat­u­la­tions Tasha!) which means that my whole family is in town and every­thing is crazy hectic. There­fore, tonight’s blog update is going to be short and sweet (and late).

1) First, I’d like to point your atten­tion to the fine folks at Dig­i­tal Strips, who have kindly done a pod­cast review of Chronil­log­i­cal. Take a listen if you have a moment! The pod­cast is really enter­tain­ing—they’ve got great banter, which is key—and of course it’s pretty spiffy that they’re talk­ing about our strip. So yeah. Listen to it! Or else!

2) John is going to be out of town this Wednes­day and Thurs­day, which unfor­tu­nately can only mean one thing: FRIDAY FILLER! Apolo­gies in advance.

3) I know I keep saying that I’ll be updat­ing the site—but seri­ously, you’re going to be seeing some changes this July. There really is a new site design in the works, and we’re also con­tem­plat­ing chang­ing our approach to the strip. We want to keep things fresh, both for you read­ers and for us as cre­ators. We’ll keep you posted as the sit­u­a­tion develops.

That’s all I got. Greg out.

“There are no two finer words in the Eng­lish lan­guage than ‘encased meats’, my friend.” — Secret Robbie

This Sat­ur­day, John and I hit up Hot Doug’s, a local Chicago insti­tu­tion spe­cial­iz­ing in the con­struc­tion and deploy­ment of dressed encased meats. In other words, a hot dog joint. We went with three friends of ours, and it was super-​fun times. Alas, I didn’t bring my camera with me—so instead I will paint a pic­ture for you in words.

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Last week I spent some time putting together an 8track mix of some of my favorite ending themes from var­i­ous video games. (You can tell from the songs I selected that I was raised in the noble tra­di­tion of Nin­tendo fan­boy­ism.) In the process of track­ing down the tracks for that mix, I redis­cov­ered my fond­ness for chip­tunes. Since John and I are both fans of the genre, I fig­ured I’d share a few of our favorite resources for find­ing chip­tunes and clas­sic video game music online.

First, for those of you unfa­mil­iar with the genre: chip­tunes are orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions made using sound chips from clas­sic gaming hard­ware. If you have ever played an NES or Game Boy, you have some idea of what this sounds like. But unlike clas­sic game music, modern chip­tunes are not back­ing tracks for another medium—they are meant to be lis­tened to on their own, as other song you might find on your iPod/Zune/media player of choice.¹ Because modern chip­tune com­posers don’t have to worry about stuff­ing their music onto some tiny corner of an already-​miniscule gaming car­tridge, their tracks tend to be more lay­ered and com­plex than the game music you remem­ber from the 80s and 90s. Anyway, I could wax poetic about the virtues of chip­tunes for quite a while—but that’s nowhere near as good as lis­ten­ing for your­self. So onto the links!

First on the list is 8bitpeoples, a col­lec­tive of extremely tal­ented chip­tune artists. If you check out their site, you’ll want to head imme­di­ately over to the discog­ra­phy sec­tion, where they have nearly 100 EPs freely avail­able for down­load. It is a ver­i­ta­ble smörgåsbord—except instead of breads and cold fish there are hun­dreds of amaz­ing songs.

From there we move on to 8bitcollective, a com­mu­nity where users can post tracks they’ve cre­ated and dis­cuss chip­tunes with other mem­bers. There’s a metic butt-​ton of stuff there, and new songs are being added all the time. In any case, any com­mu­nity where there’s an epic space-battle going on between two of the mem­bers is a winner in my book.

And hey, wouldn’t you know it? Some­one made a doc­u­men­tary about chip­tunes! I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks pretty interesting.

If you’re inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to some of the orig­i­nal game tunes that you remem­ber grow­ing up to, you’d do well to check out the game music archive at Zophar’s Domain. If you remem­ber play­ing it for the NES, they have it. If you remem­ber play­ing it before 1994, they have it. They have every­thing. They even have Dynowarz: Destruc­tion of Spondy­lus. Now, play­ing the files can be a bit tricky—there are Winamp plug-​ins for each of the file­types on the site, but not every­one has Winamp. If you’re on a Mac, I’ve had good expe­ri­ences with Richard Bannister’s Audio Over­load and would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend it. (I’ve had trou­ble with it on Linux, though; your mileage may vary.)

Finally, no post per­tain­ing to game music would be com­plete with­out a link to Over­Clocked Remix. Over­Clocked Remix (or OCR for short) is a site fea­tur­ing thou­sands of songs cre­ated by musi­cians who rearrange, rein­ter­pret, and remix music from video games (any era, from the Atari to modern “next-gen” sys­tems). Admit­tedly it’s not a chip­tune site, but it’s a huge land­mark for anyone inter­ested in game music. Another good place to go for re-​imagined video game music is VGMix.

If there are any good chip­tune (or game music) links you think I missed, let me know about ‘em in the comments!

¹ This is in no way meant to imply that clas­sic game music shouldn’t be lis­tened to on its own. I have enor­mous respect for the medium. Unre­pen­tant nerd that I am, I reg­u­larly listen to game tunes inde­pen­dently of the games they were meant to accom­pany.

A few years ago I devel­oped a pow­er­ful rhetor­i­cal prin­ci­ple that has spread widely among my circle of friends. Now I shall share this extremely potent knowl­edge with you, the dear reader. By taking advan­tage of this rule (which has been empir­i­cally ver­i­fied in innu­mer­able¹ sit­u­a­tions) you will hand­ily win any argu­ment or debate you might find your­self par­tic­i­pat­ing in.

The prin­ci­ple, which I have humbly named the Poulos Pos­tu­late, goes as follows:

• The louder you say it, the more right it is.

And an impor­tant corol­lary of this prin­ci­ple is:

• In a debate, the person who is louder is right.

Or put another way:

• You can win any debate by shout­ing lots.¹

I find the best appli­ca­tion of this prin­ci­pal is as fol­lows: the next time you’re in a debate, state your case bluntly and suc­cinctly. Don’t bother with too much detail or nuance—that crap just bogs you down and obfus­cates your point. Anyway, a shorter state­ment will be much easier on your throat once you start scream­ing at the top of your lungs.

Your oppo­nent—let’s call them “John C.” for the sake of exam­ple—will likely fail to see things your way. This is because John C. is an idiot. Which is to say, he is a stub­born con­trar­ian who con­sis­tently fails to com­pre­hend the majesty of your genius. Even though you have put forth your bril­liant argu­ment in a straight­for­ward and force­ful manner, his dim mind abjectly fails to grasp the essen­tial truth under­ly­ing your claim. Your intel­lect is vast and deep, and John C. is a mere slug squirm­ing along the lip of that deep chasm. He may be dimly cog­nizant that there is some­thing impres­sive nearby, but it is all he can to do avoid falling in.

So anyway, John C. is prob­a­bly blath­er­ing on with some kind of lame coun­ter­ar­gu­ment: “Greg, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible,” or “Greg, I’m pretty sure the moon isn’t actu­ally made of cheese,” or “Greg, I’m pretty sure that griz­zly bear is not ‘just a big cuddly fun-​bun who wants to be our friend.’” In fact, he’s prob­a­bly still talk­ing, mean­der­ing through end­less points of “evidence” as though it’ll some­how con­vince anyone that he’s right. Tough beans: he’s wrong, you’re right, and every­one will be much better off the sooner they real­ize this.

If John C. is still talk­ing, cut him off now. Simply restate your first state­ment, but—and this is the key—say it louder than you did before. Don’t scream it (yet), as you want to leave a little room for esca­la­tion if your oppo­nent doesn’t get the hint right away. But def­i­nitely use a firmer, louder, angrier tone. It’s unnec­es­sary to change the state­ment of your argu­ment in any way. In fact, saying any­thing dif­fer­ently would indi­cate incon­stancy and dif­fi­dence on your part, and you cer­tainly don’t want to be seen as some kind of flip-​flopper. No: best is to repeat your orig­i­nal state­ment exactly, word for word.

Hope­fully John C. will get the point now and admit defeat. More likely, he will be truly dense and will con­tinue to argue. For exam­ple, he may claim that you have not acknowl­edged any of the points he raised pre­vi­ously. Ignore this. He also may argue that you inter­rupted his point with­out adding any­thing new to the con­ver­sa­tion. Ignore this, too. If he keeps yam­mer­ing away, inter­rupt him. Simply restate your posi­tion again, louder this time.

Con­tinue esca­lat­ing the argu­ment in this fash­ion. Even­tu­ally John C. will get the point and admit defeat. Ide­ally, he will say some­thing like, “Oh my good­ness, now that you put it THAT way [i.e., LOUDLY] I see your side of the argu­ment and agree with you com­pletely! You are so smart and amaz­ing and incred­i­bly good look­ing and boy I wish I could be just like you!” More com­monly, your oppo­nent will simply refuse to con­tinue con­vers­ing with you. This is a clear admis­sion of defeat. It is an implicit acknowl­edg­ment of your intel­lec­tual supe­ri­or­ity, and of the fact that you are far better look­ing than he could ever hope to be, even on one of his good days.

Occa­sion­ally, you will come across an oppo­nent who is well-​versed in advanced rhetor­i­cal tech­niques and is also famil­iar with the Poulos Prin­ci­ple. For these for­mi­da­ble foes, I unfor­tu­nately have very little advice to offer you. The best I can do is wish you strength of voice and encour­age you to shout your blessed little heart out.³

¹ Innu­mer­abil­ity of sit­u­a­tions not actu­ally guar­an­teed.
² A vari­ant of the prin­ci­ple can also be applied to writ­ten argu­ments: instead of shout­ing, one must increase the size and weight of the font being used.
³ How­ever, in keep­ing with a long tra­di­tion of stay­ing at the fore­front of debat­ing tech­nolo­gies, we here at Poulos Labs have been work­ing on an advanced new rhetor­i­cal tech­nique, which we ten­ta­tively call “punching”. How­ever, it is highly exper­i­men­tal, some­what dan­ger­ous, and cur­rently suit­able for only the most expe­ri­enced debaters. We hope to have a more user-​friendly design tested and in pro­duc­tion some­time during the second quar­ter of 2010.

I didn’t post a blog entry yes­ter­day! What the heck is up with that?

Well, let me TELL you what the heck is up with that:

1. Freak­ing DIS­EASE. Man, let me tell you folks—every­body here is dying of hor­ri­ble fever. My room­mate just walked off to Uni­ver­sity Health Ser­vices with a 103 degree tem­per­a­ture. 103 degrees! That is a lot of degrees! Granted, it’s 103 degrees Fahren­heit, which is a goofy system that don’t make no sense, but I’m still pretty sure this is abnor­mal. I have since Lysoled the room thor­oughly, but I fear this may be too little, too late.

   My other room­mate and I have an ongo­ing bet that our grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mony will be can­celed due to wide­spread dis­ease. I per­son­ally don’t think it will get that bad, but I admit that the sce­nario is not alto­gether out­side the realm of pos­si­bil­ity, and that is kind of freaky-​deaky.

2. Freak­ing WRITERS’ BLOCK. I know, what a lame excuse, right? But seri­ously, I can’t think of any­thing good to write. Do YOU have any ideas? That is, do you want to hear me muse about any­thing in par­tic­u­lar? Because I can totally do that! I have a rich his­tory of ram­bling on about topics I have little-to-no author­ity to speak upon. I could also dis­cuss topics on which I am well-​informed, but I can’t imag­ine many of you are ter­ri­bly inter­ested to learn about Latin part-of-speech tag­ging or the ouvre of “Weird Al” Yankovic.

   More gen­er­ally, John and I are always open to feed­back. For exam­ple, we love it when you guys com­ment. Feel free to email us, too! Our inboxes haven’t gotten a whole lot of love since we started Chronil­log­i­cal (except for the spammy sort, which isn’t really the kind of love I’m talk­ing about). Per­haps the strong sec­tion on the side­bar is too cryp­tic? You can email us at greg [at] chronil­log­i­cal [dot] com or john [at] chronil­log­i­cal [dot] com as often as you like! (Unless it is too often, in which case you might want to let up a bit.)

So anyway, that is what the heck is up with that!

*dusts off computer*

Huzzah! John and I have made it through the semes­ter unscathed! Now, I know the blog has been a little barren these past few weeks—but with finals over we’ll be able to start post­ing with some more reg­u­lar­ity again.

My brain is a little fried from school at the moment, so instead of my usual random mus­ings, I thought I’d ran­domly muse about a few of the things John and I are plan­ning to do with the site in the next few weeks. Here’s the run-​down:

• As I men­tioned, I’ll pick up the pace again with the blog posts. It’ll be at least once a week, and I’ll aim for Monday updates.
• Chronil­log­i­cal is approach­ing its one-​year anniver­sary, which means the archives are finally get­ting some heft to them. To help bring new read­ers up to speed with the strip, we’re plan­ning to revamp the “New Readers” sec­tion, includ­ing better char­ac­ter bios and a story synopsis.
• We’re also work­ing on a gen­eral site redesign. Maybe not a com­plete over­haul, but we def­i­nitely want to keep things fresh.
• Now that school is over, things are a bit uncer­tain for both John and me. It’s a little unset­tling, but will actu­ally prob­a­bly be a good thing for the comic. With our extra free time, we’re think­ing about adjust­ing the update sched­ule. But how? If you have any sug­ges­tions, we’d love some input from our read­ers! (NB: Before making any dras­tic changes, we want to spend some time build­ing our buffer—so don’t expect a sched­ule update for a little while.)

Anyway, you should see some of these things falling into place start­ing in the first half of June. I’m hoping it all goes smoothly, and I’ll do my best to keep you updated about any pos­si­ble site main­te­nance issues.

That’s all for now. I don’t know about you, but I sure am excited about the future!

(Haha, get it? FUTURE? Because it’s a strip about time travel? Man, that joke never gets old.)

It’s the end of the semes­ter for both John and myself, which can only mean one thing: those dreaded final exam­i­na­tions are lurk­ing just around the corner. (Cue blood-​curdling shriek in the back­ground.) We’re both pretty swamped with work, so I regret to inform you that next Tuesday’s comic is going to be of the filler vari­ety. Many apolo­gies! We’ll be back to our reg­u­larly sched­uled pro­gram­ming next Friday.

Greg had been bug­ging me to read up on Tom Siddell’s Gun­nerkrigg Court for some time before I finally decided to sit down and dip into a chap­ter or two. Fel­lows, I am decid­edly better for having dipped and sub­se­quently immersed, though to what degree I am better for having done so I’m not going to tell you. A decided degree, at any rate.

A hand­ful of adjec­tives come to mind when trying to describe the series, and they are all prob­a­bly inac­cu­rate.² I do remem­ber at one point think­ing, “I bet Neil Gaiman would get a kick out of this.” Soon after, I found out that such is indeed the case! So if you like the things that Neil Gaiman likes, all the better, but I still encour­age you read Siddell’s work³ regard­less of your feel­ings for Mr. Sand­man.⁴ Come on, mon­sters and robots—what’s not to like?

There is a Ver­i­ta­ble Cast of Char­ac­ters⁵, but I decided to draw only one of them. I am a fan of Kat the Buildy-​Scientist.

Get read­ing! And come back tomor­row, also. There will be a comic to read.

—
¹ There are other web­comics I have been mean­ing to write about as well, but there are so many of them! You prob­a­bly already know this.

⁵ Cutesy cap­i­tal­iza­tion, now! I might write more like a normal person next time.

Did you know that, in addi­tion to threes, good things also come in unstop­pable sham­bling hordes? For some reason people always leave out that part of the saying. But it’s true! It’s wholly and unremit­tingly true.

I’m pretty sure every­one thinks they would be a com­plete badass in the case of a zombie upris­ing. I know I would be. I’d see the early warn­ing signs; I’d pre­pare my safe house and stock­pile appro­pri­ately; I’d exter­mi­nate that zombie scum ruth­lessly and effi­ciently. Unlike Shaun in Shaun of the Dead, I’d have no com­punc­tions over shoot­ing my zomb­i­fied mom if it meant saving my own life.¹ (Come on, man—she’s been taken! She’s not your mother any­more! Just do it!)

That said, it’s always impor­tant to take a step back and remem­ber that per­haps a zombie upris­ing would not be the great­est thing in real life. Which is to say, there is a very strong argu­ment to be made that zom­bies are a fan­tasy best left to the realm of fic­tion. With this in mind, I would like to present you with three zombie-​related items that have come to my atten­tion over the past sev­eral weeks.

1. Last March, I dis­cov­ered (via Kris Straub) an enjoy­able web series called I Am Not Infected. It fol­lows the tra­vails of three dudes who are trapped in a zombie-​infested Los Ange­les. Scary, huh? I mean, being stuck in L.A. is bad enough, but having to deal with zom­bies must make it, like, at least 1.5 times worse.

   The series is a com­bi­na­tion of humor and horror, although it tends to lean more heav­ily towards the former. The comedy is often goofy and absur­dist, and a lot of it stems from the idiocy and ego­tism of the main char­ac­ters. There are occa­sion­ally very intense moments, how­ever; for exam­ple, Episode 1.5 (NSFW) is a sur­pris­ingly well-​done homage to the zombie horror genre.

2. I recently got Left 4 Dead, and I’m enjoy­ing it a lot! For those of you unfa­mil­iar with the game, it’s a first-​person shooter based on the fol­low­ing premise: you’re on a team of four Sur­vivors who are trying to fend off an encroach­ing hoard of Infected humans. In single-​player mode the other Sur­vivors are com­put­ers, but you can also play mul­ti­player cam­paigns. In gen­eral, I’m a big fan of coop­er­a­tive cam­paigns (in first-​person shoot­ers I greatly prefer them to death-​matches), so the game is per­fect for me. There’s also a versus mode in which teams alter­nate between play­ing Sur­vivors and Infected—if you’re Infected, you’re much easier to kill, but you respawn auto­mat­i­cally and get to con­trol spe­cial zom­bies with unique powers.

   Anyway, if you’re inter­ested in play­ing, I’m on XBox live—my GamerTag is “Mister Skeleton”. (Kind of appro­pri­ate, really. Are skele­tons a kind of zombie?) I haven’t been on a whole lot recently, but hope­fully I’ll be able to play more as the school year winds down.

3. Five words: Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies. Won­der­fully, this is exactly what it sounds like. (And while we’re on the topic of zombie-​themed lit­er­a­ture, I should men­tion that one of these days I really need to read World War Z. Just another thing to put on the ol’ read­ing list.)

All this talk about zom­bies has got me won­der­ing if there are any good zombie-​themed web­comics out there. It seems like a no-​brainer (pun INTENDED) that there should be one, but I can’t think of any­thing off the top of my head (pun INTENDED—see, because zom­bies tear off the top of your head). Am I for­get­ting some­thing, or is it the case that there’s a zombie-​shaped void in the world of web­comics? And if so, why isn’t some­one get­ting on top of that? Or at least lurch­ing slowly towards it?

¹ And I love my mother dearly! I can only hope she’d do the same for me.

I promised a few weeks ago that I’d make another post about “seemingly para­dox­i­cal matters”, and I’m finally making good on that promise.¹ Be fore­warned, how­ever, that this post doesn’t really have any­thing to do with any­thing else. It’s just a cool para­dox (or “puzzle” or “problem” or what­ever other ‘p’-word you want to call it) I learned from my roommate.

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