• Beautiful art made with A Single Sheet of Paper
• Discover Magazine on imitation in social species
• Apparently I am the last to hear about this, but: Octopuses are tool users, carrying half-coconuts around

These are great, but I still can't wait for this year to end.

So I got the Netbook over the iPod Touch. And then I Hackintoshed it.



SpaceSword (because it's little and black and isn't made of what it's supposed to be) is beautiful and light and has all my essential applications on it and it didn't require too much crazy hacking. It is lovely and awesome. The logo sticker is actually from the era when that was the Apple logo.

And now I am set to bang out game design documents like no one's business over the holidays, right? Right?

• sit in the park or a café and write - on game design documents, LJ, my wiki.
• email from odd places with wireless
• browse the web or show people stuff on the web via wireless
• follow twitter, facebook, and LJ with more regularity than I do with separate desktops
• get to Dropbox documents from odd places

Now, two options are attractive, in a similar price range: an iPod Touch or a Dell Mini 10v netbook. Both would do all of those things, though the iPod Touch might be significantly less convenient for typing or showing people stuff online. The iPT would, however, replace my aging-but-not-yet-dead iPod (4 yrs old) and would let me explore iPhone games, which I'm feeling behind on, professionally.

It's a really tough call. I should get on whichever I'm going with this week, though, as I'm then going to be traveling a lot for several weeks, and whichever I decide on would be super-useful.

So I've been sick for just over a week now, and I am tired of it.  I think it might've been two distinct illnesses, actually.  One I took to Seattle for PAX - the moment I sate down there I got fever symptoms, which with an incubation period means I didn't contract it there.  That took me through the weekend, but by Sunday night's red-eye I was pretty much fine.  Monday morning, then, not having slept on the plane, I got something else entirely which I have failed all week to shake.  It might be H1Nerd1, but the incubation timing isn't right either.  I'm disinclined to go to a doctor because the answer, even if it's H1N1, is the same: treat it like the flu with lots of liquids, rest, and if you start having trouble breathing, get to a hospital STAT.  Which I already know.

It doesn't help that Alison came down on Sunday with what looks like my second illness.  We've been a messy, sniffly apartment of infection this week.

So this weekend I'm treating myself to movies and games and other distractions, which I was sorely lacking all week.  Last night I set out to watch the rest of the Ghibli films I haven't seen, starting with My Neighbors the Yamadas.  I ended up pulling out Pom Poko, which I enjoyed, but ... man, it's heavy.  Ali and I talked about how in some ways it's like the more earnest, less marketable Spirited Away, what with all the subtle Japanese cultural references and the rampant scrotum-transforming magic.

So, now: My Neighbors the Yamadas, for real.  Then I'd play Zelda, except my Wii can't read discs ... hm.  Not sure what's after that, then.  Distraction, in whatever form I can find or make it.

ETA: I've now watched through Whispers of the Heart.  I'll bet that Ali will enjoy it, though I am notoriously and hilariously wrong when trying to guess what Ali will enjoy.

It has been MONTHS (AprilMayJuneJuly?) since I posted the books that I've been reading.  It's that lovely snowball of shame, that gets rolling when you're busy, then just has more momentum when you have to post about later and ... well, it's summer.  Snowballs have no place in New York in August.

( Books (23) )


( Games (2) )
There are a bunch more games that I've dabbled with but don't feel qualified to review as "read".  Onward, then...

I've been building up these little things to post.  Here we go.

( A great film, a 9th cent. marginalized cat, puzzle bots, a Buddhist nun, flipping the bozo bit, behind the cut )
Hm.  That looks like what was on my list, for now.  Back to work!

Sunday Sunday Sunday I found a few more things.  I got a lot of business cards which time tonight will force into a third entry on MoCCA.  Today's finds:

• Jobnik! an american girl's adventures in the israeli army, and Jewish Memoir goes Pow! Zap! Oy! a drawn essay on autobiographical graphic novels, and why they are so jewy, by Miriam Libicki 
• Fort90 - Summer Carnival '09 zine by Matt Hawkins
• Higher Ground, by Shelli Paroline
• 1-up a video game story (mini-comic) by Mark Thisse
• Lesbians Vol. 1 and vol. 2, mini-comics by Jane Mai

It's late, so ... just links!  These are the wonderful things that Ali and I found at MoCCA today.  There will probably be more tomorrow, though my wallet hopes not.

•  Novasett Island by Zack Giallongo and Stephanie Yue and Grune, by Zack Giallongo
• The Harvest Comic Trilogy, which Ali says that she is going to make me pass on to someone else but I don't think that she can make me do that.  Perhaps I will hide them so that I can read them over and over.
• The Elsewhere Chronicles, Book One: The Shadow Door and Book Two: The Shadow Spies, by Bannister and Nykko 
• Preview copy of The Big Kahn, by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani
• Ofuro, by Hilary Florido, a beautiful mini-comic about a trip to Japan and the Japanese Baths.  I can identify.
• Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China and Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle.  I've been wanting to read these for a while, so I'm glad that ali_wildgoose  picked 'em up.
• Never Learn Anything From History, by Kate Beaton
• Bite Me! A Vampire Farce, by Dylan Meconis
• Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: The Manga Edition, by Adam Sexton and Hyeondo Park (interview)
• "Suffering & Death" featuring Talking Guinea Pigs! , by Jeff Mumm

I've been so busy lately that I have several times not actually been sure what was the inside of my head and what was the outside.  I can explain that if need be, it's not pretty but it's true.

HOWEVER, many important and/or fun things are coming up now, so I must speak and encourage:

• The MoCCA Art Festival is a fine comics festival occurring in New York City this weekend.  It is always awesome without reservation.  This year I'm particularly excited for new work by my friends.  Check it out:  
  • alisa5179  and 3distic  with some new work.  I want to commission them for RPG characters.  :D
  • soggytoast  and quezzie  with some fantastic-looking new work (Novasett! Grune!) and a threequel to a hit from previous MoCCAs
• Next weekend, again in New York, is the Come Out and Play Festival.  All weekend, brilliant game designers are turning the city itself into a series of games - "circle rules football" in Central Park; Space Invaders marching down the side of a building toward running people as players; mafia/werewolf played on a subway car with the stations as rounds and an 'afterlife' meta-game for them that gets offed.  It's amazing, gets you to look at the city in a different way, and is just damn fun.

.... and apparently that's as far back in my flist as I can go right now for things to point you toward.  I must run.  GO FORTH!

I've been saving a set of links for a "WTFriday" for two weeks now, and then have spent the last two fridays being too busy to post 'em.  So: Happy Monday!  Happy Memorial Day!

• Rainbow-vomiting Panda kills Knight!
• Flickr's Explore feature with a baffling interface: a rainbow-vomiting panda!
• A page from the Beginner's Bible Coloring Book, by the artist for the flickr page

I think I want to know where this rainbow-vomiting panda meme comes from.  I think I do.

The first Third Thursday Game Night went well! Somehow we ended up with very few 'regulars' from my board game semicircle, and lots of folks who have never met each other. Until tonight, that is.

1. That's a great setup for Apples To Apples, great as ever for a pickup game and icebreaker.
2. Once basically everyone had arrived, we were too big for a good game of A2A. Next up was Citadels, which I love and have been wanting to play for the last 7 game days I've been to. 5 players new to one of the most beautifully balanced games I've ever played!
3. While the other half of us played soupkills' Spank the Monkey.

Pretty good for 10+ people and 3 hours.

Next one: May 21, 2009!

Ali and I are getting ready to throw out or set out on the street a few things.  Would they be useful to you?  My friends are crafty, they often need strange things as raw materials for the Rube Goldberg machines of their lives...

• 8 1"x1.5"x6" soft foam bars
• a 15" "titanium" Powerbook Pro, all parts intact except the motherboard-mounted power supply
• several college-ruled notebooks
• a lot of IKEA picnic utensilry
• an 4-year-old Windows machine (XP, AMD processor)
• a two-slice toaster in white plastic

So?

I'm freelancing again (around stable work, fortunately).  And that means tracking my time for the first in three years.  Last time, I was working daily in a cool PIM called Tinderbox, and I built a custom time tracker that exported text invoices.  It was slick.  This time, though, I'm not doing enough freelance that it's worth rebuilding that solution, and I don't have a laptop to carry it around with me besides.  So I'm looking for something quick, simple, and preferably free. 

• I need to track my time on projects and to be able to easily export a monthly report of my time for a couple of clients. I need it to be free or <$3/mo. for a year.  I need to be able to update in different places, whether that's online or on my keychain flash drive.
• I'd like to set up basic categories within or across projects (research, documentation, correspondence) and I'd like
• I don't need anything complex.  It doesn't need to chart, or even create invoices or track payments, though if it does without forcing me to do stuff, great.

O freelancer friends, how do you track your time for your clients?

I'm getting to use one of these "Swopper" stools today at work and ... oh, do I want one at home.

Except that I'm barely *at* home.

And they're $500.

Oh well.

Okay, ICON 28 more than just "happened". It was a good time. I ran my panels with a bit more grace than last year, and a little bit more brevity. I was a better panelist on others' panels than I was last year. I won a contest when I shouldn't have, and got a great game as an award.

As usual, I got a bit more in the dealers' room than I should have: The Coyote Road, Ed. by Terri Wyndling and Ellen Datlow (that one's going to you, soggytoast); The Burning Wheel Two Volumes Revised Edition;and some hard-to-find D&D books: The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga, The Twilight Tomb, Uncaged: Faces of Sigil, Vortex of Madness & Other Planar Perils.

I was on the panels: 

• The Wii: Why I'm Playing, or Why I'm Not
• Best Games You've Never Heard of
• From Pac Man to Master Chief: the Evolution of the Mascot
• Hardcore versus Casual Gamers
• Video Games are: Art, Social Commentary, Pure Brain Rot, or all of the above

And, of course, I ran a Game Design Workshop.
I hope to blog several of the sessions for textuality.org; I just wanted to get them down here to remind myself of them and to note how cool that lineup is.  Lots to say!  Lots to hear!  The audience and my fellow panelists made each of the sessions as interesting for me as it could have been to anyone in the audience.  

I'd really like to do a Game Night (board games, parlour games, game prototypes, the occasional social video game) on about a monthly basis.

But it seems that trying to "just do that" means that I never actually schedule it.  So I'm going to set a date, and then we can change it if need be:

How about the third Thursday of each month?  I know that conflicts with a semi-regular gathering near 56th St., but I also don't think that anyone who goes to that would come to a Game Night anyway.  I could probably do Wednesday instead, but "Third Thursday" has a ring to it and I know some regular attendees would have trouble with Wed.

The next one, then, would be in two weeks, on April 16th.

How about it? Comment or email if you'd like to stay in the loop on this.

In about 11 hours, we will have a new cat.  Well, maybe. 

A very, very cute <1 yr old cat adopted ali_wildgoose's uncle, who May Not Have A Cat.  And who has several dogs, anyway.  Soooo, we're going to be taking care of the cat for the weekend while said uncle is on a trip, and if it works out, well, maybe the cat will stay.

Over the last few days of thinking about this, I've decided that I'm okay with this idea. Uncle has really built up this cat, saying that he's really sweet, very adoring, quiet, has yet to claw or knead, is housebroken, etc. and he's given him all the must-have care for a cat that wanders in off the street.  Conditions are good. Now, of course, he and Julien just need to not beat the crap out of each other more than once, and need to not get into any pissing contests over our furniture, because those are the two Dealbreakers.

It helps that Ali has figured out the perfect name for the li'l guy.  Since Julien is, properly, Julian Bashir, the new guy will be Miles O'Brien if he works out.  The fact that Ali has found the perfect name pretty much means that I'm doomed as far as this cat goes.

One thing I am very very unsure of: What is the best way to introduce these cats?  How can I make the transition easier for 15-year-old Julien?  How can we have them not tear each other apart?

It's really hard to post on your shiny new blog when you've forgotten your password, and the hint, and both of them are only recorded on your headless Mac Mini.  Okay, so this case doesn't generalize.  But here's a post that'll be going up on textuality.org as soon as I regain access:

Wii Apologize

The most common complaints I see on the Wii Fit are: 1) No one uses it after the first week anyway, and 2) it's a placebo - any benefit that people see from using it they could just as easily could/would have gotten from any other exercise.

To both of these complaints I say: who are you to tear something successful down, and you're wrong, besides.

If you know me, you know that  I have very little time for people whose first reaction to success is to minimize and denigrate it.  Their efforts add nothing to the world and take much from it.  There is utility in analyzing a success to learn how it was done, and even more utility in looking at how something harmful has become successful and how to stop it.  But the arguments against the Wii in general, and the WiiFit specifically are not doing that.  Here's an example:

There were two paragraphs in this person's comment, but they both said just that: there are other ways to do this, the WiiFit is fake.  There is nothing productive here.  WiiFit makes some people lead healthier lives, gives some people the little nudge they need to do that thing they'd been knowing that they should.  That nudge might send them to the gym, in other circumstances.  But in the cases under discussion, the nudge came from WiiFit.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  The diabetic who posted that WiiFit helped him stick to an exercise program that lowered his blood sugar level would probably be more enthusastic than I am.

Now, my frustration with this has an element to it that is very relevant to textuality.org.  One thing that is very special about playing and about games as they promote play is the creation of a space, temporal and physical, where some of the rules of everyday life are suspended.  In that space, you get a chance to try something that you would not normally do.  The "magic circle" around games allows people to practice at things as well as to sublimate (anti)social desires.  Sometimes the thing being practiced is useless, sometimes it might be harmful, but sometimes it's very very useful, as in the case of WiiFit.

I will, begrudgingly, admit that there's very little "game" in the WiiFit as people commonly use it.  There are mini-games within it, but they are by no means the focus, and there's no metagame around them. 

What there is, however, is a $70 peripheral, a console, and a whole bunch of software creating a "magic circle" ... around exercise.  Whether or not people get really into it, at some level they are role-playing a healthier person and getting practice at being active.  The Wii is actually an unusually good way to do this-- home is a private place, which makes it excellent for self-conscious people to exercise in; the WiiFit gives them a structure to do that within.  It tracks their progress.  It lets them fail an exercise without embarrassment in front of gymbunnies.  It makes them focus on the screen and their progress rather than on the jiggle of some body part that shouldn't jiggle.  And yes, I speak from experience.

Sometimes the lovers need to wander off into the forest and be enchanted by fairies to sort out their squabbles.  Sometimes a White Wolf LARP is enough to teach someone to socialize.  Sometimes a "game" is all that's needed to change habits, because what's really needed is an excuse to be someone else for a little while.  Sometimes the placebo works.

It has been a busy week. 

• I interviewed for a job, and received an offer.  I'll be working with some cool folks (names withheld until I get confirmation) for at least the next month, hopefully longer-- it's still near the games industry, and more importantly my coworkers are fantastic.  I'm very excited, both to do the work and to (hopefully) really help the company.
• Another place, with another cool group of people, just failed to get back to me.  It looked and sounded promising, and I was careful to follow up, all lights were green, but ... nothing, not even saying 'no' or 'hang on' or 'try again later'.  *frowny face*  Perhaps I'll hear back soon?  Perhaps sometime down the road?
• My father, sister, and aunt are visiting my grandmother in Florida.  I don't see a way that I can make it this week with the job uncertainty.  This tears me up - even if I were able to visit in just a few weeks, the rest of the fam won't be there. :(
• My computer has been unbearably pokey ... apparently, my recent move to near-complete 'cloud computing' overtaxed the 512 MB of RAM in my Mac Mini (late 2005).  I was thinking about getting a new computer, when ...
• My monitor died spectacularly-- buzz, fizz, crackle, snap, strange glows within the screen, then nothing.  I leapt back at the first noise, and when it went silent I crawled across the room to unplug it lest it explode, Then I realized: I used a 6-year-old Powerbook until it's death, then used a 2-year-old used Mac Mini for another year+.  Needing a new monitor, and more memory, and possibly more HD, and preferably the ability to run Windows for game dev ... it was time for a new comp.
• So, new computer!  A refurbished 24" iMac is on its way within a week.  It's going to be a little funny how much better the new computer will be.  Visually, the old 17" CRT *plus Mac Mini* would fit, entirely, within the usable screen space of the new computer.  I could make a life-size picture of the old setup as a desktop picture.  And it will actually free up space on my desk, and could probably load my software in an emulator of the old computer and run more quickly than the old.  Moore's law RULES.
• Part of the 'cloud computing' bit, a term I'm using very loosely, is using a new PIM called "Chandler".  It's pretty interesting, but is taking a while to adapt to because it just thinks differently.  Hopefully I'll get off the learning curve before too long.
• Tax docs are off to my FIL, after spending a chunk of the week tracking down a fix to some docs from my last employer. I don't think the gov't would've liked me filing 2009 1099s just yet.
• I finished bringing my plants home from the old office.  Our apartment now contains 7 new spider plants and 3 new ivies.  If you want a spider plant (really tough, needs little care, grows like a weed), just ask!

So next week looms large and promising.  I've been overcast for a while now, a cloud cover of uncertainty (and actual clouds) keeping my solar array from charging-- uncertain job prospects, uncertain income, uncertain closure on old work, all making me very anxious, reclusive, and conservative.  Spring is coming -- time to get out and run!

This spam that I received a while back miiiight be proof that portions of the internet have achieved intelligence.  It's clearly a text mashup, but reads hilariously well in some places.  Skynet's epic poetry, perhaps?


( When did automated spam get so good? )