Emsariel

Illness, Ghibli, and games

2009-09-12T16:15:21Z

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.

Books since forever

2009-08-05T02:18:02Z

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.

Flight 6 - Flight is always excellent. I liked this one a bit more than the last few, I'm not sure why. I certainly liked the Michael Gagne story that continues from previous volumes and seems to have wrapped up here.

The Keepers of the Maser, vol 1 - 5,7 - This is a GORGEOUS story, written by Massimiliano Frezzato and drawn by Fabio Ruotolo, published through Heavy Metal. The story is part Nausicaa, part Elfquest, and the art is incomprable and in full color. Unfortunately, the panels seem to be chosen more for their beauty and drama than for their ability to tell a story in sequence with each other, like one of those comics composed of stills from a movie. So it can be hard to follow. But so beautiful! And in the back there are lots of detailed appendices explaining the trippy ecology and technology.

The Elsewhere Chronicles, Books 1-3, by Bannister, Nykko, and Jaffre. Like Keepers of the Maser, this is a gorgeous story, but unlike KotM, the pacing is great. Good adventure story, though I wish there were more in each volume. And more already published! The characters are really cool and I want to know them more than I do now.

The Eternal Smile, by Gene Yang and Derek Kirk Kim - I rather liked American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang. I loved Same Difference & Other Stories by Derek Kirk Kim. Loyola Chan and the San Peligran Order makes me more disappointed and frustrated than nearly any other book that I've willingly read. The Eternal Smile is part all of those. Two of the stories come so close to showing a Faith that does good for the world before going horribly wrong and reminding me why I can't subscribe to mainstream Christianity. All three stories ... do an amazing job of showing the beauty and flaws of their everyday characters in charming and quirky ways and without flinching at the ugliness that sometimes reveals. Read it, it'll be Good For You, with all that means.

The Burning Wheel Fantasy Roleplaying System - the core book, Character Burner, and Monster Burner - I'm probably going to blog about this later as well, but here it is briefly. It's a really interesting game system that seems at every design decision to have chosen the opposite of what D&D is, except for the love of tables. Its mechanics are narratively focused, where D&D is often tactical and combat-oriented; it uses six-sided dice where D&D uses all manner of pretty polyhedra; characters are intricately woven from a life history that determines their stats, rather than the stats determining the character; advancement is integral to how you play and what your character is like, rather than being solely based on monster pelts with story awards tacked on. You can tell from this description that I generally like it's direction, but ... it's still really fussy to play. I'm going to keep trying, though.

Bite Me! A Vampire Farce, by Dylan Meconis - is just that, a vampire farce, albeit one set during the French Revolution. It's a charming and light-hearted graphic novel with more puns than you can shake a stick at. It's just fun.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle - This is a dry look at a very uneventful trip by a regular guy to a FASCINATING place. Guy Delisle has traveled the world working in the animation industry, and this book is about his trip into North Korea. He doesn't try anything particularly dangerous or adventurous while there beyond giving a guide a copy of 1984 to read, but it's still an interesting read despite that.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, by Guy Delisle - Compared to Pyongyang, this is even more of a travelogue. He still talks about interesting cultural differences, and amusing fish-out-of-water anecdotes, but while China is very, very different from the US, Canada, or France, it's not as alien as North Korea. Shenzhen seems a bit tame in comparison.

Local, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly - I ... just didn't like Local. I think that reading it was probably good for me. I couldn't find the heroine sympathetic, or anyone else for that matter. I was watching people I don't like do horrible things to each other, make each other feel badly, and then feel guilty about it later. I don't much enjoy that, except that it's probably good to get me out of my comfort zone sometimes to make me think about how other people have it worse than I do. Look, I'm trying here. It's a big hardcover book that we bought!

Klezmer: Book One: Tales of the Wild West, by Joann Sfar - Where, o where, is Book Two? I loved this book so much, and want more of it. It's about the forming of an itinerant traveling Klezmer band, but it's a folktale, drawn energetically, lovingly, and brilliantly. I just discovered the notes in the back, as I was typing this, and now I know what I'm reading in bed tonight.

Templar, Arizona, vol. 1-3, by Spike - I get a kick out of this. Templar, AZ is a long-running, beautifully drawn webcomic about ... a boy who runs away from home into a city where philosophy and politics are everything. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's as close as I can come without venturing into uber-nerdom ... well, okay, here goes: if the premise of the Planescape D&D Campaign Setting - that there's a place where belief is everything to life, the world is shaped by it and vice versa - were laid on top of our current world, I think that you'd get Templar, AZ. I also get a kick out of this because I see Spike at least twice a year at conventions and she forgets who I am every single time. There's no reason to remember me beyond the common friends and frequent introductions, I suppose. I now hope to be remembered sometime in the future as that guy who she always forgets.

pbrane: the green man, written by Chris X Ring, "directed" by Jesse Heffring - I didn't like the art style, which is interesting for the fact that it's nearly entirely doctored photographs. The story is interesting, the sort of apocalyptic matrixey thing that I often enjoy, but it's self-indulgent here (which is saying quite a bit, given that genre as a starting point). Nevertheless, I picked it up while walking by a coworker's desk and I didn't stop reading it until I'd finished it. It's an interesting experiment, a decent story, and could be really good if it were edited by someone who liked but didn't love it and who had a will of steel. Until then: cool stylistic experiment, big story, very traditionally "superhero" despite itself.

Star Ocean: Second Evolution (PSP) - this is a remake of an old JRPG. It's full of JRPG-y goodness and silliness. I'm enjoying the skill-focused advancement system, which lets me craft characters in what feel like meaningful ways. And it's pretty, redone like this. It's also got a couple of skills that let you tune the difficulty, a mechanic that is much more fully and powerfully executed in The World Ends with You, but which is still good here.

Robocalypse (DS) - I'm enjoying this little RTS for exactly the reasons that it was lent to me. It's RTS, but your direction is at an extra remove. As in Lost Magic, you have two different types of unit, one which you control pretty directly and one which you merely point in the right direction and which has a mind of its own. The latter, the 'minions', often wander off and do logical things that are so not what you wanted. I like the balance of the direct and indirect control, the strategy vs. the tactics, after a fashion.
There are a bunch more games that I've dabbled with but don't feel qualified to review as "read". Onward, then...

A backlog of small things to post

2009-07-20T01:27:43Z

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

Yesterday I went with alisa5179 and 3distic to see Brendan and the Secret of Kells. It's a candidate for favorite film of 2009. It was so gorgeous, and was remarkably well-written by my standard of "not doing the easy/cliched thing I thought it would". I'll admit that I basically have a bunch of pleasure receptors in my system that were made for this film -- Celtic mythology, mythology retold with originality, mythology dealt with in respectful and authentic ways (great research), badass fae, creepy singing little girl, dream references, boy-and-girl protagonists that feel like their age, sympathetic antagonists ... so it pushes my buttons, but DAMN well. Unfortunately, it's getting REALLY limited release, dammit. I've saved it on Netflix and bought the soundtrack on iTunes. BTW, the trailer makes it seem kinda trite and dumb. It's not. Though everything they state is in the movie, it's like they went shopping on a list of cliches for the trailer and missed everything good in the film. It does all of those things, but not as badly as it sounds. It's like ATLA in that, really. I should dislike ATLA from a list of its attributes, but they did all that dumb stuff right.

One little detail in the film deserves its own entry-- a major character in the film is a cat named Pangur Ban, which I believe is an old Irish equivalent of "Felix the White". Pangur comes from a real story: late one night in an Irish monk living in a monastery on an island in Carinthia (Austria) in the 8th or 9th cent. wrote a poem comparing his life to his cat's as marginalia in the scriptures he was studying or transcribing. There's a literal translation online with some history, and some modern Irish poets (yay Eavan Boland) have taken their hand at it. In the film, Pangur Ban doesn't have the same story, his name is never translated, but what a fantastic detail to have worked into the film. There's a cat in a film about Irish monks? Of course it's Pangur Ban.

Congratulations to my friend John Green on the announcement, if not the release just yet, of a game he's worked on: Puzzle Bots!

I've been listening to some audiobooks by Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun. She's very down to earth in how she talks about principles that I've read before, but been unable to understand. She grew up in New Jersey, has had a life I can identify with, and talks in those terms. She's a figurative translation compared to the literal translations I've seen before-- when I hear 'attachment', I know what the word means, but I don't know what it means to Tibetan Buddhism. When Pema talks about "getting stuck" on things and habits good and bad and therefore dealing with the world around you as your habits dictate and not as you need to in that moment ... that makes sense. The audiobooks have been really helping me deal with some professionally-based stress lately. I like to be very abstract, to be thinking about 15 things at once, and I'm enjoying this practice dealing just with what's going on around me, and really dealing with it. That second link, btw, to an episode of Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason, is pretty good. That's a tough topic to tackle flexibly.

I was surprised to see some of the ideas Pema relates brought up in a book I've been reading on project management. The book mentions "flipping the bozo bit" as the self-defense mechanism of shutting down someone that you don't respect. The publisher (of your game) doesn't understand what it takes to develop a feature, so their suggestions are unreasonable. My parents don't know what New York is like today, so they worry about me living in my neighborhood, oh well, just don't talk about it and I won't provoke them. It's a way of shutting down something unpleasant and not dealing with it. You flip the bit (programming term), flip the switch (not programming) and declare that person/group/perspective not worth dealing with. It's very much like some of the things that Pema Chodron talks about in the book that I've enjoyed the most, Getting Unstuck.
Hm. That looks like what was on my list, for now. Back to work!

Findings from MoCCA, Sunday

2009-06-08T05:09:19Z

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

Findings from MoCCA, Saturday

2009-06-07T07:04:43Z

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

Several awesome things

2009-06-05T15:38:31Z

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!

Monday induces rainbow-vomiting

2009-05-26T01:44:12Z

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!

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

Third Thursday Game Night 1

2009-04-17T03:42:47Z

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.

That's a great setup for Apples To Apples, great as ever for a pickup game and icebreaker.
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!
While the other half of us played soupkills' Spank the Monkey.

Pretty good for 10+ people and 3 hours.

Next one: May 21, 2009!

Useful things?

2009-04-16T12:23:10Z

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?

Time tracking?

2009-04-16T00:24:23Z

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?

emsariel @ 2009-04-14T14:09:00

2009-04-14T18:18:14Z

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.

ICON 28: it happened

2009-04-07T03:56:55Z

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.

Game Night(s)?

2009-04-02T16:39:51Z

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.

Mrrow?

2009-03-27T01:48:27Z

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?

Wii Apologize

2009-03-21T01:54:57Z

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:

Talk to anyone that actually works in fitness - it isn't actually Wiifit helping them get fit. Wiifit is essentially a placebo. You'd get the same amount of exercise trying to play with the dial on a measuring scale by shifting left and right.

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.

A Round of Crazy Updates

2009-03-14T21:39:07Z

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!

Skynet Presents: Spam

2009-03-06T20:54:17Z

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?

IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD! Blood Diamond review at theOneliner. Leguin's Earthsea books. Someone stole my car! Stress may literally be making you pull your hair out. As it is I shall offer you only the following challenge. Enter pretty redhead the second, Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood) whom JB grows equally obsessive about. The opposing forces play a large part in a films' success, and here they're an insubstantial, toothless travesty. com Where is the horse and the rider? There's inspired, and then there's inviting litigation, and this veers dangerously towards the latter. Basically, some savage Mayan warriors in need of human sacrifices to appease their god ransack the village of a peaceful neighbouring tribe, butchering, raping and taking captive it's inhabitants.
The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills into Shadow. In the case of progressive scalp infections, they can produce scarring and permanent hair loss. Forming a relationship over the phone with young Pete (Rory Culkin), Noone decides to pay the critically ill youngster a visit, only to find doubt cast over his very existence. For the most part the answer is, surprisingly, yes. In fact, it was actually quite pleasing that Bowen isn't even portrayed as a token sex object, her entwinement with Archer largely implied rather than billboarded across our retinas. com The Pursuit of Happyness review: Overbearingly downtempo.
Cousin Avi (Dennis Farina) Snatch Search Home Films Games Features Downloads Forums Mobile (? "On some level, male pattern baldness might be tied to increased testosterone levels during puberty, which are often the result of a high-fat diet or eating too many animal products," says Dr. com Where is the horse and the rider? Klaper says that a low-fat diet may help slow down the balding process. A mis-fire for sure, but with admirable intention. " As discussed in the Salt chapter, excessive salt is consumed by Americans, nearly all of it highly refined. So with a morally determined story and slew of good performances under it's belt, why the mediocre score? I can see why he was so popular in Cats. As hair is formed, available minerals and amino acids circulating in the blood are laid down in the hair. The novel by Chumpstain McBollockchop (Ed - check this name, suspect erroneous) on which this is based was written when he was seventeen, and it shows.
Considering the additional sweets, desserts, and sugar-laced foods and drinks in which Americans indulge, we can see that the sweet flavor dominates the typical diet. Basically, some savage Mayan warriors in need of human sacrifices to appease their god ransack the village of a peaceful neighbouring tribe, butchering, raping and taking captive it's inhabitants. Both poor appetite and digestion are also experienced by adults with zinc deficiency. As hair is formed, available minerals and amino acids circulating in the blood are laid down in the hair. Technically speaking it's remarkably polished work, with a style and dark beauty that's absent from Del Toro's bombastic Hollywood-backed outings. com I ran out of gas! Pregnancy, menopause and sometimes birth control pills can create hormone shifts, according to The Doctor's Book of Home Remedies for Women. Joliet Jake (John Belushi) The Blues Brothers Search Home Films Games Features Downloads Forums Mobile (? You should also consult your physician to check for an underlying health problem, such as hypothyroidism or infection.

Pimp That Snack presents: a Super Cadbury's Creme Egg

2009-03-06T20:49:17Z

akickinthehead sent me this at least one year ago, probably two, but I never passed the love on to you, O flist. As Easter is approaching again, I give you:

Building a Super Cadbury's Creme Egg

That is all.

GIP! GIP!

2009-03-05T18:11:22Z

While I was cleaning out my office workstation the other day, I came across a bunch of icons that I'd been meaning to post on LJ. I put 'em up on Tuesday, so it's time to show them off! Especially since all but one of them are by friends!

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

chibi comission by bhanesidhe - The whole thing is great because it shows my kilt and rollerblades, but the showing just the top half keeps it from being too small and features a nice expression that's good for certain LJ responses. YAY!
photo by oneangryrabbit - I've used this as a biopic in a bunch of places, but it's good here for an icon for 'games'. You can't see the titles at this size, but that keeps my face from being too useful for creepy internet people.
chibi by flypup (deviantart) - The artists at Gamelab did portraits of everyone for the staff bio pages on the site, and flypup drew my name. Bunny! Computer! Happy! My winter haircut! What else coud I ask for?
I've wanted this image for a while, so I'm glad I finally found the copy I knew I downloaded. YAY! I have NO idea where I got it.
This was concept art by gaojin (deviantart) for Gamestar Mechanic. We didn't go in that direction for the sprites, but I love this guy so much that he's been my chat icon for a while.

February Reading

2009-03-04T17:56:54Z

February was a month of games. I wanted to get a few games in while I knew that I could draw on Gamelab's library. I also was looking, more than usual, for things to zone out to, especially on the subway. I decided to close out a few games that I'd had sitting around but hadn't completed, too.

Books (1)

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood - This was my reading for the February/March Freebird Books Post-Apocalyptic Book Club. I enjoyed it, but overall enjoyed Chrysalids more. That discrepancy might be good, though, at least for the genre. Two things weighed me down while reading it. First, the narrator's an uninteresting jerk. He coasts through life motivated almost entirely by manipulating women and getting drunk, and then almost accidentally ends up being The Last Man Alive. I think there's a message within that theme of the book, but it doesn't make the experience of reading him worth it. Secondly, the future described in the book is uncomfortably possible. Every post-apoc book out there exaggerates things in society to their logical limit; what Oryx and Crake plays with is bioengineering, corporate states, and the division between rich and poor. It has a lot to say about them, and says it well; it just made me sick to read it, and not at all hopeful or inspired to try to improve. A book doesn't have to be do those things to be good, but I'll enjoy it much more. I think Chrysalids was remote enough (examining nuclear winter and religious extremism) that I could enjoy it.

Russia Becomes You, by Jeffrey Wilgus - Ali's father published a book! In 1995, he left the US for Russia and pioneered the Russian stock market. While he was over there, he wrote memoirs as lengthy emails to friends and family, and the book is comprised of those revised memoirs. It's quite interesting, and a good read. He's not a professional writer, but he writes clearly and his personal voice comes through very clearly on every page. It's like sitting and talking with him about Russia, which I got to do back in December. He focuses, generally, on general-interest topics -- it's not like sitting through a family slideshow of a trip to the Grand Canyon. He discusses the effects of the Soviet era on the people and cities, talks about the growth of capitalism and a free market, the process of buying everything (including cars) in cash, vividly describes the countryside he wanders through, the markets, the vacation stops, the small towns, and spends several chapters on Suzdal, a small town he falls in love with and buys a house in. There are a couple of friends that I NEED to read this --N. and L*s* in Boston -- but I think that many people could enjoy it.
Games (5)

Mercury Meltdown (PSP) - I really enjoyed Marble Madness when I was in middle school, and this is a nice extension of that idea. There's a puddley ball of mercury, and you have to get it to a goal. You tilt the board back and forth to slosh the mercury along, stay on the track, and dodge obstacles. Mercury Meltdown is a lot richer than ol' Marble Madness, though-- since it's mercury, you can split the blob or slide along an edge and lose some but not all of it. It's no longer an all-or-nothing marble. Then, too, there are creative alterations: you may need to color the blobs and then recombine them to make a certain hue in order to pass a gate, or you might need to chill the mercury so that it acts more like a marble and can slide along rails. It's fun, and well done IF you like the genre. I'd say that it's a "hardcore" marble game.

Mega Man Powered Up (PSP) - This is a PSP redress of MegaMan 1. It doesn't go so far retreating the original material as to make it something new entirely, like Mercury Meltdown; it's more like the True MegaMan Fan's dream of MegaMan 1. Everything old is there in complete loyalty, but then there's another mode where you can play as the bosses, fight new bosses, try for achievements. And then there's a pretty good level editor which actually lets you give and take levels from the internet. Except for fan art, fan fiction, and an OCRemix plug-in, it's really pretty much everything a real MegaMan fan could want from MM1. Now ... where's MM 2 Powered Up? Everyone KNOWS that MM2 is the best of the series - the fan favorite plus True Fan treatment? That's gold.

Aedis Eclipse: Generation of Chaos (PSP) - I was given this game as research material for a project I was working on over a year ago, and I'm glad that I was - I'd never have picked this up myself. It honestly looks like a completely stock Japanese tactics RPG in a long line of such, and I wouldn't have gone for it. I played about halfway through the "easy" quest, figured I'd gotten all the research from it I could, and set it down. I picked it up this month in my quest to finish off all these lingering games, and now I can't set it down. I finished the quest, and then found out that there are two other storylines, complete with entirely different characters, enemies, maps, in the same package. I also seem to have gotten over learning the conventions of the genre, so I'm not struggling against an incredibly complex interface every turn. At this point I can pick it up, play a couple of turns, and set it back down in 5-10 minutes - and that's the magic formula for my playing through a long game. It can be played on the subway, or while I'm waiting for my poky computer to render gmail. I can't talk about its treatment of the genre, because I haven't played that much ... but it is pretty and fairly deep for what I expected it to be. And there is a LOT of it.

Lost Winds (WiiWare) - I really enjoyed this little game, which means that I completely disagree with the Gamespot review. They thought it was too short; at about 4 hours, it is pretty short, but it's also only $10, and that still gives it two hours on a bad movie. They thought that most of the game wasn't very pretty; I thought that it was gorgeous and well-designed and relaxing. They thought it was boring; I thought that it was very peaceful and calming, and was a nice antidote to the tension of most video games. I think the key difference is what you're looking for in the game. I enjoyed it as a pretty, calm exploration of a well-designed world, and a pleasant treatment of the puzzle-platformer. It was four hours of some of what I enjoyed about Shadow of the Colossus and Okami - I could just wander around the world with nice music enjoying some beautiful imagination. Then, when I was ready for a puzzle, I could go find it. I think this game could be great for stressed out adults, and young kids, and maybe very few ages in between.

Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures (Facebook) - I'm pleased to see this game out there, because it's a nice treatment of an idea that was discussed for several years at my last job. Conventional thinking is that part of the appeal of "casual games" is that you can play them around your everyday life. You can pick them up and set them back down again in a few minutes, having made progress. They're not very punishing, and don't demand a lot of effort outside the play session. This game is the ultimate extension of that idea - You're really busy? Okay, set your character up for an adventure and then let them go. Check back in on them when you can, but mostly they'll handle themselves. Any input you have will help your character out, but they'll probably be okay without you. You can focus on the equipment-arranging, the level advancement, and read about their adventures. It's potentially quite boring, but done well, and here I think it's done pretty well, it's kinda fun... and it's great for Facebook. The game rewards attention up to a point, and gives you adventure to read about (some of the draw of RPGs), but doesn't demand attention. The problems with this particular instance of this kind of game are that the involvement is a bit too low, and some really great features that increase involvement are only unlocked after weeks of (undedicated) play. Looking at my friends list, almost no one has gotten to some of the features that are making the game fun, and they don't even know that they're there. They probably think that they've maxed out the game's appeal. As for the involvement, I wish that there was more nuance to it. Each encounter involves a roll on a stat and a target number. Once your adventurer is off and running, the random encounters mean that you can't affect the outcome that much, and that you must be passive. If you could set strategies for your character (recent Final Fantasy games) or see an upcoming encounter and make a decision (with a default if you aren't paying attention), then I think the game would be a lot deeper, and you could own your character more.

Tweets for Today

2009-03-03T22:02:59Z

09:33 Welcoming the new day! #

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New York, Chapter 3; or, Back to Freelance

2009-03-03T19:28:29Z

A couple of weeks ago, my latest project, Gamestar Mechanic, hit public beta -- you should go register! -- and that was as far as we could go with our funding. So it goes with many things these days.

Hence I am now out looking to rock the world of game and software dev. I'm pretty excited about the prospect, because there's neat work out there to be done. I've taken some time to clean up my home office, get my resume and portfolio updated, and am now looking.

If you know of people who might need help on a freelance, contractual, part-time, or even full-time basis, let me know! Here's what I do, for the record, since I only talk work about 85% of the time:

Project Management / Production for Games or Software Development - I coordinate software development, including assembling a team, scheduling and setting milestone deadlines, running daily meetings (yay Agile!), tracking tasks and defects, managing clients and their expectations, and coordinating delivery.

Quality Assurance Testing and Management - I test software, hire and coordinate testers, write good 'bug reports' and track resolution.

Game Design - I know about good game design, user interface and interaction design, and generally making things fun for a variety of people.

What needs doing - In every job I've been in, I've done things that never got listed under my title: coordinating the move of an office, founding new departments or teams, being the liaison with facilities. I know that sounds like interview B.S., but it's a good catchall-- I do lots of things, even things that I haven't done before but which clearly need doing.

I have been blessed either with a string of work that I have enjoyed, or with a soft spot in my brain that makes me enjoy whatever I do. I'm happy in the game industry, but not restricting myself to it.

And, now, I'm off for a deceptively regular afternoon - going into 'the office' once more, then off to ... gaming tonight!

Tweets for Today

2009-03-02T22:04:07Z

11:29 is frolicking in the snow #

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Tweets for Today

2009-03-01T22:02:48Z

11:02 Three things Julien Does Not Like this morning: 1) claw clippers 2) the box they came in 3) my ass-face. #

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Tweets for Today

2009-02-28T22:02:28Z

11:06 A day of digital derring-do awaits. I wish I had a computer that was up to the task. #

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