Category Archives: Site Archives

One Packet to Go

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I’ve been in school for most of my life. Pre-school, then Kindergarten, then first through twelfth, a few months off, then a semester, a few months off again, then my current stint at Vermont College. For various reasons, many of which tied to depression, college has taken me a bit more than the stereotypical four years. I started in October of 2000, and God willing, I’ll finally be graduating in October 2005. That’s fully 7 months away and an entire semester, but even so, I’m a little startled by its approach. I’m left taking stock in the work I’ve done, in the topics I’ve studied, and wonder if I’ve actually learned enough to go DO something with it. And if I haven’t, why the hell did I spend so much money for a piece of paper that doesn’t mean anything?

I’m trying not to think about it too much, no point psyching myself out when I’m in the home stretch. It’s definitely in the back of my mind, though.

My current semester has been about writing, though mostly I’ve been doing a lot of reading, as usual. I’ve got a few stories right now that I like, and I’m going to see how far I can take them in this coming month, at which point my last packet will be due. Then I head back east for my residency, and begin my Culminating Semester. The format is a little different than previous semesters, and the final body of work will be bound and placed in the university’s library. This makes me nervous. No matter how good people say my work is, no matter whether others find it acceptable, a part of me is afraid that when the work is actually weighed and measured, I’ll be found like how I feel: a fake. The work is my own, don’t get me wrong, and the amount of fluffing I do is the occasional digression; I don’t even mess with the margins or font size (the favorite length extender of students everywhere). But I don’t feel like the work I did contributes to a greater understanding for the reader or myself. So regardless of whether the essay or annotation succeeds academically, I feel it was a failure.

I’m hoping to change that with my final study. At least a little bit. I plan to focus on game design, which is a daunting enough topic that the only way I’ll complete it is if I take the bull by the horns and aggressively pursue it for the entire semester. But if I do that, then I’ll really have something to be proud of coming out of my degree. I’m down to the wire (I can’t afford another semester, if I screw my culminating one up, my education fund is about depleted), so perhaps it would make sense for me to do a lighter study for my final semester. I’m not going to, though. I want my degree to be something I’m proud of.

Discombobulated

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I’m posting because I can. And because I’m avoiding schoolwork. I wrote some more of the God story today, I’m up to about 4 pages, and like it so far. I’d hardly call it anything special, but that doesn’t make it bad. I’m not sure where I’m going to take it, but I like writing the character, so that’s alright. He does a lot of internal narration, which is a style I’ve always enjoyed, and hopefully doesn’t get in the way too much. It’s hard figuring out how much is “too much” when it comes to exposition: just because I find the setup of the situation worth explaining, it doesn’t mean the mythical “reader” is going to feel the same way. Locke, the main character, is currently flirting with a librarian and setting up a date for the weekend, which I’m not sure if he’s going to keep or not. I’m thinking he will, at the moment, but I may be wrong. Mickey wants me to work in the Goddess Advil somewhere, and I’ve got an idea on how I’m going to do that, which should be fun.

In other news, Jack Thompson is a sleazeball. I’m also not sure how I feel about CBS pitting a lawyer against two gamer geeks (Tim Buckley and Scott Ramsoomair). The whole crackdown on games is just plain disgusting. The complete disregard for the first amendment deeply disturbs me, and the legislators who are trying to restrict those rights should be ashamed of themselves.

On a personal note and the cause of this post’s title, I’ve been on Prozac for a few weeks now, and have noticed a positive difference in my mood (fewer swings in mood and less severe when they happen). I still feel extremely disconnected and disorganized, however, and still feel like I have a long road ahead of me. It doesn’t help that they’ve been wreaking havoc with my stomach… unless I eat something with the pills (and something coating/soothing at that), I have an upset stomach/queasy feeling for the rest of the day. I’m due to go back to the doctor for the follow up in another week or so, so I’ll be sure to bring that up with him then. If not, having to eat some yogurt in the morning really isn’t the end of the world, y’know?

Writing Fun

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I’ve been focusing on writing this past semester, which has largely involved a lot of reading and my typical avoidance techniques for the actual writing. That said, I’ve started three separate stories, all of which have the potential for a worthwhile story (in my humble opinion). The first is a dystopian future world with nanotechnology that I’m now thinking about rewriting (I’m only a few thousand words in, so now would definitely be the time). The second is a silly little story about a Reality Assessor investigating the strange occurences occuring in a small town somewhere in the midwest. The third is an idea that’s been percolating in my brain for ages, and I’ve actually started to write it down. I’m really happy with that one. It basically hinges on the concept that a few thousand years ago, the existing pantheons of gods got together and decided to come up with a long term solution for survival, since their existence hinges upon belief, and what with all the plagues and wars and the fickle nature of humanity, no one really had what could be called “job security”. So they formed a union, or something similar to it at least, pooling the resources and beliefs of various different pantheons into one superstructure… which is how “GOD”, and the sudden predominance of monotheistic religion was formed.

The GOD story has been quite fun to write so far, and reminds me somewhat of a hybrid between American Gods and Lord of Light (both excellent books in their own right). I may post excerpts later. Maybe.

Speaking of Lord of Light (at least in passing), I just finished reading it for the first time. It is written by Roger Zelazny, and is considered by many to be his best work (justifiably). Given the nature of this semester, I took the opportunity to put it on my bibliography, and am very glad I did. Much like the excerpts previously mentioned, I may post my annotation about it later.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve switched to WordPress. There are still template tweaks to be made (making sure navigation is everywhere I want it, etc), but overall I’m really happy with the new design and system. I’ve placed a personal moratorium on even thinking about new systems again for at least a month, to give this one a chance to shake down. Besides, WordPress 1.5 has all the features I want, as far as I can tell. So why switch again? Also, I upgraded Gallery to 1.5RC1, from 1.4.1. The template changed a little in the process, but otherwise the changes should be largely invisible to the viewer (possibly a bit faster). This gives me a chance to add the “random image” block they have to this page, which’d be cool. That said, I may hold off on that until Gallery 2 hits final, and then upgrade to that first.

TypeKey is Now Required

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Because I moderate comments, you haven’t been seeing the half dozen a day bits of comment spam I’ve been receiving and having to clear out. I’m tired of it, so I’ve turned off unregistered comments. If you want to comment, get a TypeKey account. It takes two minutes and doesn’t require any hoop jumping to get it to work.

You just click the “Sign In” link in the comments section, log in, and it’ll automatically redirect you back to that page so you can comment. Furthermore, you’ll remain logged in as long as that window is open, so if you go to other sites that use Typekey, you won’t even have to log in again. Considering Typekey is developed by Six Apart (makers of Movable Type), who also just bought LiveJournal, chances are good that LJ will start supporting Typekey (and possibly vice versa), so just do it now and get it over with.

Content Managers

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I’m still not happy with my website. I feel half-assed with my Nucleus/MT setup, and continue to feel that there’s got to be a better (for me) solution, one that actually makes me happy.

Apple is adding a slightly tweaked version of Blojsom to Mac OS X 10.4 Server, so I took a look at that. It’s very pretty, and feature rich. It also requires programs my current web hosting provider doesn’t carry (namely, Tomcat). Additionally, some of the syntax is counter-intuitive, and I’m unhappy with the documentation.

Then, while looking into ecto, I noticed their current poll listed a slew of blogging solutions and communities that I’d never heard of. At last, hope for a system I like! I clicked through several, and came across Drupal, a content manager that I REALLY like the look of. The built in featureset is robust, it is under active development, it has an extensive and feature rich plugin library, and (important), it will run handily on my current web host. Worth noting in particular is the plugin that allows LiveJournal users to participate/comment without having to re-register. There is also basic migration support for importing MT entries into their system.
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The New Arrangement

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My G5 has arrived and is set up. So far, I’ve upgraded to iLife ’05 (came in the box, just not installed), and installed iWork ’05, MySQL 4.1.9, CocoaMySQL (GUI frontend for MySQL), MenuMeters 1.2, and iChatStatus 1.2.1. I also did all the software updates, and installed and updated the developer tools.

It feels really good to have a “clean” machine, and before I do TOO much more than, say, my schoolwork, I’m going to sit down and figure out a really good file organization system, to make sure it STAYS organized and clean.
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Design Revision

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For those of you not reading this on a feed, you’ve probably noticed a significant site revision. The design I created for Critical Games has been growing on me, so I decided to implement it on my main blog. One nice aspect of this is if I ever do switch to an entirely Nucleus setup (or other), the transition will be essentially seamless for the viewer. That’s not any time soon, though, if ever (probably never).

In either case, I like having the uniform design between sites under the Critical Games aegis. Once Gallery 2 hits a stable beta (or better, stable final), I’ll probably look into effective ways to integrate the gallery into the rest of the site (a random image block, for instance, which is a built in module in Gallery 2). There is still some work that needs to be done before the transition is complete, however. (The main page is done, and so is the Credits page, but the rest of the site still needs to be transitioned.) This will be happening over the next several days; I could have plowed through and done it all at once, but I DO have other things I need to be working on.
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Quick Geek Post, Real Post Later

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After mucho deliberation, I’ve decided on a new computer and will be purchasing it tomorrow. Tentative final specs: 2.0GHz dual processor Power Mac G5, 1gb of PC3200 DDR RAM, 250gb hard drive, Radeon 9600 XT, wireless card and bluetooth module.

I also plan to get iWork, and it’ll be coming with iLife ’05 built in. I also picked up a 250gb external FireWire and FireWire800 drive for backup and archiving (you lose all your data ONCE and you’re a die-hard archivist for life), and a LaCie ElectronBlue IV 22″ monitor (factory reconditioned… $300 off retail that way, which is why I decided to splurge on the larger monitor).

Total cost: more than we have, and let’s leave it at that. That said, my trust pitched in just under $1.7k, which helps a lot, and the hope is that I’ll have a job soon (two separate prospects have shown up on my doorstep around the same time… an internship locally, writing content for a MMORPG which could potentially turn into a full time job, and the other is a full time job writing content for a MMORPG… in Australia. Strangely, the Australia one is more concrete, since I’ve actually already made it onto their shortlist. I know I was talking about moving out of the country, but I honestly wasn’t expecting so soon, and am now kind of squeamish now that there’s even a potential real prospect.)

Anyway, as the title says, this is just a geekpost. I’ll post more real stuff later. Thanks so much to all of you who’ve commented recently, and I hope to get back to all of you in one way or another soon.