All Quiet on the Eastern Front

It’s fairly rare that I write a post in the morning, mostly because I’m generally fairly nocturnal, and as such don’t do much of anything in the morning. That said, I’m down in Providence at the moment, and didn’t really feel like sleeping anymore, for whatever reason. So rather than wake anyone up, I crept out of the bed, showered, and am sitting in the kitchen on my computer, killing time until others wake up or arrive. The flaw, of course, is that the others are nocturnal too, and it could well be hours before they’re awake.

I don’t really have a lot to say, so I suppose this is a bit of a nothing post, but it seemed like the thing to do, and here I am. In relation to my previous post’s “secret project”, that would be that I’m now guest-blogging over at Applegeeks, writing for a new section they’ve added about Apple-related chatter. It’s not a pay gig, but it still feels really nice to be invited to do such a thing, and I definitely look forward to continuing. For now, I’m trying to do a new post each week discussing a different Mac developer as a regular thing, and probably posting other things on a more sporadic basis. Of course, I’m going to need to “write ahead” a bit to deal with the time I’m taking off to get some OTHER writing done, but that’s fine.

It’s interesting watching the change in light as the morning has progressed. The early morning light was delightful and refreshing, and then quickly became stronger, with sharply contrasted shadows on the buildings. The sky was mostly sunny with the occasional tuft of clouds, though in traditional weathergod mode, as my mood darkened, it clouded over. (I’m dealing with some bank stupidity involving an eaten ATM card at the moment, which my father is graciously helping facilitate while I’m away.) As I work to regain my composure and relax, it’s started to get sunny again.

I realize that the likelihood of my actually affecting the weather in a noticeable fashion is relatively small, but that is the nature of magic — it stems from belief, and from the conundrum that if you observe a connection between two things that plausibly shouldn’t have a connection, there is a possibility (however slight) that they are in fact actually connected somehow. The main difference between magic and science is that science covers the ones we’ve already managed to explain. And besides, it’s fun to think I’m altering the weather through my mood. It’s worth noting that the most mild and sunny winter on record for Seattle was the winter that my brother and I were both in Seattle and I was in generally good, mellow spirits.

Gah, I’d really like to go downstairs for a cup of coffee, but I wouldn’t be able to get back in the building without waking someone else up.

Independence Day Update

The first and arguably most important thing I’m going to say in this update is Welcome to the world, Oliver! To Chris and Lise, also many congratulations and well wishes are in order. I think you’re going to make damned fine parents, and I’m looking forward to meeting the munchkin when it’s feasible.

In other news, Happy 4th of July to those who have it as more than just the fourth day of the month! I’d also like to make quick nods to the folks I’ve noticed linking my last post, and hope they decide to stick around a bit. So to CW and Lichen, hats off to you, glad you liked the post. Maybe there are others that have linked it or other things, and if so please let me know: I like knowing people are finding something worthwhile on here, and because I have trackbacks turned off due to spam issues, I often don’t find your referral.

I’m going to aim to make a more significant post later, but for now, that’s all.

Xoogle

I’m probably late out the gate on this, but I just found a new blog that has proven to be both readable and fascinating. It’s a blog dedicated to former Google employees (there are currently two writing, with a third in theory somewhere in there). I think it says something that I’ve spent the past two hours reading it rather than getting some much-desired rest.

http://xooglers.blogspot.com/

On Everything

I actually wrote a post since the last, but it was unexpectedly lost in an absentminded reboot.

My friend Adam has his site back up. Much randomness, just as a heads up for those that used to read it. Also, the non-profit my friend Mike has been working on for the past few months now has a site up over at http://www.highlandeducationalcenter.com. Another site worth noting is The Gizmo Project, which is another VoIP/SIP netphone system that’s pretty slick. Crossplatform and a halfway decent interface for once. I’m TheNadreck or 1-747-627-6040 on it.

School is going slowly but steadily. I pounded through Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun the other day, and really enjoyed it. I think he had some really interesting insights into the nature of game design; I also completely agree with him that the state of story writing within the games industry is by and large at the level of high school. There’s vast room to improve, but i’ll be writing more in depth about that in another post over at my other site real soon now. I’ve also been actively reading a pretty good array of design blogs, notably TerraNova, Video Game Media Watch, Greg Costikyan’s blog, and of course GamaSutra.

Something really interesting and worth reading that was recently posted over at GamaSutra was Eric Zimmerman’s A Game Developer’s Bill of Rights. Again, more insight on that soon over at Critical Games. One last school related tidbit before I move on: the author of one of the books on my bibliography dropped me a line on here a little while ago, which I think is awesome… just goes to show how interconnected the internet is, even if only through Google. Marcus, if you’re reading, I’ll definitely be talking to you later! Online social engineering and communication is a topic near and dear to my heart above and beyond this particular semester.

My relationship with Erica is going smashingly; she’s simply fabulous, and I hope things continue to grow for a long time to come. I’ve been spending most of my weekends down there with her, watching movies and just in general spending time with her. It was kind of weird not going down this past weekend, but it being Thanksgiving, she was in NY with her family anyway. One of these trips, I’ll need to actually get ahold of the family I have down in Rhode Island.

In Vermont, things are going well. We’re all pretty well settled into the house in Montpelier. Good music, good food, interesting conversations… and I heat my room entirely with my computers. Uri and I have been MUDding a fair bit on AvatarMUD, as he’s been making a push to finally Lord (8 years after he started… looks like it should be doable by before Christmas, as he’s finally big enough to really pound through the levels). It’s been interesting, because playing has gotten me back into the MUD in general, after a long hiatus as a staff member. I’ve been active and visible quite a bit, helping with basic sundry stuff (lost passwords, setting altofs, helping with corpse retrievals for linkdead characters, et cetera), and also finally finished one of the areas I started 3 years ago. I’ve also been playing some of the new classes that have gone in since I last really played, like Paladin, and Fusilier.

I still want to write my own MUD, though. That’s on the backburner until I get more programming under my belt, however, since I want to write from scratch (the point isn’t to make the same mud with different content, the point is to do something unique within the genre).

Things have started to settle into something resembling a routine at this point, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back into writing regularly again. I guess time will tell.

Holistic Imagery

The title of this post is drawn from a conversation I just had with Dallas, another regular here at the coffee shop. He’s working on something called Form Syntax, which is basically creating a linguistic reference for visual concepts. It’s pretty cool stuff, from what I could see — complex in concept, but the idea is a good one. It was an interesting discussion to say the least, and the best way that I was able to encapsulate the concept is to call it holistic imagery — showing the interconnectedness of form, function, and emotion within design.

Earlier in the day, I went and had lunch with Robert, which was good. We ended up going to this strange little Hawaiian place near his office, which was odd but fun. I hadn’t seen Robert in a while, so it was nice to catch up with him a bit, see what’s new. He’s apparently gotten serious with a ladyfriend, kudos to him on that, and has also picked up a new car (Penny Arcade is doing well). It’s an Audi Quattro convertible, leather interior, climate control, all the bells and whistles (yes, Penny Arcade is doing THAT well), and I was quite envious. When I finally get back into town (who knows when), he told me to look him up and we’d hang out more.

Last night, I discovered to my joy that Muppets Season 1 will be available on DVD August 9th. I have been spreading the gospel ever since. Also, they’re doing a sequel Dark Crystal, and other fun projects, and that makes me happy — it’s always nice to see Hensons doing cool things, though I must say I still miss Jim.

Yesterday was… odd. I ended up not leaving the house all day, and just sat around online, looking at movie trailers and reading comics and chatting. I was feeling pretty isolated, but unable to bring myself to change my situation to fix that. I’m ready to head home (3ish more days, I fly home on Monday, arrive Tuesday), and am mostly just killing time until then. It just feels weird to be where I am, I suppose. Mickey’s coming down tomorrow to move shelves and stuff to the garage to be craigslisted. Then comes the weekend, and we may go do something, or do some more cleaning if needs be. We’re still friends, and even marginally functional, just getting divorced is all.

Yeah, this is a bit of an amalgam post, but such is life sometimes. I’ve been thinking about what steps I want to take this summer, and I think I have a regimen that should work:

  1. Wake up
  2. Go hiking or swimming
  3. lunch
  4. study programming, game design, writing

Dinner onward is variable, depending on what friends and family are doing. But that’s the routine I’d like to get into, and I think it’s a reasonable (and simple) regimen, one that I think I can maintain. By the end of the summer, my goal is to have at least 8 books from my bibliography read and hopefully annotated, and to have a solid grounding in Objective-C and the new features in OS X 10.4, and to be in better shape than I currently am. These three goals are accomplishable and worthwhile towards my goals. Comments, concerns, anyone want to join in?

Design Revision

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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General Updates

Before I get into it, I just wanted to stop and say HELLO to whoever it was that made a syndicated feed of this website on LiveJournal. I kinda wish you’d told me, so we could better keep it updated (it hadn’t updated since the site restructure 3 months ago), but I futzed with some redirects and got it working again.

On to the real updates. My parents flew out last Wednesday to spend a week visiting us. It’s been good fun, and I’m glad to see them. They got to meet our puppy, and we’ve done some basic touristy stuff (Science Fiction Museum, went out to Port Townsend and Port Angeles, etc), and in general have had a pretty laid back week. It’s amusing, since they get up before Mickey does, and generally by the time I come downstairs, they are sitting in the green chairs Mickey found on Craigslist for free, reading. We’re meeting with Uri for dim sum this afternoon, which I’m sure he’ll appreciate, since he’s unfortunately shouldered most of the driving burden in coming down here to visit us rather than us drive up to visit him. (As a side note, Freya LOVES Uri. Initially we were unsure how she’d handle him, since he’s A: male, and B: 6’8″. We needn’t have worried, she thinks he’s the best thing since doggie treats.)
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Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone :)

Sorry for disappearing for a while like that. I have been doing a few things with my time, and I do mean “few”. They have primarily involved doing schoolwork, and coming up with a content management solution I’m actually happy with for Critical Games. Mambo just wasn’t doing it for me… it felt kind of like a Ferrari that was missing a steering wheel… looked awesome, but was a pain to actually drive.

I did a lot more digging than was probably necessary, and finally found NucleusCMS, which is really flexible in what I put in and don’t put in… documentation isn’t the best, and the forums are slow in response time, but after dealing with some of the other systems out there I managed to figure a lot of it out on my own. I migrated it into production tonight. (Whee!)

Non-geekstuff in the extended entry, I swear:
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Sites To Note

In case you haven’t been paying attention to comments, my friend Chris has a new website: http://www.longhello.com. It’s got writing and music and fun stuff, so you should definitely go check it out, regularly. At the very least, update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions, because his stuff is worth your time, damnit.

Another website I found recently that I think is worth checking out (thus far, anyway, I just found it today) is http://www.heavenbesideyou.com. I’ve been chatting with this guy on IRC for probably over a year now, and am just now getting clueful to the fact that he has a website (and some nifty music, but I’ll leave it to him to decide where and when he posts that stuff).

And yes, I am in fact writing this blog post because I’m avoiding work. Thanks for noticing.

Hello I’m Updating

If you haven’t seen it yet, Sockbaby has finally released the conclusion to the Sockbaby Trilogy. If you haven’t seen these movies, I would highly recommend checking them out… “That Sockbaby is a Sockbaby Jesus, the Sock Saviour of the Sock People,” need I say more?

I haven’t updated in a while, and I apologize for that. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy. For instance, I am now back in Vermont for a few weeks, UberCon just wrapped up, and so did my semester. On a more geeky front, I managed to break my server severely enough that the CTO of the company had to step in to patch things. Basically, in my recent site renovations, one of the changes I requested concerning the subdomains and how things get redirected managed to create an instance of a bug that hadn’t cropped up in 3 years. I would like to publicly thank Terra, the CTO of FutureQuest, for not only fixing the issue, but doing so quickly and professionally. He (and the rest of the support staff) are the reason I keep on recommending FutureQuest.
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