I Can At Last Start To Speak

So, it's not over, not by a long shot. But, last night, as Mr. Sandman was hurling grains of beach detritus into my eyesockets in an attempt to bludgeon me to sleep (I had had too much coffee, you see), I realized that there are a couple of things I can begin to talk to you guys about.

This is a great relief to me. I've missed you. Yeah, I know, shut up, I'm not gonna go on and on about it and I ain't gonna cry, neither, so you can just forget about that. Don't get all mushy on me.

Let's see. I think I'll start here.

Before I go into detail on who the fuck is that?!??, I want to talk for a moment about a strange quirk that has colored my past few months.

It is this: we lost our Art Director in September. Under what can only be described as (indeed, one should go so far as to say must be described as) "sketchy" circumstances, my team of prototyping ninjas quite suddenly found themselves sans-visual leader. Fine, fine, no problem, I said, someone else will emerge from the team, some young, ambitious upstart will... someone... at some point, see, there's gonna be... anyone? Bueller?

It was with the greatest amount of irony that, without any candidates to draw upon who understood the game I was trying to describe, I discovered that I had been surreptitiously volunteered for the job. Now, those of you who know me know that I have no art background, beyond my own personal investigations. I have nary laid pen to paper. Lo.

Didn't matter. Team needed a lead, and I was the man for the job.

Fast forward: six weeks later, I had learned more about what an art team does, needs, and wants from their art director than I had accumulated in the previous decade. I forced myself to learn the trade... since, for the time being at least, there were several talented professional friends of mine who needed leadin'.

It was a blast.

(We finally got the right guy for the role, someone who is so staggeringly talented and experienced at it that I, gratefully, pretty much evaporated into the dark night. "Good luck! Have fun with the art! *poof*")

These six weeks, though... they did something to my head. The picture you see above is one side-effect of the process.

It is the Darklord, you see. He's a little preview of what I'm working on for this site. I assembled him in Photoshop, out of various bits and pieces. I am 100% confident that some of you recognize some of his bits, but I gotta say... as a first-ever piece of digital Photoshop art, I'm pretty damned satisfied with the results. I like him. Let me know what you think.

Unless you don't like him. In that case, fuck off.

(as my darling daughter would say, "j/k! hee hee!")

I'm working on an alternate version of this blog site. I'll keep blogging here until I get all the wrinkles worked out, but I'll hopefully have stuff up for your review and approval. Or, at the very least, I'll have something for you all to mock and point fingers at. Either way, let's assume that it's going to take for-fucking-ever, like every other personal web project I've ever seen.

It'll ship when it's done, ladies and gentlemen.

I have other stuff to talk about, but I'll blog about it later. Don't want to spent all my blogging capital at once!

For The Record

Two things:

1) Blogger has "upgraded" my account to Blogger Beta... and something went very, very wrong along the way, and now I've become reluctant to use Blogger at all. It suffices to say that when something goes wrong with a Google product, ask yourself this question: who would you call for support?

The answer, as it turns out, is the usenet. Fuck. That.

So, we may very well be seeing some changes in software around here. Stand by on that.

2) I have about seven things happening in my life right now that I can in no way blog about. Thus, we are currently in a period of what is perhaps best described as blogstipation. I expect that once the current blockage works itself out, we may well be doing a series of retrospectives on this rather hectic period in the darklord's life.

For now, though, you'll get nothing and like it. I love you all.

Attempting Desperately To Escape, He Perished.

Oh, I like this one. I like this one a lot.

Seems Wired Magazine (a publication which I will willingly excoriate: I hate them, and have, until today, found almost nothing of value betwix, on, or near their pages) has done a delightful thing. They ask a bunch of authors to follow Hemingway's example, and write a six-word story. The results are published here. Many of the web-only ones suck, but this one is just fucking brilliant:

He read his obituary with confusion.
- Steven Meretzky

Yes, that is outstanding.

...

I think that's all I have to say. Save, of course, for a digressive post-script. Stand by for that.

p.s. I'm thinking I need to update this here blog software. Blogger is cool and everything, but it's got a couple of problems with it. On the + side of the equation, there is the convenience, the simplicity, the overall Google-ness of it all. On the - side of the equation there is my utter inability to create any kind of "previous / next" post links on the site, without hand-editing every page Blogger makes (which ain't gonna happen, people, let's be reasonable here).

So, contemplating solutions.

AT LAST.

I can send emails from my phone. And, thus, photos.

I offer as evidence this picture of the place I had lunch today.


I am, in the words of the immortal Mark Twain, "all hooked up".

It is amazing to me how much of a pain in the ass this was to accomplish. I am only able to manage it because I have a POP email server available to me other than my Gmail account (Google, you see, flatly refuses to collaborate with me on this). I can connect to this external server through arcanery that I only just understand, and manage to email photos to myself. The version of myself that sits outside this rocks-and-sticks style technology wall that cell phones are currently laboring behind.

Why is it, do you suppose, that our cell phone masters still think that the way to more $$$ is to prevent us from being able to access anything but the content they themselves have authored? Very strange thinking, if you ask me.

Anyway, I'm psyched I got it to work. Only took me, like, two months.

Overblogged

So... much data... can't hold on...

/deep breath

My children take their breakfast one room over from my web wave-catchin' terminal. I prefer to "hang-10" in the den, if you catch my meaning. And so it was that, this morning, my children got to hear, muffled through the thin wall that seperates my domain from their breakfast table, the deep, stacatto pounding of my evil overlord laugh. It leapt, unbidden, from the depths of my chest and filled the house upon my reading of these words.

I "mu hu wa ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA" 'd my way through the rest of the morning. My children scurried hither and yon, hoping to avoid being tossed into the Pit O' Flame for kicks by this nefarious creature that their father had become.

Made my goddamn morning, it did.

I love being right. Have you heard? Have you heard? Sun & Google have aligned.

What's more hilarious than the news itself is the effluviant skree (to borrow a word from the title of this blog) that it generated. Hyperbole? Absolutely.

As far as I can tell, very little has actually happened. Here's Fortune's take on it, which seems nice and balanced; in short, everyone's pretty excited, but very little concrete has come out of this alignment.

Some folks are, in fact, taking issue with the whole thing. Which, as experienced media watchers know, is a fine indication that something might actually come of all this bru-ha-ha.

Regardless. Clearly we don't know much right now. Except, of course, for this:

"The American internet search group said that the deal would bolster distribution of Sun’s OpenOffice software, which offers similar programs to those available on Microsoft Office, such as word-processing software."

(taken from the Times Online)

Readers of this site have heard me pray to various gods and powers for the day when Google would give me a version of MSWord that I could use with a browser, from anywhere. It appears that the Google gods are kind and just (at least, for now), and want to do just that. And, clever monkeys, they seem to want to do that with a product that already exists.

I {heart} Google.

...

BUT!! For cryin' out loud. If you can believe it, that's actually only the first piece of remarkable news to hit the stands this morning.

I love being right. Have you heard? Have you heard? The EA lawsuit got bought out--I mean, settled.

This one I haven't spent much time on. I used to work for those yahoos, see, and it didn't seem like a good use of my time to blog about how much it sucks to work there, when other folk have done such an admirable job of that already.

That said, anyone with a passing familiarity with the way EA does business will not be startled at my opinion on how this particular lawsuit would (and will) pan out. It goes something like this:

1. EA will buy out the plaintiffs to prevent a judgement from being entered. This is prudent, and the right thing for EA to do for its own preservation.
2. Alas, this will leave the actual law unclear, and will leave the door open to future abuses.
3. EA will engage in future abuses, in part as a knee-jerk retribution against being ashamed in public. Still unable to make significant changes on their teams, managers will find themselves speaking the words "Well, you guys wanted to be hourly, so... I don't know what to tell you."
4. Working conditions will worsen, EA's profits will increase, and the hourly workers will experience increasing resentment over their small slice of the pie (even though that was the deal they signed up for).
5. The hourly workers will eventually call IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts), and the drive to unionize will begin.
6. (This may or may not actually improve things. It entirely depends on who's in charge and what issues galvanize the membership.)
   

But, as a friend of mine just said, "Yeah, here's my prediction: the sun's going to fucking rise tomorrow morning." ;)

Update-y Thing

I finally fixed the sidebar on this here website. Of yore.

See, here's the thing. When you're constructing a website, there's a tendency to imitate what you have seen. That is, to try and put stuff on the site that your "customers" (that's you) might find interesting, in a "trying to guess what people who come to this site might like" kind of a way.

This is, of course, completely fucked.

Because, see, it's a website that's all about me. If you're reading this, it has nothing to do with you looking for something interesting to buy or link from or surf to or something. It's because I amuse you. You're looking at my Web Face, and if it gives you a chuckle every now and then, and maybe moves something around in your head once in a long while, maybe you'll stick around.

So the sidebar: what you see is basically my quick link bar in my web browser.

I'm not putting it there for you, so don't get all weird. See, this way, if I'm away from my desk and on someone else's terminal (if, say, I were sneaking into your house to log onto your WoW account and send all your WoW gold to my character. I'm not naming any names, "Druid".), well, lo! My link bar has followed me into that there terminal, hasn't it?

This is the strange conversion that is creeping over me these days. I call it "the Google Effect"; I find myself wanting to put everything I have onto Google's servers, so that I can get it from any terminal anywhere in the world. I know that Microsoft thinks this is dumb. That's okay. They're dumb. Neener.

I have this dream: over the next ten years, the personal computer will undergo a kind of devloution, shedding a whole bunch of stuff that has become largely extraneous. Like, Windows.

If Google gets their way, all I'll need is a web browser, an input device, and a display of some kind, and I'll be able to do everything. "Fuck those Microsoft guys," I'll say as I ride off into the happy sunset on my horse (Trigger), "what have they done for me lately?"

Nothing. That's right, nothing.

That's my dream. As I am 50% cynic, I have a healthy dose of skepticism that it will ever come to pass. But...

Boy, it almost seems possible...


[ p.s. This post gets the Most Random Change Of Topic Mid-Stream Ever award. ]

lol

So I fell into a black hole of... uh... stuff, and didn't blog for a week. So what??

Blog blog blog blog

We're coming up on two months of blogging here. This is interesting to me, since it is easily the longest any form of journaling or writing has held my interest. Here's what we know so far:

• http://www.blogger.com/ makes this task as goddamn straightforward as it likely can be. In order to be easier or more flexible, it would literally have to follow me around begging to be updated, and use Adobe Illustrator as the authoring interface or something. It's stupid how well-thought-out it is.
• I tend to forget do to things once everything is all set up and I've done them once. It's like some little planning dude in my Head Office is going, "Okay, I've demonstrated that I can do the laundry successfully. The system is in place. Therefore, I need never do it again. Our work here is done!" And then I wonder why the laundry hasn't been done. If anyone knows what patch I can install to my firmware to fix this problem, please send help.
• After my first few weeks, the need to blog diminished some, as if the waters that had been building up over time had been bled off by my first few weeks of skree'ing. What has emerged is a gentle sensation of wanting to write. It's strange; I've been writing for a long time, and only recently have I discovered that when you get to a certain skill level, it is, as some have warned, actually pleasurable to organize your thoughts through words. Surprises abound, it seems.
• I think I'm funny from time to time. I hope you do too. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you didn't, as I'm also obtuse. Maybe a bit dry. Like a fine martini, perhaps.
• People don't like it when you say, "oh yeah! I wrote about that in my blog!" when something comes up in conversation. It leads to this really unpleasant five seconds where:
• The topic of the conversation has suddenly become your blog, instead of whatever it was that we were talking about. It's the same reaction I would get if I said, "oh yeah! I was in a movie about that!";
• Then, everyone in the conversation is suddenly, uncomfortably aware that you write a blog. Opinions vary on whether this is a socially acceptable form of behavior, so reactions vary from a sort of confused smile to actual distaste;
• Immediately after that, some kind of recovery attempt is made, and the conversation either rebounds, or collapses entirely.

Even with all its warts, I begin to see why people engage in this bizarre ritual. Venting one's spleen in the public discourse is often enormously enjoyable, sometimes embarassing, potentially damaging, and, above all, an excellent attention-getting scheme. Even if, ultimately, I'm the one paying attention to me. :P

What In The Hell Is This?

Bloglines?

Is it just me... or is this whole Internet thing getting weirder and weirder by the minute? This here thing appears to be an aggregator for Blogs and RSS feeds. Which are, themselves, aggregators of news and events. In a way.

...

I must find a way to harness this strange and glowing power source. I will cast aside my malevolent nature, and turn my work towards the betterment of humanity! But, I will work in secret (in this here hollowed out volcano), and only reveal my work to the world when it is complete! For, truly, the fools in the World Above could never understand the greatness of my work before it was fully formed. Yes, YES!!

And I Quote

Blogging, to me, so far appears to be part public masturbation, part 1-sided conversation, and part semi-literary journaling. It's...

It's like the inverse of web surfing. I post the random stray websites of my mind, rather than leading my mind through random stray websites. It's like TV in reverse.

I mentioned my blog-osity (blog-itude?) to a patch of friends I've been cultivating, and this popped out:

Now that the gauntlet is thrown, I'm going to have to compete with the rest of you fuckers to get blogged by [yours truly]. Must brush up on my analytical writing skills.

Indeed.

In actual fact, it turns out that the simple delight of using this quote (which is, itself, about attempting to take some other action to "get blogged") as the blogged quote itself could not be resisted.

I [heart] irony!

More darklordian

And I did some stuff with the colors around here. And the background. And, other stuff. Making it...

...mine.

Pondering blog-osity

So, I just spend a whole truckload of time digging around in this Blog world of blog blog blogginess. Blog.

I'm left stunned, as I often am, when confronted with the bottomless abyss of the Vast Unknowable. SWEET JESUS you people write a lot.

I'm left thinking. Just what in the fuck have I gotten myself into.

The rules of this medium are scurrying around my mind like feeding rats. There's so much to say, so much to do... and so little time!

Well, actually, there's lots of time.

The challenge, of course, is to manage to say something interesting. To actually record something into this drivel-ful medium that someone will want to read. Perhaps.

But, I think maybe that's a mistake. Perhaps it is in the very nature of this medium that trying too hard to craft oneself into an Image of Interest is swimming upstream; the very nature of blogosity seems to draw itself to a kind of bizarre self-reflective narcissism, and you've kinda gotta hope that you've got something interesting to say.

Hmmmmmm.

It's fascinating

It's fascinating how the urge to blog comes on to one. It's as if having an empty page, out there in the fabled Internet, waiting to be filled with your thoughts, and your thoughts alone, begins to creep into your consciousness, and soon... soon, you must blog.

I'm sure it won't last.

entry 1 of (n).

So, the deal is that I'm learning Flash.

And, the other part of the deal is that although I'm a game designer by trade, I think I might actually have started to become one in truth.

I've spent years at this. I've worked with small teams, big teams, and ubefuckinglievably huge teams, and have, over the years, don so little actual game design that I was starting to wonder if I wasn't just fooling myself.

"Maybe I'm actually... a producer," I'd say to myself in the secret dark of the night.

But now...

I don't know. I do know that Flash is very very cool.

I once wrote / maintained a compiler written entierly in AWK. This may not make sense to you, which is okay. It suffices to say that AWK is a very simple programming language that is sometimes used for intro programming. Writing a compiler in it is like building a bridge out of Lego. Folks would stare at it and say, "Well, I'll be goddamned if I can see how that thing stays up."

The point is. AWK & Flash share a lot of genetics, and this suprised me. I came up to speed on Flash pretty quickly. I'm going to see if I can figure out how to post a link to my first creation... hang on...

...and that was a complete failure. But I now know what I need to know to be able to do that. Next time, I promise.