A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Draw six, discard down to four

jmac@jmac.org — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:48:35 GMT

Lately, sitting at my desk, I feel like I'm playing Race or Cribbage, and all the cards in my hand work together so well that I really can't bear to discard any of them.

And, yes, as a result, I sit there sighing, rather than playing the goddamn game!

Sign I've let myself get oversaturated in lolculture

jmac@jmac.org — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:44:51 GMT

When an automated software test says "Result: FAIL", my first reaction is to dismiss it as cheap sarcasm.

Jmac.org Video Store is open!

jmac@jmac.org — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:10:14 GMT

I am pleased to announce the opening of the jmac.org video store, where you can buy DVDs of the first six episodes of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade, respectively.

If you like the things I make, please consider buying a shiny discful of it! As it says on that page, your purchase helps me improve the state of game journalism and critique — and, by extension, supports quality amateur media from game-obsessed overthinkers everywhere.

Iran

jmac@jmac.org — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:10:32 GMT

My selfish hope is that the events in Iran bring out positive - if not painless - changes in both that country and this one. In the Iranians, we Americans of all political colors see a sympathetic entity who has not just been wronged but outraged, by any objective standard.

It feels like 9/11 turned inside out. Rather than being challenged to come together to face a common threat, we're being challenged to come together to respond to a sudden and enormous wrongdoing in a place across the globe that, the day before, you and I might have had completely different opinions about.

I really hope we as a nation and a people can do a better job at meeting the challenge this time.

I've been playing games

jmac@jmac.org — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:05:59 GMT

So, a lot's been going on. Good things!

I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.

I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.

The Gameshelf shoot went great, even though I'm currently having a frustrating time importing the footage. I didn't think to clean the tape heads of the borrowed SCAT cameras - which many people use - before using them. As a result, the tapes have some schmutz on them, and every time Final Cut encounters such a blotch, it throws up its hands (as well as a modal dialog box) and saves the import-so-far to a file. There's nothing to do at this point except fast forward the tape a bit and pick it up from there, hoping that nothing juicy got skipped over. It also results in lots of smaller files to comb through versus a few long ones. This makes an already time-consumig task even longer. But I'll get through it.

This will be a fanatstic episode, but I think it's destined to be an anomaly among Gameshelfs... a "special" that I wanted to do specifically because it's so radically different than anything we've done so far, and it seemed like exactly what I personally needed to tackle in order to get into the show again. After this, we have to start getting disciplined about the show's format, enough so that planning, shooting and editing the episodes can maybe happen with some goddamn regularity for once. I have come to the conclusion the the show will never be really popular if it only comes out a couple times a year (if that).

I hope to open the jmac.org video store this week, where I will sell DVDs of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade. I have high hopes for this. Even a handful of sales would help cover my materials costs of recent Gameshelf-related adventures. It would also serve as a huge encouragement to me to produce more of both, and in theory would also serve to promote the shows to a wider audience. The presence of the DVDs will probably get me to promote the shows more aggressively, at any rate. We'll see.

I'm rather buried in Appleseed work. I lost the subcontractor I was working with just as I picked up a new small job in May, leaving me with four tasks all on my own plate. This is too many. I've been dealing with these best as I can, and this includes starting the process of bringing in new help. I am hopeful about this.

I love running the business. For all my crazy project ideas it's still the only enterprise of mine that brings in revenues, so I shouldn't shy away from the idea of letting it grow. Honestly, a large part of me is reluctant to invest much energy into growing Appleseed beyond just-me. This is the part that considers it my "day job", with a scoff. It's the same part that fuels my eagerness to work on my nuttier entrepreneurial projects, which I spent most of last year and the start of this year chasing at full throttle, and it's not used to being told to shut up for a bit.

I owe myself another period of reckoning. 2007's four-pillar system worked well and it's time to take stock and see what I really want to be doing now. The answer, I suspect, will be different from last year, or the year before that. I can only hope that the answer will fit better than it has in the past.

"Monolith", free to good home

jmac@jmac.org — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:17:20 GMT

Howdy folks,

Yes, it's time for the "monolith" to move again. I accepted it from rikchik's home years ago, which in turn got it from another place. It was great at the time, but my current space has gotten too crowded for it, so someone else should take it home.

It's a big... thing, measuring 42" x 42" x 15". It has a raised base with feet, so it can be used as a low coffee table. It can also be stood up on-end and against a wall for use as a shelf.

Its surface is panels of black material (some of which I have nailed into place after the glue wore out) over particle board. I'm not sure what it's filled with. It's pretty damn heavy, so you'd be responsible for hauling it out.

Y'all get first pick. If I don't hear from someone today I'll post to wider circles tomorrow.

Thanks!

Costuming help request

jmac@jmac.org — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:58:43 GMT

Dear loanyweb,

Would anyone local to me be able to loan me a traditional German hat for the length of June? Am willing to put your name in an upcoming Gameshelf credit roll for it. :)

Spin around, ninjas

jmac@jmac.org — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:23:52 GMT

Why was I not informed of this before? "Literal" version of the "Total Eclipse of the Heart" music video:

I like how the humor starts out at an eye-rolling, i-see-what-you-did-there level, but starts getting more comfortable and clever a little way in.

The whole series of these videos is pretty good, with several el-oh-el moments, if you're me.

IF meetup tonight @ MIT

jmac@jmac.org — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:33:27 GMT

I'm going to the Boston interactive fiction meetup tonight, 6:30, at MIT 14N-233 (Nick Montfort's office). Guest: Steve Meretzky. Come join!

(Ha ha, that was totally my first-ever pasted-in Tweet, suckas.)

http://groups.google.com/group/boston-if?hl=en

Bitching about Lost

jmac@jmac.org — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:44:43 GMT

Honestly, I found this the weakest of the season closers. "But, they exploded a nuke! And there was Jacob craziness!" Yeah, well...

OK, first of all, yeah, I liked the Jacob stuff. The opening scene of the finale, with Jacob and Black Tunic Dude, were great. I also enjoyed the scenes of Jacob intersecting with the main characters' earlier lives, though I would have edited it together differently, making it more of a rapidly unfolding montage. (If the whole season were a 2-hour film, that's how it would have happened, and it would have looked awesome. Sigh.)

WRT the nuke: O RLY? So the final scene is Juliet banging on it with the rock, and then there is a rumble and the screen goes white. Title card, credits. So one of two things just happened:

(a) Yes, she really did set off the bomb. In which case she accomplished the goal that several characters had been trying to achieve for the last several acts, to an obvious outcome. Which feels like a let-down, to me.

(b) She didn't set off the bomb. Maybe something else blew up; maybe the thing wasn't actually a bomb at all. (Lots of things in LOST cause the television screen to turn white, if you hadn't noticed.) It's useless to speculate now, but it would certainly be cliffhanger-standard to pull this one out at the start of the next season, and honestly it's what I'm expecting to happen.

Either way, we-the-viewers get nothing, not even a tease, to lead us into the next season. The strongest part of all four prior finales was the hook offered by the final scene, and this episode hands us a brick wall. I guess I can respect them wanting to try something different here, but as far as I'm concerned they just took all the air out. I basically feel like nothing at all happened, and I'm wondering if you and I even watched the same show, o you-who-were-so-excited-about-this.

This doesn't make me want to watch the next season. It does makes me angry and feel like a chump for letting myself get strung along. I feel like I do after finishing a big-budget single-player 20-hour video game that wasn't really much fun towards the end, but which I kept playing out of momentum.

I will admit I did find the meat of this season at least mildly entertaining. I did like how all the conflicts were character-driven, versus the the show ratcheting up the drama by introducing yet another fire-breathing ghost or whatever. (Jacob's appearance is the culmination of a long thread, so he gets a pass.)

Uh, though I really started to loathe the finale upon Jack's line about being too scared to hit on Kate or whatever the hell. I despise Jack. He hasn't learned a damn thing, and the show continues to treat him like he's its sympathetic center.

I thought that the Others' lack of emotional response to the Losties' mowing down untold numbers their comrades during the first three seasons was significant, and was hoping that maybe they'd be explained as Phil Dick-style androids. I was honestly fascinated by this and couldn't wait to see what they'd do with it.

Now I'm pretty sure it was just due to bad directing.

The Lost casual game: the player controls an armed character in the jungle. Every so often, the tall green plants rustle: oh no, danger! Use the mouse to aim your crosshairs! When you do, one of your character's friends pops out. Whew, what a scare!

If you accidentally click the mouse while aiming, there is a gunshot! Oh no! And then you realize that you're the one who's been shot, by an offscreen assailant. The game ends, after a brief epilogue where your character regrets their failed relationship with their father.

Come roach with me

jmac@jmac.org — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:14:13 GMT

Dear Local Gamers,

Would anyone be interested in a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach at my place on Sunday the 31st? Starting at, say, around 3PM? Currently need at least a couple more players.

It's a one-shot RPG, and I intend it to act as my own introduction to narrativist role-playing games. I don't expect any other to have played this game before, either. I have no idea how it's gonna work, but I'm putting Vegas odds on it being a blast.

Twiddle dee-dee

jmac@jmac.org — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:42:38 GMT

OK, so, I've been Twittering a lot, and I'm probably going to keep doing so. If you don't use Twitter or Facebook, you're missing a lot of the crap I'm writing every day. It's a different flavor of crap than what I write here (go look and see what I mean), but it's still crap by me, which is of theoretical interest to my friends.

So. Given my impression that some people react to this sort of thing with profound gross-out yuck, should I use a service like LoudTwitter to post my daily tweets on my LJ?

View Poll: Twonk

Jmac's Arcade #6 - Pac Man

jmac@jmac.org — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:12:14 GMT

If you see a little icon instead of a video player, clicking it should make it appear... (Blah LJ)

Whee fun

jmac@jmac.org — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:18:37 GMT

This week is crazy; something happening every day to bust up my schedule, and with layers of crisis on top of that. Cannot complain because there are exciting opportunities afoot too, but it's frustrating not to be able to commit much time to implementation, especially since I still feel like I just got home from abroad.

I didn't do any work-work over the weekend because I needed to de-stress after the vacation, and I did this by producing another Jmac's Arcade. I haven't had the time to actually upload it anywhere, which sounds silly, but I wanna do it right and redesign arcade.jmac.org first. The site looks kind of terrible in the wake of the most recent jmac.org redesign. It'll get done soon enough, and you will like it.

Here's a couple of things I may attend this week:

I'll go to Post Mortem tonight if I can put a bit of a buffer between me and the enormous 8-ball rolling behind me, rumble rumble. (Feeling kind of pessimistic about this now. Boy I sure do love writing LJ posts. LA LA LA.) An upcoming opportunity on the Appleseed side of things encourages me to stir the local-game-doodz networking pot, but it's not like I can't do that anywhere else.

I am planning on attending the next Information Superhighway shindig at Harvard Square, this coming Saturday night. I had a lot of fun at the last one, and this one apparently has guests and speakers involving both homemade TV and the board game Diplomacy, both of which are relevant to my interests right now.

Two subtle things I liked about the new Trek movie

jmac@jmac.org — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:10:38 GMT

I may have misread it because it went by in a flash, but during the bit when Spock and Kirk are (to their surprise) storming the Romulan ship, there's a beat after Spock says "cover me" and leaves where Kirk, alone, gets a sneaky look and does something to his phaser so that the barrel spins around. I think that's meant to be his furtively changing the gun's setting from "stun" to "kill". He's got a nasty mean streak! (We know their phasers were on "stun" when they beamed aboard beacuse, in the next seen, Spock is mind-reading a Romulan he had just shot. I assume that his power doesn't extend to corpses.)

When Old Spock was frankly telling people that he was from the future, their reaction was more like he had said "I am an undercover CIA agent" versus "I am a magical pirate ghost". In other words, it was met with skepticism but not outright dismissal.

What this hints at is that, in the Trek universe, time travelers pop in and out of the stream so often that they're accepted as fact, and show up on the news from time to time. One doesn't necessarily expect to meet one, but running across one during a galaxy-saving adventure isn't at all impossible.

I choose to believe that this was intentional, and very subtly done! It certainly jibes with Trek's colorful past (ahem) regarding time-travel tales.

To boldy go where no PANTS HAHAHAHA

jmac@jmac.org — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:10:44 GMT

Was talking to the late doctor_atomic just now about the new movie, and asked for her thoughts about the miniskirts. Unlike me, she noticed them right away, and found herself hoping that they were going to show unisex minis as an official Star Fleet uniform option for everyone. Apparently, these existed for the first few episodes of TNG, which depicted several pants-free male Enterprise crewmembers.

I have no memory of this, but apparently 'tis so. This cosplay dood is the only evidence I could dig up through Google Images. I could go unearth my Season 1 DVDs, I suppose, but I'll just take their word for it.

(Needless to say, the movie didn't take this tack.)

Start Wreck: The Linkage (No spoilers outside the cuts)

jmac@jmac.org — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:44:37 GMT

I saw Star Trek and enjoyed it very much. If you like cool shit, you'll probably like this movie. Lilek's thoughts on it jibe with mine, more or less.

I had cortezopossum's summary of "they managed to screw up everything, and yet it worked" in mind as I watched, but I don't think any apologies for canon-drift are really necessary. The producers made room for it in-story by not only explicitly putting the movie in an alternate timeline from the old canon, but an alternate-to-an-alternate. (Pretty sure that Romulus wasn't destroyed in the TNG timeline, right?)

I was delighted to see that Old Spock was both a fairly active character, and was also allowed to live past the ending. Knowing nothing of the plot going in, I was expecting his role to be Mr. Basil Framingstory ("Ah yes, our very first mission, why it seems like only yesterday...") so this was a nice surprise.

Three scenes of Kirk clinging to a lip of a bottomless pit by his fingers was one too many. Two (little-boy Kirk being a jackass, and first-away-team Kirk putting past jackassery to better use) would have been perfect.

I also went in with surrealestate's perception that the movie was cringingly sexist. There is sexism-by-omission, but I want to beg off that charge by the fact that, short of BSG-style gender-flips, the producers didn't have much to work with given the source material. (Now, as dougo sez, they totally could have made at least one of the crew a lady, and made it work. Aw, I am now envisioning a girlie-girl Chekov. So cute. Oh well.) I can grok the negative reading of Uhura, but it's not the one that seemed natural to me as I watched the film. So, the movie didn't really trip my personal feminist barf-o-meter, for whatever that's worth... though I wouldn't have objected to more effort.

(I preëmptively dismiss the claim that any adaptation of Trek has to be sexist in order to stay true to its roots. As commenters to Ms. Estate's post note, the 1960s TV series did a lot to test social boundaries of the day, even though much of it seems pretty backwards to us now.)

BONUS REVIEW! Terminator: Salvation trailer: Boy, when the androids come for real, robophobic shit like this is gonna be unbearably igry. Just saying.

On bitchy vacation tweets

jmac@jmac.org — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:02:34 GMT

I posted a tweet yesterday that, after a couple of hours, I came to regret for its negativity, so I took it down. It was basically: "This vacation is about 1.5 days too long." Before I did remove it, dianamp04 quite sensibly left a Facebook comment to the tune of "Oh no, a vacation! My heart is breaking for you." I had it coming, but I feel the need to say a few words (ha ha) in my defense.

Two reasons why my vacations need to be either shorter or lower-key than this one:

(0) I HAD A GREAT TIME OK. Nobody seems to believe me, especially when I pronounce it in all caps. But it is true anyway. Future timestream world-branches where I get around to upgrading my Flickr account will see me uploading some nice pictures.

(1) Introversion. classicaljunkie gets a free pass, but being in the presence of any other person on this green earth counts against my being-around-other-people bettery. I need frequent and long bouts of alone-time to recharge. Collapsing in hotel rooms after a day of itinerary-following, then getting up early the next morning in order to continue the itinerary: does not work. After a couple of days of this I am completely and visibly wrung out, and well-meaning people keep asking me if everything is OK. (See point 0.)

(2) Attention-miserliness. Lately, especially since getting back on the GTD horse, I've come to put a lot more value upon my attention, treating it as a highly precious and finite resource. A major reason I love working for myself is that I am in complete control over what things I spend my attention on. When I'm touring under someone else's power and schedule, I lose control over this. It can be fun and relaxing to let it go for a little while, but eventually I end up only feeling frustrated and anxious about it.

Why, yes, I can see you making the "world's smallest violin" gesture from here. Thanks. My point is that vacations are good for me but I have to put better definition on their size and scope in the future, or I'll get sufficiently stressed from them that I'll make bitchy twoots that I'll then bitchily delete two hours later. That's all.

A really good Memoir 44 game

jmac@jmac.org — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:59:31 GMT

Another exciting Memoir 44 game, playing scenario 40: Breakout at Klin, part of the Eastern Front expansion that classicaljunkie got me for Xmas.

M44 has kind of become "our game" - we have a reputation among some friends for liking it a maybe a little too much - but we hadn't played it in months after I got kind of burned out on it over the winter. Early summer rain combined with a good work-day put me back in the mood.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to know that even though I boasted on Twitter about how I expected to make short work of Amy's russians, she turned it around. I think I made a mistake my throwing units at Golyadi right at the start of the game, figuring I'd be able to hold them for the duration. Amy correctly focused on knocking them out for an early lead, and that kept me off-balance for the whole game. Duh: occupying territory is an endgame move in Memoir, not an opening gambit. I deserved what I got.

And, as always with Memoir 44, it really helps to remember to roll the dice well. I kept forgetting to do this, clearly. It feels like I kept rolling flags, allowing Amy's units to flounce away from all my attacks, and meanwhile she kept rolling tanks, neatly taking apart all my Panzer units.

It came down to one of those ridiculous situations where it's mutual game-point and there's two adjacent units chipping away at each other until one of them finally rolls the right symbols. But that's war for you.

Billin like a villain

jmac@jmac.org — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:00:29 GMT

Felt at loose ends this morning, so threw myself into Appleseed work, finishing a major phase of an interesting job that involves knocking PDFs around in novel ways. Emerged from a rare fugue just in time for supper.

I can't complain about my life too much when stress-relief means doing billable work.

(Also, I enjoy the chance to work with graphics, instead of just text. At the end of a work-phase the accumulated think-through doodles in my notebook look cooler.)

F.J. Gallagher has a blog

jmac@jmac.org — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:54:55 GMT

http://fjgallagher.wordpress.com/

Blog of Frank Gallagher, the dedicatedly brilliant personality who brought UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, to statewide prominence in the early-mid 1990s. He also made it an exciting place to work, enough to become the reason my undergraduate career took an extra year to complete.

Looks like he's joined the ever-growing crowd of people I know in Portland, ME, though he clearly keeps strong ties to his beloved San Fransisco.

In some ways he was the first real boss-slash-colleague I ever had, and I have been looking for this guy off and on for ages. He dropped me a LinkedIn invite just yesterday! I look forward to reading him once again.

Note to Volity.net users

jmac@jmac.org — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:48:17 GMT

All volity.net Jabber services, including the Arbitrarium, are taking a little nappie nap because they are sleepy. Also because we're in the middle of a server transition. I'll post again when they are back.

UPDATE OK, back. As you were.

Dear LazyVet

jmac@jmac.org — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:33:19 GMT

Our kitty-cat has started peeing all over the back of the litterbox instead of onto the litter. She is very neat with burying her other business. This is a recent change of behavior. It's a bit gross for her humans, but she seems as happy as usual otherwise. Should we be concerned?

New CSS for jmac.org

jmac@jmac.org — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:46:51 GMT

I humbly request critique or comment on jmac.org's redesign. What do you think?

Allow me to say that I do feel pretty studly in my ability to transform it from this using only a new stylesheet. There are some small HTML changes between old and new, but they are incidental touch-ups that have nothing to do with the page's format. I didn't even assign any new id or class attributes.

That said, pretty much everything on the site beyond the content area of the front page feels either years out of date, or is overtly preserved personal memorabilia, frozen in time. Personal home pages, man... it's a 1.0 concept in a 2.0 world. Still not sure how best to approach that old stuff.

Zoning off interruptions

jmac@jmac.org — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:09:37 GMT

[Crossposted from Appleseed Blog]

While I do almost all of my work - and maybe a little too much of my play - on a MacBook laptop, I keep an older desktop computer in my office for tasks that are better left to sessile machines. I seldom use it interactively, though, and its display - balanced on the back edge of my desk - usually shows only whichever screensaver has most recently caught my fancy. (Was running SurveillanceSaver for a long time, but lately have favored HAL-9000.)

Recently, I discovered, quite by accident, a new use for this arrangement that may permanently improve the way I work. For a project I'm working on, I had reason to comb through some video footage that existed only on one of this machine's two hard drives. It was a time-consuming task, so inevitably the usual forest of Twitter clients and Gmail windows and RSS feed-readers and such sprouted up as I worked. (How strange, yes, as if by magic.) Presently I completed by task and switched back to my laptop, but decided that I liked how all the happy little info-stream windows looked on the larger display, so left them there.

After getting back to work, I quickly realized that the constant Bing! New email and Bong! new tweets and Doink! new news articles interruptions I had going on my laptop were now entirely redundant, as these same activities were also evident on the screen in the background. My background in physical space, recall, running on a separate computer.

Experimentally, I turned off all my laptop's many new-event notifiers. I found myself in a new place: the streams were still present, and I continued to stay current with the outside world, but the sense of constant interruption had vanished.

Now, when I need a micro-break, I need only cast my eyes up at my other display and see what's changed. I do this often enough that I never fall behind; the crucial bit is that I decide when I'm ready to take another sip from my personal external-info fountain, rather than have it splash me in the face while I'm in the middle of a thought.

I realize this exact solution isn't something that everyone can implement, since not everyone happens to have the same computing setup I do. But I do recommend that fellow information workers who share the need to be continuously plugged in, but also feel the constant low-level stress of continuous, clangorous interruptions, re-invent this solution in whatever way works for them. I'm hopeful that, in a small but crucial way, it's changed my life for the better.