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The Great Games Experiment

Everyone knows I’m a sucker for social networking sites. I just discovered another one, The Great Games Experiment, a site that allows you to sign up as a game player or game developer. I’ve found some of the interface to be awesome and intuitive, but other features of the site are just abysmally hard to understand. There is definitely a lot to do over there, I’ll have to look at it more when I’m less sleepy.

Oh, and after a single day, I’m totally addicted to Travian, a web-based massively multiplayer RTS. Check it out!

I was trolling around looking for cool game developer conferences, and found out I just missed the imgd conference this very month, here in MN. Sounds like it focused more on MMO (an acronym I’m not sure I’ve encountered before, but assume is the relevant parts of MMORPG), but it still would probably have been worth checking out.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to whether I’m really interested in persuing a career in game development, or whether I really just want it to be something I do in my spare time for fun. I can honestly say I really dig my current job, and I know that’s something relatively rare and special. I think for now I’m just along for the ride. We’ll see where this thing takes me.

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two movies and work life balance

I saw a couple of good movies this weekend, Eagle Vs. Shark, and Hot Fuzz.

I thought EVS was better, but it had a fairly mixed reaction from the crowd I saw it with. My biggest complaint would be that it was a bit too Napoleon Dynamite, or anyway that the main (male) character was going for the same qualities, and at times seemed to be channeling Napoleon. Otherwise, it was totally brilliant, and at times very much succeeded in achieving heartwarming status. There are some clips up on Youtube of Jemaine Clement (the male lead) singing and playing guitar on a stage with another guy. You should really watch the songs Albi, the Racist Dragon, and Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros if you haven’t already. (Links via Sharyn.)

Hot Fuzz was everything I should have expected from it. I think I did a fairly good job of going into it without expectations, but if I had thought to have them, it would have met them. Basically, it was a rehashing of the same themes apparent in Shaun of the Dead, and starred the same two male characters, (for those of you living under a rock who haven’t heard of it). I’ll try not to give any spoilers here, but basically, I felt like Shaun was a zombie movie within a parody of a zombie movie. It was totally funny and awesome up until about the last fourth of the movie, when it turned into a full-on zombie movie, without reservation. Hot Fuzz was the same way! It was a parody of cop movies (buddy-cop movies, if that’s a genre), again more or less turning into an actual cop movie for the last twenty minutes or so. It was still funny, and still very much fun and original, but lacked the “genre” aspect that made Shaun so appealing for me in particular, so I’d have to say I liked it a bit less overall.

I saw Hot Fuzz last night as a sort of break in the middle of a twelve-hour work bender. (Yes, on a Saturday.) We have a big site launch this week, and everyone’s been pushing really hard to get the last few details working. (To say nothing of actually putting any finishing touches on them.) I thought yesterday may have been my longest work day ever, but when I spent an hour logging all my hours for the last week, I realized I worked about the same number last Thursday also. Whew!

I’m going to try and get a good night’s sleep tonight. I feel like i might be coming down with something, but it could also be allergies. Anyway, I’m sniffly and miserable.

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it’s back

livingtech is back.

I’m posting this from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I’m sitting propped up on a hotel bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows. From here, I have a nice view to my right out the sliding glass door of the beach and ocean stretching to infinity on the horizon. (Check out my flickr stream for some photos from the beach.)

I have tons of actual work to do, (I’m not on vacation, just piggybacking on Florence’s work travel), so I’m going to keep this short. Astute readers will have noticed I’ve switched from MT to WP, and moved the old homepage out of the way. No more hiding the blog behind a /blog/ subdirectory. I’ve still got lots of minor formatting changes I want to make to the stylesheet, and I want to do some pruning of useless old pages too.

So much to write about. So little time!

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Long time no blog

Well, I was basically not blogging because Movable Type ate all those entries last year. Losing six months worth of blog posts was just about frustrating enough to put me off blogging forever. (But as it turns out, it really just put me off blogging for… oh, another six months or so.)

I guess there were other factors at work as well. For instance, I got engaged.

I also wrote a puzzle game.

Blogging on chesstris about puzzle games has made me want to start this thing back up again.

So anyway, I’m using Word Press now. Also, I found a whole shit-ton of my missing posts over at the wayback machine. I think if I wait long enough, they will probably have them all. Unfortunately, it’s been kind of a lot of annoying copy-pasting to get them into word press.

I have grand plans for replacing livingtech’s index with this blog. I’ll preserve all my old pages too, but clearly some of them will have to move.

More soon.

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Missing Entries and Firefox Extensions

I don’t know how, but I’ve suddenly “lost” all my entries since last December. (What’s that like 4? …you might be asking yourself, but I’m not used to data loss, and it makes me paranoid and annoyed.)

Anyway, I’ve added a new tool to my arsenal of firefox extensions today.

FireBug is another web dev extension that I have this feeling I will find absolutely essential after a few more uses. It totally replaces the functionality (and poor UI) of the DOM inspector, and adds all kinds of other nifty features as well. (I’m particularly looking forward to using the step-through javascript debugger.)

Now that drag-and-drop tab re-ordering is in firefox by default, the only other extension I will still put on all my installs is the web developer toolbar, which I don’t actually use as a toolbar, since all the functionality is also available from the contextual menu.

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The Time Traveler’s Wife

I just finsihed reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffengger. It was extraordinarilly sublime. Imense. Wonderful. Very romantic and heartwarming, while also having an element of action and mystery. In short, it was really, really great. Basically it’s about this guy who gets “unstuck” in time, who time travels without much warning and in much the same way that epileptics have seisures. It’s a brain condition, and in the book there is a doctor who eventually figures out what is different about him. He meets this woman claire who has known him her whole life. In his future, he goes back to visit her many times. In fact, the book is just as much her story as it is his. There are so many poignant unspoken things between these characters, between Henry and Claire that I almost felt it was unrealistic. But they did talk, and about important things, and they fought, but more emphasis was placed on the things they couldn’t tell each other, or didn’t want to. About the future, mostly. The book was very quiet in a way, quite subtle and beautiful, especially when dealing with the more “hard science”-y aspects. It did feel totally like science fiction. The time travel was especially well done, and very internally consistant. I would have liked to have had some more explaination for it, but this was just as good. An explaination might have been lame, really. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, the unabashed romance tied in quite well with my personal life right now, and it will definitely haunt me–dare I say it? …into the future.

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travel and blog catchup

The trip to japan was awesome. Photos here. Florence and I are still doing great. I’m sure Nate thinks I’ve abandoned him. I can’t even remember the last time I slept at the house. Last night Florence and I saw KR’s show in the fringe, and ran into Nate outside afterwards. It felt like the first time I’d seen him in weeks.

Last weekend Florence and I went down to visit her sister in Chicago. We went to Wizard’s World on Saturday, this giant comic convention, and it was pretty great. I’ve really been reading a lot of comics lately, Runaways and Young Avengers, and Futurama, and Girls… with some x-men thrown in there for good measure. It started with some graphic novels, V for Vendetta and The Watchmen. Florence’s sister Susie has tons of comics, and it was fun looking through her collection. (Mike also has a nice collection, and I haven’t taken nearly enough advantage of it — although I did borrow The Watchmen from him, and some of those x-men.)

On Sunday night, as we were driving back, we got off the freeway at the Wisconsin dells, and decided spontaneously to stay at Kalahari, this water park that I’d heard about because my brother John went there recently. Now I feel bad I didn’t go with him, because it was AWESOME. Florence and I had a really wonderful time going on all the rides together, and it really made the trip something memorable.

I’m reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s super good, chalk full of literary goodness. Also reading Game Plan, The Game Inventor’s Handbook, which is about what it sounds like, although it’s more about publishing games and getting them published than the actual act of inventing them. I’ve been playing a lot of games again, and have come up with this abstract strategy game that uses a bunch of dice in a non-random way. We’ve played it a few times, and it’s gotten some decent comments from everybody. I’ve decided I’m going to get a set of large (1″) dice to play with just for parties and stuff. Email me if you’re interested in the rules. As soon as I think of a decent name for it, I’ll probably post them to board game geek or something. I had this idea that I’d be coming up with new games to use the same dice, and selling a handbook full of them, and I still might do that, but I want to at least give one set of rules away. Plus, none of the other games are as far along in terms of rules and thinking them out as this one. There is one other one that I’d like to try out in the near future… I’ve just got to find time to do it.

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blogistry visitation rights

I went to the Pride Festival today in Loring Park with Fisch, and ran into Jason and a friend of his on our way there. So the four of us wandered around, and at one point we were at some booth for GLBT journalists (I should really remember the name of the org), and Jason mentioned that he writes for the Mpls Metroblog. So the guy behind the desk says, oh, are you Jason then? It was like he knew exactly who all the metrobloggers were.

Turns out he writes snarkmarket. Anyway, after that, jason joked that he should have worn his “local celebrity” tee shirt or something.

The point is that I feel like a real slacker for not updating here more frequently. Although really I feel like a slacker for not following up on any of the fifty billion blog/internet ideas I have seemingly daily. I have a new one that I’m hoping to get someone else involved in. I think if there are two of us motivated, I’ll be more likely to hold up my end, and not let the entire thing die a horrible death before it ever begins.

On a sort of related note, the other day I realized that blogistry.com gets like 300-500 hits per day. And it’s an MT blog that’s just sitting on its own domain DOING NOTHING. There are literally two entries, and they’re from early 2004. I wonder if that’s more hits than this site gets… last time I actually looked at usage stats was back in 2004, and it would have been at that time.

Anyway, it feels like everyone has some cool internet side-project they’re working on, and I have nothing.

Interesting link of the day: Kiva, which allows you to offer loans to individuals (businesses?) in the third world. (I hope that’s accurate.) Anyway, it seems like a good thing, and I can’t wait to show it to Florence. (Via Snarkmarket.)

Incidentally, she’s in Japan already, where I’ll be joining her this coming wednesday.

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maybe the longest lack of blog entries ever

I ask myself ‘why write?’, and ‘why update?’, and don’t. Every day I write on the way to work. I write poems, and short short stories. I read when I can, lately it’s been short stories by gabriel garcia marquez.

I listen to CDs on my ipod. I bought one by Ivy that I really love.

I feel like time has been floating by gracefully for weeks now. I haven’t been paying any attention at all. I’ve been lost in a new love, and have literally been home for only a few hours a week.

I’ve tried to update my flickr account. There are tons of new photos I posted last night from the downtown library opening last week.

My battery is low, and I’m going to return to low-tech (hand-written) journaling now.