The current situation

When I get a call from my parents' house at an unusual hour, I worry that this will finally be the call when I learn that one of them has died.

After I hear the voicemail, which is invariably just a request to call back about one minor family matter or another, I worry about having to talk about the Obama administration with them.

Let's Simplify

OK, I'm still making too many screwups with all my bank accounts. Just blew another $50 in overdraft fees, despite my best efforts. (From two unrelated $25-each blunders, no less.)

I'm happy enough with using ING - and using Yodlee to manage my accounts there - that tomorrow I'm gonna march down to Central Bank and close my personal account with them. This will mean that all my ING deposits will have to happen through snail mail, instead of my current system of depositing to Central in-person and then shuttling the money to ING via web. (And occasionally mistiming something, for another $25 fee.) But that's OK; it's a small inconvenience to face versus the hundreds of dollars I lose annually to silly mistakes.

Keeping my Appleseed account at Central, because ING doesn't offer business checking - only business savings. (I do own such an account, and use it for tax withholding.) I will henceforth withdraw money from Appleseed not by visiting Central and filling out account-transfer slips, but by writing myself checks, and then popping them in the mail! And y'know what... this idea appeals to me.

I smirk at how much I'm looking forward to doing this tomorrow morning. I shall have my revenge! Uh-huh.

Goin' to GameLoop 2009

I shall be going to GameLoop on Saturday, the BarCamp-style "unconference" for game professionals. I had a great time at its inaugural event last year, and I've been especially looking forward to it since attending Boston BarCamp in April. I appreciate these sorts of nerdly social stewpots, and the combinatorial ideas that can come out of them.

Big fail, alas, on the work-goals I set for the weekend. I will have neither a finished Gameshelf episode, nor completed personal-bizcards. It's for the right reasons, I guess - I got surprised by a surge of Appleseed work this month, and have been putting in one fully billable day after another despite myself, with no desire afterwards to work on anything else. It's what I deserve to have stuffed into my gob after bitching so much about money problems. Here you go, then! Eat up. Oh well; they'll get done in the fullness of time.

And anyway, showing off one's own shit is a secondary reason to go to these things anyway. I go to meet interesting and smart people, and talk about games with them! My own status as a "game professional" status is very in-betweeny right now, but that doesn't mean I don't have a lot of stories to tell. Since last August, I've:

• Gotten serious about a commercial video game project, and then had it die in IP-licensing negotiation
• Launched an entirely new initiative in the online-gaming space, worked feverishly at it for six months, and am now (slowly but surely (but mostly slowly) ) looking for business partners
• Had more cockamamie ideas about new (as far as I know) styles of online gameplay that get me excited, and also reticent, because having some dork blather at you about their AWESOME completely unimplemented game idea is worse than someone telling you about this CRAZY dream they had last night, but anyway
• Revived Jmac's Arcade and the Gameshelf, and became filled with idears about what I'm going to do with the latter and how it will be different from what I've done so far

Yeah, so, it'll be a good time.