Weekend

[prog]

Had a great weekend. Saturday classicaljunkie and I drove to the south shore to meet my mom for her birthday. We drove around the area together and looked at the houses I grew up in, which still look quite the same, though Cliff Top is smaller than I remember! It still has a nice "Cliff Top" sign; I'm glad that its name has survived whatever sequence of owners it's had over the last two decades.

We walked around Nantasket Beach a little. It looks a lot different without that roller coaster, man. The two arcades I so fondly remember both still seem to be there, though. I want to return soon, after the summer season starts, to see what they're like now. Honestly, I'm surprised that the Penny Arcade is still there; in the 1980s that's where you'd find all the low-rent arcade games, while the nicer and newer stuff was in Dream Machine. I'm assuming they're not actually boarded-up vacant properties with the signs still on!

We saw "The Illusionist" on DVD, and I didn't like it very much. We watched the finale of Survivor Fiji, which made me subtly upset, becuase (a) the wrong guy won because a third contestant played kingmaker for irrationally selfish reasons (though at least the winner was one of the "good guys"), (b) half the people in the final jury acted like total assholes, and (c) I still don't have a million dollars and here this other guy does now. Though I bet he doesn't actually, coz of how these things work, but still.

Everyone played too much Puzzle Quest. Blaaargh. It is a really good game.

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Starting this week, I'm rolling out out a new way to parcel my time. I had been vaguely holding onto a model from when I started at ITA, but that's been outmoded for months and it's high time I tried something that reflects my current actual lifestyle. Here's what I'm trying instead:

Mon, Tue, Wed: Make money. For now, that means contract programming work, and activities that support same.
Thu, Fri: Volity furtherance, of any kind. Can be coding, or project management, or just reading a relevant book.
Sat: Free day. Wheeee.
Sun: Video projects. Edit, write, or plan. Whatever needs doing next.

I can be social and whatever on any day; this schedule just defines where my default stance lay on any given day of the week. It also gives me some soothing mental sorting: if I'm fretting because I have three fairly heavy things to accomplish, lo! here is an arbitrary but good-as-any order to accomplish them in, based on where we happen to be in the calendar.

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

Also I didn't know about the final jury mechanic at all, where all the season's losers vote for which of the finalists gets to win. That's actually quite clever!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I have deeply mixed feelings about it. It's basically a huge kingmaker situation, where players who no longer have any stake in the game decide the outcome. But what it really means is that the entire game is about figuring out the psychology of how to get these kingmakers to make you king. It's weird that such non-game reasoning becomes a game skill, and it's certainly not a game I'd ever want to play myself, but it's fascinating to watch.

If you like that, you should also check out Big Brother, which I think starts in June. It has the same jury mechanism, but a lot more interesting game structure leading up to it. Unfortunately the players tend to be more annoying than in Survivor, since the struggle to survive is replaced by the struggle to remain sane in a locked house, but it's still pretty entertaining as a game.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also, if you're not sick of it yet, you might like to read Shannon Appelcline's analysis of Survivor from a game design point of view.

[prog.livejournal.com]

This is cool.