I've been playing games

[prog]

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

Comments

[dariusk.livejournal.com]

"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 think you're right.

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

It will be popular, but it's popularity will be limited to a rather small population of people.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I think I was more fine with that in years past than I am now. I maintain perfectly correct in thinking that few people who subscribe to its RSS feed will un-subscribe from it just because it's irregular, and that was enough for me. But what I've been lighting on is that an irregular show doesn't pick up as many subscribers as a regular one, nor does it get as much word-of-mouth.

[prog.livejournal.com]

It seems like such a well-duh conclusion now. But having an RSS feed lets a lazy person come to incorrect but more convenient conclusions!

It wasn't until I last month read "Fans, Friends & Followers", where almost every artist interviewed insisted that regular updates are vital, that I started to rethink this.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

"Honestly, a large part of me is reluctant to invest much energy into growing Appleseed beyond just-me."

I'm in a similar position with regard to my company, Predictive Patterns. Growing a consulting business beyond one person is a huge step. As it is, I can offer my clients strong assurances about the quality of the work, the timeliness, etc. There are a whole bunch of issues I just don't have to think about, including having the intellectual capacity to do the job, which given the esoteric nature of a lot of my jobs (custom compression algorithm for b-mode ultrasound data was a recent one) is a big problem.

If I grow the business it'll completely change its nature. I'm not at all sure I want to do that, but on the other hand the one-person-does-everything model produces way too much fluctuation in revenue and effort to be viable over the longer term unless I spend some time building up a reasonably thick cash cushion to carry me through leaner times. Doing that, of course, means putting all the fun side-projects on hold, which starts to look way too much like a real job. It is none-the-less what I'm going to do for the next year or so, and then re-evaluate my situation.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Even though my first step in this direction didn't last long before the subcontractor decided to quit, the short amount of time that it was working out felt really right. It made me want to try again ASAP.

It's not quite passive income because management takes plenty of time and attention on its own, but it's a different kind of work than personal implementation. I enjoyed balancing time between design, management and hacking among Appleseed's active projects, producing good stuff and pulling in revenue just a little bit easier than if I were doing everything all by myself. I can see what nice things lay further down that road, at the cost of a little more risk and perseverance.

But I'm aware of the concern about changing the company's nature. For now I want to grow very slowly, slow enough that I can personally write off on - and claim responsibility for - all the work Appleseed generates. So far I accomplish this by working only with hackers I know and trust.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Hmm. "Claim responsibility for" is perhaps not the right phrase here. I meant it in terms of my willingness to stake my professional reputation on anything Appleseed produces, no matter who the author is. Not that I myself with to claim to author everything!

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I understand perfectly! That's my big concern: feeling I can stand behind work done under my supervision, but not by me. I've had bad experiences in the past with this, and am not quite ready to take the risk again. It sounds like you've got some good people to draw on, which makes all the difference in the world.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

Right now, I am in solo consulting land (third time) too, and really enjoying it. I have experimented with using some sub-contractors this year, and like with most things, it really depends on who you bring in. I do find that allocating certain tasks to a sub means that they will get done, but perhaps not as quickly or exactly like I would have done them -- but it sure frees me up to do other things that are more critical to the project.

My plan for now is to continue to stay a one-person operation, with increasing amounts of sub-contracting when it makes sense. Having a group of people with various skills that I have worked with in the past who are available for some projects is also very handy.

I have transitioned into being a "real company" and hiring lots of people before. It is very hard to find the right people, and you can quickly end up spending lots of time dealing with people issues and managing, instead of producing work yourself. I think doing less billable-hour work myself was one of my biggest mistakes in the past.