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

One thing I forgot in my recounting of last weekend was like I got myself right with Quicken. This is good, but it bears bad news. I can now easily call up a total of my YTD consulting earnings, make a naïve estimate of what this implies my 2007 income taxes will be, compare this figure to the size of my savings account, and grunt.

So this is actually kind of an FYI for my friends: I am going to batten down and try to cushion the impact as much as I can by spending as little as I can get away with until I know what I owe. So please don't be sad if I regularly excuse myself from fancy dinners and such for the next several months.

It's true that I foresee some fat deductions for myself - I've poured thousands out-of-pocket into the zero-revenue Volity Games, and this will earn me great pity from the IRS. But at the same time I've earned enough from consulting that it's not going to end up a wash like 2006 was.

This is, I hope, the objectively worst bit of fallout from it taking me months and months to realize that I was actually in business for myself and had to start acting like it.

Wrote a monologue for Jmac's Arcade yesterday, and hope to record it today. I've had the idea for this one since March, but then I did some Gameshelf work and then the webclient attacked and I haven't done any video work since.

However, last weekend I put together an aggressive but sane schedule of webclient milestones covering the next couple of months, and so long as I stay ahead of it I finally feel like I have time for my most neglected pillar. This is very good; I hadn't been been working by any schedule other than my two drop-dead deadlines (Sep 30 for live Tic Tac Toe demo, Dec 31 for full client), and that only gets me into work-or-feel-guilty mode. More fine-grained deadlines gives me a much more palpable sense of progress, and room to stretch in other directions.

Come Monday it'll be back to the Volity mines for another few days, though...

Dropped the Gameshelf crew a note last week about all this, too. I hope that producing another Arcade will whet my appetite to pick the show back up. Been considering sticking an audio news segment onto its RSS feed, just to keep it warm. We'll see.

Urgh, also in a stickyish situation coz the song I wanna use for this Arcade's BGM is by a local band (Rat Club) who hasn't updated their website since January and whose email bounces. They have a MySpace page and I'm tempted to get a MySpace account just to ask them if I can use the song. I'm further tempted to just try using the song anyway if I can't reach them, covering it with all appropriate attribution and hoping for goodwiil. It's pretty perfect for this piece.

---

Picked up Mario Strikers Charged a couple days ago, arguably the first "real" game (versus a discful of minigames and unlocks) for my Wii. It's a soccer game, and the followup to the original Mario Strikers for Game Cube that nobody heard of because it was for Game Cube. Haven't played enough to really get an impression of it yet; it's not quite as pick-up-and-go as Mario Kart but it isn't far off the mark either. The A button passes, B shoots, C fires off whatever power-up you just picked up, and everything else is an advanced technique that you can ignore at first. But it's not yet clear to me where the power-ups come from (it's nothing as obvious as running over "?"-boxes), and the action can get confusing pretty quickly.

The game encourages cooperative play, supporting two players to a side, and I look forward to doing some of that. Very interested in its internet play as well, so please let me know if you get a copy too.

---

I've been making coffee again, and generally eating breakfast produced in my own kitchen. Still hitting the Starbucks across the street for my afternoon jolt, though.

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.

---

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.

It took three months but I think I'm getting the hang of pillar-hopping. In bed last night, I thought, "I am sick of Volity. Boo boo boo." This after a very good meeting of the Volity Illuminati (we convene biweekly now), itself on the heels of a week-long Volity tear.

In the past I might have met this thought with despair that I was getting bored with something so important. Now I recognize that I'm restless and, under my current life-organization system, I can just hop to another pillar for a while. This week, I shall make money.

Really, the four-pillars model, supplemented by a hyperlinky, pillar-subdivided to-do list that I started in January in my one VoodooPad document, has worked out better than I hoped. It's not a stringent regimen that I could write a self-help book around; it's really quite casual, something to consult whenever I feel I'm not sure what to do next, or worry that I'm not spending my time well. Yet, in some ways, I feel more productive now than ever. Never mind whether or not anything I'm producing is worth it, ultimately.

Stuff coming up:

* There'll be a practice run-through of the completed presentation at my place on Sunday night. Easter-ignoring heathens who want to help me tune my prattle to the Perl people are welcome; let me know if you'd like to come.

* The presentation itself is still go for April 10 at MIT. Here's the Boston.pm Wiki page about the next meeting.

* I know what the next Jmac's Arcade will be about, but I haven't written it yet.

* I grabbed some SCAT studio time for Tuesday, the 24, during which something will happen. I still want to do a MULE shoot. I might have to punt and just play MULE off-camera and review it like Joe and I reviewed Star Control several episodes ago, but I really want to pull off my idea for a live shoot with players at a PC. Would any of y'all be interested in casting yourselves? (This reminds me of a post I haven't written yet about Gameshelf casting in general. Another time.)

Of the four pillars, I've been paying the least attention to Volity. I've been quite aware of this, and last night was reminded of it further by a visit from those creatures of my mind I call the boogeymen, the imps who crouch on my shoulder when I'm having trouble sleeping and chuckle into my ear about how I'm heading into failure, about what a fool I've been, reciting a catalog of my missteps. All I can do is twitch and moan feebly. It's awful.

The thing is, though, they're totally on my side. It's bitter medicine, but when it mixes with the morning sunlight, it turns into a fuel of tremendous potency. There's little that motivates me more than proving naysayers wrong about my own work, even if they're imaginary projections of my semi-conscious anxieties. And I have to think they know exactly what they're doing.

So last night the boogeymen were cooing about all the wasted effort of last year, and all the threads that have been blowing in the wind for months. So today (after a lovely breakfast and etc.) I kicked ass across three Volity-related fronts. I finished redoing some libraries that were causing deep-set bugs from poor design decisions I made last year; I merged contributor code into the Subversion trunk, updated the change log, and chatted with said contributor; I closed a bunch of old tickets on RT and solved some new tickets that happened to come in during all this.

Much remains on the backlog but that was a fine day's (at least) work. And here it is only Monday. Very good. It is not wise to rely on frustrated sprinting as a primary work pattern, but once in a while it can do a lot to make one feel more able.

---

I am completely unprepared for the 'thon. Oh, I'm going, all right, and it's going to choo-choo-train me right into the ground. Why don't they look. I'll come out the other end a drained and broken man, I just know it. At least it's in the Somerville Theater this year, making for an easy hobble home. And my supporting entourage this year is gonna be great, too, so yay.

This year's logo (spotted via derspatchel because I am not keeping up on the message board for some reason) is brilliant.

---

I am trying to get five stars in every song at the medium difficulty level in Guitar Hero 2, so I can unlock a stupid bonus guitar (which does nothing for you gameplay-wise, just gives you something to brag about). It's hard but quite addicting, just like Amplitude was a few year ago. All day I kept wandering over to the TV to throw on the silly little toy Gibson and try another couple of songs, which takes only 10 minutes, and then I felt done and went back to my desk for a while. Safer than Angband any day.

The difficulty ramp-up between Medium and Hard is pretty intense. I can't get through even a single song at that level.

Ideally I'd wait until the 15th but the Hunt's gonna screw everything up, so, Four Pillars:

I've started to bill ITA like they were expecting me to bill them when we negotiated the contract last fall. I had been underbilling by a lot and nobody receiving the bills was calling me on it. (And why should they have?) Also, my first project with them is finally demoable. I mean, I demoed it last Friday. Everyone is happy.

classicaljunkie and I have been dating for a couple of weeks (o scandal, o calamity) and it's been going very nicely, thanks.

Meeting next week with Gameshelf people to discuss "Season 2". I want to take what we learned so far and do things differently and better. I have already made some personnel changes and other strategic decisions, and I'm hoping for a really fun year with the show.

I released version 0.4.0 of Gamut a couple of days ago and am in the midst of some spring cleaning in Volity-space. After the hunt but before February I hope to formally re-launch Volity as an open project. It's been open this whole time, mind you, but we haven't been pushing it as such. The Volity Network has a momentum of its own now, which is very nice, but an adjustment like this still needs pushing.

And so 2006 glides to a close. This was an unusually homogenous year for me, especially coming after the crazy-quilt calendar of 2005. Volity dominated three-quarters of my year, though other non-blocking events happened in parallel, notably my befriending a whole group of new and excellent people (whom I think of as the dictator555 circle, met via dougo).

As the year ends I find myself staring down a whole queue of topics that (except for Volity) had been waiting since this time last year for me to come down off my Volity jag. I really need to build personal mission statements around each one. They group themselves into four categories:

* Volity
* Dating
* Video production (mostly Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade)
* Work (ITA and (hypothetically) other reliable income sources)

Air, water, fire and earth, eh? (Well, Volity's pretty fiery too, but let us not overthink my elemental shoehorning.)

Today, there is a general advance across all fronts, and I am actually quite pleased with everything. But I still need to figure out what I want to have happen in each section, and then keep that in mind over the course of the upcoming year.

I did write a little essay to myself about Volity the other night, and things are going to be all right. Here's the scene: the Andys and I have committed to feeding the project all the money it needs for the foreseeable future (mostly server-hosting costs). We will continue doing this until either something magical happens and it begins to pay for itself, or we all agree that it has become a hopeless financial drag. We cannot know when the former may happen, and we have a long way to fall before the latter occurs.

For my part, I will treat it as a hobby that happens to be incorporated as a business, and therefore holds that much wider a source of inspiration, and a target for application. Because I love it, I will continue to work on it as motivation strikes, and I expect it to strike regularly, but I won't hold myself to any guaranteed pace. This is a different way of thinking than I held when I started at ITA, when I thought my week would be divided between ITA-days and Volity-days. It eventually became clear to me that it instead fell naturally into ITA-days and jmac-days, and that this was fine, because it happens that I like to spend my time on Volity anyway... just not exclusively so.

I see good things for 2007, and I hope it will be good for you too.