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

For those of you just tuning in, I shall elucidate upon my gift-giving and gift-receiving policies. This applies equally to Xmas and birthdays.

In a nutshell, I do my best to avoid active participation in the gift-exchanging aspects of all of these. I do not gift people due to calendar-bound events, and expect no gifts in return.

I do like to gift people on a whim occasionally. Usually it's a piece of media or a game that I figure some particular individual really must experience for themselves, and I'm so adamant about this that I choose to rob them of the option of not owning it by buying it for them. I tend to put no ceremony around this, other than the surprise, which I admit to finding delightful.

If I have not gifted you in this way, it is because nothing has yet said to me "[your name here] needs this right now", at least not during a time when I have been flush with money. And certainly these periods come and go.

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That said, I do gracefully accept gifts at Xmas and other times, so let us go over what I've gotten so far:

classicaljunkie got me the Pacific Theater expansion to Memoir '44, which is excellent. It's a little box that includes a sand-colored Japanese army set, new terrain tiles (stuff like jungles, rice paddies, mountains and caves), and plenty of new rules and scenarios. We played one of the Guam landing scenarios and it was hella fun.

My favorite new rules involve movement and battle modifications that apply to both sides in all the Pacific scenarios. The U.S. Marines are Gung-Ho, which in M44 terms means that they can usually order an additional unit in their eagerness to crush the enemy. The Japanese forces balance this by ignoring most retreat-flags rolled against them. They can also perform Banzai attacks, moving two hexes and battling if the target is adjacent (infantry can normally move only one hex and battle), and throwing an extra die if the attacking unit is at full strength. It's great. I will absolutely bring it to the next HoRGN and hope to find an opponent there.

My parents got me the "Party Box" edition of Apples to Apples, which is like the normal edition only more so; it has two card racks and twice as many cards. We played a little as a family and everyone had a good time.

They also got me a hell of a lot of white briefs. I do not wear white or briefs, but I suppose it makes a nice backup supply.

Friday worked on ITA stuff from home via finally-working VPN, and received a long-sought written spec on this project I am tackling alone. First I need to machine me up some Perl tools, and spent the day sketching out some modules I can design to help me start hacking this company. I shall enjoy this, at least at first. I hope I can keep it up.

Friday evening was a lot of fun. My clothes are ratty, so I went clothes shopping with dictator555. I hate making clothes decisions by myself so this was excellent. She helped me pick out some nice shirts at the Eddie Bauer outlet, and on her advice I got mediums instead of larges. Yes, they fit nicer off the rack, but will they survive their first washing? We shall see.

I did have to put the kibosh on a pair of strange gray jeans she suggested. They actually fit perfectly, and I this I mean they were snug from the waist to the knees. In the mirror, they looked much tighter than they felt, and as a lifelong rumply-pants-wearer I was sufficiently tweaked by the effect to veto them.

No, for the pants purchase I reverted to my old ways, diving into Filene's Basement, locating some trou of my numbers that seemed inoffensive, and getting the hell out. Even with the dictator's company my clothes-shopping tolerance is only so long. Alas I am wearing the gray chinos I got now, and they manage to be slightly too short, revealing a scandalous amount of ankle while I sit. Grr. (At least I wear tall socks.) I need to find who online sells "OTB" pants and get some more of those. I liked those a lot.

Bakc to Friday: dinner at Pho Pasteur. It was good. I had not had pho since I worked in Hermon, under a boss whose Vietnamese parents-in-law ran a restaurant in Bangor. (The Oriental Dang, which I think is sadly no longer with us.) And then Battlestar watching with a big and noisy crowd. It was very good.

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Saturday and Sunday worked on Volity RSS and the newsletter, both long-delayed projects, and both all done now. I mean, we will make more RSS feeds and more newsletters, but our little publishing systems for both are complete and it'll be a lot easier now.

We ended up mailing out over 400 newsletters to people who either (1) explicitly asked for mail via the website's prefs page, or (2) haven't set their prefs at all. In the latter case, we set their mail prefs to "no" as soon as the letter went out, so they won't get any more mass-mailing from us unless they visit the website and then check the "mail me stuff" checkbox. A postscript in the newsletter says as much. This is daerr's idea, and like all his ideas of treating your customers well I tend to put my full weight behind it. He is a customer-happiness geek, and to be listened to in this regard!

At any rate I'm pretty psyched that we managed to collect 400 emails without trying particularly hard. We only started to do so after chatting with Kristin Looney's (looneykristin's) about it after Origins, when she chided us for not doing enough to establish connections with our customers. And even then we were pretty passive about it, making it easy for people to register their email addresses, and giving them good reasons to do it (like password recovery), but not throwing a fit or barring them from gameplay if they chose not to.

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Monday was almost entirely sunk into Jmac's Arcade. I produced the Nibbler ep, and then went ahead and did the other stuff I had been threatening, including mixing a better version of the Scramble one and then putting them all on YouTube as well as Google Video. (Will link to them later.) I hadn't uploaded anything to YouTube before and it's interesting to compare the features they offer to uploaders, versus Google. And, as I had hoped, Missile Command got a decent thumbnail, so yay.

Then games at dougos, where I played "Courtyards", a game produced by some guy who (I am told) owned a $10,000 wood-printer and wanted to make a game out of it so zappity-zap. It's an all-right tile-laying game, but I think it's more about "hey look what I did with my wood printer" than anything. Even the box is made from interlocking slats of printer-output. Unfortunately the rules are on a plain old sheet of paper; he should have tried burning them into the box!

And then I krushed everyone at Citadels. Ma ha ha ha. I love that game so much. I still really want to play the two/three-player variant again sometime, though. (Spoiler for the next Gameshelf: I do not win the game we played. I don't think I even came close!)

Hi chums how are you.

mrmorse and I had a grand time at SCAT tonight filming the host segments for the first Gameshelf show. Yes, finally. Sorry this is taking so long, to those of you who care. My motivation to finally stitch the thing together is higher than ever right now, after working with the great volunteer crew and talking to another guy there who saw the teaser we made in June and wanted to know when we're making more.

Collected info on how SCAT series work. It's less complicated than I was expecting, and there's now nothing stopping me from scheduling several shows' worth of shoots. Well: I'm going to make this first show first, just to prove to myself that I can. Then we'll see. I already have a full itinerary in mind for the next show, and I'd like to put two or three more in the can before I call it a series. (Four episodes is the rule of thumb the station uses, in fact.)

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Been hacking on Javolin, and talking with daerr about early business duties, like drafting the corporate operating agreements, which he rightfully compares to a game of Nomic. We gave each other deadlines for later this week... one of mine involves finally updating the written business plan to match the one we've been talking about most recently.

Not much fun to be had there, but I'm getting really impatient to get into a position where I can start pitching to investors. (Incorporation and organization is also necessary for that, but at least it's novel and fun.) At this point I feel as needful for validation as I do for money.

Meanwhile MA is *cricket noise* six days after my LLC filing. I'll try calling someone tomorrow. Paranoid that they emailed me and Gmail thought it was spam. I get more than 100 spams a day, and it's hard to manually wade through my spamtrap.

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I ordered some clothes from American Apparel online because I like their clothes even though I don't like their retail outlet. More than two weeks later, I still haven't gotten them. Last week I called to correct my address, which had magically changed from Linden Ave to Lincoln Ave at some point in their elf-driven computer-brain system. I don't know what the problem is, and have been putting off calling them too, because I hate using the phone, actually.

I guess I'm just not meant to be their customer, frowny. (But I will try to remember to call them anwyay; there's > $100 worth of new clothes for me, floating out there somewhere.)

Guy sitting next to me: earthy-plaid shirt, khaki shorts, giant shiny black-and-silver goth-o-bondage boots.

You know you're in deep-infraction territory when I call the fashion police on you.