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

I just listened to a podcast where a role-playing game publisher talked about RPGs' lousy reputation with the mainstream public. He cited a time he was at a concert trying to chat up a lady: when he said he published role-playing games, she expressed curiosity about what that meant. He said, "You know, like Dungeons and Dragons!" and she turned and walked away without another word.

My friend, I am here to tell there is indeed bad marketing afoot, but it isn't with the games. When she wanted to know more, instead of giving her an intriguing capsule summary of the whole medium, you dropped the D&D bomb, with all its attendant baggage. Well, of course she will immediately file you with all the greasy little trolls her clique made cruel fun of in seventh grade, and why would she want to waste further words on you after that?

You should have gone with describing the games' shared, social storytelling aspect. That is way sexier, and if you spin it right you can sound classically artsy and edgily modern at the same time.

But please, don't go snorting about Dungeons & Dragons and then expect to make a new special friend. D&D will forever be associated with sad little nerds, not because it's a sad little nerdish game but because it will always attract them in sufficient number to tightly bind the two in the eye of any observer. (No matter how many Vin Diesels step forward to lend their badassery to its image.)

The world of RPGs is full of games that archetypical nerds in their numbers will never find. Next time you wanna pick up chicks, start talking about, I dunno, Dogs in the Vineyard or something. Even if it doesn't work, at least you probably won't get utterly shut down.

I am having a good day.

In the wee hours this morning I played two games of Tic Tac Toe against a bot with the Volity web client. The application is not in a state where anyone other than me can use it, but we have nonetheless acheived target depth. It's all lateral digging from here. I IMed radiotelescope around 1a.m. to share the moment. He said "WTF, mid-August?" and told me to go see a movie.

I've suffered discomfort from zits growing deep in my left ear over the past couple of days, and they burst while I was showering this morning. It was briefly horrible, but after spending a while mucking the ear out with Q-tips I felt my old self again. If it weren't for classicaljunkie I probably wouldn't have had any Q-tips on hand. Truly, this is what love is all about. (Actually now that I think back I originally bought the Q-tips to clean my keyboard. Wev.)

Walked to Kendall to squirrel the spoils of my July contracting work into the one ATM in town that accepts deposits for NetBank. Buoyant and listening to favorite podcasts, I thought upon Zarf's advice and looked at the movie theater, but they had no noon shows, so instead treated myself to lunch & beer at the CBC. I think I ticked off the server when I changed my mind about outdoor seating and asked to go inside instead; though the restaurant had few people in it he sat me next to a couple of grumpy people talking business, ignoring their cranky protests about why I had to sit there. I listened to my iPod and enjoyed my meal anyway, and said hello to modpixie on my way home.

Now it's pouring out even though I was walking through the sunshine. Who knows!

It has been a full weekend.

Saturday saw a lot of Volity hacking, breaking ground on the web client's server-side component. Once the complete skeleton is built I'll commit it as v0.1, but my fugue state didn't last more than a few hours and I had to be all "whoah" and raise my hands and step away before I could quite get there. Maybe I'll finish it today. Anyway, this will be the first Perl-based Volity sub-project that I've started since I got religion via Perl Best Practices, which taught me to start major projects by writing the tests (and, in so doing, designing the interface) first. So that's exciting. If you're me.

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In the evening, radiotelescope, cthulhia and I saw Day Watch, the sequel to last year's Night Watch, a.k.a. the crazy Russian vampire movie that everyone except for me and the people I saw it with hated. I liked this movie too, though not as much as the first. It replaced the crazy imagery and action of the first movie with some fun plot development. I dug it, but I missed the other stuff. It also contained one completely irritating character, who (among other things) failed Mo's Movie Measure the instant that she was able. Worse was that this occurred during an egregious and overlong "Freaky Friday" sequence, and so I spent five or six minutes in a sustained wince in the middle of this otherwise enjoyable flick, and that was unfortunate.

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Sunday was classicaljunkie's birthday! Following plans that dougo initiated a while ago, and also accompanied by Cthulhia, we drove to Kimball Farms to play miniature golf, or "putt-putt" as CJ calls it in her native language. I hadn't played since I was a kid but I'll be damned if I still didn't have reasonably good chops for it. My friends laughed when I said it was all the golfing video games I play, but I wasn't entirely joking! The place has two courses, and we played both, with me winning the first round and CJ the second (after Cth left), though the point spread was fairly tight.

The courses were enjoyable but rather bland, with one real standout whose like I had never seen before: one hole split in a vee a few feet away from the tee, with one arm snaking towards the cup in the usual fashion, and the other dumping into an artificial stream. As it turns out, the best solution involves purposefully putting into the water, which carries your ball under a platform and through a hidden tube, ejecting it right at the cup. But there's no explicit documentation about this; you either need to watch someone do it, or be intrepid enough to figure that there had to be some reason for the hole's stairway-to-nowhere design, making the leap of faith yourself. Doug was the brave one in our party, and he and I both got holes in one.

The rest of the course was really nothing special, but I just couldn't shut up about that one hole. Great design!

Also did some unexpected networking: the dad of the family playing behind us turned out to be a publisher of some computer and video game magazines from the 1980s and 90s that I loved as a kid! He couldn't help but overhear Doug and I talk about Volity and iPhones and such, and we chatted for a while. he was interested to hear about my startup, so I need to email him a little follow-up today. Had no business cards on hand, but wrote my info on the back of an extra scorecard for him.

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Then we went to dinner with dictator555, at Pigalle, in the Boylston vicinity. This was the first time I'd really experienced a fancy-dan restaurant where you pay exorbitantly for very little edible mass. It felt like something from a New Yorker cartoon. I ordered a $15 a menu item describing itself as gnocchi, and it meant this quite literally, featuring a gnocchi, one single piece, on a little bed of vegetables; an island in an otherwise large and empty plate. I did appreciate this, though perhaps not in the way they meant me to.

It was delicious, what there was, and I also quite enjoyed the sampling that my dining companions allowed me from their dishes. I said that I'd consider returning the next time I felt the need to really impress someone.

I went into last weekend feeling really weird and doomed and came out of it... well I guess I still feel doomed but at least it's the good kind.

Saturday was a day for conversations. I had a conversation with daerr about the Volity web client, and later had another with classicaljunkie about the nature and direction of our relationship. I now feel on much better footing with both.

For the first time in a long while, Volity suffuses me with the IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK sense of dread, the way my gut feeling manifests itself when I'm on the right path. It feels awful but it is a good thing. I put all of Sunday into the first real I know exactly what I'm doing-quality work into the web client. As I write this, I am almost done porting Testbench into HTML. If you know what this means, this ought to be exciting to you. At any rate, there will be more public announcements and demonstrations when it's ready.

Yes, Sunday was supposed to be my first day for doing video production work, according to my new weekly schedule. But, the schedule's meant to be broken, and my being on fire about something acts as a trump here.

Yesterday wasn't really the weekend but I'll mention anyway that I spent most of the day doing good work for the webby client, and then I watched Eraserhead for the first time. Now I have the idea in my head to try grinding it down to a 20- or even 10-minute short and seeing if it turns into a whacked-out surreal comedy. Also making one of those joke fake-out trailers out of it. I think there's just enough dialog in there to make a trailer that depicts it as a romantic comedy. She's got a wacky family, and he's got some kooky hangups! What could possibly bring them together?

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On Saturday D also set me up with all of the Heroes and Lost that I haven't seen yet. In the case of Heroes, this was most of them. The three of us watched a couple of episodes all together that evening, and CJ and I have been catching two or three at a time since then. (She's already seen them all and is a huge fan.) I like the show but I don't loooove it. It feels very tropey to me, in terms of both style and content. I have already read The Invisibles and Astro City and other superhero (d|r)econstruction efforts, and here is yet another one that clearly follows their lead, albeit in a new medium with decent production values.

I find the production itself diminished for being riddled with visual clichés. Oh, a character is walking backwards? Wait for the hand to come out and grab the shoulder! Yes, there it is. BUM BUM sez the soundtrack. Yeah, shut up. Actually I do have to say shut UP out loud at the voiceover that randomly reads different episodes in and out with Winfrey book club psychobabble.

Also, the depiction of severe neurological trauma on a conscious body continues to be the only visual that can really squick me. And boy there's a lot of that on the show. Insert standard frustration that you can show living brains getting liquified on American TV, but not boobies. Boobies are bad. Also swearing.

I have some really hairsplitting whines about specific bits of content on the show, but in every case it comes down to "that's not how I would have written it", and if I'm imagining myself on the show's writing staff, that has to mean that I feel something for it. And I do; when it's fun, it's really fun. And it's fun more that it isn't.

Currently, the most obvious classicaljunkie-enabled change in my behavior is that I no longer have any inhibitions about chugging Pepto Bismol straight from the bottle.

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.

May 1 means that somewhere around now is the ten-year anniversary of my graduating from the University of Maine with BAs in English and Journalism.

Being a solitary sort, and living outside of a real city (Bangor being made mostly of particle board and broken dreams etc.), upon receiving my diploma I immediately lost touch with all of my classmates, most of whom immediately scattered across the country in search of their futures. I stayed in town and worked retail for a while before a chance meeting with a UMaine acquaintance gave me my first technical job. But he turned out to be kind of hard to work for, and the job of varying goodness. Later, two years after my graduation, kyroraz became the first fellow UMaine alum to reconnect with me by inviting me into a D&D group, which led to my introduction to daerr, and from there to my first programming job.

I blogged a few years ago about almost setting up a meeting with dear Katie, my Maine Campus editor-in-chief back in the day. I successfully pinged her at the start of this decade, after I moved to Boston and found where she was working, at a PR firm downtown... but she's slipped off the radar since then. Her managing editor and our good friend Chris found his way onto my IM buddy list only a few months ago, contacting me from out of the blue. Since I last saw him, he has married his then-girlfriend and they bought a house and have just baked up their fourth(!) kid and so on, all of these things so alien to me and my accurséd cave-dwelling kind.

There's also Daphne, a writer at the paper whose name I came across in an IF newsgroup a couple of years ago. We traded email briefly and then I just let it slide off, as I do, cuz I stink.

I don't remember the names of any of my classmates outside of the newspaper, though I remember some students namelessly. I am moved to tell you about one of the most regretful events from this time was my running into another recent graduate with whom I was reasonably friendly with in class but didn't necessarily know very well. Unbidden, she handed me a scrap of paper with her number. She was beautiful and smart, but I was so completely unversed in such matters that I didn't know what I was supposed to do with it. I mean: yes, one day not long after this I called her on the phone, but I didn't quite realize that I was expected to suggest anything or even bring up any topic in particular, and after several minutes of idle chit-chat she lost patience and politely bid me farewell. I never called back.

I was actually laughing while typing the previous. I don't think I've ever thought about this incident directly. It's pretty funny.

I have done a hella lot in ten years, my five in Maine and my five in Mass., but I can't v. well say that I'm satisfied, not with the position I've put myself in lately.

So how was my Xmas?

I was with mom and dad in their house, along with brothers Peter and Ricky, and Ricky's friend Russell (known affectionately by my parents as "Sewerman"). Sentimental Ricky was near to tears because we nukes (plus Russell) were all together, which doesn't happen very often. (Note: There's a reason for that.) Ricky spent much of the day loudly obsessing over the wording of the Constitution, and how this explained the Civil War. Peter enjoyed a couple of card games with me. He's a big Aquarius fan, and teaching him Mama Mia was pretty fun, actually.

Some fun was had going through the photos on my iBook and telling stories about the people therein. I have given up explaining to Peter that I am not dating every woman who I mention in my stories about my life, so he now thinks I've having all these crazy flings, but this amuses him, so, whatever.

Here I have a little epiphany. To some extent I think everyone in my family feels the same confusion in my stories about my friends. Their concept of friendship is definitely different than mine, as is, perhaps, their whole concept of Proper Interpersonal Relationships. The more I think about it, drawing on my memories of growing up with them, the more I see a belief within my nukes that one is close to one's family, and keeps one's distance from everyone else. Friends can be fun activity partners, but getting too close to them will turn you gay, which means that you have failed as a human or something. No kidding -- my dad used to out-and-out warn me about this, when I was but a wee prog. This assumes that your friends are of the same sex as you, because being friends with someone of opposite gender, but with no intention to eventually marry them, is weird, and probably also a path to sexual inversion. The only way approved ways to bond with people are by a) marrying them or b) creating them, both of which brings them into your family, where it's OK to get as close as you want. Within limits.

Oh, my poor family, when I see them in this light. No wonder they're all broken. All they have is each other, because they don't think they're allowed anyone else. And what does that really give them?

Eh. Maybe I'm just looking for an excuse for my own difficulties in getting close to people when I write this sort of thing. It seems true, anyway.

Back to the gift exchange: Well, to be honest, I wasn't paying much attention. I mean, I usually ignore holidays (and the passage of time in general) but I was extra-special unaware of Xmas this year due to my workload, so I didn't even think about any giving. My parents got me a sweatjacket, which I then gave to Peter, and an electric razor thing with built-in vacuum cleaner, which, eh, I guess I'll eBay or something eventually. I had earlier told my parents that the best gift would be nothing at all, since I have too much stuff as it is, and this explains the lack of new furniture and whatnot. (Over the past year, in fact, they've attempted to gift me with entire patio sets and so on, and it's all I can do to wave my hands at them, no no no, really, you can keep it.)

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Random observation: I view electrical outlets as the source of all life (especially since obtaining my iBook), and I plan my stay in any place by their availability.

My parents view electrical outlets as ugly wall defacements best kept hidden behind large, heavy pieces of furniture. Putting them dead-center behind giant sofas and bookcases always wins, for them.

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I've spent the last couple of days in study. Been playing with Squeak for OS X, and kicking around MIGS, the modular Internet game system, my own mysterious project.

After deciding that my current strategy would make client-writing too difficult (or, at best, easy but with ugly results), I have yet again reshaped my ideas for how this game system would work, and have started slapping some code together, though so much of it is needed before anything can appear on-screen -- I'm trying to make a game-creation framework, rather than just one game -- that there's still a lot more to write before I can start enjoying any gee-whiz results. This is the most trying time of software creation, I believe, the period between barenaked concept and the first pre-pre-pre-alpha working model. I'm almost scared to put it down for the evening, fearing that the future me, seeing no deliverables, will just give up and not return to it. But: I've been working on this all night and need a break. We'll see what happens.

As a result of my rethinking, I have been learning a lot about SVG. If I stick to my present course, MIGS will rely heavily on this particular technology -- which is pretty cool. It's perfect for a lot of the nutty stuff I'd like to do in MIGS, particularly where it involves bringing together lots of little graphical bits from different sources and mushing them all together into one visual field. This is, more or less, my current plan for how MIGS will build and present game boards and pieces. It should in theory work both for people who just want to grab a client program, connect to a server, and start playing, and for those who wish to design and show off their own electronic signature Icehouse stashes or whatever when playing. In theory. We'll... um, see what happens.

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One of the Arcus people, on hearing that I spent much of yesterday hiding out here at the office, said that he spend much of his day hiding in the basement of his father's home with his own two little sons, where they all rolled up D&D 3E characters. They now have an elf wizard and a halfling monk. I said: "Awesome."