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

A lady just called me and asked if I had any Stoner Fluxx in stock.

"No, we don't", I said, wondering if maybe she was a Looney person that would then respond with "Wanna buy some?" but instead she said "OK, thank you though!" and we hung up.

Man, having a good laugh about something on Boardgamegeek until someone brings up Fluxx and everyone starts bashing it... it's like when you're having a grand time at a family gathering until suddenly everyone else starts having a farting contest or joking about dirty Mexicans or something. Who are these people.

Fluxx is to BGG as Zardoz is to the Thon message board. "Fluxx, now, there's a game!" Except that I guess the metaphor only stretches so far, since the Thon people wouldn't say that Zardoz is the movie you watch to make your wife or girlfriend happy before moving on to a real movie. The idea makes me giggle, though.

I need to learn Photoshop.

Feeling lazy, so here is excerpts from stuff I posted to the Volity betatest list:

First, I'd like to announce that we've released version 0.3.5 of
Gamut, our official client application. The new features I'm
personally most excited about are its online documentation - it now
features a "Gamut Help" command under its Help menu that summons a
user manual. It begins with a welcome page for first-time users,
guiding them through their first couple of Volity games. I'd love to
hear what y'all think of it.

You can download Gamut by visiting http://volity.net and clicking the
big shiny blue button you'll see therein. And if you haven't seen the
volity.net website yet... well, you're in for a treat. And even if you
are already familar with it, you may not have known that we just
launched a developer blog at http://volity.net/blog . Right now it's
just us in the core yapping. OK, it's just Zarf yapping. IMHO that's
reason enough to check it out, but nonetheless we soon hope to offer
user-driven project blogs as part of our self-service developer
support stuff.

If you're coming to betatest in person tonight, try to bring a laptop if you can; our token Intel PC is still dead, so we have fewer courtesy computers than before. (This despite the generous donation of a hard drive from lediva; it turns out we had a bum motherboard. A new one is en route.) Folks can use our office Macs if it comes down to it, of course.

I just picked up two piping-hot guest parking cards from the city, which means that I don't have three, or indeed any number greater than two, for two's all they give ya. So drive if you must, and I shall endeavor to accomodate. (Rumor has it that I can nullify parking tickets that guests receive, but rumor also has it that this is hard to actually do.)

If you can't make it in person, log in to the system between 7pm and 11pm eastern and find it crawling with activity. Info as always at http://volity.org/betatesting.html . In the past we've had great success with a mix of both kinds of players. Just hang out in the devchat.

However you plan on playing, please go download brand-new version 0.3.1 of Javolin first; it's so new that as I write this the packages are still uploading from my Mac to our server. (Update: they're done now.) The most important change from 0.3.0 is an improved invitation system that radiotelescope devised, which should eliminate the need for people to be on your roster before you could invite them to a table. Previous betapaloozas showed us that, while this looked fine on paper, it was confusing and awful to actually use. We look forward to seeing how well this new way works.

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There has been a surge in activity from total strangers since I posted a testing request to Looney Labs' Fluxx mailing list. This has actually been great; several people have been playing Fluxx over and over (usually against bots), and occasionally filing new tickets for us. Our favorite one so far was filed by a player who discovered a way in which the Fluxx ruleset itself is broken!

This player and a bunch of bots got the game into a state where both the draw and discard piles were empty (meaning that some players were hoarding cards and not playing any Hand Limit rules, which is a bad habit of our current bots), and a bot played Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look, I drew Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look...

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So how about that there developer beta? I have two or three discrete bits of programming to accomplish still, and then I need to perform some release engineering. I am predicting that the betapalooza (plus this cold I have) will preclude me from finishing today, but I am hell-bent on getting it all wrapped up before Saturday.

I plan on making this the first release to the CPAN of the Perl stuff. This is actually exciting, and a big step.

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Volity is kicking butt. We need to start thinking about money again, soon.

The snow kept the Andys away through Sunday, so this has been a really slacky weekend for me. Got into gear Sunday evening and am riding that into today, brum brum. Expect to see Space Station Assault become scrutable this week. It is a cool game and people should play it, gosh darn it... but I am well aware that, as currently presented, it's not very approachable to those who don't know the rules already.

Also, if you haven't seen Fluxx in the last few days, go check it out. I've been responding to feedback, and I think the game's sexier now than it was a week ago. I'm going to go ping the Looneys about it very soon, though I may hold off until I can coincide that communication with other stuff.

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Feeling braver lately. Had one conversation late Saturday that was exactly the sort of conversation I hate having, involving questions that, once asked, make me want to barf. But of course all is better for its having happened. Much like barfing.

And the day before that, I was in Harvard Square and feeling a rush of wot de hell paid a visit to the university medical center's dental office. I nearly wept with gratitude upon learning that I can continue to avail myself of their services; I really love Dr. Joo and the other tooth-techs there. I don't have insurance any more, but the checkup fee I was quoted was basically the same as the last dentist bill I had to pay myself, some 10 years ago in Brewer, Maine. How about that!

So, Feb. 28 I will learn how well 15 months of flossing and fluoride rinsing's been paying off. Better stated as: I will learn if the two unresolved cavities have healed themselves (our optimistic goal), need to be filled anyway (dammit), or spiraled out of control and necessitate horrible blood-gushing surgery (unlikely).

Next is getting around to having a rest-of-body checkup, coz it's been a couple of years already... meh. Maybe wait until I see what happens with the company. If it turns out I need emergency same-day kidney detorsion or whatever, I may as well put it the triggering checkup off until I'll have insurance, from one source or another, ho ho.

I just delcared Fluxx to be Alpha. Despite its possessing some display bugs, I can play games against myself without killing anything. Now I want to see if other people can play it without getting confused or frustrated. Feeling confident from meeting this more recent deadline, I hereby predict that we'll be able to get the game out to beta testers by the end of next week.

You will like this. It is good. A big thank-you to al the testers so far, especially those of you who signed on expecting Fluxx, didn't see it, and dutifully tested the rest of the system anyway. You rock. (BTW, if I have neglected to get any beta-test invitations from me, and I know who you are, please drop me a note and I'll set you up.)

After that, and aside from reacting to testers' critiques, I'm retiring from making Volity games and going to attack the volity.net website (which has been waiting patiently for years (literally) for me to bless it with content) and cultivate the business. I've been taking care of the earthy stuff in the meantime, but distracted enough to do sort of a half-assed job of it. I succeeded in opening us a bank account, for example, but failed to get a debit card for it so we could actually, y'know, buy things, and now nearly a week's gone by with me forgetting to drop in and amend this. La.

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Mystery Hunt this weekend, oh boy oh boy. Two potential stress sources, though:

* The invitation requested formal attire. I have some reasonably suave-looking clothes (which I used to wear a lot) but nothing you'd call formal, and I sure as hell ain't rentin no tux for the Hunt, not on my budget. Of course, this being the Hunt, I'm sure the invitation was made fully expecting some creative responses. rikchik has heroically offered to lead a group-dive into the Garment District to find things that are "formal" according to at least one person in some time period that did or might later exist. This is great but even that is making me wobbly because I haaaate clothes shopping. Well, we'll see how it goes.

* I have to split early Sunday afternoon to do the Chicken Heart show at Arisia. Doh... I originally thought that it was scheduled for Saturday. So of course I'm racked with worry that not only will our team make it up to the final runaround, but they will do so right at 1pm, just when I have to toddle off to Boston. Aiee!

That said, if you're slumming at Arisia at 2pm on Sunday, you should come see CHICKEN HEART and hear my offensive Bronx accent.

What a strange day. I have spent the last five hours seated and writing email. Which sounds cushy, except I feel like I've been working hard, and managed to develop an appetite. Time for a MEAT SAMMICH

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Crazy goal: Fluxx in beta before the Mystery Hunt. Wish me luck!

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I declined subscribing to COBRA insurance coz it was friggin 'spensive and am now hoping I didn't choose poorly, since I really must follow up on my teeth this month. If it turns out I need to have a $2000 root canal or something I will be right pissed.

I'm guessing this is unlikely since my teeth don't hurt, and I've been taking better care of them in the last year than ever before... but I still don't know the current status of the two unfilled cavities I was diagnosed with last year. (They actually found four, but chose to leave the smaller ones alone for the time being.)

Unless I'm severely unlucky, I'm probably looking at a couple more fillings, at worst. I dunno how much that costs.

Just poking my head in. How y'all doing.

The Day of Meetings hit all its targets (which is about as good as such days can get), and I have spent every waking hour since then working on the Fluxx UI. It reached feature-completeness last night, and I've been adding polish and chrome since then. It's no doubt still full of bugs, as I haven't yet tried it against the Fluxx referee that radiotelescope has running at an undisclosed location. I'm looking forward to alpha-testing it this weekend, and then beta-testing it with some Fluxx-fan friends.

Erf, I keep forgetting that I only have all the Keeper artwork to finish. I have only a handful done, finished last month before I decided to punt that sub-project in favor of working on the meat of the problem. In my testing I've been using my War graphic as filler for every single image, so the UI constantly has chubby little tanks of various sizes trundling all over it. In the grim future of Fluxx there is only War.

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I bent my mind towards Christmas 2005 for the first time today: checking Zipcar availabily, weeping, and then buying a Greyhound ticket. Gonna spend Xmas Morning through Boxing Day Afternoon with the fam. I sigh with immobility.

Finally started working on the Fluxx UI in earnest. I ground out the above Keeper icons in about an hour after once again blowing the dust off Illustrator and trying to figure out how the hell the tools work. As usual, through blundering around and pecking at its (sadly kind of crappy) online docs, I did a decent job, and started figuring things out as I went. These are the simplest of the 18 Keeper designs I have in mind, and I may return to redo them once I've learned various things by making the next 14.

The thought bubble is supposed to be "Dreams", by the way. I hope that's obvious enough if you know that there's a Keeper with that name in the game, which is often paired with Sleep -- whose icon I hope is a bit more obvious.

Also pleased to see that Illustrator's SVG output isn't as insane as I thought it was. It's insane by default, but you can tell it to keep all its proprietary metadata out of the file and not embed any fonts or graphics, and (in the case of these graphics) that shrinks the file size from more than 250K to less than 4K. That adds up to many megs of savings in the final game SVG UI file, resulting in that much less work for the renderer to meditate upon before play.

Yesterday was a bad day. I became very sad, and shut down early. Two true facts about me: it's hard to emotionally unbalance me, but if I do lose balance, a good night's sleep always restores it. This is likely a good thing.

Why was I sad? I was thinking about what a wash A.D. 2001 seems to me. I don't feel as if I've done much this year, especially compared to 1999 and 2000. I thought about various decisions I had made poorly, or failed to make at all, and opportunities lost due to lack of strong communication. And this isn't even getting into the bigger stuff of the layoffs and 9-11. I wanted to cry, and wondered at what age I lost the ability to will myself into doing so, or if I ever really could.

Today was a good day. Worked for a couple hours in the 1369 on chapter 7, which is due tomorrow, enough to convince myself that I can turn it in before Monday's done. I should have had it done today, but I ended up sinking half the day into a visit to Joe's. In retrospect, I think of the scenes from the film "Pi" of Max visiting his mentor. Just like this, Joe is a cranky old man (two years older than me) who works in my field, except far more experienced and published, and who gives me lots of curmudgeonly advice, but who also abandoned his most ambitious project when it got too dangerous (actually he dropped his most recent book contract because it got too boring) and enjoys having me over to play our favorite game, Go. Er, I mean Fluxx. And Settlers of Catan Card Game.

However, even though I am, right according to script, working obsessively with my own project, I failed to ride around randomly on the T while staring at a Settlers black knight token in my hand, and then have dreams about finding my brain sitting on the stairs at the Central Square station. Which is good, because eventually I'd find Joe dead in his apartment, slumped over his keyboard while half-written treatise on Man Things Was Not Meant To Know About XML-RPC glowed on his monitor, and his whole Fluxx deck laid out along pseudo-Kabbalistic patterns (his copy of "The End Is Near" would be open next to it, for reference). So that's good.

If I make a movie about XML it will be called this: <:-/>

Stayed home from Rick's housewarming so I could play with the new*new*new XML::SAX Perl module. Since I'm not very experienced with SAX, and since further it doesn't actually come with the documentation packages it's supposed to (grumble... but forgiveable, since it's only at v0.03), it took some extra time to grok, but I think I got it. Emailed Erik and Nat, asking them to sanity check my summary of the module's magic. (Basically, it seems to be just a highly intelligent parser dispatcher, and its handlers work the same as PerlSAX always has.)

Worth noting: on my walk to the cafe, a very little boy was so ecstatic over seeing the snowfall, finally normal weather, that, ignoring his parents' directions to stay put, he raced down his front steps, picked up a double-mittenful of snow, ran up with a huge grin to a total stranger, and got him good, right on the leg.

"Ouch, I've been snowballed!" I said, only slowing my pace a little, to let him scoot past and dive into a whole yardful of new snow. "Oh! Did he get you?" said his mother. I could only shrug and laugh.