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

The LiveJournal/DreamWidth Coprosperity Sphere still rocks the hizzle when it comes to getting stuff done locally. After failing to divest myself of "The Monolith" after a year of occasional posts to the prog LJ, to Craig's List, and to Freecycle, a single post to davis_square on Saturday did the trick. I got two email enquiries almost immediately, the first of which resulted in a successful haul-away just a few hours ago.

What also helped was a helping of focus I applied to this project, spending Friday night dragging the Monolith around and applying all my set-dressing skills to shoot the two extraordinarily contrived photographs found on that post, improvising props out of various objects from around the house. Compare them to the bland photo I took two summers ago. I can sell an image when I choose to put my back into it, I think!

I will also take this opportunity to say that I don't really understand quite how HDR photography works -- I haven't read about it outside of the paragraph that my iPhone's manual devotes to it -- but its results are pretty damned magical.

And then no fewer than three Monolith owners, past and present (I didn't know until recently that it has a twin, owned by the twin brother of the friend who gave it to me!) left comments on that post, reminiscing about this most unusual piece of furniture and answering other petitioners' questions. I couldn't ask for anything more than that.

People can be awesome about the silliest things.

Now that we come to it, I say goodbye to the monolith with a touch of melancholy. I love giving things away, but this was a lot of... a lot of raw mass to give away all at once, really, and the fact I was doing so not for my usual selfish reasons but to promote domestic tranquility (read: classicaljunkie hated its particle-board guts) made its departure a little sad for me. But I'm happy I managed to make a memorable event out of it, and even a successful little art project. That's a fair trade!

I haven't written anything lately about what's actually going on in my life. I have been holding it out for myself as a treat. I can only remember so much, so lemme cash it in now.

Really, all I've been doing since the housewarming is work on one project or another, occasionally shoving myself out the damn door to go do something that is not work. I've been doing an OK job of that, so I will tell you about these things first.

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At the end of August, radiotelescope and I attended Boston GameLoop. I failed to blog about that in a timely manner, but I did at least burp my transcribed notes at one of the organizers, and you can find them spread around that wiki. I especially enjoyed the sessions on discussing non-marketing ARGs, and on baking viral aspects into digital games. I networked a lot, and left feeling, perhaps for the first time, that I really was part of the games industry now. I still have rather complicated feelings about this.

The weekend after that cthulhia and I attended shatterstripes' gallery opening of her beautiful tarot deck art. I know the artist as an acquaintance from MUDs many years ago, but hadn't actually met her in person before, so it was fun to chat for a while about all that stuff. I look forward to being able to buy a mass-printed copy of the deck someday!

Labor day weekend I sat inside and prototyped a new project, and then helped Joe with a SCAT shoot; it was nice seeing the Gameshelf crew again. Weekend after that, my parents spent Saturday with us. We took them to the Summer Shack.

Last weekend classicaljunkie, dictator555, Nate and I went apple & berry picking. I wasn't that into it, but I really needed to go far outside my bubble and walk around outside for a while. It was also interesting being in an organic orchard - really ugly apples, covered with bugs! I considered this a feature.

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Some of you are aware that I've taken on yet another commercial project. This puts Project X on the back burner, while the Volity Network remains in the freezer. That feels like a joke at first - oh, look, jmac is unable to finish something again, so here he is, serially launching a new thing. Right?

However, the new thing has enough going for it that I decided to risk taking on this extra self-loathing in order to pursue it. It's a relatively small project, it primarily uses a web-based interface, and it re-uses various technologies I developed for Volity.

As such, it's now a project of Volity Games, the company, so I have my two partners there working with me on it. It will get done.

No no no, I'm not even gonna hint at a done-date. Don't worry, you wont miss it when it's ready. But, in the meantime, this is what's taking up all my work-time (besides the bread-n-butter stuff of Appleseed contracts).

So the annual Boston Sci-Fi movie marathon is happening in just a few days and I haven't lifted a finger. Neither doctor_atomic nor dictator555 are able to join me this year. One or the other has been my unfailing stay-awake-through-the-whole-damn-thing companion since I started going, six years ago.

The doctor's the one who introduced me to the thon, right when we were becoming close friends. So her absence is a bummer, but not wholly unexpected; she's very busy pursuing her real-life mad science at the moment.

Two years ago I was in a similar position, and on a last-minute lark I asked the dictator if she wanted to go a-thonning with me instead, figuring that she'd decline and I'd have an excuse to stay home. I didn't know her very well, but I knew (via dougo) that she'd expressed an interest in the thon. Surprise, she said yes, and so I quickly became good friends with her, and soon enough with all her friends, one of whom was classicaljunkie, and la-di-da. (No, CJ is not a thonner. Pity!)

What I'm trying to say is, the thon's been good to me. I've been to six in a row and I'd like to make it seven. Yesterday I would have said "...I think" to that but the closer it gets to Sunday the more psyched I get. I love the thon.

Even though the lineup has a lot of downers. And I have no idea how the thon crowd will react to 2001. Even if most of the audience has probably already seen it at least twice. The long parts of the movie are... long.

Still. Who-all's with me? Any of the slightly-less-hardcore-but-still-awesome folks I have sat beside in years past? Failing that, any fellow lunatics whose theater sections I can defect into this year?

This week is Blank Verse Blog Week, an invention of my dear friends, the Freaks. They've been at this for several years; I don't do it coz I'm lazy. We're already a couple of days into it, but it's not too late for you to start, if you're into that sort of thing.

My colleague Zarf has started a Sourceforge project about Boodler, his wonderful soundscape generator. Several years ago he developed it up to a point where it was useable if you wanted to monkey about with Python-based command-line interfaces and manually manage your own sound libraries. I found the program's output sufficiently nifty that I would go through the ordeal - much of Perl & XML was written with its ebbing and flowing rainstorm module as background sound - but of course most people can't hack that. He and some other folks are now working on making the thing more accessible. There is a mailing list.

What other projects should I know about?

Congratulations, meerkitty, on earning your number!

I have had a good couple of days...

Wednesday after the RMV stupidness I went to work and worked from 10 until 4:30 and it was great. I really must make an effort to dig in by 10, when I want to have a work-day like that. Which, um, should really be all of them. Split work early to eat n drink n scheme with J, always delightful.

Thursday I went to eat at dictator555's aunt's house with that whole crowd, which was kind of random but quite welcome. I actually didn't think about what I'd do for T-day until Wednesday afternoon. I IMed classicaljunkie to ask if it'd be tacky to post my Thanksgiving Orphan status on LJ, and then she was like EAT WITH US OM NOM NOM and I was like ok ok.

Hanging out with a friend's extended family that you don't know at all is always a little strange, and as a shy nerd at heart I found it a little rough at times, but I still made it out with not only an overful l belly but experience at playing four-handed Cribbage (for this family, like mine, are native New Englanders). This is actually pretty nifty and I look forward to teaching the variant to my own family up north!

On the train ride home I sat near a woman who was flirting really really loudly and I dare say tactlessly with the guys sitting behind her for the whole 1.5-hour ride and it was horrible and I was glad I put more than just talky podcasts on my Shuffle before leaving. Really that was the only negative experience.

Now it's not yet 1 and I'm actually a little sleepy. WOW. Off to go try and take advantage of this.

Interesting weekend, even though (especially in contrast to the previous two weekends) I didn't really get out much.

Not too long ago at some dictator555-orchestrated event, new-to-town xartofnothingx offered to loan us some of her Google Ad-wrangling expertise. So Saturday afternoon we all sat down around 1 Volity Towers' fabulous oak conference table and I pressed the button that dimmed the candelabra and lowered the 20-foot Internets screen so that we could go over it together. As predicted it was mostly a conversation between her and daerr coz it's not like Zarf or I know anything about this stuff.

After doing lots of keyword tuning, we modified the website to let Google catch Gamut downloads. If we set everything up right, we should be able to tell how many people who see our ads end up not just clicking on them but going all the way to installing our software. Looking forward to seeing what those numbers look like in another week or so.

Other than that I set up all the Jmac's Arcade stuff. And I wanted to make a second episode about Asteroids, except that my making-movies-from-what's-happening-on-the-screen software can't capture it! MacMAME's vector-graphics emulation pegs the CPU (even though it's a G5), and running 10-fps screen-capture on top of that just kills everything. I am bummed.

Wrote the output part of the ledger-display component. This is what you will look at when you want to see a report on the credits you've earned with your games, and from whom, or a report on how you've been spending your credits.

Tonight I got a burst of energy for a strange reason because I almost took a random opportunity to meet a couple of new friends-of-a-friend. Due to a benign miscue I ended up not being able to go, but for some reason the fact I almost did made me go wheeeee for like two hours after. Huh?! Yeah I dunno. I guess with all of everything going on I'm feeling socially adventurous again, as socially adventurous as I am able to get, anyway. Well, good.

Then I cleaned up Whitey, the old iBook, which is to say I attacked it with fingernail and Brillo pad until its lid was (almost) clean of stickers. I have moved past being the sort of person who has a sticker-covered latoptop, I suppose. I chose, however, to leave the Jim's Big Ego vinyl sticker that cthulhia gave me a long time ago. For some reason, advertising local geekish folkrock is still within the bounds.

There also remains a little grinning bat inside, over the screen, a memoir of the time when doctor_atomic was a housemate. And there's an extremely deteriorated Tirade sticker on the bottom, probably from a Looney Labs order from early 2002 or thenabouts.

The only thing I didn't hit on today's to-do list was fixing the toys on jmac.org, which have been broken for god knows how long, probably since I switched servers last year. How embarrassing! The toys, mostly stuff that all dates pre-2002, really serves no purpose other than impressing people exploring my site for the first time, but that's a pretty good reason by itself to keep them propped up. I'll have to get to that this week.

Had a well-timed weekend full of social thingamabobs involving all the lovely ladies of my flist who have profession-evoking LJ names that start with D.

Friday night went to doctor_atomic's very last undergraduate chamber singer performance. I thought that the last piece they did, Janequin's Le Guerre, is a pretty boss note to end one's college career on, since the performers get to sing violent sound effects. In French.

Not much in the way of post-show celebration since she had a plane to catch early the next morning; off to another conference. She's been attending a lot of these, all a transitional step to her starting the long path towards becoming a really-real doctor. Criminy. I am proud of her.

Next day, joined dictator555 and company for a birthday lunch at a favorite little Italian joint in the North End. I dunno if I've ever been to the North End before, despite living here like 5 and a half years, sheesh. A neighborhood to revisit many times, once I can afford it again. (Well, looking's free, in the meantime, I guess.)

There were graduates everywhere, with the caps and the gowns, each one surrounded by a knot of family. I dunno where they came from, precisely. Was a little giddy and briefly considered enacting a policy of saying "congratulations!" to every one crossing my path, but I'm just not that kind of person.

Was surprised to see a big old building near the T stop labeled "Scotch 'n Sirloin", which I immediately recognized as something I'd seen many many times as a kid. If my understanding of reality is correct, this would have happened during trips through the city with my dad, as I think the building overlooks where I-93 used to be, pre-Big Dig.

Oddly, there appears to be no restaurant by that name in Boston, though Google reveals a well-known one of the same name in Rochester, NY. The Boston building is now occupied by an architectural design firm, but the old sign remains, and they even have a picture of it on their website (which I stole, as you can see).

But ah, what a giddily American name for a restaurant. Booze 'n Beefslabs!

After dining retreated back to her secret underground bunker where we played the new Ticket to Ride Märklin and I came in dead last again what the hell even though I played a lot better this time and had a good time anyway. (A lot of the reason I got so cranky with the previous weekend's game is that I got stuck early and never really pulled free, and this surprised and frustrated me. Part of TTR's charm, maybe any rail game's charm, is the sense that you're always making progress, setting small goals and meeting them, and can feel satisfied with your work even if you're not getting as many points as everyone else. But I was just spinning my tires, that game.)

(On the other hand, the whole experience of meeting all your goals, smiling down at your work, and then looking up to discover that the game's been stolen from you regardless... there are painful echoes of November 2004 in this. Perhaps that day I lost the ability to lose with a shrug and a grin. That's pre-11/2 thinking.)

It was another 5-player game, too, making my current 5-player PvP TTR record 0-8. Zwounds! I think the thing about 5-player games is that card-hoarding strategies, which I learned to ply to my advantage in the original game, don't work nearly as well. Next time I'm in this situation, I'm gonna start building sooner and then keep up the heat.

(Impress your friends: "Märklin" is pronounced like [MAIR-klin], not [MAR-klin]. Also prog is pronounced [WAIN-ker].)

Whee, I feel a big plate of sick coming on, of the run-down-blah variety. Been feeling it down deep since early evening. I hope that I can still make the final Chicken Heart recording session. I don't think I'll be that sick. We'll see. The thing is that I haven't really been ill since we set up in December, and I fear that my luck'll run out before winter does.

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Propped on my elbow in bed, I mistyped Chicken Heart as Chick3en Heart, and I think of some sort of post-cyberpunk reimagining of it. Please don't.

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Went to a perfectly fine housewarming party tonite. I had picked up on some worries about possible social tensions, but to my eye these were absent or at least quietly averted. It's true that I'm often not very good at spotting these things, but I do believe that my friends do OK by each other. So says jmac.

As with the famous housewarming at Highland Avenue I helped host 3.75 years ago, there was relatively little mixing of tribes. My glob kept largely to the living room, and we were many, so it was OK. Sometimes someone would go into the kitchen to hear the theater geeking a little better (or to get at the fruit plate or the booze), and sometimes a theater geek or bookstore employee would wander into our section if they had something to add about Abba or Nerf or whatever we were going on about. Or to get to the cookies. We should have established trade routes.

I've feel like I've done maybe one day's worth of work in the two-and-change that I've been been back in Somerville. Time to get back into coding mode, after I gets me some shut-eye.

In social news, a long-lost friend -- an actual college friend if you can believe it -- has reappeared to such a degree that he's now on my AIM roster. And another friend from more recent times seems to have become actively unavailable, for reasons I can only speculate upon. (But may be clued by my icon choice.) So goes life.