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

Spent the greater part of the afternoon tuning Google AdWords campaigns. I have four distinct ad-groups running now, covering the spread of (local | national) and ("I'm a Perl hacker" | "I'm a software consultant").

Running many variants of ad-haiku, but they all go something like this:

Web consultant for hire
Clean design, robust software.
SaaS, Perl our specialties.

Budgeted one V-note per day for the whole deal, and put some Google Analytics goodness into the Appleseed site as well. Trying to not be addicted with reloading my stats page now, which is already showing results. Lemme give it a day, at least.

From daerr, a cute slideshow about Perl 5.10.

Maybe a little too cute, though. For the love of gord: don't compare your project to "Star Wars: Episode 1" in the first five slides. You are basically saying "Yay lightsabers Ha ha ha :( fuck we're doomed". *slap* Snap out of it!!

It reminds me of a podcast I heard recently that featured a community luminary giving a presentation on Perl 6 syntax, and stating at the beginning that the entirety of the talk could be rendered obsolete this time next year. Well then! Thank for letting me know that now is a good time to hit the fast forward button on my iPod. (More than that, even; this was the beginning of the end of my assumption that Perl 6 will ever see a release.)

I dunno what it is with Perl people and their rush to out-self-efface each other, but it's not a very good way to win converts, yo.

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.

On a whim, I just registered for a breakfast meeting of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce tomorrow so I can network with local businessfolk as a service provider. It's a little pricey, but not too pricey to rise out of what-have-I-got-to-lose range. (Plus, it's a write-off. I now make the write-off gesture, to demonstrate.)

I attended another such breakfast around two years ago, when I was starting to look for Volity funding and while my business ignorance was profound. It was entirely the wrong place for that, but I was impressed by how nice the people were. Several gave me tips on more appropriate groups to join. Now, I represent a different business that actually does offer a service they might be interested in. It feels a little topsy-turvy, talking about my programming prowess to random flower-shop owners and insurance-firm partners, but the idea to attend hit me the other day and the idea feels right in my gut. Why not?



I just threw together this business card. It's not meant to be a permanent design for me; just something decent-looking that I can print onto cardstock tonight and hand to people tomorrow. The URL doesn't exist yet but I'll make it happen presently. What do you think?

Is it fair to refer to myself as a consultant, at this point? I get the impression that a consultant is best defined as the person who points at themselves and says "I'm a consultant." It sounds a little more, eh, business-cardy than "freelance programmer". Would you agree?

In other news, the usual client just asked if they can assign me some more stuff. Things are gonna be OK, on the money pillar.

That last post reminded me:

For some time I've wanted to make a page on jmac.org about my freelance programming business, more than the front-page blurb and link to my resume that's there now. One element I'm missing from this is a nice photograph of myself, with a big fat alpha channel as a backdrop, letting me work it into any layout.

I am actually looking to lay down a little dough on getting a nice couple of smart-lookin studio-made portraits that I could bend to this sort of use. I have also run into multiple instances in the recent past where entities - conference applications, "professional" blogs, et cetry - have requested high-quality photos, and I've had nothing to offer (I attached a manky iSight photo to the ETech app).

Any of y'all have any recommendations of where I could make this happen locally? (This includes you yourself, possibly; I really have no idea.)

(Also held back from making the page by a basic hesitation to promote myself as a freelance programmer when my "real" job is being the president of Volity Games. But hell, if putting a lot of work into it would have a just-my-luck effect of causing Volity to suddenly get a million bucks, forcing me to abandon my freelance job? I wouldn't cry much.)

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.

After the last post I did a number of things. Got tea and dropped stacks of flyers around, including in the Looney room with permission from Mr. Looney himself. Then I started feeling poorly again, so I took a nap, while daerr improved the Game Finder a bit, which was pretty neat. Woke up feeling like a new man, and ate an actually pretty tasty and reasonably priced Greek platter at the food court (still a poor substitute for the real Greek place that dictator555 adored so much, but now that we're here I doubt we'll be able to get far from this one block of Columbus; logistics makes the convention center a very deep gravity well).

Now I was ready to be social and things went pretty well. Greeted all the Looneys and the various assembled Rabbits. Everyone had something to say about Volity, and I was well pleased. Took a practice pitch-run at one of the vendors on the show floor (saving our real attack for tomorrow, as predicted). Played some Giant Zendo with zyxwvut, Ryan, and some random Origins people. Met up with misuba who interviewed us for his podcast. (Will mention here when that's ready; not until after the show.) Frequently walked past the flyer-tables to unbury and straighten my own stack after everyone else poured their own junky flyers all over it. Rough business!

Unfortunately this brings to mind another stupid thing that happened: the flyers were printed with a fairly glaring error that placed all the screenshots on irregular white rectangles, making it look like they were cut-and-pasted onto the PDF with their original white backgrounds left in. Argh! We think this is because the PDF used advanced alpha-channel features that Kinko's couldn't hack and happily ignored. Bummer. Well, the flyers still do their job, so I don't care that much.

You know, what kind of a name is "Command & Colors: Ancients" anyway? "Battle Cry" and "Memoir '44" are both far more evocative than "C & C: American Civil War" and "C & C: World War II Europe", respectively. The cheaper game components are one thing, but I don't think GMT can use the excuse of a smaller budgets than Hasbro or Days of Wonder, here.

"Ancients" isn't even very specific as to which ancients we are dealing with, even though the game is specifically about battle tactics used by Rome and Carthage during the Punic Wars. I would have been a lot happier if someone did the typical dealie of grabbing a sentence fragment from some chronologically appropriate speech and making that the title.

Other than that though, I really enjoyed this game and will buy a copy when I can afford to do so. If you enjoyed either of the other two Command & Colors games you will like it too.