prog | Entries tagged with networking

This week is crazy; something happening every day to bust up my schedule, and with layers of crisis on top of that. Cannot complain because there are exciting opportunities afoot too, but it's frustrating not to be able to commit much time to implementation, especially since I still feel like I just got home from abroad.

I didn't do any work-work over the weekend because I needed to de-stress after the vacation, and I did this by producing another Jmac's Arcade. I haven't had the time to actually upload it anywhere, which sounds silly, but I wanna do it right and redesign arcade.jmac.org first. The site looks kind of terrible in the wake of the most recent jmac.org redesign. It'll get done soon enough, and you will like it.

Here's a couple of things I may attend this week:

I'll go to Post Mortem tonight if I can put a bit of a buffer between me and the enormous 8-ball rolling behind me, rumble rumble. (Feeling kind of pessimistic about this now. Boy I sure do love writing LJ posts. LA LA LA.) An upcoming opportunity on the Appleseed side of things encourages me to stir the local-game-doodz networking pot, but it's not like I can't do that anywhere else.

I am planning on attending the next Information Superhighway shindig at Harvard Square, this coming Saturday night. I had a lot of fun at the last one, and this one apparently has guests and speakers involving both homemade TV and the board game Diplomacy, both of which are relevant to my interests right now.

Highlight of the weekend was a last-minute decision to attend BarCamp Boston 4. This was the second "Unconference" I'd attended, after last year's GameLoop (which was, in turn, inspired by BarCamp Boston 3). I had a great time, learned a lot and met lots of cool people. Inspired to try proposing some talks myself, next time I attend something like this.

All attendees were asked to identify themselves with three info-tags. I chose Perl, Consulting, and DIY Television. I ended up leaning most heavily on the latter, unsurprisingly, as TV production's what currently on the upswing in my personal obsessionery. And lo, serendipity smiled upon me: I found myself talking to people who work with NPR and WGBH (Boston's PBS affiliate), just a day after deciding that public broadcasting represents a good first place to start my little research project into up-marketing The Gameshelf. Sent out a passel of followup email this morning, and have high hopes that it will lead to some interesting conversations.

Props to

dariusk for helping these introductions along; a natural facilitator, he was a force of nature Saturday morning, all but bodily dragging people around the room in order to arrange them into ideal conversational pods.

I handed out lots of Appleseed cards, but usually with a sheepish well-heh-heh-this-is-my-day-job, and the scribbled addition of "jmac.org" onto it. It's time for me to design a personal card again, something I can use when I am not introducing myself primarily as a software expert, or Volity's president. My last design, pictured here, is nine years old, drawn while I was still living in Maine. While I still have a bunch left, it's been a while since I've carried any around. It tries to bespeak creativity and cleverness while being vague and jokey about it, which describes my 2000 self to a tee. I'd like to think I've earned a little more definition since then, and need a card that suggests it.

Just had reason to touch up my LinkedIn profile. Re-aimed the Volity link to the increasingly useful company page Zarf made, changed my profile's headline from "Software Consultant" to "Software Consultant and Ludocentric Entrepreneur", and added this graf to my description:

I am also the president of Volity Games (http://volity.com), a little startup I run with a few friends. Through various experimental web-based projects, as well as a blog and occasional TV show we produce, we study games as a communication medium, and seek innovative new ways for people to come together through play.

Half of me is rolling his eyes, and half of me says "Yeah, sounds about right."

Hello, my social network,

Tell me: do I know anyone who is involved in the TV industry, or who might be able to comfortably introduce me to colleagues who are? (Note: have already dispatched pigeons to the Gameshelf's crew members. Y'all are the second ones to hear this question.)

No need for me to be coy here: it struck me earlier this evening that there's no good reason for my complete ignorance about the world of commercial television. So long as I'm in the dark about it, I also lack reasons why I've never even thought about making The Gameshelf a part of it. I can imagine plenty of good reasons it's a ridiculous and dismissible notion - even ones that have nothing to do with the quality of relevance of my show - and wouldn't be a bit surprised to discover that any or all are true. But I don't know.

What I do know is that when I turn on TV38 and I see The Phantom Gourmet, I point at it and say "I would not hate it if my show worked like this." And as it happens, I feel that my show actually is really relevant. I could totally make a pitch on the basis that we're entering an increasingly ludocentric world, and we need a TV series that intelligently examines the history, culture (hi

radtea!), and criticism of games across all media. Something far broader and deeper than your typical G4 game-of-the-moment review show.

The two episodes we produced in 2007 were really awesome, and were I so motivated, I would feel perfectly comfortable cutting a demo reel around them. The thought of shooting a whole honest-to-god season of The Gameshelf with a budget, even a very small one, makes my toes tingle. It's a fragile fantasy right now, but now that it's bit me, I've got to know more about it.

I really need to GTFO of the house, so I'm going to this thing tonight: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1502742

Boston is full of cool Internet people. Why aren't they meeting each other?

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY is Boston's monthly party gathering hackers, activists, artists, designers, nonprofits, startups, academics and general geekery to hang out and connect with one another.

* No agenda, no "networking," no presentations. Just beverages, food, ideas and cool people.
* Best of all the price is free, just like the current market value for the Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.

* This time: come out and meet Boston's gaming peeps! We're gathering startups, nonprofit game developers, researchers, and (as usual) a few awesome curveball guests for the mix.

* Also, come and play games! We'll have some cool newer fare set up on big screen and projector -- but will also be working the nostalgia circuit (read: Sam and Max, Doom, Chrono Trigger, NetHack) with a bank of slick XOs courtesy One Laptop Per Child.

8 PM, 50 Church street, free food n grinks. Filfre to join me!!

Had a decent time at Post Mortem last night; I think I'm going to make a monthly habit of it. An open but passively advertised event (I honestly don't recall how I originally heard about it), it's much less crowded and stressful than certain other pub-based nerdly events I could name. Arguably its industry focus helps keep the number of attendees down, but it's not like they ask for proof of employment at the door. The fact it's out in "the boonies" of Waltham probably helps more.

I ended up spending not a dime on the whole adventure, which is always nice. The commuter rail ticket-seller ignored me during the trip out, as sometimes happens, and a collision of events at the venue led to two drink tickets and a free buffet of hot pub food for all comers. I would end up bumming a ride home from a Gameshelf crewmember I bumped into there.

(OK, I did drop a couple bucks on tips. I think I was in the minority of people who were actually tipping the bartenders as they surrendered their drink tickets. WTF, people.)

Didn't write a company name on my nametag, which was an error, because evocative company names can act as a great conversation starter at events like this. People will either see a name they recognize and want to talk to you for that reason, or see a strange name and want to talk to you for that reason. Next time I'll just write "Appleseed". Though that's not the name of either of my game-producing personas, it is the name of the one thing I consider "my company" right now, and makes for a fine conversational lead-in.

Introduced myself to the event's organizer and asked if he knew anyone doing anything with Live Arcade. He didn't, which surprised me. I said, "Well, you do now, ha ha ha," big deal. The organizer is a cool dude and a great host, anyway; he makes a point of attending with an easy-to-find bright orange shirt on, and makes a point of drifting around and making sure everyone's happy to be there. He's done that at every Post Mortem I've attended off-and-on over the last couple of years.

Bumped into my Gameshelf friend and a friend of his, who has created games in the mobile market, a topic always interesting to me. Through that conversation, we drew in another indie game developer in a situation much like mine - writing the code for a casual game, contracting out the art & sound work, and looking for a publisher. Key difference is that she's going to shop around a finished and ready-to-publish product whereas I'm just shooting for a get-the-point-across prototype right now. Looking forward to following up with her.

Talked to a guy writing a book having something to do with game culture. I said I had a handful of angles he may be overlooking and would follow up with him as well.

The formal presentation was about selling "virtual goods", those little one-dollar images you can buy as gifts for people on Facebook (or indeed here on LiveJournal), or bonus clothing to spruce up your avatar on an online game, or what have you. Right, that thing that you probably look at and go Arrghh people are stupid that's the one. I decided that it didn't have much to do with the kind of downloadable, add-on content that, as a hopeful XBLA publisher, I'm interested in. But it was interesting to learn about nonetheless.

Blurb to put into your conference ad if you don't want me to come:

There was so much energy in the room - with everyone taking pictures, blogging, podcasting, and twittering - it was reminiscent of SXSW.

Why yes, I have set up a twitter thing, though I update it maybe twice a week currently (I'm "jasonmcintosh"). And I might go anyway - eh, it's $50, and I could stand to punch up my local network a little. But that description just makes me blanch, still.

Here I am. Created the account two months ago, and got around to filling it out this morning. I used the Gmail invitey-tool to blast out 23 completely impersonal friend requests to people who were already on Facebook and whose full names I quickly recognized. Everyone else who knows me should feel free to friend me.

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.

Hey folks. I didn't go to Origins; the Andys didn't wanna and the timing just didn't seem right. I am giving myself another day or three to decide if I wanna go to Gen Con. I don't have a really solid reason to go, since Volity is in such a weird transitional state. Networking is good, but until the web client's in full beta it all feels uncomfortably premature.

In any case, the Great Work continues. Today saw

classicaljunkie off to Houston as I have for the last N Sundays (which means I stand in my doorway and wave bye-bye as she schleps her stuff away) and then turned to work on the web client. Right now the going is rough, and unavoidably a little frustrating, as I'm finally starting to interface my crazy library stuff with the website. Who knew, for example, that you can't make AJAX calls to a host other than that of the website making the call? Er, well, you probably did, sure, but the issue's never come up for me before, and since prototype.js treats this with silent failure[1] I got really hung up on it. A phone call to

daerr resolved this.

I think I need to mix up my life a little more. Monomania is expensive, especially when you're working alone (or have the unavoidable perception that you're alone, even if you're not really). Focus is great, but there's a subtle gradation of diminishing returns, and sometimes the march can turn into a slog hours or even days before you notice. There's a constant assumption that whatever you could do is less important that The Project, and so you keep working on it, even when you really don't wanna. (Or worse, and too frequently: you really really don't wanna, and so you do something truly time-wasting instead.)

Right now I enjoy some variety because of the contracting job that I'm obligated to do, and I have no trouble letting myself context-switch into it three days a week. But that's still a task with the morphology of sitting on my ass planning and typing code, and anyway, that's my day job. It's also the only part of my week-by-week schedule from a couple months ago that I've stuck to; since writing that plan, I have spent exactly zero Sundays on video projects, for example.

OK, listen: Tomorrow, monday, after work, I'm gonna map out a plan for the next two months. On the Volity blog I called a shot that had me hitting a certain milestone with the web client by September 15. I'll scatter some subgoals between now and then, and then see if that doesn't show some places where I could fit in some other activity as well.

[1] No, I didn't try setting up an onFailure handler. But really, this seems like a job for exceptions. And now you'll explain to me how the architecture makes that impossible, sure, sure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For Volity, it was a win. The audience was quite large (given the venue of a pub's second-floor function room) and I'm pretty sure I succeeded in keeping its attention for the whole four-and-some minutes of my talk. There was much enthusiastic cheering, and I got some nice compliments about it, chatting with lots of folks afterward. These included total strangers, friends of friends, and two people from O'Reilly I hadn't seen in several years.

The major take-away was an invitation from the director of the O'Reilly Network to help create an article about Volity. I am not sure if he's thinking more an interview or a technical article, but I emailed him a little while ago saying I'm willing to do anything up to and including writing the whole article myself, noting that I wrote several articles for ORN before I started Volity in 2003 (and when it had a different director). Dunno what their editorial policy is on technology inventors writing about their own stuff. We'll see.

I credit the Ignite organizers for posting video from previous events on blip.tv. I watched several before I started putting together our bit on Tuesday. I applied my observation that, with only five minutes to work with, big grabby visuals worked much better on slides than lots of text bullets. The result was a fine success and I really gotta post a version online for y'all to see. Bug me about it if I don't!

Unfortunately, the venue for this event wasn't so hot. The room was a long and somewhat skinny rectangle with the stage at one end and the bar at the other. It quickly fell into a use-pattern where people who wanted to watch the presentations sat or stood in the stage half, while people who didn't really care hung out in the bar half, talking in the shouty voice one uses in a crowded pub.

Sadly, sound travels. One of the organizers repeatedly took the mic between presentations to ask for quiet from the back, which worked for about 2.5 minutes each time. And it got worse as the evening wore on; a colleague and I agreed that we were fortunate to have our talks scheduled among the earlier block.

Also the assembled geeks apparently failed to drink enough, since the same organizer asked people to enjoy another drink if they were thinking of it, since if they didnt O'Reilly would be stuck with a your-event's-attendees-didn't-cover-our-costs bill. I had three pints all told, which was about two and a half too many given my medication. But, you know: business. It's a write-off.

Oh, also the keynote was actually kind of interesting content-wise but the guy stumbled weirdly a couple of times. He was met with grumbling at a throw-away comment that the number of women in the audience was in the single digits - a strange thing to say since this was visibly untrue to anyone there. Then he responded to this grumbling by making a sarcastic jab at "feminists". WTF? It got things started on odd footing. Fortunately, most of my fellow lightning-talkers were smoother. (And if some weren't, they were yanked off after five minutes anyway...)

I was bored last night so I took up an invitation to LinkedIn that

jtroutman sent me in January, and set up a profile there. I ignored the invitation initially, figuring that LinkedIn was just another Orkut-like thing that some segment of my nerdy adult friends were having a microfad over - see how many ~~pokemon~~ ~~experience points~~ connections you can collect! - but since the start of the year I've gotten the impression that the site has actually earned a fairly decent rep as a useful resource for professionals, especially those who do need to network at least occasionally.

I commenced to bombard invitations at people until I was too sleepy to keep at it. If you didn't get one and wish to be part of my scintillating business network just say so. (Or invite me via the thingy.)

My TV is sane again. Apparently the cable box just went bonkers; swapping it out fixed everything. My channel 2 thought that it was the Discovery channel this morning. So even the fake lineup I was getting shuffled itself around more or less daily. What the.

The thing last night was OK. I got to see Guitar Hero II (which looks very nice; y'all who are waiting for this game will be quite happy with it) and met up with Lee from the show and a couple of his friends. Didn't do any networking of note, for I did not want to. I woulda stayed longer if the Harmonix people there were going to say something, but nobody said nuttin an hour into it so I left once I was done with my beer.

I am getting hit harder with spam of various kinds lately. I have a record amount in Gmail (though not quite enough for another Grim Milestone yet), and my cell phone is getting daily called by a prerecorded Spanish-language message. I've also picked up two junk livejournal friends-ofs in the last few weeks. Well, one seems to be completely automated, and the other appears to be an actual person who enjoys mass-friending the LJ database occasionally.

I am completely obsessed with Witching Hour, the latest album by Ladytron. I like the whole thing an awful lot. I've absorbed it enough that I can listen to it loud while coding, and indeed am wearing my headphones now so I can listen to it this way without disgruntling the Zarf.

I'm not feeling terribly social right now but I may go to a thing that Harmonix is hosting tonight anyway since it's just a short Red Line ride away. One of the Gameshelf's crew will be there and maybe he can introduce me to new people. This is good, even though I'm too deep in hack-mode to feel particularly needful of more networking at this moment.

Have discovered the world of Creative Commons-licensed music, which I'd like to start exploiting for my podcasts. Yahoo's CC search is a very nice resource.

This was written Saturday night but I had trouble posting it from the hotel's crap Internet connection. Home now; more later.

Finished the expo floor today, more or less. There were a couple of less promising booths we skipped once time started to get tight; we may drop by those as part of a cleanup-run on Sunday, but I'm just as likely to spend that day revisiting some vendors whose stuff I'd actually liked and making purchases, within my budget. OK, quite outside of my budget, since my budget is $0. Maybe I'll just play more games instead.

Anyway, another great day of shmoozing, much like yesterday was. I have dozens of followup conversations to have as soon as we get home. I already have have Monday planned: me, a laptop, and the Diesel Cafe's wifi. And the stack of other peoples' business cards that

radiotelescope has collected, with notes by me or him on the back of each one describing the vendor, their game, their reaction to Volity, and things we should mention when we contact them.

Socializing: all the rabbits were awesome and sometimes knew me better than I knew them but that's OK, and appropriately symptomatic of my efforts to make noise with Volity.

I said hello to

uilos and

jazzfish and

ubiquity and other folks I basically only see at Origins. But all this being said, I haven't really hung out in the Big Experiment much this year. Both Friday and Satuurday I kind of felt done with people after spending nearly a full work-day on my feet pitching at game vendors in a noisy expo hall, and I predict that Sunday will be a rush of followups and whatever last licks of publicity I can get in.

Another factor is that the Looney space somehow wasn't as appealing as it has been in previous years. I remember in 2002 and 2004 it made clever use of brought-in tables, screens and other separators to section off the room into different areas while still keeping it all open. This time, it was much closer to being just another big room with tables, like all the other event rooms. This is too bad. I should mention this to someone.

Last night

misuba showed me were the beer was, and I did enjoy this very much, though it made me miss the semi-surprise wedding of two Looney fans.

daerr, who happened to be standing around bemused while it occurred, got a gift of four special marriage-themed Fluxx cards, and there was so much cake that it lasted into today and I finally had a slice after the Nth person reminded me that HEY THERE'S CAKE.

And you know, being casually invited into the Rabbit Area to partake of day-old wedding cake made me a little mushed out inside. I always write something after every Origins about how stupidly included I feel, and I feel like that again this year even though I didn't do any Looney demoing (beyond playing in a couple Giant Pyramid games and chatting about them in a rabbity way with onlookers).

And the rabbits tended to call me "jmac" which I like a lot too. For various reasons I've been answering increasingly to "Jason" lately; that is, there is an increase in the number and frequency of people around me who call me that. And that is a perfectly fine thing to call me... but I found myself unexpectedly delighted at having a roomful of nice people spontaneously use my nickname. It's nice to know that I still like it, too.

Today we cruised five of the expo floor's eleven aisled. It went really well; a couple of people were borderline dismissive, but about twice as many were really excited to hear about us, and everyone else was interested enough to invite followup conversation after the show. If I weren't completely exhausted I'd be pretty psyched.

My favorite vendor, I think, was a guy from Sandwich, Illinois (which he described as a small farming community) who had his own invention, a multiplayer crossword game. He had made a tactical error in coming all by himself, as he had nobody to relieve him from booth duties, and after two days was a little punch drunk, enough to get confused at his own game components. But he lit up when he heard about Volity and immediately grasped how it would really benefit his mechanic, which actually does look rather clever. So he is one of many folks we are going to follow up with.

Off to get dinner and then probably just hang out in the Looney room until EOD.

In the morning

jtroutman met with

daerr and I, and gave me even more things to do before Wednesday. Press releases, flyers. We'll see.

Games at

dougo's. Was taught Richard Borg's new Command & Colors: Ancients and played it twice. Loved it, though too bad about the giant step down in production quality from Memoir '44. I really don't mind using wood blocks instead of plastic miniatures, but the Battle Cry-style dice are unfortunate and the paper-thin board, terrain tiles and even playing cards are a crying shame.

People with industry ties there, and got some good networking and some lame networking in, though I can smooth over the latter in email. Had fun watching

dictator555 get beaten up by a baby while teaching people to play Settlers of the Stone Age but then it was time to join

doctor_atomic and company for the Venture Brothers season two premiere. That was a good time.

Now, though, I am grouchy because a jokey thing went sour, putting me into a bad mood that followed me all the way home. I think really I just have a high base level of grouchiness going on, between having no money or time and... oh, yeah, I guess that's all of it.

J lent me Perdido Street Station. I haven't read any fiction in weeks. I think I'll go to bed with it now. Way too much to do tomorrow, including a new Gamut release before the Werewolf test if I can swing it.

I wanna do the license thing tomorrow, but, grunt, it's occurred to me that they might make me surrender my license to get the temp Mass one, leaving me with no valid-looking photo ID at all. So I will have to call and ask them about it first. I hate calling about stuff like this. Bleaaah.

On Saturday

classicaljunkie had a birthday party and lo the games were busted out. Wait, didn't this happen last weekend too? Boy am I confused. Actually the games were not busted out until several hours after start of festivities because it was a BBQ and there was as much eating and hanging around outside as is appropriate to such a venue. I didn't even know that the junkie and the

dictator555 (who orchestrated this multiple-birthday calamity thing) had an outside, so that was pretty swell. I have never had an outside! I am jealous.

After the business of tamping a truly uncharacteristic amount of seared flesh down my howling maw was concluded, I turned to games. The ones I played included Don, a simple bidding game I liked even though I lost hard at it (as I do with all bidding games), Hoopla, a party game by the Cranium people that's fun even though it was flawed in a couple of ways, and Bang!, a silly, violent, and quite enjoyable card game that I brought.

Also another game i can't quite recall the name of, "Logico" or "Logistica" or something, where you move colored wooden blocks around a world map with cute little wooden vehicles. It looked like a promising brain-burner but I ended up not really liking it much. However, it burned my brain anyway, which is why I played only silly games for the rest of the evening.

I have not written about Tuesday yet even though it was interesting. After one of our angel contacts suggested it to us, Zarf and I attended a Boston Post-Mortem gathering at the Skellig in Waltham.

It was not what I expected. From applying personal experience to the description on the website, I was envisioning a few tables at the pub pushed together and filled with geeks continually arriving in small groups and confusedly placing asynchronous food orders. In fact, when we arrived, I spotted a crowded corner booth with some likely types at it (one guy with an EFF T-shirt, anyway) and started to approach them when an employee used his nerddar on us or something and said "You guys here for the post-mortem?" while gesturing down a different corridor.

The event was in a large function room in the back, with its own bar and two bartenders working at breakneck pace, and from whom I procured cheeseburger and beer. It turned out to be basically a networking-with-a-scheduled-presentation event just like all the MIT Forum events I've been attending, except it was just games people. Wow! So this is where they have all been hiding. I actually felt a little foolish to have taken so long to find it. (I did come across their website months ago but it didn't make it clear that the meeting are, overtly, all about networking.)

I knew we were in the right crowd when someone recognized Zarf on sight, within seconds of our entrance. It was a CMU connection rather than a games one, but close enough. I had to laugh. I myself ran into a familiar face from the old Mostly Looney Game Night crowd too, so both of us ended up with immediate initial contacts into the crowd. From there we both talked to a bunch of other people. I didn't meet anyone who I wanted to follow up with as soon as I got home, but passed out a lot of cards anyway, and learned a lot of random stuff. It was a good time, enjoying a beer while a complete stranger is confiding in me how Nintendo really works. Looking forward to the next one.

O so cranky right now.

Due to my whack shcedule, sleep wasn't an option if I wanted to go to the 7:30 Cambridge Chamber of Commerce networking breakfast at the Radisson. (Tried to sleep a little anyways. It wasn't happening.) So stayed up all night to go to an event which I learned, about a quarter of the way through, was embarrassingly off-topic; all the attendees represented mature businesses who wished to sell services to other businesses; the goal of the networking was specifically seeking customers. And here I was, from a pre-production startup seeking funding so that we can provide anti-work services!

I figured this out sometime after a guy at the first table looked at me and disgustedly said "So... you're looking for money. Not customers." (The event was set up like speed dating, with people pitching at a tableful of local businessfolk, then everyone changed tables and did it again. It's actually a good idea, but the topic was just totally wrong for me.) I can't blame myself for this; the CCC website didn't name any topic beyond "business networking". I guess that chambers of commerce are just assumed to focus on business-to-business assistance? I did not know this. Oh well.

At the second table I explained that I was there due to a misunderstanding, and gave my pitch anyway. Not wondering what the hell I was doing there, this table was far more receptive than the first, and I received many smiles wishes for good luck, many from people who had done the scary startup thing themselves years earlier. An ad-space seller from the Herald was especially excited about the Volity idea, because I was describing something so very different from Grand Theft Auto, which is all he knows about modern digital games.

Other bright sides, vaguely: I was expecting to pay the full $70 non-member, walk-in attendance fee, but I guess they either thought I was a member or were feeling generous, and asked for only $35. Also, I am saving a couple hundred bucks on a CCC membership I won't be buying.

So collected some slight burn-experience, and a little good karma, but that's about it. Then I came home, played some Mario DS (this game is so good) and slept from 10:30 to 4:30, making me officially the most vampiric I have ever been. And now I have to find my script so I can go to rehearsal for this radio play thing, which I half-regret volunteering for now... I really didn't think it through as to all the time it'd take in rehearsal. Aaargh. Oh well.

I won't be sleeping tonight, though I'll likely be sleepy and half-dead anyway. Probably I'll just keep myself awake through the Gameshelf shoot in a possibly vain attempt to have a "normal" schedule again. Wish me luck.

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

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

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