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

So, a lot's been going on. Good things!

I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.

I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.

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The Gameshelf shoot went great, even though I'm currently having a frustrating time importing the footage. I didn't think to clean the tape heads of the borrowed SCAT cameras - which many people use - before using them. As a result, the tapes have some schmutz on them, and every time Final Cut encounters such a blotch, it throws up its hands (as well as a modal dialog box) and saves the import-so-far to a file. There's nothing to do at this point except fast forward the tape a bit and pick it up from there, hoping that nothing juicy got skipped over. It also results in lots of smaller files to comb through versus a few long ones. This makes an already time-consumig task even longer. But I'll get through it.

This will be a fanatstic episode, but I think it's destined to be an anomaly among Gameshelfs... a "special" that I wanted to do specifically because it's so radically different than anything we've done so far, and it seemed like exactly what I personally needed to tackle in order to get into the show again. After this, we have to start getting disciplined about the show's format, enough so that planning, shooting and editing the episodes can maybe happen with some goddamn regularity for once. I have come to the conclusion the the show will never be really popular if it only comes out a couple times a year (if that).

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I hope to open the jmac.org video store this week, where I will sell DVDs of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade. I have high hopes for this. Even a handful of sales would help cover my materials costs of recent Gameshelf-related adventures. It would also serve as a huge encouragement to me to produce more of both, and in theory would also serve to promote the shows to a wider audience. The presence of the DVDs will probably get me to promote the shows more aggressively, at any rate. We'll see.

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I'm rather buried in Appleseed work. I lost the subcontractor I was working with just as I picked up a new small job in May, leaving me with four tasks all on my own plate. This is too many. I've been dealing with these best as I can, and this includes starting the process of bringing in new help. I am hopeful about this.

I love running the business. For all my crazy project ideas it's still the only enterprise of mine that brings in revenues, so I shouldn't shy away from the idea of letting it grow. Honestly, a large part of me is reluctant to invest much energy into growing Appleseed beyond just-me. This is the part that considers it my "day job", with a scoff. It's the same part that fuels my eagerness to work on my nuttier entrepreneurial projects, which I spent most of last year and the start of this year chasing at full throttle, and it's not used to being told to shut up for a bit.

I owe myself another period of reckoning. 2007's four-pillar system worked well and it's time to take stock and see what I really want to be doing now. The answer, I suspect, will be different from last year, or the year before that. I can only hope that the answer will fit better than it has in the past.

Crazy weekend. There were the movies on Friday, then shopping and cleaning on Saturday (I bought nice new shoes, by god), and Sunday held more mini golfing and, finally, a video game party of the sort I've been threatening for a long time.

Golf was all right. It was kind of a cheesy course out in Billerica that dougo had happened across earlier. He, classicaljunkie, dianamp04 and I hit the greens, which were decorated with lumpy Fiberglas dinosaurs and bunnies and chipmunks. The holes were oddly cruel, relying heavily on subtle topographic twists to send balls into forsaken corners or even flip them off of the green entirely. We each maxed out the stroke limit several times, and I didn't feel that the course was clever or pretty enough (that the water was shut off didn't help) to justify its meanness. I like Kimball Farms' mini golf better, and still hope to play on a really nutty windmills-and-all course sometime soon. (Suggestions welcome.)

The video game thing went splendidly. Thirteen people mooshed into my apartment at peak; I went so far as to set up a table in the kitchen but it didn't get used because everyone was in the front rooms Wiiing, DSing, or playing board games. Several people were exposed to the Wii for the first time, and after lots of the mandatory Tennis there was WarioWare and Mario Party and Monkey Ball ahoy.

I am under the impression that half or more of my guests didn't really play video games at all until the recent advent of physically engaging home games, from DDR through Guitar Hero and on into the Wii. It is a Good Thing.

I got some comments early on that both my TV and my living room were kind of small, but I think everyone had fun. I certainly had fun being host! I don't do that very often.

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Oh, what else... the client slid some work at me after I was like "dude?" at them, and I finished the Jmac's Arcade but will sit on it until I hear back from the band owning the music I like. Half of them did in fact write me back, and advised me to wait until the other half got back from vacation after Labor Day. In any other situation I'd just go ahead with what I have but since the thing's like five months overdue I may as well stick it out another week.

In Volity-land, I'm in the process of insinuating the successful test-firing from two weeks ago (already? sheesh) into a branch of the volity.net website. It's tricky and I'm trying to do right by my future selves who will have to maintain what eventually comes out of it, the poor bastards, so I am not predicting that there'll be demos in August. Early September, I bet. As per my annual habit I'm retreating to Maine for the long weekend and plan on making a working vacation out of it.

Broke personal policy to make a post to the Looneys' "geeks" mailing list tonight, finding myself completely unable to keep my mouth shut after a thread with people wishing that there were some way to play Treehouse on the web. Well... uh, there still isn't! But there will be, this year, since the first thing we're gonna wanna do around the pre-beta phase will involve porting over our current games. I normally avoid writing about all the totally awesome stuff duuuude that I'm working on oh boy you'll be so impressed, a firm believer that the more you pump that sort of thing up the further from your grip it floats. But in this case, I really can't see a reason why it won't happen, lawd willing and the crick don't rise.

I'm going to be upset all day today because I missed a dear friend's party last night. It was billed as a house-cooling but amounted to a going-away party too, since this is why the house was being cooled. And I just forgot to go. This sort of thing just gnaws at me all day long.

I can only blame the fact that May is zipping past, by my perception. I'm not sure why this is. But when I last looked at the invitation, I thought, "May 19, bah, that's weeks away," and then suddenly it was the morning of the 20th and I was sad. In fact, I would say that May is passing at double-speed; I was thinking earlier that I did a lot of social things last weekend, before thinking harder and recalling that I was conflating my memories of the last two weekends' worth of events. Damn.

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Yesterday was a day off of sorts anyway. Instead of working on the plan I was zapped by the VALIS and took pages of notes on an IF idea. I feel really good about this one, but of course the less said here the better... I've had ideas aplenty since I wrote my one game in 1999, and but I never wrote a single line of code about any of them, even when I gibbered in a forum like this about how I just got the best game idea evar.

This time, though, I have the whole prologue written, in my head, and the first couple of midgame scenes. I have the setting down, and I know who the main characters are. It gets ruder after that... I have a only a likely sketch of an ending and just the barest whiff of how the story gets there, but this is still the most plotting I've ever managed to do, and I'm very excited about it all.

I'm especially happy that it's based around a setting I wanted to work on in 1999, dusted off and then infused with years of experience since then reading stories and playing games. It really feels like it could work. It would be a pastiche, but very much my own, too. I hope I can actually make it. You would like it.

It's many months away. But if I start writing any code at all — quite likely, since I'm as in love with Inform 7 as I am and itching to do something with it — it will be locked in, as far as I'm concerned.

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A father and son (maybe 8 years old) are attacking each other with boffers without any protective gear on the Mass Ave sidewalk, like a foot away from traffic. This is irresponsible and my inner keimel wants to give them hell. But my outer prog is working very hard to actively ignore them, since I really can't stand urban attention-getters, which is what these guys are afaic. Or anyway the dad is.

Also their technique is horrible. Stephan would lay them both out flat. Hell, I would. But they are beneath my contempt. Hm, the dad gets points for scolding the boy for brandishing the boffer while inside the cafe, though. Maybe they both just started taking lessons or something.