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

I feel like Captain Turdbucket for being slacky in responding to some Boston Warren business last night, as this contributed to the consequence that we're all unscheduled and uncomped for Vericon, now. sigh.

---

leahleaf is now with us. That's nutty.

I was thinking the other day how my late 1999 visit (so long ago, now!) to Leah and Gang in MD was the first time I ever really experienced the joy of being part of a happy and creatively sparkling social group (Circle L!), even for just a weekend. Perhaps it was the beginning of the end of any feelings of contentedness that I had as a Maine resident. I moved to Somerville just about a year after that.

Now I get to play the hmm, have I met these people? game with other people's friends lists again. Ah, LiveJournal. God love you.

---

Another positive book meeting today. I hit my editorial stride this morning, when I got up wicked early, like 8:30 am (!!!), which always fills me with energy. I love looking up from my work to glance at my clock and seeing a before-noon time. The trick will be pulling this off repeatedly, of course.

One week left before either the to-production date, or the prog-begs-for-another-weekend-cuz-he's-this-close-to-being-done date. All is well.

Attended a poker night at Joe's house. I figured I'd show up just to be social, and maybe mess things up by bringing my copy of Cheapass Games' 'Unexploded Cow', a fine gambling game in its own right. But, after some needling, I bought a dollar's worth of chips, and lost it in three or four hands, along with fifty cents that Joe lent me. My first gambling debt! You all can now say that you were there when prog's downward spiral began. Cut to montage of prog stumbling down a dark street with neon signs, martini glasses, roulette wheels, etc. passing over his shoulder. And we never did play the Cow game.

I was turned off to gambling-for-keeps, even with weenie stakes, early in my career as a gamer, when, in 1994, a friend politely declined to give me back the White Knight card I lost to him as a Magic: The Gathering ante. How uncool, I thought to myself, and never played that way again. (I'd stop playing Magic altogether after a year, anyway, but for different reasons.)

The reason I showed up at all (sacrificing precious BookTime) involved the fact that Joe dangled before my widdle nose the fact that local Perl hackers of high reknown would attend. Since I was thinking earlier today about how conversation I've had with other hackers, even (maybe especially) informal and off-topic ones, have helped me a lot in my book-revision mission so far, I figured The Book would thank me for it. And also I was sick of working on the thing today.

So, I met a bunch of people whose names I won't drop because I hate to sound like I'm name-dropping even though probably nobody who reads this would recognize any of them. (This is a good reason to blog on my home site. So I can not-namedrop where namedropping would matter. Shooah.) But, it was all verra nice. I hit it off with everyone, as is my wont with most people of the non-(insane/boring) persuasion, did in fact talk about the book, and, of course, handed out summore of my silly non-business cards.

Speaking of: I asked Andy today what it takes to make a corporation. From his description, it sounds a lot like registering a domain: confirm that no corporation with this name already exists, pay some lawyer $50, badda-bing, there's your Inc. Now you can do whatever you want with this. Like building a business around it. Or you can just hold onto it and do nothing except have fun making vague plans. Since I'm already doing exactly this with 3 or 4 domain names, why not add a corporation name to the mix? Seriously.

Not an excuse, but an explanation to myself: I can't avoid writing mostly about friends and family this week, because that happens to be where I have sunk all my time since passing in that first draft. I claim to have totally ignored the holidays, and to this I now say: As if. It's all good.

So today I dropped in on Noah and Melissa in Boston. They and their friends are my Social Circle N, the one I thought would be my root when I moved here, since Noah, a former coworker, was my sole preregistered friend (he paid the $52 registration fee and everything), but which in fact turned out to be last I'd hook up with in 2001. (The first, not counting O'Reilly, were Circles D, J(s), and J(o), in that order. Deciphering the naming scheme is left as an exercise for the reader.) I do love these kids! Though they're very different sorts of people, they fit the same archetype my revered old Maine friends Chris and Lies filled, way back when: a bonded pair that just radiates comfort, and which I just like to be around for hours and hours, like a cat on an air vent. (Pardon the strange idiom. I looked around just now and saw FS sitting on an air vent. It seemed right.) So I didn't mind spending even more time playing games, as I have been all weekend. M had bought N a big ol' basket of new games, and I helped them break in a couple: Cheapass's U.S. Patent No. 1 (fun! though it might have the same pile-on endgame problem as Great Brain Robbery... I want to play it some more to see if the in-game fixes work) and Grave Robbers From Outer Space, a game of the growing genre of card games whose cards are all very funny to go through and read, and which might or might not actually work as a game. It seemed OK Or Better.

[Tangent: I realize that I have not mentioned Chris and Lies in this blog before, even though I remember writing about them in livejournal, deep in someone else's comments section. I am too lazy to go hunting for that. The main feature of my own bloggy software-in-development is user-definable glossaries, so I'd be able to make, for example, the first onscreen appearance of "Chris and Lies" a link to a separate glossary page that tells you all about them, with links back to blog entries where they are mentioned. Note to self: This is a cool project! Finish it sometime, OK?]

We also talked about the geek house idea, something stalled since that yucky move of mine last month. I would leave them feeling elated, since we made steps towards something that could almost be called planning, by going over what we'd all agree would be Neat Features for such a house. Not secret clubhouse fanatasies of shark pools and autogyros (though we'll probably give these a passing nod later) but practical issues like having a Hack Room and a decent-sized drawing (read: gaming) room. The side-effect was that I now won't feel bad about planning to move yet again, in with other people: it's not cuz I like group A better than group B, but because my current residence lacks features I'd like. And: it does, actually, because there's nothing approaching a living room here. I mean, I will attempt a generic game night here in January at least once, but the number of people we'll invite will be severely limited, since we have just one little room to use, the dining room, sandwiched between the kitchen and a bedroom. I dunno how or if it will actually work.

There's also something to be said for living with a tight group of handpicked friends after months of planning. Or so the theory goes, anyway. This leads into the issue of whom to invite, which might get thorny. Imagining the unlikely (I hope) scenario of everyone I know learning that I'm undertaking a geek house project, I immediately see two or more particular people -- needy, energy-vampire "friends", you know the type -- who'd glom onto me about it, and I would have to tell them: No, sorry, you are not cool enough, which I do not wish to do. All the cool people I know seem content where they are. To my surprise, M and N said they wouldn't consider anyone else in Circle N. Similar reasons to mine, I guess. Well, whatever... we're just starting to really think about this, and I'm sure we'll hit on one or two candidates. There's time, and I have plenty of unmined and potentially rich friend-making territory at my fingertips. (I really have to try getting to know any of the people in Circle D better than as fellow gamers. Sniff, sniff, is that a Resolution I smell?)

On Tuesday we're gonna meet for lunch and maybe I'll show them what Davis Square looks like. That area remains a goal -- Paris of the 90s and all that -- but truth be told I wouldn't mind living elsewhere in Cambridgeport, which they'll see when the game thingy occurs. It all works out.