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

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).

Finally back to work. I took a week off, more or less, fleeing to Maine over the Labor Day weekend. I almost didn't go but last-minute consultation with a dear advisor over IM convinced me I could use a vacation.

I spent a lot of time with friends whom, in some cases, I haven't seen much of lately, and this was very nice. (I owe a post, sometime soon, to the topic of my current friend-network; it's developed in surprising directions over the last six months or so.) On my return I geared up to speed without hurry, and today made a plan of attack regarding the payment system. I thought I already had one, two weeks ago, but it turned out that my head wasn't all the way around it and I had to start over.

Now I know I'm really on the right track because as I look over the plans I get that feeling of mortal dread that presses down on me whenever I sense that I have once again found the path, and feel overwhelmed with thoughts of how very long it is and how very little time I have.

The card that has always affected me the most deeply in the Robin Wood Tarot is the Five of Cups. What particularly affects me in her version is the background, with a wide, overcast sky reflected in gray-green hills and gray-blue water. By the castle and standing stones in the far distance it's clearly meant to be some sort of Europe, but as a native New Englander I know exactly the sort of chill, damp day that's being depicted, and my bones almost ache to think of it. But what really puts a shudder into my heart is how the cloaked figure watches as the only color in the world, the bright red wine, spills away from him; in moments it will be gone.

I have chronic low-level fear of plenty of things, but Lost Opportunity is special among them in that it also acts as a motivator. The near-somatic feeling I get when I look at this card is the same as the dreadful weight I feel when I know that I'm on the right path. It is a hand that at once presses me down towards the earth even as it shoves me forward. What a strange mix!

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In other news, I can't stop reading the latest Tim Powers novel, Three Days to Never. (Wow, what a cheesy title, though; I had already forgotten it.) I am halfway through and anything could happen, but unless it pulls a Miéville on me (and I don't think it will) I think it will turn out to do for Tim Powers what The Saddest Music in the World did for Guy Maddin: it's the work first work by an artist I admire that I actually like. Well, that's not entirely fair; I liked The Drawing of the Dark a lot, but it's by a much younger author and it's very fluffy. This book is a feast. I'll have more to say when I'm done with it.

It's funny that it comes on the heels of my reading PKD's Clans of the Alphane Moon, which I really enjoyed for all its utter incomprehensibility. More than any other Dick I've read, it felt the most like magical realism, with characters who could fly or reverse time or were slime molds from Ganymede, all taken for granted by the protagonist (a hapless PKD stand-in, as always). I am seeing some underlying similarities between the two books, even though they're so different in execution. I don't think this is entirely a product of the recency illusion; Powers is a student of Dick. But, again: I'll save a longer analysis for later.

Any suggestions for Gameshelf slogans? I figure we can have as many as we want.

* It is the nineties and there is time for The Gameshelf.
* It's The Gameshelf's fault Black Leaf died.

I dry up after that.

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Finally made a proper Gnostica deck, with stickers [pdf link], using an Aquarian Tarot deck I bought long ago expressly for this purpose. I am proud of my coloring job; I made Alison's chameleon on The World's icon look even cuter.

I wanted to scissor out all the little coin shapes and stick 'em on individually, but gave up after doing just one; the sticker-paper backing is way too hard to peel off when you don't have any corners to pick at. So the Ace of Pentacles looks really good with one little round score-pip, and the rest get big sloppy rectangles. Oh well.

And now the deck is too thick to fit back into the box.

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The idea occurred to me tonight that if I really wanted to procrastinate I'd set my tagging project aside and start making new, past-dated LJ posts based on the dozens-perhaps-hundreds of personal, offline journal entries, dating from ~1992-2000, which I've been carrying around for years, transferred from one Mac's hard drive to the next along with all my college papers and everything else from that time.

Was just reading some from 1998. First impressions of people I know very well now, and detailed entries about people I've since drifted away from. And lots of goo-goo about crushes. I still get crushes, I guess, but these might have been more poignant since this was back when I was actually dating people. Or anyway close enough in time to the last time I had dated someone that it was not unreasonable to think that I'd try to go out with some of these people. Doo dee doo. Now I hate everyone arrrrr and life is simple.