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

Today's Gameshelf column: Similar Journeys in Very Different Games, on how a puzzle hunt I played over the weekend is like Shadow of the Colossus. I like it.

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I have quietly modified my internal definition of The Gameshelf to be less the home base for my video series of the same name, and more the home of my weekly-ish column on games. I have lately been regarding this regular column experiment as the best personal decision I've made since incorporating Appleseed.

I will continue to work on video projects, as inspiration strikes. In fact, I don't plan on making this change of tack "official" until after I publish the video I've currently got laid out on the editing table, and which I hope to have done before June. (It'd be sooner, but I have to prepare a presentation on Planbeast first, whee.) But I have come to accept that, while I love working with video, writing is the only creative endeavor that I can actually accomplish with any regularity at all.

When I titled my first LJ post about my new columns "Yay I shipped something", I wasn't just being flippant. I was actually thrilled to have started and then completed a creative project within a reasonable amount of time. Since then, I've written several more columns, some of which I actually like, and several of which have netted some nice and unexpected feedback from various sources. It's encouraged me to start pitching column ideas at magazines and other websites, and I feel optimistic about where that in turn might lead.

Clearly, I'm pretty good at this, and I like doing it. Just as clearly, would be foolish to not react appropriately.

After accidentally leaving my nice notebook on the train last weekend, I took the opportunity to pick up a Moleskine, the brand of notebook that I've heard a lot about over the last year or so. (Probably I've been hearing about them for longer, but since I didn't get into the habit of using a paper notebook again until early 2009, I didn't hear any of it.)

I chose a softcover pocket-sized model that fits nicely into my sportcoat's breast pocket, or my front pants pocket in a pinch. (My lost notebook was too large for this.) After a week of use I am quickly joining the ranks of Moleskine fan-dorkery. Things I've learned:

• I am in fact able to take notes just fine on unruled paper. Moleskine sells ruled notebooks, and I would have bought one if I hadn't known that the ones labeled "plain notebook" meant really plain. However, even though my notes are mostly writing, I got used to the lack of letter-scaffolding very quickly. And my doodles, spot-art, and various expository circles and arrows are happier for it.

• Moleskines may look at first like they can't lay flat like spiral-bound notebooks. However, they want to be abused: to make it stay open, just pound the sucker flat with the heel of your hand, or fold it over, or wedge the top edge under your keyboard. The integrated elastic band, with which you seal the notebook shut after use, helps heal any temporary deformities you wreak on the Moleskine's shape. It feels good to roughly manhandle this thing that you're also pouring your thoughts into, and I'm not sure why. Something like pounding clay?

• The "Reward for return: $______" pre-printed line on the title page is smart. Not because it's convenient, but because it informs the new Moleskine user that, yes in fact, their thoughts are precious and they should take the time to put a price tag on an insurance-against-loss policy. (I wrote down 100.)

• I was about to write that I haven't figured out any good use for the accordion-pocket attached to the inner back cover, except that I found myself interrupted by the arrival of my new bizcards. And, wouldn't you know it, a few of them fit right into that pocket real good, making the notebook an emergency backup bizcard reservoir.

I'm two weeks in to a writing experiment, posting a long opinion piece about games every Monday to the Gameshelf. I'm not limiting myself to Mondays only, but the rule is that there has to be something there on Monday no matter what. The columns I've written so far are Farewell to Megaton and Shelf Space, intended to be my first couple of steps in a series of columns about the state of online gaming (and my own relationship with it). I don't necessarily intend to keep writing about online games week after week, and might switch to some other topic for a change of pace before I've said all I intend to say about that.

So far I'm not super happy with my output. It's not like the TF2 column, which really wanted to be written and punched its way out of me. I know that if my deadline wasn't there, I'd have said this isn't going anywhere in both cases, and abandoned them. Instead, I spent hours and hours on each, working and refining until I finally ended up with a structure that had approximately one focus and seemed to stand up by itself.

More than anything, the experience so far reminds of one of the most painful things of working as an editor for The Maine Campus, the student paper that defined my life in the middle 1990s. One of the rules for being an editor was writing an opinion piece on a regular schedule, weekly or biweekly. As a group, we'd occasionally write a real goodie, but usually we wrote vapid stinkers just to take up the column-inches. Sometimes we openly apologized within the column itself for having nothing to say that week. But, you know: deadlines. Hope you're enjoying your lunch, anyway!

I guess I'll see how I feel after a month of this.

I've been meaning to note for a while that I am no longer in hell, and am once again happy with my work situation. I say this fully realizing that I also said this last summer before I fell flat on my back. But I know exactly what I did wrong then, and it's a mistake I won't make again.

In short, I ran a business with no marketing and a single customer, who was under no obligation not to simply wander off when they felt done with me. Leaving me with no income and no plan to attract new customers. It turns out that customers aren't employers.

After six harrowing, empty-cupboard weeks of full-time, unpaid work I had some marketing in place and a small corral of active customers. That interim was really rough, but knowing that I pulled myself out of it through my own strength (with assists from my excellent friends) is awesome. My confidence in my ability to do business as well as sling code shot up tremendously, even before I started actually collecting money again, just from witnessing my own success at finding and connecting with new customers.

Gord willing, I now have a heightened awareness of pitfalls that I haven't fallen into yet. Not too long ago I was talking with some friends on the train. One, who had just landed a lucrative full-time job, said he was tempted by my stories of the independent life, but was also made quite wary by my little time of troubles. I said that I had learned my lesson from all of that, and I don't foresee any other terrible things happening to me. "Unless someone sues me," I mused. Suddenly, I felt very cold. "Yes, that would count," said my friend.

So that is why I am moving forward with this reorganization plan, primarily as armor against any future legal blows. (No, I'm not expecting anyone to sue me. And really, that's the point.)

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I am seriously considering writing a book, or something bookish, about my experiences. There's a lot of spilled ink about becoming a consultant, and far more about embracing the freelance life in general. But I haven't encountered any works targeted specifically towards software professionals, coming to them with the message that there is another way and offering advice on how to break free and get started.

I discovered the lifestyle by accident, by way of launching an unrelated startup, and later looking for supplemental income without having to go back to a job. After a year of trial and error I finally have an idea how it works. And from this vantage point, I continue to feel surprise that I know tons of software people, but only one or two work for themselves. It's certainly not the life for everyone, but for me it is without a doubt the best job I've ever had. I probably could have started years before I actually did, had I only known it was possible. The message needs to get out more.

Thursday was a sick day. Clobbered and miserable. At the end of the day I greeted the returned classicaljunkie and she gave me Tylenol cold & flu pills, which (after an hour of sleep) snapped me back into sensibility like a light switch. I swear by this product now.

Friday did some contract work for the first time in a while. (This coming week I'm gonna be doing a lot of it, actually.) After that, delivered an HTML snapshot of the web client's table UI (not super-easy to do since it's a slippery DHTML app) toradiotelescope. He insisted that this demo needs to make a much better first impression than I was preparing, and then volunteered to help make it happen himself. I have no problem with this sort of criticism!

Saturday started to set up the machine that will host jmac.org. After moving over! It's mostly Gameshelf episodes, and I discover that a few seem to exist in duplicate. Well, i can do something about that, at least. Then attended an art salon featureing cthulhia's paintings, marymary's poetry and C's recorder-playin. It was delightful.

Sunday, more machine setup, and reaching out to prodigal jmac.org users via email to tell em what's up and ask if they'd like to stay. Discovery, via daerr, of Google's domain-level management apps. I am likely to point jmac.org's MX records at it to let Google handle all my domain's incoming mail. Yeah, I know.

Afternoon meeting with taskboy3000 about the Gameshelf shoot we're having on Tuesday, including a script read-through. Also, we played MULE again. Trader Joe's dinner with classicaljunkie, and then we hung out at dictator555 and Nate's place for a while, drinking their tea while I wrote some new game news segments. It will be a good show.

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...)

Random hypothesis:

In general, and over the whole history of the medium, characters in television shows lie far more often than real-life people would in similar situations. This is because lying is an inexpensive way for writers to introduce plot twists and intercharacter stresses.

This from a conversation with dougo about "Lost", which I've been watching on DVD. Midway through the second season I'm getting pretty tired of how the all the characters turn to lying so easily, even to characters that I'm fairly sure are supposed to be people they trust. It's moved past caution into what I'd call childishness. These are supposed to be complex adults, not little kids who think that the best way to handle an encounter with something weird is to never tell anyone ever (or until you blurt it out when sufficiently harassed or otherwise upset).

I think this is related to why characters in modern-setting fiction never call the cops. But at least Lost doesn't have that problem...

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Also the actor(s, probably) playing Claire's baby are several months too old, at least in some shots. Even I can tell the difference.

I like to hear people talk about their jobs, if they enjoy them. Here is a survey of people on my friends list whom I know mainly through an admiration for their work, and who have blogs where they often talk about what they do. (Are there others I ought to be reading?)

jwz runs a nightclub in San Fransisco, and frequently posts of his adventures, often including a copious amount of his photography. Occasionally posts something that draws from his cred as the maintainer of xscreensaver or the brash alpha-hacker responsible for much of Netscape Navigator, back in the day. Grumbles about macs sometimes (he is maybe the most famous Mac user known to the Slashdot crowd, besides Jobs and Woz I guess). Most of his posts, though, are either fascinating links or crazy photos and movies. His tastes in non sequitur are quite similar to mine, I suppose.

grrm is still writing the Song of Ice and Fire series, that thing I repeatedly declare that I hate forever and then continue plowing through. Posts infrequently, but often enough to assure us that he's still there. Likes SF cons and football.

tmcm is a cartoonist most famous for Too Much Coffee Man and whose cartoons haven't really been all that good in a long time. But I love his posts and photographs about his life otherwise, including his recent adventures in producing an opera based on his famous character. He posts all of his finished cartoons, as well as many preliminary sketches and doodles. Sometimes he gets the blog involved: in a recent post he grumbled about not being satisfied with a particular punchline, and ended up replacing it with one that a fan suggested in comments.

urbaniak is an actor living in New York City. He's most recognized for his roles in the film Henry Fool, which I have not seen, and Venture Brothers, which I adore (he provides the voice for Dr. Venture). About half of his posts are bizarre, slow-paced flamewars with (so far) two particular LJ users who might not even be real people. These are not very interesting. Much of the rest is stories of being an actor in New York, and are great. His fans enjoy making animated gifs of his babies beating each other up.

officialgaiman is Neil Gaiman. Much of the content is public responses to fan mail, which gives it a very different feel than the other journals listed here. Most of the comments are the ladies swooning every time he posts a picture of himself, which is often.

(Was going to add zarf for the yuks "gee he's been quiet lately" but he doesn't actually use his website as anything remotely like a blog, so.)

A good business meeting last night. But with half a month to go, and less than half of our goal met, it's time to bust out my inner jerk. Email poke-n-prod campaign to follow immediately.

I spent most of yesterday bringing our business plan up to date (written in August, it still thought that going wireless was our main goal) and daerr is currently finishing the spreadsheet that details how we're carving up our initial units pool. This will get shuttled off to Ted, our new lawyer, who will do magical and sadly expensive things.

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Also have been using the DS wireless for the first time, and a lot, now that the little flip-top systems are finally starting to appear in the hands of local friends. Got to play both kinds of multiplayer Meteos: "DS Download Play" with a friend who didn't have his own copy of the cartridge, and straight-up Vs. Play with one who did. Download play was quite limited and rather lame, but Vs. was a blast and we played it a lot; I reportedly got this friend to actually like the game, making him feel better about buying it. (Which is good, since I'm the one who recommended it to him.)

And I picked up Mario Kart DS today, letting me try out Nintendo's brand-new Internet service. Have had a bunch of races against unseen folks, and it seems to work great, though it's not like any online game I've played yet.

I know little about how the thing works (yet -- I have a professional interest in reading up on this, actually), and question the apparent fact that it doesn't feature any sort of skill-based matchmaking that I can see. Of course, if it does, I wouldn't know yet, since I'm new to the system and it wouldn't have had a chance to gauge my ability yet. In the last race I played, one person was clearly somewhat better than me -- not so much that I have reason to complain -- while the other two racers just stunk. I have no idea what metric it used, if any, to toss us all together.

I was a little surprised and quite intrigued to see that there's no lobby; to begin racing, your only option is to select which pool of players you'd like your opponents to come from ("Regional" (the default), "Worldwide", "Friends", or "Rivals"), and let the network do the rest. It sticks you in a bin, then (after several seconds) drops in three playmates, and off you go. No obvious way to tell who people are (besides whatever handle they give themselves) or say hello; there is only racing. Again, I've only messed with it a little and haven't read the docs, so I could be missing something.

My friend code is: 326476971938. So apparently if you have a copy of this game yourself, you can punch this in and then you will become my "friend". Maybe I'm not supposed to blog this? I don't know. I assume you can also do this to name someone your "rival". I'm not sure what the semantic difference bewteen "friend" and "rival" is meant to be, in this context. Surely all my friends are my rivals, when I'm playing games with them? Shrug.

A nice touch I really like: the game has a simple paint program with which you can create a unique little icon for yourself. This gets "painted" on your kart, and when you're online everyone who's made an emblem has it permanently displayed next to their name. I made a little Volity icon, of course.

Ohh, I see now. I just read in the docs that your "rivals" are actually people who the system thinks are about as good as you are. But is there something like an ELO score that I see peek at, or is the rating system totally opaque? Meh?

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I have gotten really good at Meteos, by the way. I have unlocked 20 planets (along with the starting set of four) and have eight to go. Woo woo. I have been twiddling with this game for nearly two months, whenever I need to not-think and just twitch-react for a couple of minutes, and I still love it. I have surely gotten a better fun-per-dollar ratio from this cartridge than I have most any other game I've spent money on in recent memory. (Board games, too... a $30 DS cartridge being a sight cheaper than some of the board games I buy.)

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If anyone is curious why I switch between writing numbers as words and as numerals, it's because of my journalism degree. The AP Style Guide compels its followers to write numbers between zero and nine as words and everything else as digits. Or is it one and nine? Well, anyway.

I tend to write out "percent" (rather than use "%") for the same reason.

Anyone had any experience with LyX? About to write a long and involved technical document for the first time in a while (in a year and a half, really). The thought of once again hand-grinding DocBook tags with Emacs fills me with ennui.

I suppose I could use this here copy of Word, too. But it offends my nostrils for divers reasons, and not (just) the hairy-hooting "free as in speech" ones. Fact is, I very much prefer the DocBooky way of working with a document structurally, rather than layout-wise. There are ways to kinda-sorta do this in Word, and as far as I know they are all shallow and weak hacks.

I'm passing the time now waiting for tetex to install, praying it compiles. Dum de dum.

Update: Pff. Never mind. It compiled, and the application runs, but trying to convert the intro page into HTML results in a baroque error, and trying to covert it into a PDF results in a pageful of garbage. Flussssh

I hate everything.

Update 2: Oh, I didn't have the latex2html program installed. Trying to fink it now. Also I didn't notice that there's a bunch of PDF converters to choose from, and some seem to actually work OK.

I'll start kicking through the tutorial while that program tries to install itself... if I can't easily turn what I write into HTML, it's a deal-breaker.

Update 3: The HTML conversion magically works, post-finking. OK, less hateful now.

Update 4: The HTML conversion command seems to have vanished from my menus in between launches of the application. Um.