I think we missed a chance at a grand adventure while at Fitten. I bet "STEPHEN POPICK BLOWS GOATS" was some sort of Da Vinci Code like riddle. I feel so narrow minded.

So who wants to play some games this Thursday?? I'm raising my hand.

STEPHEN POPICK.

Finally, I remember.

Fortunately I can go back to forgetting about him and his barnyard fellatio now.

Whose name was it that was carved into the door on the 4th floor of Fitten during summer 1999? I can't remember it and it's drivin me nuts.

Remember?

_______ __________ BLOWS GOATS in 4" high x 1/2" deep letters.

Brad, you should buy new shoes.

I bought FF1&2 in Indianapolis this week. 1 is ok, but there are way too many random encounters with monsters for a game without a map. If I have to wander around trying to remember where I'm supposed to go, I dont want to be interrupted every 7 seconds.

Thanks for filling me in Jeremy. I hope everyone realizes that California is going to break off from the mainland in a cataclysmic earthquake. I believe it's referendum 404 or something like that. I'm sure it will pass.

Ryan surprised me this weekend when he said he wanted an Xbox 360. Prior to this weekend all he had talked about was waiting to buy the PS3. He surprised me again when he bought an Xbox 360. It looks really nice on my tv. That was not a surprise.

Now let me relate to you a story on how I have personally been affected by the Department of Homeland Security. I've recently begun using superglue to keep the 11 year old soles to my 11 year old shoes attached to the 11 year old top part of my shoe. Normally I would have a spare tube of superglue ready to use in my pocket. I must now remove that spare tube on my way to the airport or suffer great pangs of guilt when I breeze through security and walk onto a plane with deadly contraband. Last Thursday while returning my pimp ride to the Avis Rental Center, the sole of my shoe started falling off. With every step I took the sole would smack the innards of my shoe with a resound FWAP! I had no glue. I didn't no what to do. So I kept walking... all the way to my plane... all the way to baggage claim... all the way back to my car... me and my broken shoe.

Next week is my last week in NY. I think I will be home for about 3 weeks or so. We should do stuff.

I'm waiting until theres some sort of viral epidemic floating around the country. Thats when I'm taking my marbles and going home.

I love podcasts. They are free, entertaining, easy to get, lots of them. I listen to all sorts of them. Most of them daily. The best part is that theres a podcast about everything. I listen to a couple Japanese learning podcasts, a couple Japanese language podcasts, some podcasts on Buddhism, a couple on Catholicism, one on some religions, poetry, philosophy, history and other ones have come and gone from my queue of podcasts. I dont listen to any gaming podcasts because I think I get the digest version from Martin about once a week or so.

Liquids? You have got to be putting shit in my pants, TSA. First off, banning something after the dudes have been arrested and their plot thwarted is FUCKING BACKWARDS YOU TWATS. If y'all were spending my hard-slacked tax dollares properly, first you ban something, then you thwart a plot. Not the other way around. I seriously believe soon we'll all have to change into TSA-approved scrubs under the watchful eye of TSA ass inspectors at the airport, put into opaque hermetically sealed containers which will be loaded onto planes (what no longer have windows, in-flight service of any kind, bathrooms or air conditioning since terra-ists will be suspected of using line-of-sight communication, peanuts, free maxipads (sleds to you, Mark) or cold air (to drive a terra-generating heat engine) in any combination to wreak havoc) and flown to your destination with four F/A-18 escort planes and Red Chinese soldiers on board hired to poke at you with a rusty Tokarev SVT-40s to make sure you're not having any fun whatsoever.

Stranger things have happened. We used to laugh at Matt's craaaaaazy ideas about pissing into cars' fuel tanks by the year 2000 and the Scroty-Tote™. Mercedes recently announced a method of injecting urea to reduce NOx emissions in their diesel engines so they would be CARB emissions compliant. Yes, urea. As in "urine" as in "to piss". No word yet on anyone planning widespread adoption of the Scroty-Tote™.

Which is one reason why I ain't yet nor do I plan to move to California, the land of fruits and nuts. I like my diesel car, especially that 11% of my fuel comes from locally-grown soybeans. It also seems to me that living in California makes you soft, much in the same way living in NYC makes you hard. Plus I like cold weather and the Midwest. And my dog. And this lamp, and this chair. And my yo-yo. And Martin being done with school. Again. I congratulate you, sir!

But I tell you what, there is one thing that frightens me on planes.

Motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking planes.

notes from last year:

• transistors shrank in size by a factor of 2 -- thanks moore!


• mark joined a master's program in which he is not interested (read: sold out)


• we WON the war on terror (fuck yeah).


• noone's seen you because we all moved to california

am i missing anything?

Last week I went to the beach. Edisto Beach. Its an island a little south of Charleston. There was lots of beer drinking, game playing and getting annoyed with family members. cause thats how I roll. Family style. word.

I went to a serpentarium, you know, one of those places with lots of serpents. And some alligators. cant have a zoo in the south without some alligators. I got some video of some alligators getting fed. They swallow their food whole. Thats right. Their food. They swallow it. Whole. So why the fuck do they got teeth? I dont know. I didnt ask.

I thought it'd be cool if I told them I wanted all the motherfuckin snakes out of my motherfuckin serpentarium, but I didnt tell them that. So it wasnt cool. But it would have been.

I went to Fort Sumter. Apparently Abner Doubleday was stationed there during the shelling. Apparently he aimed a cannon at a hotel in Charleston and shot 2 rounds into it. He said he did it because the room service was terrible. That amused me and my fellow National Park patrons.

I got 2 more stamps in my National Parks passport. I'm afraid theres going to be some Park passport stamp inflation though. Ft Sumters an island, right? So to get to this island you take a boat. This boat has to dock somewhere. They built the area around the area you catch the boat up and named it "Libery Square." I'm pretty sure it has no historical significance. The other problem is that there is another one of these on the other side of Charleston harbor called "Patriots Point." So now my book has an extra, worthless stamp that I shouldnt have stamped. And I'm ashamed to be an American.

fyi... apparently i live under a rock because based on my last post you'd think subscription based music services were a new thing. i realize now that services like napster to go and rhapsody to go have been around for about a year.

is there anything else that happened within the past year i should know about?

So I've been thinking of buying a non-Apple mp3 player (ever since the Rio Karma, so that's about 2 years now) when I ran across this article at ExtremeTech. Perhaps a subscription based music service with enough music to satisfy me is the is the push I need to buy a nice new gadget. So I checked out, Urge, which happens to be integrated into Windows Media Player 11 and have enjoyed using it for 4 days of a 14 day trial. My only thought is that I wonder if the subscription based service will last. $15 a month seems like a sweet deal for all the music I can download, even if it's all protected windows media files.

No dodgeball until November works in my favor. I am flabby and out of shape. By November I can turn that around and be at the pinnacle of dodgeball fitness... or I can sit around and play computer games like Oblivion and Titan's Quest during my free time.

Martin, to answer your questions:

1) No, I wasn't really moving my arms around a lot. A little bit, but not too much. I was also standing up so I probably wasn't in the optimal position for minimizing tiredness. But I think I would have gotten tired playing that way after an hour.

2) I think it is somewhat safe to say that the hammer falls down and the utopian game dev companies can become hell holes. Two years ago, there was a big panel session at GDC on the quality of life for programmers. It was directly targeted at EA for the unfair treatment / expectation that programmers work far more than a good happy society should ask for. As a result, EA changed their policies. I'm not sure what changes they made exactly, but I do know that my friend at EA does not feel overly pressured. Raph Koster, the Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment (and considered to be a visionary badass), once said that they expect their employees to get in sometime before 10 and leave by 7 (under normal dev circumstances) and that he feels everyone is at a good happy medium that way.

At PlayMotion, we face the same exact problem. The hammer certainly does fall and allnighters become a necessity sometimes. The fact is that it is very hard to schedule time accurately for something complicated like writing videogames. Even at ILM, I see a fair number of show-stopping bugs causing mayhem and sometimes allnighters. One thing that ILM does (and I'm pretty sure the MS Windows team does as well) which I think is neat is a nightly build with regression tests that run following the build. Everyone writes functions to (hopefully) test everything. So the day some code is committed whose testing functions run successfully but break someone else's tests, they know about it right then and there and take action immediately. Another thing about ILM that makes development harder than most software companies is that the users are sometimes using the build from the previous night in order to take advantage of a new feature. Production is the quality assurance department. That's kinda crazy!

Did anyone else know that there was free improv in the park every thursday?? It has been going on since screen on the green ended (I think). I went last night after running into Sarah Bates at a resident function. She and I walked down the park and met up with some friends of hers and watching improv from Dad's Garage and Whole World. There was some other company, but they sucked and therefore I don't remember their names. It was cool. Sarah's friends brought scotch so we were dropping shots of scotch on occasion. It was really good scotch too (McCallan 18). After that we (a drunk Sarah and I) walked back to the Biltmore. It was a fun night. Unfortunately it was the last night for improv, so there will be no more fun.

Brad and my World Cup of Dodgeball has been postponed until November (those bastards!!!). I will reeling in remorse for the next few days until my dodgeball double header this sunday.

Greetings from Boston. Siggraph was cool. Very frenetic. Lots of energy. I'll share much later.

Oh. I thought you'd seen a moose in the stairwell or something.

You take this way too seriously. your PhD is going to go easy and you're going to shoot yourself or something because your life has no meaning anymore without Georgia Tech dicking you around.

VINDICATION!!!!!

i just want everyone to stop and think about the fact that an interface (i wish i could say the gameplay, but you take what you can get) caused matt (_matt_) to not notice the graphics. matt. graphics.

ok.