I just heard that the body shop has discovered additional damage to the car and now it's going to be totalled.

So, I'm back to looking for a ride. It's going to be hard to replace the old car. It was a 2001 model and still had less than 50,000 miles on it. -_-

Damn that incompetent blankety-blank that smashed into me. Shut the hell up and pay attention to the road, you.

At least the assessed value of the car is almost exactly what I paid for it in the first place, so essentially, I had a car for nearly two years for free.

I had visions of driving that car for at least a decade longer, and without the intervention of the incompetent, I probably would have pulled it off.

Well, actually, that's Hideki Matsui's nickname.




A triple short of the cycle in game 6 (it's never happened in the world series) Matsui knocked in 6 of the Yankees' 7 runs in the final game of the season. He was awarded the world series MVP award, the first time it's ever been awarded to a (full time) Designated Hitter.

My car is still at the shop. It was originally made in japan, so it's possible that the parts have to be imported from there. There is a local plant that makes them (Toyota Echo) but it's possible that they didn't make that year, so parts might still be hard to come by locally.

On the upside, the weather is still unreasonably nice and I spent the day in tshirt and shorts. I suspect that I will have to find some jeans fairly soon, there is no way this kind of weather can persist for long. (and it had better get rainy soon - we need the water)

It was hard to keep focused on the game though, the Mark Twain prize was being awarded to Bill Cosby. Now THAT'S counter-programming.

You know what happens if an itty bitty car bumps into you?

you repair your rear bumper.

You know what happens if an SUV hits you from behind?








this



I was on my way to meeting someone for dinner and traffic slowed in front of me. Unfortunately traffic behind me included a SUV with multiple occupants, one of which, namely the driver, wasn't paying close enough attention to the road and did that to the back of my car. The collision knocked me into the car in front of me for some cosmetic damage.

The interior of my car is sprayed with coke which exploded from my ever-present mug of holding. The lid shot off and coke sprayed everywhere. At some point in the collision my hat made a break for it.

We were in the #2 lane out of 4 and CHP showed up to stop traffic long enough for us to get off to the shoulder. Nobody was injured and the local PD showed up to collect all the relevant information. It appears that the driver behind me has insurance, which is good news.

I'll know more about the state of the car in a few days. I'll know more about the state of my joints by tomorrow, more than likely.

...for the wood floor in his new home, that is.




Maru and owner have moved and apparently the wood floors in the new apartment are not slippery enough for Maru to perform his famous box-sliding trick.

For reference, this is what he liked to do with boxes.




Hopefully the new floors will be waxed soon. The world needs more videos of Maru sliding in boxes...

...with runners on base.

Pablo Sandoval was not an All-Star this year, despite having (at the time) the second best batting average in the NL. There was an online fan voting process that failed to get him in and then, when an injury opened another slot, the Phillies manager Charlie Manuel picked his own outfielder, who had a batting average 60 points lower...

Well, the Phillies are in town tonight and Pablo "Kung-Fu Panda" Sandoval greeted Manuel with a solo home run into the bay and a two run double off of the base of the left field wall. (so far, it's the top of the 5th inning as I type this)

I hope Charlie Manuel remembers who he didn't pick for the all-star game and I hope Pablo keeps a hot bat for the rest of the season in general and whenever facing the Phillies in particular. I'm sure motivation is not an issue for him right now.

He's a lot of fun to watch and is one of the new players that has the Giants in contention for a post season berth. I love his enthusiasm for the game and how he interacts with his teammates. He's built kind of like a barrel, so you can see how he came by his nickname.

Go Kung-Fu Panda!

So my friend's brother has received his advanced degree and has a position dealing with prisoners with psychological problems. He's married with two kids. Both he and his wife are gamers with a fondness for euro boardgames and some RPGs.

I never would have guessed, but his wife caught us flatfooted after a game.

Evidently, she's seen some sort of documentary about how the US rigged the Twin Towers to collapse and then had dupes fly fully loaded passenger jets into them to provide a cover story.

So-called experts 'prove' how it's just about impossible for a structure as large as the Twin Towers to collapse into their own footprint unless they were essentially demolished by professionals with perfectly placed shaped charges.

I haven't seen this alleged documentary and I don't intend to.

In all fairness, I am not an engineer. Nor am I a materials scientist, an architect or a demolitions expert. So, even if this documentary were full of such experts 'proving' their case, I wouldn't be able to check their math or confirm their claims.

However, I have this reason to not believe them.

Nobody else does either.

Not CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeira, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox or any of the other media outlets has mentioned this.

In order for this outrageous claim to be true, the following must also be true - Every media outlet in the whole world is either blissfully unaware of this document, or they have mistakenly judged it to be full of $h!t. Alternately, every media outlet is aware of this claim and they believe it to be true, but they have been bribed or coerced into keeping silent on the subject. Which is even less likely, given that there are plenty of media outlets that are run by governments that despise us and would love to have something to smear our reputations with.

Seriously, the only way this could have a chance of being true is for there to be a global conspiracy that keeps it from being aired or printed anywhere. That in and of itself, is utter lunacy. The notion that anyone could control the world media with an iron fist is laughable. Given the completely disjointed and spastic nature of the media at large. (Remember that Bolivian TV station that presented Lost as footage of the Air France disaster?) Surely, presented with something as juicy as this (provided it had any chance of being true) somebody, somewhere would have jumped the gun and ran with it.

But nobody did.

How much Kool-Aid do you need to drink in order to actually believe a line like that?

I returned home a few minutes before midnight Tuesday night and found the exit from US 101 blocked by a line of at least 8 patrolcars, road flares, the works. I passed by and caught a glimpse of even more patrolcars on the road in addition to an ambulance and a fire truck. I got off on the next exit and made my way back to the exit. (I live a stone's throw away from the exit - I could literally throw a rock from my front door to the highway on/offramp) I am forced to detour around the block and approach from the other side, as the intersection is blocked by a wall of San Mateo police cars. Going around one block, I drove by three other police cars and I find my habitual parking space still open.

I parked and got out, the neighbors across the street are all on the sidewalk watching the proceedings. Some dude is being led to a patrolcar, hands cuffed behind his back. Apparently, there was a traffic stop on 101 maybe ten or twenty yards before the exit ramp. The vehicle had multiple occupants, some of which footbailed and apparently jumped the soundwall and fence of the folks who live across the street. I guess all the extra cars were keeping an eye out for anyone trying to escape the scene. I never found out what the fire truck was there for.

Two hours later, everyone is gone. I guess they found everyone they were looking for. I guess if it had to happen, it was a good thing it happened now. Two weeks from now, there might not have been enough budget to put enough police in the streets to catch those guys, whoever they were. (The governator warns that the state might run out of money in a few weeks)

FWIW, the police I encountered were professional and courteous. Around here, they typically are.

I forgot some stuff so I had to drive back home after hours on Friday night. I picked up some signage materials, some makeshift shelving and a prop weapon I had made some years ago that looks a lot like this:


I brought a sheet of pegboard and some hooks. I used it to display a piece of stained glass artwork done by a friend (Nausicaa's pet critter) and also the prop of Excaliborg. It got lots of attention, just as planned. I need to make more of them, I got a bunch of offers to buy it.

I won't sell this one, it's covered in black gaffer's tape and it won't last a minute if it gets wet. I'll make more now that I have a pretty good idea that there's more than a little interest.

I did more demos of buttonmen, but midway through the day, I got busted for selling dice and random buttonmen. The artist's alley rules are pretty strict on not being able to sell things you didn't make, so they went back into the suitcase. I think I made about ten dollars selling them, so it wasn't exactly a tragedy.

So I switched from doing buttonmen demos (play it at www.buttonmen.com) to catfight demos. It takes up a little more space but it's more than worth it. Oddly enough, for a while Nickie was outselling Tamiya two to one.


You would've thought that Tamiya would have sold better at an anime con especially while I've got a prop version of her giant hammer, but there you have it.

Actually something that belonged on Friday's post - I ran into an old classmate in the flea market. He runs a store in a town south of San Jose called Anime101
www.anime-101.com
He used to get a booth for the dealer's room but he skipped last year due to having just moved into a new location (money tight) and this year his wive was very pregnant with their second child (time tight). He said he would be back in the dealer's room next year. I showed him the prototypes and he was very interested. I need to get started scaling up for a real production run soon.

Another thing I forgot to mention about Friday - I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch at La Victoria. After getting all the stuff out of the car, I got out of the expensive convention center parking and went in search of a cheaper parking space. I found out that La Victoria has multiple locations and we got our signals crossed. He grabbed my burrito and met me on the street. I apologized for the misunderstanding, I bought him lunch yesterday.

Anyway Saturday went smoothly other than the above issue. A decent number of the foam weapons got sold. I got a good idea of what I need to do to be more successful next year. I need to be more organized for one thing...

I'm dying.

Setup for the Artist's Alley started at about 10am. I managed to straggle in about five minutes before that and bring a rolling box of stuff up the elevator and immediately run into the back of a line of people with carts, boxes and other stuff. They're checking people in one at a time. Joy.

Fortunately, I am sort of sharing space with the Bay Area Animation Society, and they're ahead of me in line. I cut up to where they are and get processed along with them. I don't have all of my paperwork with me, their email detailing the checkin process somehow bounced or got sent to the spam folder. Oddly, BAAS doesn't have their paperwork in order either. Fortunately, the founder who forgot to bring the paperwork is also on Fanime Staff and has cleared things with the people who run the artist's alley. We slide by.

Setup is a nightmare for me. I had intended to have a modular display made of coroplast, but didn't have time to get it made. (again, much of my time has been consumed with the repairs to the floor and shoving around furniture and boxes to facilitate said repairs)

I had observed that there was a group that sponsored a boffer weapon arena at Baycon for years. Nothing similar had ever been attempted at Fanime, where there are many times more people and lots of people who like toy weapons. So I had resolved to build a bunch of them and sell them at Fanime. I enlisted a friend who was active in NERO until the local chapter folded. I had spent a year in NERO when I was in Atlanta and had gotten pretty good at making weapons.

Incidentally, the guy who got me into NERO in the first place makes some kickass costume work, his website:
http://www.lionofthesun.com/



Anyway, I stack a handful of completed weapons on the table and make a pile of partially built weapons and components (pipe, foam, tape)in the back. It is a stroke of good luck that our tables are up against the wall, and there is a lot of room behind the tables. We take full advantage. I also have boxes of cut vinyl stickers, prototypes of an acrylic/wood maptile system and catfight brawl decks.


In addition, I brought a ginormous mallet I made some years earlier.


I had many offers to buy it, but I need to figure out how to mass produce it before I should sell the prototype. Still, it's something I need to consider making for next year's fanime. It's made of closed cell foam and tape. It's surprisingly light given how sturdy it is.

Sales on Friday were haphazard, as the dealer's room got most of the attention. There was another round of the flea market, with about half of the stuff being leftovers from Thursday.

Checkin to the hotel was uneventful, it's across the street from the convention center so it isn't much work getting back and forth.

It started thursday. I spent the day helping to pry up the old pergo in the bathroom and tossing out the moldy padding and then replacing it with new stuff. Got filthy and showered before running off to the San Jose convention center to try to get to the advance badge pickup.

Managed to get into line a few minutes (!) before it was scheduled to close. Traffic was awful, as usual, despite it being nearly 8pm. Fortunately the line moved briskly and they stayed open well past their posted hours. FanimeCon has managed to scale up many times its original size without losing sight of the little things that make a con fun for attendees.

Having gotten that done, I swung through the flea market. Plenty of interesting things on offer, but this time I am on a mission. I have a contract to do some illos for an RPG and the writer mentioned that he was looking for something in the style of Kia Asamiya.


OK, I guess I can live with that. Problem is, most of his illustration work is from a long time ago, apparently he's doing sculpting now. Nobody had any of his art books for sale, the best I was able to scrounge was some of the original Nadesico manga. Better than nothing I guess.

At least, he didn't say to draw like Yukito (Battle Angel Alita) Kishiro.

This will be the first year I get an artist's alley table at Fanime. I am woefully underprepared, partly because I am a doofus, and partly because I have been spending time tearing up the flooring, moving everything from room to room and putting in new pergo.

Friday morning looms, with setup and the beginning of the flood of humanity...

For a second game in a row, the cylons have thwarted Adama's efforts to guide Galactica to safety.

This time, I was in fact a loyal human follower, Col. Tigh. I actually ended up as simultaneously Admiral and President for a while. This time, unlike our last disastrous opening, we immediately ran into a number of problems all focused like a laser on our food supply. So, right out of the gate, we were frightfully short of food.

(Food is one of the four key resources along with Fuel, Population and Morale that, if you run out of any of them, ends the game with a human loss) In the previous game, we were critically short of everything but food, which we had plenty of. Oh, the irony.

The owner of the game has a fixation on Apollo and won't play any other character. Unfortunately, she also has a fixation on the vipers vs raiders fighting aspect of the game and has little appreciation of the strategic vs tactical game.

Two players out themselves as cylons after the halfway point. (we were already short of multiple things so we didn't have three cylons) Shortly after our famine phase, we started running short of fuel. The Cylons timed their treachery well, as they managed to put two of the remaining four players in the brig. It looked like they would be able to lock up our only remaining pilot (Apollo, as starbuck revealed that she was a cylon) just as there was looming disaster in the fleet. Fortunately, president Baltar managed to spring Adama (Baltar's player was a cylon last game so the irony was not lost on us) who managed to use his political clout to spring Apollo.

Hello Dad. I'm in jail.

Sigh. Well, just as we're recovering from this fiasco, we find ourselves running critically short of morale points. Apollo's player is fixated on damaged vipers which is largely irrelevant because we only need one or two, given that we only have one pilot player. I get two chances to use political quorum cards to boost morale. It's only got a 3/8 chance of working but I've got two. Unfortunately, I roll poorly and we get nothing out of it. My calculator tells me that I had over a 60% of getting at least one point out of it, but that assumes that my luck is average.

We had a tiny chance of succeeding, unfortunately, both cards I drew were both the same and both awful. So we had to grind through another cycle to try to activate the endgame. Baltar's penultimate turn came down to a choice of repairing vipers we don't need or getting Tigh out of sick bay (being there means you get fewer skill cards to use primarily in fighting off disasters) So he fixes Vipers. Whee.

The next disaster is one that needs skill cards to keep the fleet from running out of morale. What do you know, I don't have enough cards because I was sick. Oh well, we lost. Good thing we had those extra vipers, though.

On the upside, her cat, Shakti, was not afraid of strangers. Sharon used to have another cat that had cancer and could only keep weight on through free feeding and two meals a day. That meant that Shakti used to also overindulge in the bounty and used to be huge. Now she's only somewhat pudgy and has an extra flap of fur that waggles back and forth if she runs. It's really amusing to see. I've seen several cats that had fur like that. Their dog, Stella was a goofy thing with no hair and a desperate need to lick my knees.

Humorously, the game describes itself as taking 2-3 hours. We took about 5 hours to end not with a bang, but a whimper.
I can see how you could lose in 2-3 hours, but I can't see how the humans can win in that timeframe. Please let me know if we're doing something wrong.

We're already trying to synch up schedules for a rematch...

We're not addicted.

Last weekend, there was a game day event at a friend's house. Well, actually, it was a friend of a friend. I know this guy who organizes game day events at various households around the bay area (the San Francisco one) and this time it was in the east bay near Oakland. It actually might have been in Oakland or it might not. I don't know exactly where the city limits are and all of the cities have merged into a continuous mosaic of industrial, urban, suburban and municipal zones.

This neighborhood was on the edge of a run down area on its way to gentrification when the real estate bubble burst. Still, there aren't any vacant properties and no forest of for sale signs so I guess this area isn't as affected as others.

The household has a yappy dog, a cautious cat and a caged rodent that is probably a guinea pig, and boardgamers. There are about a dozen people in attendance, including some hangers-on and a toddler. It's a nice place with the entrance on the ground floor, kitchen, dining nook and living space on the second and bedrooms on the third. Games have been arranged on the second floor along with a variety of healthy munchies.

One of the women I had not met before is fond of teaching a game called Ghost Stories.





It's a cooperative boardgame where you play a kung fu monk, trying to save his village from evil. There is a deck of cards which are various monsters. Every turn, you turn over the top card which must be placed on the board (if possible) and some of them have effects that are triggered when they arrive (like they bring more ghosts) or effects that happen while they are in play (like they curse you or they try to haunt the village) or effects that happen when they are defeated (some give you bonuses, some give you pain). There is a 3x3 grid of villagers in the middle, which represent townsfolk who can help you fight evil.

Each player has a choice of one of two special abilities, and no player shares the same choices, so there are a total of 8 powers. That means there are 16 possible configurations of powers, not including the various seating configurations. Because of the nature of some powers, the seating arrangement can be important too.

There is a deck of very powerful evil spirits that represent the masterminds of the evil forces. One is selected at random and put near the bottom of the deck. There are 3 ways the players can lose - they can all be defeated, the town can be corrupted (on the easy setting this is when 3 tiles in a row are haunted or any 4 tiles are haunted) or you get to the bottom of the ghost deck.

Fighting is usually done rolling dice. The dice are 6 sided and have one dot for each color of players, black and white (wildcard). Ghosts have either a player's color which means they manifest on their side of town or black which means they go anywhere. Having a full set of 3 ghosts in front of you is very bad.

It's a tricky game, I plan on picking it up pretty soon. The game is beautiful, replayable and mechanically pretty simple. Me Likey.

Our first game ended in defeat. Too many tough monsters all at once overwhelmed us.

After that, somebody just bought Battlestar Galactica the boardgame.




It took a while to set up, as it was unpunched. Brand new. Unfortunately, that also meant that the owner didn't know how it went. I had played half of one game, so I sort of took the lead in getting things going.

At the beginning of the game, every player is dealt a random card that tells them if they are a human or a cylon. So you never know who is on your side. I started the game as a cylon.

This was immensely unfair because I was the only one who knew how the game went so I just played as a human for the first half. It didn't matter much because the cards went so badly the humans got pounded anyway. Every turn, a player has to turn over a card that is some sort of problem. Sometimes it's an internal problem like some internal affair that needs addressing or sometimes it's cylons attacking. We started out with a ton of cylons.

Every time cylons attack, it usually adds more cylons to zones around Galactica in addition to random civilian ships. If raiders end in the same zone as unguarded civvy ships, they destroy them and then you turn them over to see if there was anything important on them. You can lose population, fuel, food or morale when you lose civilian ships.

The humans can lose if they run out of population, fuel, food or morale. They can also lose if the Galactica is heavily damaged or invaded. They win if they manage to make 8 points worth of jumps and then one more. About half of the crisis cards (the bad things that happen every turn) also advance the jump counter which helps the humans move towards victory. Many of them add or activate cylons.

Players have skills which govern which kinds of cards they collect. Pilots get piloting cards which help in combat, technical staff get mechanical cards which help repair things, politicians get political cards which help dealing with people, officers get tactical cards which help with tactics and so on. Each one also helps with skill checks. Some of the crisis cards involve events which must be acted on by people to prevent catastrophe or to gain resources. They usually have a set of skills that will help and the rest which hinder. If it is a technical issue, then perhaps only the piloting and mechanical cards will help. For example, it might say 10 pts required, Piloting and Repair only. So two random cards are added and every player can add no cards, or as many cards as they like. Some players have no piloting or repair skills so if you see them adding cards to a technical skill test, they can't be trying to help. In this case, only piloting or repair cards are added to the total (every card has a number from 1 to 5 which is used only for skill checks) and any other type is subtracted.

In one such test, I noticed that there were three inappropriate colored cards in the pile when revealed. That meant that one of the other two players (I knew what card I contributed) wasn't trying to help at all. So, we immediately turned the eye of suspicion on the two others who contributed. Since I pointed it out, most people assumed that I wasn't the one who tried (successfuly) to sabotage the attempt. (There were two random cards added to the pile, and three bad cards so based on the number of cards contributed, either or both of the other players could have been cylons)

Eventually, one of the two outed himself as a cylon. Now he stopped pretending to help and got to play a different set of cards to interfere with the humans. I still pretended to be a loyal human.

When the humans make the halfway point a second loyalty card is dealt to all players. One player dropped out early and we just left the character fallow. It was thought that the absentee Gaius Baltar might have also been a cylon, as he is dealt two loyalty cards in the beginning and if either says cylon, then he is supposed to sabotage the game. At the halfway point, an additional cylon sympathiser card is added and dealt out randomly. If you get this card, you have to reveal it. If the humans are over halfway depleted in any of the four resources (people, fuel, food or morale) then the sympathizer stays loyal to the humans, if the humans are doing well, then the cylon sympathizer becomes a cylon. It's the game's way of tuning the difficulty based on current performance.

The other person who might have been a cylon drew the sympathizer card. Three of the four resources were over half gone, so no new cylon. Not that we needed it.

The game went pretty smoothly for the next jump, then fell apart on the penultimate jump. Everything but food was critically low and I just sat back and let things go to hell. I really didn't need to do anything other than slow play some of my cards to let skill checks fail and things degenerate.

We made the next to last jump and ran out of fuel. The cylon player was happy about it and then I revealed that I was also a cylon and several of the players were shocked. I had been fairly aggressive as Boomer shooting cylon raiders, protecting civilian ships and repairing damage. The humans had the opportunity to look at a player's loyalty card in the game and they hadn't even considered looking at mine.

I had even used Boomer's special ability to negate a crisis introduced by the active cylon player. I did it because it totally gave the impression that I was trying to help the humans to win and because it wasn't the absolute worst thing that could happen. Better I used up the ability before that came along.

Anyway, they couldn't believe I was a cylon all along. They have scheduled a rematch because they are certain that things will work out for humanity this time.

I'll let you know.

I think this happened on Wednesday. I was hanging out in the CA Lounge resting my feet. (this was day 2 of the foot problem) Near the back of the lounge is where Dr. Ray has his massage chairs set up. There were a few people I knew hanging out there and one person I didn't know. He turned out to be the owner of a development house in Saipan. He had a bunch of photos of his office, I forget the name of the place, but they had a life sized statue of Spawn in the lobby.

Anyway, the conversation wanders to and fro about game development stuff. At some point, I mentioned that I was a big fan of the trend of studios shipping tools for adding custom content along with their games. Stuff like SPORE, the Sims, Unreal games, Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion, Supreme Commander, Civilization, etc.

This guy, possibly owing to his console roots, dismisses the trend as a fad. He honestly doesn't think it's a particularly big deal. I, and the rest of the conversation pit fall silent and stare at the guy because, frankly, I think he's nuts. Of all things, he brings up youTube as an example of what a blight community generated content is.

Everybody brightens up - the consensus of everyone else in the conversation pit can be summed up as "youTube! Yeah!". The simple point is made that youTube is made of AWESOME because although it is full of horrible content, you, the user, aren't forced to look at the junk, you are free to cherry pick the nuggets of WIN from the sea of FAIL. The general point is that youTube is simply a microcosm of the internet as a whole. If it sucks, it's your fault for clicking on junk.

On the other hand, it is fairly easy to find what you think is cool. There are people who make stuff and put it on the internet. Find one who is reliably cool and subscribe to their youTube channel, bookmark their website, etc. It's not all that difficult, is it?

The point is, a development team has a finite amount of time to create content for their game, while their userbase has a virtually unlimited amount of man hours to spend doing the same. There are games that came out years ago that I still play because there is a constant stream of new content coming out to keep it interesting. There are new models to plug in, new weapons to try, new maps to explore, total conversion mods and so on. Look at the character options that shipped with the Sims. Look at how much variation (and quality) you can get just by downloading stuff for free. On top of that, there are pay sites with even better stuff. The difference is mind boggling. Even more so with Oblivion. The character models were downright homely, but the mod community is obsessed with achieving supermodel results, and they pretty much do.

This is the quality of models that shipped with the original game.


Here's a little something the mod community cooked up:



This is the result of somebody trying really hard to make an attractive woman in Oblivion using the files that shipped on the disk.



and some people who use custom files to get better results:





Are there awful community created models for these games? Of course!
Are you obliged to use any of them? Of course not!

That's the beauty of the mindset that says it is a good idea to ship some version of your development tools with the game. That way, it allows that percentage of your userbase that will not be satisfied with your efforts to spend their energy on adding the content that will pacify them instead of complaining about your shortcomings in online forums. And it extends the life of your game by an extraordinary amount. Thanks to the tons of mods, I still haven't finished Oblivion's expansions yet...

I don't think I convinced the guy. He was pretty deadset in his ways, having spent years developing games for oldschool consoles (the kinds without hard drives) that didn't have the architecture to handle community generated content in any meaningful way. He's living in the past, but the writing's on the wall. Little Big Planet pretty much swept the game developer's choice awards and the other big winner, Fallout 3 is another game that has a vibrant mod community.

I have some models to finish. Back to work.

I'm going to try to recall everything interesting I experienced at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, so I'm going in reverse.

Friday is the last day of the GDC and it's especially crowded because, on top of everyone else, there are hordes of students from various art colleges, game design schools and other schools congregating mostly around the career expo (job fair) looking for entry level positions or internships.

There are also a small number of panels or seminars open to them that are typically about things like how to break into the industry. These sessions get filled up very quickly. Fortunately, I don't have to work any of them.

Oddly enough, by Friday, I don't have to work anywhere. My work schedule was done Thursday. Nevertheless, we are gently nudged to pick up slack whenever we find it. I have a friend that I worked with when Cheapass Games were still active who was feeling wrecked Friday morning and had a physically demanding midday shift who wanted to exchange for a sedentary one. I just took it.

It's what we call a floater shift. Floaters wear radios and are in communication with each other, superfloaters, staff and ultimately the show staff. When CAs (volunteers) encounter problems they can't resolve, they're supposed to summon their floater. Every post that is manned by CAs is supposed to have a dedicated floater that is supposed to circulate and make sure each post is OK. If the floater can't get the answer or fix the problem, they call in a superfloater (veteran floater who oversees a number of floater regions) if that doesn't work, call staff, on up to UMD staff (the corporation that bought the GDC last year)

Out of over 400 CAs this year, there are about 3 or 4 dozen people who are floaters. So it's hard to trade floater shifts because the other person has to be floater qualified. I had two previous floater shifts this year, but both of them were boring. This one was pretty boring too, but somebody had to do it. Two and a half hours of very little activity. Most of the people were at the expo or job fair, I guess.

Two reasons why people might spend time at the expo


Also, many companies give away stuff at the job fair. I picked up a few tshirts in exchange for resumes. I can always use tshirts.

That afternoon, I take in a few last sessions. One is an extremely lackluster affair about interface art. The guy pretty much read his slides in a monotone. Very disappointing. I had one good idea come of it though. I wrote a note on the feedback form that they should screen potential speakers by having them send in audition tapes via youtube or similar. It would also be a good idea to make sure speakers are at least understandable in english (or use translation services) Microsoft had a sponsored session (essentially an infomercial) where the presenter was only barely intelligible.

Fortunately the last session of the day (and the GDC) was much better. This one was about how to imbue games with cinematic elements without resorting to FMV (full motion video) This is the third installment by two very upbeat, energetic presenters who are enthusiastic and fluid. Their talk is peppered by video clips of movies and games demonstrating their techniques. Many are obvious, some are subtle, all are shown to be relevant to games. An entertaining way to wrap up the show, and the foul taste of the previous session is cleaned from my mental mouth.

This is where things take a turn for the surreal.

As I'm making my way up the escalators to return to the CA lounge, this gentleman who I do not recognize (and justifiably so, as we are complete strangers) points at me and pretty much does the Donald Sutherland thing from body snatchers.



I'm like - WTF? He excitedly grabs his buddy and points at my hat. I've been switching hats from day to day and I'm not entirely sure what I'm wearing that day. It turns out to be the Atari Jaguar hat that has been worn twice. Once at a company softball game and then at the 2009 GDC. He turns out to be an employee of Square-Enix and a bigtime Jaguar fan. He wants to know where I came by the hat and completely freaks out when I tell him that I worked on a Jaguar title. Fangasm ensues.



We take some goofy photos and trade stories about old school stuff. I wish we'd run into each other earlier, there just isn't enough time because I need to get back to the lounge and clean up my junk that's gotten scattered all over the lounge over the last 5 days. We exchange cards and hopefully we can do dinner next year. They're a blast, it makes me want to dig up my old TurgoGrafix 16 again.



I gather some people and run off to the food court. It's an upscale affair and completely crowded. Curiously enough, I end up sitting next to Oliver, someone who I met at a game night at a friend's house. This friend, I'd met on the buttonmen website that was programmed by a CA. Small world 'aint it? Oliver works in the city planner's office in the city and is only aware of the GDC because of the horde of computer game related tshirts. Funny, that.

Back after hours, there is the after-GDC meeting where prizes are raffled off, suggestions, complaints and praise are solicited and everyone hangs out and plays games, socializes and eventually says their goodbyes.



Then, finally, it's off. I get a ride from a friend who has just graduated with a game design degree from UCSC (my alma mater). Of course, they had no such program when I attended, he's from the first graduating class of this program's existence. He's a programmer and also an artist. We get back after midnight and yap about game design stuff until 5 am. I make sure he is sufficiently caffeinated to survive the trip home. I collapse - for me GDC09 is over.

I'm back from the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Sore, exhausted, and all that jazz. The good news is that I didn't get blisters. The bad news is that I may have something worse.

A little background for those of you unfamiliar with the event. The Game Developers Conference (formerly the Computer Game Developers Conference) was started by Chris Crawford, an eccentric game designer thought by some to be a genius when he invited 23 people to come to his house and talk about game development. Later that year, a collection of industry professionals organized the first commercial incarnation at a Silicon Valley hotel and the whole thing started to snowball. Five years later, the CGDC has hundreds of attendees and a few dozen Conference Associates aka CAs aka volunteers, one of which is me. It's 1992 and for the first and last time, the CAs are issued official black tshirts to identify them. Since black tshirts are often worn by attendees, CAs in later years will always wear bright colors.



I show up early last Sunday to help set things up. The GDC is now held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Parking is at a premium, so I get dropped off by my folks. I like spending time with other CAs so I use the CA housing program. You send them money, they arrange for hotel rooms with other CAs so you can return in groups. The Moscone is on the edge of the downtown area and if you stray a few blocks in the wrong directions, you can find some pretty dodgy neighborhoods. Somehow, for the past three years it's been in San Francisco, every year, I find myself in hotels that are progressively farther and farther away. This year, it's about a 20 minute walk away from the West hall. I would gripe, but I'm sharing the room with two CA staff. (they're like the NCOs of the CA army) Obviously, they aren't playing favorites. It's a good idea grouping up for the walks back to hotels at night. There are many panhandlers and even less pleasant people on the streets.

The show is separated in two main phases. The first two days are for summits and tutorials. The next three days are the main show. During the main show, the expo opens, which is where vendors try to get you to use their software or hardware or services. I didn't spend a lot of time in there, but I didn't see the maids this year. (the picture below is from 2007)



Also the career pavilion opens wednesday, which is where companies that are looking for new employees collect resumes and cards. Lots of people there, especially friday, when students can buy a cheaper pass that allows them to attend a few seminars directed at people new or trying to get into the industry, the job fair, and the expo. It's a zoo.

Tuesday morning, something went wrong and my foot really started hurting. Lucky for us there is a CA staffer who is a licensed massage therapist. He thinks that it might be the onset of plantar fasciitis. This is bad news because I need to be mobile. I get an ankle wrap and soldier on. That night, I iced the foot as best I could.

Luckily for me, it settled down over the next two days and by Friday, I was feeling good enough to take a shift for a friend who was looking to trade a strenuous job for a sedentary one. I still feel a little stiff and have been warned to avoid walking around barefoot first thing in the morning.

I'll post more as my brain recovers and I remember all the cool things that happened last week. This is seriously the best event of the year for me this year and pretty much every year. As tired as I am right now, I can't wait for GDC 2010.

Or at least in living memory.

It started out like it was going to be interesting, I got a call late last night from a friend who was pitching a bid for doing a racing game to a client and needed some 3d assets for said game. In between his call and me downloading the sample files, the toilet started overflowing. I didn't notice because I was doing something or other on the computer waiting for the files to download. (they took just under an hour)

My chair sits on a sheet of wood to keep from making permanent divots in the carpet padding. So I didn't notice anything was amiss until I stood up to do something and the carpet goes squish and there's water welling up from below. I think "oh damn, I've spilled something" except that I only have one glass of water (and the omnipresent mug of coke) in my room and the aforementioned glass of water is half full and unspilled on the shelf just like I left it. Also, I notice that I can't see a visible spill on the carpet, but everywhere I step, it's wet.

I get to the hall and it's full of water. Pretty much the entirety of the first floor is soaked. I run for the wet/dry vac and get it set up in the kitchen, which is the easiest place to start because I can dump the contents in the backyard from there. Also, it has a pergo floor, which makes cleaning it up pretty easy. With a little help, the cleanup on the hardwood floored rooms takes a mere 6 or 7 hours. The carpeted rooms will need to be emptied and stripped down because the carpet pads are soaked with water, which is more or less impossible to get to while the carpet is in place.

The next day is even worse. After nearly no sleep, and no shower because, if I forgot to mention it, the pipes leading to the sewers is clogged. So it's time to get out the snake and try to unclog whatever it is that's clogged the pipe. Doesn't work. Go to the back yard to check the access pipe and it's full of nasty water. Out comes the wet/dry vac and after several loads, it's obvious that there's water leaking back into the pipe from somewhere. Which is odd, because nothing in the house is draining water into that pipe. Until another check of the bathroom reveals that the toilet is still leaking. This time it only takes a little time to clean up the mess because it only flooded part of the bathroom and a little in the hallway.

In case you've never dealt with a snake, it's a coiled wire springlike cable with a loose spiraled bit at the end designed to auger into  clogs and break them up. You attach this to a power drill and rotate it while pushing it along until it reaches the clog. Several attempts to thread the snake into the pipes end in failure. So off to Home Depot to buy a new one that has fewer kinks in it. Still no good. The next approach is to dig holes to get to the pipe that needed repair last time. Nobody knows exactly where that was, so several holes are dug with no luck. So back to Home Depot to rent an industrial strength snake. This one is electrically powered, so no dealing with hand drills. Also, instead of a spring, it's a flexible cable with a cutting head to chew through clogs.

This thing does the trick in half an hour. Wish we'd thought of that first, because we wasted 8 hours trying to get to the clogged pipe.

The good news is that with that clog eliminated, we can use the shower again.

I can't describe the stench generated by trying to get through all of the backed up sewer juice. It's just as well that I have a lousy sense of smell. Now I have to unload everything out of my room and get the carpet out. Currently, it's still a little swampish back here.

Tomorrow can't possibly be worse. Saturday, I'm going to see the Watchmen movie. At this point, I don't even care how it is - I just need an escape for a few hours.

NASA is having a poll to name the new module for the ISS! Guess what's on the list.

www.nasa.gov/externalflash/name_ISS/index.html

Get in there and vote, Browncoat!  Do it for Wash, do it for Book, do it just to poke FOX in the ribs to remind them how stupid they were to cancel that show.

Coincidentally, someone is talking of starting a Serenity game on a biweekly basis. I'm thinking about making a male companion based on Cat from Red Dwarf. This could be freakin' hillarious. Or disastrous. Or possibly disastrously hillarious. Hillariously disastrous?

Somebody pointed me to his blog. He posted an entry about a clever game designed by James Ernest called Buttonmen.

wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/02/the-best-ten-minutes-of-the-day.html

It's one of my favorite games because it's so simple. It's billed as a combat game between two characters, but at it's core, it's about dice.

One of the side benefits of this game is that it justifies my collection of strange dice. Buttonmen have been designed to use dice of any size between 1 and 30 sides. There is a website that lets you play the game online with pretty much every button in the world, plus a bunch of imaginary designs (including one that consists of a single 99-sided die) Conventions, ranging from Origins, FanimeCon, Anime Expo, PolyCon, KublaCon (twice) and a host of others have created promotional buttonmen that were only available for attendees.

Other buttons have been created by creators of various IPs like Girl Genius (Foglio), The D&D Fantasy set (Larry Elmore), Brawl (Ryan Kinnard), Presidential Candidates (John Kovalic), Famous Mathmaticians (Aaron Williams), Sluggy Freelance (Pete Abrams), Legend of the 5 Rings (various artists), Sailor Moon (Naoko Takeuchi), and even brawling catgirls (me)

The website (www.buttonmen.com) is a free site that lets you play the game with people online. It's handy because it does all the math for you, so you don't have to worry about missing obscure rules or unfamiliar buttons.

The game design is pretty simple, but there are occasional hiccups where the rules simply don't work. A famous example is a promotional button called Echo, who is defined as being an exact copy of the button your opponent has. But what happens if two players both select Echo? Nobody really knows. The website simply assigns each player the first button in the game, alphabetically speaking. It seems as good a solution as any.

Because the game itself is so simple (experienced players can bang through a game in under a minute, given simple buttons), it lends itself to all sorts of extra silliness. The website helps in that it keeps meticulous records such as your win%, each button's overall win%, each button's win% vs each other button and so on. So if you wanted to make a handicap tournament, you could say that each player had to pick a button with a win% no higher than 100 - the player's current win%.  Or you could make a tournament where you could only play a character that had a name starting with B. Or the first letter of your first name. Or only buttons that featured characters with guns. Or hammers.

I remember that, in 2002, I created a best of 7 tournament where you had to pick between two buttons, one named Angel, the other Giant. For the benefit of people who don't follow american sports, the two teams that met in the World Series that year were from California, the San Francisco Giants and the Anaheim Angels. Since the World series is a best of 7 (more accurately, first to four wins) contest, I made the buttonmen tournament the same way. I think an Angel won that tournament, too. -_-

Sadly, the game is not being actively supported. James has gone on to greener pastures and now works for Microsoft. I doubt he has any time to devote to his clever but alas, not terribly profitable, games.

Somebody wants to play buttonmen in SL.