Dipping a toe back in the grind

Inspired by some good ass podcasts I’ve listened to, I just cracked open my game project this week for the first time in like six months, and…it’s a lot less well organized than I thought it was. The real test of how organized something is if you step away for a bit and remotely understand what’s going on when you get back.

I just spent an hour trying to figure out why a mouse click was behaving the way it was, and it turns out it’s because I did something “clever” that was actually just kind of lazy and has an annoying side effect. It’s easy enough to kludge this by throwing in an extra check, but I should really redo all the scripting for the controls from the ground up and all in one place this time. Having multiple objects listening to the same inputs at the same time and depending on them all to know when not to be doing things is, at best, inefficient, and makes finding bugs a pain.

The only enemy is stopping.

I’ll miss you, American Apparel, but also good riddance

It’s really sad watching American Apparel wind down, but honestly this is at least five years overdue. The company has been running on fumes for years, and there’s probably no way to disband the cult of personality around the sleazebag founder that led to this failure.

Fun fact: I worked for them for a while and the contract had a section in it explicitly saying that if you found out the CEO was up to some bad news, you had to keep it to yourself. Which means he’s always into some bad news, or else that section wouldn’t be there. He’s a millionaire, but it was always my prediction that he’d end up penniless or in severe debt. My track record with predictions is generally bad, but this one seems to be holding up.

I definitely have a love-hate relationship with the company, because I still love the products, but they absolutely deserved to die. At least we still have Penguin Original for outstanding colorful clothing, and Lululemon for revolting corporate behavior.

Modern Mythology, from the Elder Scrolls

From The Story of Aevar Stone-Singer in Morrowind: Bloodmoon:

“Hear me out,” the boy continued. “I am not yet a warrior, so my sword will not be needed. I cannot read the portents, so the people will not seek my counsel. And I am young, and not yet wise in the ways of the law. I will retrieve the Gifts of the All-Maker from the Greedy Man. If I cannot, I will not be missed.”

The Skaal thought on this briefly, and decided to let Aevar go.

That, right there, is a vote of confidence.

One summer vacation, I had a racist dog

When I was a kid, our dog was racist as hell. The only black person she ever encountered was the meter man who would invade her yard once a month to check our water usage. So when we took a road trip many years later, we were going through downtown Atlanta and she was flipping her shit. It was an entire city of meter men.

Why are gaming nerds so terrible?

I’m apparently spending a lot of time wondering about the psychology of terrible people.

I am late to this and only catching up but the misogynistic storm raging in the gaming world about indie game dev Zoe Quinn is insane and terrifying. It’s not the first time this has happened and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s always depressing to remember that something you love so much can have such a disgusting and toxic culture.

But why the hell is gaming so uniquely ugly in this regard? The world of entertainment is a misogynistic place. In competitive fields where individuals are vying for attention (such as film or electronic music), women are generally paid much less or consistently overlooked. It’s quiet, effective and nasty. Video games, apparently, are a different bag of oranges. Why can’t they just quietly drown women’s dreams like everyone else? Why does it have to be so incredibly explosive and violent?

I have a guess, and it ties into what is basically the unraveling of traditional nerd culture.

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Ideas for Free! Ghosts vs. Zombies

Zombies are dead, right? As in, ceased to be living, they are corpses just shambling along without their resident spirit, waiting to be put down by some nerd in a fedora or whatever. Whether it’s the old zombies and being done by magic, or new zombies and being done by infection, they’re dead.

So a bunch of people get turned into zombies, but they still have shit they never did, so now they’re ghosts, yeah? And they see their own dead bodies going around being assholes, so they decide they have to do something about it. This is a great idea, guys.

But I hate zombies so I want somebody else to write it. Fuck.

What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?

Most of my thinking on the continuing brutality in Ferguson, MO. has been less about the protests themselves and more about what on earth the police might be thinking. Their behavior has been not just ruthless, but so consistently bizarre and they are clearly operating in a different world from everyone else. Their frame of reference has to be completely different from that of everyone on the outside.

But yesterday, after some short and inexplicable peace when the police took a breather, they were back at it, this time breaking out LRAD sound cannons, and I think I figured something out. Looking at the protest section of the Wikipedia article, a few of the American incidents have something in common: they’re protests organized against very large institutions. Two of the deployments were against a G20 meeting and against Occupy protestors. It was also deployed but not used at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

And here’s where I think the fault is: the Ferguson Police Department things that this is one of those. They think people are raging against the machine, and they just need to be scared away and everything will go back to normal, and the freaks will be beaten back into their little holes. What they don’t seem to fully understand is that the institution being protested is them.

Continue reading “What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?”