Been a while since I’ve written anything. Since you can’t RSS this blog, I’m sure no one’ll see this for weeks. Ha.

So. If you haven’t already heard, we’re having a kid. Specifically, if everything continues to chug along as it has, we’ll be having a son in October. No, we don’t yet know the name. Stop asking. 🙂

Ei-Nyung’s younger (I’d originally written little, but he’s not that little anymore) brother is coming out to visit for about a month starting Saturday. Starting *Wednesday*, we’ll be getting the floors refinished. It’s all pretty crazy. We’ve been painting the new drywall for the last five or six days – I’m just about as sick of painting as a single person can be, and more, both hands are totally cramped from the pressure required to get a thin coat of paint out of the rollers. I picked up a Napa cabbage at the store this evening, and could barely hold on to it.

Tomorrow, we’ve gotta move the remaining stuff outta the living room so that the floors can be sanded. Should be fun.

It’s pretty crazy how different it all looks.

On the work side, Taxiball’s been out for a couple weeks now, and it’s chugging along. We got featured in the “New & Noteworthy” section of the Games page on the App Store, and while it’s been good at generating momentum, and the game continues to sell, it’s not taking off like a rocket. We’ve got lots of really, really positive reviews from review sites, but it’s not driving traffic to the game. Advertising on Penny Arcade’s really entertaining for me from a personal perspective, but hasn’t paid off in terms of a return on the investment.

The next few things we’ve got in the pipe are all really, really exciting – and given Taxiball’s positive response, I’m confident that the next games will be as good – it’s just a matter of getting them out to an audience. We’re gonna keep updating Taxiball with new content, and see how it does – we have some really oddball plans coming up, so who knows what will eventually make the game “tip.”

Anyway. Gotta get someone to look at the outside of the house – if we can get the water leak fixed before winter, then that’ll be all the major house issues, save the upstairs bathroom, complete. Who would have thought?

So… Taxiball’s been released to Apple. It’ll be up on the App Store when they put it there, it seems. Who knows how long it’ll be.

Quite strange. There are a couple previews posted on the web – one on iphonegamenetwork.com and one on theappera.com – looking forward to seeing their reviews. Also had someone very, very influential play the game today. It’ll be interesting to see what happens from there…

Hrm. Odd. Pensive. Nervous.

Was reading the Alinea cookbook again, and Grant Achatz mentions that he was inspired for a dish by some tree roots he saw while walking with his kids through a park. He also talks about how he’s always pulling inspiration for his food from the rest of his life, and how basically, everything he sees passes through this filter of “how could this influence food?”

Reminds me of two things – the first, Shigeru Miyamoto’s descriptions of his inspiration for Zelda (exploring caves as a youth) and Pikmin (his then-recent obsession with gardening). And obviously, they’re fundamentally the same thing – someone who is so saturated by something that he breaks apart the rest of his (or her) existence and views the world through a very specific lens.

The second thing it reminds me of is a thought I had a couple months ago, but couldn’t really explain. I’d been reading a bit about how the mind processes things, and I haven’t read enough to really talk about it with any certainty, but there’s this idea of “chunking” things – creating shortcuts in how you process information around you so you don’t have to process every detail every time you see something.

Ei-Nyung used to say that she never really noticed what model cars were – basically a car had chunked to “car” where all cars were fundamentally the same, where for me, I’d chunked Mazdas and Toyotas and Ferraris and the like, then later broken up those chunks into RX-7s and F430’s. I find that the idea of chunking seems to explain the holes in my memory – how I process past events is really reduced down to a few (to me) critical details, and almost everything else appears to be disposed of. I dispose of who was at an event, for instance, while this is clearly one of the critical things that many (most?) people seem to place as a high priority.

So, the thought was this – basically, Achatz uses food as a hammer to break through the chunks. Most people look at a tree and see a tree. He understands food as flavor, form, presentation, etc., and then breaks the tree down into those things – the tree then becomes the inspiration for some aspect of the food. Miyamoto understands gaming as interaction, character, game systems, etc., and then un-chunks his world based around those things.

It seems to me that a lot of these sorts of creative breakthroughs seem to happen when you take something very ordinary, that you look at every day for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then use some “hammer” to break apart the chunks, and find some detail that’s relevant, or interesting, or that other people are overlooking. In which case, a person’s specific expertise is basically their mining hammer, and the way their brain has stored information is the quarry. You can enrich the quarry by learning new things, but until you take your hammer and break the stuff apart, you’re not really mining.

Hrm.

In most weekends of mine, any one of these things would have consumed the entire weekend on its own:

1.) Flew to Chicago, and ate at Alinea. The most mindbogglingly insane meal I’ve ever had, without question. Would recommend to anyone, but it’ll really only be worth it if you’re a bit of a foodie.

2.) Went to Kraken’s wedding and hung out with a bunch of TEPs.

3.) Met (for the first time in person) three people I’ve known for almost a decade, and hung out with some other good friends as well.

Then flew back. Exhausted, happy to see Mobius, missing Ei-Nyung (who continued on to Philly for a week), and looking forward to the future!

Taxiball’s close. Very close.

Went and played Broomball for a friend’s birthday tonight. Basically ice hockey sans skates, with a smaller stick. Big fun – landed pretty hard on my left hand, but no serious injury to be had. The only thing is, dang, I’m outta shape. Not up to the hour of running around like a madman, and ended up swapping out for goalie a good portion of the time.

Still, very entertaining. Between this and go-karting, have had an eventful couple weeks. Next week, maybe the bits and bobs for the arcade stick will arrive, and I’ll have a weekend o’ building.

Really looking forward to the Mini running, as well. Need to give the roof another couple coats of paint, then start working on the rest of the body. Woo!

Today was basically the perfect day. Went swimming in the morning, dropped off the Mini at a Mini repair guy (clutch needs replacement, unfortunately (~$580 was the estimate)). Looking forward to being able to drive it around during the summer.

Then took Mobius to the dog walk, and just hung around for an hour or so outside while he jogged around. Gonna go play Broomball tonight for a friend’s birthday. Gonna be rad.

Oh – that thing was the first pass at the SelfAware logo – basically, you have to imagine the eyes slowly blinking into existence – then, when they “pop” open, the “backlight” glow fires up. It’s basically an iPhone with eyes, with the screen facing backward. In the second revision, the eyes are red, and the font’s different.

Whee-ha!

Things have been going really well so far with the whole new work arrangement. We’ve picked a name, and barring legal conflicts (which I don’t forsee), our new division is called SelfAware Games. The idea is to simply refer to it as SelfAware, in sort of the same way you never call Insomniac Insomniac Games. I’m down to basically 1.1 jobs from 3, and it’s made my life a hell of a lot easier.

Just turned 33, which is sort of odd. Not bad, or anything… just odd.

Been playing Halo Wars, Killzone 2, Resident Evil 5, and MadWorld. An interesting bunch of VERY high profile games released in an unusual timeframe. I can only hope that the major console developers have finally gotten off the “must release during holiday!” bus. It’s only taken four or five years of catastrophic clusterfuckedness… sheesh.

Anyway – the games are all good, in varying degrees. Halo Wars is good but simple. Killzone is good but the controls are a bit wonky. RE5 is good but the controls outright suck. MadWorld is good, but … relentlessly grim, and in many ways, disturbing enough that it’s unpleasant to play.

On a totally different note, went Karting for my birthday (thanks, Ei-Nyung) and had an absolute blast. Jess took some nice pictures, including the one above. I really, really enjoy go-karting. I suspect I’d enjoy a day at the track just as much, but the risk factor for karting is much lower, which is a pretty serious plus, particularly given that I have no training driving, which I’d definitely want before doing a track day.

Still – big fun, and I’m looking forward to going again sometime relatively soon. No videogame driving comes even marginally close to the experience. One of the funny things was that the night before we went (it was supposed to be a surprise), I’d watched “Truth in 24“, a documentary about Audi’s 2008 run at the 24 Hours of LeMans. The documentary was awesome, and it definitely made me want to go race. I’d even IM’ed a friend saying I was gonna organize a go-karting trip the following week. So the surprise was really, really well timed. 😀

Saw Watchmen the other day as well, and it was a really good interpretation of a story that I wouldn’t have thought possible to condense into a 2-ish hour movie. I have no idea how it’d translate to someone without having read the book, but as a companion to the original story, it’s actually pretty fantastic. Made me go re-read the book, and it’s a really good story. As a movie, though, Watchmen is worse than the story, just because of its density. V for Vendetta, on the other hand, was better as a movie than a comic, IMO – and remains my favorite Alan Moore movie. 😀 Still want to go see Watchmen again, though.

Other’n that, life continues to chug along. It’s been, and is going to be, a very, very interesting year.

Gotta work out plans for a trip to Chicago at the beginning of May.

So, as of March 11, 2009, I’m a Co-Manager of Social Concepts Gaming. It’s a division within Social Concepts that’s run by Colin and me. We’re making games, almost entirely on our own terms.

I think it’s the start of something really interesting, and one of the first times I’ve started a job and not actively thought from the start, “Hrm… I wonder what’s next?” Barring catastrophe, this is a job I could see myself at for the remainder of my career, if we do well. If we don’t? Sure, obviously, there’s that. But there’s very little about this arrangement I could imagine wanting to do differently.

Here’s to the start of something different!

Just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s new(ish) book Outliers, and really, really enjoyed it. Like all his books, the stories are interesting, it’s a really fast read, and he draws a lot of very clear connections between the stories and the arguments he’s making.

More, the underlying argument makes a great deal of sense. The notion that a person is more than just their immediate selves is one that Americans don’t seem to put a lot of faith into, but by taking a look at a number of very successful people and trying to figure out what kinds of things led to their success (or in some cases, lack thereof), Gladwell makes a really good case that where you’re from matters, but more, and better, that basically anyone can actively *do* something about it.

For me, thinking about a future where I’ll one day have kids, it’s an interesting way to think about what kinds of things we’d do while raising them. I know I love a lazy weekend in the hammock or on the couch, but the book’s reminded me how hard my parents worked to give me the opportunities I had, and how much of who I am I owe the hard work they put in to keeping me fully engaged all the time.

Repayment for that would seem to be best done in kind. The days and days and days my mom spent waiting to take me from one activity to the next… those days I inherit, and pass on to my future children.

So… in what appears to be an absolutely monstrous burst of ridiculousness, as of mid-afternoon today, I’m officially employed at the same company Ei-Nyung works at for 3 days a week. What makes this *ludicrous* is that I only took a $2,000 pay cut from my salary at the start of last year to go down to 3 days a week.

:O

Seriously, it boggles my mind. In the other half time, I’m doing design consulting for another project, which has been pretty fun so far, and working on an iPhone game with Colin. This provides enough $$ to keep us financially stable (though we’ll know for sure in a couple months), and time to work on these other side projects, which are riskier.

It’s ridiculous.