I wonder if somewhere, deep down in his heart of hearts, John McCain knows he’s sold himself out. That he’s sold out every principle he’s ever said he believed in, that he’s sold his POW experience for political profit, that he’s stood on the graves of those murdered on 9/11 for political gain, that he now stands as a man who has never held a consistent important value through the arc of his political career.

I wonder if at some point, he’ll look in the mirror and realize what he’s become.

Part of me wonders whether somewhere in him, he understands. That at some point in the future, Rove will tell him to lie yet again – to say something base and underhanded, designed to appeal to the worst fears of people, to sell his personal character further down the river, to tear down any remnants of moral fiber he supposedly has left, and at some point, he will simply snap.

He will say to us all that he is not the man he thought he was. That his cynical, opportunistic and ill-conceived choice of Palin as the heir to the most vital role in our government was shortsighted and stupid. That he really does believe in a woman’s right to choose, or that this war was handled incompetently, and that Bush is a worthless failure of a human, but that he embraced him anyway does show the content of his character and his failure as a leader and human being.

I imagine the blank stare into the camera at the moment of realization – the slack jawed moment of silence as this wave crashes over his mind and runs down into his heart. The moment when he realizes that in every respect, he has been a failure – that he has no integrity, that he has no character, that he’s sold every single thing of value in a mad, pointless scramble for political power. I can’t really think of what he’d say next. I imagine he’d sit down on stage, lost like a little boy, and wonder where it all went wrong.

But that implies there was something there to begin with, and that the plaudits he’s received in the past were actually true.

I don’t care about his POW experience. It has little bearing on his qualities as a leader, and his cynical exploitation of it shows how cheap and tawdry the experience is to him now. I don’t care about his label as a maverick. When it mattered for him to do the right thing, to stand up to the powers that be, he failed in every respect. He claims the “surge” is getting us to a point where we’re winning in Iraq, when it’s clear to everyone that the goalposts for “winning” have moved so far as to be utterly irrelevant. People see the impact of the economy in their daily lives. People who aren’t worth $40 million or have ten homes, or married into exorbitant wealth by leaving their crippled wife and children.

But it bothers me, because I know the Republican Hate Machine is effective. That it can color peoples’ opinions and get the squawking right-wing buffoons to parrot their every talking point. That those things seep into the minds of the gullible and weak, and they see that as strength and courage, though the veneer hides the total lack of exactly that. I’m awake now, at 2:30 on a Saturday morning because of that fear. Because I want to do something to change that, but know that nothing I do between now and the election will matter all that much.

I don’t have faith in America. I don’t have faith in the people. The people are stupid, media-led, disengaged, ignorant sheep, and the Republicans are better at playing to the things that make them feel righteous and scared. The Democrats want to appeal to the hope, the compassion, and the optimism of the American People. Those things are nothing next to xenophobia, anger, and fear.

I feel like you have to be mentally retarded – literally – to be a modern conservative. That there has to be something wrong with your brain. I’ve been wondering why we can categorize dogs as “alphas,” “betas,” “gammas,” and “omegas” based on their tendencies, but we can’t do the same for people.

Modern Conservatives are the Starscreams of the political world. Perenially victimized, power-hungry, and stupid. Whiny. Obnoxious. Second-rate. A loser with a big gun. I think it’s a personality type – the “worthless beta human.” Wah, me. Me me me. Pay attention to me. Ignore those that aren’t like me. Crush them as I stand on them on my way to the top. Me. These people are too stupid to be *stupid*. It has to be a mental defect.

Maybe it’s wrong of me to think that the images from the RNC on CNN somehow smack of Big Brother/V for Vendetta/etc.

But the smiling visage of Bush, the angry Thompson, the heil-ing hat people and the teargas-surrounded riot police… let’s just say it’s a very different picture than last week.

So, went to the eye doc this morning, and mentioned I’d been having some trouble seeing clearly. He took a look, and it turns out while my right eye is still 20/20 with glasses, my left eye’s gotten quite a bit worse due to an increase in astigmatism. Doc thinks that it’s due to the adema, and may still heal up to normal, but some correction may be necessary. Bleah.

Basically, though, things are still getting better – weaning off the eyedrops over the next two weeks, next followup’s in a month, so I’ll find out more then.

—

On an unrelated note, I watched Biden and Kerry’s speeches from the DNC tonight, and they were both impassioned, articulate, and moving. Kerry’s was better than Biden’s IMO, but I’m looking forward to Obama tomorrow night. More, I’m actually looking forward to McCain next week, and seeing how the media reacts to them side by side. Thing is, I really feel like the Dems have traction on EVERYTHING. There will always be die-hard right-wing fucktards who are unable/unwilling to think rationally about anything, but aside from those lunatic douchebags, the things that are “calls to arms” are all there for the Dems. Fight against an unjust war – rail against a failing economy – fight for energy independence – restore America’s dignity and influence in the world — these are things that McCain can’t even marginally talk about with any passion or involvement, or without any blatant hypocrisy.

Seeing him try to rouse the base and placate the masses when he can barely figure out what HE believes in from moment-to-moment, I’m sure the media will go completely apeshit for him if he simply doesn’t forget his own name, or the name of the town he’s in at the time. But fuck them – peoples lives are so fucked up with the housing crisis, failing banks, rising health care costs – it’s REAL now for most people – the stuff that was once abstract nonsense. The idiot right wingers only give a shit about their ideology until they need someone to save them from it. When it comes down to the issues – at this point ANY issue – I can’t think of a single thing where McCain’s even marginally in the right in any rational analysis, and I can’t think of a single thing that I genuinely believe he believes in other than his own history as a POW and that it should protect him from all criticism.

It’ll be interesting to watch. I know the election will be relatively close – the American people as a whole are complete fucking morons. But this should be as much of a landslide as you can get in the modern, disengaged, apathetic world. I hope it’s a fucking rout.

So, had another appointment with the optometrist today, and things are looking better. Definitely “comfortable,” which is good – no more pain. The problem is that my left eye’s still unable to focus properly, and so it’s hard to look at stuff for extended periods of time. Out of work ’till at least Monday. Which is fine – it’s relaxing, at least, but sort of a pain anyway. At least at this point, I can hang out in the hammock, instead of being doped up in a dark room, trying not to blink.

Heh.

Listened to something like 20 hours of Top Gear, and some comedy while I was laid up, which was all good fun. Ei-Nyung took great care of me, stuffing me full of delicious foods. She made a great strawberry granita, which goes really well with some whipped cream. Also some awesome fried rice. Yum!

Anyway – still weird – I picked up the first episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, but found I can’t play it, ’cause I can’t see the icons. Ah, well. Might be almost able to play Soul Calibur, since it’s basically giant characters moving around, and you don’t need to see too much detail. Not that I really desperately need to be playing a game, but I am getting pretty bored of Clarkson, Hammond and May. 🙂

So, Friday morning, my eyes were stinging pretty badly. Figured it was likely some sort of allergic reaction, as god knows, I’ve had enough of those. Strange, though, ’cause I’d been taking a Claritin every evening, and it’d kept the hayfever pretty much under control this year. But for the last few days, my eyes had been stinging, sort of a low-grade really sleepy-like burn.

On the drive in to work, my right eye suddenly began to burn – it didn’t turn red, it didn’t get itchy, it just started to sting like nobody’s business. I couldn’t keep it open, and tears just started streaming out of the eye. I assumed maybe an allergic reaction to my coworker’s dog, and when we got out of the car at work, things seemed to return more or less to normal.

Half an hour later, both eyes started burning. I couldn’t read anything, and sent out an e-mail asking if anyone had any anti-allergy eyedrops or something similar. No dice, so my coworker (the one with the dog) offered to take me to a pharmacy or something. On the way there, things got really bad, enough that he suggested going to the local urgent care clinic. At this point, it seemed like the sensible thing to do. No eyedrops were going to make this sort of pain stop.

So, off we went. Fortunately, the urgent care clinic is pretty empty on a Friday morning, so I was seen quickly. The doctor said it was likely an allergic reaction to something, gave me some numbing eye drops (which instantly stopped the burning), and a 50 mg shot of Benadryl in the butt. Benadryl knocks me out, and this was no exception. Owen picked me up from the clinic, drive me back to work, and I konked out in one of the unused offices for an hour and a half. When I woke up, the eyedrops were wearing off, and the eyes started burning again.

Clearly, I wasn’t able to continue working, and there was a window of time where I could see enough, and wasn’t sleepy, so I told HR I needed the rest of the day off, and drove home. The rest of the day passed pretty uneventfully, but later in the evening, as Ei-Nyung and I were watching So You Think You Can Dance (the finale, TiVo’d), my eyes started burning again. Needles in the eyes, on fire – impossible to keep my eyes open, tears streaming out – the tears felt like lemon juice in an open wound, and everything basically made everything worse.

We went to the ER, and they basically said the same thing. Looked at my eyes with a number of tools, dyed them to try to see damage, nothing. Everything looked healthy, but the pain was intolerable. Again, the numbing drops, relief. But no resolution. All I got was a prescription for Vicodin. But I suppose it would have to do. Couldn’t be picked up ’till morning.

The next morning… it’s hard to describe. Where before, the whole eyeball burned, now, everything was concentrated into a single point. I’d slept on my stomach, and it was like all the pain had concentrated into a single point at the center of my eye – the lowest point (if you were sleeping on your stomach). Opening my eyes, it was like someone was pushing a pencil into my pupil.

When I was in high school, I’d scratched my cornea – got a sliver of glass in my eye from a broken bottle at a water polo match. Intense pain. This was a lot like that. Every time I moved my eyes – either one – it was like gargling a bucket of razor blades. I could keep them wide open, in which case, I was fine – though extremely light-sensitive, so I’d get almost instantly nauseous. If I closed my eyes, razor blades. If I blinked, both. So, I kept my eyes closed, and my eyeballs as still as possible.

Called the optometrist, and was told they could see me at 1. We went at noonish, because I just couldn’t tolerate the pain anymore. The doctor was incredibly kind, accomodating, and had a wonderfully relaxed and reassuring manner. Dr. Choong Yu, I believe. Wholeheartedly recommended. He did a battery of tests, prescribed a number of medications (one for pain, one antibiotic, one anti-allergy), and gave me some contacts that would essentially act as bandages, and protect the corneas from further damage.

Ei-Nyung filled all the prescriptions (poor thing ahd to go back to the pharmacy like, four or five times to get everything), and I started taking the Vicodin. Fortunately, it basically put me out, and I only remember sleeping for hours and hours, periodically getting woken up to be either stuffed full of delicious food, or had my eyes lit on fire with some sort of medications. Not the best sort of crapshoot, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Ei-Nyung kept waking me up, every six hours, for medication. Midnight, 6am, whatever – she’d give me the Vicodin, wait, give me the eyedrops for pain, wait, then the antibiotics.

I love her, from the bottom of my heart, and never in a million years could I ask for a more loving wife. I can only hope that in her times of crisis, I’m as calm, collected, and thoughtful.

Sucks, being blind. Can’t play games, can’t red, can’t really watch movies. I ended up listening to the first season of Top Gear, which Andre had burned for me a while back. Definitely a weird show to just listen to without any visuals, but it passed the time, and I knew there was a LOT of it, so there’d be more if I needed it. Sunday passed quickly, I spent most of it asleep.

The drops were torture. I couldn’t open my eyes on their own, so Ei-Nyung would have to pry them open, and I’d have to try to roll my eye up or down out of the way of the drop – every drop, the next fifteen minutes, I’d want to just carve my eyes out, but over time, it got easier. Every six hours, two sessions of eyedrops. Seems like a stupid thing to be so pained by, but there you go.

Sometime Sunday, the contacts started irritating me more than the pain. A doctor will ask you, on a scale of 1-10, what’s the pain feel like? For me, the most pain I’ve ever experienced was when my leg would swell with blood after I’d had knee surgery – that was probably a 9. This pain was at best a 1 or a 2, if I could think about it rationally, but the problem with a constant pain in the eyes is that it’s impossible to think about it rationally. Even though the doctors had said that my vision was fine, I kept thinking, “What if I’m going blind?”

Every twitch of the eye led to stabbing pain, each pain was a reminder that something was horribly wrong with my eyes. Without sight, I can’t do my job, I can’t participate in many of the things that I really enjoy doing. The reminder was frustrating, and the frustration took the level 1 or level 2 pain up to a 9. I’d whimper – audibly – nothing I could do to stop it. I felt like an idiot, but it was literally out of my control.

Somewhere in there, I did get an answer to a question I’ve asked myself in the past – what would it be like to be blind? Would I want to keep on living? The answer is, “It’d fucking suck,” and “Absolutely, yes.” I’d learn to adapt – I could already sort of make my way around the house – clumsily, sure, but I could kind of get around. I could still think, I could still talk, I could still feel. Life would go on, even if I couldn’t see it.

Monday came, and I had an appointment with the optometrist late in the afternoon. We moved it up, because the contacts were driving me crazy, and so my regular optometrist took a look. The numbing eyedrops returned – ah, sweet magical relief – I couldn’t focus, but could also for teh first time in days actually open my eyes and mostly see.

Again, she checked, and the vision looked mostly fine – problems were still there, still needed the “bandage” ocntacts, and it looked like it’d be a few more days, still. My heart sank. Still, this time, when the numbing drops wore off, the contacts had sat better, and the constant irritation was mostly gone. By the evening, I could keep my eyes open for a reasoanble length of time – I still can’t focus, but I can generally see – enough to (mostly) touch type this post.

The pain’s still there, but a lot duller, and I can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel. Probably another couple days of diminished misery, then things will likely sort themselves out. I wish I knew what *caused* this – that’s the worst part, that I don’t have any idea how to prevent something like this from happening in the future. I don’t think it was any sort of chemical exposure, and the symptoms were totally different than my usual allergies. If this happens on a regular basis, I swear I’ll lose my mind. But hopefully, it’s just a one-time thing, and if things continue to get better at this pace, things should be good by Wednesday.

To everyone who’s already heard through various channels and sent well-wishes, thank you – it really means a lot. Scary times. Knowing you have friends out there really makes it easier.

You Are an Alien

You’re so strange, people occasionally wonder if you’re from another world. You don’t try to be different, but you see most things from a very unique, very offbeat perspective. Brilliant to the point of genius, you definitely have some advanced intelligence going on. No matter what circles you travel in, you always feel like a stranger. And it’s a feeling you’ve learned to like. Your greatest power: Your superhuman brain Your greatest weakness: Your lack of empathy – you just don’t get humans You play well with: Zombies

So, in a move that makes my life weirdly parallel with my friend Perlick’s, I’m at a bit of a crossroads. Essentially, the problem is that I don’t think I have a viable future at my current company – funding and staffing issues indicate that if I look at the long ball, the only project I want to work on isn’t going to get the money or the people required to turn it into the game it should be.

If it did – if I felt confident it had the force of the company behind it, I would stay. It has the potential to be something genre-defining. But I can’t convince myself that’ll be the case. It will languish without resources until the development process is hell on Earth. And though I’ve been getting along really well with the project lead, this is *my* game. It’s built on ideas I either cut from whole cloth, or sheperded into existence. And so it’s frustrating – not because of the lack of credit – I don’t really mind that all that much. It’s the fact that he’ll always have the final say on things, and I won’t. I know that’s petty, and the way the world works. But I also can’t ignore how frustrated I feel when he pulls the game in some bizarre direction, and I need to fight to get it back to something good.

It’s a fine dynamic, and we’re even working reasonably well together. But it’s about knowing at any minute he can do whatever he wants, and I’m essentially powerless to do anything about it. If I’m going to invest years of my life in something like this, I can’t invest what I *need* to invest in it with that feeling constantly looming over my head.

So I’m looking elsewhere. And the parallel to Perlick’s life is that the decision in front of me is a hands-on, hardcore development position at a company that has some interesting key players, or a “30,000 foot view” position at an established company. And I don’t know. Because I love the development process when it works well, but when it sucks, it really sucks, and for the last few years, it’s sucked a lot. Unfortunately, when it’s good, it’s euphoria. I just don’t have the confidence I’ll find a place where things can be sustainably good.

So maybe taking the non-development route is the chickenshit way out. At the same time, I’d be really, really good at it, and it’s something I really enjoy doing. The job essentially is what I’d *love* to have done as a consultant, but instead, it’s backed by a company, and instead of spending time trying to convince people that they need what I’d provide, they’re already looking for that input.

So the choice will undoubtedly have a huge impact on my career for the next few years. If a choice presents itself at all (the two positions are at different points in the process, and there’s the promise of an offer from one, but a little ways to go on the other). Maybe nothing will work out, and I’ll stick it out a little longer at the current gig. I dunno.

Just strange.

For now, the game blog’s moved to helavagames.blogspot.com.

So, for a long time, I’ve wanted to do some independent game development. And along the way, I’ve worked with friends to develop ideas that we thought would be cool – stuff we wanted to play. One of the things that’s been sort of weird about it is that we’ve often anticipated trends by about two years – a very “standard” development time for a game.

So, while a bunch of the ideas were good, they’re not as novel as they once were. There’s one in particular that I’m still pretty convinced I’ll make one day, but that one’s the most ambitious of all.

So, whenever I’ve said I wanted to do some sort of independent development, I’ve always felt like there was someone nipping at our heels – that the ideas had a fuse, and it hit whether we did it or someone else did. And the problem with that is that starting a company and pursuing a really innovative idea is extraordinarily difficult. What you want, I think, is to take an idea that isn’t particularly new or innovative, and put your own spin on it, and start a company with that. Known quantities – things that are predictable – things where your experience counts for something. But you’ve still gotta make it interesting.

I think this is the one: Bowling RPG.

Seriously. It’s ridiculous, I get it. But it’s perfect.

Wii Bowling is awesome. It’s visceral, accessible, and puts the player in the game in a way that almost no game before or since has. But there’s nothing to it. You bowl, and that’s it. It’s fine as a casual experience – something that you don’t dive particularly deep into. But it’s also not all about what videogames can do. There’s no long-term reward structure, there’s no story, there’s no progression of any kind other than a skill rating. There’s also no character. There’s no fantasy.

So, what if it were more? Your bowler starts as a member of his high school bowling team. You’ve got your character, a cast of your classmates, and the various other high schools you’re competing against in your bowling league. As the game starts, it’s about the competition, and working with your teammates to defeat the other teams. You bowl, using the Wii Sports mechanics, but you also get to talk to your teammates, get fired up over rivalries with the other teams, etc.

As the game progresses, you find that things are maybe more than they seem – that the bowling ball is more than a simple hunk of whatever bowling balls are made of. They’re conduits to something bigger. You start bowling more formidable opponents. They have techniques to throwing the ball – shouting names like in old kung fu movies, they can get the ball to skip across lanes, approaching the pins at a steeper angle than otherwise possible. They can hit the 7-10 split using what looks like supernatural technique.

You go on a quest to learn these techniques. You find the bowling master, on top of the mountain, and he tells you that there’s more to the world that you can see, and that you – and your teammates – have a destiny.

The deeper you get into the crazier side of bowling, the crazier the applications of the bowling mechanics become. Instead of simply bowling against pins, now you’re in high-noon style duels in the middle of a war-torn Times Square with a demon whose bowling arm is like Tetsuo’s mutated arm from Akira. As he sends his giant, car-sized ball, a flaming ball filled with crackling lightning, down the street towards you, tearing up the asphalt in its wake, you muster your last ounce of strength, call out some crazy technique, and you wind up and send your ball directly at it. Your small ball hits perfectly, shattering the demon’s ball, and it continues on its path toward the demon himself. As he spins desperately out of the way, your ball knocks down the skyscraper behind him.

Your teammates are an integral part of the story, and the bowling-based combat. You can combo attacks with them (multiplayer?), and each has his or her own backstory you learn more about as the game progresses.

The comic above is a soccer-themed manga called (obviously) Whistle. It’s a great example of a very straightforward but awesome execution on the sports manga formula. Plucky kid makes good with a small-town team, and works to defeat larger-than-life rivals. It’s great because the main character isn’t saddled with angst – he loves what he’s doing, and busts his ass to get better at it. It manges to be incredibly inspiring without being (too) cheesy. The cast of characters is diverse, lovable, and sympathetic. A game with this kind of cast of characters, with a mechanic that’s accessible and proven to be interesting…

Mechanically, it’s simple to make. It’s all in the story and the art, but the talent to make those things awesome is out there. It’s an idea that people are still chasing, because I think that there isn’t a game that uses the Wii to its full potential yet, and this, to me, does. So in that respect, there are undoubtedly people scrambling to find an idea like this, but I don’t think anyone would approach it quite in this way.

I think this is the one.

No, the picture’s not there for any particular reason, other than to just have a picture there.

Busy Saturday, but odd. Went to the Berkeley Kite Festival with Perlick (in from outta town for an interview), Colin and Jess. Had a great time watching some kite fighting, giant octopuses, and flying some kites of our own. Got a little sunburnt, which you can probably see as some rosy-cheekedness in the picture.

Then tonight, based on a text message I got in the morning, I went to a party at some high-school classmates’ house. People I haven’t seen in maybe six or seven years. At the party, sort of randomly, there were HUGE number of people I went to high school with. Some were personal friends, some were people I almost never talked to. Anne Hege, Jenessa Joffe, Madu Miller, Gabi Condi, Etienne Fang, Camilla Kardel, Soon Sohn, and Lara Moren. It was a bit odd – some of the people are always great to see – Jenessa, Anne, Etienne, with others, it was odd. Camilla clearly had no recollection of who I was, which is, frankly, probably for the best. We didn’t get along particularly well in eighth grade, but hell, that’s a lifetime ago.

Anyway – spent most of the evening talking with Jenessa and Anne, and had a great time. Strange how people bounce in and out of your life sporadically sometimes.

Last night, I made some cold-brewed coffee. Just took a bunch of coarsely ground coffee and dumped it into a pot with a bunch of water and let it sit for 12 hours. It’s supposed to have a strong coffee punch with less harshness and acidity, and sure enough, it did the trick. Tomorrow, I’m gonna jog out, get some cream, and make granita di caffe, which certainly *sounds* good. We’ll see if I can pull it off.