Reasonably productive weekend. Spent a good deal of time with friends (H’s b-day shindig Sat., E&J coming up for brunch Sun), did some cooking (made dinner (steak, hummus, sour cream wrap things), Korean snack thingies with Ei-Nyung Sun., made chocolate cupcake frosting Sat.), did some weeding (Sun.), played some games (finished Assault Heroes, some PGR4, some GTA4, some Advance Wars: Days of Ruin), took the dog out a couple times, changed the oil in the Metropolitan, bought some food for the week…

Pretty nice weekend.

We’ve been getting up earlier and taking Mobius on longer walks in the morning for exercise. It’s been good so far. I’ve been wanting to go swimming during lunch, but the problem is that the pool’s just far enough away that to walk there and back would mean I’d have basically no time to swim, and now that I carpool most days, walking’s the only choice I’ve got. I asked if I could take a bike there and store it somewhere, but there’s nowhere to keep it, and the company won’t let me keep it at my desk.

Been trying to do pushups and crunches regularly, but so far it’s been sporadic because I’ve overdone it and ended up too sore to do a reasonable set the next day (or day after) – gotta start slower and work my way up.

One of the weird things that’s been working at least a little is that for a really long time, my default response to something would be, “Yeah, sure…” but the reality of it would be, “Yeah… ‘sure.'” I’d keep the option open but almost never act on it. Now, the goal is to simply make the default answer “yes,” whenever possible. Dinner? Yes. Wanna go see a movie? Yes. Wanna watch Battlestar now? Yes. Weed? Yes. Exercise? Yes.

It’s been a good shift for me, because having the default be effectively “no” meant that I spent a lot of time *not* doing stuff, and I’d fill the time by surfing the same two dozen sites I visit regularly or watching TV I didn’t really care all that much about.

Oh – this week, one goal is to figure out how to replace the seat upholstery on the Metropolitan. The vinyl’s cracked and it needs to be patched because the unprotected foam gets wrecked really, really quickly. There’s a place on eBay that sells really nice three-piece stitched seat upholstery, but the original one’s just a single piece of pleather. If I can get a piece of suitable pleather for <$20, I'll make it myself, but if not, I'll get the one from eBay.

My doctor is a worthless piece of shit. It took a month to get an appointment, and due to a miscommunication with their scheduling people, I’d had the appointment recorded at a different time than they did. While I was 20 minutes late to their time, I was 30 minutes early to mine. They were utterly dismissive – the error must be my fault, no, you’ll have to wait until JUNE to rebook. Hayfever? Oh, well. JUNE.

Fuck you you piece of shit. I’m finding another doctor. One who isn’t a fucking asshole.

After a really whacked out sleep schedule freakout on Friday (Ei-Nyung went to sleep at 8:30 and I went to sleep at 2), we had a pretty reasonable evening. Cooked more Korean food, which is always nice, and I made a batch of Japanese curry for later in the week and a drop-off for the extended Team.

Sunday, we went to Klay & Nana’s for brunch per tradition and we caught a matinee screening of Iron Man. Holy crap, it was awesome. Best superhero movie next to Batman Begins, and honestly, if I saw it again, I could see changing my mind. Whoever did the mechanical design for the suit is a genius.

The movie is surprisingly character driven, to the point where it’s almost disappointing when it turns into a (still pretty damn good) action piece. After the movie, we came home – we’d bought stuff Saturday for some temaki sushi, so we cooked up the rice and turned a once-frozen slab o’ tuna from the Korean store ($10 for a pound of sushi-grade tuna!) into half spicy tuna (Japanese mayo, sriracha, sesame oil, green onion, and for laughs, a finely diced jalapeno) and half a randomly concocted poki-style thing (garlic, shallot, ginger, green onion, soy sauce, sesame oil). Some unagi, avocado, cucumber, takuan, ume, and home-grown shiso rounded out the mix, as well as some shrimp ceviche and (strangely) macaroni salad that Eric, Christy and their guest (whose name I can’t remember how to properly spell) brought over.

After that, as all our social gatherings seem to devolve into, Rock Band, which lasted about two hours. Good times.

Definitely need to catch Iron Man again when it’s at the Parkway.

What’s interesting about that movies is that when it’s all said and done, you *really* want to be in the suit. It’s sort of the perfect situation to have a good videogame adaptation, because it’s as close as you’d get to fulfilling that fantasy, short of (gasp) using your imagination. But it’s strange – obviously, flying around in the Iron Man suit would be incredibly awesome – but more, I think I just want to have a dream and pursue it with that sort of single-mindedness and have some hope of success. It’s not like that’s not possible – as always, the problem is with my inability to self-motivate in this regard – I feel like I stick to the status quo because it keeps the potential dream (of success) alive, instead of producing the potential reality of failure.

Seems like a really lame position to take, but there it is. I just need to convince myself that other options are possible too.

Articles like this one have been all over the intarwebs the last few days. I’m just curious why headlines aren’t more like, “McCain Says the Blatantly Obvious Three Years Too Late” or “McCain Speaks Truth to Power at Utterly Irrelevant Time.” Why the fuck does it MATTER that McCain’s criticizing the Bush administration? It’s conventional wisdom at this point that the response to Katrina was about as terrible as it could possibly be – McCain’s not “criticizing the Bush administration,” he’s saying things everyone already knows to be true.

Yet the press spins away.

Disgusting.

Bleah. In a bit of a funk. Two of the guys I hung out with at work have recently left – one for Harmonix, and one for Bungie. If you made a list of the “most jealousy-inducing places to work in games,” the only other companies on the list would be Valve and Blizzard. On top of losing two people who were both really good and fun to hang out with, it really makes me wonder what I want out of my career in games, and why I am where I am.

Right now, things aren’t bad. I’m really happy with the state of the game we’ve been working on, and I think it genuinely has potential to address a really long-standing problem I’ve had with games in a really interesting way. It’s not “art” – at least, not yet – it’s just entertainment, but I think it’s entertainment that has the potential to be pretty damn good. The problem is that the company is hemorrhaging talent, and it’s at the point where there’s only one other designer (the guy I carpool with) who I know has what I’d consider real talent. There’s one guy I think is pretty good, two that I don’t really have any experience with, and one I think just doesn’t have it in him.

So, the thing is, even if this game gets put into the pipeline and gets a full budget, does this company have the talent to make a genuinely great game? Maybe. That’s about all the hope I can muster for the future. At the same time, if I ask myself, “Where else could I work?” the answers aren’t good. There’s the four mentioned above, but they’re in different places, and moving isn’t really an option I’m interested in pursuing. In the Bay Area, there’s EA Redwood Shores, Sega, Crystal Dynamics, Double Fine, Factor 5, Backbone, Planet Moon, Secret Level, 2K Marin, Nihilistic…

2K Marin’s obviously got a lot of hype – with Bioshock the critical and commercial success it was, they’re clearly pushing for a huge hit with Bioshock 2. Someone recently asked me why I hadn’t interviewed there yet, and frankly, the problem is that I don’t know what I’d do with a Bioshock 2. The gameplay mechanics weren’t what “made the game,” and the story… was done, in Bioshock 1. There’s nowhere to take that story.

You could do something thematically similar, but the things that made Bioshock distinctive and unique were really one-offs – you’d have to pull off something equally challenging and unusual, but in a totally new and different way. And *even if* you managed to pull that off, you’d only ever be the successor to Bioshock. It is in some ways, a lose-lose situation – not even enough of an interesting challenge to be motivating. Bioshock 2, unfortunately, is a game that *shouldn’t exist*, and as a result, I can’t really imagine wanting to devote two years of my life to that project.

Obviously, it’d be great to make something that was a commercial success – that’d be grand. But more than that, I want three major things:

1.) To work with people I enjoy working with

2.) To work on something I am personally proud of

3.) A sense of creative ownership (even with collaborators) over the work

Point 3 isn’t really gonna happen at any of the major companies, but point 2 would definitely be facilitated by working at a place that really knows how to make quality games. Point 1 is a tossup, and something that’s always hard to find – but not impossible. There have been times where I’ve really enjoyed working with the people I work with – they just haven’t lasted very long before the situations were shaken up.

Feh. If I were honestly totally motivated – to the point I’d need to be to *actually* start an independent development, I would work on something in the evenings outside of work. But I don’t. I have a tool I *should* be writing stuff for, but I can’t find it in me to sit down and work on it. Why is that? Fear of failure? I dunno. I can’t explain it. I should just do it.

Oh – one other thing – having now spent some time with the iPod Touch – it’s an incredible piece of hardware. While it’s missing some of the functionality of the iPhone, the thinness it achieves as a result actually makes it feel really, really different. While the iPhone’s sort of chunky, this thing feels like a really … futuristic thing. I mean, what it really feels like is nothing. It’s just a screen – yet it’s also an iPod, plays video, surfs the web (in a remarkably useful fashion), tells me how to get places, allows me to read e-mail, blah blah blah.

More than just a really neat phone, or a really neat iPod, Apple’s onto something that feels like it could really be the future of computing. For what 90+% of what I need to do, if all I had was the Touch or an iPhone, I could do exactly that. The only limiting factor is the physical size of the screen, and the speed at which I could type on the thing.

I can’t say I have any good ideas about how to resolve those issues, but when they are resolved, which they obviously will be, this actually feels like it’ll be the future of computing.

So, not really all that much to post. I guess outside work, there’s not a whole lot going on that isn’t hanging out at home, with the dog or random friends. Work’s actually going pretty well. I think we’re on the right track, and actually going to be making something that’s potentially quite good. I’ve got a prototype running with stuff I’ve hacked together with existing tech, and it’s actually fun to play. Stable enough that other people in the company can come by, check it out, and have a good time – more, they come back for more. That’s a really excellent state to be in for a prototype, so I’m pretty happy about that.

Got a bit of a cold last week which knocked me out for a couple days. Dealing with the f’ing city for permit stuff is a nightmare. Turns out, we can’t get any money of the $4,800 they charged us because the *previous* permits were “undervalued.” I went down to the city to ask how the F they can charge us extra for permits that have expired, but they basically said, “tough shit,” and that was that. It’s true the previous permits were undervalued, but they claimed that when re-opening expired permits, they do a revaluation as part of the process, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

So, fine – we’re out ~$5K, but more than that, it’s the last goddamn time I get permits for work done in our house. Fortunately, all that’s left is a remodel of the main floor bathroom, and I just don’t give a shit whether we get permits for that or not. Fuck those guys, “fair” or not.

The kitchen’s still awesome. Still getting a little used to the layout, and because the panel eliminated a couple units of cabinet space, the pantry area feels a little cramped, strangely, but it’s still pretty spectacular, and I don’t have any complaints about it.

We still need to paint. I keep putting it off, mentally, and as a result, end up putting it off in practice as well. We’ve gotta tape up, put some dropcloths down and knock out the primer and paint in a day or two. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, but if we do that, it’ll be only the second room in the house that’s legitimately *complete* – the only other one is the downstairs bathroom. The downstairs bedroom would be as well, except for the window leak. Once that’s proven to be fixed, we need to repair the water damage, add trim to the window, then that one’s done as well.

Whee.

Been sort of tired recently as well. Maybe it’s got something to do with the sickness of the previous week, but I’ve been feeling kinda run-down. Just sort of a loss of momentum as well. There was a period where I was painting the Mini, doing stuff on the house, etc. It was good – these days, I find myself looking at webpages all evening, which is a totally pointless waste of time. I feel like I’ve got to take control of my time again, and make sure that I’m doing something – even something entertaining – just not something tedious and pointless. I’ve got a couple small things around the house that need doing – a vent cover in the downstairs near the window in the living room needs installing, the Mini still needs to get its last couple coats of paint on the roof, and the lawn needs some serious weeding.

Still, work’s going well – the project is finally satisfying, on the right track, and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. The guy I was having trouble with before has worked out – we’re working really well together, and I’m perfectly happy to admit that while my frustrations about the work environment were legitimate, my judgement about his potential and his personality were incorrect.

Groovy.

Crazy day today. Took care of a bunch of errands, made a good double-batch of buta kakuni, had friends over for shabu-shabu & Rock Band, took Mobius to the beach, and made some headway cleaning up the spare room.

Of course, I also ended up falling asleep in the hammock in the mid-afternoon and as a result burned the living crap out of some balsamic I was reducing, but other than that, hey. Not too bad.

Played around with the iPod Touch that Ei-Nyung got for me for my birthday. It’s pretty incredible – so much functionality in such a tiny device. One interesting thing is that a couple of my friends have been working on porting Aura, our GBA game from a couple years back, to the iPhone, now that the SDK is out.

Kick ass!

So… the kitchen’s done… with one exception. The permit can’t be finalized, because the inspector found out there were unfinalized permits. Fun. Re-opening the permits today cost $4,800, and the inspector’s coming tomorrow to do the first round of inspections.

*sigh*

Still, on the positive side, the kitchen’s done (for the most part). On another negative side, there’s something weird going on with our fridge. It appears to be keeping things cool, but it’s reading out that it’s at 68 degrees. Which is obviously not refrigerator-like temperatures.

*sigh*

So, today’s been weirdly good and bad. On the positive side, it’s been ten years as of today since Ei-Nyung and I started seeing each other! And I’ll leave it at that. With more pictures of the kitchen.