part of a blog meme thing. You wanna write about the same subject? Do it.

I remember when I was young, living on Chetwood Ave. in Oakland, it was the kind of place you could go play out on the street – safe, uncrowded, friendly. You could spend all day doing somersaults on the lawn, or biking up and down the street, which is pretty much all I did.

Apparently, one day, I went over to our old neighbor (probably 85, at the time – she’s passed away now, RIP Vera Edwards), and said, “Yes is the opposite of no, and no is the opposite of yes!” This was, apparently, a revelation to me at the time, and I said it with a sort of “Eureka” air about it. I don’t rememember it too clearly, so I suppose that doesn’t count. She told me about it years later.

One thing I do remember fondly (sorta) is trying to teach a cat to somersault. There was a little black cat that hung out on out lawn between the driveway and the hedge that bordered our neighbor’s house. I somersaulted on the lawn, trying to show the cat how to do it, and ended up spraining my shoulder. Fun times.

Eating The Kitchen Sink at the Ice Creamery on Grand, with my dad and my cousin.

Lying on the grass in front of our house, years before I’d develop allergies that would pretty much make such a time impossible.

Spent today home, sick. Played a bunch of games, went to the optometrist, took the dog out for a couple walks, and cooked some risotto.

The games:

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat – fun arcadey shooter. A really weird hybrid of arcadey and realistic, the single player is oddly compelling, yet still too strange for me to really get into.

Perfect Dark Zero – at times excellent, at times completely directionless, f’ed up garbage. It’s actually really strange – it’s clear a *lot* of work went into this game, but it’s really strangely unfinished-feeling. I know it was rushed to make launch, and so I feel bad dissing the game, but there are times when it is *so* poorly done that it’s almost unplayable. The “stealth” aspects are horrible in almost every respect, and are almost game-ruining in and of themselves.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted – much better than the Underground games, the cop chases add a level of uniqueness and chaos that was sorely missing from the series. Easily the best NFS I’ve played, and there have been a lot of ’em. Not nearly as pretty as PGR3, but in some respects, more fun.

The optometrist:

I believe these will be my next glasses – Oakley Chop Top 4.0 in Olive Titanium. I’ll find out Saturday at noon, if they’re “affordable” or not. They’ll probably run ~$350 pre-VSP, and probably about $100ish with insurance.

I figure I’ll get some Oakleys, becuase I really love their sunglasses, and they’ve got stellar customer service. $300’s exorbitant for sunglasses, but for prescription glasses, it’s more or less the standard. So might as well go for something I like, instead of like, Ralph Lauren, or Hugo Boss or some crap.

The dog walks:

Standard ’round the blocks stuff.

The risotto:

Mushrooms, cannellini beans, bacon, arboio, rosemary, chicken stock, onion, celery, butter, parmesan, deliciousness. This was complemented by Joe’s coppa-wrapped shrimp. When we ran out of coppa, I flash-fried the rest of the shrimp in butter & olive oil. Delicious, as well, and made for a fine dinner.

Ah, fun. Back to work tomorrow – I think I’m feeling better.

Meetings have a rhythm. Get the right people in a room, a goal, and some pressure, and you can achieve some pretty wicked progress in a short amount of time. When a couple of my friends used to come over on Sundays to talk about game concepts, and work on fleshing ’em out, we’d make incredible progress in a relatively short amount of time, simply because we had the right chemistry – the right “pop” that would be able to mix casual, friendly conversation with incredibly interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

We’d play off each other’s ideas, and the banter had a natural back-and-forth that just … flowed. It was effortless, by and large.

The group of people I tend to meet with now completely lacks that “pop” – and it’s problematic, when you’re on a schedule, and you’ve got meetings all day, and they all drag like you’re mired in quicksand. Last week, just before leaving for break, we had a quick meeting about one particular aspect of the game that was missing some of the usual attendants – that meeting was hands down the best one I’ve been in so far on this project. People contributed, the banter boiled the good ideas to the top, and the end result, I believe, was so far, the most interesting concept we’ve had so far, as a group. (Yes, it was a meeting I organized, but I bear only some responsibility for not *driving* the meeting.)

The problem, here, is that we have a couple *very* forceful personalities on our team – and they tend to be the most experienced voices. The problem is that they don’t understand the concept of a meeting having a rhythm – the only thing that seems to matter moment-to-moment is getting their thoughts across. Yes, you need to convey your thoughts, but you also have to understand the ebb and flow, and read the personalities in the room, to know when linger, and when to move on. We have, for instance, one extremely experienced person on the team who I respect a great deal, but is hung up on a concept everyone else has bought in to. The *problem* isn’t that they don’t buy into it, but rather, that they bring *no* new means to *approach* their problem with it. It’s the same questions, over and over. And slowly, to boot – every time they talk, the meeting screeches to a complete stop, simply until they get their sentence out.

The problem, of course, is that a good meeting is like a rolling stone – it has momentum. It takes time to get it rolling, and if you actively stop it, it’s difficult to get it rolling again. You can nudge it in a different direction, or you can get it rolling slightly faster or slower, and pull everyone else along with you without breaking up the momentum. But stop the thing, and everyone falls off. We have two people who are regular attendees who stop the rock every time they talk, because they can’t understand the momentum that’s been built. The project’s EP, who’s also functionally the design lead, blows the rock to bits every time he’s in a meeting. It’s disaster, and it wastes everyone’s time.

Moreover, though, it robs us of the productive, crazy idea farm that a good get together can be. I *love* working in good meetings, when we’re all on fire. But the design meetings right now … they’re like being hit in the head with a hammer.

Man, this weekend has been for shit. Sick and stuck in bed Wednesday through Thursday afternoon (pretty much just before T-day dinner), then finally feeling better, and dinner on Friday destroys my Friday night-Saturday afternoon with nausea. Lovely! Five days off, and I spend basically ~3 of them ill. Whee!

Went to a new restaurant last night, called Herbivore (http://food.helava.com) and had the “Lemongrass Noodles” which for various reasons, was the worst thing I’ve eaten in years, far and away. I mean, just absolutely terrible in every respect. To top it off, though, it’s made me constantly nauseous *just* to the point where I’d like to puke, but can’t. So all last night was spent on the verge of vomiting, but being unable to. At 8 this morning, I couldn’t take it anymore, went to the store, and got some Pepto Bismol. If in an hour, I’m not feeling any better, I’m gonna make myself puke, which is something I’ve never had to do before in my entire life.

I swear to god, that meal was like eating poison. I should have sent it back to the chef, and asked them if this was how this shit was supposed to taste, because I’m pretty sure the dinner wasn’t supposed to taste like detergent and bleach. Ugh. It feels like my innards are revolting, and trying to escape through my throat, but something’s preventing it from happening properly.

A good friend of mine, Kevin McCormick, died last week. I didn’t really know how to deal with it, then – the shock of it, the circumstance, it all became just a haze I didn’t know how to walk through. A memorial site was put for him, that contained people’s stories, and pictures of him, and the things that he did. He was a great engineer, in the true sense of the word – curious about the world, and the kind of guy who decides to make things happen.

He was always doing some sort of project, whether it was rigging up an electronic jukebox for a bathroom in the years before .mp3, or building a crazy loft for a room, or firing a carrot through a box of Bisquick with a compressed air cannon. I’ve never known anyone to have as much stuff as he did – he’d pick up anything that seemed even remotely useful, if it comtained something novel.

I have a really terrible memory for events, and so it’s rare that I remember specific chain of events with a particular clarity – but I remember one night, FB had brought home an old HP tape drive. This ran some tape, maybe a half inch wide, on reels maybe 12″ in diameter. You’d feed the tape cartridge into the machine, and it would spool out some amount of tape, into the machine, whose top was clear plastic. You could see the flexible tape fed into the machine, and it would be grabbed, by a pair of rollers. If the rollers missed the tape, a jet of air would try to push the tape into proper alignment, and the rollers would try again.

I remember that the first night he brought home this tape drive, we watched it for something on the order of a half an hour, as the tape fed, missed, realigned itself, failed, pulled the tape back in, spooled it out, and then finally caught. We watched this loading sequence over and over, simply marvelling that someone had thought that a jet of air could make this happen, then had actually made the whole thing work. That sense of curiousness, coupled with his his intense drive to actually *make* things, and a creative, artistic vision… well, it’s a rare quality, and one I doubt I will ever again see embodied with such intensity.

I’m glad I remember that moment – I’m grateful and proud to have shared a quiet moment with Kevin, marvelling at the wonderous vagaries of the world.

In the last several years, I remember seeing Frostbyte only twice, both at weddings in Boston. One time, he gave me (and many others) a tour of the Warehouse, which was just an astonishing place, with Fred Fenning’s old laser equipment, and Frostbyte’s assorted electronic stuff. It was pure chaos, but beautiful in its industrial and artistic functionality – chaos you could only appreciate, knowing that the conductor in the center of it all knew every bit and bauble that was in those piles, and that if it was ever needed, this was where it was supposed to be.

I never told Kevin that I loved him – I don’t think I did, at any rate. I don’t tell many people I love them, even when I do. I have what is, to me, a surprising number of friends who I feel genuine love for, and I rarely if ever express it to them. Just not that kind of guy, on most days. Hell, I rarely ever tell my cousin I love him, and he’s as close to a brother as I can imagine. I love him to pieces.

No, I don’t really know where this is going.

I thought of something sort of selfish. At one point in college, I came inches from being run over by a car. I had skidded out in the first rain of the season while biking to a hobby store, and managed to slide across an intersection into the path of an oncoming car. The car had seen me slide, and stopped in time, but literally inches from me. I had a moment where I thought to myself, “this is it, that’s all I get,” and my life flashed before my eyes. I know it sounds trite, or cliche, but it honestly happened, where every memory I had of my life up to that point played out for me in sequence. I thought it was curious, when it reached present day, that I hadn’t actually died, so I rolled over, to hit my nose on the tire of the car that had stopped. That’s how close I had come to death – a nose. But the notion that your life flashes before your eyes – true stuff. And the thing that occurred to me, was that I hope maybe Kevin remembered that moment, watching the HP tape drive, as well.

I didn’t know how to respond to Kevin’s death, until tonight. Ei-Nyung and I were talking about her NaNoWriMo plot, and she was telling me about how one of the characters worried about whether he’d be remembered after he died – probably influenced to some degree by the recent events, even if not intentionally. And Colin had just come home and said that at Kevin’s memorial, more people showed up than the venue could accomodate, and it struck me just how incredible and appropriate that all was. Frostbyte got a real kick out of bringing people joy. He’d play music he loved, and hope you loved it, too. He’d show you something cool, and hoped you’d find it cool, or inspiring. I always thought that one of the things he really loved was seeing that creative spark that he had, lit in others through his actions, and I imagine him standing outside the chapel, watching people go in and out, remembering his extraordinary life, and revelling in the joy he brought others.

I have a very clear image of Kevin in my head, but few clear memories of our time together – I have a very bad memory for events – the sequence of events themselves. I couldn’t remember, literally, anything that we had done together for days after I’d heard he died. I had this image of him in my head, and he simply wasn’t doing anything. He was standing there, waiting for some memory to animate him. After hearing all the stories, and seeing all the photos people had posted, he’s really come to life again – I can see him walking around, doing things, talking to me – it’s as thought I can reach out and touch him – and in that, the loss becomes concrete – only now, do I fully understand what I will never see again, and it just utterly, compeletely breaks my heart in pieces.

I wish I believed in an afterlife. I wish that Kevin could understand what kind of impact he had on me – that I could sit on a couch with him and reminisce about the old days, and the days yet to come. I wish I could tell him how much he meant to me, nad how many times I was just in awe of his genius. I wish I could hug him, see him smile, look into those intense, blue eyes and see him laugh. I know it’s all in my head, I know that he’ll live in my memory, and that the image I have of him how – the clear, animated, vibrant image of him, I’ll remember forever.

Gah. Dammit, I’m crying again.

So, we had the ship party for our game tonight, and I’ve gotta say, I was really let down. Our executive producer was falling-down drunk, so drunk that he could barely coherently read the “awards.” It was just embarassing, and showed a real lack of respect for the team, to me. On top of that, the whole team “awards” thing was just a management circle-jerk, and so poorly thought out, it was simply astonishing.

Basically, our management team was removed, to go to another project. Everyone above a particular level was excised to move to this other group. And almost every one of them got an “award.” Upper management rewarding middle management, or the new team rewarding itself. It was just really painful to watch a falling down drunk guy giving himself a pat on the back. It was like a bad (or maybe good) episode of The Office, and I lost a whole hell of a lot of respect for the guy.

That’s not to say some of the awards were undeserved – a lot of them were. But some of them were absolutely insulting, to me, and I expect, to the team. And particularly given that the vast majority of these awards went to people who went with management to the new team, well, it really felt like a hearty “fuck you” from the now-departed “leaders.”

Well, fuck them – seriously. We had more than a few people not in management, myself included, absolutely bust fucking ass to make a great goddamn product for these guys, and this jackass gets up on stage to drunkenly wank his friends? Marvelfuckingous. The lack of acknowledgement of contributions outside the management team was insulting, and the drunken idiocy doubly so. Color me really fucking unimpressed.

A reference to this.

Obviously, everyone’s situation is different, but it’s about as parallel a situation as you can get. Here was a man, one of the most creative and intelligent people I’ve had the incredible privilege and joy of calling a friend, dead from an ecstacy overdose. I haven’t talked to him in years – our lives, and lifestyles drifted apart towards the waning days of our time in college, and though I didn’t talk to him often, he was one of those people who simply is a building block in your life. Now that he’s gone, I feel… nothing. I expect that I will, but at the moment, I only feel regret – I don’t expect there was anything I could ever have done to have changed the course of events. He knew what he was doing, and did it with gusto. I’m not sure he was ever comfortable, until towards the end of college, when he found acceptance, and a lifestyle he felt at home in.

Dammit, I want to feel sad, I do – but I don’t. I’m angry, I’m depressed, and shocked – I want to let go of those feelings, and just let the tragedy of it overwhelm me with sadness. But it is tragedy – he brought it on himself, and I can’t feel any sadness without it being tied to anger, or remorse, or regret.

I hope he died, loving every goddamn minute of life. I hope it was worth it, Kevin. I’ll miss you.

So, there’s a comic out there I won’t link directly, called The Pet Professional. It’s “written” by a friend of Scott Kurtz, the guy behind pvponline, which I read on a regular basis. It’s basically about a hitman for pets, but it’s one of the worst written, most poorly laid out, humorless pieces of crap I’ve ever seen. So, it’s not like that’s unusual – there are few people who can really write and draw funny stuff on a regular basis (the artist is someone else, and his art, while feeling kind of “dead” is still stylistic, and not entirely terrible). But what really irritates me is that the guy started selling shirts and other swag the moment the first strip was published. There was more work put into the *store* than the actual comic itself, and whether it’s true or not, it’s incredibly difficult for me to not believe that this whole comic is a really cynical merchandising exercise.

I mean, there’s simply nothing to it. A guy goes around killing supposedly irritating pets. But there’s no writing in it that makes any of the hits satisfying, interesting, or funny. It’s like you took a one sentence description, and tried to market that, instead of any actual content. Blah. I don’t know why it irritates me so, but I find it just reprehensible.

Whatever.

On the NaNoWriMo front, I’m at 37+K, and hoping to break 40K today. I think my current problem has stuck because I simply haven’t found any means to introduce someone new, to drive the plot along. Because the monk is so solitary and unfamiliar with the environment he’s in, he requires other characters to push him in the right direction. Without that, I’ve been sort of lost. I think that given that, as a starting point, and some of the characters we’ve already established, I know who’s coming next, and what they’re going to end up doing.

Fun!

I just love that line. Can’t remember where I heard it – I think it was a fake band name in a book, or something. (I’m sure Ei-Nyung will comment with a proper source). Been writing, mostly – http://inciteanovel.blogspot.com has the dirty details, and playing Sly 2: Band of Thieves, which is an absolutely stellar game.

Moving cubes at work, which is a shame, as I’ll lose my wonderful window onto the lawn. Basically moving to the other side of the building, still vaguely near a window, but much less so, which is kinda sad. Regardless, it’ll be a nice open space, so I suppose I can’t complain too much. *grumble grumble*

Hm. Other’n that, not a whole lot going on. Work on the garden’s somewhat stalled, just due to the ridiculously dark evenings precluding actually working on it after work, and wanting to write on the weekends. Yeah. Really, though, outside the writing, walking the dog, eating, working, sleeping, and playing games, there really ain’t a hell of a lot changed in the last month or so.