Parents

One thing we’ve been doing when going to my parents’ house with the kids has been to basically incentivize them to want to go to the grandparents’ house. Despite my dad just sitting on his iPhone the whole time, my mom will hang out with the kids – they played Qwirkle this afternoon, and they have a pretty good time. They often get sweets from my mom, and they like running around on the flat yard, which is a nice change from our house – they played frisbee for a bit this evening.
I, on the other hand, have been anti-incentivized to go to their house. Every single time I go, I’ve got literally hours of manual labor to do, and every week, it just piles up and up. More, every time a weekend passes and I *don’t* go, by midweek the next week I get some text from my dad saying that he & my mom got in a fight, and she’s a.) so stressed she’s going to leave him, b.) has obvious memory problems and I need to take him seriously, or c.) some other shit.
And no, none of those things are true. But they always weigh on me. So the only associations I have now are a.) lots of difficult, often frustrating physical labor, and b.) being the only bulwark holding back my parents’ implosion.
Every goddamn week.
And it was alright before I had a job. But I have a job now. One I like, sure, but it’s still got a lot of stress & effort, and now I get to go from that to a job I’ve grown to despise, sacrificing what amounts to half my weekend to deal with them.
I get why my mom feels trapped. It’s driving me bananas. And I feel terrible for feeling this way, but also, fuck – half of this shit they can take care of on their own, they just don’t because I’m here. And Ei-Nyung posited that maybe they do this to have an excuse for me to come over, but if that’s the case it’s a terrible plan, because it’s going to explode in their face in a hurry. Or it won’t, because I don’t have any fucking choice in the matter regardless.

Random Photos

I think I need to get off of WordPress. The site’s just too junky to be considered a modern blogging option. The way it handles media files is garbage, and its interface is just … ugh.

Anyway. Here’s some recent photos.

 

2017

Well. 2017 on a national level was an obvious dumpster fire. On a personal level, it started out terribly. Wonderspark had some very long odds for survival, and despite making a game I was really proud of, we couldn’t find it an audience in time.

In March, we ran out of money, and shut the company down.

Ei-Nyung and I spent the bulk of the year unemployed. In every way but financially, it was a pretty spectacular time. I learned to kiteboard, we managed to move my parents out to Concord, we spent a lot of time with the kids, going to Dublin & London, Tahoe… it was a really good summer (aside from the stress involved with moving my parents). I took on a contract design job that was an interesting foray into health-related stuff, and then in October, a friend of mine, Chuck, dropped a job in my lap that I couldn’t pass up.

So I took it. I’ll write a little more about it later when it’s more public, but not only was it perfect on paper, but after starting, I’ve become even more excited about it as it’s developed.

The kids are great. Still a wonderful team. They’ve spent so much time making things, drawing, telling stories… it’s great to see how creative and constructive they are. J’s a generous older brother, and K is amazing at keeping up with someone almost twice his age.

We’re just north of Atlanta now, hanging out with Ei-Nyung’s side of the family – the kids get along great with their cousins.

Will post pics later.

Star Wars

I’ve got today off, and was contemplating going to see The Last Jedi again, but instead decided to watch The Force Awakens in the background while doing other stuff.
One thing about both TFA and TLJ that I really appreciate is how different the jobs they had were.
There were so many details in TFA that feel so natural now, but when seeing it for the first time, were significant, and important to be there. The ways in which Rey’s personality and life are conveyed are elegant and brilliant. The tension before Chewie and Han step on to the Millenium Falcon. The blaster bolt hanging in the air.
TFA had to resuscitate a franchise that was largely dead to me. It had to remind me of the awe I felt when I watched Star Wars for the first, twentieth, hundredth time as a kid. And yet, it had to feel new. Enough. It boggles my mind that they were able to walk that line.
People complained about how it felt like New Hope v2, and yes, it absolutely does. That’s its job. But it also gave us a bunch of new paths into the universe. New characters who were *different* than their New Hope counterparts.
And then TLJ’s job was to really blow that all apart and show us how Rey isn’t Luke, how Kylo Ren isn’t just an echo of Vader. How all the beats that we were expecting could be subverted and repurposed, and for the seeds of the new Star Wars, that were planted in TFA, to grow in their own directions.
I’m listening to the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack now, and one of the things that I really enjoyed about 2049 was that while it was consistent with the universe, it did the same kinds of things – it continued some of the critical hallmarks, and still forged new ground. It illuminated the original without overshadowing it or subverting it, and it extended a lot of the themes of the original without feeling like it was a slave to the expectations it created.
Maybe that’s why there’s such a backlash among the whining manbabies about TLJ. It’s a story that in large part, doesn’t feel like it owes anything to the fans.
It takes its direction from the story, and its potential for the future. It’s not there to give people what they think they want.
I love that about TLJ. And I massively respect the monstrous task they had with TFA. Both are amazing works of threading impossible needles. To me, they (and 2049) make it through with elegance, delight, surprise – and they honor the source material.
I’d love to see a Denis Villeneuve take on Star Wars. 😮

One Shot

One of the things that always ticks at the back of my mind is that we only ever get one shot at this. Many days, it often feels like we can try try again – but much of life is once and done. The kids aren’t babies anymore, and I expect I will never be a father to a baby again. I expect I will never start a company again. Go caving again. Do a triathlon again. Maybe – there’s always a chance. But it’s strange. I will never be who I was again. I can only become who I will be.

Star Wars Battlefront 2: WTF???

Played the first level of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 with Luke Skywalker in it, and it is, as far as I can recall, one of the worst single levels of a game I’ve ever played.
And it’s not just that mechanically, it sucks. But oh my god mechanically, it sucks. Swat flies with lightsaber. No actual skill involved. Do it for a long time. Have to do it again. End level. From a gameplay perspective, it’s garbage.
But the early parts of the level and the narrative are even more jarring. You’re Luke Skywalker. You’re on a weird planet, so you go exploring. You feel something in the Force. You run into a bunch of Stormtroopers. You mow them down without a second thought.
At some point midway through the level, you come across a member of “Inferno Squad”, the squad the main character is part of. This guy is one of her close compatriots. He’s trapped. So you free him. Luke doesn’t kill this guy. And he asks, “Why didn’t you kill me?” and Luke says basically “I killed those Stormtroopers because they didn’t give me a choice. You did.”
And it’s *insane*. Luke just killed dozens of soldiers literally without a second thought. And then for purely plot reasons, he not only saves this guy, but teams up with him, and then expresses “We’re not getting out of this without each other,” which is *nonsense*. Luke’s an incredibly powerful Jedi. This guy is basically a badass TIE fighter pilot and nothing more.
The whole story is so off the rails and Luke’s behavior is so nonsensical that it’s really disconcerting to me that this is a canonical story. And then for the last half of the level after meeting that guy, you swat bugs. For 10 minutes. It’s terrible.

I Got Mine

There’s a political debate going on on a friend of mine’s post (on Facebook), and there’s a right-winger who’s gamely arguing their position. He’s articulate, and detailed in his explanations of his ideology, which is interesting because most of the arguments I’ve seen from right wingers are unintelligible racist/misogynist/homophobic nonsense.
So this guy’s at least trying to make arguments couched in a kind of intellectualism, which is a nice change of pace. I can even follow his logic in many places, and it seems at least internally consistent.
The problem is that the internal consistency *constantly* just leads back to something along the lines of, “I’m a self-made success, and I deserve everything I have. Everyone who isn’t a success deserves not only failure, but nothing from me.” Basically, it’s an ideology completely codified around being a self-absorbed asshole.
I got mine, fuck everyone else. They failed because they’re unworthy, there’s no system that’s stacking anything against anyone, because *I* succeeded.
I guess it’s better than outright misogyny and racism, but it’s couched in a kind of “intellectual” distance, which is also in a way significantly worse. Like James Damore, there’s a pretense of rationality, but the arguments are hollow and unsubstantiated, they just *sound* better than “waaah black people.” But it’s all the same morally vacant shit.

Freedom

I’d seen this a few days ago and read it, but something about it really just hit me, and I feel stupid that it’s taken me this long to really understand it.
I understand, intellectually, the following:
  • Black people are always at risk of being stopped by the police for no reason, and often get killed.
  • Women are constantly under threat of abuse, rape, physical violence, emotional violence, etc.
  • Poor people are constantly criminalized for things that would be trivial for middle-income folks.
  • Trans people are basically constantly under threat of physical violence, and can’t feel comfortable in society because we don’t create any space for them.
The list goes on and on. I understand all those things, and intellectually, I get it. Here’s the thing that flipped for me just now, and it made this all really resonate with me in an emotional way.
I am free.
They are not free.
I want to live in a world where we are, all of us, free.

In-App Purchases

It’ll be interesting to see the effects of EA giving in re: IAP on Battlefront 2. I think they were in a rough spot here, kind of a hole they dug & stuck one foot in, and then attracted the internet hate machine. Nowhere to go from there.
But let’s say that the internet wins, here. Let’s say IAP is out. Woo hoo! Hey, *I* think that’s a perfectly fine thing. As someone who did IAP for a long time & justified it to myself, I’m much happier not having to think about it. But I like games. And games are $$$$$$ to make.
So what happens? The audience doesn’t instantly double in size. Yet some companies right now are making 50%+ of their revenue in IAP. So you cut out 50% of revenue. What happens next? The execs lose out on their huge-ass bonuses? Sure. That’s part of it. But then cut down the development budget of your future game, and make it a lot higher risk for a company to make a big bet.
What’s the result? Smaller and *more conservative* games. More things that riff on existing successes. Less willingness to take chances. Will it be a heyday for smaller devs? Of course not, don’t be stupid.
But it will make fulfilling the ever-increasing expectations and entitlement of the AAA-gamer crowd more and more difficult, more risky, etc. I think the internet thinks that this means that devs will be free to work on premium games without IAP. I think they’ve just traded one devil for another.
We’ll see.

Anatomy of a Story

Started reading a pretty excellent book called Anatomy of a Story, by John Truby after seeing it constantly quoted in a neat YouTube series called “Lessons From the Screenplay”. Part of what made me check it out was that it focuses a lot on structure, and the bits in LFtS really resonated with the process I’d been percolating in my head about how I wanted to write something next.
That is, I *love* the NaNoWriMo stream-of-consciousness model for “shaking ideas out”, but it results in a terrible *story* because it’s just essentially a long string of pseudo-random events, and I’d never developed enough structure for the stories to be interesting or meaningful beyond whether any random event was interesting or meaningful.
Whereas my favorite stories are all a distillation of a single idea, and that idea pervades everything about the story. So about five (?) years ago, I was thinking about what I wanted to write for NaNoWriMo, and it was a story about someone who woke up in unusual circumstances, and had lost their memory (cliche so far, I know), but was face-blind.
And the whole point of this was that as they unraveled what was happening, the way they perceived other people would change. The story would start with everyone looking like those blank drawing mannequins – literally no distinguishing features, so that the audience has no distinguishing features to pull from. But then as they discover things about what is happening, they start to see everyone as representations of a celebrity that embodies that “thing” – whatever it is. But *everyone* looks like that person. It’d be kind of like Being John Malkovich, but the fact that it’s John Malkovich in the moment is a reflection of something specific, and the person changes from scene to scene. The idea was that I wanted people to be recognizable as someone, but for that someone not to really mean anything other than acting as a symbol for an idea. If this were a movie, though, it wouldn’t be like Being John Malkovich, where it’s all digital replacements. You’d have to find just a shitload of lookalikes. Different in subtle ways, but in ways you wouldn’t pick up on unless you were really observant, and even within a single scene of the main character talking to that person, the actor might change every cut.
As they circle in on things, and start piecing things together, they realize that the character elements within the celebrities that are who they’re seeing are indicative of ways in which they have interacted with the world by giving those things away. They’re too passive. They’re too agreeable. They’re too accommodating. They do this maybe in part because of their condition, but they also do it because this is what a lot of society conditions us to do – to give ourselves away to fit in, and this is essentially the extreme version of that. The character is face-blind and can’t distinguish anyone from themselves, but functionally, no one could distinguish who *they* are, either, because they have no distinct personality of their own.
At some point (and this is where things really start to escape me), the pieces of those personalities would come together, you’d grow to understand that those things are the distinctive person that this person *is*, and you’d start to get a clearer picture of who they are. And of course, in true Film Noir style the person at the center of whatever this mystery is is themselves, who they saw in a reflection but thought was someone else, because they can’t recognize themselves by sight.
And the story probably ends with that – they’ve begun to figure out who they are, but their condition doesn’t change, and because of that condition they can’t themselves solve the mystery, even though the reader can. But the progress & growth for the character is they do begin to understand who they are, and that journey of self-discovery is what leads them to the solution, they just never get the satisfaction of feeling it.