So, I went to sleep and felt fine last night. Got to sleep at a reasonable hour, slept a good night’s sleep, and woke up with a blinding headache. Every time I sat up, the lights turned up, and I had to lie back down. It felt like someone had my head in a vise. Painful. Spent most of the morning in bed, then by afternoon, felt good enough to wander about the house. Went to a new chinese food place on Lakeshore, which ended up being more Panda Express-y than I’d have liked, but it was still actually reasonably ok. Almost regardless of quality, it’s nice to have another restaurant on Lakeshore.

Spent the rest of the day playing games, then in the evening, decided to do a bit of gardening, which I did for maybe 30 minutes, before I got frustrated it was so dark, and tired, from moving dirt. It’s strange, how satisfying the work is, though. Ended up digging up a huge cluster of bulbs that were just about to sprout, so that was really good – saved me some trouble in the future. Still trying to dig out a bunch of roots, but the process is just really slow. You’ve gotta dig around the perimeter, then start cutting the roots away until you work your way to the main “trunk,” which then requires either a sawzall or an axe to get through. Again, satisfying, but not necessarily easy or fun.

Something a friend of mine said on his blog reminded me of bits of my adolescence, and for some reason, one of the memories that bubbled up to the surface was going to Redwood Park, in high school, and mountain biking. Or rather, the weird thing is that it reminded me of a time I went to the park, and *didn’t* have my bike. I would walk the trails, but imagine I was on my bike – “brake here, pedal pedal pedal, left around this root cluster, wheelie, pop up the rear wheel. Pedal pedal, brake, right around the rut, left over the root, jump the small gap back to the right, pedal, brake turn hard right back off the seat, drop off, I’d probably have fallen there… pedal pedal, shift to an easier gear pedal UP wheel up over the root, shift weight forward, pop the rear wheel up, left into the rut, ride the rut whoa, that root would have surprised me, and over I go.” That sort of thing was really commonplace. Days after a ride, I could visualize every detail of it.

I’d do the same for swimming races – I was so familiar with certain pools, I could feel the texture of the walls against my feet, and know how careful I’d have to be when turning. I could see every detail of a hundred yards of breaststroke, when to breathe, when to kick, and pull, how far I’d be from the wall on my last stroke, where I’d surface from the pull-down… The whole thing. I don’t think I bother to do that at all for anything anymore.

Weird.

There’s that saying, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There was a discussion at work today that basically centered around the fact that a good portion of the team isn’t involved in the design process, and is, as a result, feeling left out. I had sort of an epiphany – when I first started designing stuff, I went to everyone I could get my hands on, for input, for feedback, just for perspective. I would bounce ideas off of everyone, because people simply have different skills and ways of looking at things, and it’s good to get as many people involved in the process as possible.

So, it was weird to sit there and think that basically, I’ve stopped doing that. In part, because last year, I did a huge portion of the design and implementation of a system in almost complete isolation, I got used to having to rely on figuring out how to do things on my own. I still tap the resources I have – I’ve been talking to one of my friends, who’s got an incredible amount of experience, and always has good ideas about how to implement pretty ludicrously complicated designs. So it’s not like I’ve been ignoring the resources at hand.

But I definitely haven’t been reaching out beyond the people I feel like I know really well, and part of that is simply training – you learn that everyone else is busy, and so I figured that I had my work to do, and everyone else had a similar amount. But this year, one of the things that’s really fucked is that we had essentially no production staff – no one to run the schedules, to set people in motion, and to make sure that people had interesting work to keep them occupied.

So, part of that fell to us, and we failed to do it right. It’s strange, though, how quickly it becomes easy to isolate oneself – part of what it takes to be a designer in this industry is to be fearless, and have no ego. I’m not good at either of the two, but I’m learning.

You have to be fearless, because you’re putting your ideas on the line. You send them out into the world, formed from your head, and they come back to you changed, crippled, mangled, and sometimes, much, much better. But your flaws are in those ideas – the things you overlooked, the things you didn’t take into consideration when you should have, and more. Every mistake burns – it makes you feel stupid, and inadequate. every time someone comes to you with a question – “why didn’t you do this,” you’re forced to wonder if you made the right decision, and if not, why.

One of the most important things I learned from my dad at my last job was that it’s often not that you need to make the *right* decision – it’s that you need to make the *best* decision. You need to take your information, and you sometimes need to move forward, even if you have no assurances that you’re right. School teaches you to be right – to make sure that you have the correct answer. The real world teaches you that quite often, you will be, and you’ll need to be wrong, and that waiting for the right answer will mean waiting forever, when there’s so much to be learned by simply moving forward, making the mistake, and learning not to do the same thing next time.

Which, of course, ties to the lack of ego. You have to be able to distance yourself from your work – you have to understand that sometimes, it won’t be the way you want it to be, or that you’ve made a terrible mistake, or things need to get cut simply because we don’t have the time to implement it in the way that you want. And through all of that, you need to not take it personally, and continue to strive to make the best thing you can.

The last thing, I suppose, is that design is really a service. In part, what you do is that you create, but the other part is that you take other people’s ideas, and incorporate them into the whole. It’s not like painting, where you take your vision, and make it reality. Maybe one day, games will be like that again – but until then, designing games is part facilitating collaboration, and part visionary creative genius. Ha.

It’s been strange – the last few weeks have been patently awful, at work. The situation with a number of the perosnalities on the team has been really grating, and I found myself perusing Gamasutra’s job listings today. But we met tonight to discuss a number of these very same issues, and discussing them opened my eyes, in one respect, to the fact that I’ve been using only a hammer, and in art it let me vent some of my frustration at how badly this team’s been run so far. It seems like we’re moving toward the right track. We’re not there yet, but we’re walking in the general direction.

Just saw the movie Layer Cake – it’s a British gangster film, sort of like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch (I mention those simply because Guy Ritchie was originally slated to direct), but a bit more serious – less obviously funny, and a lot more tense. I really, really enjoyed it, and am actually interested in seeing Daniel Craig as James Bond, now, where I had no interest before. If he brings any of the intensity he brought to this, it’ll be quite interesting to watch, and it’ll put Bond in a totally new place on the map.

Recommended.

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.