Deet de dee

No, there's no reason for this post. None atall.

So, well, hello Internet travelers! Hope you're feeling fine!

This is shaping up to be a very nice morning

Birds are chirping, laundry is finally bopping around in the machine, I’m drinking coffee from someone else’s cupboard, and this morning there’ll be a parade. Sounds like the start of any good SyFy natural disaster movie.

For awhile now I’ve been looking forward to today, and these next few weeks, where I’ll sit in an old familiar house, with its old familiar dog, and hopefully write some things.

It was a surprise to hear (late in the evening yesterday) that one of my first duties sitting this beautiful house would be to play host to a few dozen paradegogers, most notably the local Library Book Cart Drill Team. This is a real thing. One or two dozen librarians, from many different county libraries, shall make the trip into town. Here they will uniform up, claim their squeaky and authentic library book carts, and then roll, twirl, and swoosh them through the parade with practiced synchronicity.

The drill team leader has a whistle.

This is my very favorite dog. I’d like to claim myself as his very favorite human, but lament that his love can be bought with any small amount of bread and/or popcorn.

And yes, there are Christmas lights on the palmish tree behind me. They have not come down in the past five years.

This Could Be My Favorite

Socrates said that writing killed the memory. Wonder what a harddrive does.

It's neat to find yourself snooping through one of many discarded 'documents' folders, only to find a really good poem. At least, one you like. And I personally liked stumbling upon this one:

the magic catalyst, knowing
names of elements that color the sky
truths that swim behind a friend's eye
dynamics of contrivance to let men fly

subtler nudges at questions of why
do well to kindle all that growing
yielding fields to wisdom's flowing
that slivers of flesh
like legs through a dress
after long night's sigh
surprise we voyeurs by regular showing


I like what happens towards the end, though I'm still new enough to poetry that I'm not totally sure why. Good feeling. For my birthday, recently, I inflicted an entire chapbook of poems (called Nightmare Paint) on exactly three of my friends. One, in Norway, got a fully digital version, whereas everyone else got printouts of a bunch of .txt files. Not sure why, but Notepad is one of my favorite places to write.

So, yeah. Teaching again. Loving that I get to build a hybrid game studies/media theory course, and loving the media ethics/developer ethics course I get to keep building.

Otherwise, machinations apace.

We Dub Thee, “Asskicker”

This last week was a good one. I threw and attended some great parties, watched a lot of horror flicks, and did some writing that’s got me fairly-well jazzed. The highlight was probably Christmas eve, where Grandma and I watched Bing Crosby romance some dames.


The simultaneously very neat, and very not neat thing about writing as a pseudo-profession, is that it never quite feels like I’m allowed to talk about the Bigger and Cooler Stuff.

So here instead is the shot glass that my sister and I hath dubbed, “Asskicker.” She’s a well-known glass-blower and ceramist here in Seattle. And before you, in all of its pixilated glory, is Asskicker: an utterly unique, and utterly ass-kicking drinking vessel.



Yeah, baby.



Nailed that detail.

Oh yes I did.

Some Happenings

Seattle’s Penny Arcade Expo, which now seems to go by the name PAX Prime, was sufficiently action-packed to deserve its own post. It’s getting the deluxe treatment, in the form of some type of specious games article you’ll be able to find in a bit. It’ll include banter with booth babes, banter with people who created my favorite games ever, banter at sexy parties, and reflections of unadulterated wisdom. For now, this is me and some new friends (these three from the Escapist) driving to Chinatown a day before PAX began.


yay new friends (from left: a hidden John Funk, Janelle Bonanno, meself, and Kelly Helder)!

PAX held much adventuring with friends old and new, yet little good photographic evidence. Sorry, internets.

Continuing this multimedia extravaganza shall be a poem I scribbled down after a beautiful evening catching up with old friends. We were camping at a site somewhere along Mt. Ranier, next to an expansive lake. It’s of that very much out-of-the-way kind of place, reachable by odd winding dirt roads, that you always seem to share with heavily-armed hillbillies and the kind of women who’ve mastered the obnoxious drunken come-hither scream. Our first night camping, both came out in full force, firing off what must have been a barrage of .223, 12-guage, 9mm, and vodka rounds from atop a big rocky outcropping a few meters from our tents.

I of course wetted and forcefully blew on my bicep, in order to make powerful farting noises, which seemed to confuse them sufficiently that they moved down the lake a bit. This was a comfort for our entire party.

The second night, we spied a brave law officer, and heard far fewer and far more distant gunshots. That day had been an exhausting mix of heavy drinking while floating lazily on a lake log, and heavy drinking while sitting around a fire. All with sunshine, which I certainly wasn’t used to. Folks progressively went to sleep, until it was just myself and one of my favorite people in the world. Here’s the poem.


Embers

The day comes to a close
Cicadas surround with their notes
Dragon eyes form in wood’s grain
On fire as the pit slows to dying

I join a friend from far away
We move from the fire as night
Comes alive, and we speak of moving on
Until the cicadas go silent

Tobacco smolders, weaves shining lines
Dimming slow as satellites in the sky
Fire’s embers breathe orange from their core
Log styled like Aztec dog huffs flames

Hours later in the sea of black
Its eyes remain in points of light


Gamasutra was gracious for even accepting Psychology is Fun, let alone accepting it a hefty few months late. At the time I really did consider it some of my best work – though it could have conveyed certain ideas better. It was a little horrifying, for instance, to see folks think I was actually attacking Ian Bogost. I agree with the man, and more importantly learn from what he has to say, most if not all of the time.

That’s all the updating that comes to mind just now.

But Not Yet

This is not The Promised Post. That I've been legitimately busy (maybe for the first time in my life) makes writing about the past few months evermore the daunting task for one so traditionally lackadaisical. Or lazy, lazy probably works better. I'm indulging the lazydazical side today, sipping hot chocolate in the Seattle drizzle.



Yes, this coffee mug moonlights as a cereal bowl.

Language is Beautiful moves along, that's the main point for this post. It's a game on poetry that's been submitted for the IGF, and, though maybe not where it should be (existentially), some great feedback came from folks at Meaningful Play and my lovely friends, both on and off Facebook. The best analogy is that a bunch of crazy people have poured rare and fragrant coffee grounds into my brain, the water is still hot, and the redesign, it percolates.

It's taking time, and that's fine. I'm not making instant coffee. I'm making multiple designs to reflect how we read poetry, in a non-game-ethnocentric sort of way. That is, the value and weight of the words should, ultimately, balance with the value and weight of the interaction.

And for now I'm home, safe, and chocolated.

Fine, Fine

I'll update my CV. Happy now?

A lot's happened since my road trip down to Sunny Southern California. I'll make a post about it. Later. Promise.