Retrospective

I'm breaking my strict one post per month maximum rule to reflect on a couple of realizations that struck me quite recently.

First of all, I've now been on the job for six months. That one was pretty startling to me as it certainly doesn't feel that long. Looking back, I really threw myself into this world, and that time just blew by me. It's not a bad thing... quite the contrary considering how much I enjoy my work, and I guess it just comes with the territory to an extent. I've really been fortunate to not only get into the game industry, but also work on an amazingly awesome game.

Which brings me to the second point. I realized that the first time I ever heard of Spore, I was sitting in CIS 300, my first game design class in college. It was the prof's lecture on his trip to GDC, and that seems so far back to me. There was a lot (nearly 3 years) of game development I did at school after that moment. As someone pointed out to me (at GDC of all places), several generations of GDIACers left Cornell with the hopes of working on Spore. I don't know if that's funny or sad or just weird. Anyway, it struck me as interesting at least.

inane is too good for this

Seriously. I sat down, determined to show signs of life on the interwebs. The motivation was there... hell, I even had some things I really wanted to get down on paper... er, well whatever you'd call this.

Nothing. I must have half-written half a dozen things and ended up deleting each one. I'd just get part of the way through it, realized that even I didn't care what I was writing about anymore and trashed it. And this always came after spending the time to meticulously rework that first half to my obsessively particular satisfaction.

I'm not sure what my problem is. Not like it sits very high on the list of worst problems to have, but still. I can't even seem to write for me anymore, and that's just damn irritating.

Maybe I'll feel it better tomorrow... who knows?

Ping

I'm amazingly tired from 3 days on the road, but I figured I should at least show some signs of life here. For reference, driving from Dallas to San Francisco is hard. The route has lots of desolate land which is surprisingly dull to drive through. The one day stop in Vegas was a nice bonus as well.

I've got just over a week before my career starts. I don't think the whole moving out, real life, working world thing has really sunk in yet. Perhaps it's the fact that I'll be making games... or maybe it's just the tired talking.

Anyway, once I get settled I should restart my regular presence in the blogosphere (wow I hate that word). See you next week.

Livelock

It's relatively late, and there doesn't seem to be much promise of sleep in my near future. Do I need to lose sleep over something? Not really, but sometimes I just get this way. It's not really serious insomnia (like I'm qualified to say that), I just can't get my mind to slow down long enough to feel tired.

The problem with this state is that it tends to be wholly unproductive. I have plenty of things I could be doing and many things that I want to be doing. However, my brain is racing in so many directions at once nothing really gets accomplished.

Now that I think about it, this state of existence almost always results in a blog post of some sort or another. I find that throwing some thoughts down onto virtual paper helps me focus and eventually tone down some of the craziness in my head. Okay, that last sentence just made me sound like a nut. Don't you just love this extremely extreme stream of consciousness writing style?

I wish I had something more interesting to say at this point. I guess I thought something would coalesce out of the random. Yet another delicious entry for the inane tag... what would I do without it?

Time Capsule

I guess it makes sense to do another one of these post things. Having one a week allows me to pretend that this is a regular deal. I could probably be writing more if I wasn't a few weeks away of finally moving away from home. It's not that sissy going to college style moving away neither... this is full on, change of permanent residence, we're turning your old room into something else, don't come back because your own parents will charge you rent, for serious moving out.

The first lesson of all this? I have a ton of stuff. It's quite ridiculous and fairly surprising. Most of my time is being spent systematically categorizing all of my belongings into one of three categories: haul, ship, trash. The first two is everything that comes with me to California, everything else goes in the trash (or gets donated if applicable).

My overall operating footprint is pretty small, but apparently I haven't thrown anything away since middle school, so there's tons of junk that I have no reason to keep. It's been a very interesting experience, as I dig through piles of things I'm slowing going backwards in my own past. Quite strange really, because you don't properly appreciate how much you've changed until you start following the paper trail. I've found notes from 7th grade that make no sense but we're clearly important enough to stash away in a drawer.

The whole process has been surprisingly emotional. As things resurface from the depths of my room, memories both good and bad come along with them. Then, more often than not, the physical remnants get purged from my existence. That can be a good feeling as it reminds me how much I've grown over the past decade. On the other hand, it can be a reminder of good times long past, spent with friends that were once close... our interactions now limited to the occasional email or phone call or the even more rare reunion-like gathering.

More than anything it shows me how important relics are to the process of keeping one's history. They act like pointers into a memory that's generally hard to freely access. It makes me want to keep a camera on my person at all times, in hopes of not missing or forgetting something potentially important. It may not be a life recorder, but it's a start.

Here Comes the Rain

...again. Normally, I wouldn't blog about the weather because that's dangerous close to the world of inanities that includes what I had for lunch or what flavor of floss I decided to use today (cinnamon? Thrilling). However, the weather in Dallas has been fairly unusual as of late... and I got one (albeit obvious) 80s pop reference in there, so we should be good.

We're one week away from July. Usually that means only one thing in Texas: dry and hot. Instead, we've got another week of rain in the forecast and highs just barely starting to crack 90. Our precipitation MTD/YTD stands at 6.53/27.51 compared to normal values of 2.83/18.51 (all in inches of course). Now, I'm no meteorologist, but that strikes me as rather unusual. I don't recall a time in recent memory that we weren't facing drought conditions in the summer. Granted, we've still got time left to dry up, but we're having an awfully wet start to the dry months.

Of course, now that I've written this, it's unbelievably obvious that it is of little general interest. So we're getting unusually high rain during an unusually mild June here... big deal. I could try to extract some relevance out of it by going off on global climate change or something, but I'd much rather try to come up with another 80s reference to end this on a high note.

It's the end of the world as we know it... (double prizer)