Renewing

I upgraded to Blogger in Beta just about as soon as I could. The reason? I suppose that I wanted to make sure I had the newest features. The best of the best. I then proceded to do nothing. I didn't upgrade my layout. I didn't do much of anything. Hell, I barely post at all.

I need to re-organize my main blog roll. Heck, clearing up my reader and bookmarks would be a feat worthy of praise. But I wanted to test the new layout functions. Out comes the old, purposeless blog. Clickety-click.

Wow... nifty!

New look, new features. Went back and added lables to the old posts. Which means I had to read the old posts.

It's amazing how far I feel I've come in a rather short year and a half (or so) since I began this blog.

I got married. I started a much more serious blog. I programmed a game for a competition. I bought a DS Lite. My wife bought a PS2. My brother moved in so he could go to the University College down the street.

It's weird, looking back. I feel so much older and more confident. I read my old posts and I can hear a much younger me talking. It hasn't been all that long, but it has been intense.

So this blog? It gets to be the lab rat. And maybe, if it is good, I'll post some more stuff here.

#1 at Marketing

Seth Godin, an accomplished author and marketer, has this to say about being #1:

If your marketing strategy requires you to hit #1 in order to succeed, you probably need a new marketing strategy.

He's talking about blockbuster movies in this post, but a lot of what he's saying applies directly to game publishers. The dinosaur game publishers are still using this model, and it is slowly killing them and their games. It means bigger teams, larger budgets, longer development time. It also means minimal design risk, and low innovation.

If you want to make games on the cutting edge, or just make games that explore new ground, then you need to get away from the idea that #1 is the place you have to be to succeed. You need to create something worth talking about, and worth playing.

If you want to be an indie developer, you need to see what Seth has to say about marketing. Start reading his blog, you'll see a who new side to marketing.

Death by Chocolate

I'm a geek. This means that the two primary chemicals that power me are Caffeine and Capsaicin. I, like all sane and healthy people, also like chocolate (which contains chemical #1). So the idea that the loves could be combined, and in a humourous type of game for a group of chocolate loving friends, is pure joy.

I give you Chocolate Roulette.

12 chocolate bullets. 11 are filled with sweet, yummy goodness. 1 is filled with red chilli pepper death. Who will bite the bullet, so to speak? No one knows.

I want this. Someone should buy me this. I'll even go first.

Word Flow

For those of you familiar with Eric Burns and Websnark*, I'm going to try something. I'm going to try to prime my own word pump and build up my momentum by simply putting to page something, anything. You see, I have an article for a monthly round table that I want to write. I've had this idea in my head for over a week.

I like to get an idea, and let it simmer. It builds for a few days, collects other ideas around it, and at some point coalesces into a whole. Up until a little while ago, I used to let these ideas slip past. They would flit by as a stream-of-consciousness rant, or inner-monologue. Or I would talk to myself for half an hour and get them out that way. Recently, I've been trying to trap them in type. It's been working Ok.

I wanted to write the piece on the weekend, but (as usual) life was busy and I barely had time to relax, let alone type. The whole idea actually formed, ready to be written, on Monday. If it wasn't for work, and the catch-up that I wound up doing from the overly busy weekend, I would have had it then. I let it slip past.

Now I've lost the damn thing again. It feels over-boiled and dry. I've misplaced the focus. I just can't find it. And the words just don't want to arrange themselves into a nice whole. In fact, my brain has been trying to write this stupid, pointless post instead. So instead of writing something intelligent and worthwhile, I'm writing this down. Hopefully it will clear my head, and prime the pump, and the ideas will be back and flowing tomorrow.

I've got 'till Thursday, and I know I have stuff I want to say. AHHHHH!!!

*As a side note, if you don't read Websnark and you are at all interested in Web Comics or other stuff, you should check it out.

Johari Window

Right... there is this thing called a Johari Window. It uses a grid of adjectives to aloow you, and other people who know you, to descibe and map your personality. So, if you think you know me then go and contribute to my Johari Window.

Contribute

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(Parenthetical)

I have a deep-seated love of parentheses. It comes from my writing style being very stream-of-consciousness. I write the way that I think, and I think very much the way that I would speak. Or, perhaps it is the other way around; I speak very much as I think. So much so that I am sure that I sub-vocalize as I write, and even when I’m just thinking. It leads to other things, like talking to myself. I know it makes me sound crazy, but the monologue is already in my head, why not let it out.

I’m starting to digress, so I’ll try to get back to my point. I digress a lot. I do this because my mode of speech (and think) includes a lot of little asides and points of interest. I have to regularly stop and say something relevant, or irrelevant, or interesting, or pointless. So I drop a set of parentheses and put my aside in them, and then continue on my way.

I’m not the only one to do this. In fact, the more stuff I read on the Internet, the more I see this as a common trait among bloggers, and posters of all stripes. It’s gotten so bad, that it is almost anticipated that daily I will come across something that I dread: a set of nested brackets. As much as I love to use them, I try not to nest them (God knows that I fail sometimes). I just can’t stand them, they make the words just that much harder to read.

Types and Purposes

We are blessed by technology. In the days of typewriters it was hard to find punctuation that suited your basic needs, let alone your esoteric ones. Mechanical constraints and design limitations meant that it was not uncommon to be left with the bare minimum of punctuation marks. Quite often, typists would have to do without even such commonplace staples as the exclamation mark. We, however, have 101(+) key keyboards that contain more punctuation that we know what to do with. They even include 4 different types of brackets.

Each type of bracket has specific purposes within writing. They also have many specialized purposes across varied disciplines (although this itself may be another essay). Triangle brackets < > are used primarily in technical writing and special cases. Curly brackets { } (or chicken lips, as programmers occasionally term them) derive from math, and are (fortunately) seen little in the world of words. Square brackets [ ] show up as a multipurpose editor's tool, editing quotes and containing all sorts of bibliographic information.

This leaves only the poor parentheses to hold all of my asides and inner-most thoughts. Well, that's not entirely true. I could use the trusty double dash – the em dash – to isolate my ideas. Except that I've always felt that the dash brings out and emphasizes an idea, where the parentheses subdue and stifle the idea into an ignorable aside.

The problem is the aside within an aside. These are confusing and, for the most part, unnecessary. I've found that, with a careful amount of self editing, many of my asides can be worked into my main stream of thought. I manage this by re-organizing sentences, putting in comma breaks, and sometimes just deleting meandering and useless junk. This makes my ramblings easier to read, and reduces my overall use of parentheses.

Everyone can do this. No more should there be needlessly complicated and recursive writings. Simple reduce, reorganize, and relocate your parenthetical ideas and no more will you find yourself putting a bracket within a bracket. Leave the nested brackets for math and programming. Make your English easier to read.

I'm addicted to parentheses, but I'm recovering. Well, I'm trying (really!).

Bad Poems, Fun Times

Technology can provide mechanisms to create the most amazing and unexpected forms of artistic expression. Take, for example, bad poetry. There is, in essence, a formula that can be followed to create bad poetry. Take several unrelated words or phrases, sting them together with ennui and bongo music, then present them to an audience of like-minded art appreciators. This formula can be turned into a quick little script, paired with a database of phrases, and viola... bad poetry.

Ok, I'm kidding. Bad poetry is perhaps the most mocked of all written forms. It is so bad, in fact, that is has had cause to be published. It mocks itself, and causes a sort of ironic amusement and wonder at the general awfulness of it all. And, of course, we can all get in on it. Anyone can sit down and write their own bad poetry (some people do this unintentionally). But for those of us, on the go, we can find (if we look) humourous ways of generating bad poetry quickly. The internet is truly wonderful.

A quick Google search reveals a plethora of "poetry generators", many dedicated to producing the worst kinds of poetry. There is goth poetry, bad poetry, and (the worst) Vogon poetry. Why are we fascinated with re-arranging words and phrases into new, sublime, and ultimately horrible combinations of broken metaphors and abused similes? Probably because it is fun. To that extent, I give you a Garfield Randomizer.

Not only is Garfield one of the most consistently mediocre strips available for consumption, but the general lack of substance allows it to be easily remixed into something new. Simply by clicking the go button, you can create strips of absurdity, strips of randomness, strips of... well, bad poetry. How can something so bland, so bad, be so addictive?


Of course, if I really wanted to use a computer to make bad poetry, I'd just load up my copy of Grim Fandango and head into the Blue Casket. That can just kill hours.