Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in ssr2k's LiveJournal:

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Monday, June 22nd, 2009
12:24 pm	Sorry I’m sorry that I was always with someone else when you weren’t, and vice versa. I’m sorry that we got close when I needed a friend, and I’m sorry that our friendship and loneliness got so tangled up. I’m sorry that I lost track of which was which. I’m sorry I said “I love you”. I’m sorry that I never did anything about it afterwards. Every time I think of you I feel an aching regret inside. I really hope you don’t feel the same, or at least don’t think of me often. I miss you so much sometimes. But I also barely remember you. I’m happy, and we’re not together, and I guess that’s ok. If you’re doing ok too then maybe there isn’t even anything to feel bad about. I’ve always been too scared to find you and ask. If it turned out that I hurt you it would just be too much to take. Current Mood: melancholy Current Music: Noir - Soundtrack (Comment on this)
Monday, May 26th, 2008
6:51 pm	Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself Sorry I haven't been posting, if you read, but... Well, I don't know. I haven't felt like it. Blogging is kind of something I do when I'm supposed to be working. It's not nearly as fun to do it on my own time, I suppose. Updates. Two Seconds aren't going to be playing any more shows, I guess. Not really sure what to do now in terms of favorite bands. I feel that's an important attribute to know about yourself: who's your favorite musical entity. Band, composer, something. I suppose I could go back to an old one. Or I could just say, "Oh, you probably never heard of them, and they broke up anyway." Life-goals thing list continues. Fae hit the current Warcraft level cap on May 15, so that's another one handled. This might seem like a fairly silly and pointless "life goal", but I set out to do it and by gum I did. I need that feeling of completing things every now and again; it's just a sort of personal development candy that I crave. Maybe because my dad can't finish anything, maybe I'm just a little neurotic about closure. Who knows, who cares? If you click here you'll see pictures of our trip to San Diego. It's been two years since Liz and I started hanging out. God, that's weird. Current Mood: weird (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
5:53 pm	This Is What You're Leaving Behind I have found a brutal crash bug that nobody else on my current team can reproduce. Why? Because it's not a game system, it's a music player, and there are no other gamers on the test or development teams. It's bound to happen to customers on accident, but nobody else has the split-second timing and hand-eye coordination to do it on purpose every time. I am game tester, hear me roar! Rawr. Current Mood: satisfied (Comment on this)
5:52 pm	Hey Rob, What Happens to a Pot in a Kiln? Downsized, let go, cashiered, released, discharged, terminated, shitcanned. However you want to spin it, I'm out from Leapfrog. I can't say I'm especially surprised, but I am disappointed. I've been here for well over a year, and it was only a matter of time before I either got hired - unlikely, if history is any judge - or set free. It would have been nice to get a bit of job security, and I really like the little extras around here. Bagel Friday is nice, and it's nice to be able to show up a little bit late without anyone hassling me. I liked working in the East Bay. But I'm not making games, and I'm not really on a path to make games. That's the goal, and LeapFrog is essentially a detour. I've gotten some valuable experience: administering a team, dealing with competing demands from production and test, working within schedules, and so forth. Several ugly doses of reality. The problem for me here is that when you get down to it I'm not working towards telling the stories that I want to, and telling stories is sort of what I do. So the new plan is that I'll work until my last day, on May 9, then have a nice leisurely week of playing Warcraft, cleaning the apartment, accomplishing (cheap) life goals, and so forth. On the 16th Liz and I head down to San Diego for our long-delayed food tour. We get back on the 19th, and I start looking for a new gig, preferably at a real game company. I'm trying to look at this as an opportunity, a sort of karmic kick out the door. But it always stings to be rejected, even if you didn't want the one who's rejecting you in the first place. Current Mood: weird Current Music: Animal Product - Operator in the Sky (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
6:00 pm	Daily McCain Hateblogging I dunno, it feels really good to hate John McCain. He makes me feel so intelligent and morally upright everytime he opens his damn mouth. I know it's probably an illusion, but... Still pretending that a vote for him isn't a vote for George Bush's third term, today John McCain threw Bush under the bus levee: John McCain toured still hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately landed his plane at the nearest Air Force base. He offered a pledge Thursday to New Orleans residents that their situation will not be forgotten and that such a botched disaster response will never happen again. And here is John McCain, on the day New Orleans was drowning, urging George Bush to get to the nearest Air Force base: Via Dailykos Current Mood: angry Current Music: throbbing in temple (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
10:35 am	John McCain is an Idiot Asshole Part Umpty-Ump I really ought to just look away when I see a headline with McCain's name in it - I already know it's just going to infuriate me. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: angry (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
12:53 pm	John McCain Is A Short-Sighted Pandering Idiot… …who knows nothing about economics… if we're lucky!: On Apr. 15, McCain took a big leap forward in doing that. In a broad-ranging economic speech in Pittsburgh, he called for several highly targeted tax cuts and federal spending initiatives. Included were a summer gas-tax holiday that would suspend the 18.4¢ federal gas tax and 24.4¢ diesel tax, and a doubling of the personal tax exemption for dependents, from $3,500 to $7,000. As Dr. Dean Baker explains it better than I ever could: According to the oil industry, they have their refineries running flat out, producing all the gas they can. This means that the price is determined on the demand side. We have a fixed amount of gas entering the market, the question is simply what price clears the market. In this context, if we reduce or eliminate the gas tax, the price doesn't change, the lower tax will simply allow Exxon and other oil companies to keep more profits (unless of course they were lying about running their refineries at capacity). ( Read more... ) Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
10:57 am	Terrifying Courtesy of the sorely-missed Fafblog, a sobering assessment from Bradford Plumer about the needs and challenges facing clean energy: January 30, 2006 How Helpless? Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran an important front-page story on the global warming debate: "Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend." Right. A few months ago, I wrote an article on this very subject for QED that isn't fully online, but here are some basic numbers from the piece and reasons for serious pessimism that humans really can slow or reverse the trend at this point. Basically, the goal looks attainable in theory, but in practice may be far out of reach.( Read more... ) Current Mood: intimidated (Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
1:06 pm	Thanks, Uncle Sam I just got my tax refunds and paid off another credit card. Three down, one to go. Check me out, all disciplined and shit. Current Mood: pleased (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
10:44 am	What The Ever-Lying Fuck?! Constitution-blogger Glenn Greenwald parses Attorney General Michael Mukasey's latest thusly: either the administration is too stupid to properly do their job, or they're too stupid to properly lie about doing their job. Read 'em and weep: Michael Mukasey's tearful lies (updated below - Update II) Michael Mukasey has conclusively proven himself to be an exact replica of Alberto Gonzales -- slavishly loyal to every presidential whim and unbound by even the most minimal constraints of truth while serving those whims. Speaking in San Francisco this week, Mukasey demanded that the President be given new warrantless eavesdropping powers and that lawbreaking telecoms be granted amnesty. To make his case, Mukasey teared up while exploiting the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 and said this: Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went." At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America's anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. "We got three thousand. . . . We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that," he said, struggling to maintain his composure. At the time of the attacks, Mr. Mukasey was the chief judge at the federal courthouse a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: irritated Current Music: broken HVAC (Comment on this)
Monday, March 31st, 2008
10:11 am	But Then What Will My Kids Nag Me For? Sandy Duncan suggests it's gonna be the future soon: ‘Consoles on the Way Out’ - Former Xbox VP Sandy Duncan, formerly vice president of Xbox Europe, claims consoles as we know them will die out within a decade. ”I think dedicated games devices will die [out] in the next 5 to 10 years. The business model is very risky and the costs associated with creating new hardware are incredibly high,” Duncan told That Videogame Blog. "There is a definite convergence of other devices, such as set top boxes,” continued the man who now heads casual gaming business YoYo Games. “There's hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and an Xbox 360, for example. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: working (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
3:24 pm	Pod to Pod One of the podcasts I've been most enjoying lately is the Bungie Studios podcast that comes out every couple of weeks. Halo's got a reputation as the game of choice for asshole Bud-guzzling frat boys - among many, many others who enjoy it, those guys are the stereotypical audience for the game - and the Bungie folks on the podcast tend to speak to that audience a bit. But while they're boisterous and immature, they're also working at one of the top game companies in the industry, and they don't just talk about marketing talking points. To be sure, they hit all the marks on how awesome Halo 3 is - the podcast is really just another marketing avenue for Bungie's flagship product - but they also talk about the job, the coding, testing, dealing with internet fanboy maniacs, and all that stuff that I've done too, and I love hearing it. It's really like listening to a radio show by and about my community, the game-making community. ( and yet... ) Current Mood: blah Current Music: I'm A Dick - The Muffs (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 21st, 2008
1:36 pm	Wait, Wait Is it just me, or is the safest investment these days foreign currency? Current Mood: confused Current Music: Al Gore - The Assault on Reason (audio book) (Comment on this)
Friday, January 18th, 2008
10:46 am	Bush Calls for Everyone to Stop Being Mad at Him A quick note on reportage: this headline makes it sounds like Bush is proposing a $145 million budget, which he's not. This is a call for $145 million to be dumped into the economy en masse as a stimulus package.. Bush calls for $145 billion economy plan WASHINGTON - President Bush, acknowledging the risk of recession, embraced about $145 billion worth of tax relief Friday to give the economy a "shot in the arm." Bush said such a growth package must also include tax incentives for business investment and quick tax relief for individuals. And he said that to be effective, an economic stimulus package would need to roughly represent 1 percent of the gross domestic product — the value of all U.S. goods and services and the best measure of the country's economic standing. "There is a risk of a downturn," the president said in his remarks at the White House. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, speaking after Bush's remarks, said 1 percent of GDP would equate to $140 billion to $150 billion, which is along the lines of what private economists say should be sufficient to help give the economy a short-term boost. ( Read more... ) The cynic in me wonders if Bush isn't just offering everyone $500 to like him again, given that his approval rating has descended past its previous Nixonian levels to a Herbert-Hooverish degree of public disdain. It worked back in 2000, when he offered everyone $300 to vote for him. The other cynic in me wonders if he isn't trying to pump up a bit of enthusiasm for the Republican party in general, given the current uncertain state of the Republican primary. Everyone seems to be talking about Democrats these days. The other cynic in me wonders just how much of the tax break will be given to massive corporations - oh yeah, including small businesses, but probably not mostly - in hopes that they'll trickle their tax break down to workers and customers rather than hand it out to their multi-millionaire executives. Again. That is, some people in the administration are probably hoping that. Some other people are probably just looking for any excuse to hand out 150 billion more dollars to their friends at the country club. My favorite part is that Bush doesn't say how he wants to pay for this, but he excludes all possible methods except one. There won't be a reduction in other spending. There won't be an increase in other taxes or tariffs to offset the handout. So the only other option is - ta da! - borrowing! Which has already crippled our currency so badly that the U.S. dollar is worth less than the Canadian dollar! Hell, we've almost been passed by the Australian dollar. This will probably provide a short term goose for the economy - cynic: maybe all the way to November - but will even further cripple our ability to participate in the global economy, which will only have deeper repercussions in the next few years. Bush has combined lavish tax cuts to his friends in big industry with humongous government spending on contracts with those same friends, constantly funneling America's wealth into the hands of the power elite. Now, shockingly, the common American people have less money left to spend, and earnings are down. So Bush will give the people money, which the people can then give to his friends, earnings will go up next quarter, and Bush's friends will keep even more money, and the common American people won't have any Then what? Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Al Gore - The Assault on Reason (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
3:11 pm	I'm Tired Of Fighting At least in games. And I mostly mean in new games. I'll still play WoW and Dawn of War all day and all night, and be happy doing it. I've already bought those games, and bought into them. They're a part of my gaming life these days. They're old friends I hang out with. But when I look at the shelf in GameStop, I find I'm not really interested in playing another shooter with some new guns and some new targets. It's all air guns and paper targets, just with another coat of paint. It's cops and robbers for $50.00. I'm not looking forward to another RTS where I make little dudes, go dominate terrain, and blow up other little dudes. I can play Lord of the Rings Risk with my sister anytime. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Two Seconds - An Hour Alone (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
11:24 am	Juice I've been thinking and talking to friends for a while now about how energy independence - and not National energy independence for America, but individual energy independence for each citizen - is the next step in the evolution of both our economy and our rights as citizens and human beings. Now there's good news courtesy of Firedoglake: Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of man. Albert Arnold Gore Jr., come on down! You all recall Christy’s posting on Al Gore’s joining this energy venture, right? Well, it turns out that he and the others involved have picked an excellent time for this — silicon, the basic material used in most solar cells, is about to go into big-time production with a corresponding price drop that in five years (less if oil keeps getting pricier) will make solar energy cheaper than oil, even with oil’s massive subsidies. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Metric - Patriarch on a Vespa (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
3:17 pm	Oh No I've been hanging out with my friends Shrey and Lil, and their baby Satya. She's very cute, and mostly well-behaved, at least during Monday night trivia. I kind of want a baby now. But just a little bit. Current Mood: disappointed (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
11:41 am	Yeah, I Guess So Reprinted from the American Prospect Website: http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=generation_overwhelmed Generation Overwhelmed Thomas Friedman has mistaken my generation's absolute paralysis in the face of so many choices, so many causes, and so much awareness, for a mere quiet. Courtney E. Martin | October 22, 2007 | web only At my housewarming party last weekend there was vodka and tonic and indie rock, there were a few, inexpensive cheeses, and there were some 20-somethings with loose tongues and misunderstood hearts. My friend Molly, an assistant in a big New York publishing house and a fascinating world-wanderer, had sent me the link to Thomas Friedman's New York Times op-ed, "Generation Q," earlier in the day. "So what did you think?" she asked. Molly and I met while studying abroad in South Africa together. "About what?" asked my friend Daniel, a labor organizer destined for Harvard Divinity School next fall. A native of Paul Wellstone's Minnesota, he's spent the years since college on the Hill in Washington, in Harlem sky rises, and Los Angeles barrios and synagogues alike, trying to figure out how to bring people together. "That Friedman piece where he alleges that our generation is idealistic and 'too quiet, too online, for [our] own good,'" I summarized, I admit, rolling my eyes. "What's that?" asked Ben, a new friend of mine who works for the Clinton Foundation and who was a speech writer and a campaign organizer before that. A lengthy, raucous conversation about outrage, its sources and manifestations, ensued. Until of course, we got distracted by a really good dance song ... ( Read more... ) Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: White Stripes - Icky Thump (Comment on this)
Monday, October 22nd, 2007
12:12 pm	That Alchemical MMOment My coworker and I were just talking about MMOs in general and in particular the rumored new Star Wars MMO from Bioware/Pandemic that it is rumored sparked the EA buyout. Rumor rumor rumor. Anyhow, we agreed that we'd both be interested in playing a Star Wars MMO, but I had to say that I'd need it to be as good as WoW - or better - to get me to stop playing, as well as being qualitatively different from WoW. I mean, otherwise, why switch? We had some ideas for how a next-gen MMO would differentiate itself from the most refined product of the current/soon-to-be-previous generation: 1) A more refined reputation system. The endgame of WoW has continually involved farming rep from with various factions in order to earn higher levels of friendship with each and resulting permissions to buy loot. Bioware's RPGs haven't had a terribly complicated reputation system - you're somewhere on a scale of Good -> Evil, based on what you say and do - but their conversation trees and NPC handling have always been top notch. What about an MMO with large numbers of complex conversation trees, each leading to increases in various reputation factors, e.g. Honor, Naiveté, Scoundrel-iness, Violence, Menace, etc. Oops, I just realized that reads like a scale of Good -> Evil. What I meant was they'd all be factors in how you are treated, so if you have a high reputation for Honor and Violence you can get work as a soldier, high Menace, low Honor plus some measure of Scoundrel-iness opens up changing your class to Bounty Hunter, high Scoundrel plus some level of bad faction rep with the local authorities opens up smuggling missions, and so forth. I guess my points are lots of interdependent reputation factors, plus a lot of mutual exclusivity. This means a lot more work for the developer, because everyone needs to be kept playing without being able to experience all the content, but it means a much more varied experience for the community, and it means there is no cookie-cutter path through the game. 2) Eras. The casual/hardcore split in a Star Wars MMO could be catastrophic. Many of the people who would be drawn to play the game would be interested less in playing in the Star Wars Universe than in playing the Star Wars movies. These are radically different propositions, and Star Wars Galaxies utterly failed to reconcile them. To let the player play the Star Wars movies, you make them Luke Skywalker - or maybe Han Solo, but most likely Han Skywalker, Jedi Smuggler supreme! - and let them blow up Death Stars, fight Darth Vader, train with Yoda, etc. To let the player play in the Star Wars universe, you build a galaxy far, far away and fill it with alien peoples, ancient ruins, rusty spaceships, and then set them loose to farm moisture, smuggle spice from Kessel, or what the fuck ever. You can't do both. The overarching narrative of Star Wars is a story of multiple epic catastrophic social changes. There's a coup d'etat, a fasctist dictatorship, genocide, a successful populist revolution, and then multiple alien invasions (in the Expanded Universe, anyway). You have a classic Republic, a dark Empire, and a shaky young democracy trying to gain its feet in the face of assaults from the dregs of the fallen empire as well as incomprehensible alien threats. The standard MMO proposition that everything is always the same so that everyone can always try it out is laughable in the face of this story. That would lead to ridiculous things like raids getting together and blowing up the Death Star for fat loot every week, groups getting Darth Vader on farm status, Princess Leia asking everyone and their mom to bring Obi-Wan Kenobi to her, old Ben out in the desert handing out lightsabers like Halloween candy. Ridiculous. What if, instead, you essentially instanced the entire galaxy multiple times in to various eras? You could have an Old Republic version, an Empire and Rebellion version, and a new Republic version. Once a character completed certain key events - defeat the separatist army, blow up the Death Star, and so on - the galaxy would re-instance around them, with the changes rippling out to seem more gradual, and then they'd be playing in the new era with everyone else who was at the same level. Again, I'm aware that this is a lot of work, but I think the effect is really worthwhile. As an alternative, and maybe this would work better for another game than Star Wars, what if you had multiple eras, and a version of your character in each. As you leveled in an earlier era, your older character in later eras would be more experienced, and new opportunities would open up as you did favors for people in the past, killed or saved people, and so on. Doing things in the future wouldn't have any effect on the past, but doing things in the past would lay the foundation for the future. Actually, this is a really weird idea now that I think of it, and it would probably have to be built into the game fiction to explain how this was working. Some kind of strange flashback mechanic, or something. Oh, my coworker's idea was that in the Star Wars MMO you wouldn't have Chewbacca and R2-D2 just hanging around or anything, but you could trigger instanced "flashback" missions where the player character "recalled" that time they met Han Solo on Hoth. That's not a bad idea. 3) Scale. Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far, far away. Not on Tattooine, Coruscant, and Corellia. I'm aware that almost everything I've mentioned is essentially boiling down to "make an absolute shitload of content", but there it is. You need planets, fucking worlds, or you're not talking Star Wars. I mean, let people scoot around between them - nobody wants to play 3-d chess with a wookie for 36 hours while in transit - but give us worlds. WoW is geared to move the player through 3 very different zones and an instance every 10 levels; if a Star Wars MMO can keep that kind of variety going it'll go a long way to keeping interest up. I'm sure anyone who's working on an MMO right now has thought about all this and has their own answers to these questions and probably dozens of others I' haven't given any thought to. But it's fun to ponder the structures that are possible in the format and wonder what will actually come next. Current Mood: nerdy Current Music: Nirvana - Tourette's (Comment on this)
Friday, October 12th, 2007
5:00 pm	A Little More Free I just paid off the first - and smallest - of my credit cards from the trip today. I'd hoped to be further into paying down the trip by now, but things have come up. At any rate, this is a big, good milestone, and I'm hoping that hewing to my repayment schedule with a bit more discipline will speed up the process. Living debt-free for a bit is one of my long-term goals, and one that I can't just up and do overnight. I'm fairly confident that the payoff will be proportional to the time it takes, though. ( Read more... ) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)