I used to have a strict code. For work related writing, I used U.S. spelling. For personal writing, I used British spelling. That's why I've been liberal with my U's and stingy with my Z's since the inception of this blog. Now, however, I'm using vista's built in speech recognition, and it obviously uses the default Microsoft dictionary with the default language and regional settings, so--voila!--I have suddenly become U.S.ified. Maybe I'll muck around with the regional settings at some point, but for right now it's enough that I don't have to give myself The Claw by typing stuff out.

As for the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, it may be Cubital Tunnel Syndrome instead, or as well as, or something. It's currently under control, and I could be typing this if I wanted, but I'm trying not to inflame it again (especially as I finished my course of Anti-inflammatories), and I'm also trying to train this thing to recognize my voice in time for NaNoWriMo. It would be nice if it could speak back to me in Majel Barrett Roddenberry's dulcet tones, but we've got a couple of centuries before that, right? So far, it's just clicks and beeps--far less comprehensible then Gizmoo, for example.

This is the entry that I was working on before all the bad news came. It's been sitting in draft form for a while, so let's see if I can remember what I was going to say. Also, I'm using speech recognition technology to give my hands a break. I'm hoping to train it so that I can use it during November when I, once again, embark on NaNoWriMo, because 50,000 words are about 49,000 too many for my poor, tingly wrists. (Oh, and it uses U.S. spelling so I guess that's what I'm stuck with.) So, here we go:

Phew! I have been super-busy lately. Last week I spent five days in Seattle on a business trip, but lucky for me, my business trips involve going to giant gaming conventions and talking non-stop to people about video games. I didn't really mention it on my blog beforehand, because I'd been faked out a couple of times before about trips to Seoul and Brighton (other international offices for our company), and wasn't prepared to believe the trip was real until I was actually boarding a plane.

Therefore, it came as something of a shock to me when I realized that I had to hurry up and pack because I had to get up for my flight at 5:30 AM. I know, I always manage to do this (you may recall that I once packed to emigrate in a couple of hours, while drunk, at 2:00 AM), and yet it always comes as a surprise to me.

The Seattle experience itself was really exciting. From the moment I walked into the convention center, under the banner, positioned right at the entrance to the exhibition hall, of one of the characters from our game, I knew I was in Nerdvana. The booth right in front of ours was for Fallout 3, and they had an airstream on Astro turf with a white picket fence around the booth and 1950s nuclear test site mannequins both before and after obliteration. Naturally, this was one of the most popular booths at the convention, and we got a lot of extra traffic from being next to it. I got the opportunity to talk to many people who have been following our game since it was first announced, and they were really excited to play it. It's really gratifying to meet people who are fans of the project I've been working so hard on for the past year. Admittedly, we have so far been flying under the radar of the majority of gamers, so for most people at the convention, this was the first time they'd seen or heard of the game--and people loved it. You have to admit, it's shiny.

Before we went to Seattle, we drew up a nice detailed schedule, and we were supposed to have half of every day off. Staci and I had all these grandiose plans about going to the art museum, the aquarium, the spice noodle (that's not a speech recognition error; that's what we call it), and spending at least an afternoon going around the convention. However, when players started showing up, it turned out that we had severely underestimated the number of staff we needed in the booth. All of us ended up working the entire time, and my convention-going time was limited to my lunch breaks. I barely had time to say hello to everyone I knew at other booths, let alone play demos of any of the games.

Between all this, I did at least get to see Mindi and Dwoo for dinner. It was hard to believe that I'd never met Dwoo before; and, even more strange, never spoken to or communicated with him before, either. I guess that goes to show how good a writer Mindi is--she had created Dwoo as a fully three-dimensional character in my mind, and apparently vice versa. They are incredibly cute, both together and separately, are a major part of the reason that I came away from the whole Seattle experience feeling that it's one of the few cities I might be tempted to move to if I had the opportunity. Which is why what came after is so ironic and annoying.

Ack! I have so much to write about, and an entry sitting half-finished in draft form, but am trying to minimise non-work typing because I am getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and my hands are all tingly (yes, I went to the doctor and now have wrist splints, anti-inflammatories and am getting an appointment with an occupational therapist). In sum: I went to Seattle for a trade show, it was awesome, I saw Min, I met Dwoo, I had a great time, and now for unrelated reasons my job will be relocating there whether or not I follow suit.

Oops. I accidentally published this when I meant to save it as a draft. I only wrote part 1, then saved it. It originally had just one point, then a number 2. with no entry; when Heath read it, he thought I was making a joke that I only had one superpower. Aww, self pity.

Anyway, here it is in full:

1. It's bigger on the inside:

I can fit a ridiculous amount of stuff into spaces you'd think wouldn't contain it all. Call it 3D Tetris. I first demonstrated this power when I helped mUrt move his stuff out of his hall of residence after his first year at Plymouth Uni. We had a whole room full of stuff vs. a Fiat Punto, and I was determined that we would only make one trip. Since then this power has come in handy when moving from Stoke to Plymouth, Plymouth to Stoke, and College Station to Austin. With the latter, we had one space, exactly vacuum-cleaner sized, at the top of our U-haul when we were done, so I finished vacuuming and then we stuck it in the van on its side right at the top.

It's also useful for room rearrangements. I can always see the best ways to put the furniture or fit things into storage.

2. Naming names:

If I give you a nickname, it will stick. See: Flon, mUrt, Eaf. When Larry expressed a wish to go by Lars, I told him that if he was serious, all he had to do was give me the word.

3. Teleportation:

Nah, not really. But that would be cool, wouldn't it?

Iskra bought Larry the complete box-set of every X-Files episode ever (and the first movie) for his birthday, and we've all be (re)discovering our love for the show. It was funny; the Friday before the gift, we went to a movie and in front of it, there was the trailer for the new X-Files movie. At that point, I hadn't thought about the show much in years, and was taken aback. A new movie? Now? Really? It seemed gratuitous. The very next day, we sat down and watched the pilot episode, and my love was rekindled. By the time I saw the trailer again on the Sunday (yes, we go to the cinema a lot; we are a film-buff household), I was jumping up and down in my seat, eager for more X-Files.

Since then, I've seen a good number of episodes, ones I saw and loved the first time round (mainly S1 and S2), new and awesome ones (S5 and S6), and the disappointing ones that inspired the title of this post (S9).

Apparently, I have a huge well of affection both for the show and for the two main characters. I didn't really think about it in the years since I used to watch religiously, and in fact I missed a lot of first-run episodes, because a couple of years after the show debuted, I got too busy for TV. But there was something formative and influential about watching it, and I love Mulder and his sunflower seeds and porn obsession, and Scully and her one eyebrow that seems to levitate somewhere north of her forehead. And both of their mumbling. I love them. I want to sit down and watch every episode I didn't see, catch up on all the mythology even as it spirals out of human comprehension.

The X-Files love renewal was a purely positive experience until we watched four S9 episodes in a row the other night. This isn't to say that any of the episodes are bad, as such. It's more like...say you're a hummus lover. You go to the shop for hummus, and they're out of your favourite brand, so you buy this other hummus. And it's definitely made from mushed-up chick peas. I mean, it's not entirely unhummussy. But...it could've been the other hummus. Not that it's objectionable to put in your mouth, just that it's not your hummus. It's entirely missing the tahini. I don't understand how anyone can think it's really hummus without the tahini. And it doesn't count if you spend your entire meal talking about tahini. The tahini actually has to be there.

The best part about watching this all out of order is that there are still a shitload of earlier episodes I haven't seen. Maybe I'll dig out that one that Stephen King wrote. I hear he doesn't suck.

This week, a friend of mine killed herself.

She wasn't someone I knew intimately, but someone I had definitely wanted to build more of a friendship with and to get to know better. She seemed, not just amiable and friendly, but actively chipper and sunshiney. Why is it so often the last person you expect? asked Staci. I guess it's because people who are good at covering up never get help for themselves.

It feels like a bomb went off in my social group. I'm very concerned for the people who were closest to her, one in particular. What do you even do with this information? Where do you put it? What part of your brain is equipped to process this?

For some reason, I'm struck with the urge to answer Cindy's question, about "how you would weather a tragedy of this magnitude without some sort of spiritual under girding." Maybe pontificating is how I deal with stuff.

Continue reading "Processing"

Today was not the worst day in my company's history. Maybe the second worst.

Of course, because my company does its business online and by definition attracts overenthusiastic fans, rumours abound when any such move is in the works. Such as this lovely, responsible bit of reporting. Notice how it rampantly speculates on how our studio was to be shut down and the remaining jobs shipped to the West coast, when the reality ended up being 21 people laid off. Not that that doesn't suck, but there are 300 people in our office. Or this article, from the same source, back in February, predicting downsizing all over the place. I can't recall the number, but it was either six or eight people in the end.

Thing is, we are gamers. We work at video game companies because we like video games. We read the gaming press. Don't the people who write these stupid, unsubstantiated articles think about the stress they're causing people at the company they're writing about? I guess that's less important than maybe getting a scoop in case some of their wild speculation winds up being true.

So I guess it's not enough to learn that, when you work in high tech, you have to resign yourself to seeing a whole company get shut down around you, and to being laid off, perhaps even only three months after the last time you were laid off, you also have to learn to expect rampant and gleeful speculation about your company collapsing around your ears, and anyone who steps up to say, "Hey, these are people you're talking about" gets labelled a fanboi and a shill.

In related news, though you grow a callus after you've seen enough of it, seeing friends get laid off will never, ever be easy. The only consolation is knowing how awesome they are, and how many companies out there will want to snap them up if they have an iota of sense.

(Index of all photos to be found here.)

Since my last entry (which, I apologise, seems very long ago now), I have been several different people.

Wedding Photographer:
Larry and Iskra got hitched on June 27th, in the sweetest Justice of the Peace/Register Office ceremony I've seen. I was the unofficial photographer, but that's only because the best photographer among us was saying her vows at the time. Iskra's sister Tsvety came to stay for a couple of weeks. Sadly, now she has gone and the newlyweds are facing a mountain of immigration paperwork. Heath and I are trying to give them the benefit of our experience, but the forms have changed several times since we went through it.

Screen writer:
Heath, Larry, Greg and I co-wrote a short film for this year's 48 hour film contest. It was my first taste of co-writing anything, and the pressure was on, since we had to finalise the script before we left on the Friday night so that Greg could begin shooting ASAP on Saturday morning. What we came up with was very surreal and absurd, which may have been a testament to our mental state while writing it. It was also my first taste of seeing something I helped to write realised on-screen, and I have to say that Greg did a great job of it. Many of the scenes, and even the particular shots, were how I had imagined them in discussion, or even better. I think it came out a great short film, without even taking into account the circumstances under which it was made.

Sadly, due to technical difficulties, we submitted the film too late to qualify for the contest, but at least we had something we were happy with.

(Malef)actor:
Athena got a request from one of our friends, someone heavily involved in the SCA, to prepare a short performance for an event that took place this past weekend. This consisted of the two big fight scenes from Romeo And Juliet, and I--who have never really picked up a sword before--was cast as Tybalt, master sword fighter, and participant in the most sword fights of any cast member (three). Cue some intensive choreography and practice.

At the event on Saturday, we arrived while the SCAers were at feast (dinner), and were immediately identified as actors thanks to the fact that we were 1. In character, with the two house groups shooting malevolent glances at each other across the street, and b. Carrying live steel (SCA fighting rules state that all weapons must be tipped). The king called me a malefactor. Actor. Same difference.

In the interpretation we did, thanks in part to casting limitations, we ended up having Juliet, Tybalt and Benvolio as scrappy girls, and instead of having R & J meet at a ball, they met in a brawl. Essentially, Juliet took the Gregory role in that scene, and made flirty eyes at Sampson...you'd be surprised how the lines lend themselves to it. Everyone was playing their roles pretty sexed up, except me. I was mainly Anger Management Teen. The second brawl was in the tavern, amongst SCAers who had been drinking a while, by torchlight. I was a little nervous of waving my sword around in that situation, but nobody got stuck with anything they shouldn't've.

I killed my coworker Sean, and then Heath killed me. (I got better.) It's fun to do something so ephemeral--you really had to be there; I can't do it justice in the explanation--but it's a lot of work to put in for such a short payoff.

Woman in man in man's clothing
The casting was announced for the play we're putting on in the autumn: I'm playing Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew. Yes, it's yet another manservant role, but this time I get to spend most of the play pretending to be my master, who's a big ole fop. Rehearsals started last week.

Workaholic
You may have noticed that my two plays overlapped last week, with rehearsals for the second one starting in the week of the performance of the first. You can imagine my joy when our team at work was also given a deadline, with six days' notice, of Sunday afternoon (Monday morning in our Korean office). I worked nearly twice my normal workweek, and by the end of it was talking scribble. We spent the first three days tracking down and fixing some highly technical problems that were causing things not to work at all. That was before we could even start polishing the content that we needed to sign off on by Sunday. We were also in the middle of learning a new process with new, highly complicated software, when this deadline got dropped on us. In between all that, I was going to rehearsals where I was told that I needed to be louder in the performance. Yeah, I will, but I have to save something.

I have never been so glad in all my life for it to be Monday. I think I'm going home early.

Has a whole thing! On rafs! With raf charades! And chewing yeaves!

And he was wearing a most fetching red-lined tux jacket with jeans. And I got all starstruck, and so did Heath and Gilliam. Next time we go and see him we are forking out for close seats. Because he's worth it :).

I'm going to discuss the new Indiana Jones movie in this post--nothing you wouldn't have gathered from trailers, but I know people appreciate the warning. But that's all the warning you get, because after the jump it's all hanging out there (no spoiler tags).

Continue reading "Magical plot demons"

So people have been complaining--*ahem*--I mean, commentingto me about my lack of updating lately. I keep meaning to post more, but how much do you people really need to hear about my D&D characters? And there's only so much I can say about work before getting to details that the fanboys don't need to know.

Today I have been at a friend's house for a BBQ and have drunk way more beers than I should've. I don't know how normal it is to hang out, and get drunk, with co-workers as my main social life, but I should stop comparing myself to some notion of normality. It's not like I'd know normal if it jumped out and bit me in the face. One thing I've always loved about my place of work is that I don't have to pretend to be someone I'm not, or to censor things before they come out of my mouth (except in meetings, but, y'know).

I don't think I've really addressed this before but my friend Staci is my new co-worker. We share an office and do essentially the same job. I can't believe my incredible luck. I've had friends who I've liked as much as Staci, but I've never before had the confidence that it was mutual. I think if I had cooked up a friend character and had her brought to life, she would be Staci, except maybe with a little more confidence in her own abilities about certain things. Before we shared an office we were spending plenty of time hanging out, but since she got this job it's basically been a mind-meld. We spend all day looking at text that has been machine-translated from Korean, and then we hang out afterwards. We have a bizarre language that only we speak, made of Engrish combined with Doctor Who-fandom. Our friends fear us. We also play in three of the aforementioned D&D games together. Do not cross us or we will in-joke you to death!

I think I should wrap this up so I can get some more rice salad (the remnants of my contribution to the party) and soak up some of the beer so that by the time Leila arrives I will be comprehensible.

Oh, and go check out The Return of the Movie Musketeers: Indiana Jones 4, which I totally knitted a chain mail hood for.