Consumable Gifts
Consumable Gifts Stuff takes up room. This is an important observation for someone living in an apartment, especially as you move from one apartment to another. Even though I've been living in the same house for over 5 years (has it been that long already?), I still see the danger of having too much stuff. It's a sort of debt that hangs over your head, really.
Anyways, with that in mind, I decided that the best kind of gifts, for the most part, are consumable. They're something that you enjoy for a certain amount of time, and then *poof* they are gone. Ideally, this is different from disposable gifts, although recyclable gifts are fine, too. In fact, gifts like games or CDs that are easily transferable (or sellable) are fine, too.
So, for Christmas, I got a number of consumable gifts, including books and Playstation 2 games. That's great!
Except, of course, that I've consumed them by now.
Well, except for Sly Cooper 3. I haven't started that yet, but it's next on my list. I've read my books, drunk my tea (well, there's still more of that), and played one of the Playstation 2 games. I should probably write a review - look for that in an upcoming blog
No blog today - gone to UG
Maybe I'll see you there?
Science Friction
Science Friction
I'm reading a collection of science fiction novellas (large short stories, I suppose). I like SF, although it's more of a passing fancy than a dedication. There aren't many authors that I can name, and none that I follow closely. I'm not including Fantasy, as there is an author of that genre that I do follow closely (Terry Pratchett).
I've read two stories so far from the "Best of the Best Vol. 2" collection that I got from the library. Each of them featured a male protagonist that had a difficult relationship with a woman. I'm not sure what I can generalize from this about SF authors...
Completion
In the first one, "Sailing to Byzantium", there are a few different outcomes that the characters discuss, and, while the story ends before you know which path the characters choose, there is an indication that they will choose one of them.
However, in the second story, "Surfacing", the main characters are set before an interesting challenge. They talk about different options, bemoan their fate, and then the protaganist says, (I'm paraphrasing here), "Wait! I've got an idea!", and then the story ends. Needless to say, this is entirely unsatisfying. Perhaps readers that are more clever than I can see what his great scheme is, but it's beyond me. I hope the other stories are better.
SheepSpace
My Sheep
I've decided to create a MySpace account to play around with. I'm surprised that they limit password length to about 10 characters, although they do force you to include at least one number.
Uploading a picture now. I see that it doesn't recognize the transparent GIF format, so I'm going to fix that.
I already have a friend! Tom. That name sounds familar. Perhaps he's the founder. Talk about eating your own dog food. Maybe Tom created my space because he was lonely?
Verifying email address. You know, someday we'll teach kids in school these basic life skills. How to get an email address, how to create a myspace account, how to use PayPal, how to pass CAPTCHA tests, etc.
Tom has 216588760 friends. That's a lot. I hope he's not lonely anymore.
I'm filling out my profile information. Just using whatever answers come to mind. I probably should have thought about this more.
Whoops! My first Server too busy error (500). I had read about myspace's performance issues. They care, but not too much. I mean, it's not a life or death sort of application, is it?
I hope Tom doesn't take it personally, but I've removed him as a friend. Now I don't have any friends.
There's a lot of information here. I doubt I'll fill it all in. Well, schools, companies, and videos I can skip for now.
I was really hoping for more mash-up like stuff. I've got videos on You-Tube, I've got (well, should create) a facebook account, and I've got a board game geek account, too. I'd prefer to link them all together rather than entering everying again.
Anyways, that's enough for now. We'll see where this goes.
Sly and the Great Tree
Sly 2 Sly Cooper is what I wanted Thief (Looking Glass Studios) to be. Direct combat is possible, but not very effective. The game encourages you to be sneaky without restricting you to only being sneaky.
The Great Tree
I can tell when a game is really good when I need to set a limit (ahead of time) on how long I will play that game. For a number of Reflexive game demos, this limit is built in (60 minutes, or for some generous games, 2 hours*).
- For bad games, I don't even get to the 60 minute mark before putting the game aside, writing a quick review, and being done with it.
- For mediocre games, I'll play until the 60 minutes are up, and then say, "Well, I've wasted enough of my life on that game.
- For good games, I'll go through the entire 60 minutes in a single setting. Then, exhausted, I'll think, "Boy, that was fun, I should buy that game for more."
Certain games, like Star Defender 4 and The Great Tree, are so good that that fall out of this scale.
- For excellent games, I carefully dole out the fun in measured quantities. I'll just play through this set of levels, or play until I lose all of my ships. The disappointment when I stop playing is actually outweighed by my anticipation of playing again.
This may be some new take on the "just one more turn" type of games. With a time limit in place, there's a sort of artificial value inflation (when a resource is limited, it becomes more valuable). How does one create a game where the anticipation of playing is as good, or possibly better than the playing itself?
* Two hours is really too much. You're taking a risk that the player will get bored of the game in that much time
Annual_Review
Annual Review
I'm cleaning up my email folder. This should be part of my annual "prepare for a new year" process. I'm mostly just making this up, so it's not really annual yet (and may never be).
Over the last few weeks, I've thought about what I want to do next year. Writing my annual Christmas letter (which is an annual tradition, running on 6 years now, I think) has put me in an introspective sort of mind-frame. I suppose you could look at this as research for my new year's resolutions.
I'll start with something small. Actually, I have a few small recurring resolutions. One is this blog - I want to post every 5 days or so, so if you come back once a week, you should always have something new to read. I can't promise this, of course, as I do occassionally go on vacation, but I'll do what I can.
Also, I want to clean up by selling something on eBay each week. I'd probably do better if did a dedicated ebay push, just take a few weeks to sell everything, but that would introduce the possible (likely) problem of sending the wrong thing to the wrong person. So, instead, I'm going to try to post something on Friday (each auction ending on Friday) and get it in the mail on Saturday morning (presuming I get paid more or less when the auction ends). I'm hoping this will be a maintainable pace.
Heck, I hope that writing a new blog entry each 5 days is a sustainable pace, too. I've got (I think I mentioned this earlier) a script that prompts me (I refer to it as Nag-amation) every 5 days, looks in my unsent folder, and (if it finds anything) formats it for me review and makes it easy for me to send it along. Sweet.
Well, after babbling for three paragraphs, I can finally get to what I want to tell you. 2008 will be aboout 3 things for me. Music. Games. And Magic: the Gathering. Ok, so technically, Magic is a game, but I dedicate enough time to it that it merits its own category. I'll start there.
It's a kind of Magic
I play at least two hours of Magic a week (and this doesn't include the homework time of making and tweaking decks). Additionally, I'm blessed with a wife and a housemate that also play Magic, so it's not hard to convince either (or both) of them to crack open some boosters for a quick Winchester draft or sealed deck.
Then there's the tournaments (running them, not playing in them - which is a rare treat). I'm on track to have at least one tournament a month - in January, I'm teaching new players how to play, and in February, a new set it coming out, and in March (being my birth-month), I can probably arrange to have a casual tournament at my house. In April, another set will come out, and I'll probably have the opportunity to work at a pre-release. Six months away, and I see a good amount of Magic in my future.
Other Games
"Well, Sheep, " you might say, "that sounds like a committment. What else do you have time for?" While I've more or less stopped going to my local gaming group on Mondays (which is sad, but they simply go too late for my schedule), the Jedi Princess and our houseguest (who deserves some sort of FlyingSheep name) have dinner and games with friends of ours once a week. We only usualy play one game (or two short games), but it's something. Also, a little bird told me that one of our friends is getting Race for the Galaxy for Christmas - I can't wait for that.
New paragraph - what I really want to do is spend more time designing, developing, and testing my own game designs. There's another Unity Games event at the end of January that's providing a nice deadline, and with Sara's family visiting, I've got a few people to try out my ideas on. I'd like to say I've got both a carrot and a stick as incentive, but I have no idea whether the family is the carrot and the deadline is the stick, or vice versa. Some metaphors are better left unsaid, I suppose.
I have some interest in creating a web app to either share these designs (and encourage other budding game designers to share their ideas) or just to track what games I play and when (although I expect board game geek has such a service already written).
Sweet, sweet Music
Music is the easiest of these three, as I'm more of a twig in a stream, rather than the stream itself (my metaphors are getting worse, aren't they?). I'm in two groups (three, if you distinguish between the Dance/March+Medley community groups) that rehearse weekly or monthly and perform whenever the opportunities arise.
Website?
You may have noticed that, short of the blog resolution and some ideas for potential web projects regarding gaming, I don't have many plans for FlyingSheep.com. While I hope to continue to play with existing public tools (like MySpace, and possibly FaceBook), and this site will continue to be a playground for ideas that I want to try out, I don't have any plans to commit a large amount of time to the website. I hope that doesn't come off as disappointing to the two of you who still read this blog (: But one of my goals with making this list of goals (a meta-goal, if you will) was to replace my guilt over not getting more stuff done with a recognition of the stuff that I do get done. I suppose I don't want to have a dozen half-finished projects, I'd rather have 6 finished projects, without driving myself crazy (:
Chistmas Part I
Christmas (part one)
So, we went to my parent's house for Christmas Eve. I made lasagna, which is a rare treat. I'm not allowed to make lasagna at home because, well, there's no such thing as a "small lasagna", and we end up having leftovers all week.
Ironically, we ended up taking about half of the lasagna home, so we've still got enough leftovers for a week.
Sly Cooper 2
Anyways, one of my gifts was Sly Cooper 2. I got the original for Christmas two years ago, and was pleased that the opening sequence of Sly Cooper 2 starts, "Two years ago, Sly Cooper defeated Clockwerk...". It's cool when game time =eal time (at least in my life).
It's a shame that it's taken me so long to get back into the Sly Cooper games. I think that there's something wrong with way they select portions of the game as demos. I played a demo of Sly 2 that was included in one of the Ratchet and Clank games (which is brilliant cross-selling). In the demo, I had to follow someone around without being caught. After a few feeble tries of the demo, I gave up in disgust, convinced that the success of the first Sly Cooper must have been a fluke.
Now, having played the game - including the same mission that was used as a demo, I think it's great. I'm remembering now the fun that I had with the original. Each mini-mission is slightly challenging (I expect them to get tougher as I go), and there's plenty of other things to do (like pick-pocketting, finding all the clue bottles, exploring, etc.). It's not completely free-range (like Grand Theft Auto), and not completely linear (like Jak 2 and 3), and playing as three different characters in a multitude of game types means a lot of variety.
Spice of life
Different stuff in small amounts is sort of a theme in these post-Christmas days. I spend a little time, maybe an hour or so, playing Sly 2, then I work on a game design for about an hour, then watch a few episodes of Twilight Zone or Simpsons (more Christmas loot), and then start the cycle over again. It's nice, but I worry that I'm being too superficial and I shouldn't indulge my short attention span so much. Eh, I'm not really worried.
So, if this is Christmas part 1, when's Christmas part 2? Whenever my wife's parents arrive to kick off another round of present opening. Possibly tonight.
How do you open presents?
They open presents differently than my family does. In my family, everyone gets a gift (or a stream of gifts) and opens them simultaniously, competing for attention. This is similar to the way we do everything - we talk all at once, and we're not all that good at listening. It's surprising how well we communicate with each other, really.
My wife's family, on the other hand, opens presents one at a time. Each present opener has the full attention of everyone in the family. Additionally, someone should (although we've failed at the this the last few years) keep track of who got what from whom, as most of the gift-givers aren't present, and thank you cards (or phone calls) are difficult if you can't remember who gave you what.
I like both approaches to gift opening. Frantically opening presents is exciting and boisterous and celebratory, while leisurely opening presents is enjoyable and stretches out the fun (open presents for a while, stop for a snack, open more presents, stop for a nap, then finish opening presents).
