May Contain Nuts

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in :P.

Sometimes I want to smack myself senseless.  Obviously, this requires a little bit of setup to adequately explain where I’m coming from, so I’ll try to start far enough back that it’s enlightening without being boring or otherwise unnecessarily detailed…

Oscy and I have, for some time now, been involved with a neighbor in our apartment complex who has, to put it lightly, been going through some really serious relationship-related issues.  On the side, she’s a complete technophobe who also happens to have a bizzare tendency to want to have all manner of technology in her apartment, then freaks out about it a few days later because she’s either unknowingly broken it, forgotten what it was there for, doesn’t actually know how to use it, or thinks that someone might be hacking into it (this includes being suspicious of the little circuit boards in her smoke detector, fearing that her apartment may be bugged).  Stay with me here, because I’m slowly getting to the point…

One of the less intelligent things I did for this woman was give her my extremely outdated Dell laptop in an attempt to assuage her fears about her computer being hijacked and get her to a functional state of computing again, both tech-wise and peace-of-mind-wise.  In the course of the month and a half or so that she had the laptop, I ended up re-installing XP three different times (once for the initial wipe before I gave her the system, and twice more after that because either she or someone in her family who promised to “fix” this perfectly operational system for her completely trashed it instead).  Finally, she ended up just giving the laptop back to me a couple of weeks ago (a blessing in more than one way, as I’d been missing the nicety of having a lappy around, and it meant I would no longer be dragged over to her apartment at 11 PM to “fix” something that wasn’t broken and listen to another hour or two of sob stories).  She then tried to get it back a couple of days later, only to then change her mind once more a few days after that, but that’s neither here nor there (just annoying).

Anyway, throughout this whole mess, she’s ended up becoming friends of sorts with the complex’s maintenance guy, whom she also had try to “fix” the not-broken laptop (which resulted in me having to re-align the pins for the power plug after both of them failed to realize they were forcing the jack in the wrong way… bloddy idiots).  At some point she mentioned me and my incalculable technological prowess to him, and about a week ago, he came by asking if I could take a look at his computer, because he was having problems with pop-ups and couldn’t get some of his games to run.  The end goal of this post is now in sight… stay on target!
I agreed to look at his computer after he promised to pay me for my time (something my neighbor has never done), and spent last Saturday evening merrily removing over 200 virus- or malware-infected files from his computer, deleting all of the crapware that came with it, and setting up a functional AV/Anti-spamware suite (in other words, Not Norton)… which was actually pre-installed, never activated, and probably damaged by a bit of malware because it wouldn’t run properly despite launching at boot-up).  All told, I ended up charging him $70 for the time spent, which is still easily half of what he would have been gouged for at Geek Squad.

It then occurred to me that I lived in an apartment complex that was probably full of lamers as hopelessly lost as these two people, and that there was probably a fair amount of money to be had fixing their problems for them at half the price of what Geek Squad would charge (still a fair amount of money by any estimation) without the hassle of lugging their computer off to a retail store and dealing with Best Buy’s interminably long wait times and generally clueless staff.  This led to the ad-hoc creation of the Computer Defense Force, an “on-site” computer service & repair operation for apartment tennants.  Now, I’ve prided myself on not having to deal with endless system maintenance since I bought my G5 three years ago (doesn’t seem that long, but maybe thats a good thing, hehe), so Oscy was understandably baffled by this decision to start servicing computers in my “copious” spare time outside of work.  There’s actually two reasons why I decided to get into this again after 3 years of just dealing with Oscy’s computer and the occasional service call from my clueless family members: 1) more money is always a good thing, and 2) it actually makes me kind of happy doing this to computers that aren’t mine.  I have to be a bit more careful with other people’s systems, obviously, but I’m helping people get their computers working again, and oddly enough, it’s good stress relief watching a virus scan or disk defrag run.  And did I mention I’d get paid for this?

Now we’re on the home stretch… I realized last night that my quaint little Pages document of a sales invoice was pretty cool and all, but that I’d need a real way to track expenses and payments, as well as services offered, services rendered, the costs for those services, and to whom I provided them (as well as who still owed me cash moneys).  The problem is that most of the apps that handle invoicing and billing on the Mac are built for web designers and other freelance-type people who have big projects for small number of specific clients.  Now, if there’s one down-side to what the Mac has done for me, it’s made me less inclined to try and shoehorn the way I want to do things into the way an application wants me to do things.  My growing tendencies toward programming my way out of a hole I’ve found myself in have done absolutely nothing to help this situation.  So, at a loss for an app that does exactly what I want (a surprising rarity on a platform that supposedly has far less software than Windows does), I decided on a whim to start up XCode and start dinking around in the hopes that I might be able to figure out how to build my own program.  For those of you who have been waiting for this moment, this is the part where I commence smacking myself senseless.

OS X apps are written in Objective-C, which is a related language in some ways (but obviously not others) to C, C++, and any of the other not-C# variants of C floating around these days.  I have nothing but bad experiences from my C++ computer programming classes, learning how to create MPG calculators that ran in the Command Prompt, which has made me extremely hesitant to try learning a C-variant language that has absolutely no practical use where I work.  My forray into XCode last night wasn’t exactly nightmarish, but I was just blindly following the instructions given to me by the Hello World tutorial, so I didn’t get much of anything out of it beyond learning that XCode/Interface Builder’s way of building apps and linking them to UIs is very different from Visual Studio’s (in some ways better, in other ways a lot more tedious).  I still know next to nothing about Objective-C, and I’m betting that by the time I’ve learned enough about the language to build my shiny little application with CoreData usage and iCal &Address Book integration, I could probably just make money by selling that instead of the services I’d be managing with it.

Plus I still want to make video games…

And I need to actually get Issue 12 of the Archiver done for TCT, which I was asked to help with 5 days ago…

And I’m still interested in trying my hand at C# desktop programming, just so I can have a potentially useful new skill at work if the need arises…

And I’m helping to plan Mysterium…

Which, speaking of, means I need to get the Room Share system finalized tonight and handed off to TW and Odo for assistance in developing…

See why I want to smack myself?  I mean, Learning New Skills for Fun and Profit is cool and all, but I’m still working on that “and Profit” part… I have a ton of ideas for things to do, and no time to finish any of them as a result.  And all the while I keep coming up with more new things to try and do.  It’s somewhat maddening…

Briefly, (or Boxerly?) I would just like to point out that deciding to split a program’s language strings out into a separate file so that they can be easily modified after you’ve already done a significant amount of development work to get the project to a stable and functional point is a bad thing. Stupidly, I’d thought about doing this when I first started this project, but I dismissed the idea as something I’d get to later, when everything was up and running. Only now I have about a bajillion strings to split out of the program into an XML container file, and I have to work language loading code into every page around the structure of the existing code.

To continue the stream-of-consciousness style implied by the title of this entry, I have a couple of lists to present. The first is “things I need to do tonight”, in no particular order:

• Make jewelry. I’ve got a couple of necklace ideas I want to work on. Hopefully I can get them done within an hour or two tonight and actually get them posted to our Etsy store. If not, they’ll probably go up tomorrow.
• Finish figuring out Cha-Ching. As I mentioned in my previous post about resolutions, I’m looking at an app called Cha-Ching to manage our finances, both personal and professional. It’s also got some handy budgeting features in it to track what we’re spending, where it’s being spent, and how much we have left to spend in the current budget. The main drawback to this program is that the demo I’m using is limited to 100 transactions, which makes it a fairly useless demo to see if it will properly track the several accounts we’ve got across a span of several months. Still, I’m going to sit down tonight with it and the help file open in its own space and poke around at it a bit more. There’s a couple of other options I can look into if this ends up not being what I need, but from the small amount of time I spent with it yesterday, it seems like it’ll do the trick.
• Write back to slightperil about Archivist stuff. I have a lot of bridge-building to do, but hopefully I can work out a way to start cross-linking with all of the Guild and group sites (like the Messengers, the DZS, the Cartographers, the Greeters, etc.) to create a massive inter-connected resource network for the Cavern and the community at large. We have so much technology at our disposal that the original Guilds of D’ni would never have had, and I think it’s only appropriate that we take advantage of it and make things as open and connected as we can possibly make them.

My second list is a list of things I’d like to see added to the iPod Touch’s software. I’ve had the thing for just shy of a month now, and after using it fairly extensively, I can say that the following are things that could (and should) be in the software, but aren’t for whatever reason. I’m not even talking here about things like copy/paste or the lack of a Maps or Mail app, just “little” things that lack the typical level of integration and ease-of-use that usually comes with an Apple device. It might be that some of this stuff isn’t in there in favor of making the device more compatible with the Windows market, but that’s one of those things that just kind of annoys me even more than it just not being included for no reason. Anyway, on with the list:

1. Multiple on-the-go playlists. The Touch has a flippin’ keyboard. When I’ve created a playlist in the on-the-go section, let me save it as a normal playlist and give it a name. If I’m away from my computer for a fair amount of time (like, say, 9 hours, as I am every work day), I’m probably going to want to mix up more than one playlist a day every now and then (and I have, actually). Don’t make me delete the playlist I made first just so I can make another one. Let me save it, and then sync it back to iTunes when I get home.
2. On a similar note, make all playlists editable. Again, this thing has serious multitasking capabilities, and if I can edit the on-the-go playlist in the most fantastically awesome way ever (really, it’s damn spiffy), why can’t I edit the rest of my playlists this way? Heck, just ditch the on-the-go playlist concept and make an “add playlist” button or menu option at the top of the playlist pane for even better consistency, and add an edit button to the top right of each playlist you select, just like the on-the-go one has now.
3. Support multiple calendars from iCal across the board. This is probably one of those cross-platform compatibility issues, but I have a Mac, and it has iCal. I have an iPod that syncs events from all of the calendars in iCal. Why can the iPod Touch not properly segregate them into the various calendars (by color, please?) like even my old iPod Mini can? Furthermore, why can’t I add an event to a specific calendar that’s been synced to the Touch? I had the “wild” idea about two weeks ago to make use of a GTD-style method of tracking due dates and events for various things, but that kind of fell apart when I found out the Touch didn’t support creating events in separate calendars. Wha? I realize this is a consumer device and not a business PDA, but seriously… I’m a consumer with a lot of things to do; why support multiple calendar syncing if it doesn’t do anything visible on the iPod? Stupid CD player in the trunk…

This is harder than I remember it being… of course, last time I literally just hacked a few queries together and didn’t do much at all in the way of actual database integration. This time around I’m going all out with new post markers and view counts and everything. Thus, it’s slower-going than I expected it to be.

That said, the Library is coming along nicely. The main index page is working, and the story list just needs a modification to only show the number of comments a story has received, excluding the number of story posts made (might include that separately). The trouble with that is that the information isn’t stored in the topic cache this way, so I’d need to query the database an unknown number of times to get all of the post IDs and their parents for each story, then loop through them for each topic and get final counts for story posts and comments. This may end up being more trouble than it’s worth, and I may as a result end up pulling the count altogether. Hopefully I can work something out, though.

The story page itself is also making headway. Creating a nested comment structure is hard, even when you’re only nesting one level deep. However, I finally banged out a rather insanely elegant solution that takes full advantage of the <foreach> construct in IPB’s HTML-logic parser. I’m rather proud of it, I must say. Now I just have to make sure the posts are parsing correctly, tidy up the actual presentation, and integrate the code to mark the story as read when viewing it, and I’ll be pretty much all set on the viewing front.

I plan on getting the view component of the Library wrapped up tomorrow, and getting the view component of the News wrapped up on Saturday. Posting, commenting, replying, editing, and moderating will have to wait until late Saturday and Sunday. That pushes getting the Golden KI automation done back into next week, hopefully no later than Tuesday. If I still have time before next Friday, I’d like to see how feasible it would be to get a search built in to the Library and News segments; we’ll have to see, though… it may not end up happening, just because search is a pain, and managing permissions within the forum the way I’ve got it hacked is a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Anyway, I’ll probably be doing a backup of the live database next Friday or Saturday, uploading it to the test server, and executing an update on it there to see where any kinks might crop up and fix them before deploying this thing live. We’re getting close!

It occurs to me that I’ve been rather a bit more talkative than usual of late.

Anyway, an update, a personal bit, and some rumination to follow.

Firstly, on the promised subject of DPWR, I’m hard at work getting the upgraded version of the site hammered out, finalized, skinned, and integrated into IPB 2.3. The forums are complete, as are the Gallery and the Archive. The links system has been totally overhauled, and will need to have all of its information re-entered from scratch, but there’s a lot of cruft in there that doesn’t work anymore anyway, and a lot of new stuff to add, so I look at it as a way to make the whole thing better overall. The Community page just needs a couple of tweaks, and will ultimately prove to be FAR more useful than the current landing pad with two links on it that I’ve been using for the past 3 years. I’ve taken to syndicating a few of the community’s RSS feeds, such as the feeds for Explorer Exchange and the Jalak Registry, as well as MystBlogs, UruBlogs, and the CCQDB. Community-related news items from the main page are also re-printed here, along with a calendar, an online list, and access to the Member List.

Slightly less far along is the actual home page, but that’s mainly because it’s still missing some minor News integration and the whole gamut of Library integration. Once the Library is wrapped up, I’ll be tying that in, and everything will be complete. There’s already some better integration than there used to be, with better Archive integration befitting of the new Archive component, separate news feeds for Community/Cavern news and general game-, GameTap-, and Cyan-related news, and a new listing of the last 4 images to be posted in the Gallery.

The Golden KI, the Library, and the News segments are the only things that still require considerable amounts of effort. The Golden KI is largely complete, but it’s my intention to overhaul the rather arcane voting system and manual contest switch-overs that are currently in place, and replace them with poll-based voting in the forum itself, as well as an automated task to switch the contest over, handle topic/poll creation for each round, and announce a winner after each round is over.

The Library will be largely unchanged, because it doesn’t seem to be lacking much beyond a search feature, and I’m still looking into how difficult that would be to actually implement. The layout will be updated to reflect the new site design (don’t worry, it’s nothing drastic like previous revisions… this is more of a refinement). It’s still in the early-ish stages of development, but it should move fairly quickly once I dig in. My goal is to have the Library complete by Wednesday night.

The News bit is going to require a little bit more work, because I want to democratize it a bit more than it currently is. The new version of the News section will allow anyone with an account to post a news article or event announcement. Regular member accounts will require staff approval of their entries to prevent spam, while certain groups, like TCT, who have a history of posting solid material, will be able to post without the approval restriction. As with the Library, I’d love to have a search feature for this section of the site, but it depends on how feasible it ends up being; both the News and the Library both draw their data from Invision Power Board’s forum database, so the permissions restrictions and such that go along with that need to be worked around in order to get search working outside of the forum itself. Development of News should be completed by Thursday or Friday at the latest. Ideally, this will all be wrapped up before my new computer gets here, so I can give it my undivided attention when it does. I fully expect to have the new DPWR online before October 1st (of this year, just to be overly-specific).

Moving on to a completely different topic, today I started “Phase 1″ of my eventual data storage and backup solution. My current solution is pretty much “hope the drive doesn’t crash before late October”, though I’m hoping to move well beyond that soon. I was doing some browsing earlier today and noticed that Best Buy was selling the new revisions of Western Digital’s MyBook line at $50 off, so I went ahead and sprung for a 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for all of $140 after tax. This will eventually become my Time Machine back-up drive, but for now it’s serving as an extended storage drive for my Mac, because I’ve been running desperately low on storage space for the past while now. I’ve already moved my iPhoto library over, and am in the process of moving my iTunes library over as well, for a combined storage savings of about 80 gigs.

When Leopard comes out, I will be getting a copy along with an additional internal hard drive (probably also 500 GB), which will become the new extended storage drive. I’ll be backing up all of my data to this drive, and then doing a fresh installation of OS X on my primary disk, just to make sure all of the cruft and haxies and random crap I’ve installed but no longer use is cleaned up for before I start using the new OS. Once I have Leopard installed, I’ll copy what needs copying back over to the primary drive, and then set up the MyBook drive as the Time Machine backup target. So, I’ll have 820 gigs of storage backed up on a 500 gig drive. Perhaps not an optimal solution, but one which can be extended as time goes on as need be.

For those interested, here’s the AppleScript (in convenient ZIP format…) for creating a new TXT file in the currently selected Finder window’s location. It will launch TextEdit if not already open, and the tricky part: see if it just launched, was already running but had no documents open, or was running and has documents open. It will then prompt you for a filename (I know, not 100% Windows-equivalent, but it’s better than having “Untitled 24.txt” in your folder). If you cancel, nothing happens, so yay. If you click OK, you’ll get a new window in TextEdit (or TextEdit will launch and NOT give you two new documents for the price of one… that was a pain to figure out), and a saved file with your chosen name in the Finder window.

One difficulty seems to be that it continually prompts you if you want to run the script when you select it from the Scripts menu, and I have NO idea how to get that to go away :P.

If anybody can turn this into a Contextual Menu Item or an Automator action, that’d be awesome. Heck, even just removing the “Run this script?” prompt would be fantastic.

Download the ZIP of the Script file.

Solving bugs in code, while perhaps the most frustratingly annoying thing on the planet, is perhaps one of the more satisfying parts of writing code… the most satisfying thing being having your crazy-ass code idea actually work with no bugs the first time through. This is a notably rare occurrence, especially with me.

I also find myself continually annoyed at the fact that 99% of everything I’m doing will never be seen by the average person who looks at the site because I’ve put it on my resume. All they’ll see is the rather simplistic front page, which has since been mutilated into something obscene by the client, who doesn’t have an ounce of design sense in his entire body. Nobody’ll see the dynamically-generated data charts, the fancy AJAX tools, the involved and delicate exercise tracking system, or the complex reservation calendar setup. This frustrates me to no end.

Oh well, at least more of it is working now… moving inexorably closer to being DONE with this damned thing. Gods. But boy does it feel good when stuff starts working.

It’s a wonder I’m not bi-polar…

Note to self… never, ever ever try to mess around with a database at 4:00 AM. Nasty things like dropping data from a production table tend to ensue.

*ded*

Happy fourth to everyone in the US, unless you’re the people blowing up fireworks outside my window while I’m trying to slog my way through writing PHP and JavaScript, two activities I find hard to do with random explosions going off in the background. I find myself idly wondering if we would have such a fascination with shooting off fireworks today were our national anthem not about exploding rockets.

Fireworks are supposedly illegal for personal purchase and posession in Kentucky anyway, so where does this stuff come from?

So I’m still behind on my web development contract. The week and a half of sheer insanity followed by three straight days of grueling horror as we premiered Star Wars did not help matters any, and I’m presently trying to retain a grip on sanity, which means my ability to write code that does anything but print “AMC is a demon-spawn” is rather limited. I also, despite all indications otherwise after the premiere, still have a job at AMC, though I do need to cull my hours in order to catch up on web development. I say this because after the premiere (which did not go off without a hitch, despite our best efforts), the three of us who ran the midnight showing were fairly certain we’d get written up for the problems, even though we couldn’t have done anything more to prevent them. Had we been written up, the three of us would have walked, and by all reports, about 4 more people would have followed us off the job. (Un?)fortunately, this was not the case, and everyone is still gainfully employed, but still looking for a reason to leave.

I’m pondering the intelligence of my bank, as they reported that a check I deposited was in my account balance according to the online account access site when in fact $860 of the $960 was still lacking in a magical property known as “funds availablility”, which means my efforts to pay off the Cinema Display have resulted in my account going under the zero limit. Poopy. Fortunately, a recent re-check has indicated that I am no longer overdrawn and that the Apple payment went through without taking me below zero since my check deposit also apparently finished going through today. Yay. I’m thinking about driving to the Apple Store tomorrow after work and dragging a dual 2.3GHz G5 out the door with me, w00t.

I am apparently in a limbo state that RAWA and I have co-deemed “in the running” as far as my application at Cyan is concerned… they’re not quite actually really actively hiring at the moment, but apparently someone was impressed because they do actually send you an email if you suck and they want you to go away, and I’ve yet to get a “go away” email. Woohoo.

After watching the special edition DVDs of A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back (ah for the days when “Episode X” did not connotate instant recognition of what the smeg you were talking about), I have concluded that digital effects are a lot more expensive, in terms of man-hours, than traditional effects. The original New Hope and Empire credits have about a 30 to 40 person crew listed under optical effects, miniatures, and muppetry. The Special Edition add-on credits have a list of about 100 extra people on Lead TD (a term I still need to find the definition of and actually memorize this time) and Animation, plus rotoscoping and matchmoving. That’s a hell of a lot of people. I admit it was probably harder than it should have been since the original trilogy wasn’t shot with ILM’s target thingies all over the set for matchmoving purposes and whatnot, but still… 100 people doing the job that 30 people did fantastically well almost 30 years ago. Go figure.

I’ve been asked if I have any intentions of going into film given how much I tend to talk about it, but really, I talk about it because that’s what I deal with about 35 hours a week, and I see a lot of good and an extraordinary amount of bad movies roll through our doors at AMC Newport. When I talk about film, or storytelling, or digital effects, I’m largely basing my reactions and opinions on what I’ve seen and discussed at work and in school. I really have no burning desire to go into digital film effects at ILM, Weta, Cinesite, or Sony Pictures Imageworks. They do absolutely mind-blowing stuff (usually… I’ve seen bad [and I mean truly visually bad, not just a slip in a matchmove every few dozen scenes] from everybody but Weta, but I’ve only seen LotR from them), but they are largely involved in simply bringing an artistic vision to the screen as best as they can manage. It’s a fairly one-way pipeline in film, and I want to do something that has more two-way-ness in it, which is why I want to make video games. More than that, though, I want to tell stories. Not just telling stories to people, though, but with people. That’s the real fun, I think, which is why I’m eyeing Cyan rather seriously, becase I get the feeling, based on what Rand has said in interviews, that he wants to advance the role of storytelling and interaction in games. This intrigues me, and I’d like to be on-board while he does whatever he’s doing.

Tangentally, I’ve decided that the next time I play Myst, I need to make a mini-game out of it entitled “find the construction errors”, which basically involves pouring over each still and trying to see where things were built or textured badly. As a sort of component, the goal is to try and determine how each object was built just by analysing it visually in the final render. This was brought on by a recent test of my Cinema Display’s visual quality at very low resolutions (namely 640×480), wherein I noticed several oddities on Myst Island, such as the uber-reflective Planetarium rock texture (you can see the dock reflected off the side when you’re standing right beside it) and the mis-aligned Tree Elevator (the tree is three parts: a bottom, the elevator box, and the top [plus the leaf cone], and the elevator part doesn’t line up with the top and bottom). This is largely aimed at learning from other people’s mistakes, not pointing them out simply to make fun of them. The rest of it is just good-natured fun seeing how far CG has come since 1993 in terms of accuracy and what you can do with it if you do it properly. Myst is an inspiration to all us late-blooming “three guys and a garage an internet” CG artists who want to do something fun :).