I have a new daughter.
On Friday May 22, 2009, Chloe Zen Johnson was born. She was 20.25 inches long and weighed 8 lbs, 13 oz.
New Shirt Available
For your amusement and mine, I have created a shirt which you can purchase.
Invisible progress!
Just “finished” (there is still a possibility that more bugs/inefficiencies will come to my attention, but for now it’s finished) my C# implementation of a Goal-Oriented Action Planner. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read the previous post or just ignore this one. Pretty exciting to me, anyway. I ended up just allowing one value per state symbol, with effects replacing the old value with the new one.
Games are fun, but that’s not the point.
Most games are developed with the intent of inducing feelings of “fun” in players. In my opinion, which is at least partially influenced by my read of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, this approach is irresponsible at best. The theory presented by the book is that the feeling we call “having fun” is our brains giving us chemical rewards for learning new patterns and/or recognizing old ones.
Continue reading ‘Games are fun, but that’s not the point.’ »
Close Range
This is a hilarious parody, but perhaps not for the very squeamish. Watch the video and play the “demo.”
Modern Warfare 2
Apparently the marketing people at Activision want Modern Warfare 2 to be the best-selling game of all time. That’s not really very interesting, but I had some fun in the comments thread.
D&D Session Report 2
Well, over a week has passed since our second D&D session, so it’s probably about time I did the write-up. (I started this post a week ago, so now we’ve even had the third session and I’m just getting around to posting the report for the second.)
Unknown White Male
This is one I’ve wanted to watch ever since I heard about it (I can’t remember exactly how; I think I saw a preview for it on some independent film channel or something). We have had it from Netflix for a few months but never got around to watching it until a couple nights ago. Just posting this to say that Unknown White Male is a fascinating film which I think many people would like.
PS3: Difficult by Design
I suppose this shouldn’t be all that surprising. But really? That’s why the PS3 was designed that way? Some seriously flawed logic there.
Work in progress.
I’ve been working on and off lately on creating a library of classes and algorithms in C# to help me make games and game prototypes. When I get them into a decent state I intend to put them up online, releasing the code to the public domain (free for any use).
You might just get 3 after all, David.
So the DM, after reading the previous post, thought the part about how we believed the kids was interesting because he didn’t think it’d be figured out so quickly.
D&D Session Report 1
On Saturday I joined a new D&D 4th Edition game which was starting up and will be having sessions every two weeks or so. My play availability will probably be extremely limited once the baby’s born but I intend to enjoy it until then. I’m looking forward to the next session, as this one was a lot of fun. We were all starting at 3rd level, and for a couple of the players I think it was their first time playing D&D (for me it had been a while), or at least their first time with 4th Edition. Some of the rest are min-max hack-n-slashers (one in particular, and the other player and DM are a little bit like that though they do value story and roleplay at least a bit). I wasn’t the DM, by the way, just one of the players. The session went something like this.
Today I will write a post for this blog.
Two, hopefully.
Added Google Reader to the sidebar.
Just added a widget on the sidebar to show stuff I’ve shared from Google Reader.
a post…?
Misty this morning, here. Foggy. Kinda cool, doesn’t happen often.
I’m not sure what to write here, now. Time has passed (surprise).
Looking for something?
I suggest reading A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.
Morning Pages
I’ve been keeping up with my morning pages for the course pretty well. Tuesday of last week, this is what I wrote.
Gifts can be difficult to choose.
That’s why Dave Barry’s Holiday Gift Guide is now available.
I’m impressed.
The previous post must have set some kind of record for longest time on the internet without a single page view (from anyone other than myself and maybe webcrawlers). I think that must mean that this blog is now part of the dark, uncharted fringe of the internet. Soon trees will be falling silently here left and right. Maybe a new culture will arise and evolve as a separate species with a society to whom the prime virtue is apathy and whose language consists entirely of noises uttered during coitus. After a wrenching political upheval, one hero or villain among them, depending on your point of view, will intentionally or accidentally unleash a malevolence that will drive them to extinction before devouring itself in nothingness.
