malvasia bianca

For whatever reason, I’ve been playing a fair amount of Flight Control HD this week, and it’s reminded me of my current attempt to get my next action list under control. In both cases, there are a bunch of items (tasks, planes) that you’d like to take care of, with new ones appearing all the […]

Now that I don’t work at Playdom, I have rather more freedom to write about Facebook games; I don’t plan to do that a lot, and I’ll certainly be doing so with a Playdom bias (among other things because I get a lot more game invites for Playdom’s games than for other games), but I […]

One checklist item when starting my new job was setting up a new Things installation. (I have separate work and home installations, with the home one synced to my iPhone.) And, most of a couple of months in, the differences between the two are pretty striking: my Next Action list at work is a lot […]

One thing that I’ve learned from the Vintage Game Club: the mechanics of old games don’t always hold up so well, and old adventure games are certainly no exception to that, generally making me bang my head against the wall (and not in a “proud to have finally figured that out” way) a few times […]

When we bought our most recent computer, my plan was always to install Windows on it eventually. And now, with the VGHVI’s LOTRO symposia on the first week of every month, I’m thinking it might be time. But I could use some advice from people who have done this before. Some context: I’m only planning […]

At work, we frequently play a few rounds of Burnout Revenge after lunch. (Video games seem to be a general startup thing, not just a game startup thing.) Which is a lot of fun; the only Burnout game I’d previously played was Burnout Paradise, and while I think that game is a masterpiece, I’m also […]

When Apple released a version of iOS with a limited form of multitasking, they also added a way to switch directly between apps by double-tapping the home screen. I almost never used that feature, however—I don’t have so many apps on my phone that it’s hard for me to get to the one I want […]

Another way to look at what I was saying yesterday about Tiny Wings: the game says that your actions matter (even if those “actions” consist solely of deciding when to touch the screen!), that they’re worth focusing on and honing, and the game goes to quite some length to actively support you in that journey. […]

Some things that I found interesting about Tiny Wings: It’s a one-button game, using a mechanism that works well and that I haven’t seen before. Which makes me happy for the medium: if there’s valuable novelty there, there’s valuable novelty everywhere. It has a procedurally generated world, but each world persists for a day. (Rather […]

A correction in regards to my earlier post on “employees as commodities”. My guess as to why my peer bonus gift cards was cancelled was incorrect: a former coworker got curious and asked around, and it turns out that, due to a mishap, a bunch of gift cards got cancelled. And Playdom decided not to […]

I played through Planetfall recently (still an amazing game, about which more later); but, before doing so, I had to decide what platform to play it on, given the plethora of Z-Machine interpreters. And I decided to give Frotz on the iPad a try. That was an experiment, but not a particularly eccentric one: I […]

I’ve been at Sumo Logic for about a month and a half now, and I’m really enjoying myself: very interesting programming, great coworkers, and I’m quite optimistic about our product. So if you live in the Bay Area and think it would be fun to write Scala code to do real-time analytics on very large […]

When I first started playing Minecraft, I spent most of my time, well, mining. Or at least underground: I’d obsessively dig stairs going straight through the rock in one direction or another, I’d occasionally hollow out a blocky room whenever I needed a space for a chest or a crafting table, and every once in […]

Edit: The speculation in the second half of this post is incorrect, see this followup for clarification. Probably the main reason why I wasn’t unhappy to leave Playdom was that I’d gotten the feeling that much of the upper management viewed the company’s employees as commodities. After the acquisition, the company didn’t make any effort […]

I usually listen to podcasts when I walk to and from work or do the grocery shopping, which means that I like to always have a set of earphones in my pocket. And, unfortunately, they have a habit of breaking more often than I’d like: it’s not unusual for me to have to buy a […]

I (along with a lot of other people) was curious about Diaspora when it was first announced, though I can’t say that I’ve been too excited about its initial release. (Incidentally, feel free to add me if you’re already on Diaspora, and I also have invites available if people want them; I don’t currently plan […]