malvasia bianca

I’m honestly not entirely sure why I’m writing this post: the fact that large corporations suck is not a surprise to anybody, and neither is the fact that large corporations try to coat themselves in a veneer of human interactions and come off looking even worse once you get beneath that veneer. Still, venting can […]

Since my role shift at work, I’ve been thinking about teams: partly being surprised by my reactions to some interactions, partly thinking about ways in which my instincts are a bad fit for some aspects of our house style. And three questions about organizational team structure (in general, not about my current job) that I’ve […]

I’ve been thinking about earning, spending, and saving money more than normal recently. Part of this is getting older in a young person’s industry while having my employment be more contingent than normal over the last year; part of it is the lure of riches that the startup dream dangles in front of you; part […]

Like many other people, I switched to Feedly as my Google Reader replacement. The import worked well; as part of that process, in the “Uncategorized” category, I found dozens of blogs that hadn’t published for years. I removed most of those subscriptions, but some of them I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of: And […]

I really have fallen off of my blogging rhythm ever since getting back from vacation: the trip left me somewhat sleep-deprived, somewhat frazzled, and with a sequence of small “I finished a game” posts that I felt that I had to get out of the way. That combined to get me out of sync; I’ve […]

We went to Japan two and a half months ago, and I still haven’t gotten around to really blogging about the trip! Part of that is because I’ve been busy; most of that is because I’m not much of a travel blogger, I write about things I’ve been thinking about instead of places I’ve been […]

The Friday talks. Bringing a fine GDC to an end; this is the first year where I haven’t gone to a single talk that I felt was a mistake for me to attend, and several were excellent. And powerful: two or three of this year’s talks brought me to tears. 10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners […]

The talks I attended on Thursday; all were good, but the Walking Dead one was particularly enlightening. 10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman 11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman 2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider […]

My notes for the Wednesday GDC 2013 sessions: Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, […]

On a couple of instances, most recently on his thousandth blog post, Jordan has brought up some advice that I gave him when he was starting his blog: that you should have low standards. Jordan phrased that advice more articulately than I did at the time, I’m sure: What he meant: to blog you have […]

This is going to a hard post to write. Normally, I play a game, finish it, and write about it here; but I’ve been playing Rock Band 3 for more than two years, and I’ve been playing one game in the series or another constantly since the first game came out back in 2007. So […]

Every so often, I get somewhat dissatisfied with an aspect of how I’m spending my time; these days, it generally involves rethinking the way small actions fill time. I’m in the middle of one of those periods right now; it was kicked off by me running into a thought-provoking article about (temporarily) quitting Twitter right […]

We’re visiting Japan for a couple of weeks in April; does anybody have any recommendations as to where we should go? It’s our first time there, we don’t have even the basic outlines of the trip planned yet, let alone any details.

About a year ago, I read Whipping Girl, and this point stuck with me: If you require any evidence that femininity can be more fierce and dangerous than masculinity, all you need to do is ask the average man to hold your handbag or a bouquet of flowers for a minute, and watch how far […]

Christmas is almost upon us; a holiday that I am not very good at, and have, at best, mixed feelings about. So: time to dig into those feelings? It’s a religious holiday in origin; and certainly I would never say that Christians shouldn’t find Christmas to be deeply meaningful. In some circumstances, I would expect […]

If you’re not already subscribed to it, I’d like to suggest that you might want to read my linkblog as well. My ground rules there are that I never post more than four links a day, that I generally try to find quotes when linking to articles, and that I generally don’t add much commentary […]

One thing I’ve been wondering recently: to what extent do I like the influence of Silicon Valley venture capital firms on the local startup culture? There are certain ways in which their influence is good, no question: it’s great that there’s money available for people to try new things, it’s great that it means that […]

On the Sunday before GDC this year, I spent the first half of the afternoon up at a chocolate festival, and the evening playing the Battlestar Galactica board game with some fellow GDC-attending friends. (Or at least they were friends before we started playing!) That left me with some free time in San Francisco in […]

I frequently lament the lack of crepe stands in Downtown Mountain View, so I was pleased that a restaurant called “Crepevine” was setting up shop; when I noticed it had opened its doors today, I figured I’d go in and buy a crepe to eat on my way home. The restaurant looked pleasant enough once […]

One of my main sources of blog posts is following analogies: seeing where they’ll lead me, stretching them far past their breaking point in hopes that they’ll give me a different perspective on something that I’m thinking about. And today’s area in which to analogize is forms of social organization, or relationships more broadly. The […]