malvasia bianca

When Steve Jobs died, I felt I should write about him. Probably about Apple, really: I don’t know anything about Jobs, but Apple (the company and its products) occupies a surprising amount of my psychic space. It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, […]

And now Zippy is gone. Which I’d been worried about: his body had been slowly falling apart for years now, and it wasn’t at all clear to me that we’d know when to make the decision that the time had come. (Zippy’s decline pattern was very different from Yosha’s.) But on Tuesday, my subconscious was […]

I’ve started another blog (or blog-like thing), “Malvasian Fragments”, whose intent is to give me a space to explore nascent thoughts, thoughts that are too long for Twitter but aren’t well-developed enough to fit in this blog. (Insert snark about the lack of coherence of a lot that does show up in this blog!) The […]

Liesl, Miranda, and I are a rather traditional nuclear family: living on our own (well, once with two dogs, more recently with one, sadly soon to be none), without any relatives within thousands of miles. It wasn’t always that way, though: for four years, Liesl and I shared a house with our close friend Jordan. […]

I back Kickstarter projects not infrequently, but I don’t talk about them much here. And the project I backed most recently, Bhaloidam, was going to be no exception: surely you’re all quite familiar with Corvus Elrod, have been hearing about this project for years now, and have already signed up to back it? It’s about […]

This month’s theme seems to be “blog about David’s sexuality”; one of my coworkers recently reminded me that National Coming Out Day is today, so let’s just make that theme still more explicit. Because it’s kind of amazing (embarrassing, really) that I’ve written more than 1100 posts on this blog, and this is the first […]

There are enough posts on this blog (this will be number 1144) that I’ve long since lost track of them. For most of them, that’s fine (actually, for most of them, forgetting is probably an act of mercy), but there are some posts that capture ideas that I still refer to occasionally, and I’m sure […]

I’ve already talked about the puzzle gameplay in Catherine; what about the rest of the game? For me, the tone was set with the very first question I got asked in the confessional: “Does life begin or end at marriage?” Which is an analysis of marriage that I would never for a moment consider performing: […]

Catherine seems to mostly attract interest for reasons related to its narrative, but of course you spend most of your time with the game shoving blocks around in the puzzle mode. I went through it on Normal which, generally speaking, meant: quite difficult. So I failed a lot, but with persistence, I made it through […]

I’m surprised that I don’t seem to have blogged about it here yet, but I’ve been curious about the barefoot running movement for a while. (Prompted by reading Born to Run, among other things.) My first experiment was with huaraches made by Invisible Shoes: once my feet got used to them (which took a couple […]

I woke up this morning in a musical but frenzied mood; so, as soon as the rest of the household emerged, I sat down at the piano to play (and, in places, sing) through a Billy Joel collection that I bought yesterday. I’d been full of energy this week, so next I decided to work […]

We used to be a two-dog household, but our older dog, Yosha, died a few years ago. (Has it been five years? Wow.) Which was (quite) tough on Zippy for the first month or so, but he got used to the new state of affairs, and went back to his general good albeit mere mood. […]

It’s rather odd rereading my prior post on getting braces. Not least because it was written four years ago: I knew it had been a while, but I didn’t realize it had been that long! But also because of the “it should only last about five months” bit. My memory tells me that, even at […]

Meandering on from the discussion on forms of responses from a couple of months ago: my tolerance for snark has gone down markedly over the last few years. And it’s not just snark: it’s responses that, in whatever fashion, have as their substance “you are wrong, I am right, and I am going to focus […]

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 […]

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 […]

Another podcast that I got around to listening to in my GDC commute was the CDC Podcast episode on “A Post-Comment World”. And thinking about that episode added a twist to my understanding of forms of publication and discussion on the web. The number of online publication niches continues to grow: it’s not just blogs […]

In a role-playing game, you customize your character’s abilities, refining that customization as the game progresses. Your character will typically have a class (fighter, mage, priest, rogue, etc.), which you pick at the start of the game and generally doesn’t change; this sets broad limits of your character’s abilities. You also typically have cross-class attributes […]

Beginnings As soon as Disney’s acquisition of Playdom closed, e-mails from recruiters started appearing regularly in my inbox. Most of them I essentially ignored: I’d been having a great time at Playdom, and while I didn’t expect to stay there for the six years that I’d stayed in my previous job, I certainly wasn’t planning […]

If you’ve been wondering at the slow pace of updates here, part of the reason is that a low-key job search suddenly got a lot hotter over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, it’s over now: I’ll be joining Sumo Logic on February 21st. More info to come eventually…