malvasia bianca

It has been clear for a while that I would benefit from Japanese lessons: I’ve been getting a lot out of self-study (with assistance from books and JapanesePod101), but that self study means that I’ve never been in a situation where I actually had to produce Japanese. Which isn’t the end of the world—there’s nothing at all wrong with focusing on reading, and you can certainly make a case that I’ll find myself more frequently in situations where I want to read or listen to Japanese than situations where I want to speak it. Still, it is a lack, and a lack that I’d been feeling more and more.

The obvious solution to this lack is to take Japanese lessons. I hadn’t done that for two reasons: one is that it costs money, and the other is that it takes time. (Japanese in general is taking up more and more of my time, and not always in productive ways: over the last few months, I’ve been spending too much time reviewing vocabulary, to the extent that I’m now thinking that, in retrospect, adding a bit of Chinese to the mix was a mistake.) But with the upcoming trip to Japan, I now have a concrete situation where being able to speak Japanese would be useful and where I can’t fool myself that reviewing vocabulary alone is a good idea; so I asked around, found a teacher, and now I’m taking Japanese lessons on Saturday mornings.

It’s only been three weeks so far, but my initial reaction is: this was clearly a good idea. I wasn’t fooling myself that I really have learned a fair amount over the years; but that learning isn’t always showing itself in ways that are productive when it comes to speaking. Over and over again, my teacher would ask me something, and I would know that it’s a word that I would recognize if I saw it in Japanese, but I couldn’t come up with it myself. (My memorization practice has almost exclusively gone in the Japanese-to-English direction rather than the English-to-Japanese direction.) And the same thing would happen with grammar.

So I have a lot of learning to do. (And I also have to get over my own fear of saying the wrong thing, but that at least I am conscious of and can deal with.) But I think the learning is coming along reasonably quickly: my teacher seems to think that I’m doing a good job, and I can feel the words and knowledge shaking loose in my brain and rearranging themselves in more productive ways. Who knows how well I’ll be able to speak Japanese in April, and it will certainly be a completely different (and much less comfortable) experience than traveling to France or Germany, but we’ll be able to do well enough.

It is still a time cost, and one that’s more noticeable given how much time I’m wanting to spend on guitar during the weekends these days. So right now I’m not committing to continuing to take lessons after I get back from Japan. Having said that, I’m tentatively thinking that I’ll stick with the lessons for a while, quite possibly a long while: I’m getting benefits that way that I’m not going to get any other way. (Unless I do something like move to Japan for a few months!) It will help my reading, too, I’m fairly sure: as I move beyond bilingual editions or comics that I have English-language copies of, I imagine it will be useful to have somebody whom I can ask questions to about phrases that confuse me. And speaking practice will potentially give me access to better understanding of written Japanese, because I’ll be able to see more of the choices involved in crafting a sentence.

So, for now, I’m taking this as a sign that I should get more serious about studying Japanese, and that I should shift the balance of how I’m studying. I’m adding in lessons, and a greater amount of English-to-Japanese practice; I’m dialing down memorization practice, being more comfortable with looking up words but not adding them to the list to memorize. (On which note, I’ve finally finished memorizing the 1981 version of the Joyo Kanji list, though it will be a little over half a year before I’ve learned the extra 196 characters that were added in the 2010 revision.) And I should spend more time reading—for now, I’m freeing up a bit of time on weekends by moving one bit of reading practice (Hikaru no Go) from weekends to Wednesdays, except that I enjoy reading that enough that I’m still reading it on weekends, I’m just now reading two chapters a week! (I also discovered last week that there’s a new edition of Hikaru no Go which is much nicer to read: larger pages, better quality paper and printing, and occasional sections are even in color.)

And I’m also getting comfortable with thinking that there’s a good chance that Japanese is the last language I’m going to seriously study. One reason why I started studying Japanese is that I wanted to show that I could still learn languages; not that I was worried, but, well, it had been maybe 15 years at the time since the last time I’d started learning a language. Now, though, I really don’t spend much time at all thinking about that sort of thing: I’m confident that I can learn things (languages, instruments, whatever) if I spend the time on them, but I also have a quite good idea of what that time cost is, and of what the tradeoffs are when compromising on that learning.

So, for me right now: the tradeoffs are such that I’d rather dive in more deeply, and do it right. And one aspect of getting older and having a good number of self-directed multi-year learning projects under my belt is that I’m comfortable with the thought that doing it right is potentially not just a multi-year process but a multi-decade process. (At least given that I’m not throwing myself into this completely: I’m still a dilettante, I’m just, well, a committed dilettante.) I’m not wedded to that thought, and it wouldn’t shock me if, a decade from now, I decided that, say, focusing on Chinese was the right thing to do. (Heck, maybe I’ll even get religious as I get older and go back to Pali!) But I’m also quite comfortable with a possibility space where my current interests carry forward for quite some time.

The Vintage Game Club has been dormant for a while now, but the recent release of System Shock 2 on Good Old Games was too much for Michael to resist, so he’s organizing a playthrough! So, if you’re thinking of giving the game a try yourself, please consider playing along with the VGC.

When I saw that Kris had a “Cat Games” tier on her GoFundMe campaign, promising that she would “encourage Jason to write a Twine game about your generosity (it may be a string of “jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkaaaaa”)”, I just couldn’t resist.

And I am very pleased to see that Jason has, indeed delivered. It is a true existential masterpiece; I am honored indeed to have played some small part in coming into being.

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 before I was about to have rather more free time than I was used to because of a hiatus I took from work.

I didn’t follow the article’s advice, but I’ve been thinking about what it said, because I think it’s pointing out something true and relevant to me that I wasn’t aware of before. It starts in a relatively familiar place, that

Twitter has done a lot of really great things for me. I’ve met a huge number of people I care about because of it, and a good number of those have become coworkers and colleagues—even closest friends. In fact, I’d say that outside of my family, most of “my people” in real life are folks I met on Twitter.

Which is a little stronger than I would phrase it myself, but at the core I agree with that point: Twitter leads to real friendships, real connections. It then moves on to a discussion of empathy:

The level of candor people often share on Twitter, particularly over time, has given me a strong sense of who some of the people I follow are, how they think, and what they value. I end up including many of the people on my Twitter list in the somewhat fuzzy set of people I empathize with.

As a result, I’ve actually been able to predict with frightening accuracy how well I’d get along and work with people I’ve followed on Twitter longer than a few months.

And that’s great, it really is. But the article then points out something that I hadn’t thought about as much:

But the problem that occurs is that it can be a huge mental lease we’re signing when we invite a few hundred people into our Twitter life. To some degree, it is choosing to subject ourselves to thousands of ads throughout the day, but ones that come from trusted sources we care about, so they’re actually impactful.

Even if the people we know aren’t explicitly selling things (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or Promoting their Personal Brand™ (there is everything wrong with that), we’re still choosing to accept their stream of one-second ads with *some* kind of message all day.

We’ve surrendered a massive amount of mental and emotional energy without making the explicit choice to do so—it’s simply imposed on us by subscribing to the channel and checking it.

This is also true. I need to care about people, I do care about people. But that doesn’t mean that I need to care about hundreds of people on an hour-by-hour basis, or that it’s healthy for me to do so.

The author of that article recommends taking an extended break from Twitter. I thought about doing that, and I still might do that; his reasons for that seem pretty good. But I have too many friends where I want to know what and how they’re doing on a week-by-week basis (if not necessarily an hour-basis), and where I won’t learn that any way other than Twitter. And Twitter serves an information role similar to blogs for me as well. I didn’t want to give either of those up; but I did want to acknowledge that spreading my empathy too thin was arguably unhealthy, and that while my life improves by having random input from interesting people, that doesn’t mean that it keeps on improving as much or, indeed, at all if I continue to add more interesting people into the bucket.

So I started unfollowing people. At first, that was easy enough, once I’d accepted the basic premise that the mere fact that somebody is nice isn’t enough of a connection. Basically, I unfollowed people whom I hadn’t met in person or had conversations through other mediums (e-mail, voice chat), whom I didn’t have regular conversations with over Twitter, and who didn’t have blogs that caused me to think enough to get me curious about what they said in other mediums. Nice people all, I’m sure, and people whom I would be happy to meet in person; but I hadn’t.

That seemed like an improvement, and I appreciated the small but noticeable time savings it gave me. (For better or for worse, I’m a “read your entire feed” kind of person, in both my Twitter consumption and my blog consumption.) What I wasn’t expecting was what this revealed about the tweeting habits of other people I followed: with my Twitter traffic cut approximately in half, that gave a lot more room for more prolific tweeters to make their presence felt. (And more prolific retweeters—this noticeably increased the density of retweets in my feed, though I got that back under control by turning off retweets from a few people.)

This is where things got painful: there were several people who unquestionably fell in the bucket of “interesting people whom I’ve met in person, whom I care about, and who I wanted to see how they were doing on a week-by-week basis”. The problem is: some such people tweet on a minute-by-minute basis. And they’re at the center of conversations, which means that by seeing them I also see replies to them from other people I follow.

For better or for worse, I don’t have a good way to control that volume. (Maybe I should switch to a list-centric Twitter client?) Instead, though, I unfollowed a few more people. This time, it hurt—I can think of three people in particular whom I miss in my Twitter feed, I just don’t miss them quite enough to want my phone to be filled with page after page of their tweets. (So, to anybody who goes from this article to check whether I’m following them on Twitter and discovers to their surprise that I’m not anymore: that doubtless means that you’re one of those three people, and I miss you!)

I’m mostly over that hump; the gradual weeding-down continues, though. Results will vary, but: I’m happy both with my choice of following fewer people on Twitter and my choice to not take a vacation from Twitter. No promises that either of those will continue, but for now they seem like a reasonable place to be.

That’s Twitter; can/should I apply those lessons elsewhere? Blogs and podcasts are two potential analogues; and, in both places, I’ve been trying to reduce my volume of consumption as well.

Though those two play out differently, from each other and from Twitter. I’d already pared down my blog reading enough that I don’t have to carve out time to read blogs every day. Or at least I don’t have to catch up every day: I group my blogs into lists, and two of those lists I do catch up on most days. Those lists are short, though, and I haven’t particularly pruned them.

But I have pruned outside of them: ideally, I’d like my blog subscriptions to be at a level where I can read them one or two evenings a week and be caught up. (There’s certainly likely to be one or two evenings a week when I’m too tired to write here or concentrate on a game, and blogs can be good for that, though I will have to save a few of the more thoughtful pieces to read on a day when I’m less tired.) I ended up unsubscribing from a few prolific, generally more newsy feeds, and that’s brought the blogs relatively under control.

Podcasts are different: for a while, I’ve had the list of podcasts that I subscribe to in order to listen to every episode at a manageable level. But I find myself more and more often adding single episodes of podcasts that catch my eye somewhere to the queue, and that list is building up.

Contrary to my normal habits, though, I’m relatively comfortable with letting those build up. I’ve flagged those individual episodes as potentially interesting, but my brain seems relatively comfortable not treating that flagging as a commitment to listen to those episodes, so they sit in my podcast client for a while. And eventually I do listen to them or I delete them; I’m treating their volume as feedback that I should slightly raise my bar for what to save, but it’s not a big deal.

There is one thing that’s going on with my brain and podcasts that I’m not entirely comfortable with and that comes back to the empathy issue I mentioned above: the number of podcasts that I listen to that are by people who I generally consider interesting people but whom I don’t have an active reason to really feel I’m learning huge amounts from. I’m actually pretty good at not listening to every episode of such podcasts, but still: I’ll dip into episodes when they talk about something that catches my interest.

In particular, I do this with several of the shows on the 5by5 podcast network. (Or shows by people who used to be on it but aren’t any more, like John Gruber.) And what I’m realizing by observing myself is that I’m giving them access to an hour or two of my attention every week, and by doing that causing myself to care about things that, honestly, I don’t really want to care about. So I’m trying to be more careful about that now; I’m still listening to Horace Dediu regularly, because he talks about stuff that I really do want to think about, but I’m trying to raise my bar with other shows from that circle.

So, that’s Twitter, blogs, and podcasts: in all three, I’m slimming down, driven in part by time limitations and in part by a desire to not cede my choice in attention to other people. Which raises two questions: 1) What is the balance of those two drives? 2) What about other ways in which I’m spending my time?

Fortunately, I had a good test case for both of those questions recently: I had an unplanned vacation from work for a little more than a week of December. So I ended up having free time during the days, and asking the question of: how do I want to fill it?

The answer turned out not to be: by reading Twitter and blogs more. Instead, the single thing that I wanted to do the most was practice guitar; second on the list was catching up on blog posts; and the other two things that I spent significant amounts of time doing were programming and singing. (Playing games would doubtless have been on that list if I hadn’t been starting a Rocksmith binge and winding down a Rock Band 3 binge.)

Which is a list that I’m pretty comfortable with: if I run a thought experiment of what I would do if I were taking a year or two off of work instead of a week or two off, that’s still a plausible guess as to what I would do. Though I think I would try to make room for a larger-scale creative project in that situation; something that I’m open to now, actually, I’d be happy to carve out time for game development with the right collaborators.

I certainly wouldn’t try to find time to, say, listen to more podcasts—I was, in fact, going to say that I’d probably listen to fewer podcasts, but that’s probably not true, because I would still carve out time to walk, and I’d listen to podcasts during that time. (Or at least during some of that time: I should probably spend more of my walking time listening to music than I currently do.) I’m actually going to have another related experiment soon, when my employer moves to Redwood City: that will add a train commute to my day, and I think I’m going to fill that time with reading books instead of with podcasts.

(Side note that I’ll bring up now since I’m slipping into making lists: GTD, when done right, is not about having your life ruled by lists: it’s about feeling that, at any moment, you’re doing what you’ll find most satisfying. The lists, instead, are for two purposes: one is to provide a place for your long-term satisfaction and short-term satisfaction to negotiate with each other; and the other is to get you to take commitments seriously, so if you’re not sure if you want to do something, you don’t put it on your Next Actions list, you put it on your Someday/Maybe list. As I get better with GTD, my Next Actions list gets shorter, and I get more and more comfortable with doing whatever catches my fancy without worrying that I’m missing anything by doing that.)

(Side note two: if I had more free time, I quite possible would carve out more of it to play board games. Which I’m actually doing frequently at work over lunch, but that puts a cap on how long a game can be: I’d like to play longer games and play games more often with a wider group of people. Not that I don’t enjoy playing games with my coworkers, they’re a great group of people, but my family and non-coworkers friends are also great people!)

The other thing that I’m spending a lot of time on is learning Japanese. During the weekdays, that mostly consists of going through memory review (and that’s at the edge of taking noticeable amounts of time); and my weekends are getting more and more Japanese projects in them. (The current list is lessons with a teacher (about which I’ll blog soon), reading a children’s magazine, reading Hikaru no Go, and reading a grammar book.)

This is a little out of whack. Having said that, what is not out of whack is that I’m spending significant amounts of time learning Japanese: it’s still something I want to do, and I want to do well.

But the balance is off. I’m spending too much time memorizing stuff, both in terms of percentage and total volume. For the latter, it’s arguably a mistake that I started listening to Chinese-language podcasts; maybe I should stop adding new Chinese vocabulary words, maybe I should even delete existing ones from my memorization program. And for the former, I should spend more time reading and talking Japanese; aside from that being the ultimate goal of what I’m doing, I bet it will help my memorization (as long as I don’t get too uptight about entering new words), because I’ll have run into a lot more words in other contexts, so I’ll be more likely to remember them and hence my program will throw them at me less often. And I should try to carve out some reading time outside of weekends, too, so my weekend Japanese practice doesn’t start to feel like a chore.

So, that’s where things are. I want to keep on writing on this blog; I want to keep on playing guitar; I want to keep on programming (but work gives me a good amount of that); I want to spend an hour or so most days walking. I want to spend a little more time studying Japanese; I want to spend a little more time reading books, and a change in commute will make that easier. I want to continue playing games, but I’m okay with Rocksmith taking a fair amount (but certainly not all) of my video game playing time; I would like to have a little more of that time spent on board games. I want to immerse myself fairly deeply into the activities I’ve listed above, and that involves a real time commitment; that tradeoff means spending less time reading blogs and Twitter.

That seems like a pretty good plan for 2013.

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.

Papo & Yo is, I suspect, an important game. But it is also a game that my history doesn’t equip me particularly well to talk about. This, given its subject matter, is extremely fortunate for me personally; it does handicap me as a blogger in this instance, however.

But still: I have to say something about the game. Both because, well, that’s what I do when I’m finished with a game; but also because maybe Papo & Yo can teach me something about linking game mechanics and meaning?

Ever since it appeared last September, my brain has been in a constant dialogue with that Puzzle Box article. And Papo & Yo approaches that question from a different direction. It sets Monster up as a puzzle to be solved, where if you do the right sort of thing you’ll unlock the relationship that you desire. A different sort of relationship from almost any other game out there, but still: the pattern is there.

Except that it isn’t: at the end of the game, you have to accept that you can’t save Monster, you can’t get the relationship that you wanted. (Or, of course, you don’t have to accept that, but not accepting that won’t do you any good.) Which has real power, power that is amplified both by the real-world context and by the past history of this game trope (and related game tropes, in particular the protagonist as hero/savior) that this game consciously sets against you.

One more common trope that Papo & Yo sadly works with, rather than against is Women in Refrigerators. For most of the game, I suppose Alejandra has more of a feel of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl; but when she moves from the fringes and starts taking a more direct role, you just know that she’s not going to last very long; and, five minutes later, there she goes. I’m sure there’s something interesting to be said here about the gendered nature of violence, but it felt to me like a misstep on Papo & Yo‘s part, and Alejandra’s reappearance on the floating island, rather than giving more context to her character, just made that worse for me.

Narrowing my scope: the combat with Monster. You try to avoid Monster; most of the time, you succeed, but that’s hard enough that you’ll fail more than once. You’ll get knocked down, you’ll try to run away, you’ll get knocked down a couple more times before you escape or achieve what you were trying to do.

This sort of persistent, non-fatal attack is, I think, rather unusual in games. And I was surprised by how powerful I felt it to be: the lack of a health bar meant that my brain couldn’t simply slip into a game-playing mode when thinking about it, the lack of a fail state meant that I couldn’t simply give up and refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation. This abuse is happening; there’s no easy out, there’s not even an out of giving up, I’m going to have to both confront its reality right now and the reality that I’ll experience it again in the future. I’ll think about what I could have done differently to avoid it this time, to avoid it next time; but even if I avoid it next time, I’ll slip up again at some point.

And even that way of phrasing things says something: I’m blaming myself for slipping up, but of course it’s Monster who is attacking me. I’m in a world of wonders; much of the time, he’s irrelevant to that, he’s pleasant or even helpful just enough to show how much I love him, but he always comes back to hitting me, burning me, knocking me to the ground. In almost any other game, behavior like that would just be part of the challenge, part of the environmental hazards that the game places in front of me and that I take pleasure in overcoming; in Papo & Yo, it’s certainly part of the environmental hazard, but the way in which it persists brings Monster noticeably outside of the scope of a standard challenge.

Where the game actually came together for me was right before the end, in the segment where a section of town has gotten tilted on its side and you have to find a way to climb up to get to Monster. On the one hand, this is where Papo & Yo really embraced its nature as a platformer; but, on the other hand, that change of orientation was, in its own way, one of the most perceptually disorienting sequences I’ve ever gone through in a game.

And this mirrors what Quico is going through at this time. He’s coming to terms with the fact that he can’t save Monster, and that at Monster’s hands he’s lost other people who are dear to him. He still cares about Monster, he still wishes the best for Monster, but he has to find a way to rebuild his life without Monster. His world has been turned on its side; disorienting indeed.

Merlin Mann’s Back to Work podcast recently did a five-part series on GTD (starting with episode 95); good to have an excuse to think about that again, to have my eyes opened to ways in which I can improve my GTD practice.

One thing which particularly struck me while listening to the series was the discussion of inboxes, starting about 40 minutes into episode 98. That’s something that I think I’m okay at on a personal level, but I have more trouble with at a team level. And actually, at work, I have more trouble with it at a personal level, too—bug trackers are as likely to hinder inbox clarity as help it, and work involves multiple people with different roles and different positions in the hierarchy. That makes GTD in general more delicate than my personal GTD system, and inboxes are one place where those sorts of tensions get particularly exposed.

Which maybe makes GTD ideal for work environments! Because honestly identifying and focusing on your commitments is even more important in situations involving multiple people than situations involving single people, and it’s way too easy to sweep that sort of thing under the rug. So probably GTD’s tools are particularly important: just being clear about what your inboxes are and what an inbox means (in particular, that an item being in an inbox absolutely does not equal making a commitment to it), for one, but also weekly reviews.

Thinking about a team situation, too, there is the question: what are our team inboxes versus our work inboxes, who is putting stuff into them, who is processing them? One of my pet peeves about our Jira usage is that we’re doing it in a way that encourages individual inboxes; Jira encourages individual inboxes but does not require them, so I’m trying to experiment with a team inbox there. We’ll see how that goes; the experiment has just started, so who knows how it will turn out.

I’m optimistic that we’ll come up with a good framework for thinking about these sorts of issues at work. (On which note: I’m glad I just read Clear Leadership, in particular the concept of “interpersonal mush” that it identifies seems like a useful one to have available.) And it’s not like we have to invent solutions from scratch: aside from GTD, various agile methodologies all address the issue of inboxes and commitments in their own way, and kanban in particular puts it front and center.

I think Spaceteam is a kind of amazing game, though I doubt I’ll have much to say about it. There are way too few cooperative multiplayer games out there, which is one of my favorite play styles; the game play is charming and holds up for a surprisingly long time given its basic simplicity; the pacing and challenge level is well done.

And everybody likes it: I wasn’t surprised that my coworkers liked it, I wasn’t surprised that Liesl and Miranda liked it (and liked it enough for Miranda to ask repeatedly to play it over the next several weeks); I wasn’t even surprised that my father enjoyed playing it when we roped him into a game over Christmas. What I wasn’t expecting was for my father to ask to play it again a couple of other times over his visit; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him ask to play a video game before.

There probably are real lessons here about project organization, too: the way people have to avoid stepping on each others’ toes, the way you negotiate priorities, the unspoken agreements you end up with to support all of that, and the ways you handle blame.

And then there are the credits.

So: a wonderful game. Just not one that I have much to say about!

Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed myself using my iPad more and more during evenings, in situations where I would have used other devices in the past: we’ve only had one laptop for a while now, and while I used to try to grab it every other evening, more and more I’ve been letting Liesl use the laptop while I stay with my iPad.

Part of this is apps that sync better between devices. My experience with Things Cloud has been universally positive: it worked much better for syncing between my phone and my Mac than wifi sync did. (Wifi sync was fine from an accuracy point of view, it was just slow.) So I installed Things on both Macs at home (it had been on the iMac but not on the Macbook), and used it on three devices for a while; and finally I decided that my experience was good enough that I’d pick up the iPad version of Things. Which meant that I could now look at my notes for what I was planning to do on the iPad, click on links from Things while on the iPad, create Things entries with links from the iPad, etc.

My Things iPad usage actually is displacing iPhone usage as much as it’s displacing iPad usage. And the other place where I’ve been using cloud syncing recently is in Twitterrific. I’d been using Twitter almost exclusively through the official iPhone Twitter client since back in the Tweetie days (in fact, Tweetie was eye-opening to me, making it clear that the iPhone could give rise to software that was better than on full-size computers, not just shrunk-down compromises); but the official client has been getting worse and worse since Twitter acquired it, and Twitterrific 5 looked gorgeous. So I bought a copy of it, and turned on cloud syncing; all of a sudden I could read Twitter on my iPad and my iPhone instead of having to pick one device to stick with. (And all of a sudden I had an iPad Twitter client that didn’t look like crap—the official client was still okay on the iPhone, but very badly designed as iPad software.) So here even more than Things, my iPad usage is displacing the iPhone; I still like the form factor of the full-size iPad for many things, but I can imagine how I might find a smaller form factor iPad better than either device. (That’s still imagination, though—I haven’t actually bought an iPad Mini, and I don’t plan to particularly soon.)

Still, those are both side activities in the evening. The iPad had already displaced the laptop for reading e-mail and for reading blogs; but for writing e-mails of any length and writing blog posts, I prefer a real keyboard. But then I saw a few tweets recommending the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover and figured I’d give that a try.

So I got one. And I’m glad I did: it’s a quite serviceable keyboard, and it works in my preferred position (which is probably the hardest one for an iPad keyboard to manage), namely with the keyboard and iPad in my lap with the iPad in portrait mode. It’s not great as an actual cover—you can’t fold it back, and the magnetic attachment is weak—so I leave the smart cover on most of the time, but I’m glad to have it available to switch to, and I’ll certainly be glad to have it at GDC.

I’m still figuring out the best way to use the iPad to write blog posts, though. The WordPress app is okay, but it doesn’t let me edit in HTML mode (and I can’t bear the thought of not being able to distinguish between cite tags and em tags); also, it still seems to have an annoying bug about storing a publication date when you save a draft, which I have to remember to manually edit before I hit publish.

I think what I should do there is mostly write my blog posts in Notesy and save them in my Dropbox folder, only moving them over to WordPress for final publication. And I can do that final publication in the web editor rather than in the app itself (or maybe through the app’s view of the dashboard, or something). I haven’t trained myself to do that just yet, though; but I imagine in a few weeks I’ll have fairly well-engrained habits that lead to me spending most evenings exclusively on the iPad.

Or at least I would imagine that, except for one factor: Oracle. Because the reason why Liesl grabs the laptop is that there’s a Solitaire game she likes on it; and that Solitaire game is delivered as a Java applet through the web browser. It’s the only reason why we have Java applets enabled at all on the laptop; and, for the last couple of weeks, that has been an extremely unwise thing to do.

I’m quite sympathetic to Liesl in this regard—I like Solitaire, too, and the applet is well done and has a nice selection of games. Still, Solitaire a game that lends itself better to the iPad interface than to a laptop interface. So I did a bit of searching, and came up with Solitaire Plus! HD—it seemed to have a good selection of games and a good UI.

And Liesl thinks that version of Solitaire works just fine. So, as it turns out, she’s now the one exclusively using her iPad during the evenings, while I’ve gone back to using the laptop to write blog posts. (The Logitech keyboard cover is a quite good keyboard given its constraints, but the Macbook’s keyboard is better, and it’s easier to cross-reference web pages when editing posts on a laptop then on an iPad.) Still: I’m using the iPad more than I was even half a year ago, I’m using it more than I use the laptop, and a world where my laptop usage is relegated to work and specialized purposes is clearly visible.

A while back, I got around to upgrading memory (my spaced repetition memorization project) to Rails 3.0. Then Rails 3.1 hit; I upgraded to that in the sense that I was using a 3.1.x version of the Rails gems, but Rails 3.1 came with a bunch of new defaults: jQuery instead of Prototype, the asset pipeline, CoffeeScript, and SASS. And I wasn’t using any of those new defaults: I put in a couple of hours towards upgrading at the time, but I ran into trouble and I’d just let things sit. Since then, Rails 3.2 had appeared, and Rails 4 was on the horizon, so it was clearly high time for me to switch. (My unplanned switch to Ruby 1.9.3 / RVM was a factor nudging me along, too.) Conveniently, I took a hiatus from work for part of December, and while I wanted to spend much of that time playing guitar, I was happy to spend some of it getting this upgrade out of the way.

The first question, then, is sequencing the changes. Clearly switching to CoffeeScript and SASS should come after the asset pipeline, and they also felt more optional than switching to jQuery. I think that, the last time I’d tried this, I’d tried switching to the asset pipeline while leaving Prototype in place, but that ran into trouble. (One of the issues here is that my code for keyboard shortcuts had required me to tweak the existing Prototype integration.)

I thought about switching the order of those two steps, switching to jQuery first while not turning on the asset pipeline, but ultimately I decided that turning on the asset pipeline was simple enough that I would do that together with the jQuery switch. (After all, that would save me the trouble of figuring out how to get jQuery included without grabbing it via the asset pipeline.) So that was my plan of record.

First, though, I spent a little while getting a development system set up on my Mac, so that I didn’t have to do all of the testing over an ssh tunnel to a Linux box. That was a pleasant enough diversion; a few things took a little more fiddling than I expected, but not a lot, and it was good to start from a clean slate so I knew exactly what was in the environment.

Then came the basic asset pipeline / jQuery switch. Fortunately, memory is a very small program, so there wasn’t much I had to do to get it to work with jQuery: add # in a few places, call .html() instead of .update(). And the asset pipeline part of the switch was as simple as I expected. I broke the keyboard shortcuts as part of converting to jQuery, but other than that, all the functionality was there with a quite simple change.

Then I turned my attention to the keyboard shortcut. That actually turned out to be very straightforward: I had one selector that was selecting the wrong element (a form instead of a button), so it’s actually possible that all the problems I had before were self-inflicted; even if they weren’t, once I selected the button and translated to jQuery’s way of doing things, everything worked. That was a huge relief—one of the lessons of this project (along with some self-observations at work) is that I’m so immersed in the TDD way of doing things that I get physically nervous if functionality doesn’t work for as much as an hour. So getting things back to working, albeit with somewhat unstylish code, was a huge relief.

Of course, the next step was to make the code more stylish—working is good, but it’s only a start. I spent a bit of time refactoring that keyboard event handler; then, prompted by the existence of the asset pipeline, I moved it out of the .html.erb file into a separate .js file. (The rest of the project was in general structured reasonably well, but not that part of it…) I only wanted that handler on one of my pages, though; I’m not sure what the best practice is for that sort of conditional behavior in Rails, but I ended up deciding that I would have one .js file per controller, leaving it empty for all controllers other than the quiz controller.

With that, I had a JavaScript story; next, time to clean up my CSS. It had been split across two files (a legacy of the scaffold generation); I unified that. I also started looking at asset precompilation; I ran into some problems there, and for the time being I just stuck everything in my list of files to precompile.

That got the first two items checked off of the list, at least in a basic form; next came CoffeeScript and SASS. The only JavaScript I had was that event handler; I converted it to CoffeeScript, making a few stupid mistakes along the way but liking the results. I’d never used SASS before; but it also seems like a clear improvement, in particular its nesting support is an obviously good idea.

At this point, everything on my initial list was done; but a next level of improvements were on the horizon. I wanted to think about proper organization of these files (e.g. how to handle the mobile versus full versions of the site, which I’d been doing by swapping out CSS files), I wanted to make it look as much like a new Rails 3.1 project as possible instead of something that had evolved over years (looking back, I guess the initial version was Rails 2.1?), I wanted to be able to do push-button deployment from my Mac at home to my Linux server, and I wanted to bring it up to the most recent Rails 3.2 version.

I started by comparing various files in my project with those of a freshly generated single-controller Rails 3.1 project, and I copied over all the changes that made sense. (It was amusing to see that mine was so old that the default formats the controller spit out were HTML and XML instead of HTML and JSON!) I also fiddled with routing a bit, and switched over to Ruby 1.9.3 hash syntax in several places. In terms of organization, the main change that I made was sticking a class in the body element that said whether I was on the mobile or full version of the device, and then including all the CSS for both versions all the time instead of swapping out CSS files conditionally. (SASS nesting was super useful here, of course.)

Then came push-button deployment; I eventually got a script that I was quite happy with. The main issue there was figuring out where to precompile the assets (which, incidentally, is something that gave me rather more trouble than I was expecting in general; I think I even ran into some bugs on gems with the latest 3.1.x version, but I can’t remember the details, it’s all clean now at any rate); I eventually settled on a two-phase approach where I check things out in a staging directory, bundle update, run all the unit tests and precompile the assets, then rsync the assets to the deployment directory and just do a git pull in that directory without compiling any assets or running tests. That gave me an acceptably small window of time when the deployment was in a slightly inconsistent state. (And I do control when Passenger restarts, anyways, so that window isn’t a problem.)

Switching to Rails 3.2 actually ended up hitting one wrinkle: the JavaScript escaping protection ran up against some code where I was intentionally sending   from the backend, because the ampersand kept on getting transformed into & no matter what I did. Eventually I realized that I should just get over my 90’s instinct of using character entities and instead specify it as a unicode character: \u00A0 worked just fine.

So yay, things are all up to date. Which I’ve been very glad of twice over the last month—there have been two Rails security vulnerabilities that seemed fairly serious, but in both cases I could just bump a version number, do ‘bundle update’, and run the deployment script I’d spent the time to get working solidly, getting the problem fixed in maybe two minutes. It really does feel a lot better to not only be up to date on your third-party software versions but to have spent the time to switch your code over to using the latest idioms and to have firmed up your deployment infrastructure. I’m now actively looking forward to Rails 4, as an excuse to nudge things along still further; and I have some changes that I’d like to make to the memory software itself as well.

Another GDC is coming up, and as frequently happens, there’s a video game blogger who is trying to raise money to attend GDC whom I very much support in that endeavour. This year, it’s Kris Ligman, whom you probably know best through her work curating This Week in Videogame Blogging at Critical Distance each week; I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that those columns are the single most important thing bringing together the part of the video game blogosphere that I inhabit.

That work, though crucial and time consuming, is unpaid. I wish we had better funding models for that sort of thing, making it easier for people to make at least a part-time job out of it; in the absence of such models, though, I want to make sure people like Kris can continue to do their work. And I’m positive that a trip to GDC will inform her work in concrete and productive ways.

So, if you read those columns, or interact with her on Twitter, or read her blog, or read her work anywhere else, and if you can spare a few bucks: please donate to her campaign. She makes a difference; you can help her make a difference.

If you click on that link, you will find that she has already met her funding goal. But I encourage you not to stop there. Yes, she will be able to attend GDC with the money she has now; but the budget that she lists there is a bare-bones one. (Believe me, you will not eat very well in San Francisco for eight dollars a day.) And the extra expenses that she lists at the bottom are real, too. I’ll quote what she says about that:

In addition to this, I’m sure I don’t have to belabor the point that my work on Critical Distance represents a major, unpaid time commitment each week — a time commitment I increasingly cannot make, due to working 40-60 hours a week (barely) making ends meet on my basic necessities. Therefore, if you have enjoyed my roundups for Critical Distance, or any of my other articles most of which are also free to be read and shared, please consider donating a little extra to keep this work top-notch, on schedule, and free for everyone.

So, while most years, I’m happy if we just reach our goal, this year I really would like the donations to keep on for a while. The money will not go to waste.

Many thanks for whatever help you can give.

I’ve been playing Rock Band in whatever its current incarnation is pretty much every weekend since the first iteration of the series came out. At first, I liked playing fake plastic guitars and was curious about drums (and, to a lesser extent, singing), and I enjoyed having people with good musical taste select songs for me to go through. (I only regularly listened to pop music for something like four years of my life, so I have a lot of gaps to fill!) That might have gotten stale eventually, but then the Beatles version came along with songs I love (and adding vocal harmonies, which were surprisingly interesting), and a year later Rock Band 3 allowed you to play on a real keyboard and a real guitar. I bought the Fender Squier Rock Band 3 guitar as soon as it came out (a few months after the game was released, but that’s okay, the delay gave me time to get keyboards out of the way first), and I’ve put in a few hours with that every weekend since March 2011.

That turned out to be an incredibly enriching experience. I actually always found Rock Band to be an informative guide to different ways to investigate songs, but its pro guitar mode is a much deeper dive than any of its other modes are. And it really did help me learn guitar: the game didn’t turn me into a good guitar player, or even a decent one, but I could find my around a fingerboard well enough for most songs, I can play standard chords (including barre chords) fairly reliably now.

Rock Band 3 isn’t the only game out there that’s trying to teach you how to play on a real guitar, though. In particular, Rocksmith appeared towards the end of 2011, a game which is focused exclusively on playing on a real guitar: its major selling point is that it comes with a cable that does DSP magic allowing you to plug any electric guitar into it, instead of restricting you to one specific (and musically inferior) model. If that could work, that’s great; initial response was mixed (in particular complaining a lot about audio lag), but some people were positive. Still, reading the initial responses, I figured I’d stick with Rock Band 3: it seemed that nobody was on the fence, people were generally strongly against one game or the other. And given that I liked Rock Band 3 and was getting a lot out of it (in ways that many other people clearly weren’t), it seemed likely that it was a better fit for me. (Kirk’s review swayed me, too.)

Still, I hadn’t mentally written off Rocksmith entirely; and, a year later, I started hearing more positive comments about it. (I imagine the recent PC release helped broaden its audience.) So when Rampant Coyote wrote a blog post discussing the two games, saying positive things about both, I looked at the price and decided I could give Rocksmith a try: I’d probably end up too annoyed by the lag and the design choices to stick with it very long, but the potential upside was high. And I’m curious about games and learning and music anyways, so I should explore their intersection.

That turned out to be the right choice. I’m trying to write this blog post in a way that isn’t negative towards Rock Band 3, because I have a huge amount of respect and appreciation for that game: I’m very glad I spent as much time with it as I did, I enjoyed the experience and learned a lot. Heck, for all I know I would have found Rocksmith frustrating to play at the beginning if Rock Band 3 hadn’t prepped me in advance: there’s a lot of basic skills that Rock Band 3 taught me, and I simply have no idea what Rocksmith is like for people without those basic skills. And when I was feeling particularly lost on the guitar fingerboard, I very much appreciated the Rock Band 3 Squier’s ability to tell me what fret I was holding down before I strummed it, it meant that I didn’t use looking at the guitar as a crutch as much as I otherwise would have had to.

But, having said that, my Rocksmith experience is starting to make me wonder about Rock Band 3, and in particular about Harmonix’s design goals for the game. One of my favorite talks from the first GDC I attended was one that Dan Teasdale gave about Harmonix’s design philosophy: for every game, they have One Question that they’re trying to keep in mind. For the original Guitar Hero, it was “Does this rock?”, for the original Rock Band, it was “Is this an authentic band experience?”. For Rock Band 3, Harmonix kept the same question of “Is this an authentic band experience?”, but decided to emphasize the “authentic” part: going in the direction of real drums (cymbals, twin kick pedals), real keyboards (an instrument they’d left out entirely in earlier iterations), and, most ambitiously, real guitars.

In hindsight, this question was perhaps too flexible. You can justify a lot in terms of authenticity: get rid of the fake instruments entirely, make people play for real, have every sound come from players’ actions! If you don’t want to go that far, you can say that the goal is just to have people feel like they’re playing in a band without making them too uncomfortable; but once you allow that flexibility, you can land anywhere in the design space from the original Rock Band to Rock Band 3 to beyond. And once you have such a broad design space, I don’t see how the One Question helps you make choices any more.

I have no idea if the folks at Rocksmith use a similar One Question approach, but I also have no difficulty in imagining a question that would work for them: “Does this help you learn how to play guitar?” That gives a much more focused answer: everything in the game is about having the player sit down with a guitar, trying to get the sounds that come out of the guitar sound more and more like the sounds that real rock guitarists produce.

Now, that difference in questions doesn’t make Rocksmith a better game than Rock Band 3; but it does mean that Rocksmith is, to my mind, a significantly more coherent game than Rock Band 3. In retrospect, maybe Bohemian Rhapsody was an even better choice for Rock Band 3‘s signature song than I realized at the time: the game’s glorious multiplicity means that there are always new, significantly different experiences to be found if you’re looking for them. (As I was stopping using Rock Band 3 to learn how to play guitar, I was also starting to sing more with the game!) But Rocksmith‘s focus is very powerful indeed: as soon as I came home today, I picked up the guitar and turned on the Xbox so I could practice, and I practiced more while dinner was cooking, and I’m already thinking ahead to whether I’ll have time to do the same thing tomorrow.

At its core, Rock Band 3 remains a video game in a rather traditional sense, even when playing in pro guitar mode: it’s about pressing appropriate controls at appropriate times to get the desired effect on your environment. Hold down these buttons and strum, now shift to these buttons and strum, and continue. For a game, it’s quite prescriptive about this: you have a bit of choice on how to use the controls (whether or not to strum on a hammer-on, when to activate overdrive, etc.), but with the exception of vocals, it’s fundamentally a game about pressing buttons the way it tells you to.

This continues with pro guitar mode. The difference there is that you have over a hundred buttons to press instead of five plus a scroll bar; and that really is a huge difference, it opens up a rich world of associations and linkages to you. I come from a piano background; to a first approximation, a piano is a collection of 88 buttons, and while that first approximation leaves out a lot, it also includes a lot.

And, for better or for worse, Harmonix made certain choices that keep it anchored within that game space of pressing buttons, that maintained a distance between you and the music. Even before I started playing pro guitar mode, I was frustrated that the game didn’t offer a mode where I could hear my mistakes when playing pro keys; I asked Harmonix about this after a GDC talk, and I was told that they felt that preserving the illusion of sounding great was so important that they wouldn’t allow modes that broke through that illusion.

With pro guitar, unlike with pro keys, there’s an easy workaround to that problem: unmute your guitar and plug it into an amp while you’re playing. Unfortunately, here you run into another problem: if you unmute the guitar strings, then the game will think you’re strumming when you’re not. You’ll get a bad score, which I can take or leave; but the game will play a jarring “wrong note” sound and stop playing the regular track for a bit, both of which are significantly more annoying. Miranda takes violin lessons, and a fair amount of that time is spent with her and her teacher playing a piece together; you can do that in Rock Band 3, but it’s like having a teacher who will stop playing and make a screeching sound with his bow every time you make a mistake, and who will randomly do that occasionally when you don’t make a mistake. This is neither a pleasant nor a didactically effective choice.

It is, however, a choice that is true to Rock Band‘s video game heritage. At its core, the game retains a strong focus on racking up points, and judging you by that criterion: and it’s as afraid of giving you points you don’t deserve as it is of taking away points that you do deserve. It wasn’t until I played Rocksmith that I realized how jarring that is: Rocksmith never penalizes you for playing extra notes, so not only does the question of false strums not arise, you can even try to listen and figure out the full versions of sections of the song that it’s only giving to you in a reduced difficulty. Rock Band 3‘s overdrive mode is another example of inappropriate game trappings that Rocksmith leaves out: if I’m focused on learning guitar, then the last thing I want to think about is what my streak multiplier is and whether I’m likely to be able to retain that and, if so, to lift the head of the guitar even if that interferes with my playing.

One of Roger‘s aphorisms is that “learning is always learning to play”. And one of the tenets of the practomimetic learning approach that he and his associates try to follow is that, in a well-designed game for learning, there is no distinction between evaluation and your didactic goals: playing the game well should be exactly the same as doing whatever you’re trying to learn well.

To my mind, Rocksmith does this extraordinarily well. As I mentioned above, it starts out by getting this right in a subtle way: it tries to avoid situations where the game punishes you for playing well musically. Guitarists might actually quibble with me on this one, because one way in which rock guitar differs from my classical piano background is the flexibility in exactly which notes you play to get a given chord; Rocksmith gives you a lot of wiggle room, but it does ultimately expect you to be playing from a given score. With that caveat aside, though: you can throw in extra notes, you can experiment with different techniques to silence strings that you don’t want to have sustain, and the game doesn’t care, it will accept what you throw at it. (Also, as far as I can tell, its strum detection leans fairly strongly towards claiming that you’ve strummed if there’s any doubt.)

It also has a significantly richer domain model than Rock Band 3 does. Rock Band 3 doesn’t model string bending at all (and in fact the electronics of its guitar make it actively hostile towards string bending); several songs in that game made a lot more sense to me in places when I realized that what I thought sounded like a HOPO grace note that somehow wasn’t modeled in the game was actually a string bend. Rocksmith‘s treatment of string muting is also much better than Rock Band 3‘s: the latter game entirely ignores the melodic aspect of string muting (making Take On Me very frustrating in the middle of the song), and it fails to distinguish between palm muting and muting coming from chord changes. (To be sure, Rocksmith isn’t perfect here: palm muted notes are one area where the game sometimes incorrectly claims that you have missed a note.)

One of Kirk’s points in his aforementioned review is that “Teaching music is a fundamentally human act, and it can only be properly done with soul and love.” When I started playing Rock Band 3, I was thinking I might start taking guitar lessons from an actual human being at some point; I still might do that, but I haven’t yet.

And there are ways in which having a person to guide me would be helpful, no question about it. My first couple of sessions with Rocksmith had moments of frustration that I would have gotten past much more quickly with a human teacher: sometimes notes weren’t registering when I was playing the correct fret, and I wasn’t sure why, and figuring out how much to bend strings took me several iterations. I’ve gotten over both of those problems (the former was caused by me pressing too hard on the strings, making them go sharp—stiffer strings helped a lot with that—while the latter was helped through a combination of me learning what to listen to and getting a guitar that isn’t actively hostile to bending strings), but I would have gotten over them much faster with a human helping me to give me pointers.

And I’m sure there are other ways in which having a human teach me would be a huge help: focusing more on musicality rather than on simply getting the notes right, in particular. Having said that, working with a game has active benefits, and benefits that go beyond the obvious ones of constant availability of instruction and cost savings. Because I really like having fifty-odd songs to work through, seeing a different set of songs every session and having more and more notes added to the song in each playthrough: I liked that in Rock Band 3, I like that in Rocksmith, and I’ve never had a human music teacher just dump me into a lake full of music like that. (Miranda had probably been taking violin lessons for about four years before she’d been asked to play fifty different songs!) Not that the traditional approach of having you focus on really learning a song isn’t a good one; but Rocksmith has that too, because once you get good enough on a song, you’ll get dumped into Master Mode where you have to play the song from memory.

Of course, Kirk’s point isn’t just about the details of human interactions in a teaching context: it’s about soul more broadly, something that he says the Rock Band series captures better than Rocksmith. And I agree with him about that: returning to Rock Band‘s One Question, you can tell that Harmonix is focusing on the “authentic band experience” as a whole. So yeah, there’s a lot less soul in Rocksmith‘s opening with its focus on guitar closeups. To me, though, that doesn’t point at a flaw in Rocksmith so much as a difference (though, to be honest, that intro could be improved): Rocksmith is focused on learning guitar, not on feeling like you’re in a band. And putting instruments front and center fits within that in a way that Rock Band‘s intro wouldn’t.

And the benefits of this focus on instruments are a lot more concrete to me than it would have been even a month ago. I always knew that the Rock Band 3 Squier was a bad instrument, and was planning to move up to something better once I was sure I’d outgrown it and would appreciate the difference in a better instrument. But I never got around to doing that, and never really felt the lack, for over a year and a half.

I started playing Rocksmith in late October; within a couple of weeks, I could see that my guitar wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to. So, at the end of November, I got it set up properly; that helped, but part of the way in which it helped was to bring clarity to ways in which I wanted a better instrument. By the middle of December, I was actively planning on getting a better guitar, trying out friends’ instruments to see what in them I liked more and what I liked less. The first weekend in January, I went shopping, found a great deal on a truly lovely instrument; as soon as I brought it home and started playing it, I had absolutely no doubt that I’d made the right choice, and I’ve barely put it down since then.

So yeah, Rocksmith is focused on guitars, while Rock Band is focused on being in a band. But there’s soul in Rocksmith‘s approach, you just have to dig a bit deeper to find it: it’s helped me forge a bond with an instrument that I hadn’t had before.

And, actually, I think Rocksmith will ultimately end up being better for me on the band front, too. I like playing along with the game quite a bit, and I have no qualms about treating it as an essentially solo experience. (I like playing chamber music with friends on the piano, but I spend a lot more time there playing solo music as well, and that’s great.) But Rocksmith, unlike Rock Band 3, does expose multiple different guitar parts for every song, instead of trying to combine them into one; aside from being didactically interesting (among other things because I realize how repetitive some of those parts are!), this also actively welcomes multiple guitarists playing together.

And that isn’t just an abstract benefit for me. One of my coworkers started playing Rocksmith over the holiday break, and I think a second one is going to dive into Rocksmith‘s bass mode; that means that my friends and I have access to a collection of songs that we can learn and play together. We’ve already come up with our initial setlist to work on learning; I’m not sure if we’ll get together this weekend or next, but I’m sure that a month from now we will have played together, probably more than once.

Neither of these games is close to perfect; but both of them have enriched my life hugely. And I love the direction in which they’re pointing: towards a world full of music at your fingertips, a world where learning is learning to play (in the double sense of playing music and playing games), a world where there’s a helping hand always available to guide you from listening to pieces to your first stumblings playing them to increased confidence. And a helping hand that doesn’t try to confine you to its realm: the direction that it’s leading you is towards a wide-open world of music, and if you take off and start running through that world on your own, it’s happy to let go, to send you off with a wave and the best of wishes.

For a long time, the Kickstarter whose product I was most eagerly waiting for was Corvus Elrod‘s Bhaloidam. The funny thing was that I wasn’t entirely sure why I was looking forward to it so much—I have a lot of respect for Corvus, and he seemed to be going in an interesting direction, but I don’t play non-electronic RPGs. Not that I have anything against them, but they require a time commitment that I’m reluctant to make, I don’t have a pre-existing group of friends that I’m in the habit of playing them with, I don’t feel like rounding up a group to play them with. Also, I don’t have ideas about a campaign that I want to run myself.

But as the release date got closer, I could see reasons to justify my excitement. When I read through the handbook, the system looked interestingly different: very sparse rules, with a nice simple set of abstractions. Gameplay that was based on speaking sentences instead of calculating damage and hit points, but with enough constraints to limit and support the players. It’s bridging the space between traditional gameplay and traditional performances in a way I hadn’t seen before: definitely worth looking into. And I loved the physical version of both the handbook and the lifewheel that eventually showed up: the Skein Pack is well worth the price.

And, as it turned out, I did have a pre-existing group of friends to play with: I play games with the VGHVI folks every Thursday night, we were looking for something different to do, and Bhaloidam was the obvious choice! So yay, we decided to play it once a month.

I quite like the handbook, but I couldn’t quite see how the mechanics would play out in practice. Fortunately, Corvus had a solution to that: the handbook comes with an introductory scenario designed to teach players the mechanics, and Corvus himself volunteered to run a session of that for us! And then Dan Cox put it together into a lovely podcast episode, with both audio and video versions.

That podcast is actually what motivated me to write this post: I imagine I’m not the only person who thought Bhaloidam sounded neat but couldn’t quite see how it would play out in practice. So, if you’re one of those people: I strongly recommend you listening to (or watching, if you prefer) the podcast, Dan and Corvus did great work. And if you’re not a person who is yet curious about Bhaloidam, I also think the podcast would be interested in showing you why it might be interesting. Because I do think that Bhaloidam is potentially a rather important new thing, a distinct point in the design space not just of games but of performance and art more broadly.

And if you’re interested in playing, consider dropping in on one of the VGHVI sessions—the campaign that we’re running (Greek Gods in Space) is pretty free-form, I imagine we should be able to support newcomers somewhat.

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 away he holds it from his body. Or tell him that you would like to put your lipstick on him and watch how fast he runs off in the other direction. In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female- or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self.

Which is definitely true for me: the idea of working on a strongly female-oriented game, Sorority Life, amused me, but publicly wearing the Sorority Life hoodie that I was given made me feel noticeably uncomfortable. We’re talking about a hoodie, not a handbag or lipstick, the only thing identifying it as girly (aside from the zipper being on the wrong side) was the name written on it, but still: it stayed in the closet.

Or at least it stayed in the closet for most of a year; but then I got fed up at some egregious sexist bullshit around me, and started wearing that jacket as a sort of symbolic (and doubtless almost completely unnoticed) silent protest. My discomfort at wearing it was still there, but it mostly went away after a day or two. But the presence of that discomfort seemed interesting, seemed worth interrogating.

Which, admittedly, I haven’t done very much of. But that desire to interrogate is showing through occasionally now: I had a fun time going jewelry shopping for Liesl and Miranda when I was at PSL (though I didn’t get anything for myself; there was one necklace that I wasn’t sure Liesl would like, and I would have taken over that one myself if she didn’t, but as it turns out she did), I’ve been following fashion links and browsing the linked-to web sites more than I had been (nice to see Science Fiction Fashion & Style start posting again), and I did get a stunning (though, sadly, a little tighter than optimal) set of fuzzy rainbow leg warmers to wear last month.

So: baby steps. And I’m not planning to change my default clothing away from something ostentatiously bland (at least apart from the socks that peek out from under my jeans). I might go a bit farther than I have been, though—watching Miranda get lots of earrings over Christmas (she had her ears pierced after her thirteenth birthday) hasn’t gotten me to actually want to get my ears pierced, but it has gotten me thinking about what sorts of jewelry I might want if I were to do that. (Longish asymmetry, probably.) Who knows, maybe an ear cuff is in my future?

I used to spend rather more time thinking about this sort of thing, I think. I hadn’t actually worn them for years, but there used to be a couple of skirts in my closet. (And, in yet another sign that Liesl and I belonged together: she gave one of them to me.) If I’m remembering correctly, the motivation for purchasing that came out of an entirely stereotypical mathematician’s way of thinking: clothing choices are an apparently arbitrary distinction, I don’t see any a priori reason to prefer male clothing choices over female clothing choices, so let’s see what the other choice is like and try wearing a skirt? The answer turned out to be: it was physically freeing feeling in some ways, it opened me up to mild but noticeable opprobrium (from both external and internal sources) that I didn’t feel like actively fighting, and I really depend on having pockets. So that experiment didn’t last (and I feel like I need to give a shout-out to Steve at some point in this post, and I suppose this is as good a place as any); whereas other experiments that involved hair choices were much more successful, lasting for almost a quarter century by now. All these experiments came from the same place; it’s certainly not a coincidence that certain aspects of programming culture are aligned with unkempt beards (“Unix beards”) on the one hand and Utilikilts on the other hand.

Some of the other gender-linked rethinking that I did at that time has had much more of an effect than those skirts, though. When I was growing up, it was much much more likely for women to do all the cooking in families than men; I didn’t want to end up in that situation myself. If I’m remembering correctly, I got that first skirt at a summer math program I went to in Duluth; Jordan and I shared an apartment there that summer, and we took the opportunity to learn to cook together. Very much the right choice; Liesl and I cooked together occasionally even when we started dating, and decades on we regularly do that four nights a week.

(I imagine that choice turns out differently for young adults these days—from the outside, it looks like there’s much less gender distinction in terms of cooking than there was when I was coming of age, but it also looks like the way that distinction is erased has a little more to do with neither men nor women really learning how to cook than with men taking a more active role in the kitchen. I could be wrong, though.)

Maybe I started thinking about child rearing roles at about the same time, maybe I didn’t think about that until a few years later; hard to be sure. Either way, it led in the same direction: this is something where past societal models (and, I suspect, present societal pressures) would lean towards having Liesl do much more of the heavy lifting, and I didn’t want to shirk in that way. That’s turned out with a somewhat different texture than cooking has, because a lot of childrearing/childcare activities aren’t naturally done by both of us at the same time in the way cooking is, so there have been times in Miranda’s life when I’ve spent more time looking after her and times when Liesl has spent more time. Still, I’m comfortable and very happy with how that split has turned out, too.

That’s where I am, that’s how I got here. But reread the quote at the top of this post in light of that: I’d been trying to approach the question of how I respond to gender divisions by thinking things through abstractly, and thinking things through in a lens that erases differences. So: I’m missing emotional responses, and I’m missing differences as a resource.

Actually, rereading that, it’s a little unfair. Yes, I wanted to split the cooking and childcare because I felt it was the right thing to do; but I also wanted to do so because I thought they would both be very rewarding (especially childcare). And wow, good call on that. As to emotional responses: skirt wearing gave me a taste of that.

Still, there’s more room to explore. I haven’t been inclined to explore positionings that are actively girly; should I? I’m certainly not going to go deeply in that direction, but I’m sure there’s something I can learn.

I’m wondering, though, whether I’m also doing erasing in the other direction: ignoring differences, potentially rewarding ones even, that come from taking a more masculine approach than I’m drawn to? That, in its own way, is a way of thinking that I’m rather uncomfortable with. And I’m wondering whether that discomfort leads to me missing out on potential approaches, either for personal changes or for external rhetorical use.

And pitting manhood against boyhood is potentially useful rhetorically: not in the horrific vapidity of challenging somebody to be a “man” by doing something violent or stupid, but in the sense of “grow up and start relating to women as human beings, start accepting the complexity of the world around you, be confident enough of yourself to not have to fall into the traps of stereotypes and fears of the other that the world lays for you”. I seem to recall that Ta-Nehisi Coates has written some interesting posts along those lines recently; his take on The Forever War is one example.

But that’s mostly about pitting adulthood against adolescence. (To be clear: adolescence is an important stage in life, and I still reach back into thinking like an adolescent as a resource in certain situations. But it’s very much not the only tool I have, and the dangers of that mode of thought are real. And, well: I’m not an adolescent, and haven’t been one for a long time.) What about distinctions of masculine behavior versus feminine behavior? What active good can I see there?

So, reaching into stereotypes: men are hornier. That’s a fine thing; it’s one possible tone on the emotional palette, good to have access to. It’s a dangerous one because it depends so closely on interactions with other people, leading to a risk of erasing those other people as people, but by the same token it can bring people closer together if they find a fit. So sure: a fine thing, if that’s what you’re into (and a morally neutral thing in general), but not a fine thing in a way that is leading me anywhere interesting in the context of this post?

Men are violent. That is not a morally neutral thing: that is a bad thing. If we step back from it: the violence is from competition and one-upmanship. I play enough games that I won’t say competition is bad, but it leads in the direction of a zero-sum way of seeing the world that is at the least dangerous. Stepping back still further: competition (in particular as it relates to showing yourself off to women) is a form of displaying excellence. That starts to point in a direction that I can get behind wholeheartedly: I think it’s great for people to find something and try to be really good at it, and to show that to others.

Looking at stereotypical masculine and feminine roles in families: the women are the nurturers, the men are the breadwinners. If I want to find something positive in the second half of the split, it’s that men want to provide, to make sure the family has what it wants; that is a good thing. And it also recognizes the question of a balance between the internal family world and the external work world: both are important and should be acknowledged.

I dunno. The truth is, I don’t have much stomach right now for exploring the details of masculinity. I do find it interesting to see what my female coworkers point out about masculine behavior in our workplace: some of it I’m annoyed by, some of it I’m blind to and participate happily in myself, and there’s probably something to be learned there. But ultimately: I am male, I don’t have to explore or justify what that means, and nobody is asking me to. And right now I’d rather explore spheres that involve less violence, less one-upmanship, and more caring rather than the reverse.

I don’t normally put spoiler warnings on this blog, but given how recently The Walking Dead came out, I’ll make an exception: spoilers below.

If I had to try to put a finger on what makes The Walking Dead so different from other narrative games I’ve played recently, it’s the way the game avoids framing characters in instrumental/mechanical terms. (Or at least in traditional game mechanical terms: Roger would doubtless point out here that narrative is a mechanic!)

Contrast The Walking Dead with Dragon Age 2, for example. There are many purely narrative interactions in the latter game: wandering around town listening to your party members chat with each other, for example. And even when it comes to your relationships with each of the individual party members, the gaminess doesn’t get in your face too much: there’s an explicit slider, but The Walking Dead also suggests the possibility of sliders, albeit implicit ones.

But still: your party members in Dragon Age 2 all have their own class characteristics, with direct effects on combat and exploration. At a basic level: you can bring whomever you want into most dungeons, but if you don’t bring at least one thief, you won’t be able to open chests, and that will have an impact on your gameplay that you may not be willing to put up with. And beyond such basic choices, there’s the fact that you’re constantly leveling up your party members, choosing how to allocate those skills, and observing the effects of those skill allocations in battle.

Then there’s a meta-level consequence of the construction of your party members in Dragon Age 2 (and, of course, your construction of yourself): it puts a set of archetypes at hand. I actually really appreciated the ways in which Dragon Age 2 stepped away from the omnipresent “hero of destiny saving the world” storyline, but it’s still there in the background, together with a standard set of companions to accompany you on that quest. I like archetypes, and I’m fond of that set of them, but still: I’ve seen them enough, and in particular I’m tired of seeing those archetypes constantly presented in a context that is dominated by combat.

(The Walking Dead is, of course, not free of archetypes itself; and some of those archetypes have been explored at length in other video games recently as well. But it turns out that there’s a big difference between a game where you spend most of your time killing zombies as efficiently as possible, with narrative fitting in the margins, versus a game where you spend most of your time talking to other people or thinking about talking to other people, with zombie combat held in reserve as (often quite dramatic!) punctuation and as an omnipresent threat intensifying your narrative interactions.)

The character that I ended up being the most interested in (or at least most interested in my responses to) was Kenny: I’d never had interactions like those with him in a video game before. At first, I felt like an ally of his: we were both fathers (or father substitute, in my case), he seemed like a pretty competent guy, and the other person who was looking for power, Lilly, was allied with somebody who was actively hostile towards me. I didn’t necessarily feel that Kenny and I were close friends (for cultural reasons if nothing else), but still: given the potential alliances, I was on his side.

That relationship got more complex in the second episode. As that episode opened up, it became clear that Kenny didn’t see me as as strong as an ally of his as I’d thought I’d been acting towards him. I don’t know how much of this was that I might have been giving more guarded responses to him than I’d remembered, how much was that events might have happened off-screen in the two months that the characters had experienced between the events of the first episode and those of the second episode, and how much is just different people reading the exact same different interactions in different ways.

Whatever the explanation, it gave me space to reconsider relationships. The episode made you take a more active role in leadership questions; that got me more sympathetic towards Lilly. Her dad was still a hostile, aggressive asshole, but I could at least start relating to him as a father. (And, stepping back to video game questions: I was first annoyed at a hypothetical relationship meter not behaving like I expected it to, but then I realized that I didn’t know if that meter existed and I’d have a richer play experience if I didn’t worry about it.)

And then Kenny killed Lilly’s dad, in the first scene in which the game took my breath away. That’s The Walking Dead right there: you have a life-and-death choice in front of you, one side is probably the right one in terms of future survival but you’re not sure it’s a choice you’re willing to make, you have to make a choice faster than you’re comfortable with, if you don’t make a choice somebody else will, and no matter what, you have to deal with the consequences to your relationships. And, stepping out to video game land, it shows another difference from what I’d expected: the game designers are quite happy to give you a facade of choice that all lead to the same life-and-death outcome. (Larry dies no matter what you do.) But the existence of those choices forces you to confront them despite their lack of traditional game consequences; and that affects how you relate to other people, how you relate to yourself.

In Episode 3, Lilly seems to be trying to hold things together, but is also showing signs of potential paranoia. Except that it looks like what she’s suspecting really was happening; I guess she wasn’t paranoid, after all? Which leads to us following Kenny’s plan; I’m dubious that it’s a good idea, but staying put won’t work any more, so let’s go along with him.

But Lilly really was paranoid, as it turns out. And then things go horribly wrong for Kenny. (Tears running down my face in that scene.) And, all of a sudden, Kenny’s plan becomes the only thing he has left to hold on to. (Well, maybe not the only thing he has to hang on to: there’s his increasing hatred of Ben…)

And this turns out to be one of the major themes of the final two episodes: how much do I want to go along with Kenny’s plan, and to the extent I want to go along with it, how much am I doing that because it’s the right thing to do, how much am I doing that to support Kenny’s leadership, how much am I doing that to humor Kenny and give him something to cling to, how much am I doing that because I think a plan would be useful and nobody else has an idea?

By this point, I really didn’t believe in his plan, but the game didn’t give me a lot of other options. But his behavior is so very human: I’m as guilty as fixating on a solution as anybody, and he’s doing that with the added pressures of first seeing yourself as the provider figure and then having everything else ripped away. At this point, he needs something to cling to: his plan for a boat is that focus.

And while I disagreed with that plan—trading one unknown situation for another didn’t seem like something to count on—for all I know it would have been the right thing! Which brings us back to the ways in which this is such an untraditional video game: in pretty much any other game I can think of, if somebody had strongly presented a plan like that, then following it would have been a route to success, possibly the only route to success. I can imagine games where you can benefit from actively avoid somebody else’s plan, too, but not here: here, you have to think enough about the plan to decide to whether and how you’re committed to it, only to have a reminder that outcomes are not within your control.

So, that’s Kenny: I liked him less and less as the game went on, I agreed with him less and less, but that dislike and disagreement never led to a lack of sympathy. An amazing portrayal not just of a character but of a relationship. And a relationship that depended, I think, on this being a game: I can imagine a book or a movie giving me as deep or deeper insights into Kenny’s character, but the feelings about my relationship (or the point-of-view character’s relationship) with the Kenny wouldn’t be as strong. Because, over and over again, I had to think about what that relationship meant to me, how I would respond in some circumstance given our history; without that interactivity, there would always have been an extra layer of distance. (I’m sure many other players ended up feeling quite differently about Kenny than I did.)

That’s how my relationship with Kenny changed over the course of the game; but, of course, my most important relationship in the game was that with Clementine. I imagine this game is like a punch in the gut to any father; its horrificness might be surreal enough to make me disconnect from that aspect of the game, except that Clementine is so well drawn in so many ways. Figuring out what we mean to each other, with the primal instinct of: she’s a scared kid, I need to be there to help her. Flashes where she’s just a normal kid finding joy in moments of life; flashes where she’s a precocious eight-year-old, but not unrealistically so; flashes where she’s freaked out by the world around her; flashes where it turns out that she’s the one helping me instead of me being the one helping her.

And watching her grow up over the course of the episodes. With significant steps in that regard in the middle of the third episode, at the end of the final episode. But with you as the father figure helping her up both of those steps; and that ending, that ending.

I don’t have as much to say about Clementine as about Kenny, as it turns out, but that is in no sense a weakness of the game. What’s going on there is that so many of the interactions with Clementine felt right that there’s not as much for me to pull out; Kenny, meanwhile, made me just uneasy enough that I needed to take out that feeling periodically and look at it.

But that unease, while perhaps with him and perhaps with me, was never with the game. And over and over again, the game made such smart tonal choices.

Which brings me back to where I started: the game’s developers had access to a tonal palette that wouldn’t have been available in most games, because most games would have had mechanics in place that would have swamped a huge range of the spectrum of relationships. I’ve never appreciated point-and-click adventures as much as I have when playing The Walking Dead: adventure games traditionally swamp narrative concerns with their own mechanic, that of (often frustratingly obtuse) puzzle solving. But The Walking Dead shows how the lightest of touches of adventure mechanics gives room for the relationship design space to expand in other ways.

And I wish more games did that. Not necessarily using adventure game mechanics: I’d like to see games where the mechanics more actively reinforce relationships while allowing room for a meaningful, personal range of responses. I’m nervous about entwining the mechanics too tightly with relationships (c.f. that puzzle box article I keep coming back to), though: the negative space in The Walking Dead is important. (As it is in Bhaloidam, a game I’m very much looking forward to playing further with my VGHVI companions.)

There have to be more design possibilities out there, though. I certainly never would have expected to react this way to a point-and-click adventure game about zombies, after all; though maybe that’s silly, Left 4 Dead is more focused in its own way on relationships than any other shooter that I can think of, after all.

2012 has given me (has given us all) a lot to think about in what I want out of games, what we can get out of games. I look forward to the next wave of games that learn from this year’s.

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 its religious nature to be an active negative for me personally, though: I find Christians’ domination of public discourse to be abhorrent in political contexts, so the fact that the year’s largest holiday is a Christian one isn’t a plus for me. The thing is, though, the holiday has become so secular that its religious heritage almost never impinges on me enough to matter! So, if I had another religious tradition, Christmas’s Christian nature would probably annoy me, but as is, I’m surprisingly blase about that aspect of it.

Christmas is a holiday that serves as an excuse to get together with family and to have a nice meal; both of those are certainly good things. It’s a bit unfortunate in that regard that it’s so close to Thanksgiving, and I like it that Thanksgiving is open to friends in a way that Christmas isn’t, but still: yay Christmas in this regard, even if it isn’t as nice as Thanksgiving.

Christmas and New Year’s provide a time when people generally have several days off from work and often can take off an entire week without disruption. That’s certainly a plus: we get too few vacations in the US, and it’s good for some vacations to be naturally synchronized. Again, it’s a bit of a pity that Christmas and Thanksgiving are so close in that regard, but there’s not much I can do about that.

Christmas is, I think, the most musical holiday of the year. Which would be awesome, except that most Christmas music is awful. Ah well.

I kind of think that I don’t like Christmas trees, except that there turns out to be something quite powerful about putting up decorations that have been in the family for decades. And it never takes nearly as long as I think, and some of our ornaments are adorable. So that turns into a good thing, too.

But really: Christmas is mostly about the presents. We get a couple of months solid of being told that we should be shopping for Christmas; that would annoy me except that I’m pretty good at tuning out shopping-related messages in general. So it mostly annoys me when I find stores unexpectedly busy or shipping unexpectedly delayed or something because other people are paying attention to Christmas. (Not that I regularly go to stores, other than grocery shopping! But once every few years Christmas traffic ends up directly affecting me.)

That’s just the general consumerism, but my problem is more specific: I’m really not very good at the whole ‘present’ thing. I don’t in general like giving or receiving presents, so a holiday around that puts me on edge.

That’s actually not entirely true: there’s one aspect of present giving that I’m happy to participate in and see other people participate in, namely uncles (or aunts or grandparents: relatives other than your parents) giving kids presents that expose them to bits of culture that they might not get directly from their parents. Miranda’s Uncle Jack and Grandpa Bross are very good at this: she’s gotten lots of fun stuff from Think Geek, and she’s a big fan of the Get Smart DVD set that she got a few years ago. So I like seeing Miranda being on the receiving end of this, and it’s fun for us to pick out presents for Miranda’s cousins, too.

The kind of gifts that I’m particularly bad at are gifts between adults. I think the idea of noticing something that you think a loved one would particularly like and getting it for them is charming; in practice, though, it’s not something that I almost ever do. (Though I actually had a fun time getting jewelry for Liesl and Miranda at Bien Mur during PSL.) It’s a good thing that Liesl is so accepting of this foible of mine: I wouldn’t blame her at all at being annoyed at me.

The kind of Christmas gifts I feel strangest about, though, are actually gifts from parents to children. Sometimes, those can function in a similar way to “crazy uncle” gifts, and that’s great. But, a lot of the time, they aren’t: Christmas and birthday gifts seem to me to come from a combination of parents’ default response to kids wanting stuff to be “no” and a recognition that always saying no isn’t the right thing to do; so you provide an explicit safety valve twice a year.

And having a safety valve is good, no question; and it’s also not like parents are going to always say yes, to give kids a credit card that they can use on whatever they want.

Still, it doesn’t feel right to me. Partly, it’s an imposed power dynamic: reinforcing the fact that children are financially dependent on their parents, turning the kids into supplicants and making them be grateful for whatever they receive. And partly it’s a reinforcement of parents as culture determiners: they get to decide what aspects of culture are worthwhile enough to spend money on.

And partly it’s artificial infantilization of kids, removing a learning opportunity. Yes, you can’t buy whatever you want, that’s a real constraint. But, especially as kids get older, shouldn’t you use that constraint as a learning opportunity? Let kids make choices about spending money, and involve larger amounts of money in that as the kids gain experience. And, if you don’t do that in ways that make the parents nervous, you’re doing it wrong: kids should sometimes buy things that their parents wouldn’t approve of; and kids should sometimes make mistakes, mistakes that they themselves would regret later. Much better to do that in a relatively safe environment than to shut kids off within a financial bubble until all of a sudden they need to be really independent and mistakes start actually mattering.

I’m not sure exactly what I would like Christmas to be. Further away from Thanksgiving, sure, and less overwhelming. But mostly I’d like the gift giving to be toned down. By all means we should keep gifts that are about somebody saying to somebody else “I thought of you when I saw this”; but I’m quite dubious about all other classes of gifts. And I wish I had better ideas for how to navigate the tensions around financial dependence for children that Christmas provides a release valve for.

Mushishi struck me right off the bat as an unusual manga series from a formal point of view; looking back, though, I’m not sure why I got that feeling quite as strongly as I did. Comparing it to the rest of my bookshelf, it is the case that most of the manga that I read has a strong narrative arc; not all of it, though (e.g. Yotsuba&!), and expanding beyond manga to comics more broadly (or, for that matter, expanding beyond anime to TV more broadly), having chapters that aren’t strongly connected is arguably the norm rather than the exception. (It probably is the norm in manga, too, I have no reason to believe the selection on my bookshelf is representative.)

Though even compared to other series with relatively disconnected chapters, Mushishi is unusual, I think. For one thing, there’s only one significant recurring character: Gingko, the titular mushi master. So in most of the chapters, every single character that you meet other than Ginko will be new to you: he wanders into a new town, helps somebody there, and leaves. Also, most episodic works without a strong linear narrative still manage to work in some sort of development of characters and the world, albeit at a slower pace; but over the course of Mushishi‘s ten volumes, I can think of only two or three chapters that actively work to flesh out Ginko’s history, and the world is similarly lacking in developmental arc.

Hmm, maybe I should look further ahead for analogies: This American Life, perhaps? Like that show, Mushishi drops into into a different place (albeit a single story rather than multiple ones) from episode to episode; and those episodes explore both a given event and, I think, an aspect of human nature. Mushishi‘s stories have more consistency in topic, in character than the stories in This American Life, but there’s something about the approach that both of them take that feels similar.

Anyways, enough with the analogies, back to Mushishi. Ginko is the only major recurring character, but the series also takes place in a consistent world. Indeed, the lack of multiple recurring characters serves to heighten the focus on that world: in a series with frequent, repeated interactions between characters, you almost have to end up learning a lot about those characters by seeing their interactions. Mushishi, in contrast, leaves space for the story really to not be about Ginko: he’s not a blank slate, but you’re also almost never thinking directly about Ginko, you’re seeing him help the world along. (Hmm, coming back to analogies, Mushishi is in some ways similar to detective stories; but it’s not about the brilliance of the detective in question.)

And even though there aren’t recurring characters, there are recurring patterns. Almost every chapter has Gingko helping a single person who is sick or in trouble; and that person doesn’t live in a vacuum, they relate strongly to a small group (their family, usually), and typically have a slightly less strong but still very important relationship to a larger group (the other residents of whatever village Ginko is visiting in). That’s the human side of each chapter’s interactions; but there’s also always a species of mushi (supernatural, primordial bugs / bacteria, basically) that has infected that person.

So there are enough human interactions for each chapter to focus on some bit of human psychology. And the mushi aren’t a blank slate, either: each species of mushi has its own needs and effects. Those aspects, of course, all intertwine: the personality of the sick person, the nature (the strengths, the dysfunctions) of her relationships with those around her, and the resonances that appear from the tension placed on that personality and relationships by the mushi’s presence, effects, and needs. And, for that matter, Ginko isn’t a blank slate, either.

He is, though, relatively given to being in the background. Maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement: he’s not shy about telling people what he thinks is the best thing to do, given the context that they’re in. But the series would have options of turning him into a brilliant investigator or of turning him into a wise man, and it steps away from that.

And this quietness pervades the series: in particular, it’s there in the series’s approach to the world as well. It could be all about learning a taxonomy of mushi, of how their ecosystem fits together. It could be the sort of series typical in fantasy and science fiction where you can feel the author’s copious worldbuilding notes informing every page. I love series like that; but that’s not the sort of series Mushi is. And I’m glad of that: it’s making an affirmative choice to be quietly experiential, and I need more moments like that in my life.

Mushishi is a ten-volume manga series; there are also anime episodes that cover the first half of the books. They’re wonderful for many of the same reasons as the books are; but I also particularly appreciate the anime’s use of color. Both the generally muted color palette that the series uses and the fact that each episode (at least in the first half, I think this may have waned as the series went on?) generally takes one color to focus on a bit more. So you’ll perhaps see more purple in a given episode, or a bit more green, mirroring somehow whatever aspects of experience are are coming to the fore in that episode.

A very satisfying series? Nourishing series? Relaxing series? I’m not sure what the best word is; I’ve never seen anything quite like it, but I’m very glad I’ve had the experience of encountering it.

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 of my own. (I’m thinking of modifying that last rule.) I don’t focus on any one theme; some frequent topics are social structures (especially gender issues), programming and agile, cute animals, and games, but there’s a fair amount of miscellaneous stuff there, too.

(While I’m mentioning blog-like stuff, there’s also my gaming notes blog. I doubt that’s too likely to be of interest to anybody other than myself these days, though: these days it’s mostly notes to myself on my progress using games to learn guitar.)

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 there are exciting small companies around, and I’m fairly sure that VCs have valuable specialized knowledge that I don’t have and could benefit from. So that’s all to the good.

It is not, however the case that VCs’ interests and my interests are aligned. Don’t get me wrong: if I’m working at a VC-funded company, then those VCs and I both want the company to succeed, and that’s great. But beyond that, our interests diverge significantly.

Their goal is to make money in a five-yearish horizon through a portfolio approach, starting from a significant pool of cash. The portfolio is a particularly important factor here: no matter what, most startups are going to fail; so, rather than try to get as many as possible to be a moderate success, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do to do what you can to get a few companies in your portfolio to be a major success. And, while I’d be perfectly happy to be working at a company that’s a major success, it’s much less clear to me that I want to do that at the cost of reducing the chances that the company is a moderate success. Because the company crashing and burning is potentially a problem at a financial level; it’s also potentially much more of a problem at a personal level. For example, I believe in the concept of a “sustainable pace”, that on average, for most people, working too hard eventually produces less output. But if the unsustainable pace averages mask nine disasters and one remarkable success, then that may be just fine for a portfolio approach, despite what it does to the people who go through the nine disasters. (This is probably where some of the VC-funded startup youth fetishism comes in, too.)

Time horizons also play into that issue, as well: if you can keep up an unsustainable pace long enough to look good at a payoff threshold, then that could be good enough. (Possibly burning out many people along the way while hiring enough new faces to replace them and keep the company looking healthy from the outside.) I think I saw a version of this at Playdom: the company spent the year before it got bought going on a hiring spree, buying companies that, even at the time, seemed like they made no sense. (Don’t get me wrong, some of the purchase made a lot of sense, but there were certainly many specific purchases that I raised my eyebrows at.) As far as I can tell, this was a ploy to make Playdom look good to potential purchasers by increasing our headcount, our number of games and players, and our geographic reach; but we shut down a bunch of those games soon after Disney bought us, and I didn’t see anything concrete come out of many of those studios.

The amount of money VCs are investing also plays into this. Even when funding small companies, they don’t want those companies to stay small: they want those companies to grow and grow, to justify larger and larger investments and still larger payouts. So, if you want to work at a company that is small and focused, VC funded companies probably aren’t the best place to go? (Though there are exceptions: if your small and focused company is producing something that appeals to tens or hundreds of millions of people, then you can be the next Instragram.)

That’s how VCs are looking for aspects of companies that I’m not; but I’m also looking for aspects of companies that VCs don’t have as strong a reason to be attracted to. I’m always trying to learn something, and typically have specific goals along those lines that I’m looking for at companies; VCs have no reason to care about my personal development. More broadly, I’ve been participating in industry discussions about how to develop software, and trying to figure out which of those ideas seem to work well for me; I’m sure noises about some of that filters up to the VC level, but I’m also sure that most VCs don’t have any real idea what the word ‘agile’ means. (Not that they should; this is a difference, not a judgment.)

I also want to work at a company that I feel is doing the right thing: e.g. on a basic level it should treat people of different genders, ethnicities, ages, class backgrounds, sexualities, relationship status, etc. fairly. Silicon Valley actually strikes me as astonishingly open to different nationalities (most of the founders of most of the companies that I’ve worked at haven’t been American, along with a noticeable fraction of the employees); on many of the other dimensions, though, Silicon Valley isn’t nearly as open. Here’s a nice takedown of some of the bullshit around the idea of a “meritocracy”, and VC firms themselves apparently don’t do so well themselves in this regard. I hear rumors about VC “pattern matching”; if this means that VCs are happy to insert ignorant sexist assholes into the management ranks of their portfolio companies because those execs fit some sort of pattern that the VCs have seen, that is not good.

What’s scary, too, is how hard it can be to tell this sort of thing in advance: when joining a company, you never know how it is going to change over the next months or years. For example, when I did my last job search, I talked to a few Facebook game companies; some of them were steeped in testosterone, but one, Casual Collective, seemed like a pleasant enough place. They’d produced one game I respected, they woman I interviewed with seemed sharp, and their name seemed to signal that they weren’t going to go too far down the “core gamer” path. I didn’t interview further with them because of the technologies they were using and because of their location, but if that job search had gone slightly differently I can easily imagine myself having been interested in them.

A year later, they’d changed their name to Kixeye, turned themselves into a maker of “hardcore” games, and released this recruiting video that positioned them squarely within the brogrammer manchild tradition. And I saw more news coverage (and for that matter people in person) speaking favorably of that video than not: it’s not just one company, that’s a lamentably strong aspect of the culture around here. (There’s way too much adolescent male status jockeying going on, way too little quiet listening; and I will be perfectly happy never to see another foam bat or nerf gun in my life.) Though Kixeye does seem to be particularly bad: rather than quietly shunning people who don’t fit into that culture, they seem to have had an actively discriminatory culture. I’d like to think that I would have picked up on that culture if I’d interviewed in person, but I’m not at all confident that that’s the case; and, for that matter, for all I know the culture of the company really may have changed significantly since I interviewed. Which could be fine for somebody on the outside who is trying to get the company to pivot in search of greater profits; not necessarily so great for people in the middle of it.

I dunno; I’ve been in a pretty negative mood recently. Because the truth is, I could find just as many bad things to say about lots of other corporate subcultures around here; I certainly wouldn’t actively want to work in large companies, either, though I’m getting a more nuanced view of their strengths and weaknesses. And I’ve worked with great people at a lot of startups around here: great technically, but also great human beings, people that it’s been an honor to work with. I also certainly have nothing against making money, and I think that it’s great that money is available for people with ideas.

I just wish I had better leads on companies that were concentrating a bit more on their culture and their effects, companies that want to build the right things in the right ways. I’m sure there are a fair number if I knew where to look, I’m just not plugged into networks that enable me to see them.

And, seriously: the sexism in the valley has to stop.

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 the second half of the afternoon.

Conveniently, a coworker of mine, Chuck Clanton, was having a show that afternoon, so I went by there. And I’m very glad I did: I like both chocolate and board games more than most people, but his show was amazing. So, some pictures, only nine months late!

Pieta, made from fired ceramic.

An alabaster sculpture. This might be called ‘Sorrow’, or it might be unnamed, my notes aren’t clear.

I didn’t catch the name of this one; I wish I’d taken pictures of it from more angles…

Reclining Nude, made from statuario marble.

Torn Asunder, made from carerra marble.

A closeup on one of the faces from Torn Asunder.

Larger and smaller versions of a piece called Supplicant, made from statuario marble.

Contemplation (Male), made from fired ceramic with a metal patina.

I didn’t catch the name of this one; a statue of a woman reclining on a bench outside.

A closeup on the woman’s torso.

And a closeup on her face.

A panel outside; I didn’t catch the name of this one, either.

Two figures on the ground outside.

Here’s a better view of the figure on the left.

A female bust.

And a male bust.

Here’s a statue that’s still in progress.

Inside Chuck’s workshop.

That’s Chuck on the left, talking to some of the guests.

This piece is actually by Chuck’s teacher Harriet Moore; it’s called Dante’s Inferno, and is made from fired ceramic.