I attended my second Cleveland Game Developers meetup last night, and (gasp!) I had a lot of fun. It’s a pretty diverse group, with as many artists as programmers, so my fears of being surrounded by other technical types were largely unfounded.

I even got to offer advice on music software to someone there. It’s a great feeling, to be in a position to be helpful to someone you don’t know personally.

I kinda like networking events. I know they’re the bane of many people’s existences, but there’s a time and place for the sort of neutral, casual conversation you get at things like this. Sure, being overly friendly at a networking event can be awkward, and if you’re having networking-type discussions with friends, that’s just depressing… but I feel a strange sort of calm talking to people I’ve never met before, who I may never meet again. It’s kind of liberating.

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They’re pushing this Game Jam thing where you’re given a theme for a game, split into teams, and have 48 hours to come up with something interesting. I’m not really interested in doing a 48-hour programming challenge… I just don’t think I’ll find such a thing particularly fun or relevant to the specific programming skills I need to work on right now. However, if I attended as an illustrator or a fledgling musician, assigned to a random programmer, I think that would be an interesting experience. I could use the practice thinking quickly and doing those sorts of creative pursuits under absurdly tight deadlines.

As I understand it, they’re short on illustrators and musicians anyway… need to confirm that, though.

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Watched Apocalypse Now for the first time last night. It may not sound like it, but that’s kind of a big deal. As someone with a dad who’s a Vietnam war veteran, Vietnam war movies simply didn’t exist in my chilldhood — or young-adulthood. The war itself was never spoken of, and I only know details of my dad’s involvement in the war secondhand.

Sure, I’ve seen Good Morning Vietnam and Heaven and Earth but those aren’t focused on combat so much.

So anyway, I watched it, and failed to find it particularly disturbing, or horrifying, though my impression is that it wanted to be those things, and succeeds for most people. I sorta wonder if there’s something wrong with me there. I’ve found maybe one or two movies in my life disturbing.

Then again, going back to the whole war-veteran thing… of course, I’ve never seen real warfare, but I’m pretty sure that no movie is ever, ever going to come close to capturing even the secondhand account of this event in my head, cobbled together from a couple decades of whispers and worried looks.

You want to flesh that out in a 2 or 3 hour ‘epic’? Please. I may just laugh at you.