Since her vacation is nearly over, I guess it’s time to evaluate my progress keeping things together while Marie is away. This will, by necessity, be fiercely dry.

To recap: in the past, I’ve noticed a tendency to become slightly unstable when the following triggers are present (I’m not sure which are important):

1. Marie is away…
2. …and unreachable via phone, IM, etc.
3. I’ve started working in a new environment…
4. …with new people.
5. It’s early fall.

Said instability has, in the past, manifested itself in the following ways:

1. General confusion.
2. Vague feelings of being unable to keep friendships alive.
3. Inventing memories about hurting a friend, and then being distracted or incapacitated by guilt over said memories.

So. As for the current situation, triggers (1), (3), and (5) are present. It just so happens that my company moved offices recently, and I have just now started coming in to work at the new place.

However, only result (b) has actually happened. And maybe a little bit of (a), but only very little. I am presently regarding the insecure feelings I have with massive amounts of suspicion, and am confident that my concerns lack any real factual support.

As for (c), said friends I’ve worried about have historically had consistent physical characteristics; I have therefore identified a couple potential candidates for the person I’d be obsessing over now. Thankfully though, this has not actually happened, and my perception of my relationships with said candidates has appeared perfectly normal in the last few days, as far as I can tell.

To sum up, this has largely been a non-event. I credit:

• Being aware, for the first time, that problems were likely to arise;
• Frequent contact with Marie;
• Frequent breaks to stop and think about past experiences with Marie (this is not something I naturally do);
• Going into this while genuinely happy with my social life and life in general (unlike previous episodes);
• The distinct possibility that nothing bad was likely to happen anyway, despite my stressing out about it.

So, that’s a very long-winded way of saying: yay, nothing happened. 🙂

Looking forward to seeing Marie again tomorrow.

Found this picture while cleaning the other day.

So here’s the start of my amazing career as a computer programmer. You can see most of a latch-hook duck that I was working on in the foreground; that’s not so much different than making pixel art, when you think about it.

This picture is kind of freaking me out. Sure, everything is so horribly dated, with an awful 70s couch in one corner and a barely visible open-reel player in the other. And I don’t see old pictures of myself often; I didn’t think we had any at all around here.

But mostly, I’m thinking about the Basic programming book that came with the computer I’m sitting in front of. It’s sitting on top of the grey box behind me; you can see the blue spine with white and black stripes on top. Presumably, I had been reading this book around the time this picture was taken. Given the position of the television and non-avocado carpet, I actually suspect I had gone through it or had already finished it a year or three before the picture was taken. I’m not a good judge of age; I was 6 or 7 when I started and I’m not sure how old I am in the picture.

I can’t believe I read that book. No, really. I don’t mean, I think it’s incredible that I read it. I mean, I’m doubting that I did. It’s almost 150 pages long. It’s written for people completely unfamiliar with programming, but it’s not exactly written for kids. While illustrated, it’s got fewer pictures than the programming book I’m reading now.

But I did learn Basic around this time, John has no memory of teaching it to me, my parents didn’t know how to program this particular computer, and I can’t find any evidence out there of a different, more beginner-y type book that would have come with the computer. Though I do remember typing in programs verbatim from computer magazines, which itself was a good way to learn.

So most of my knowledge must have come from that book.

In many ways, that’s kind of an anachronism. I’m having trouble imagining what the modern equivalent of that would be. Computers don’t come with programming books anymore, much less languages to program in. I suppose a motivated kindergartner could do HTML & Javascript, but they’d have to go looking for instructional material. That’s really different than stumbling across a book that was bundled with the computer you’ve got, a machine that wasn’t really bought so anybody in the house could learn programming.

Though I guess I can’t really complain that modern kindergartners don’t have access to spontaneous, unexpected avenues to learn new things. That’s what web surfing is for. 🙂

Time for some just-before-bed rambling, though I think the danger of posting something I’ll regret is minimal.

Been feeling kind of cranky for the last day or so. (I won’t get into the why; that’s a separate issue that I should deal with, since my tendency is not to deal with such things at all.)

But anyway, what I wanted to talk about was my propensity to try to capitalize on that sort of thing.

Like many people, I’m more productive — far more productive, and creative, and willing to stay up late working on things — when upset. Wired recently did a piece on how this may have worked wonders for Apple. And I’d definitely say my output the last day and a half has been pretty great.

I don’t like that this happens. Thankfully, I’ve stopped going out of my way to willfully upset myself for the sake of increased creativity… but I’m wondering if capitalizing on being angry when it organically happens is just as bad. It makes me value being upset. It might serve as a disincentive to, say, repair the situation that’s causing this.

See, I knew this was going to happen. I knew yesterday morning that, at some point yesterday afternoon, something was likely to happen that would make me cranky.

So while I’m confident that I’m not, by my own actions, getting myself into a heightened emotional state anymore, I may still, by inaction, be willfully allowing this to happen, and continue.

Maybe.

Just something to think about for a while.

I’ve recently started reading two new blogs: indie game news, and official Windows 8 design stuff.

It updates rather infrequently, but in many ways, I find the Windows 8 blog more interesting than the games one. More to the point, I find UI design & programming more interesting than game design & programming.

I suppose this says a lot about me, even though it’s already been said: I’d rather work on apps than games. Not that I find game design unworthy of my time in an absolute sense; it’s just a sort of consolation prize in some respects.

Still, I’ve managed to get Tinselfly back at a reasonable trickle, and have even been working on my board game a bit.

With the way work-work has been going, I’m clearly not going to have something ready to submit to this year’s Independent Games Festival. (I’m not at all stressy about that, but that’s another post.)

However, I’ve recently discovered Windows Gadgets, those little things like clocks and news feeds that sit on your desktop.

I don’t generally use my desktop. I get grumpy if there are more than a couple files on it at any given time (which, for the record, there are now).

Also, I don’t generally use the two monitors I’ve got. When I do, it’s great, but generally, I just use the nice big external one. So I put a few gadgets on my usually-empty laptop monitor in the hopes that they’ll help with my productivity somewhat.

The first thing I did was add a couple of image slide shows. The Pictures folder on my computer consists mostly of random things I’ve grabbed off the web; anything I find interesting, I save locally. But I hardly ever open my Pictures folder to look at this stuff. So now a couple random selections of mine are always visible, and it’s interesting to look at the combinations of things that come up and think about how they might fit together. Good for brainstorming design ideas.

The second thing I added was a simple countdown tool. I was posting countdowns to the Festival on this blog here, and while that was cool and motivating as long as I was looking at my own blog, I kinda forgot about it easily. So I’ve got something right on my own desktop now.

Furthermore, I’ve decided to use it in a more granular way than I was using the Festival countdown; here you can see I’ve given myself five days to get random-map generation working for Tinselfly. I like deadlines. I’m much more productive with a deadline.

I’ll probably also add more countdowns — you can do that — for more long term goals like a playable adventure mode and a release candidate date too.

So.

With any luck, I’ll be posting a new Tinselfly build sometime in the next five days. 🙂

Sometime in the next month or two, Marie will be taking a trip to London. I’ve been a little stressy about this. I tend to become easily confused when Marie isn’t around. She sort of grounds me in the present; when she’s away, I have a tendency to forget that the last 15 years of my Marie-filled life ever happened.

I have been known to invent memories about having let down my friends in horrible, horrible ways while Marie is out. I have been known to be mostly unable to function because I’m feeling so horrible about these horrible things I didn’t actually do.

But this is all pretty laughable compared to the problems of my mother in law, who’s sitting in my living room right now. She’s a paranoid schizophrenic, who’s not on any medication.

Evil medical students are trying to perform experiments on her. Andrew Lloyd Webber stole all her ideas. Random people are trying to beat her up in her sleep.

It must be awful to live in the world she lives in. I wish I could show her around my world, which is really quite a happy place the vast majority of the time, but I can’t do that.

I suppose it’s good, every now and then, to be reminded that sanity is not a given for all of us, and to be grateful for how sane I am most all of the time.

And I can now stop being all whiny about what will happen to me while Marie is away.

Still horribly busy with work-work.

But while I’m waiting for a giant database restore and a giant software install to finish, I thought I’d babble about this, my first foray into absurdly long work weeks.

Now, I know, for some of you, this is nothing remarkable; my impression is that I’m lucky to have been working as a programmer as long as I have and not have had to put in hours like this yet. But this is new to me, so have some rambling thoughts on the subject.

I’m finding it useful to compare this to running. It’s nice and concrete and physical.

Just as I can decide to sprint instead of walk, I’ve trained myself to sort of mentally sprint on command. I will think more clearly, solve problems more quickly, type faster; I will be less likely to lose track of what I’m doing.

It’s a rush.

And just like sprinting, this is not sustainable and will kill my pace in the long run. I will even forget to breathe sometimes. If I start off my day like this, I’ll be a zombie by the afternoon.

So I have to be careful, not just about how many hours I’m working, but how I’m working when I’m sitting at the computer. Which means slowing down a bit.

Until recently, I didn’t really know how to slow down. It’s like I’m sprinting, and when I get tired I just fall over and take a nap. Walking was a skill I didn’t have. Until recently, I didn’t know how to code while tired. When I needed a break, I did something that was different from coding like doodling or playing on the piano.

But I’ve recently learned that — gasp — there’s such a thing as taking a break to write different code. The same way there’s such a thing as moving when not sprinting. To approach the whole act of coding in a different, more deliberate sort of way.

This programming book I’ve been reading has been immensely helpful. Without going into too much technical detail, it’s a sort of cookbook filled with common recipes you can use over and over again, so that programming becomes not so much about brain-hurting problem solving and more about calmly looking for an appropriate looking recipe card. Figuring out which recipe I should be using for any given problem and then following the directions there is something I can do while kind of fried. And I’ll feel refreshed afterwards.

I need to learn more ways to code that require less thinking.

Yesterday, I unsubscribed from the only game design blog I’ve been reading for a while. Mostly because I thought the author was coming off as a bit smug and condescending and it was making me cranky.

I feel kind of bad about this.

Sure, I disagreed with most of what the author had to say, but I frequently enjoy and learn a lot, reading things I disagree with—as long as I think the author isn’t being pushy about their opinions. We all think this industry can be better. We all have different strategies for doing that. But to me, it’s all about exploring possibilities. As soon as someone says anything about how games should be made, or worse, played, I’m gonna tune them out completely.

But there were some good thoughts in this blog, and like I said, I feel kinda bad for bailing. Like I should just put up with the annoyance and bear it for the sake of being exposed to ideas different than my own. Like it makes me a more narrow-minded person for doing this. I know this author doesn’t mean to come off as a jerk. I’ve seen him actively seek out advice for how to sound less jerky.

Then again, who means to come off as a condescending douche? Who wakes up in the morning and decides to write like that? There are lots of bloggers out there, and I don’t see too much nobility in being patient with those who haven’t figured out how to sound approachable yet. I haven’t actually tried very hard to look for warm, friendly game design blogs, but I’m sure they exist. It’s not a blog per se, but Extra Credits is quite good.

I’d love to see more things like that.

I’ve slowly been updating my web site, adding pages for my projects and web sites and whatnot, and it got me thinking about progress.

Take web sites, for example. It would be tempting to think that, given more experience, I’ll consistently produce better and better work.

It certainly doesn’t feel like this, though. While I love my most recent design, The Peacock’s Paintbrush is still one of my favorites — and one of my first; it was made around ten years ago.

It’s tempting to feel like I haven’t made much progress at all. Which, sometimes I do. I worry that I’m not improving as a designer or a programmer or whatever here.

My output is really more like this:

Kinda random.

But really, it’s not as random as it looks. Experience does not make my work consistently better. It increases the probability that my work will be better.

The quality of my work will tend towards the darker red areas here. Without question, my work experience has made my average better.

However, under the right circumstances, I am still perfectly capable of producing crap. If I don’t get along personally with my client; if I hate the work itself, the work will suffer.

Ten years ago, under the right circumstances, I was perfectly capable of creating amazing things. The Peacock’s Paintbrush was a fascinating challenge. I was excited about getting portfolio pieces out there, and I had just the right amount of creative freedom.

The true measure of my progress is, I suppose, to look at the jobs that I neither love nor hate. The ones I just do because they have to be done. They’ll tend towards that nice dark red stripe, and I’ll forget about them the moment they’re over… but that’s the sort of stuff I should think about, when I’m thinking about what I can reasonably expect to accomplish next.