Huh… How have I not posted on my recent gardening work at all? In fact, I haven’t posted about gardening since 2011, which is, like, forever ago and very different from what I’m doing now. Here’s a little insight into what I did last year, and I’ll do a follow-up on how I’m kicking off 2018.
Early spring 2017 Mammillaria zeilmanniana, flowering.
Last year, I expanded from the single saguaro I mentioned in 2011 (who has been through some shit, I tell you) to a pretty sweet cactus/succulent garden for a newbie. Anything I bought directly was targeted to be able to handle USDA Zone 7 winter living at least–I have some great books to help with this–but I ended up with a bunch of stuff straight out of Mexico and Arizona that need much more coddling.
Folks probably know that I make video games as part of Future Proof Games, but maybe not what we’re doing at the moment. Many, many (many) years ago, Gregory made “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors”, a very sweet Flash game about balloons and drowning.
As the site stats geek for FPG, I can tell you “Majesty” remains pretty damned popular. (Hell, it just got linked by Buzzfeed a few days ago.) It’s an evocative game that continues to appeal to folks wanting to explore the soft feelings of a big, weird, sessile alien. Problem is, Flash is finally actually dying — no phone/tablet can run it, and some browser configurations require user action before it’ll run Flash.
So we’re bringing “Majesty” to modern devices: Android, iOS, and Windows/OSX/Linux. And holy crap, this game feels great on a phone; moving the tentacle with your finger just feels real in a way that the tiny, mouse-controlled Flash version doesn’t. I’m excited to test it on tablets.
It’ll be out later this year and is being developed in parallel with Exploit: Zero Day, which will also have some big news soon. (I could write a whole post on the thought processes around dividing time between two projects for a part-time team like ours!)
Something that would really help the game be successful is if the desktop versions can launch on Steam. For us to do that, we need to make it through Steam Greenlight. If you have a Steam account, take a moment and vote for “Majesty”.
Something that would put a smile on my face would be if you left a cheery comment on the Greenlight page. Y’all know how the internet can be.
I had an… unforgettable dinner this past Saturday night with the local live-action roleplaying players that I’ve been gaming with for the last handful of years.
I took a break from gaming with them last summer after my surgery, initially due to the inconvenience (I couldn’t drive, and the sling was uncomfortable), and then due to the fact that when I weighed the fun vs. the toxic behaviors the group has, I found I’d rather be spending my time doing things like building Future Proof Games.
The dinner on Saturday was to get folks face-to-face to talk about a big issue in the group: they lost their regular gaming location at the end of 2014. Some games have had to be canceled, but folks have been very generous. People have opened their homes to host a game or two, and one person rented hotel rooms for us to game in.
That night, though, I heard something pretty disgusting — a denigration of people’s generosity, at times in the same breath as an exaltation of their own (the below is paraphrased, in part to remove names).
xkcd: Epsilon and Zeta – I don't link to XKCD much, in part because I don't read it much, and in part because everyone else in the world does. That said, this one uses real-deal National Hurricane Center advisories in it, and is really good.
Ann Aguirre’s Blog – Authors Against Bullying: Blog Hop – "Things were bad. People made fun of me daily. They picked on my appearance, my weight, my geeky interests. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom rather than face a cafeteria full of people who didn’t like me."
Utah Game Developer Jailed for Not Paying Wages – ABC News – "Hunter lasted two years before calling it quits, hanging onto promises of paychecks that appeared only erratically, with Rushton sometimes handing out checks selectively and demanding confidentiality while blaming companies that licensed games for being slow to pay for their development or royalties."
Beyond Minecraft: Notch On Fame, Pressure, Sequels | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – A bizarre thing for there to have been contention over: "Sometimes the fans are right, too. Like ladders. I did not want ladders in Minecraft at all. Ladders are never fun. They’re not fun in Minecraft either. But they’re a very good utility. It’s an easy way to get straight up without having stairs going back and forth."
On Labeling Women “Crazy” | Paging Dr. NerdLove – "I started realizing that when my friends and I would talk about our crazy exes or what-have-you, more often than not, we weren’t talking about ex girlfriends or random dates who exhibited signs of genuine mental health issues. […] For the most part, crazy meant 'acting in a way I didn’t like.'"
