Category: life

Facebook IPO

life
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Facebook IPO

I’m neutral on this, I have no skin in the game, and I’m skeptical as to whether the IPO will benefit users (ha!) or simply amplify the rate at which their personal data gets exploited. But it seems to me that financial journalism has succumbed to the attitude that the purpose of a stock IPO is to make everyone lucky enough to buy in filthy rich on Day One, simply by virtue of their being fortunate enough to have the opportunity to buy the stock. That’s an astonishingly bad way to look at IPO’s, and is exactly the attitude that resulted in the first tech bubble back around the turn of the millennium. You’d think by now we’d be smarter than that, but no.

http makes us all journalists.

design, development, internet, life
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Something I did made the paper a year ago, and I just now found out about it:

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/09/anonymous_circulates_diy_press.php

The blog article mis-attributes the quote “http makes us all journalists” to Peter Fein, who I’ve never met or had any dealings with, but I actually came up with the slogan, and the 1.0 design of the press pass. [Update: It turns out that I have met Pete, but it was long after the fact of the BART protests. In fact, without realizing that he was the same person from the article above, I met him and his wife Elizabeth at Notacon9. I’m happy to report that they’re wonderful people.]

After I created the design, and it was put up the noisebridge wiki, I remember at the time a number of journalists took offense to the slogan, completely missing the point of it while being defensive about their college major or profession. I guess it stings when your career is threatened by the emergence of a new medium that the old guard doesn’t understand readily, misses the boat on, and you watch newspaper after newspaper go out of business or get swallowed up by corporate media conglomerates.

I get that Journalism is a serious discipline and has standards, most of which are completely gone from broadcast and publishing these days, but whatever, they’re important standards. Saying “http makes us all journalists” wasn’t meant to insult your diploma, your profession, your Peabody, or your Pulitzer.

The point was that the slogan is directly after a quotation of the full text of the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press. The internet, especially http, enables all of us to be our own press. Freedom of the Press isn’t just freedom for Journalists, but for artists and authors and everyone who has a mind to express thoughts with. “With HTTP, All Can Publish” might have been a more accurate slogan, but I came up with the idea in about 10 minutes, and I like the spirit of it, so I’ll stick with it. Frankly, I’d rather there be more agitated journalists in the world, rather than the corporate media shills that have largely supplanted them, while abdicating the Fourth Estate for a comfy paycheck. If you’re a journalist and the slogan pissed you off, good. If it inspired even one person in the general public to take up the mantle and aspire to become a serious journalist, even better.

I created the design when a friend in SF tweeting about the Bay Area Rapid Transit protests, that were happening at the time, said that people who didn’t have press passes were being denied access to the protest area. The protests were in response to a police shooting and killing of an homeless man who was on the prone on the ground at the time he was shot, and not a threat to anyone. That shouldn’t have happened. I felt strongly that the protesters had a right to protest and a right to cover their own actions and publish about it, so I created the press pass. It took maybe a half hour, a couple of rectangles in Illustrator, and I was done. The idea that the right to be present to cover an event should be limited to those who possess a Press pass struck me as an unconstitutional abridgment of rights reserved for all. So I created a Press pass for all.

The version I created didn’t have the photo of the Guy Fawkes wearing person in the ID photo. My idea was to take your own passport photo and put it in there — I measured everything out carefully to be sized correctly, and made the card the size of a ISO spec for an ID card that I found details on the internet.

The image at the right is the symbol for Noisebridge, a SF hackerspace that I’d like to visit someday. I ganked the image from their website and incorporated it into the design, since the friend who got the idea started was affiliated with them, and they were involved to some capacity in organizing the BART protests. I’ve met some cool people from Noisebridge who I consider to be good people: bright, conscientious, inquisitive, concerned.

The reverse of the press pass had the text of the First Amendment and the slogan “http makes us all journalists” which I meant to emphasize the fact that the internet is a truly democratizing force, enabling each and every one of us to communicate with everyone else, reaching people we might never otherwise have known about, and impossible to censor… though, they never do quit trying.

Someone else put the Guy Fawkes image in there, but you could just as well replace it with your own image if you wanted, as I originally intended. The “points system” for doing this or that with the pass to make it more authentic looking was also someone else’s idea, as was the information resources to help people know their rights. Each contributor acted freely of their own accord to contribute their ideas and built off of them without ever talking to each other. It is what you make it. Modify to suit your needs. Do what you want, be responsible for what you do. That’s the power true freedom gives you.

I’m not a member of Anonymous, as I’m not posting this anonymously. Anonymous does some good, some bad, just like anything else. I don’t know anything more about them than what you can read on the internet.

###

More favorable coverage, with an image of the original design:

http://lafiga.firedoglake.com/2011/08/23/http-makes-us-all-journalists/

Crowd Funding

life
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I became aware of Kickstarter a few years ago when hacker historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com tried to raise $25,000 to fund “The Jason Scott Sabbatical“, a year off from work to be devoted to a documentary project that ended up being Get Lamp. For $50 I would get a DVD copy of the documentary after it was finished, if he finished it. This was a big If, but I had seen Jason’s excellent BBS documentary and that was enough to sell me on the project.

To me, it was clear: I wanted to see a documentary about text adventure games. Here was someone who’d probably find a way to do it anyway even if he couldn’t raise the money, but it might end up taking years longer for it to happen without funding. I’d never spent even $20 on a major DVD release from a big studio film that already existed before, but I was happy to give $50 to Jason in order to have a chance at seeing what he could do with it.

Then I waited. And waited. Meanwhile, Jason worked his ass off and made a kick-ass documentary, produced a DVD, and I got it. Along the way I got many updates from him describing what he was going through, sometimes a video clip. The whole time I felt completely confident that his project would succeed, barring a plane crash or heart attack or something. And successful it was. I was so happy when I received my copy in the mail. It seems like yesterday, but it’s been a couple years now. It retrospect it feels like it happened so quickly.

When Jason came around again saying he’d produce three more documentaries for $100k, I gladly put up $250 to get a copy of each of them. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll be sad, but not for the $250. I’ll be sad because we won’t have our culture enriched by three amazing documentaries, and because it’ll mean that Jason’s been incapacitated somehow, and both of those things are worth being sad about.

Today, Kickstarter has become an increasingly popular way of raising money for various projects. It’s a beautiful thing, the internet making it possible for someone with an idea and drive to find a way to make a dream happen, for someone with vision to share that vision with people and find individuals willing to put their faith in it, and allow that person the means to work on achieving their vision without the undue compromise and loss of control that can accompany venture capital.

A few months ago, a major Kickstarter success created headlines when Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure project went viral, raising over $3.3 million, or about 8 times their original goal. Double Fine’s success came due to Schafer’s reputation and track record (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle), and the fact that he wanted to do a game project in an underserved genre that once was really popular, and apparently still is after all, despite the so-called “triple-A” industry choosing to ignore it for many years.

One way of looking at Kickstarter, at least for certain projects, is as a way of dressing up “pre-sales” and getting good marketing for a product that would have existed anyway. I avoid anything that looks like this, which is why I didn’t put any money into the Double Fine Adventure project. If and when it comes out, if it looks good, I’ll just buy it. If it sucks, I won’t. I prefer to put my money into projects that may not happen without my $10 or $50. But a lot of people didn’t feel that way, or their love for Tim Schafer’s work was enough for them. I’m sure a lot of them simply got caught up in the excitement and wanted to see how high they could push the total, too, because people are like that.

So it’s a time of exuberance and good feeling for Kickstarter. A time of irrationality, as well. There’s a manic party atmosphere surrounding successful fundraising drives, jubilance and celebration.

But what we normally think of as success isn’t just the raising the money part. It’s the doing it part. This takes months and years. And it’s never guaranteed to be successful, or be everything that everyone hoped.

It seems inevitable that at some point, there will be a high profile failure. Imagine Duke Nukem Forever as a Kickstarter project. Imagine a Bernie Madoff Kickstarter. Oh noes! So I’ve begun to notice a few people have begun to express concerns and doubts about Kickstarter, a creeping negativity. A dose of realism is a good thing, but I still think Kickstarter is a great thing and I would rather see many projects attempted and a good number of them fail than no projects attempted.

It should be obvious, but with all the exuberance it’s good to remember that there’s always risk in life, and Kickstarter projects are no different. But the possibility of failure shouldn’t dissuade you from taking a risk. You should normally only take risks that you can survive if the risk pans out and there’s failure.

Most if not all Kickstarters have backing levels that allow you to support a project at a tiny amount of risk. How much you’re willing to donate is a personal choice, and if you’re comfortable with donating the amount money, it should be with the understanding that it’s possible the project could fail. Is it still worth it to you for the chance to see it succeed? Then go for it.

Another obvious point: It’s a good idea to evaluate the Kickstarter proposal to get a sense of how likely it is that the proposal will result in a successfully completed project. Do research on the people behind the project and find out what they’ve done. If they have a track record that suggests that they can do it, it’s probably a safer bet that they will.

But a big part of the beauty of Kickstarter is that it allows people who have no track record, but who do have a dream and some ability, to get a chance to try to realize that dream, instead of getting sucked into a low-level peon position and soulless corporate slavery. If the person has no track record, but still presents themselves well, and somehow demonstrates that they are prepared and understand what they’re getting into, and if the project idea means something to you, it’s worth taking a chance on, at least a small one.

Kickstarter doesn’t take just anyone’s proposal, and they do a number of things to make sure the ones they do take on have a better chance of success. Kickstarter doesn’t just allow people to market their fundraising efforts for worthy projects, they provide guidance. I believe Kickstarter understands that in order to remain successful at funding projects, they need to guard their reputation and ensure that as many of the projects that get funded through Kickstarter do end up being completed, and have a realistic chance of it from the beginning. Still, there’s always that risk… so, no one’s throwing money they need in order to live on Kickstarters, right? If you’re comfortable parting with the amount, and you think the project would make the world a better place, then take the risk, I say.

Notacon 9

life
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Notacon 9 weekend is over.

I gave my Game Maker Crash Course talk, which went well. I livecoded Space Invaders using Game Maker 8.1. This was my first-ever livecoding talk, and let me tell you, it’s not easy to talk intelligibly while coding!

I was really anxious about screwing the talk up the night before, but when I got into it I was able to keep my mental focus in both the talk and in the code, and got through enough of it in 90 minutes that I felt like I’d gotten most of the fundamentals across, and took Q&A at that point. The talk went much better than my first go at it at my sneak preview/dress rehearsal, which means the March 10 rehearsal did it’s job admirably — but there was still a lot of things that I glossed over and didn’t explain as fully as I’d intended in my notes and slides.

But I think that actually worked out better (it was more an ad lib to go off script than an error), because I ended up just sticking to the immediate project and didn’t digress into confusing subjunctive sidebars about all the other things one might possibly do in Game Maker with a given type of resource, Event, or Action. I only flubbed a couple times (apart from the intentional errors that I made to demonstrate how the process of building up a project iteratively really looks — building and testing incremental bits of progress toward the final project), and recovered gracefully and kept the talk moving, and I didn’t end up needing my detailed outline notes at all. I’m not sure how well the audio got picked up by the microphone, as I could not really hear myself over the monitors at all while I was speaking, but it will be interesting to see if they can do anything in post-processing to salvage the video.

One of the best things at Notacon this year, and possibly one of the best all time things at Notacon, was the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator workshop led by Mike Substelny and Tom Robertson. I was very happy that they came to their first Notacon in a roundabout way because of me. When I was working on my proposal for A Game Any Game, I approached Mike and asked him if he would like to help me out with a Game Maker workshop for the weekend. Mike was the instructor who led the intro to game design class at Lorain County Community College, which is what finally got me back into game design and programming, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to work together on a project like this with him. He declined at first, but after thinking about it some more decided to submit his own proposal with Tom, and that’s how that happened. I love seeing my enthusiasm for community events bring in more people and their energy for the things that they are enthusiastic about.

I saw a lot of friends this year, and by that I don’t mean the usual hacker scene personalities; I mean local people who I’ve known for years, but never had seen at Notacon before. Even though I always felt many of them would be into it and enjoy the talks and activities, and many of them were friends or friends of friends with people who went each year. I’m not sure whether my talking about how great it is to be there for the past three years had any influence or not, but it doesn’t really matter.

However, this year’s event was quite a bit smaller than past years, overall. I’m not sure why that is, and it makes me wonder. The same good feelings were there, about being at a great party with brilliant people, and actually in some ways maybe they were stronger than past years, the luminaries and bigger personalities who were missing gave the event a more down to earth and sedate tone and I think maybe allowed those who were there to embiggen themselves a bit to fill out the empty space more than they might have otherwise. I felt like there was something missing for much of the weekend, so many people who’ve been coming for years who weren’t there this year.

A Game Any Game was not as successful as I had hoped, but ever since I submitted the proposal to do it, I had this feeling that it would be difficult to attract participants when there’s so much else to do all weekend long. We had a few people come to the table we were at, to talk and get the software from me, and build a little start of something. And any amount of that to me counts as win. I hadn’t planned on making a game myself, as I’d wanted to be available to help others with their questions as they got acclimated to Game Maker, but with the lack of participants, I ended up working on a game and completed it just before the event ended.

It really isn’t much of a game, in fact it’s really pretty broken in some ways, and the code, if you look at it, it quite rough. As I worked on it, I had the feeling I used to get from drawing margin doodles while sitting around waiting for inspiration to grab me. It was less an attempt at designing something good, and more an experiment, to stretch my legs a bit and do something I hadn’t done with Game Maker before, and so I chose to do a game that used mouse controls. Doing the controls was a little tricky, mainly because I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted, and I’m not certain that the approach I ended up with is the best, and probably it isn’t, but for the purposes of exploring the mouse functions and doing something with them, it was a good experience. I only spent maybe a total of four hours over the weekend seriously engrossed in building it, and much of the rest of the time I was working on it, it was an aimless, design-less exercise.

So, enough excuse-making, I think I’ve adequately established that this is probably not worth playing, but for posterity I’ll have the .gm81 file water if anyone wants to look at the code, build it, play it, or mess around with it. I don’t plan to develop it further.

I’m planning on getting back into MUST!GET!EGG! in the next week after Ludum Dare. For those who I met this weekend who might be reading this, that will be a more inspired creation and should be a decent game by the time I finish it.

MUST!GET!EGG!

development, games, life
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Inspiration strikes in unexpected ways sometimes. This morning while I was listening to the news on the local NPR affiliate, a story came on about an easter egg hunt in Colorado that was canceled this year because the year before, parents were out of control, being aggressive about making sure their precious child got an egg before they were all snatched away by the villainous other children.

I was so appalled by the story that I made the following snarky quip on Facebook:

MUST!GET!EGG! genesis

The imagery was so strong that I knew I just had to work up the idea into a full concept and design, and then build a game. I wrote up a little design document today and I liked it, so I put in a few hours this evening working on it, and it’s still very early but I think this will actually be a decent game when it’s all done, if I can make everything work the way I want it to.

So far it’s very crude, but in less than four hours I had playable characters roughed out. Here’s the shotgun-toting Hunter in action:

MUST!GET!EGG! alpha screenshot

One thing I noticed about this creative process is how satisfying it is to have an angry reaction to a news story and turn it into the inspiration for a creative work. This is how I know that I’m a game designer: when my first response to something is “Make a game out of that.” Doing it in response to something that makes me feel is what makes me an artist.

I also found the game concept itself very satisfying because it’s so inappropriate — it’s hard to get much wronger than having shotgun-toting hunters gunning for bad parents at an easter egg hunt to teach everyone a lesson. If this were done up as anything but a zany pixel-art graphics 2D game, it’d probably be disturbing and controversial. As it is, I suppose in the next few weeks or months if it gets noticed, it may end up generating some controversy, especially if the news media picks up the story of this game as sortof an echo of the original story.

The thing that makes me happy about this project is just how quickly I can work when I have a spark of creativity. My Game Maker craftsmanship continues to improve and I find that I can make things very quickly, which is essential for me. Unlike the experience I had with the Global Game Jam back in January — which was amazing in its own right — tonight I didn’t have to go through the agony of losing work due to a corrupted project file, and having to rebuild everything. I worked quickly, and got results quickly. I can imagine completing a full project like this in maybe <100 hours, which is fantastic.

Every time I pick up Game Maker and build something with it, I get a little more confident, find it a little easier, and learn a little more. It feels great.

I’ve met some amazing people.

life, Uncategorized
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I’m going to relate a story that just happened to me that got me to thinking: I’ve really met some amazing people in my time.

The other day, I was trying to log into the Global Game Jam website, and was having a hell of a time remembering my password. Stupid me had forgotten my password, which isn’t a big deal since the website, like just about any website has a forgot password feature. But for some reason this one was driving me nuts. I’d get the email to reset my password, click the link, log in, change my password, then log out to verify I now knew my password by logging back in again, and it would tell me I wasn’t giving it the right username/password again.

After a dozen or so times doing this, I went to the web site and clicked Contact, and wrote them an email describing the problem I was having.

I got an email the next day from Elonka Dunin. She suggested that I try logging in with my username as my username, and not my email address. A lot of websites these days use your email address as a login name, since they generally uniquely identify a user. And a lot of websites are done in such a way that you can log in either with your username OR the email address that you used to create the account with. In this case, they didn’t. But I didn’t know that. And because I didn’t sleep much that weekend when I created the account, I didn’t remember or didn’t notice, or both.

Now, ordinarily, who cares, right? It’s just one of those things, a “me being dumb” moment out of maybe a million I’ll have in my life, if I’m lucky to live that long. Nine times out of ten, I might have not cared about it enough to bother notifying the web site that it has a problem, and would have just not bothered logging out, or I would have just continued using the reset password method to get back into the site until I really got sick of it. But actually, in my case, I have been using the Global Game Jam site from multiple computers, and it was bothersome to have to go through the whole process every time, and, besides, it was driving me effing bonkers to have the web site tell me every time I tried that I couldn’t for the life of me enter my @#($#(& password in correctly, even when I @#(&%((^ well knew that I’d been @#($&#@&(^* entering it correctly. So, this one time, I bothered to write and let someone know I was having a problem, and someone was nice enough to help me fix the problem.

The story might end there, 99 times out of 100. But Elonka had written to me from a gmail account, and so the next day after I’d replied to her message thanking her for her help, I got a notification from pidgin asking me to authorize new buddies, and Elonka’s account happened to be one of them. I figured I didn’t need to chat with her, and probably wouldn’t ever need to again, and I’m not normally an outgoing type of person, but for whatever reason I figured “what’s the harm” and I clicked Authorize.

So, today, I get home from work and I’m all set to go swimming at the Y. I have a little time to kill, so I fix myself a quick dinner and I try to watch The Daily Show from their website. Only, their Flash seems to be all glitched up and the stream keeps interrupting and restarting, and then REALLY starts messing up and playing commercials over the top of the show, and then crashes entirely. I keep messing with reloading it, hoping to get the show in before I have to leave to go swimming, but as is often the case with computer problems, I get sucked into it and before I know it, it’s too late to go swimming.

So, because of that, I happened to be home when I got the IM from Elonka, asking me if I was OK with getting into globalgamejam.org. I say yes, wondering why she was asking since I’d already replied to her email with my thanks. Ordinarily I might have just ignored the message, not out of rudeness, but out of this driven focus to try to manage my time effectively. But for some reason, instead of closing the window I thanked her again and I figured that was going to be that.

By now, you might be wondering who Elonka Dunin is. Well, I wasn’t sure myself, although the name had sounded familiar for some reason. It turns out, this is who she is. So, I wrote to globalgamejam about an authentication problem and I didn’t get a response back from some volunteer intern college student, or an outsourced helpdesk monkey. I got a response from someone who happens to be Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association’s Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and is one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam. I had no idea.

For reasons I’m not quite clear on, she went on to ask me if I was planning on attending Notacon this year. I was a bit puzzled, but I guessed that she had read a mention of it in my Game Jam project page or something. I’m speaking there, in fact, so I told her about my talk and about how I was organizing a tiny little Game Jam event this year. And she said, “Wow!”

Elonka Dunin: "Wow!"=D

Dude, I got a “wow” from Elonka Dunin.

It turns out she has some family in Cleveland, and has herself spoken at Notacon, and she knows my friend Aestetix, who probably more than anyone else is responsible for helping me find my way into the hacker scene. Small world!

She also complimented me on my blog entry postmortem on the Game Jam, and mentioned that she had sent it to some other people as an example of good writing.

So I’m sitting here, feeling kindof struck at how amazing tonight has been for me, and how a series of seemingly inconsequential events strung themselves together to make it happen. And it also made me think about how many amazing people I’ve met and gotten to know at least a little bit in the last couple years since I stepped out of my comfort zone and offered to pick Aestetix up at the airport in exchange for being his “plus one” to get in to Notacon 6, just so I could meet this cool guy I’d been reading on livejournal since forever.

I guess I’ve come a long way from that time. In many ways I feel like I’m still just getting started, but I guess I should start getting used to the idea that people are going to know who I am before I tell them if I keep this up. What a strange realization to have for someone so used to feeling invisible.