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Human Lab Rat #76: This is my brain before drugs

The image to the left there is my brain OFF drugs.  I drew this image after my first appointment with my new "talk therapist", and since later that same day I had my first appointment with my new "drug therapist", I shared it with her.

I have always said that I draw like a crazy person, but now I finally have an outlet for embracing that.  Of course, when I say I draw like a crazy person, I mean the fact that I can't draw a straight line to save my life.  I don't actually mean that I think crazy people can't draw.  Heck, look at Van Gough!  Then again, he couldn't draw a straight line either, hmm.

Be sure to click the image to enlarge it, if you want to see everything I wrote.  This image came into my head while I was walking home from therapy and worrying about my wallet, which I had lost that morning.  I kept thinking about how I had looked everywhere for my wallet, and I kept coming up with more and more ridiculous places to look, wondering if I'd had some bizarre mental lapse in the two blocks between the grocery story and my house.  It's especially weird to think like this when you're in the middle of a psych evaluation program; everything becomes a possible sign towards crazytown, if you let it.

When I was first looking into the possibility that I had ADHD, one of the statement that resonated with me was "I feel like my thoughts are constantly 'stuck in a groove'".  This image has come into my mind countless times.  Sometimes it's when I am trying to fall asleep and my brain gets stuck on an idea and won't let it go or develop it further: the idea just sits there blocking any other processing from happening, but also blocking the path to sleep. Other times, especially when I am trying too hard to remember something, especially something so familiar that it's embarrassing that I can't remember it, I get stuck on some tangent that's completely wrong -- you know, like "I can't remember the name, but it starts with a Q... Quaker?  Quackenbush?  Quasimodo?  Oh right, it was Smith!"

So, while I was thinking about the wallet thing, and how I'd looked everywhere but probably was missing the obvious, this image came into my head.  In my morning therapy session we'd talked about how I tend to talk (and write) around a subject instead of getting to the point or directly answering the question, so drawing was a great way to short-circuit that.

Also, as soon as I got home, I looked in the one place I'd previously thought to look but didn't because it was "too ridiculous", and sure enough, my wallet was there!

Good Thing #42: Viva Vivanno!

Say what you will about "corporate coffee", sometimes Starbucks comes through with a winner. Actually Starbucks is devilishly good at coming up with winners. Just about every time I begin to suffer from "drink fatigue", they roll out something new and even more delicious. Like any seasonal line, often there's the one "killer sip" that makes the whole collection worthwhile. The Eggnog Latte and Gingerbread Latte, now common in plenty of chains, rose to popularity thanks to Sbux. Unfortunately, as in fashion, there's always those pieces that are more about concept than execution. Starbucks' recent attempts at healthy drinks have often fallen into this category. The Skinny Mocha? You might still find it on the menu, but I bet your local S$ has already stopped carrying the syrup for it. It tasted like a chocolate cow peed in a cup! The Skinny Vanilla Latte? Somewhat better. I will admit that on my more neurotic "healthy" days I've put up with the Nutrasweet aftertaste to get the low-sugar, low-fat benefits. But it was actually the SVL that made me realize I'm just as happy drinking straight espresso, and a doppio's a heck of a lot cheaper and more efficient and lower in dairy, with no fat and no sugar. And an espresso is so quick to down that you can drink it in the heat and not feel like you're being ridiculous. Of course, for summer drinks, the favorite up until now has been the Frappuccino. With enough calories to put you well on your way to a heart attack (or, in the reduced-fat version, at least enough to keep the cellulite on your thighs) the Frappuccino is Satan in a cup: a foul tempter that brings people back again and again. One former non-caffeine-head in my office (a rarity in creative industries) discovered that drinking a Frappuccino is like "drinking ice cream", and now he joins us in morning coffee. Muahahaha. All hail the bean! But the Vivanno may change all that. According to the initial marketing hype, the Vivanno is a 250 calorie wonder, with 20 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber, but no mention of fat. Subsequent Starbucks propaganda has mentioned "at least" 16 grams of protein, probably because of the two flavor choices, and a way to "reduce fat" by asking for a nonfat milk substitute (which you'd think would be standard with a healthy drink, no?), and 270 calories instead of 250. So what is this wonder? In the form I've fallen in love with, it's a banana-chocolate milkshake with (optionally) a shot of espresso added. Usually by mid-afternoon I want a good snack, and a caffeine boost, and the Vivanno takes care of both in one shot (no pun intended). It also takes me back to my childhood, when my sister and I would make banana milkshakes from frozen orange juice, ice cubes, and bananas. Yes, we grew up in a fairly healthy household, thanks to my mom getting her hands on a copy of "Sugar Blues", but that's a subject for a much longer post. Our big childhood vice was chocolate milk, which our mother let us have fairly regularly, figuring it at least got us to drink milk (oreo cookies were also a suitable bribe for this). So, put those things together with the adult vice of espresso, and you have Paradise in a cup. There is also a mango form, to which the caffeine-addicted can add a shot of green tea (Their slogan really should be "Starbucks: keeping you high from dawn til dusk"), but I haven't gotten around to that one yet; today was the first day of their being available, so I'm already an early adopter! I suspect I'll keep slurping down the espresso-banana-chocolate concoction until Fall approaches and the Pumpkin Spice Latte returns. Cheers!

Boston Pride 2008

Today I marched in Boston Pride with the ACLU (full disclosure: I am not a card-carrying member).

In past prides, I've marched with groups that I'm heavily involved in, but this year my friend Chris posted to Facebook asking for folks to join up with the ACLU, so I did.  I love how the Internet has created a whole new way of organizing things.  I then passed the invitation on to another friend Chris, and he joined us.  We didn't exactly overwhelm the crowd with our size, but I think we did pretty well with the energy.  Props to the guys whose waving and smiling muscles didn't poop out (about halfway through I started to wilt a bit...) and especially to the guy who kept getting the crowd going, long after we ran out of swag to throw at them.  And what IS it with people's compulsion to grab swag at parades?  We barely made it 5 blocks before we were out of mardi gras beads and frisbees!

I started to write a long political thing here, but I don't think I need to say more than the picture shows.  OK, one note: please note how this group that is defending civil liberties is willing to take a lighthearted approach by having everyone wear Statue of Liberty crowns.  Sometimes the lighter political touch makes more of a difference than the heavy-handed one.  At least among intelligent folks, I think.  And sometimes I worry that we don't give enough credit to peoples' intelligence.

I will, of course, eat those words if Obama loses the upcoming election...

Stonewall Brawl

Some of you have probably already read about my company's upcoming game "Stonewall Brawl", which recreates in a tongue-in-cheek fashion the events of the Stonewall Riots.  Stories started appearing in the blogosphere about it on Thursday the 12th, and on Friday the 13th (appropriately enough) we started seeing the first comment backlash.

Mostly people have expressed concern over the fact that the main character is a white male instead of a black drag queen.  This was a poor selection of screen shots on our part, but we had finished animating the white male character while the black drag queen was still undergoing some pixel surgery.  Of course, I knew as soon as we publicized this game, we'd immediately hear about something that wasn't quite right.  It's been an interesting discussion in our half-gay, half-straight office: where does something go from being "just funny" to "political satire"?

The tough part here is that we're actually trying to make fun of the game mechanic of "Streets of Rage" style games (which generally involve a lot of button-mashing) while also giving people a potentially empowering experience.  We're basically asking the question, "What if Stonewall were actually one super-powered LGBT (or insert letter of your choice here) person versus the cops?"  There are good game play reasons for this, including the fact that having the player control more than one character at a time is a difficult interface problem (though we are pushing to add a "buddy battle" mode before the game goes live in a week).  We've also attempted to come up with ways of indicating other brawlers on the street, but the focus of the game is really on you, the player, getting to kick some authority ass.

Things have gotten a LOT better for the LGBT community in the last 30 years, but it's still important to feel this empowerment.  I have just been rereading John Rechy's "The Sexual Outlaw", a book written in 1977 about gay versus the police in LA during the three previous years.  Revisiting this book has been somewhat of a revelation to me.  OK, I'll be the first to admit that when I first read it in high school in the '80s, I skipped a lot of the analysis for the juicy bits... and got a pretty weird impression of gay life in the process, which took my coming out and actually finding a community before I realized just how weird it was.  However, in reading the book now, so much of it is about the negative effects of oppression.  A surface reading of the book led me to think that Rechy was advocating public sex as the ultimate subversion against the criminalization of gay behavior, but on my second reading, I realized that he was talking about public sex as an angry reaction to oppression.

Whether public sex actually solves anything is debatable, but then again we can also debate whether violence solves anything.  However, the point is, in part, that striking back against authority feels good.  This is part of why games like "Grand Theft Auto" do so well: it's not that (most) people really want to go out and kill other people, but that they want to feel like they can explore a more subversive side of life.

Today, (most) people also wouldn't go out looking for a fight with the cops, even though many people live in fear of some authority figure or other.  "Stonewall Brawl" gives players a chance to act out a superpowered fantasy against the backdrop of historic events.   I am glad that so far the game has gotten people to discuss the significance of Stonewall a bit more; I hope that once the game is released, people will also be able to laugh along with it.  It's pretty outrageous.  And I mean that in the good way!

So it's come to this...

No, that's not a Photoshop effect.  That's really me in a suit.  At work.

Today was a grant foundation's site visit for one of the organizations I work with.  Usually I get to be the "cool guy" with the untucked collared shirt and fashionable jeans (though that may end soon; see yesterday's post).  But since this was a very important visit, we were all advised "tie at a minimum, suit at a maximum".  So I went for the suit.  Needless to say, everyone at work (both jobs) commented on it, since to see me out of jeans, you usually have to be getting married or dead.  Well OK, I guess technically the folks at the gym see me out of jeans every day, and during the summer I wear shorts and... it was just a turn of phrase, OK?!

So the suit.  I actually like dressing up occasionally, but I don't like it during a workday.  Because my job involves so much running around and being silly with people, I feel really restrained in a suit. Then again, that's probably why they still make so many 9-5 corporate guys wear them.

I'm also neurotic about how the suit looks on me.  Part of it is the "I can't have nice things" syndrome from yesterday's post: Am I going to spill on it? Do I have to get it drycleaned again? (probably and probably) What if someone invites me to join a pickup rugby game? (doubtful).  The rest of it is my being self-conscious about the fact that I know a suit isn't my normal mode of dress and wondering if I'm pulling it off: Are my pants pulled too high?  Does my dress shirt poof out funny?  Which button do I keep buttoned on the jacket? (usually, always, and none).

The other reason the suit thing gets to me, despite my joy of playing dressup, is the fact that the whole time I am aware that I'm not playing.  Although running a game design company is serious business, it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that everything you do is fun.  Wearing a suit makes that a little harder.

Anyway, the presentation went fine, and even the people there were surprised I followed the dress code.  Now we'll just have to see what kind of funding my fashion coordinating rakes in...

This is why...

So for Christmas 2006, my boyfriend bought me a $150.00 gift certificate to Riccardi, with the intention that I use it to buy "nice jeans".  Now, I've never paid more than $50.00 for a pair of jeans, and partly this is because I'm a nerd with a limited fashion budget, but mostly this is because I know how hard I am on pants.  My friends (at least one subset of them) used to joke about how I must spend so much time on my knees because of the holes.  In fact, they were right, though as you might imagine, the reason was not what they were implying.  I used to do a lot of large-scale artwork, which involved working on the floor of my room on my hands and knees.  Come to think of it, whenever I do a piece of art that isn't on the computer, I find some reason to do it on my knees... let's not pursue this line of discussion any further.  It'll just embarrass us both.

Speaking of embarrassment, about a year ago, I started noticing a new jeans problem: holes appearing right at the crotch of the jeans on either side.  And, as you might imagine, the jokes started again.  The truth of how I was getting the holes is actually even more embarrassing than the jokes, and for now, because I am writing this BEFORE having my evening drink, we won't take this any further.

But the point is this: it took me until February 2008 (over a year later) to use the darned gift certificate, partly because I was intimidated by the Riccardi store (having someone help me to try on jeans?  so weird!), and partly because, well, I knew what would happen: I would discover that  I like expensive jeans, and then this would become A Bad Habit, given my inability to keep clothes from getting messed up.

Sure enough, the really nice salesperson (who embraced my nerdiness wholeheartedly, even accepting my requirement that the jeans have "big enough pockets for geek stuff" without batting an eyelash) talked me into a pair that cost $200, so I ended up dropping the amount of money I  pay for my USUAL jeans on top of the gift certificate money.  But they were pretty cool jeans.

Flash forward two months, and I notice the cool stitching on one of the pockets is beginning to unravel.  This is yet another mystery to be solved: do I lean more heavily on one side than the other?  I've been working on my posture this year (grandma would be so proud!), so I've actually been thinking about such things.  Wouldn't I have noticed that? And no, I don't carry anything in my back pockets (three months living in NYC in the 1990s would break you of that habit, too).

Later that same month, I find there is now a hole in the crotch of these jeans, even though I have been super-careful not to do the thing that causes the crotch-holes (don't ask).  So I immediately take them to the nice tailor ladies down the street (in my head they are the Russian version of The Fates) and pay another $20 to ensure that my $200 investment will last a bit longer.  There's nothing to be done about the pocket stitching except to try to tie off the loose threads and cut them, so I do that myself.

And then I go and let Andrew talk me into a second pair of expensive (but not quite as expensive) jeans, because this pair will be better, while the first pair is being repaired.  That is another story.  And yes, part of my problem is that I tend to wear out one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes at a time.  See also, I'm a big nerd.

So last night Andrew says to me "Are those your NEW jeans?  Is there ALREADY a hole in them?"  I remind him that I got the hole fixed a month ago and that he must just see the thread, but no, he's right.  ANOTHER hole in the EXACT SAME PLACE on the opposite side!

Fortunately I have the second pair of jeans, which do seem sturdier than the first ones, mostly because they are "raw denim", which is apparently "a la mode", which is, I gather, French for "uncomfortably stiff".  (I know what it really means.  Y'all can stop emailing me about it now.)

However, I think this will be the end of the expensive jeans habit.  When I think about how many cups of coffee I could have bought with this money, or for that matter how many games for my Wii (assuming I can ever wrest it away from my fiancé!), I feel like there's a giant hole where my wallet used to be.  Oh wait, it must have fallen out.  Dangit!

Wiidow

OK, I SUCK AT BLOGGING!  I admit it.  How can I not, since this is my first post in months.  A longer assessment of my weaknesses in this area will follow.  For now, I thought I'd try something new.  Inspired by Pamela Ribon's stickies series of photos, I'm posting one-word comics of myself.  The idea was from Pamie; the fact that we both happen to do the face-in-one-hand-looking-unimpressed thing a lot is just something we have in common.

Anyway, I was all proud of myself when I came up with Wiidow earlier today after losing my fiancé (Oh yeah, we're engaged.  So many updates I should have made here this year!) to Super Paper Mario for the afternoon (I wasn't really upset; it gave me more time to mess around on learning Japanese.  Yes, I am a total nerd even on my days off.) BUT then I Googled and found out the term is already in Urban Dictionary.  This is the problem with the Internet; it's pretty damned hard to be first at anything.  No wonder people still post "FIRST!" in the comments threads, despite that being so '90s...

dispatches from the land of the near-dead #1

So here I am in Florida, headed towards The Villages in the Light truck. Two points of clarification: the Villages has nothing to do with "the village" from "The Prisoner", and my almost-inlaws are named Light; the truck is a big one.

So I hope it goes without saying that I'm joking about the near-dead. I wouldn't want hate mail telling me I'm being un-christmassy. However, The Villages is a HUGE retirement community. 40,000 senior citizens during the summer, and 80,000 during winter! It's independent living, not like a convalescent situation. But still, it's weird.

1) as you might expect, there are multiple cafeteria style restaurants (think Luby's or Old Country Kitchen)

2) everyone drives golf carts, sometimes covering miles in them. And they have them all pimped out!

3) There is an age-restricted pool but instead of "adult swim" meaning 18+, no one under THIRTY is allowed in the pool. So I can swim in a pool that my boyfriend can't!

Back to catching up with the inlaws...

what a time to get cable!

So we've been without cable TV for nearly 3 years now.  With our previous roommates we had a DirecTV system and more junk to clog our eyeballs than we could handle.  But with our move from a house to an apartment, we knew something like that would be tough to pull off (we live in a neighborhood with old houses that aren't very dish-friendly, and with neighbors that probably aren't very fond of how they look, either!).  So we looked into "regular" cable, but then we discovered that the adjective Comcastic is not a positive one, despite what the company would like you to think.  So we settled for Internet and "basic basic" cable (the practically free version that gives you the same stations as you'd get with an antenna)... and we only got the "basic basic" because they charge you MORE, if you don't get it.

So flash forward to now.  I've been wanting cable TV back since we moved into our new apartment in July.  Partly it's that we have more space so one of us can watch TV while the other one is out of earshot, but a lot of it is that I have missed being able to dip into different parts of the pop culture pool on occasion.  Sure, lots of stuff can be found on the Internet now, but there's something kinda nice about knowing you can fill your craving for an episode of The Price Is Right (or better, Sabado Gigante!) whenever you're in the mood.

So I spent a ridiculous amount of time over the last two weeks trying to get the best deal from Comcast.  But I couldn't find out ANY deals without talking to TWO online salespeople and TWO phone salespeople.  It seems that the online people know nothing about the phone offers, and furthermore, you cant even READ about the online offers anymore -- you have to go into a "chat room" with a customer service rep, so it's basically like being on the phone, except with more carpal tunnel syndrome.

Finally, thanks to a TV ad (thank goodness we had basic cable so I could research getting cable!) we learned that they have a $39.95 a month deal that gives you a whole bunch of stuff for a year, but ONLY if you are a complete Comcast virgin  If Comcast has ever touched your data pipe (You may giggle now.  I did as I typed that.), then you have to pay a premium.  OK, fine, so I'll pay a few bucks more.  I want it that much now.

At the end of the day, it ended up being over TWICE what a new subscriber would pay, and I don't even get all the features.  And yet the customer service rep happily told me what a good deal I was getting.  If Verizon had FIOS going here I would have so switched!

Anyway, after all is said and done, I am looking forward to having cable, except of course, now I'm also remembering we're in the middle of a freaking writers' strike.  So what do I have to look forward to, besides the aforementioned Price is Right and Sabado Gigante reruns?  Well, I guess I can enjoy the gradual crash-and-burn as Hollywood discovers writers actually ARE necessary to run their shows...

NaNoWriMo Day 15: Wanting Something...

This is the now -famous last frame from Randall Munroe's comic XKCD, in which one character dreams the coordinates of a particular place and time, goes to the spot, and finds nothing there.  What propelled this particular strip into fame was the fact that the date/time mentioned in the strip hadn't happened yet -- and so around a thousand people showed up in a park in Cambridge, MA, at the appointed date and time, and Randall Munroe appeared and said "Maybe wanting something DOES make it real."

It's a sweet and inspiring story, but of course, to make it real, Randall needed an audience.  He's built one over the last three years of publishing XKCD, and since he lives in that bastion of geekdom, Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT, he's got a pretty big local audience (though I understand people traveled from geek meccas far and wide to attend the event).  So really the conclusion should be "Maybe having enough people want the same thing makes it real."

Randall Munroe's comic strip shuttles back and forth frequently between loneliness and optimism.  He's tapped into some universal paradox of the human condition with this idea, and  this particular strip embodied both ends of the spectrum.

So what does this have to do with me, and with NaNoWriMo?  My question of the day is, "What does it take to convince people to want the same thing as you?"  This can be a tricky proposition, whether it's convincing your boyfriend that you need time to work on your novel (mine's been very good about this) or convincing investors that your game ideas are going to make money some day (I haven't done quite as well in this area).

I spent most of last week in California at a conference of informal science educators, showing off my work on Geckoman.  It was a good group of folks, and I got some support for the project, but it ate up all of my time, so other than outlining the rest of my YA novel, nothing really got done.  Came back and went to NYC for the weekend, which was supposed to be my relaxation time, when I had decided I would not write, but of course, that put me even further behind.  Now I'm back, but work has been so stressful that I can't find the mental space I found last year during NaNoWriMo, where I'd spend 1 to 4 hours a day working on the project, with very few skipped days!

Now I just stare at the screen and noodle around with the ideas.  I feel like this novel idea that came to me in a single blast of inspiration was a great gift, but it's like getting a "some assembly required" toy with no instructions.  Last night I actually had another bizarre inspiration and indulged myself in writing another outline that was completely the OPPOSITE of what I wanted to do with the YA novel -- pessimistic, paranoid, and very "adult" themed.  But then the cold I've been fighting for weeks got the best of me, and I had to give up at about 1:00am.

I want to finish NaNoWriMo again, but it may not happen, in the face of all the other stuff I have to worry about right now.  When I started Metaversal Studios nearly four years ago, I felt like I was setting up the conditions for something wonderful to happen -- like Randall Munroe's lonely-optimistic comic.  And I've been very lucky to be surrounded by an incredibly talented group of students and professionals who have made some amazing things happen.  Unfortunately, it's very difficult to sustain such efforts on no money -- so we end up taking on non-game-related client projects to make ends meet and we move further and further away from our original goals of creating something wonderful and unique.

There's still a lot of promise, and a lot of hope, but even with our little band of creatives here working together in one big group hug, it still sometimes feels pretty lonely.

Come on, world.  We really want this. Maybe if you want it, too, we can make it real.