The only constant is change.
Musings on Existence
A farewell to Phosphorous from FTU #256
Jan 14th
Bill “Phosphorous” Sears passed away today. I never got the chance to meet him, but his art graced a number of games I worked on, and I’m going to miss him.
About 10 years ago, my friends Rich and Iikka started making games as Digital Eel. They make games with style and a touch of insanity. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work on almost all of their games as a tester, starting in early beta stages, often before much of the game is fleshed out – there’s an engine there, but gameplay may be wildly unbalanced, the UI is still in flux, missions or levels are really limited. That sounds kind of painful, but I assure you, it’s fun.
Partly because Digital Eel makes games that are enjoyable to play, and that’s evident even in early half-finished versions. But mostly it’s fun because I get to have opinions about gameplay, storyline and the like, and those sometimes make it into the game. Nothing like seeing your requirements in the finished product to make you feel a sense of ownership.
There’s a fairly small group of guys (people, but they are in fact all guys) who have been beta testing Digital Eel games. Early, Rich started calling us the Fearless Testers – that’s even the label he put on us for the credits. My friend John Slade and I decided to unionize, in the event that a dispute ever broke out, to give ourselves collective bargain leverage. Or something. We might have been drinking at the time. So we dubbed ourselves “Fearless Testers Union, local 256,” a number chosen both to imply that we had a lot of people behind us, and because hey, powers of 2, we’re nerds.
Digital Eel is Rich and Iikka, but it’s also Phos. His brain-melting art graces the box design for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, which is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s funny, and challenging, and beautiful, and profound, and I’ve played and replayed it dozens of times. His art and his sense of weirdness is all over Digital Eel’s games. I’m proud to have worked on games with him, and I’m sad that I won’t get to do so again.
Farewell, Phos. I hope its weirder than you imagined where you are, because it’s less weird around here without you.
Fearless Testers Union, Local 256, at a recent meeting.
Counterproductive biological functions
Jun 2nd
Some of the things that my body does (and possibly yours as well) are counterproductive. Case in point: I’m fighting a cold that makes me sound like Hellboy (according to my son Alex, age 11). My throat hurts when I swallow. So why does the condition of “throat hurts” produce the reaction of “salivate excessively”? Hello, more saliva means more swallowing, which hurts more.
To deal with this, I’m employing the tactic I used last night, albeit not deliberately: stay up so late that I fall asleep almost immediately when I go to bed.
It’s not what you might call a good plan, but it’s what I’ve got.
Eyeball farmers or phishing boats?
Mar 2nd
Despite not having updated in a few days, I’m getting a lot of spam comments on my posts. They’re fairly obviously from non-native English speakers (or people who are nearly illiterate), so they’re easy to spot, and since I have comment moderation turned on, they’re not making it through, but they’re still annoying.
The strangest thing is that Gmail flags most of the notifications as spam, since they contain the comment text with characteristic bad grammar and the associated link to some eyeball farm or phishing site. I glanced into my Spam folder a few days ago, saw one and then went looking for more.
Curious.
Dear John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich: thank you.
Jan 16th
Dude was First Lord of the Admiralty, in addition to inventing the sandwich (probably).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sandwich
Think for a moment what life would be like without the idea of the sandwich. Assume for a moment that nobody else thought of it (then or now).
I’d freaking starve to death.
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