Today: Grooving out to Pomplamoose

GRR.

Just when I was hitting the ground running on getting back to paying work, the 'net goes down in my apartment. One of the contractors in the building just took the $%#@ing wire: Cut it at two ends and walked off with the middle. It's been 48 hours getting that fixed and I ended up with a bag full of wiring tools never thought I'd own again.

I am modestly pissed right now.

Everything seems bright, coming out the other side of a time of pressure and grief.

The last month has been all deadlines with the game, getting things ready for the printer. Fix it now, or it comes out wrong, all 2,000 copies. It's been all details all day, every day, and then waking in the middle of the night to do a bit more. And for the last week, meanwhile, my last pet was dying.

There's no guinea pig in the house anymore. Albert is buried next to his sister.

The deadlines are all wrapped up. At last? Well, 99.99% at last. I could move a few text bubbles 2mm to the side here and there, to make sure they don't get cut off when the rulebook isn't lined up exactly perfectly, as the printer binds it. And I need to move a few shades around on the map for the same reason. And I will. But... pretty much... it's out of my hands now.

From here, the key to get the game out without having to make any compromises is to turn back to making money. It's liberating. The pursuit of cash never feels entirely pure. But now that I can look 6 months away, and see how running out could threaten this thing I've poured so much love into, now it has a purpose. I can see the goal from here. It's not money for money's own sake.

The last month was hard. From here, February looks like a swarm of possibilities.

I'm happy to see the frontpage set today:
Tarion's "Wandering Star", photography by Talamia

I love it for its ambition: That it's the second part of a trilogy. That Tarion and Talamia shot it over the course of hours, from dusk well past sunset, with all the changing light and the difficulty that entails. I love that they committed to this on a site that makes no guarantees of buying, or publishing, any set. And then there is beauty.


Work like this pushes the standards of what it means to be an SG set.

P.S. The trilogy, part one: The Message

Here's how I spend my days, January 2012 edition:


It's final tuning time for Lyssan, going back and forth with the printer. As predicted, it's a long process. Add 5mm to the edge of this file here, add a non-printing layer with instructions there. They say jump, I do it. It would all be fast changes, except half the stuff I have to teach myself how to do as they ask for it. And some of the files are so large they take 10 minutes just to load or save, and two hours to re-upload after each change.

But it's pride inspiring to see it all come together. The way I feel about feats of beautiful design, I'm starting to feel about this game. And that's a good. It's not all good. There's plenty of insomnia to go around as I wonder what notes are buried with urgent instructions to come back and fix x, and not to forget y. If only I could remember what I was forgetting.

And stuff worth sharing:

Question:

You're sending something off to China to be manufactured. You've concerned about sweatshop conditions for workers there. You've never seen the factory where your thing will be made, and don't know if it's a sweatshop. The guy who's your only business contact with the company spends almost all his time on this side of the pond. If things were bad over there, he might have never seen it, either. How do you find out if this company treats its employees decently?

I'm uploading the first print candidate for Lyssan now, for the printer.

It's a gig, after being compressed down to a single zipfile.

I oversaw that. Wrote most of it. Dreamed it up.

I don't mean to sound proud, here. If you imagine these words being said, imagine me being in shock as I say them.

I've never created anything that took this long to upload before.

A lot of days I wonder what the @#$% I'm doing with my life. I'm not saving starving children, or ending war, or pushing forward the boundaries of science. I've put the last year and a half of my life into making a game. A game? A game. Why the heck did I do that?

I don't know if it's worth anything. But it is a very large file.

I've been getting into hand-binding books, and the next natural thought was, "I should write something of my own to bind." And then it hit me that i had no idea how to get any of the software I've ever used in the past to organize pages into sections for binding.

The problem, sketched:

I'm presuming the easiest way to get what I want is to tell the word processing software to set up its WYSIWYG environment for 8.5x5.5" pages, then have a second pass that rearranges those pages for printing onto 8.5x11" sheets, depending on how many sheets I tell it are in each signature. But that's just it - I've never done this before. Presumably 10,000 people before me have solved this problem already, and it's a known solution. Perhaps one of them is reading this now...

(Crossposted in the design group)

There's a labyrinth on the floor. In the busiest crossing in the busiest airport in the busiest country in the world. There's a labyrinth in mosaic stone on the floor, where thousands of people cross each hour, not looking down, not breaking stride.

In old Catholic Europe they laid labyrinths into the floors of cathedrals. It symbolized the pilgrimage, and all the twists and backtracking along the way. How you'd set out to go one place, and end up everywhere else before you got there.



Atlanta Hartsfield, Terminal A, in the exact middle of the walk between the gates and the escalators. Look down.