Focus
This past week, I was sick with a nasty cold bug of some sort. The forced down time has got me thinking about my time and how I use it. There’s a slow revolution of thought… perhaps I am going to fail if I keep on the way I have.
Perhaps I am not focused enough in my scope, you know? Perhaps I won’t achieve much of anything if I keep trying to do 3 or 4 jobs well simultaneously, or at least in my mind’s eye. I think the priorities that I actually have need to line up with the ones in my mind.
It seems obvious, I guess. It’s not when you’re living it. It’s very easy to miss the mark, mentally, but continue to go on with whatever is best in the moment, over and over again, and not catch the incongruence.
Translation from Jen-ese: I’m realizing that I may have to give up on some goals/roles if I really want to move forward. I’m just not sure which goals are best to drop, but I have a hunch… a hunch that music creation may be the thing to drop. Not that I wouldn’t continue pursuits as a hobby, but to be honest with myself that it’s not worth the job frustration to constantly keep it in the mix.
Well, nothing is decided, but my gut is my gut. We’ll see how this plays out, won’t we? I’d have no regrets if that came to pass, you know. I’m much closer to be in a place I am happy with because of my music skills and all of the time I have devoted to them, so there is no retroactive loss. I see it more as a consolidation, rather than a loss.
Time will tell.
Painful!
I just went through an extremely painful manual WordPress update, just so I could type a post that I am now too tired to type. Darn it! Next time.
A New Idea…
I recently posted something on my shiny new TED profile, and it goes something like this:
I want to create a non-profit that provides after school programs for kids to create and design video games, while also participating in contests where they can win scholarship money for college.
It seems like a smart idea, to me, but I’m just not sure of how to do it.
This is truth. I have had this idea, in the back of my mind, that there must be a way to encourage a pro-creation, perhaps less consumerism-y attitudes in kids. I know of so many people – yes, young people! – who are so driven to be hand-fed their entertainment, every day. They don’t understand the value in creating, in crafting. They hyperdigest games and look blankly at the screen when there is nothing left.
I want to offer an alternative. I want to gear kids towards creating and solving, rather than having disks/cartridges that solve those problems for them.
Ideally, this would be a non-profit. I would want the money coming in to go towards scholarships that enable kids with passion to create – and do so smartly! – to go on to higher education with less stress on their parents.
Do I seem like an idealist? I think this can be done, and can be effective. Schools seem to be in dire need of more after-school programs around here, and in many other places.
Some bullet points on what I would probably need:
- Smart tools for creating simple games from scratch (think WarioWare DIY and Construct)
- Those who are passionate about teaching, and do it well, to help design curriculum and activities
- Math, art, computer science whizkids to help me make meaningful lessons in design
- I would love to incorporate teaching algorithms into the design curriculum… mmm.
- NON-PROFIT EDUCATION
- FUNDING EDUCATION (these are in CAPS because they are the most intimidating!)
If you have any tips, please pass them my way.
Florida?
Hey travelers! There is a great possibility that I will have a day in Orlando. I’ve never been, and I’ll be with a good friend. What would you do? We’re trying not to be high-spenders. (Yes, I know DisneyEverything is there, but we’ve never been to that, either, so we are clueless.)
All ideas/suggestions appreciated! We’ll also be at the STS-132 NASA shuttle launch, which should be fantastic! 
Mobile Phone Fun
I have a G1. I live by this device, despite how much it has been misbehaving these past weeks. These past few days, it turns out that I wasn’t receiving texts because my internal memory was too low!
I had to call tech support (nice folks, btw) to discover that low space correlated. But seriously – why couldn’t there have been a warning on the phone? A simple pop-up would’ve been fine! It’s not like this is my SD space – it’s INTERNAL space. I really expect them to keep up on that or prevent me from, uh, limiting my phone’s functionality. Seriously. Also, the internet cache doesn’t clear automatically… at all? I mean, what?! This is a phone, not a laptop, not a PC. I expect a bit more vigilance in keeping space down and making sure that the phone is, first of all, a workable phone.
I guess that’s been my biggest complaint about the G1: it should, by default, ensure that it is always a functional phone. I still get times where the Contact list crashes, or I can’t get to the dialer as the phone behaves sluggishly (without 6 apps running, at that, or anything non-Google running). I understand that your memory is also a pagefile, but come on! Set aside space for it, don’t make it my responsibility to fish around and find out that you’re suffering. For ONCE, learn from Windows by reserving that pagefile AHEAD of time. It’s just for this reason!
Revisit: Personal Silence
As I enjoy the happy silence of an early Sunday morning, I love to think about how the silence is, itself, not so bad. There can be lots of love within silence, for example.
January 4th, 2008 in “Silence Theory”:
This Esquire article got me thinking [again] about the power of personal silence. There’s a gap between what people understand by what you say and what you don’t, especially whether you say anything or not.
In high school, I was a fairly depressed teenager. Typical small-town, too-smart kid with the right classes and the wrong people. I reached a point of bubbling anger that effervesced through the day, preps and jocks in wise avoidance after a few months. I was aggressive in indoor gym, especially with soccer and badminton. If that wasn’t enough to strike fear in the hearts of classmates, my silence usually did it. Nothing can communicate unfriendliness like a refusal to answer a question with a glare that could cut iron. The mystery, though… you felt the mystery of yourself after doing this for some time as what you didn’t say left all the more to your assailant’s imagination. I frightened myself a bit, after some time, as I realized that I didn’t have anything to fill in those empty spaces, either.
On the other hand, you can have the deepest, sweetest communications with those you love without an utterance passing. A total 360 to the same space!
What do you say when you speak? Are you chatty, covering up social discomfort, or filling a space that would otherwise seem too awkward to live within? Do you use silence to strengthen the words you do say? It’s kind of like keeping your word by not upholding promises to it unless it is of dire importance… people will know your actions or words mean business.
Revisit: IPC Reading: Visual Intelligence
I love this quickie from my ITP class!
November 5th, 2007 in “the TECH of Jen Grier”:
Phantom limbs… a strange concept I haven’t thought of since my old studies in meditation and the supernatural. The idea that your brain has such a part in conceiving senses as opposed to a direct route of feeling from what you to touch to what you know is definitely a disturbing thought. It all seems to happen too quickly for that to be true.
The “bunny taps” really got me. The premise is that you can tap two points across a distance on your body – say your arm – and feel a tap between those points, as if the sensation “hopped” across the distance. This happens with fairly quick taps. It’s a fascinating phenomenon of sensation.
Sakura Matsuri!
I just realized that I totally forgot about this great holiday! The Brooklyn Botanical Garden just reminded me of an upcoming celebration… in… Brooklyn. Surely there must be some celebrating in South Carolina? It looks like there was one in Boiling Springs on the 12th…
I’ve probably missed my chance to celebrate at all, as most folks celebrate in mid-April, but I have to give it a shot! Locals, give me details!
Friend Code!
Just to ride on the recent DS/WarioWare high, I finally got Tim to bring my wireless router back to me so I could download all of those Ninsoft games.
My friend-code is 2751 3945 0117 and my nickname is Jenothy. Please give me yours so we can start sharing games and whatnot!
P.S.: I accidentally tasted Bitter Yuck! spray this week. Yes, the spray that is intended for CATS. I’ve never tasted something so horrible and so difficult to get the taste out of my mouth. Yuck for serious! I can’t believe it doesn’t work on my cats. Perhaps I should make a microgame about it as a catharsis.
WarioWare D.I.Y. Love
I’ve become engrossed with this game/tool. I blazed through all of the tutorials, including the advanced “Assembly Dojo”, and have almost finished all of the freelance jobs. As much as I just enjoy doing it, I wanted to see more whiz-bang moments for completing the tutorials and jobs. Seeing a new record/song in the store didn’t really feel like enough. I felt like there was so much more content in the previous WarioWare games. Yes, it’s slighly unfair because this is chock full of tools for making and sharing, but I don’t have any buddies to share with yet. As a single-player experience, I was expecting more to happen (without making my own game) for these smart ancillary tasks.
Perhaps it will open up once I’ve submitted my own totally fresh “In Wonder” game. (Liquid wouldn’t fit.) I’ve also gotten into the habit of making extremely detailed sprites, which makes me wonder if I actually have some kind of artistic talent. I’ve always thought about getting a small tablet, but I never felt justified in doing so. I’m lucky to have many artists in my life, even for personal projects, but WarioWare asks you to make art – now! – so I’ve tried. And tweaked. And become obsessed with my limited palette. And patterns. And how to make the right shadow using the comic tools (screentones, if you know what I mean). I slowly went from the I-don’t-care-about-art-Player who would deliberately make a blob and two spots for a face to recreating Pikachu and Ghastly for two of the last jobs in the last batch. Accurately (as far as 32×32 or 64×64 pixels will allow me, I forget how big those were). With shading and perspective.
I’ll see if I can post pictures tomorrow. I’m really proud of them, to say the least.
Oh, about the actual game making: I have started my first all-me, no-tutorial game. It’s in a semi-realistic style. I was thinking about making sad/serious minigames. For this one, it’s a boy, alone in his barely-lit room, looking depressed. I was going to make the start command “Contemplate Futility” or something along those lines (the above has too many characters and wouldn’t fit). The music is already simple/ultra sad. I’m not sure what the action is, or if there should be nothing (no in-game response) to do. Just… the direct command, to the player, to empathize. I think that’s a shocking change from the usual lighthearted and quirky tone of microgames.
Can you make a stunning emotional experience in 4 seconds or less? …Why not?
