Monthly Archives: January 2009

Games and Game Development, Personal Blog

The Sleepiest Chimera

As a present, Jesse gave me the little chimera figurine that comes with the fancy-pants edition of Resistance 2. It does not look fierce, but rather as though it is yawning. Perhaps it was put on some uneventful patrol and is bored out of its mind. Poor guy.

Speaking of sleep, I’ve been conducting a sort of sleep experiment of my own for the past week. Basically the idea is that I’ve taken 2 weeks of my life in which I will sleep as much as I please, with no obligations to guilt me awake. I just want to see what my sleep patterns are when left to my own devices.

So far, the patterns have been incredibly erratic, but I have been getting about 11-12 hours of sleep a day total. I have been otherwise keeping active and making sure I have access to sunlight, but it seems to make no difference.

Jesse is loaning me some sleep-robot thing that detects your near-awake periods at night, and figures your sleep pattern based on those. It seems to only work with long stretches of sleep, but I’ll give it a try tonight and see how it works. It’s a nifty little device, at any rate.

I have no idea what I’ll do with this data after the end of the 2 weeks, but I feel like it’s good to have, and I’m just generally curious. Plus, after this semester I’ll be a working woman. No more luxurious breaks, so I’d better work one in now!

Personal Blog

Bugs

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A leaf bug has decided to board with us for the winter. I noticed him at first before leaving for break, hanging out on our dish drying rack. Today, I found him again in the shower.

First, yes, I know that it is extremely likely that these are two entirely different leaf bugs. But what harm is there in pretending that it’s just the one?

Anyway, I presume his lingering on dishes and in the shower is for the available water source. Today, though, he appeared to have been caught in there while someone else was in the shower, and was quite waterlogged. I brushed him with a toilet paper square to soak up some of the excess water (enough so that he could pull his antennae apart, at least. They were stuck together) and he scuttled along the rim of the bath.

Part of me was concerned that I should move him out of the bathroom, for fear that one of my roommates may not be so keen on having a bug in the house for the winter. But, I decided that he probably knew what he was doing, and didn’t want to disrupt his access to a water source.

Winter is always tough for me, because my typical method for finding bugs in the house is to catch them and put them outside. But during the cold cold winter, I of course can’t do this! What am I supposed to do with these bugs? Usually I just let them be, but I don’t want my roommates to stomp them, so where can I hide them for the winter months?

Maybe I should start a bug terrarium in the basement.

Personal Blog

Stupid love

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So, in light of yet another incarnation of my track record of becoming very close friends with someone, falling in love with them, and having it be unrequited, I have resolved to start dating this semester.

I am, fortunately, on the cusp of the generation where the use of online dating services is not only no longer a taboo, but is actually the norm for people meeting one another. I have been assured by many a friend that dating is not as miserable an experience as I think, and so far everyone seems excited by this new prospect.

Well, everyone but me, but I’m sure that will all change once I find someone decent to distract my affections.

So far my initial exploration of the famed dating site experience has yielded:

1) Some guy inviting me to a hookah bar (who was kind of an idiot) and

2) Some guy sending me a nice little email in which every single sentence in the ENTIRE email had the EXACT same structure.

It’s a start, I guess, because I’m already learning about things I want in a relationship. I’ve learned that I need my potential other to be eloquent, and I’ve learned that I’m SEVERELY annoyed by people who respond to a casual question by asking “why?”

I’m also being forced to take into account what I find physically attractive in males, versus my typical means (which is to fall in love with the brain and then become attracted to whatever body it happens to be in).

Granted, I probably won’t go on any actual dates until my 2 week sleepathon is up, but baby steps count as steps.

I’m kind of miserable about the whole ordeal at the moment, but if stupid emotional brain wouldn’t keep going and screwing up my friendships, then I wouldn’t have to drag her through this nonsense. So it’s her own damned fault!

Stay tuned for a most likely more-positive outlook on dating. Give it a month or so.

Personal Blog

Masque of the Red Death

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Okay, so, I have this thing about the Masque of the Red Death. No no! Hear me out on this…

I feel like I’ve talked about this before, but if I have it’s been ages. I think I read the short story first in the 8th grade while we were doing a segment on Edgar Allan Poe, and have re-read it many times sense.

In spite of my frequent reviews of the story over the past 13 or so years, and in spite of Poe’s specific description of the many rooms in the suite where the story takes place, I can NOT wrap my head around the way the place is laid out. I’ve gone so far as to scrawl maps onto grid paper, and I still can’t grasp it.

Part of the problem, I think, is my ignorance of the typical architecture of the story’s time. I don’t even have a basis to begin with to imagine what a *normal* imperial suite would have looked like, let alone Prospero’s bizarre rendition of one.

I’ve often contemplated doing some renderings of the rooms and the layout, but I think this is the year I’m actually going to sit down and do it. You will not conquer me, Poe, not this time!

Likely, the internet could help me in my need of a map, but somehow I feel like this is something I have to generate straight out of my brain. Will I succeed? Mystery! Intrigue!

Personal Blog

2008 Review

The first thing I learned when looking back on 2008 was that I forgot to do a year review for 2007. Doh! Oh well, such is life!

08 was a good year for me. I think I have changed into something different by the end of it, but something for the better.

– The ETC West Coast Trip: adventure and fun and education! I went to Disneyland for the first time and sniffed out more companies than I had any right to see. It was a fantastic opportunity, and I’m so excited to see this year’s first-years head off on the same trip. Wee!

– I was lucky enough to land a sweet deal for my first project course at the ETC. Bandology was amazing, and I was so grateful to be on a team with such awesome people. I feel like it was a first step in boosting my confidence, and convincing me that yes, I could be a designer.

– speaking of which, GDC ’08 was a pretty big turning point for me. That was when I figured out that I should be looking for a design internship, not a production one. For some reason, I’d held the role of game designer in my head as something that I couldn’t do, reserved for people more awesome than me. At GDC I reached up and plucked it out and held it right there in my hand. It was some kind of magic.

– Ah, the summer. Pre-Insomniac Lisa and post-Insomniac Lisa were two completely different Lisas. Oh, Insomniac, you will forever be the incubator that hatched a new phase of Lisadom.

– Dorky though it may be, ’08 was the year where I did some semblance of end-game content in WoW. Rather, it was the Year of the Tank. Confidence boosts come in more forms than one would guess, you guys.

– Imagine my luck when my second ETC project team was also awesome! Get In Line harnessed a freshly hatched new Lisa and drove her to new levels.

– I got to go to Project Horseshoe! What an awesome experience. I met cool people and stretched my brain in cool new ways and learned a thing or two about myself in the process.

– Which brings us to the most recent: ringing in the holiday season with the Tuesday Night Ballers. It was as though we’d all gone off on our own adventures, then came back to enrich one another with all that we had learned. Such wonderful friends, I am lucky!

I am extremely excited about 2009. A little scared, sure, but who isn’t? It’s going to be some kind of adventure, I can tell already.