Category Archives: Personal Blog

Entries from my personal journal

Personal Blog

Inner Fire

I’m having one of those stretches where I’m really excited about what I’m doing at work. We got updated schedules, which helps a TON in how energetic I am in any job. When I know my schedule, I can adjust my energy output across time very efficiently.

It’s one of those times where I’m all giddy when I wake up in the morning, because I’m excited about getting in and doing stuff, or perhaps I solved a particularly tricky problem in a dream. It sounds silly, but I solve game design problems in dreams all the time. Subconscious Lisa, she is very clever, and I give her plenty of time to work, what with all the sleeping I do.

Like everything else lately, I know that times come and go and change, so I’m trying to be thrilled and happy while the inspiration lasts.

I think part of the inner fire comes from me recently jolting up and realizing, “OMG, I’m making games, like, as a job.”

A similar thing happens to me with music. I often forget music exists, and then when I suddenly remember for whatever reason, I’m like “MUSIC EXISTS!!” and listening to music endlessly and dancing for days. It’s a strange phenomenon, but whatever. Being surprised now and then by a truth of life never hurt anybody.

Personal Blog

Internet Power

Most of the time, when I get mail from the former residents of my apartment, I just toss it in the shredder. But occasionally I get something that gives off the “important” vibe (something from the IRS, packages, etc) in which case I turn to the internet.

There’s something fun about tracking down a stranger on the internet at finding a means of contacting them, be it email or myspace message. Every time this has happened, the person has been very grateful of my snooping so that they can be reunited with their important documents.

Last week I had my first incident since moving to LA – a suspiciously important looking letter turned out to be a check for $130 for one of my unit’s former residents. Lucky for me, she had a unique name, so google turned her up pretty quickly (though I did have to make a Plaxo account to get her email address). Anyway, it turned out she still lived in the complex, but in a different unit, and was EXTREMELY grateful that I’d tracked her down. I went over the next day and taped her letter to her door.

Today when I got home, she’d taped a little thank you note to my door, thanking me again and saying I could call on her if I ever needed anything. So nice! Physical thank-you notes are the best thing ever.

Anyway, it just goes to show that having all of your personal information floating out on the internet available to anyone with decent google-fu can lead to good, afterall.

Personal Blog

Happy

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Today I was eating an orange, which at the time was the tastiest orange in all the land, and I realized that I’m living like a queen.

I have this little home, and it’s perfect, and it’s pretty and the light shines through every morning and makes little rainbows. And there’s an uppity hummingbird who chirps demandingly at me if his feeder is empty, but that’s okay. And there’s all this water! Look at all the water we have! It’s like a miracle! We can swim in it, and take baths in it – queenly activities, don’t you think?

And I can lay on the floor and stare out the window if I want to, and that’s okay.

Oh, what a happy time I’m having!

Personal Blog

Art Books – Internet Garage Sale

I have a few art reference books that I have no use of anymore, but I remember how very valuable they were to me when I was drawing and learning the ins and outs of rendering anatomy and all that, so I’m selling them (hopefully to some artsy folks who would get good use out of them).

Prices are cheapsville, with shipping costs on top.

If you’re interested in one, shoot me an email (since my journal propagates to so many sources, I don’t wanna play the timestamp game with comments) – wertle at wertle dot com

Art Books for sale back here

Personal Blog

Lavender leaves?

Hey Internet. So, I’ve started taking clippings from my herb garden to dry, and I’m wondering what I can do with my lavender. It’s a young plant, so it probably won’t bloom until next year, but the leaves smell wonderful!

When I look up uses for lavender (culinary or otherwise), almost all of them involve using the buds or dried blossoms. What about uses for the leaves? Anyone know any good ones?

Personal Blog

What I want for Christmas

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I’m really bad at asking for Christmas presents, mostly because when someone asks me, my mind goes totally blank. Sure, there are things that I think "this would be nice to have," here and there throughout the year, but I can never recall them on the spot.

So this year I started keeping track of things with Amazon’s wishlist, hence this materialistic post. Not that I want ALL of these things, but it gives a narrower pool of selection than I usually leave my exasperated family with. Oh well!

Stuff I want

Personal Blog

An Experiment

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After chatting with some friends in WoW today, I’ve decided to try an experiment. I want to see if I can progress as a character without doing damage to anything.

I’m going to track my progress and any insights I have along the way here:

http://wow-pacifist.blogspot.com/

So if you’re on Thorium Brotherhood, say hello!

Personal Blog

R.I.P Bando

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I remember when we first brought Bando home. The whole Bandology team had gone out to shop, and I had resolved to get a fish (after having “given up” bettas several years before). I had him in his cup on the drive home as we pondered a name. “How about Bando,” I said, “after the project.”

When we first got him set up in his tank, he clamped his fins and dashed behind a fake plant to hide. However, his timidity was short-lived. As soon as he caught sight of Joe’s black winter coat hanging up nearby, Bando went on a flaring rampage. He flared at the coat for so long and with such vigor that I was worried he would exhaust himself, and put a piece of paper on that side of the tank so he couldn’t see it anymore. Thus began Bando’s trademark hate of anything the color black. We tried to make him a progressive fish, but it just didn’t work.

Bando was a tough little fish, and unlike previous bettas I have owned, he was not a picky eater at all. He’d gobble up anything dropped into his tank, including a piece of popcorn that fell in there by accident once. He attacked it, ripped off a little piece, and ate it right up! All the same, frozen brine shrimp were probably his favorite treat. I fed them to him out of an eye dropper, and he would bite the end and suck them all out at once!

When I went on my internship at Insomniac, Bando spent his summer at Schell Games, winning the heart of Brian Evans. Bando loved Brian, and frequently did his happy dance every time he approached later in the year.

However, the true love of Bando’s life was Tracy Brown. The first time Bando built a serious bubble nest was for Tracy, and he was all flirting and dancing whenever she approached. That’s another difference between Bando and my previous bettas: he was teeerrrible at building bubble nests! He’d try now and then, but they’d always fall right apart, until there were all kinds of stray bubbles floating about the tank. But for Tracy, he always put in top effort!

Moving from the ETC to Schell Games and back several times, I discovered that Bando was very low-stress about being moved. He just shrugged it off, as well as a fish can shrug. Thus, I was confident that he could make the trip across the country to California. He rode out with Josh and I in a travel mug, sitting in the cup holder of the car, and residing in his one-gallon tank at nights to rest. When he got settled back into his big tank at Insomniac, he was happy to go on patrol and make sure all the decorations in the tank were keeping in line.

My desk at Insomniac was a brighter place with Bando around (both literally and figuratively), and he was happy to swim up to say hello to anyone who approached his tank. He loved that he could see me out of one side of the tank and Josh out of the other, and spent most of his time swimming about, resting in his cave, or defending his territory from the dreaded Mirror Fish.

Bando has been an enriching part of my life, and I will sincerely miss him. I am very sad, but I am happy that his suffering from dropsy is over. Goodbye, Bando, you were a good fish!

Personal Blog

What It Is: Part 1

Jesse gave me a book called What It Is by Lynda Barry, as a spontaneous gift. He said that reading it felt like talking to me, and I can see that, because for me reading it feels like being inside of my brain. It’s the sort of book I’ll have to read twice: Once to absorb it all, and the second time to put into practice the questions and exercises.

There is a part that touches on things we wish we could do, often as children, wishing we could draw, or sing, or dance, or write stories, or act, and so on. Barry questions the reader, “Do you wish you could draw? What do you think it would be like?” Similarly, what do you imagine being able to sing would feel like? I answered along as I read through, and noticed a similarity that I hadn’t before.

“I would feel free,” I thought. I think that being able to sing, or to dance, would make me feel a certain, unique freedom. I think that many people who wish they could draw imagine that it would feel the same way. Isn’t that interesting? What’s that all about?

I remember riding on the ACTS bus with Monica Hardin as a sophomore in high school, and we would badger her to sing for us. I remember thinking, “if I could sing like that, I would sing all the time!” I also remember stopping suddenly after that thought, and remembering all the times people had complimented my drawing, saying “if I could draw like that, I would draw all the time!” Interesting.

There seemed to be a disparity in the reality (my being able to draw already) and the perception of what it must be like to be able to (probably similar to my perception of what it would be like to sing). I think it’s similar to the idea of not being able to fly. We often wish we could fly, and dream about it, and yearn for it, but I think it’s important that we can’t. The feeling of yearning is an experience in and of itself that can be appreciated and taken for granted. If we COULD fly, it would mean something different to us.

I feel like I’m scratching the service on some insight or another, and that there is deeper digging to do. I haven’t pieced all these thoughts together quite yet, but I have them all in the same net.