So let's make this official. I'm quitting my day job - Friday is my last day at the office. (pause for exclamations). Why? That's complicated. :-) The short version is that I want to try writing full time and see if that works for me. This is a good time for me to take a year off to pursue something crazy, so I'm going for it. If a year from now nothing is clicking . . . well we'll regroup and see what's what. I'm a little unsure how much of the longer version I really want to get into in text, in a public forum. I feel slightly compelled to say it has nothing to do with my current job or my current coworkers. This has been brewing under the surface ever since we closed the doors at Circus Freak. I (involuntarily) spent some downtime - the first significant downtime I've ever had since going to college. And during that downtime an ugly fact began to emerge - I was tired of the game industry. What didn't emerge then was anything I wanted to do instead, so that wasn't a very constructive piece of data. I've done "regular" programming and it didn't much appeal. So when Crystal called for me to do work on Whiplash I said yes. Whiplash was a strange situation, so I didn't count it as data points on my radar. So that got us to Snowblind (although it wasn't called Snowblind for another six months or so in my narrative here). I thought, let's see what another game is like (and also, if I'm being brutally honest we wanted to buy a house - and I needed full time employment for that). And Snowblind was better than I would have thought it could have been - good enough that this wasn't an easy decision to make. But during 2004 I figured out what my "dream job" was - and that I wanted to take a crack at writing fiction. NaNoWriMo was a glorious experiment - if I could write a novel under huge time pressure (while pushing towards ship as well) and still want to go full time then I'd have some faith this wasn't a flitting fancy. (Clever people will notice that I acquired a Mac in just enough time to use it as a writing tool as well - a year ago I would have been unwilling to own a machine that didn't run DevStudio.) So I like Crystal, and I really like my current team. But the fact remains when all the dust settles that I want to try something different. The industry has zigged in the last few years and I want to zag. Bigger teams, bigger budgets, and bigger business makes game programming a different place then I found in 1995. And an upcoming generation change is only going exacerbate all of that. The thought of having a human scale construct - one I can wrap my head around and say - "Look. I made that. It didn't exist before, and it wouldn't exist without me." is very appealing. Games used to be that way, and they aren't really anymore. And it has to be that way, and I don't want to be Canute ordering the tide out to keep my feet from getting wet. But damnit, I don't want wet feet either! (Sadly when looking for links to backstop my literary allusion I find that most sources say Canute actually was showing fawning courtiers that he was not all powerful. Which destroys my paragraph. But I like it, so I'm going with the "Canute as megalomaniacal maniac" version.) So there you have it. Next week I'll be working full time on a few different writing projects. My "Fiction Ideas" folder is beginning to fatten up - I'm getting really excited at the possibilities. Wish me luck!

I wouldn't quite call it a New Year's Resolution, but I decided this year I wanted to stay a bit more creative - and particularly a little more engaged with the world around me (as opposed to the virtual worlds of gaming/coding/hacking I can turn internal and focus on so easily). So I decided one aspect of that was I wanted to seriously start taking some pictures. The result is a separate blog - which I call Pic-A-Day (well I call it Pic_A_Day - damn programmer semantics :-)) Actually this is why I upgraded Movable Type on New Year's Day - so I had better picture uploading capabilities. I figured I'd run it for a week, and if I was happy with the result then I'd publish the link. Sadly it was around the week mark when I got terribly sick and didn't post for three days. And during that hiatus we found out that comments were broken, so I didn't want to announce it during that mess. And I just got that fixed yesterday, but didn't actually take a picture yesterday (well, I did snap a picture, but I didn't process and post it.) so I couldn't announce yesterday. But here we are and I posted today, so this is the grand unveiling. You can access it at Pic_A_Day. It has a RSS feed available - I haven't patched a comments feed in, but I will soon. I'll also adjust this page's templates so it has the link available. So to review - it's a totally separate blog (technically a photoblog). It has it's own RSS feed (on it's page), separate from here. I might cross-link posts sometimes if I want to get all wordy. We'll see.

This rocks the house! I've wanted this feature for a long time - it's how I tend to manage our NetFlix queue. It's just that up until now I've done it by careful queue management and now NetFlix will do it for me. Superfly!

Remember the fictional advertising firm "Trans" from Pattern Recognition? Well there's a company that does this for real, only they've found they don't even have to pay people to do it. - NY Times story (I saw that at William Gibson's blog.) And no - I have no idea why the full text of PR is posted there - I just found it while Googling to verify Trans was the company name.