Diary Entry

[jducoeur]

Haven't done one of these in a while, so this is a bit long:

Last Wednesday: Got a request from Mara to run dance practice again. Did so the previous week because she wasn't going to be available (and knew about it in advance). This time, she was just plain under the weather, so wrote to me on Wednesday morning. The result didn't work as well as last week, since I didn't have much time to plan (and the poor weather seems to have resulted in a relatively small and tired dance practice all around), but it went okay.

Re-introduced Burgundian Basse Danse -- recent conversation with alienor had reminded me of the fact that we haven't taught it in years, and folks should be grounded in it. So I taught Cassoulle La Nouvelle from scratch, using the Daniele method ("Large imperfect, small perfect, etc"). Folks seemed to pretty much get it.

Thursday: Gaming at metageek's. Smallish group (me, him, cvirtue and pamelina), but a reasonable size for some of the games I had brought. Taught him and pamelina to play Fluxx; concluded that (a) Fluxx is better with more people, and (b) while I appreciate the politics of Stoner Fluxx, it just isn't as well-balanced a deck as the original game. (Something like half the goals require the Weed keeper.) Then taught them all to play Ice Towers, which was a great hit; we played a number of games in quick succession, and I was reminded of just how much I like that game. Finished off with a fairly long game of Igor, which proves to be a bit slow when everyone is still learning the game. (But metageek and cvirtue turn out to have an excellent stash of useful toys to act as props, helping to get into the spirit of things.)

Friday: Pas de msmemory -- this was the second of three consecutive weeks in which she was away from one reason or another (Balticon this time), so I found myself with an unaccustomed empty Friday evening. Slept adequately on Friday, but the rest of the weekend pretty much sucked: I'm just not used to sleeping alone.

Saturday: Quiet day, which was okay. I was tempted to go do stuff with learnedax and company, but decided that A Day Off was really what I needed. Got assorted chores done, so I managed to feel virtuous for a change.

Sunday: Prisonerfest at Melville Keep. learnedax and alexx_kay have been talking for a while about doing a small-scale Prisoner marathon, and decided that this was a good day for it. Got an appropriate-sized crowd for the living room: the two of them; me giving a lift to 43duckies and rufinia; gyzki and D; and the rest of the house (including Joan, who happened to pop in for a visit) coming in and out.

alexx_kay picked out a good lineup, pretty much all of the episodes that I would classify as either particularly good or important. I must admit that the more times I see Fall Out (the last episode), the more annoyingly self-indulgent I find it. While it provides endless geek-conversation fodder, it really isn't especially well-written in any regard. At best, it's notable as more surreal than anything else I've seen on TV.

It was interesting when kestrell passed through: her housemates almost automatically fell into a sort of narrative mode, describing the action on the screen. alexx_kay proves (no surprise) to be especially good at this, hitting all the important bits with a good dose of descriptive variety, quickly enough to not step on the dialogue.

Afterwards, assorted geek conversation: the initial discussion of the show quickly segued into a computer-game discussion somehow. Found out that Thief III is out. I'll have to get that, and use it as an excuse to finally play through the first two games. (I played a number of assorted levels of the original games while we were writing them, but have actually never played either one clear through. For that matter, I've technically never played System Shock II all the way through, although I'm pretty sure I hit every major part of the game while I was debugging it.)

Monday: Went over to ladysprite's for brunch -- pixel was up visiting, so she wanted to make a mini-party of it. Ate fabulously yummy blueberry muffins while we watched A Mighty Wind; I'd somehow now gotten around to seeing it before, and she wanted me to be able to get the cultural referents. Wonderfully funny movie, although I think you have to know the folk music scene to really appreciate it. Need to get the album: I really like the Folksmen's stuff.

Afterwards, we went downtown to the Aquarium, which I haven't been to in a number of years. Very cool stuff, especially the new jellyfish exhibit. When they're behind glass, I can appreciate the alien beauty of the jellies without getting as creeped out as I was seeing them washed up on the beach in Florida. They have a number of species in the exhibit, although it is punctuated by Moon Jellies every 20 feet or so.

msmemory got home earlier than I expected (tpau having apparently asserted a strong desire to get out Really Really Early), so we got to have our weekly date, albeit a few days late. I felt it was my patriotic duty to have a hamburger, so we headed for the brewpub; finding that closed for the holiday, we went to Bison County instead. Had a Buffalo Burger, mostly because I could -- generally good, although I would have been happier if they'd had bacon available as a topping.

Tuesday: Nominally Accademia, but that fizzled. ladysprite was feeling under the weather (as I suspected she might be). When I got to MIT and remembered to turn on my phone, I was immediately called by Phelan, who was frazzled and exhausted and wanted to beg off, and mentioned that Caroline wouldn't be there. So I got out my stuff and wandered over; after half an hour or waiting, it was still just me, oakleaf_mirror and Aaron, so I decided that we had failed critical mass. (Particularly given that, not having had any notice, I didn't have anything prepped.) I'm apparently also going to be in charge in two weeks, so ladysprite and I need to pick a couple of dances and prep the research materials, so that critical mass won't be an issue.

Upcoming Events:

Tonight: Dance practice.

Thursday: Probably gaming over at jikharra's.

Friday: kestrell's graduation party. (msmemory will be at her college reunion, so the weekly date is not an option.)

Sunday: Special gaming session at jikharra's.

Comments

[tpau]

8am is not that early. we avoided traffic that way. it still took 8 hours. but only becasue i wasn't drivingthe whole way. woudl have been back by 2pm if we went 95 the entire time :)

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

System Shock II all the way through, although I'm pretty sure I hit every major part of the game while I was debugging it.

um.

i'm working very hard right now to quell a rising wave of fanboy exuberance.

please pardon my ignorance, but would you mind explaining what you meant by that statement?

thanks,
steve

[jducoeur]

I wrote the multiplayer systems for Shock II (well, everything but avatar movement); as such, I had my hands in nearly every part of the code. alexx_kay was on the design side: he did a lot of the fine detail work on the story and game balancing. Both of us came in a bit late (well after the game was under way), but were heavily involved in writing the guts of the game.

Looking Glass was a bit of a madhouse, but a fun place to work nonetheless. I do miss it...

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

many thanks. as it so happens, Looking Glass Studios was the only developer who ever made me seriously consider switching my primary gaming platform from MacOS to Windows.

i'm particularly delighted to learn that i know people who worked there. :)

-steve

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I was mostly QA at LG, actually, just a small amount of design/writing work on Shock 2. Oh, and a bit of voice work. I played the insane hacker who caused most of the chaos on deck four :-)

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

As impolitic as it is of me to say so, I was really disappointed when you weren't teaching today - I knew it was temporary, but wasn't sure how temporary. I respond to your teaching style so much better that it's like night and day. (Just to use a hackneyed phrase.)

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Thanks, but I'll ask you to think about what you do and don't like, and *tell Mara*. Bear in mind, she's the one *I* learned from -- she's no novice to dance teaching. But she's very shy, and doesn't really know the current dance practice crowd, so she doesn't particularly know what people think. Folks need to talk to her, so she can get a better grip on where she needs to tweak her style...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

It was interesting when kestrell passed through: her housemates almost automatically fell into a sort of narrative mode, describing the action on the screen.

Heh. There was an interesting period when we'd all first gotten into the habit of doing this, when even after Kes had left the room, we'd keep narrating out of inertia :-)

alexx_kay proves (no surprise) to be especially good at this, hitting all the important bits with a good dose of descriptive variety, quickly enough to not step on the dialogue.

Thank you! It comes from a combination of years of practice, plus the editing skills I learned from Storytellers, plus hearing all the private complaints that Kes was usually too polite to make in public. (frex, Karen and Barbara would often get into debates over the precise color of a given costume -- said debates going on for minutes, over dialogue.) Oh, and in the case of The Prisoner, I've seen them enough times that I knew both what visual story points were significant, and also when important stretches of dialogue were coming up :-)