A little blog of questionable wisdom written by a builder of little games. I do a lot of little things these days. I hope some of them do a little good.
These posts are old and new, serious and absurd, technical yet philosophical. I’ve kept even the questionable bits—partly for nostalgia, mostly as proof that wisdom arrives slowly, if at all.
If you’d like to reach me and don’t already know how, LinkedIn is probably your best bet. Students, I’ll likely reply; salespeople, probably not.
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In the early 2000s, I worked for a digital video processing startup that Autodesk acquired. We were merged with another acquisition. Our team became the developers, their team (the “others”) became management. The others were clueless. They didn’t understand the technical domain, our customers, or the product. Naturally, I hated them. Their meetings were always pointless; I learned to skip them. Their product plan was a disaster. We secretly built our own, supposedly better version. We believed once upper management saw how superior ours was, we’d finally get rid of the others and everything would be good again.
Continue reading →In the early 90s, I first discovered MUDs: amazing text-based, multiplayer roleplaying-games before the web or silly things like graphics. I was one of those cool kids who played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) and this was like that but you played with randos on the internet instead.
You started at level 1 killing rats for experience points. After you gained enough experience points, you leveled up, and your character became more powerful. Then you killed slimes, and goblins, and later trolls and dragons as your power grew. Unlike AD&D, which required walking to a friend’s house and coordinating schedules, MUDs were always there. Always waiting. Just one more level… I feigned illness to skip school and grind all day. My grades suffered. School was boring anyway though. Completing one more dungeon, getting better gear, just one more level; so much more satisfying than learning about arctangents.
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