What could go wrong?

(a twitter thread – originally posted Feb 7 2020)

Alright, gather round. I’ll tell you my ‘Alpaca Farm’ story. This came up this morning since my friend had been trying to tell her husband about it and texted me trying to remember what had been so traumatic so she could explain it better.

In 2006, I was working as a telephone technician and got sent out on a service call to the middle of nowhere, I think somewhere around Pinckney, MI. Paperwork said customer had no dial tone on a couple extensions, something like that.

I don’t remember if the customer was under a name or a company name, not really important. Suffice it to say, I found myself at an Alpaca Farm. Owner was a nice (lonely?) middle-aged lady, greeted me, probably introduced me to an Alpaca or two that were out and about.

I remember she had a decent operation at the farm – she’d clearly done well in the past and now mostly was handling the care of the animals and business side of things while she had subcontracted out the logistics of processing the fur.

I don’t remember if she had a spouse/partner, either way they weren’t there, so it was just me, her, some alpacas and a one-floor ranch house that she lived in and worked out of. People who have business phone systems in their houses are a unique bunch anyway…

Continue reading What could go wrong?

Adventures in Gravitational Relativity

(from the archives)

Many years ago now, I stumbled across Upside Down (2012) on Netflix. It’s a classic story of star-crossed love between a boy from one world and a girl from another. Except that in this case, what keeps them from getting down is quite literally an agreement on which direction it is.

So, already, we’re talking about a very far-out type of story universe, taking something we all take for granted (namely: gravity) and messing with it.

Then, when I started sitting down to write about it a short time later, I stumbled upon another film with a similar core concept: サカサマのパテマ <<Patema Inverted>> (2013). After viewing Patema, it seemed only fitting to talk about both of these movies together and how one clearly rose above the other with their treatment of the common conceit.

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A Bedtime Story.

(Note: any resemblance to real events, past, present, or future is purely coincidental)

Once upon a time, a Big Media Conglomerate acquired the film rights to a Certain Media Property and one day assigned the Property to a subsidiary Film Production Studio for development. And from this development work, a Script was written, and Production started. And since the Titular Character of the film was to be computer-generated, Motion-Capture and 3D Modeling was conducted to bring the character to life.

Then on a certain day, it was determined that Sufficient Composited Footage was available to produce A Preview, so one was edited together and released on-line. When The Internet saw The Preview, the outcry was Loud and Thunderous, and many Aspersions were cast upon the Film Production Studio regarding the Extremely Sub-Standard Quality of the 3D character concept as it appeared in what would come to be known as The ‘Damnéd’ Preview.

So, the Film Production Studio walked back The ‘Damnéd’ Preview and told The Internet that it was going to Rework things and come back with Something That Actually Looked Like The Original Character As It Had Appeared In The Source Material And Every Other Medium In Which It Had Ever Been Included Since Time Immemorial.

“Yes, You F*cking Morons,” The Internet said, “that is what you Should Have Done The First Time!”

Continue reading A Bedtime Story.

At the Mercy of The Invisible Hand

What a strange time and place I live in, where I can choose who to pay for my electricity.

Before 2017, I paid for household electricity according to the traditional model (where you just pay The Electric Company for where you live.) These were the Halcyon Days when Certain Things About Adult Life Could Be Relied Upon, and the cost of fungible commodities was kept in check by the definition of ‘fungible’. But then I moved into a house that was located in one of Texas’ Electric Choice areas, so I had to quickly try and piece together what in the hell this meant and how to deal with it.

So I dove into “Power to Choose” and immediately found it was more like “Paralysis of Choice” since entering my new Zip Code resulted in over 100 offers. Immediately I started looking around for The Default (like I was used to) only to find there…wasn’t one.

So, putting that aside for the moment, I tried to get some background on Electric Choice and Why It Was A Thing. It seems that in 2002, much of Texas switched over to an un-bundled retail electrical service model where consumers could pick what company they paid for their power while still living in the same place, expecting that the competition this introduced would naturally drive down costs (like it always does, right? [/sarcasm])

It reminded me of the competitive natural gas companies that had started to creep into the market in Metro Detroit around the time I graduated college…

Continue reading At the Mercy of The Invisible Hand

The importance of community

I first stumbled onto SimplySeze‘s twitch stream a year ago today as I was trawling around Jackbox Party Pack streams. As I had been doing for a few days prior to that, I was looking for a friendly, respectful stream run by someone who cultivated a healthy, inclusive community.

I lurked for a bit before jumping in as a rando, probably on a round of Trivia Murder Party, as that was my early favorite. And as had been the case on other TMP rounds on other streams, I did really well, and soon chat was playfully accusing me of cheating.

We all played a few games, I got timed out once or twice by the mighty Moobot for posting links in chat (to jackbox.tv, LUL) and all-in-all had a great time with Seze’s community. I finally dropped a follow at the end of the stream.

Over the next couple months, I would drop in from time to time when Jackbox was being played, or lurk while I played GW2, occasionally reacting to things, suggesting quotes, or cracking jokes. And during that time, I began appearing in chat more and more, and keeping up with her schedule as much as I could.

Then, on her January 5th stream, she decided to pre-empt her scheduled Sims stream for a run of Doki Doki Literature Club. Her normal 3-4 hour stream quickly became a 12-hour epic, and I stayed around almost to the bitter end.

The next day, after watching the last hour of the VOD, I dropped a sub while she was offline.

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Once More unto the Linking Book

As some of you may have seen recently, in honor of the 25th anniversary of MYST, I finally stopped over-preparing for, and actually did my play-through live on twitch the other day.

It was not a blind, nor semi-blind play-through. I’ve played this game multiple times, in multiple versions, through the years. While I don’t have every key memorized, I know how to get through it. My aim in the stream was to move purposefully through the game and its puzzles in a way that viewers could follow along with.

NB from the future: originally this post also included links to the edited-for-YouTube version of this playthrough, but I've privated those videos in the last few years for various reasons. The rest of this post has been written in place of that since I'd like to talk a bit more about why this game is so important to me and why I wanted to do a live play-through.
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Meme: “The Gamer Tag”

Today, I was “tagged” on the tweeter by a fellow SimplySeze mod to do a gaming-themed list meme.

What is your all-time favorite video game?

Probably Windwaker. It may have something to do with the fact that it was the first game I really “beat” all by myself. It has always hit a sweet-spot with me, gameplay-wise. At least until the final battle with Ganondorf which has quite a big jump in difficulty compared to everything leading up to it.

What is your current favorite video game?

At the moment I don’t have a single favorite, but I like playing games with people now rather than alone. So collaborative games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes or MMOs like Guild Wars 2 or the Jackbox packs.

What is your favorite video game genre?

Probably would be Puzzle-Adventure. MYST was there at a key part of my early video gaming life, so anything like that which deals with exploration, puzzling, and a compelling story.

Continue reading Meme: “The Gamer Tag”

Feeling a bit twitchy

For most of this year I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at game streaming on twitch. But the big thing I’m still struggling with (other than the underwhelming nature of my hardware) is that I don’t consider myself that much of a ‘real’ gamer, let alone one that other people would actually want to watch.

Of course, I’ve had some success in the past doing in-person walk-throughs of strategy/exploration games, and I’ve done a few Let’s Plays of times I could con a friend or two into expert-ing for me on KTaNE. But I play mostly a couple of solo and mobile games, and I can’t do FPS (or have good fps) for sh*t, really.

I don’t remember exactly where I first saw someone running a stream of a Jackbox Party Pack on my twitch travels, but dropping in and playing on random people’s Jackbox streams has been a recent pastime/distraction from work. I’ve picked them up now for in-person party gaming and have been s-l-o-w-l-y getting my stuff together to do a stream myself.

But the problem of audience (and a good, decent one) remains. So far, my attempts to drum up interest among people I know IRL has been… underwhelming. Current plan is to just get it going sometime and post in all my socials something along the lines of “HAY GUYZ COME PLAY WIT ME.” We’ll see who shows up.

In the meantime, trying to be a little less of a rando in the streams I visit. Cultivating new social circles among those that already do this sort of thing is probably a good idea too…

New tricks

I never expected when I got into work this morning that I’d find myself explaining the principles and upshots of web-based content management to my 65 year-old father by the afternoon, but life sometimes throws strange curveballs.

This all arose because Dad and my aunt have a little papercraft and greeting card side hustle and he also has been spending some time with establishing an website for the business. Over the holiday, one of my aunt’s friends set up a shared hosting plan and WordPress install for her (which I’ll admit I’d been meaning to do for a year) and of course I was all over that – if there’s one thing I can do for them it’s help them move into a WordPress install. So I took a little time Christmas morning showing my dad around one of my sandbox sites, just so he had a preview of what he and my aunt would be working with.

Then this afternoon, I got an urgent “text for help” from Dad:

“I have downloaded WordPress and am trying to install it on my MacBook…”

I really didn’t have to read any further. I did a facepalm and then gave him a call.

But this is not an “old people can’t internet” story. His misunderstanding of what a CMS was, how it worked, and why they have made the 21st-century internet what it is is entirely understandable. It had just been a while since I’d really thought about it enough to explain it…

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