The not-so-daily update

Yes, I missed a day . . . or two, depending on how you count time. I'm not going to get wrapped around the axle over it. Therein lies madness . . . like when you make a New Year's resolution to lose weight, then you eat one volcano brownie and you're like "oh well, that's the end of that". Foolishness. It's the journey, not the destination.

So, the actual post. Amazon apparently made it possible to comment on comments today, and smaller fleas have smaller fleas ad nauseum. This gave me the idea for a real revenue generator, if I were a publisher:

• Hire a person with a severe self-esteem disorder (of either variety). Pay them to write a really crappy book.
• Publish it.
  
• Point them at the Amazon page for said book, with its inevitable spate of ranting about nonsense courtesy of the particular species of subliterate trolls who live there, virtually speaking.
• Hilarity ensues.
• Put up Paypal donations page for providing stellar entertainment, interweb style!

The Mundane Report

Yesterday: Did do some writing, for work (UI design doc) & notes for kickoff of my new (and first) Mutants & Masterminds campaign. I'm looking forward to getting more facile with that system -- right now I run it like a symphony orchestra, and it really wants to be a jazz combo.

Today: Not so much. A family day. Soccer for Aidan, a brief trip to the pool (interrupted by lifeguards ejecting us at the sight of lightning on the horizon) and a Shrek double feature, which went surprisingly well. No real writing (except this blog thingy, of course).

Tomorrow: Who can say? On the agenda at present are fixing my Powerbook that got dropped last weekend, for which the replacement part arrived Thursday, and the first Den Meeting for Aidan's Cub Scout den.

Having a good shuffle today

Most days, when I hit "shuffle songs" on my iPod, all I get is crap. Like the b-sides that got imported with the rest of the album because I was too lazy to unselect them. Or long strings of songs from albums I imported for my kids to listen to.

Today is not that day. I have had something like 10 great songs in a row -- songs I would have picked had I known that I wanted to listen to them. In other words, exactly what shuffle should be.

Now if only there were a way to train your iPod to do this all the time: "Good iPod! Good shuffle!"

Blogging about not blogging

Very late. Can't sleep. Haven't blogged in forever, so naturally . . .

In fact this seems like a good opportunity to inaugurate my new blogging policy. I don't update very often, and I think the fact that I have mostly talked about game development has actually been more of a hindrance than a help. Oftentimes, I am constrained in what I can say about game dev or the games industry or the asininity of a competitor, whether literally, by my proprietary agreement with EA, or figuratively, by my desire to be professional. So I'm dumping that whole topic.

Instead, I'm going to talk about what got me into this whole blogging thing in the first place, namely writing. Ostensibly, the purpose of this thing was to hone my craft, beef up the writing chops through thousands and thousands of keystrokes. Well, those keys aren't going to press themselves.

So henceforth, a resolution: to write something every single day, whether it be nothing but "800 words added to short story foo." To help kick off this momentous decision, and as a personal reminder, a short list of things I want to write about:

• Contact lenses, in all my drama.
• The price of admission to the writer's club.
• Why I still write (an anecdote).
• Katie West. (Yes, how random. It's late, I believe I said.)
  
• Using source control: a guide for writers.

- MrTact