North by magnetic north.

So I kind of always figured I had a moral compass, but I didn't think it would point so dominantly while working in a corporate environment.  There's been a number of times in my job that I've dealt with the "bad feeling in my stomach" and I'm pleased (and just as surprised, honestly) that the feelings have been right on the money each time.

My theory is that this has come about due to my actively learning where my boundaries lie, something I hadn't known or thought of until I found myself under Nick's management.  Until I took my most recent position I didn't even think of myself having boundaries, let alone knowing how far (or close) they were to how I carried myself.

Boundaries aren't necessarily fashionable at the moment; we need to have everything and all right here and now, be prepared to do everything at the whim of whomever's one step ahead of us, just so at the end of the day we've been able to take one more step to advance the greater picture.  This seems to play in almost every circle I involve myself in at the moment - political, corporate, social.  If we do not go past one more stack of paperwork, if we cannot be satisfied with temporary mediocrity, if we will not divulge our selves entirely to the gaping bottomlessness of social networking, what are we?  Not a team player, not socially conscious, not... human?

I disagree with this to the extent that it implies boundaries by their definition are bad.  A boundary that is not noticed, evaluated and revised can hamper development, true, but once acknowledged it is better to know where you can stand safely today and work on moving the line a little further another day.  Boundaries are not weakness, they're not ineptitude nor unwillingness -- as a work in progress, a boundary is merely a marker in the sand to say "I'm here today, but I'll be there tomorrow."

I now have a fair idea of my lines and where I stand on any number of issues.  I know if I get that "feeling" I should take a step back and take another look at the situation to see what I'm missing or don't like.  I guess what's weirding me now is that I am coming to decisions that I feel I should perhaps tread more carefully around, but there's no sign of the uneasiness.  I know  exactly where I stand and what I will fight for, and my boundary is nowhere in sight.

Choose your battles, I guess.

In other explosive news, man, TF2 is just plain fun and on high rotation at the moment.  Although, despite the eloquent Tim's advice, I seem much better at helping other dudes blow up enemies than doing the murderin' myself.  HMMM.

-Anthony

just tap e and i'll be there

So smooth it was like he'd been practising it the night before.

I had a dress-rehearsal for a dream early last morning.

The dream started with all of the characters, myself included, getting dressed and top-and-tailing the important scenes. Then the "official" dream started, and we proceeded with the entire narrative. I don't think I've ever rehearsed a dream before, but there you go.

Another reason this dream stuck out was that it was almost entirely void of dream-logic; nearly all of the dialogue was spoken instead of being tacitly understood, there was no fast forward of the boring bits. It effectively played out like a Wednesday night movie with a storyline that was involved enough to warrant having been impressed with my subconscious, while cliched enough to not be too proud of it.  It was almost a cross between Two-and-a-Half Men and Pretty Woman, if the Charlie Sheen character had a promiscuous butler called Jenkins.

In other rage-inspired news, someone threw a lit cigarette on my car while stopped at the lights.  Unfortunately by the time I had noticed and used the windscreen washer to extinguish and remove the offending article, the lights had gone green and I was forced to move on.

Not that I would have, y'know, done much had I witnessed the offender.  Probably.

Also, from the top-shelf content of Ellen's sparkling new blog I discovered The Outbreak, a zombie choose-your-own-adventure web film.  How cool is that?!

-Anthony

pretty cool

The problem is, we didn't grow up.

As a kid I always thought I would run away with the circus.  The idea - the certainty - came from an Enid Blyton story I'd read, and ever since it just seemed like the most probable thing that would happen when I was older.  I didn't daydream about it; it's not like other kids daydreamed about being bankers and teachers and scientists, so why would I waste time thinking about an inevitable?

It's pretty evident I never did quite graduate to carniedom, but my brief stint as a travelling performer did put to rest some misconceptions I had as a kid*.  It's hard work - that's a given - but it's also a boring life.  There's rehearsaltime, and showtime, and sleeptime.  Wash, rinse and repeat.  You absolutely live for your day off, if you've a mind to explore.  That's what I enjoyed the most about working abroad; spending time walking through the alien cities I barely touched.

But on the other hand, there's the love of your craft - day after day you do something that is profoundly your own.  I remember having distinct pride in the fact that my skill alone allowed me to travel and see things I would never have otherwise ever seen in my entire lifetime.

Something I find hard to empathise with are the people born to their circuses.  From a young age rehearsing, performing, knowing a standing ovation but not the same home from month-to-month.  I wonder if for these people there's a choice between staying the status of permanent displacement and giving it up for certified home roots.

If this choice does exist, is that leap of faith as hard for them as the contrary leap is for us?

I want to take more time to watch for when my circuses come around.  Perhaps we shouldn't be so scared about packing what we're doing for the sake of trying a different direction every once in a while.

-Anthony

*Perhaps not misconceptions, but difference in priorities I guess.

in case of emergency, please do not panic

Darth Vader is holding a duck.

Book voucher well spent!

I spent a long time playing Day of the Tentacle, The Dig introduced to me the idea of "serious" narrative in games, and for a long while I adored (and I probably still do) the humour of Sam & Max.  I hadn't really noticed before, but LucasArts could possibly have been the most influential game developer during my first few years in gaming.  I'm fairly certain this little tidbit isn't what's going to give George Lucas the warm fuzzies when he goes to bed tonight*, but it at least helps me make sense of where my fixation on adventure games comes from.

The first memory I have of being interested in a game I wasn't playing is watching my Uncle Paul play Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.  I never did get to play it myself, but wow!  Indiana Jones, slumming through tombs and trap-infested dungeons with gold, gems and broads trailing from his every pocket, all on my uncle's command!  A game that didn't feature Italian plumbers or masked mutant turtles didn't often pique my interest at that tender age, but something about Harrison Ford's pixellated features had caught my attention.

Since then there's been everything from Maniac Mansion to Lego Star Wars, and like an oblivious Threepwood it's taken an actual book about LucasArts to flick my nose and make me realise that all of these games came from the same people.  Hell, if you even start to Kevin Bacon this a little you get to add one of my all-time favourites Psychonauts to the list; Tim Schafer's job interview as reported by the author is almost worth the price-tag of the book alone.

So nostalgic gushing aside, if nothing else, I admire LucasArt's dedication to the almost forgotten form of the point-and-click adventure game amidst the leaps and bounds the industry has made in other directions.

After fanboying about Day of the Tentacle for the twentieth time today, one of the guys from work suggested I should try making my own adventure games with AGS or similar, which admittedly is a tempting idea, but it's not like I haven't got enough on my plate already, is it?

In diary-keeping news, my weekends are slowly starting to get booked out, which is nice for the first few, but can get tiring pretty quickly.  I'm going to have to start developing some better sleeping habits if I'm to keep up.

-Anthony

*I'm fairly certain that'd be the mountain of cash he'll go nappytimes on.

free sandwiches for roadies

Hey, you know, I'm...

(Actually, the above title has no relevance at all other than my wondering if I can actively write a sentence via title quotes backwards so that you get one long (and likely somewhat muddled) sentence in reverse-chronological order.  Just think on that, it'll make sense eventually.)

Hot news for the water cooler crowd today was the Watchmen movie.  Like many other nerdtypes I have been very much looking forward to the Hollywood adaption of Alan Moore's delightfully glum vigilante tale.  Of course there many were reservations and "what ifs" before the actual veiwing, but really, by the end of the two-and-three-quarter hours, the movie had accomplished as much as any other potential Watchmen movie could/may/has done.  It was solid, the casting was superb, and there's a couple of really spectacular and shiny moments that is going to make the DVD purchase essential.

Yes, there were obvious parts missing, but I don't think their absence hurt the movie at all; I actually think some parts that are missing would have weighed the movie down too much.  There's time for some things on paper, and time for other things on film, and I think Mr Snyder assessed these elements and did what he thought was best for his medium.  (I guess I could go more in depth, but lacking any sort of proficient command of Blogger I have no idea how to do LJ-style cuts to hide teasers behind.)

In more apocalyptic related news, I started Fallout 3 on the weekend.  I didn't think so many shades of brown and grey could look so pretty.  I'm playing a swaggering cowboy-sawbones cliche that likes explosives a little too much, which usually results in everything within a certain radius exploding by the word "What?" and then having to forego any form of reward due to the guilt that wells up as I realise I also took out half of the captives I was attempting to save.

What fun!

I mousetrapped our first mousecular visitor yesterday.  At least he had a nice feed of peanut butter before, y'know, snap.

-Anthony

later cecil!  we knew ye not, 'cept for your little rodent tail

Still standing? Check.

So I broke a mirror the other night.

I guess I could consider myself somemuch of a superstitious person; I avoid cracks in pavement, as I quite happen to like my mother.  I spare a thought for passing ambulances, and I certainly don't flip a coin unless I intend to follow the choices determined as such.

I played it extremely safe the next day, but the novelty wore off by this morning, let alone six years and three hundred and sixty-four days later.  It did however get me to thinking what the length of seven years really is.  In terms of lifegoals, living and family, seven years is just, well, seven years - it's a bit of time, but not as great an expanse as a generation or a lifetime.  But put it into the perspective of seven years worth of bad luck, and quite immediately I had a different appreciation for the given time period.

Seven years of prank calls, cold pizza deliveries and wondering if my house is burning down would be hard work.  The stubbed toes every morning would be enough to warrant a mid-town rampage.*

So what makes seven years of success adequately uninspiring, yet the same amount of time given to red lights and long queues all but shreds any smidgen of complacency?  Shouldn't I be just as diligent to make sure my next seven years are successful and not just accident prone?  I'm fairly certain there's something in this as far as relationships between effort needed for different levels of success and perceived difficulty, blahdy-blah, but really there's only a few hours left to the weekend and having just finished Fable II I feel the need to do something destructive.

Don't get me wrong, it was a great game, and I'm sure I made the right choice at the end, but good narratives always leave me deflated by the time they're done. 

In other news, we watched Wall-E for the first time today.  Holy moly, what an accomplished movie.  

"I don't want to survive, I want to live!"

I thought that was quite an impressive message to have iterated throughout a family movie.

-Anthony

[*]  Wouldn't (fictional) Tokyo be pissed if Godzilla's only quibble was kicking his bedside table that morning?  Forget the missiles and tanks, all he actually wanted was an icepack, poor bastard.

it just wasn't the choice i thought you'd make