Carbon Operator

I put myself at just under twenty-four hours away from an iced cappuccino and a maple dip somewhere in the greater Toronto area. My first visa for the United States was issued on September 4, 2001, and I haven’t even returned to my native Canada since 2002. I moved to Austin from Massachusetts in 2003, and it was the start of some of the best things to ever happen to me.

I had gotten my career started in earnest before age thirty. Although I had started playing Anarchy Online while in Cambridge I truly fell in love with it after moving to Austin, and that ended with sadness and an uncharacteristic lack of rage or bitterness around this time last year. My marriage came apart; and it was a necessary thing. I also made the biggest mistake of my life shortly after being hired as a game designer; and the legacy rests under my futon, the last piece of furniture that will be emptied from my apartment. Perhaps none of this matters now; or between me and the maple dip. After the maple dip is a whole lot of future in front of me. 

My mind has turned to mush in these last days of trying to get everything else to where it should go. I forgot to put God’s own toaster into the hands of the Canadian cultist before he left.

I smell of dog, dumpster and aftershave. The aftershave I don’t mind so much.

Within twenty-four hours of hearing I was out of work, my resume was being passed around at the Fleshlight company, and I had a promise from my current employers’ vice-president to email the CEO of the company I most want to work for on my behalf. I started making plans and contacts, wasted no time in getting things organized and ready for the cleanout; and generally began to suspect that I may in fact be one of these despicable creatures that thrives on adversity; then cedar fever set in and knocked me flat for three weeks, which was also perfectly fine because it gave me time to cash in on the post-Wrath of the Lich King inflation in World of Warcraft.

Massive layoffs were meted out yesterday at my company, wiping out about one-third of the total staff. Although cell phones and IMs lit up last night, the real means most of us had of finding out who still had their jobs was to see who was present today in the office. The person I shared the back corner of the design area with is gone; I will be after our current project is finished. There were some surprises, some shocks, and overwhelming relief for some. As we walked past each other in the hallways today, never have the words “good to see you” meant so much.

About a year ago the disembodied head of Dr. Kawashima laughingly pronounced me borderline retarded; and Wii Fit, after careful study of my feet on a platform, judged me to be obese. I can’t say I was surprised, really. I am somewhat built like a truck, so the BMI scale considers me a porker. Removing limbs might help, but I won’t count on it.

Expected results aside, I really like Wii Fit. The balance board is very high-quality and sturdy, and the software is very friendly. Having read several reviews that stated that Wii Fit was no substitute for a gym, I found the program surprisingly complete and challenging, and I look forward to progressing in it. The only problem is that I’ll have to rearrange my living room, but this is probably just another one of the vaunted “lifestyle changes” I’d have to make eventually. After spending half of my test wiping hair and crumbs off of the balance board, thereby baffling my strangely patient female trainer, I decided to finally weaken and buy a vacuum cleaner.

Perhaps the most intersting feature of Wii Fit is the voice that commands me to get on the balance board among other wholly technical considerations. It is an interesting combination of the gentle, high-pitched menace of the turrets in Portal, and the soothing menace of the female “Computer” computer voices of dystopian sci-fi films from the era when we actually feared the extent to which technology would take over our lives. For some reason “Westworld” kept leaping to mind but it’s probably closer to something out of “Logan’s Run.” Either way, the yoga program is kicking my ass.

Today I had to simulate text communication with a disturbed individual. I did this by laying my face on the keyboard and rolling across it a few times. The results weren’t particularly dramatic but my problem is that I have a long nose, so one key will be far more prominent than the rest in the output. My face hurt a bit after doing a couple of rolls.

I used to joke that I could faceroll the first ten levels in World of Warcraft. Research has established that my character would probably just end up walking backwards a lot.

The Law of the Sociability of Healers states that if you are a healing class of any kind and are in a major population centre for more than five minutes, someone will ask you to join their guild.

Today I bought Wrath of the Lich King, went home, and started installing it. Once the patcher reached ~340 of 389 MB suddenly and without ever having given me a minute of trouble, my hard drive upchucked and died. Gone. The BIOS disavows all knowledge. Finished. Swapping the SATA II cable didn’t do a thing. In the words of John Cleese, it has ceased to be.

I lost an installation of Spore in the process. I think I’ll live.

Watering the ocean. What if it’s thirsty? You can’t drink salt water…

Today we had a voice recording session for a new game that allows the user to torture a small, hapless anthropomorphic object. Since it calls for many sounds of pain and agony, the designers on the project had two tasks; prepare everyone for the screaming, and solicit contributions of same.

I got pulled in on the session fairly early, after Yaxamie‘s already-legendary improvisations. I did some lackluster yelping on my first turn at the microphone, then stuck around to watch the rest. The office’s answer to Bam Margera (without, perhaps, the self-destructive streak) came in with a strong concept, and it seemed to work well. Others did some screaming and other assorted exclamations of pain ranging from “loud” to “damn loud.” It was interesting to see how the people that were unconnected to the project were the most uninhibited; but near the end of the session the two designers on the project thought they could use more lower-key sounds. I stepped back up to the microphone and gave an uninterrupted thirty seconds of agonized moaning in front of coworkers while trying to not sound as if I was faking. Considering the review I got afterwards, I’m not sure how successful I was.

I have my copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk sitting beside me, and I have been looking forward to returning to the calm of the village. This title makes most others look histrionic in comparison, and is possessed of a remarkable subtlety that is unjustly overlooked. Being primarily a veteran of RPGs I am well versed in character creation ranging from the pleasurably time-consuming to the impractical; and Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS had a character generation system that was incredibly simple yet stunning in its presentation. For all the charm I found in Animal Crossing it is the character generation that I have most looked forward to seeing in this next game in the series. 

Of course, the day that Animal Crossing: City Folk hit stores another time-consuming project got dropped in my lap.

As they say: when it rains, catch sharks.