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Proposing the (Bill) Paxton Number
The Erdős Number measures how far you are from mathematician Paul Erdős via coauthoring academic papers*. The Bacon Number measures how far you are from actor Kevin Bacon via costarring in films. In honour of the late Bill Paxton, I now propose The Paxton Number. Bill Paxton has the totally-not-dubious honour of being killed, on…
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“What’s the most insane technical thing you did that actually worked?”
Or, How I Fixed A Real-Time Image Transmission Protocol For A Live Event By Making A Numbers Station The evening before the GDC round table panel on Location-Based Stories, I was with most of them in a pub. I ended up here because I’m one-half of Playlines with Rob Morgan, who was on the panel.…
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Questions to Ask after an Underwhelming Art Experience
Is this at 90% of being amazing and needs to be pushed/polished just a little or is it actually at 20% and there’s a ton more work? If it’s a long way from being good, is the path to success clear or unclear? If the extra work to make it good could be put in,…
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NYC Immersive Theatre Review
I finally set aside time over New Year’s to see all the immersive theatre in New York City that people have been bugging me to see. Here’s a terse listing of them all. NOTE: all of those shows are great and worth seeing. With my comments, I’m not trying to convince people to think about…
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Books Read 2016
The best part about books this year was discovering Octavia Butler. But the most important book I read was definitely Hillbilly Elegy. ________ Aurora – Kim Stanley Robinson – Jan 2, 2016 Dawn – Octavia E. Butler – Jan 26, 2016 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever – James Tiptree, Jr. – Mar 20, 2016 Matter…
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IRL Deviations from Snow Crash and The Diamond Age
ADDED POST-US-ELECTION UPDATE AT BOTTOM I first read Neal Stephenson’s duology of future cyber/* punk novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age a decade ago. As my personal aspirations increasingly resemble some of the elements in the novel, I’ve given them a re-read. I especially want to look how the future in the novels resembles…
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Game Mechanic Compression Ratio
After attending a conference on roguelikes over the weekend, I was talking with friend Randy Lubin about how players move from learning rules to playing a game. We discovered/invented this really cool concept: Game Mechanics Compression Ratio: the ratio between the initial instructions for a game once understood cognitively, and the complexity that they create…
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What I’ve been up to
It’s been a while! Lots of excitement is upcoming and I’m happy to finally share. At the end of April 2016, after a year and a half, I left Occipital and returned to Toronto to focus on personal projects. I had contemplated this move for a while, and the timing just happened to work out.…
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Bungie’s Destiny and Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
After a year hiatus, I played through much of Destiny recently. The production design is high-quality good. The writing is maybe good. The presentation is terrible. I’m a fan of the subtle out-of-order storytelling in the Dark Souls series. It seems Destiny tried to do the same, except ignored the subtlety, so every piece of…
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Concussive Time-Skip
On December 21st, I was in the back of a car that was in an accident on a way to work. It was the first time I was in a vehicle that had its airbags deploy. I felt a sense of gratification and immortality and having survive something that totaled 3 cars. All I had…