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Lifesteal on a Technicality
I am playing Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Like any big modern game, it is a sloppy mess of systems, for which the balance and neatness of design doesn’t matter as the point is the joy of the complex systems smooshing together. Many characters can take actions to add the “Lifesteal” modifier to attacks. Traditionally, Lifesteal (or…
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San Francisco, 2016
It was 9 am-ish in mid-December. I sat in a cafe along Folsom Street in the SOMA neighbourhood of San Francisco. This was the nearest place to me that had caffeine. Scratch that – the actual nearest place was a tiny 24/7 corner store (you’d call it a “bodega” in NYC), and had prepared coffee…
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A Dream-Locked Vision
A had a strange experience last night. Background: I had had some back pain and insomnia for a couple days. It seemed better yesterday morning, but got worse over the day. I met up with friends midday near Prospect Park to grab drinks on a patio. The back pain was getting worse, and I gleefully…
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1px VR
I have always had slightly dry eyes. This has made wearing contacts difficult. During the pandemic, I gradually became inexcusably annoyed at having to choose foggy glasses or blurry vision when wearing a mask in public. Independently, it occurred to me in The Year of Isolation that this would be an ideal time for some…
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Species-Wide Imposter Syndrome
Have you ever had that moment where you’re walking from one meeting to another and something clumsy happens – like you trip over a chair corner, you realize your shirt is undone, or you sneeze inelegantly. And then the entire facade of civilization comes crashing down. We’re barely different from the apes messing around hanging…
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Downloading a TV episode I had already paid for, in a different country
:| :| :| :| :|
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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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Observations from Spending a Day Mute
I had dental surgery midday Wednesday. It’s totally minor; I now have a small plaster cast in my mouth and it was recommended I don’t talk until Friday to speed up healing. So I haven’t talked all Wednesday night (where I went to a birthday party for a bit) and all day today at work.…
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A First-Person Tour Inside SNOLAB, a Particle Observatory Two Kilometers Under the Earth
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An Illustrating Example of Improv
I’m finalizing my PhD Thesis on interaction design for improv. This is a slightly-embellished example of something that actually happened. Yes, a mouse ran across the stage in the middle of an improv set and the performers all reacted in different ways and my mind exploded in curiosity watching it unfold. Here is a example…