My Dark Masters today announced they are laying off 1,100 people. It is . . .unclear if this is an additional 1,100 people over the 1,000 they announced in November, or if they are merely increasing the butchery by 100 souls.

Further, no clue who is getting the axe.

There goes the siren that warns of the air raid
Then comes the sound of the guns sending flak
Out for the scramble we've got to get airborne
Got to get up for the coming attack.

There is something black and vile that is running through the "current events" thread of my family. I am not yet at liberty to talk about it publicly, but suffice to say that it involves the words "oncologist," "chemotherapy," and "lumpectomy." I'd like to discuss it more, but there is a moratorium on public discussion until everyone in the family has been notified.

I'm seriously, seriously getting sick of this entire "people I care about having heart attacks and needing bypasses and other life-threatening illnesses" schtick.

I am exhausted and frustrated by it.

I wish, sincerely, that it could be me that these things happen to. Surely, it would suck, but I can take it, and then I would feel less helpless. As it stands, I can only watch from behind the glass as horrible things happen.

Jump in the cockpit and start up the engines
Remove all the wheelblocks theres no time to waste
Gathering speed as we head down the runway
Gotta get airborne before its too late.

In the "good news" category, my contract with my dark masters has been extended through the 31st of March, and I am told it will continue past that (EA has a policy of only allowing 3 month contracts at a time, so they continually require renewal).

Since my impending project schedule will likely keep me busy for the next six months at least, I'm feeling relatively safe despite the fact that the company has been laying off people right and left.

I've been working a lot lately. Probably too much, but I've had a project that's been nipping at my heels for the past month or so pretty hard. In fact, I am demoing it tomorrow for the client as well as a couple high-level people. So I spent all day (and the early part of this evening) applying a lot of spit and polish.

Running, scrambling, flying
Rolling, turning, diving, going in again
Run, live to fly, fly to live, do or die
Run, live to fly, fly to live. aces high.

I've been playing a lot of guitar lately. So much that the other night I ended up with blisters the size of Texas on my fretting hand . . . and one popped. That made me slow down for the next couple days.

I seem to be up against a new "wall." In my brain, I'm hearing all sorts of stuff, and I can tab it out, and then even pull it off . . . just really slow. I keep doing a lot of speed exercises (like spending an hour or so every evening pulling off scales while watching TV or something) but for some reason I just can't do the stuff I write at the speed it needs to be.

I think I'm getting old.

We (Maynard and I) got a microphone and set it up with the gear in the apartment and then promptly realized we didn't have anything to route it through. So we tried putting my vocals through a bass amplifier for a bit, and that sounded frickin' awesome for the most part (since I have a very low singing voice) but anything mid-range or higher sucked ass.

So I got this old Fender monitor from my friend Joe. Only, it isn't powered, and I don't have a spare amplifier to push through it.

Move in to fire at the mainstream of bombers
Let off a sharp burst and then turn away
Roll over, spin round and come in behind them
Move to their blindsides and firing again.

I finished Prince of Persia last night (review here).

I have to say that, now that I'm finished, my review is still pretty bang-on for my thoughts. The combat got more tedious (as expected), but the story kept me captivated - even the post-credits activities (if you play it, you'll know what I mean). I found the ending to be a bit of a bleak nut-punch, but that's okay, because there was hope in the form of a "to be continued" thing.

This is infinitely preferable to the "to be continued" ending of Assassin's Creed, where I couldn't care less about the story or any of the characters by the time the game ended.

(Maynard sat and watched the final fights and the post-credits stuff with me. He said it was enjoyable to just watch.)

Bandits at 8 oclock move in behind us
Ten M-E-109s out of the sun
Ascending and turning our spitfires to face them
Heading straight for them I press down my guns

Speaking of bleak, we went to see The Wrestler over the weekend.

It's a Bleak Steak served in Bleak Sauce with a side order of Bleak with a Red, Bleaky wine. But it's also an excellent, excellent film - one of the best of 2008 - and well worth seeing if only to remind you of how much shittier your life could be.

Rolling, turning, diving
Rolling, turning, diving, going in again
Run, live to fly, fly to live, do or die.
Run, live to fly, fly to live, aces high.

Now the first day that I met ya
I was looking in the sky,
When the sun turned all a blur and the thunder clouds rolled by
The sea began to shiver and the wind began to moan,
It must of been a sign for me to leave you well alone
I was born without you baby but my feelings were a little bit too strong

I am excited because next week, Friday, my birthday, the 28th, I will be hosting an intimate get to-gether for a bunch of people to play a one-shot game of Call of Cthulhu.

Historically I have done this from time to time, telling a single story in designed to be handled in one evening (play going until All Are Dead or All Are Asleep or Three A.M., whichever comes first). I create a set of characters and a scenario and let things happen. It works because, since they are "one shots", I can blithely kill and butcher any character in the set, and the players are more able to embrace the horror "trope" because there isn't any assumption that they will survive.

In the past, I've run stories where the players have been New Jersey gangsters turned into zombies, or counsillors at a summer camp, or denizens of a dying silver mine in 1880. This story has a lid on it so far, but it involves Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll, and courtship with Elder Things from Beyond Time and Space.

You never said you love meand I don't believe you can,
'Cos I saw you in a dream and you were with another man
You looked so cool and casual and I tried to look the same,
But now I've got to love ya,
Tell me who am I to blame?
I was born without you baby but my feelings were a little bit too strong

Yesterday was totally fired. I had to go into the office down in Redwood Shores, and it was a long day of meetings and politics, followed by a bit of drinking at local pub (the St. James). I got home around 7:30 and went to bed early at 9, utterly drained.

It wasn't the real work that drained me. Instead, it was the politics - stuff I'm not really involved in, either.

The fact of the matter is this: in my industry, there are two kinds of people: Elves and Dwarves. I am a Dwarf.

Elves are big on detailed project descriptions, like to have lots of meetings, demand complete control, and generally consider Dwarves to be "implementors" rather than "creators". Interestingly, many Elves like to think that they are also Dwarves and try to do things like "write database schemas" even thought they don't know jack about databases.

By contrast, Dwarves require very few directives: "Kill. Drink. Dig." Dwarves are high-output but really, really suck at politics. Politics does not get a project built. Meetings serve only to eat up a Dwarf's time and prevent him from Digging, Drinking, or Killing. I don't need you to write a four page document describing how a login dialog box works; I've been doing this for 15 years. Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

But Elves have the political power. They are the ones who decide who gets paid. So the Dwarves cannot easily go to war with the Elves. Elves consume; Dwarves produce. The politics comes down when the Elves think that project X is more important that project Y.

It is time to write up budgets for the next year. As a result, there was much blood left on the battlefield.

Oddly, though we lost a lot, the Dwarves look to be winning. And strangely I feel that I have more job security today than I did on Tuesday, if only because D. and I are the only gunslingers in the entire division.

However, a pair of Dwarven gunslingers is expensive. Herein lies the rub: can they save money by hiring many, less-experienced gunslingers and/or brute-force operatives?

I did get an invite to EA's holiday party. I was surprised, since I'm a contractor.

Now the whole wide world is movin
''Cos there's iron in my heart,
I just can't keep from cryin' 'cos you say we've got to part
Sorrow grips my voice as I stand here all alone
And watch you slowly take away a love I've never known
I was born without you baby but my feelings were a little bit too strong,
Just a little bit to strong

On Sunday, Maynard came over the bridge and we went to see Quantum of Solace.

(I did not write a review of this because, really, it's a Bond film, so you gets what you expect.)

Afterwards we ended up jamming around for a couple hours, and it was interesting how I would start up with progressions and riffs and he was able to match up to it with the (decrepit) bass guitar that is sitting in the corner.

Maynard has been writing a bunch of really good techno tracks lately, but he downplays his abilities. "I'm just happy I'm able to come up with crap that matches your tunes," he said, with the implication that any "bad" sounds were his fault. However, I was all over the place. I really need to just sit down and tab out a bunch of stuff and actually write something "whole" rather than fragments that may or may not go together.

(KBK is bringing over a bass guitar this evening that is in much better repair. I had to take the current one apart last week and fix the input jack, which is still wonky because I don't have a soldering iron.)

Now the whole wide world is movin' 'cos there's iron in my heart,
I just can't keep from cryin' 'cos you say we've got to part
Sorrow grips my voice as I stand here all alone
And watch you slowly take away
A love I've never known
I was born without you baby but my feelings were a little bit too strong,
Just a little bit to strong

Also, I am a dumbass.

Today has just blown. It is totally fired.

I'm like, Posty McPosterson. Fuck you and a bag of chips.

This weekend has been both fun and productive.

Friday was spent coding in the sun, where my superior Chiricahua melanin soaked up rays and instantly crisped to a light brown. It was pretty static until I got an email from my boss informing me that my co-worker's wife had just given birth, and that I was now In Charge. This is great but boring.

Great for him in that he's got a kid now, rock on, and he's going to have to become Mr. Responsible. D[redacted] is . . . more than a bit of a lush. D[redacted] has not one but two DWIs under his belt, and has made a deal with his wife that he was gonna quit once the kid was born.

So the week previous was mostly him being hammered.

*(In fact, my "entire group has a reputation of being hard drinkers" (my boss' boss' words), and we've been admonished about showing up to meetings with red eyes. Not just me, but everyone in my crew, three levels up.)

It is boring in that I've been relatively idle for a week and a half, waiting on specifications for a new project. I'm "on reserve," as it were. My non-disclosure agreement is still binding, even though my project was released a couple weeks back, so I can't talk about it.

However, I was informed that the budget has been signed off to keep me working at through April 1st, so I can continue to suck on the teat of My Dark Mistress, a point of news that my accountant (read: my father) is happy with.

Anyways. I spent Friday day learning about C-sharp. Which sucks. Friday evening I hung out with JQ (finally giving him an original 1977 Led Zeppelin tour t-shirt I bought for him), his girlfriend, and my neighbor.

Saturday I woke early (natch, since they have been tearing up the streets here for weeks starting at seven a.m.). I worked on my new game during the morning. I wrote a bunch of code about improvised sex tools.

Around two, I went to a bar-be-queue at eto_theipi's with Maynard. I had an excellent time though I ran out of social hit points pretty early on. There were not one but two old friends that I ran into who did not recognize me (I'm looking at you, hedr_goblin and valree). I suppose this is a testament to how much I've changed in the past couple of years. Amusing nonetheless.

(I also saw Jenny, which is always awesome.)

Afterwards, we went to see Babylon A.D. (review here), which was godawful. Then we came back and played some Geometry Wars 2 (Maynard is a fucking savant at "Pacifism") and then tried our hands at Madden 09.

I only picked it up because of the EA discount (read: 20 bux - I'd probably never pay full price for it). Neither of us had ever played a Madden game before so it was a Comedy of Incompetence. And yet, absurdly addictive. I will obviously be able to kick his ass clean the next time we play, as I own a copy of the game and his 360 is currently RROD'd.

Today, I again spent the morning coding the rock star game (currently called Tour Date) and wrestled with hibernate. Picked up six month's worth of contact lenses. Bought a copy of Watchmen as a gift for a friend. Had dinner and a couple beers with some friends.

Now: watching bad movies on DVD, smoking cigars, killing a bottle of Jameson, and playing crappy Facebook games between compiles.

It is 11:15 PM and the fog has not rolled in. Which, hopefully, means that it will be sunny again tomorrow (holiday) and I can do more work on getting skin cancer.

This fucking movie has totally bored the shit out of me and I'm no longer paying attention.

Second offer came in; much better than the first.

Further, they are *bringing it to me by hand* as I type this.

And I just got off the phone with the other guys, having manned up and told them I couldn't accept it.

Now I'm hungry.

So, I've been interviewing and so forth. And on Tuesday I did an interview with a company in San Mateo.

Tuesday evening they made me an offer (decent money), but I told them I wouldn't make a decision until Monday.

Wednesday, I had an interview with another company. The position is *for* San Francisco, but they have the offices in (ick) Pleasanton right now (for the next couple months).

I didn't hear from them, and I was getting pressure from the first guys, so I accepted their offer over the phone about 45 minutes ago.

Fifteen minutes ago, the second company called with an offer. I told them that I'd already accepted from the first company, and this . . . was a crushing disappointment to them. She asked me how much I was getting and I told her, and she said they'd beat it with a signing bonus.

I have, at this point, received neither offer letter (just been told they are coming).

If both numbers were equal, I'd take the second company because they have a better future.

However, I'm in a pickle, 'cause I already said, "yeah, I'm up for it," and I'd feel like shit if I told the first guys "uh, no" two hours after I said "yes."

So, mein herren, assuming that the second offer is better (and it will be), when I have it in my sweaty little palm, how do I handle this situation?

So, a week or so ago I was getting kind of scared about finding a job.

Then I put my resume on the block (craigslist/monster/etc.).

Now, not so much with the "fear" thing. Since I announced availability, my phone has (seriously) not stopped ringing. It's constant, starting at about 8:30 am and keeping on until about 6:00 pm. So I've been on the phone way more than normal - so much so that I've lost my voice a couple times.

About half of what is brought to me is total garbage, and then the next quarter is very iffy (good match, but NFW am I commuting to San Jose, etc.). The remainder gets pared down to phone screens, and I've been doing a lot of those. Some do okay; some not.

I had one in-person interview last week (for a company who does work with dog adoptions and communities). Today I have two (a company that builds a strange community about people entering contests [and I have no idea how they'll make cash but they're very hot to talk to me]) and another with a large magazine publisher (around since 1993, so they actually have "a business").

Later this week I will probably be interviewing with, uh, NASA. You know. The space guys. This gig I would normally never consider, being that it's a) it's PHP and b) HELLA far south, but you know: motherfucking NASA. It's not like their investors are gonna pull out and lay everyone off.

There is a metric CRAPLOAD of "web 2.0" startups out there. All of them are hiring, and most of them a) don't really know what they want to hire and b) don't really appear to have a business model. I can work with the "a" part (usually they want the equivalent position of a "Lead UI Developer" but don't know exactly how to describe it). It's the "b" part that I'm leery of. When your company says "we do this thing that is based off Facebook" I get the shivers: building your company around another company's product is always a crapshoot.

I am finding this entire process to be intensely stressful and exhausting. I am seriously doing nothing else and I have the exact same conversation seven or eight times a day. Honestly, though, it's a problem I want to have, but that doesn't mean I'm still not scared that the rug is going to get pulled out from underneath.

Hopefully I'll have a couple offers to play with over the Thanksgiving break.

So, I am officially starting to "Get Scared" with regards to finding a job and/or additional work. My stress levels are up: pulse so heavy I can feel it, hands itchy as hell, not eating well, not sleeping well.

I hate this shit.

Well, as I expected would happen, my retainer contract (the one that pays my rent and the like) has been canceled.

I expected this; the company had been pouring more resources into the sports games (and my purposes was non-sports); what sports game work I had been doing was taken over by smaller teams. Really, it's just economics.

He's keeping the deal through the end of November, and then there's other stuff involving a bunch of games I wrote that never saw the light of day due to lack of capacity. But it still means that I gotta find work.

So far, 2007 has been a bang-up, A+++ year, lemme tell you.

Now all I need is for a family member to die, and I'll have hit the Stress Trifecta.

I didn't even know there were such things as "perfect numbers" and I suppose that the reason I didn't know that is because, well, I slept in math class during school and never really cared that much about it.

Even today, the most math I deal with is shit like this:


int xd = getX() - a.getX();
int yd = getY() - a.getY();
int d = (int) Math.ceil(Math.sqrt((xd * xd) + (yd * yd)));


(Which is a calculation I use in one of my game engines to determine distance between two points on a map.)

So, you know. Casting.

Sometimes I feel intellectually challenged. Then I remember that I can name all the presidents and I don't feel so bad. Plus, I'm a hillbilly.

So, hey.

I went out this evening to see shdwspn at Zeitgeist. He is in town for a few short days from New York (not New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York of Doctor Who fame, but the first, er, second York). I don't think I'd actually seen him in probably five years. It was good; I had a good time. gnat23 gave me a ride, which I suppose is a little weird showing up with your ex-wife, but getting me out of the house sometimes is a chore.

Saw several people I haven't spoken to in years and met some cool new folks that I liked but may or may not ever see again (I hope otherwise, but this is the really-real world). I am going to try to recruit weezyl into the Militant Order of Barhah, as she seems to be into the entire "undead ravaging the countryside" thing

(More soldiers! More unlife for the Great Barhah! Barhah Akbar! MAHB! MAHB! MAHB!)

Speaking of, the MOB has been on a tear lately and my little horde is not-so little anymore. I have about a hundred little hungry zombies to feed a day now, and we're eating suburbs in Urban Dead like a lawnmower chews up weeds.

Nexus War continues apace. I have a few bugs here and there, but nothing horribly vile. Will probably produce a bug patch in the next few days.

For some reason, half of the mp3s for my copy of Paranoid are corrupt. Which sucks, because I'm trying to learn Electric Funeral, and that's one of them gone kaput.

What else.

Oh. I have a big stack of books that I've finished reading and will probably write about in the near future, but I'm wanting to finish the current series I'm in beforehand. I had never actually read the entire Elric saga before. Growing up, I read a Hawkmoon novel and I have a tattered copy of Stormbringer, but you can't really start with those.

For some reason, they seem to have stopped selling Elric books. You can't really find them on Amazon. And I had been holding out to buy a good set. However, I found on ebay a complete collection of a nice set of hardbacks that was produced in the 80s, and I picked them up for a song (like, ten bux). And now I'm halfway through the second book (or the 6th book, depending on how one counts).

Holy crap. How could I have not read this before? Seriously. Excellent stuff. Excellent writing.

And Moorcock is still alive which is even better.

Anyways. I'm reading a hell of lot - 400+ pages of stuff a day, usually.

I realized this evening that I am somewhat. . . hostile to the idea of actually working in an office now. I seriously, absolutely, in no way want to do that again. Ever.

Well. I've known that for some time. But I realized why tonight, and the reason is actually Inktomi. I totally got burnt out on the entire corporate scene there. I didn't really like that job. It wasn't a challenge, and I couldn't do anything creative: I seriously had a meeting ala Fight Club where the only comment I got on a project I did was "Can I get this in a light blue?" (which was why Inktomi's IT intranet system was secretly called the "Cornflower Blue" project).

I couldn't quit, because, well, it was 2001/2002, and jobs were rare. Gnat wasn't working, either, so we had the one income. It sucked.

Then, I got laid off, took a break, and then went to work for Elemental, which was awesome, because I felt like I could actually make a difference and apply myself. But at some point, the corporate mindset took over and bad decisions were made, and that sort of . . . cemented my hatred for the badge wearing.

This may be a problem. I need to work through it.