Gism Butter

I have never been so overpowered by impatience in all my life. The things that are brewing in my life now are slow cooking recipes. I am working towards a culmination of things. Right now as I write this, I am resting my laptop on some dude’s suitcase. He is sitting on BART with his wife, come back into town from SFO. They are staring at me, and I am surrounded by people who are probably straining eyes over their shoulders with ideas of what I am writing. Wondering if it is about them, or if it is the insane self ramblings of a deranged and self-centered mind. The latter is obviously the case.

And it is here that I write to you loyal reader that I am filled with desire, plans, ideas. How not to do things, msotly. And an open mind towards doing. BART always helps the brain. I think it’s the pressure of the tunnel below the bay.

And it is here, that I am overwhelmed by opportunity. A man I once called friend gave me that phrase. Today, I fully realize its meaning.

Anyway, I am about to hit the age of 2^5. That’s my penultimate power of two. Wow. I guess I am now old enough to impart wisdom. I’m happy. I guess that means I can give advice on being happy.

1: Golden rule: do unto others and such. Totally rad and relevant. Can get messy when values clash, but it’s generally 100% useful.

2: Be yourself. You will not understand this bit of advice until you understand yourself. Give it 20 years or so. Maybe more. I didn’t get this one until I fell in love and someone was there to tell me that my tendencies were OK and not annoying. Love is really acceptance at its core.

3: Remember everyone’s names. This is tough, but there is a way to do it. A trick: when you meet someone for the first time, make sure you say their name back to them, then say it 3 more times while talking to them and looking them in the eye or face. You will feel like a dick, like you are superficial, but this is infinitely preferable to not knowing their name the next time you meet them. You will be surprised. If you repeat their name to them and look at their face, the brain just remembers. The hardest part is forcing yourself to believe this second impulse that says “Hey, that’s Steve!” Trust me, if you repeat their name three times while looking them in the face, the name will just come to you when you see them again. It’s kinda magic.

And people’s names are magic. Like Dale Carnegie said, a person’s name is like music to their ears. They will love you if you know their name, and hate you if you forget it. Really try the above tactic. I am someone who mixes up doods and ladies in movies all the time, and have a horrible problem with names/faces. But the above trick works. Use it. Learn it. Live it. Remember everyone’s name. The janitor, the homeless dood, the sandwich guy, yer coffee girl. Everyone. This is super duper helpful. Get over yourself, and do it.

4: Always squeeze the hell out of the other guy’s hand while shaking it. A degree of discretion is advised, but when you meet some Texas oil tycoon at a party, he will be very impressed when you both squeeze like fucking maniacs. For women, just give a as firm a handshake as you can, in business situations, a I feel a limp hand in a business meeting signifies you’re being there as window dressing (read: PR).

You don’t have to go overboard, men nor women. Just be sure your handshake is very firm. Like, really, really firm. If you think it’s too much, it’s just right, unless you’re some sort of steroid case. It sounds weird, but if you give someone else a slight bit of pain when the meet you and you tell them your name, they remember you better, and they remember you as a strong, independent person. That is, provided you also:

5: Look people in the eye as often as possible. Be weird about it. It puts other people off, and you will instantly know who is weak and who is strong. Don’t be mean. Smile while doing it. Toothy, open mouth smile. But don’t hide your eyes. Look everyone in the eye. Even bums on the street. This is the single most important bit of advice in this list. It is a very basic way to show people that you are alive, human, conscious and confident. This is HUGE in business. Sales too. Do it. It gives you power.

6: Never leave something undone. If you say you’re going to do it, fucking well do it, and fast. Be scary about it. Tell that person you think X, Y, Z should be done, then go do them that night and email them about it. Nothing scares business people like a person who actually does things. It makes them sit up and take notice, even if everything you’ve done is in entirely the wrong direction. Just don’t make a habit of the wrong direction stuff.

7: Do not seek the spotlight. Only idiots want to be famous, and they get ripped apart by said fame. Be the guy or gal behind the scenes. If you are radical ninja (yes, not “a radical ninja,” the term is just “radical ninja”) you will get the recognition you deserve. Do not desire fame. Only pain comes from fame, unless the fame is on your terms. Be Warhol, not (insert reality TV person here).

8: Criticism is essential. Listen to people who hate you. Fix what they call out. Unless they are bigots or idiots. If you get fired, learn from it.  If someone says no, figure out why. Learn from mistakes, do not wallow in them.

9: Your social network is offline. Facebook and LinkedIn mean nothing. Go have a beer with that important contact. Send a thank you card to that lady at company X who you met. Be physically active. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn really only exist to show your future employer that you are an idiot, or that you are discrete. Your digital friend network is useful for information, but real world contacts are much, much more important. Go drinking with your IRC buddies. Play paintball with your Facebook pals. Get out there and meet people, press flesh, laugh together.

10: Have goals. If you have a goal, you will achieve it eventually. You simply need to have that goal. It’s better to make them big, as it’s tough to come up with new ones when you’ve finally bought that new Ford, or MacBook Air. Dream big, and hold onto those dreams. They will come true, and it will never happen how you expect it to. The universe takes care of those who are positive and determined.

11: Be happy. If you are reading this, you are part of the wealthiest, most privileged peoples in the history of the universe! Rejoice at the ease of your life and opportunities before you! The sweat of your brow is free to you, and of the greatest cost to others. Do not give it away cheaply.

13th Granny-versary Festivities
Sunday, February 21, 2010 ++ Noon ’till MIDNIGHT

++ Granny?s Empire of Art ++
702 Vermont Street, SF CA 94107
Free!

Hologlyphics in The Dollhouse Aerie

Noon – Midnight, Hologlyphics will be showing stereoscopic video viewable without 3D glasses, synchronized with live music as a performance, plus pre-recorded material. It’s stereoscopic without glasses and infinite views are available from multiple perspectives, just like a hologram. All imagery is generated in real-time and interactive.

Many other artists + performers & a mini Subgenius Film Fest. This house has too be seen in person to be believed, a multi-story staircase filled wall to wall with thousands of colored pencils, submarine bathroom and more.

Artists and schedule here-

I am able to update the blog!

I’m still ignoring this blog. In case you hadn’t noticed.

So, there’s this little museum I want to start. But it’s a big, hairy, long ass plan, so I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say that the IRS needs $ for the non-profit application to be considered, and it’s money I kind of don’t really have. Not to mention the money needed to start the actual non-profit in Delaware (the ONLY place to start a business!). Anyway, to support my efforts, I am auctioning some of the less unique prototypes in my collection. I should state that I won’t be auctioning off anything that was never seen before I found it: no Dragon’s Lair, no Cabbage Patch Atari, no Sword and the Sorcerer. But I am auctioning some Colecovision prototypes that, as far as I know, are unique in that I’m the only one who has such protos. Go and bid on them and give me money to start my dream.
Also, let me know what I should auction after the 2010 Action Game sells. If it sells.

Over the years, I have met my fair share of gamers. One-on-one, in person, there are few I cannot tolerate, or get along with, or even befriend. They’re a generally nice bunch, and there are many types: board, video, PC, Role Playing, LARPers. I love all manner of gamers, and I really don’t have a reason to generically hate gamers on sight, though some of them can smell a bit.

Anyway, I still wanted to have a massive rant against a certain type of games enthusiast. This sort is typically a PC or console gamer, usually focused on whatever’s new and cool, rather than some sort of fetishist. I suppose I could be called a fetishist for my love of antique game collection.

The sort of gamer I am talking about has no idea how to use IRC. This is my chief concern. I’ve spent about 14 years on IRC, now, and I have never once encountered a channel full of real nerds and hackers that I couldn’t get along with. Of course, 90% of all IRC talk is about dongs. I’d even postulate the Jerkcity Principle, which states that for any given set of IRC channel logs, any portion of text totaling less than 10 lines could be substituted for the text of a JerkCity cartoon without modification.

But  on Enterthegame, the IRC network for gamers, it would seem as though many gamers don’t understand this fact. I’ve been run out of a number of IRC channels on that network, despite my extreme videogame scene 31337-ness. There are always folks in these channels that are cool with the dongs, but invariably, the Ops in said channels are repugnant, intolerant goobers. The sort that think their being an op makes them the coolest fucking person in the world.

And this falls right into this sort of odd confidence some gamers have. Some gamers are really exceptionally skilled at gameplay in a certain genre. Some are just generally pompous. I think there may even be a mirror in the cinema nerd world. There are certain folks who you can talk to, and your words are setting you down in stone with them, forever. You say “dongs” once, and they’re convinced you’re a homosexual rapist 14 year old with a graffiti can and a Slipknot t-shirt. I dunno where I’m going with this…

But it’s this strange, slow-moving entitlement that gamers feel which really pisses me off. Like when they get a game, and it’s not 100% perfect, they go off on the developers and how bad they are. Generally, I would say this sort of gamer knows nothing about the software development that goes on behind a game. Sure, there are some super shitty games out there, but any finished game took a shit-ton of work for somebody. I’m not saying that every gamer needs to respect the companies behind their games, but when a company makes a bad design decision, they’re not attacking the ethical and moral underpinnings of your very being.

I think the PR world is partly to blame though. This whole Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 debacle is a perfect example of what I am talking about.

OK, backstory: Infinity Ward developed CoD:MW2, and decided not to release a dedicated server for the game. This means that people who want to play online can’t host their own little world for people to play in. Other shooters, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament allow players to run servers. I can see exactly why Infinity Ward did this. First of all, I’d wager 90% of their sales for this game will be on consoles. Consoles don’t and can’t use outside hosted servers: both Sony and Microsoft have built walled gardens for their online players, and there is no breaking out of them if you want to be published.

Second, Infinity Ward was likely changing code up until the last second before the gold master shipped for duplication. Games are never finished, they are only shipped. Any developer can tell you that no one ever finishes making a game, they just stop working on it. Like a novelist or film director who looks over their work and thinks “I could have done this, I should have changed that,” games require a ton of work and attention, so there’s always something else to do. To ship on time, it’s essential that you cut out all extraneous work. Building an entirely separate server product that would be used by your consumers–not to mention a product that won’t leave anyone open to nasty DOS attacks or exploit–is no small feat. Plus they’d have to document it all and provide tech support.

So, when Infinity Ward decided not to offer a server, I was all like “What-ev-arr!” But the gamer types I am talking about above are incensed! This is fucking affront to their very nature! How dare Infinity Ward not release a server! These gamers are entitled!

Whatever. So don’t care. It’s a game, and a modern-style shooter at that. How many 1000’s of other modern style shooters are there for the PC? Go play something else if it really matters that much.

Muther fuckers throw me out of their little game chat room? I met Shigeru Miyamoto, mother fuckers. I’ve found long lost, unkown game prototypes in piles of garbage and given them to the world for free. What have you little shits done? Sat in yer IRC channels and whined about MW2. Infinity Ward shipped a game that encompasses the work of 100’s of talented individuals. Be happy with what you got!

Anyway, I fully understand this is a childish rant. Whatever. It’s my blog. Fuck you.

Someone has finally put up a site about Jesse Sartain. I did that once, but the man called my father and harassed him. I decided it wasn’t worth it to bother with the old coot. But I have to say, seeing someone finally decided to go public with stuff on Jesse Sartain does give me a warm fuzzy. Maybe I will find this person and hand them the 80-some-odd comments that were posted here about what it’s like to work for Jesse.

I only worked for the man for a short time, but I have to say, he left a mark on my soul. The sort of mark that will be burnt into the flesh of my mind forever. No matter how many drugs I take, no matter how far out of reality I wander (not drug related, San Francisco is not within reality…) the specter of Jesse Sartain is always popping up every so often. It just peeks into the folds of my reality, through other people I meet who used to work for him, or through strange happenstances on Craigslist and in supermarkets.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about the guy. I’ve just linked to this new site that cropped up. Ya’ll can talk about him there. Now I get to try and figure out which one of ya’ll finally did it?

There are a few ways to do this out there already, but this one actually works. Just using the Jaunty backports doesn’t work, as it gives you very flakey drivers. You have to run the absolute newest kernel. My buddy Kripto laid out the following commands to make wireless actually work properly under Ubuntu Jaunty on the Asus Eee PC 1005HA. Just paste the following into a terminal, in order:

• wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb
• wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903_2.6.29-02062903_all.deb
• wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-image-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb
• Then run “sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903_2.6.29-02062903_all.deb linux-image-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb”
• Reboot

This blog becomes increasingly irrelevant the more other people want me to blog for them. I have only so much brain I can encode into any given place. So, I’ll just post some pretty pictures here.

Naturally, you came here first for your uninformed, poorly devised economic solutions. Until now, I’ve avoided talking about the economy, beyond calling a depression a depression. Dumbass. But I do currently desire to pontificate on something I know nothing about. Money.
Earlier, with a large bit of butter on my chest, I was inclined to watch This. I am deeply pissed, now. I’m not entirely sure that everything this William K. Black fellow says is true, but he is certainly reputable. And incendiary.

Based upon this interview, I whole heartedly agree with this gentleman. I think he has the answers we are looking for. And he also seems to be into the idea of stringing up the fat cats. Whatever that actually means. I’m in favor of any plan that gets me a house.