More thoughts on Google+

I am still in the ‘playing around with stuff’ phase of Google+. There is a lot to like and I think generally speaking there is nothing that would prevent me from using this network that doesn’t already trouble me about Facebook. I do think the implementation of the UI is nearly perfect and feels more sturdy than Facebook.

The one thing that really disturbs me, however, is that there are nearly deal-breaking problems for all of my friends. One friend can’t sent photos via text like she can on Facebook, another doesn’t really use iGoogle so she only learns about posts on Plus via email, which kind of defeats the purpose in my view. Another friend changed his profile picture and then promptly went back to ignoring all things social media related. I could foresee a death by a thousand paper-cuts spelling the doom of Google Plus. It gets so many things right, in my view, but people are actually pretty picky about superfluous activities like posting on social media. If it smells of hassle and compromise, it’s tough for them to make the switch.

Which I think would be a shame. I’ve seen many, many posts describing how people have been picking up friends and followers at a blistering pace on Google Plus. I suspect that GP will become a viable alternative to FB but is unlikely to ever replace it. 750 million “friends” is a very large boulder to shift.

2011
07/12
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First Impressions of Google+

I finally got my invitation into Google+. After a weekend of playing around with it I would say that the biggest advantage of the system is that it’s still new and nothing is set yet. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t feel like a finished product. Not remotely.

It certainly cribs a lot from its two primary competitors Facebook and Twitter. The profile set up is very clean and rectilinear and the posts proceed in a scrolling column in the center. There is a lot more white space than Facebook and somehow there is an element of whimsy that Facebook doesn’t have.

As far as Twitter goes, the concept of followers are there and you can also mention people in a way very similar to using the @symbol.

However there are somethings missing. Strange things.

You can post easily enough and there doesn’t seem to be any limit the amount you can type or attach. However, I couldn’t find a way to post on someone else’s profile. You can comment on other people’s stuff but it stops there. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to private message with other people although the huddle feature appears promising in that regard.

All in all, I’m still using the service because Facebook just frustrates me on many different levels but I’m not sold yet.

2011
07/12
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First Post about Go Play Northwest

Go Play Northwest is dead, long live Go Play Northwest.

I had a good experience last year at GPNW. I went as more or less another reason to visit Seattle. My dad lived in the town for awhile and I’ve always been interested in the town. I had fun at the convention but it wasn’t mind-blowing. This year was a revelation.

In some ways this year was a step down from GPNW2010. It wasn’t at the Hugo House which I thought was a terrific venue for story-telling games. It was at the Northwestern Rooms in the Seattle Center, which were fairly generic convention rooms with all of the terrible acoustics, awkward layout and bland atmosphere that comes with that. But the quality of the games made everything worth it.

I played at least three games that were excellent: with top notch GM’s (or facilitators) and incredible players. In that class I would put Microscope, my late-night apocalypse world and today’s Lady Blackbird. But there wasn’t a single game that I regretted joining. This was just overall exactly the experience that I traveled 3,000 miles to enjoy. Maybe I’ll come back next year, maybe I won’t, but I will always remember GPNW 2011.

2011
07/11
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RPG
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Trip to Seattle

Second year in a row I find myself in Seattle. Seattle is probably the place in the US that most reminds me of Japan. So green, clean and tech-obsessed. Of course there is the hippie grunge thing and Japan would never tolerate the amount of graffiti, but never the less the style of the place is very Pacific Rim.

What am I doing in Seattle? Well visiting. I love this place and there are friends to socialize with and all that.

But there is also Go Play Northwest, Seattle’s premier independent role-playing convention. Two game conventions in the space of a month is almost too much to handle but this is the real deal.

I’m already signed up for two games: Freemarket (I know, again) and Apocalypse World (not a hack). I’m going to be there the entire three days so I’m curious what sorts of other games catch my eye. Last year I ended up playing an AW hack called Minions, INC which was was a Venture Bros as told from the standpoint of Henchman 21 and 24. My friend Doug is threatening to demo an Agon hack called Shadowagon, we’ll see if that happens.

2011
07/07
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Google+ frustrates me

Once of the most annoying aspects of the roll-out of the Google+ is the frustrating ambiguity of whether or not this is all intentional. I want to join Google+ so I can play around with it for a few hours and then return to my comfortable apathy towards all things social media-related. The fact that I cannot join suggests Google is either manufacturing demand or it is legitimately concerned about the strength of its network. Or maybe some combination thereof.

Nevertheless, not being able to try the thing out for myself and make harsh snap judgements makes me very judgmental.

Things I’m interested in based on the reviews of Google+:

  1. Circles. I know that Facebook allows similar capabilities but it’s not intuitive. That is one of the major things that prevents me from enjoying FB, the knowledge that my private musings have a much wider audience than I have control over. I read reddit, I know the lulzy power of screen capture. To be able to restrict and contain and categorize brings a warm glow to the deeply geeky core of me.
  2. Hangout. This is the other big one. I have not used video chat before but I would start doing so immediately signing up to this service. There’s no reason not to. There are half dozen incidences in the past month where such a capability would have been a life-saver or greatly enhanced the fun of a situation.
  3. Huddle. A group SMS service that doesn’t do anything innovative except in being tied in with Google it greatly simplifies planning in my personal circle of friends. This would absolutely be useful right out of the gate.
  4. Unification. This isn’t a service its just the aspect of Google+ that most appeals to me - simplification. At the moment I have friends on Facebook, contacts on gmail, followers on Twitter and even a few people I contact mostly through text and phone. To bring all of these people together in a simple way would be a game-changer. Friend A doesn’t like to phone or text? No problem. Drop them into Circles and keep track of them that way. Friend B doesn’t like to be part of social media? Our chat conversations will just exist in another corner of the same interface. Friend C only emails? Well, I can still give them updates and bring them into the same conversational space as my other friends.
Things I’m not interested in or concerned about:
  1. Building up my social network all over again. Also, that nagging fear that this whole thing will collapse and any effort I spend bringing over random friends from other networks will be for naught.
  2. Google Reader. I’m curious how the Sparks function is going to work with Reader and just general internet surfing. I’m not opposed to the passive stream of information that Twitter lists and RSS functions provide, but I do want them to play nice together. Early reviews I’ve read suggest the opposite.
If you have Google+ feel free to set me straight on any erroneous impressions. You may also gloat.
2011
07/03
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Friend Google
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Further difficulties of writing

I’m trying something new with the SLANT SPACE project. I’m writing a full and detailed outline.

I know, sounds impressive doesn’t it?

I’ve always resisted doing the simple necessary things in my writing. I had a naive impression that words flowed from my head naturally on to the paper fully-formed and perfect. Maybe other writers can do that: I cannot. I have to sit and think for a long time about what I am writing. If I skip steps I make mistakes – lots of mistakes. Far too many mistakes to catch on my own.

Then there was my fear outlines rob my writing of surprise and purpose. If I already know the ending of a story why would I bother writing it? One of the primary lessons from last year’s Dreams and Monsters is that things as complex and lengthy as novels can simply not be left to chance. Leaving novels to chance results in sprawl and logical inconsistencies. Every problem has to be solved in the moment. The weight of each abrupt decision begins to cause the own edifice to sag and stagger.

The outline style I used for SLANT SPACE is a series of questions that I hope to answer during the course of the novel. I liked this system because it kept things open while still giving me the space to shape the structure of the novel. To spot a problem and then fix it while dealing with the abstractions of parts on an outline was a revelation to me.

Tomorrow I begin writing.

 

2011
07/01
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Review of “Tree of Life”

Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” is a movie that is difficult to fit into numerical ratings. How can you rate a movie that has no plot, very little characterization, and near contempt for conventional storytelling tropes like tension, character development, or character names.

Yet how can you deny a movie that creates moments of such immediate undeniable beauty you want to live your life between the spaces Malick crafts between tree limbs, waves of the ocean and vapor trails in nebula. You will be intrigued, challenged, bored, amused and horrified but what you see in this movie.

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2011
06/30
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movie revew
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JiffyCon

Had a blast Saturday at the Davis Square Jiffycon; it’s just too bad that this is the first time I’ve had to just sit down and put down my thoughts about the excellent games I played there.

Adapted from their website, Jiffycon is a New England roleplaying and board game event showcasing games by independent designers. It is not a large event, there were about 20 people there, but it was a totally my scene. Most of the games were some variant of indie RPGs and some were pretty elaborate re-workings of the same. There was a ‘Deadwoods’ hack of Burning Wheel (my friend Doug tried that one), a Cthulhu Dark adventure and Microscope. I decided on playing Polaris and Freemarket which I will describe below.

Polaris is an awesome game to read; essentially it sets up these sagas of doomed ice elves living in the arctic. I was not sure how this would actually play in the real world however. My game group has passed on the opportunity to play on a few occasions. It’s one of those things that sounds really good on paper but also clearly depends on a particular mood and theme. You have to be in the right frame of mind to play doomed ice elves – to have four or five people who are excited about playing doomed ice elves is a rare occurrence.

We had good players for Polaris, everyone ‘got’ it as far as the world goes. While one-shots tend to be somewhat goofy, Tom, the guy who facilitated the play was good at keeping the mood at an appropriate pitch. I would say the basic problem of this game is just trying to play it as a one-shot. It is tough to be serious about characters you know you are never going to play again. It’s not hard to have goofy fun with characters you have no intention of ever playing.

Freemarket, on the other hand, was just awesome. I’ve played the game before and loved it then. It’s a little tough to explain this game. It’s set in the future on a space-station where everyone has access to post-singularity tech that gives them functional immortality and basically anything that want free. This isn’t a game about darkness and despair. It’s more about coming up with a cool idea and trying to sell it to a fictional populace. The only problem with this game is past a certain point I just want to stop drawing cards and writing stuff on my character sheet and actually setting up trendy cyberware tourism company. Our GM (Superuser) Tresi was one of the organizers of the event and I think he did a terrific job taking elements of four very different characters and coming up with a story in the space of four hours.

I want to thank everyone who organized Jiffycon. This was my first visit to the con and I had a blast!

2011
06/29
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Posting first chapter of my novel

After revising my first chapter again with the notes from my workshop at Arisia I’ve decided to post it here. There are things about this book that I still really like.  Even though I have reached the point where I need to move on, the experience last year of writing this was one of the things I’ll be most proud of.

At least until I get SLANT SPACE done !

Dreamsandmonsters Preview

2011
06/29
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File under: It’s not CGI

On the same morning I watched six J-Pop stars donate, Frankenstein-style, various facial features to a hybridized uber-star, I found this video refreshing:

Basically what you’re looking at here is mercury creating an almagamation with a solid alumnium I-Beam. The process destroys the aluminium, creating a flaky crust that falls to the floor. Other than the video being spend up there is no trickery here, just one metal eating another from the inside out.

2011
06/24
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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