Guilded Lilies

It's a Geek Thing: Martha Gets Wired

Imagine my surprise on Saturday when I opened the mailbox to find not only the most anticipated piece of fiction ever written, but the newest edition of Wired magazine sporting none other than Martha Stewart on the cover!  The walk from the mailbox to my apartment went like this:  Harry Potter in my right hand, Wired magazine in my left - Harry, Martha; right hand, left hand; Martha, Harry; left hand, right hand.  Which would I open first?  It was almost more than I could stand.

Well, as hard as it is even for me to believe, it was Wired magazine that I ripped into first.  I turned immediately to the interview and read this great tidbit:

"I live in an old house with no closets and no built-ins.  I hate big cupboards.  So, where do you put your stereos and all that stuff?  The solution is easy: Put an iPod in each room, like in a drawer.  Add wireless speakers and the sound system disappears into the room.  It's so simple, and you don't have to buy all that crap.  You know how many years of crap I had?"

Besides giving an awesome bit of advice, Martha said "crap".  Twice.  And "like".   She is now officially cool, and it is finally okay for me to express my love for all that is Martha Stewart.  For years I have been taking abuse from my closest friends (the ones I dared tell) for my secret admiration of Martha (can you be a feminist and still want to have toile curtains?).  Now that she has earned herself the ultimate in geek-cred (to add to the street-cred she picked up in the hoosegow) I can confess aloud that I knew her before she discovered the Blackberry.

And have you ever beheld any greater object of geek beauty than that Wii cake?  Instructions for making your own are included, of course.  I am all ready for a full year of Martha meets Wired magazine, and from now on will dream of the day that she publishes Martha Stewart Living 2.0.  At least it will give me something else besides transferware dishes to think about for a while.

I'm Still Not Dead Yet

It's been a while, I know, but I do have a long list of really good excuses for not blogging.  I will spare you all of the details except one: circumstances have been such since my last post in March that I have only had dial-up internet access.  I can hear the collective gasps of horror among you, and the pitying thoughts of there-but-for-the-grace-of-wifi-go-I that quickly follow.  All is remedied now, with the balm of this report from bandwidthplace.com:

Communications: 3.9 megabits per second
Storage: 473.6 kilobytes per second
1MB file download: 2.2 seconds
Subjective rating: Awesome

Awesome indeed!

Now that I can actually log into my TypePad account without having to go make a sandwich between page loads, chances are much better that I will be posting on the GL blog at more regular intervals.  So if you are one of the devoted few who haven't gotten around to deleting the GL blog from your RSS feed yet- thank you very much for not giving me up for dead.  I'm getting better, and I don't want to go on the cart.

I think I'll go for a walk.

Do-Over

As it turns out, that graduate school thing I mentioned a few months back wasn't for me.  I am now invoking one of the supreme superpowers of the gaming reality: The Do-Over.

"The do-over was one of childhood's most powerful rites, for it exerted our dominion over the laws of space and time. The clock was rolled back, the game was restored to its exact status as before before the contested event and play was resumed."

Time to find a different path to the same goal. The good news is that this means I have time to blog now.  Just thought I would let you know.

Quote above is from the streetplay.com website, which now seems to be down.

I'm Not Dead Yet

I have survived my first week of graduate school.  Huzzah!  Today I wore my "I'm not dead yet" tee-shirt (given to me by a friend who actually got to see Spamalot).  I felt I needed a symbol to celebrate the fact that I made it to Friday, and I plan to make this my regular Friday attire as I work my way through the first term here.  I can tell that each week will feel like a significant accomplishment in consideration of the workload I will have, and what better way to mark the passing of time at a game school than with a Monty Python reference?  By the way, did any of you play the Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail game on the PC years ago?  I wish I had it right now.

Since we are on the subject of Monty Python, and since I am pretty much exhausted and too tired to write a proper post, and additionally since no matter how many times you have seen this clip elsewhere it will never get tired (unlike me). . . here is a YouTube clip for your entertainment:

Take a moment to think of me while playing games this weekend (especially those of you who will be playing Guild Wars) since I will be doing reading and homework instead.  Maybe if I am really good at my time management I will be able to squeak in an hour here and there throughout the term.  But it looks like I will be exclusively focused on the task of learning how to make games from here on out.  Buh bye spare time!

Five Things You Probably Don't (Want To) Know About Me

I have been tagged.  In writing this blog for almost a year now I have never been challenged to a meme, but the shift in focus on the GL blog would seem to allow for this sort of thing now so I figured why not.  I love how most bloggers introduce a meme by saying something along the lines of 'I don't normally do memes . . .' but I won't make any excuses like that for writing this post.  For me, blogging is all about getting attention in a socially indirect fashion, and the fact that Brinstar tagged me makes me feel all the better about it. So let's see if I can find five quirky but interesting facts about my life that you may not know, or even want to know, about me.

Five Things You Probably Don't Know About Me

1.  When I refer to myself as a 'grown woman playing games' I mean that I was born in the year that The Munsters premiered on television.  I'll let you do the math.

2.  One of the last free-lance art jobs that I had before becoming an online retailer (before becoming a grad student) was designing greeting cards for a company run by an order of Catholic monks.  I thought it might be refreshing to work for people that believed they would go to hell if they behaved badly, but discovered that even for men of God business is business. 

3.  This one probably goes a long way toward explaining my enjoyment of FPS games: When I was a little girl my father would take me with him to the shooting range to target shoot with his black powder muzzleloader handgun.  I recall that I was just barely strong enough to be able to hold that thing up and fire it.  Such are the pleasures of growing up in northern New Hampshire - "Live Free or Die" does suggest a certain need for familiarity with firearms after all. 

4.  Readers of my Ninth Wave Designs blog may already know this but it should fall into the "probably didn't know" category here: I have an obsession with graph paper.  I have a lot of graph paper in my life - more than one person could practically use while on this mortal plain - but that doesn't keep me from buying more when I find it.  The fact is, I started my online Moleskine business entirely because of this driving desire.  After I bought my first pocket squared Moleskine notebook I felt a necessity to have as many of them as I possibly could, and the only reasonable way to do that was to start selling them to support my habit. This graph paper obsession goes hand-in-hand with my pleasant memories of playing D & D in high school, and I used to draw maps in my spare time just for the enjoyment of laying things out on graph paper (without ever actually playing the dungeons).

5.  I sleep with books in my bed.  There - I have said it.  Now everyone knows.  I am not ashamed.  This predilection is the result of my ever-changing mood as it applies to reading before falling asleep.  I just never know what I may want to read at night, and so usually have 5 or 6 books handy just in case the one I am currently reading fails to suit my mood.  I never read one book through at a time - and more usually I am reading about twelve different books simultaneously - but there isn't room for that many of them in my bed so I have to be somewhat selective.   Sometimes I roll over in the middle of the night and get jabbed in the face by the corner of a book, so for safety reasons I try to only sleep with paperbacks.

Well, there you have it.  This is likely more than you wanted to know about me, but if you have made it this far in the post then you are now officially challenged to take up the gauntlet and write your own version of this meme.  If you don't have your own blog then write up a quick response in the comments here.  If you do have a blog then leave a trackback to let me know when you post.  Thanks for the tag, Brinstar!

Must . . . Eat . . . George A. Romero's . . . Brain!

Back in September I had the privilege of attending a screening of two of George A. Romero's films, with a presentation from George A. Romero himself as part of the program.  I waited to blog about it closer to Halloween, for obvious thematic purposes, but it was fabulous fun to hear him speak about his film making career.  He is a very charismatic speaker, and inspirational as well. Plus he says f**k to emphasize his points, which was a big crowd pleaser, especially among the younger fans dressed all in black.

This is my friend Hank with Romero - doesn't he look thrilled?  He stood in line for 3 hours to get Romero's autograph and have this picture taken, and you can tell by the look on his face that it was worth every minute.

It has been a number of years since I have seen a George A. Romero film, and I have never had the good fortune to see one on the big screen in a movie theater before.  What struck me the most was the great sense of humor he manages to work into these over-the-top horror flicks.  The two films we saw were The Dark Half, and Creepshow, both involving the writing talents of Stephen King - King even acts in one of the Creepshow segments, The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.

In an effort to make this post about gaming just a little bit I will ask this question: Where would the game Dead Rising be without George A. Romero? This is a game that has most sorely tempted me to cross over to console gaming, and I still hold a faint hope that someday the injustice of not being able to play this game on the PC will be remedied.  In spite of Capcom's disclaimer: "This game was not developed, approved, or licensed by the owners or creators of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead" (which is set in a mall just as the game is), can anyone really doubt that this game doesn't owe all of its success to George's original creative vision?  As gamers we owe a lot of playing enjoyment to the Zombie theme, none of which would have been possible without George A. Romero. 

You may not know this, but Romero lost the copyright to Night of the Living Dead due to a freakish copyright snafu and never profited from that film.  From the Wikipedia entry on the movie:

Night of the Living Dead lapsed into the public domain because of the neglect of the original theatrical distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, to place a copyright notice on the prints. In 1968, United States copyright law required a proper notice for a work to maintain a copyright. . . The distributor removed the statement when it changed the title. According to George Romero, Walter Reade "ripped us off."

Romero explained in his presentation that the original print of the film, which was called "Night of the Flesh Eaters" contained the proper copyright notice, but when the distributor decided to change the film's name to "Night of the Living Dead" they removed the copyright statement from the film, costing George the right to profit from his work.  The copyright laws at the time were such that this meant his work immediately entered into public domain.  Even today, if you buy a DVD of Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero doesn't make a penny.

I have a vision, a dream for gaming, which I will sum up with this proposed game title:  Night of the Living Legos.  I purchased this custom zombie Lego mini figure last week on eBay and then the inspiration struck while playing Lego Star Wars.  Lego Zombie! Those are two words that seem destined to go together.  Imagine a zombie game done completely in a Lego universe.  This could go a long way toward making me feel better about missing out on Dead Rising, and could give Romero a chance to make a little money off his original idea by having him write the game script.  As gamers, we all win when you work zombies into the equation, so bring on the undead slobbering masses - albeit in small cute plastic form - and prepare to see a blockbuster game franchise being born - or more appropriately, re-animated from the dead.  Just remember that you read it here first, but be sure to give the money to George.  He has earned it.

Updated Posts, WoW!

There are two updated posts this morning:

Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women

AND

Take A Falcon To Lunch Day.

Also, Titans of Azeroth help me, I am in the process of signing up for a two week trial of World of Warcraft.  Any suggestions for which server I should join?  What character class would make the best WoW tourist? If I can get the updates downloaded before the two weeks are over I will be doing well!

GL is in the House

Well, sort of anyway.  I am in the last throes of completing my project, and have enough of a break in the work load to put up this short but frivolous post.  And it's about time too!  I haven't had much spare time to play games, but nothing a good solid week of playing won't remedy.  Waiting in the wings in my shiny new copy of Lego Star Wars II, still in the shrink-wrap even, and I can't believe how much self-control I have.  It will be the big reward for finishing up, so I have it propped up on my desk to keep me working.

In the mean time you can see THIS great Flickr photoset of screen shots (via Wonderland) from Lego Star Wars II, if you haven't already dug into the game yourself.  And remember:

"Do, or do not. There is no try." - Yoda

Deadlines

It looks like I will be taking a blog vacation for the month of September as I work on a looming deadline.  Real Life has taken precedent over living on-line, and so I am relieving myself of the duty to update the Guilded Lilies blog through the end of the month.  For those few, those trusty, those tried and true among you that frequent this blog it is going to be quieter than usual here.  But please, do check back, and better yet, subscribe to my feed so that you know when I get back to blogging.  I will be responding to comments during this time, and there is a rare chance that I will finish a few of the posts-in-progress that I have lingering in draft form, so it won't be entirely dead here.

In the mean time, for your blog reading pleasure, I have collected a few chestnuts from the archives:

• PC Games: Who's Playing, Who's Buying?
• Computer Games for a More Productive Tomorrow
• Annie Get Your Gun and Annie Get Your BFG Gun
• Suspension of Disbelief: It Lifts, It Separates!
• This Virtual Space For Rent
• What's Your Gender Frequency, Kenneth?
• Hardcore Vs. Casual: It's A Woman's Prerogative
• Equality is Like Gravity: Joss Whedon on Strong Women Characters

Maybe you missed some of these posts the first time around, so for you it will seem fresh.  Feel free to do some random browsing through the archives as well, there's plenty of stuff there to keep you from being bored at work.

I'll be baaahk!