My latest on Gama. Now I just need to get the article about the indie con done, and I’ll be golden.

That was the first time I’d been inside a McDonald’s since Super Size Me came out.

Saw “A Scanner Darkly” over the weekend. Right after I turned in my midterm for my game design class.

“Take the red pill, Neo. Here, have some more. Take lots of red pills.”

Yeah, I’m sure that joke’s already come up. But I’m staking my claim anyway.

The Sci-Fi Channel has the rights to a cartoon based on “Hellboy” creator Mike Mignola’s comedy miniseries, “The Amazing Screw-On Head,” but the premise is apparently too weird, even for them, so they’ve gone and put the pilot episode up on the Intarwub just to see if anyone thinks it good enough for Cable TV.

“Head” is a send-up of classic Lovecraftian horror tropes, featuring America’s defender from all things weird during its Civil War, and confidant to none other than Abraham Lincoln, an immortal talking metal humanoid head with a screw for a neck that everyone calls “Screw-On Head.” He has several steam-engine robot bodies that he can screw himself onto, and goes on missions to fight monsters and his arch-nemesis, Emperor Zombie. In the cartoon, Head and Zombie are respectively voiced by Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce.

Go vote, America. He’s coming for you.

Not to get on anyone’s tits, but I will be attending the Texas Independent Game Conference this weekend in Austin as Gamasutra’s hired media jackal. I have some reservations that I’ll reserve for the moment, save for the fact that the conference schedule didn’t appear on the Web until a week ago, two weeks before the actual con. But Warren Spector and Greg Costikyan will be running their mouths, so of course it’ll be good press.

Speaking of press, my Austin game-scene acquaintance Evan Van Zelfden has some serious brass balls for submitting quotes from Uncle Warren’s speech at ACC last week to be published in Next-Gen. I can’t tell if it was payback for Spector giving him crap during his speech about quoting him at length in Evan’s report at his SXSW talk (not ScreenBurn, my bad). Obviously I need to ramp up my ruthlessness.

And speaking of ruthlessness, has anyone noticed the cost of registering for the Austin Game Conference this fall? Guess they really want to lock people in early this time around.

So my cable Internet has been crawling like a … not very crawly thing for the past two days, and when I got home tonight, the light on my cable modem was on fast blink.

So I called tech support. Explained in an even tone what was going on, and could someone check my connection. Was asked whether the modem was mine. Yes, I replied, it is mine. “We don’t support modems you own.” That must be a new policy, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get Internet in the first place, surely. “No, sir, it isn’t. I can only suggest pulling out the power cord and letting it reset.”

So I asked to be transferred to a rep who would cancel my service. It being still early in the evening, I went to the local dealer where I bought my used laptop (works well, though I wish I’d have waited a little longer and bought an aftermarket Dell,) which also happens to be a Clearwire dealer. Took home a transceiver, set it up by the window and hooked an extra-long ethernet cable to it, and I am back online.

Obviously with such distractions in my life these days, it’s difficult to stay focused on anything important, such as on my midterm that’s due at the start of class Saturday and the Gamasutra article I promised last week but have yet to deliver — I have good excuses for this, honestly. As it happens, my life is as interesting as it ever gets.

I just am disinclined to write much at all about it. Which is probably why my comments field is so popular with spam bots but not many humans.

Yeah, the Columbine kid. No, not those files, his Doom2 and Quake files, from when he was known as “Rebdoomer” (lol AOL.) Straight from Warren Spector’s worst nightmares.

I never played Ultima 9. People tell me I didn’t miss much.

They LIED. 

Why can’t more game commercials be like this? The mariachi band was a great touch.

Got a lot of writing to do this week and a lot of appointments to keep in addition to my regular job. Warren Spector is speaking tomorrow, and even though I highly suspect it’ll be much the same stuff he’s already said, I’ll be rushing down there like I always do. (This time I get class credit.)

In keeping with the title, however, Mike McShaffry, who has been featured multiple times before on this here Intarwub site (and elsewhere via link), made an interesting post on Quoc Tran’s IGDA forum thread about novel (and ideally more effective) production methods in game development. Yeah, I know, but I actually care about this stuff, shut up.

Continue reading Management by Mr. Mike…