deathmtn

I've also been thinking about working hard at work to further your career. Normally, I don't do this; but there are occasional periods in which I do.

Right now, I'm thinking I should never do this. Assuming a normal software development job market, I should probably only work hard on things that I think are intrinsically worthwhile, which is my natural mode of operation. Then, I should (honestly) just try to sell what I do instead of trying to bend the natural trajectory of my work.

I've been busy, and I'm tired. I was just talking to Katt about how I think I'm living my life the best I can, but feel like maybe there's some way I could do better?

Then, I realized that's basically the song Working Man:

Well I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin' yeah
I'm workin all the time.

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me,
They call me the working man.

They call me the working man
I guess that's what I am

This part, though, seem really quaint:

I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out a nice cold beer
Always seem to be wonderin
Why there's nothin' goin' down here.

OK, Working Man actually seems to have it rather sweet, by 2018 standards.

I am lucky to get home a bit after five on most days (not so much this week), and then there's a bunch of family-related and house maintaining stuff to do.

Vast numbers of people are at the mercy or the gig economy and work unpredictable and harsh hours.

I wonder if 9-5 is what people thought was too much work because of better labor conditions in the seventies, or if that was just what Rush thought of as a lot of work as a result of never having had normal jobs.

Video Games Are Boring

And then one day she started to ask about video games. I was thrilled. Of course I recommended Journey. It seemed like the natural fit. To my surprise, she didn't finish it. She didn't like that there is a snake that can kill you. It's not that it is too hard, it's that she is deeply uninterested in being attacked in a game. But it did intrigue her enough that she asked for more recommendations.

A lot of games assume people want to deal with things that they don't actually find at all enriching. The whole thing is very well-stated.

This Sigh song has handclaps! 👏 You gotta love handclaps in metal.

11 checks today.

I went to Twitter today. Non-chronolgical timelines, et al aside, I think one of the strongest tools it has for 1) increasing engagement and 2) putting users through a lot of useless and/or detrimental emotional stress is actually just the retweet feature. If it weren't easy to do that, people might think about whether or not it actually helps to spread something they reacted strongly to.

The full timeline of Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and the morphing Saudi response

“The Kingdom also affirms that if it receives any action, it will respond with greater action.”

I'm not sure what to think of this, other that holy crap.

Also, I guess the Turkish-Saudi relationship is not that good, given that its autocratic leader is interested in investigating the murder of a dissident.

Was not comfortable sitting the whole day (I'm in a satellite office for a bit in which I do not have a standing desk and didn't ask for one because I figured I wouldn't need it.) But getting up every so often mitigated discomfort, and I was able to make it through the day.

I felt this strange "treasuring" feeling of the healing process. I imagined a future old self that suffered a similar injury and was not experiencing an observable recovery. A feeling you can savor, only because the future will be grim!

Rockstar Games, who very recently boasted of making its workers work 100 hour weeks to complete their upcoming cowboy game, told an employee in the past that she was jeopardizing her career by encouraging her teammates to take a 30-minute break.

We were expected to work late & on weekends VERY regularly. In my own time I made cakes & it was something many looked forward to once a week for a short 30 minutes. It helped moral significantly. A mini non-scientific study I did showed more bugs were fixed on Cake Day!

After quite a few months of this, I got pulled aside by my boss. Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week. I was told that I was jeopardising my career by continuing to make cakes for the office.

I was told that we could do cake day, but only during lunch hour - when people are eating lunch and don’t really need that essential afternoon tea break with lots of sugar. I tried to push back.

The day I was told not to do Cake Day I had already baked a cake. I was so scared I decided not to announce anything. I never ate that cake. It was a Portal cake. That’s what voluntary crunch pressure does: it scares people into believing there's no other choice.

At one point in my career, I did crunch. Back in the early 2000s, it was something expected of people in the broader software industry, not just games. I did not work 100-hour weeks; that's unfathomable. But I did work 70-hour weeks for months at a time, and that was crushing. I don't wish that on anyone.

This morning, the guy said I was mad last night that he put his sticker in the wrong box on the calendar. I probably did sound mad because I always get tense about mistakes that are hard to reverse, even if they're mistakes that don't actually matter like this one.

A dad that seems mad because you put a sticker in the wrong spot is a very classic Bad Dad, so I should really watch out for reacting like that.

Hey! I'm sitting without discomfort!

7 checks today.

Oh, yeah, last Saturday, we played D&D again!

The PCs were headed toward a dungeon, so I made one. It was the base of operations of a rumored-to-be-dead wizard. Among other things, she did some predatory lending in the nearby village. Last session, they investigated a few instances of the villagers suffering the effects of that. (A golem systematically ripping apart a house, for example.)

I picked a setting: It was a mountain that you could go inside, meaning that it had a mine, tunnels, and who knows what else.

I chose a general theme, history, and factions for the dungeon.

Then, I thought, it would be great if areas within the dungeon were swappable. Meaning, you could say "in this space in the dungeon, Areas, A, B, and F could both physically fit and make narrative." Then, at game time, you could decide "it is actually Area B that will go here". Being able to decide what goes where dynamically would help a great deal with pacing issues while also being more fun for the DM.

Of course, I then tried to write a web app to support it. I had dungeon floor outlines on the left, and then generated ares on the right. I figured the DM would be able to generate a bunch of areas, delete the ones they didn't like, then label the ones they did like and key the content to those areas. Then, at game time, they'd drag areas to their proper place among the dungeon floor outlines and save that.

A couple of hours in, I realized it was harder than I thought to generate areas that were usable, so I let the idea go. I could have pivoted to making a little drawing program for them DM so they could make their own areas, but drawing that kind of thing on the computer is bigger hassle than just drawing them in their natural habitat: graph paper.

Having burned time on a technological gamble, I cut over the next evening to just making a dungeon the old-fashioned way. I draw maps on graph paper and wrote out lists of:

1. "Rooms" (whatever you want to call the atomic unit of space in a dungeon, be it castle or the inside of a mountain)
2. Events
3. Monsters
4. Items and item tables

Doing this on paper was really satisfying and peaceful. My only major fear about it was that I could lose the notebook that it was in, but now that I think about it, I can mitigate that by taking pictures of it.

Again, having limited time, I couldn't define the entire mountain. I had to choose between defining more of the outside or writing more of the interior and coming up with a way to railroad PCs into the inside. I had railroaded them way back at the beginning of the campaign by having the store they were in fall into a sinkhole that slid them 1,000 feet underground, so I decided to keep things more "Zelda" this time. There will be a cost to leaving the dungeon, but there will also be a cost to moving anywhere outside. However, it won't be impossible.

As such, I set up encounters outside of the mountain, and hey, I guessed right! The PCs spent more time outside the mountain than inside.

I worked out a few really weird monsters that they didn't get to in this session, but they got plenty of mileage out of:

1. Badgers! They're really mean in nature, and in 2E AD&D, surprisingly statistically powerful. They have claw/claw/bite! Animals provoke strong reactions in the PCs (and players)! There was a lot of discussion about how to respond to a particularly damaging badger attack! In the end, they killed one and befriended one.

2. Fengon, a hobgoblin lookout. He belongs to a local bandit gang. The PCs Charm Person or Mammal'd him, and
he rolled with the party for a while, telling "tough older brother"-style stories and boasting of his own strength. Kardosh, the party's barbarian (technically a fighter on paper) was crushed when Fengon beat him in arm wrestling, then proceeded to flex. (He later restored his honor himself by forcing open a scrollcase that Fengon could not open.)

3. The challenge of using rope to climb a mountain! So, these guys are really into rope. They had a total 300' of rope on them. Egg, the thief, has a Ring of Feather Fall. They had her do this risk-free, but exhaustive, search for an entrance, and they found one of the high ones.

Then, they went into MacGyver mode to find a way to get 100' up the mountain (141' along the side of the mountain, as we figured out, because this fantasy mountain has a 45 degree slope) without risking falling and death while climbing with their many heavy possessions.

One of the players came up with rope splicing (which seems extremely error-prone) as a way to avoid knots when connecting the six ropes into a single 300' loop. (The reason they wanted a loop is beyond the scope of this post.)

It was some highly entertaining conjecturing, and they did in fact get the system work for one player, but could not actually unlock the door they worked so hard to climb to. We'll see how/if they deal with that next time!

In the Clues Are Hard to Do Department, they encountered a bed of broken adventurer bones. Among them was a note instructing them to climb the mountain in order to skip over some amount of dungeon trouble. The players, very reasonably, found this extremely ambiguous. But when I wrote it, I was like, oh obviously, that'll get them go this one way.

So, there you have it. Badgers, a bro hobgoblin, and a mountain and some rope. With the right players, that's all you need in an adventure!

Good update on this task, though! I think RamNode or NameBright responded to my DMCA email because the stolen site is no longer up. I'd guess RamNode because they actually replied to my email.

Anyway, DMCA is actually good for something!

I cleared a task that I had in my big plan for the month. It was "List tasks for exhibiting." The idea was that I'd refer back to a solicitation for artists to exhibit at an event in December. I figured, hey, I'm an artist, and lots of artists do this; I should try it out and see if it's a good way for people to check out my stuff.

Well, I looked that event up today, and they're looking for installation artists. I'm more of a "show you a thing on a computer or tablet or on your own phone" kinda artist.

In an effort to honor the spirit of that task, I looked up a local artists' association that I remembered. They take dues, then they get to exhibit at events (which may be attended mostly by each other, which is fine).

Upon examination, it appears to be all painters. I emailed them to see if I, a generative artist, would be allowed to join them. Then, I moved the task to the Done column.

It felt oddly dishonorable? But there's no great way to set a scope for something like that. Either you say you're going to take a few shots and move on, or you say that the task is to actually exhibit by any means necessary, which makes the task into a quest.

Really good talk by Mouse Reeve about the techniques they used to make Unfamiliar City. The maps are generated in layers, starting with simplex noise. It reminds me a bit of how worlds are generated in Dwarf Fortress. (Though really, a lot of things are generated in layers, so maybe that's not an especially illuminating comparison.)