Midnight Ryder's Blog

When Skyler Lovelace of Pixel Time and I sat down and discussed the idea of an Introduction to Game Development (and a Game Development for Teens class) for Pixel Time, we threw together a quick “marketing blurb” on what my accomplishments were.  It was quick and simple:

“Sickmon is a popular speaker at IndieGamesCon, an annual conference for independent game developers. As a software development, he has released seven video games of his own, as well performed contract work in the game industry. Sickmon was co-host on the World of Gamer Zone TV show, which aired in 2006. He plans to re-launch the show as an online series, to be shot at Pixel Time.”

We moved on, and didn’t think much about it until someone questioned my credentials online.  It didn’t bug me someone asking (in fact, I think that’s a very diligent approach to spending time and effort for a course like this – get online, and check things out), but it pointed out one of the flaws in the plan – we really needed to expand upon that.  I had considered a standard resume, but I think this format will be a little more fun (and informative!)

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Well, finally. When I moved the blog, the goal was to start using it quite frequently. That was last year’s plan, anyway. In fact, I’ve got stubs of articles written in a folder, but I’ve just never gotten around to finishing them and recording the podcast. And of course, the site also started to look way too cluttered – I had added my Twitter stream to the site, just for the heck of it, and suddenly all the real content just disappeared into the 3,000 tweets I’ve posted since my last blog entry (OK, I’ll admit it – I talk on Twitter way too damned much somedays.)

One of the other problems with the blog was motivation – while I wanted to do it, it never filtered to the top of my pile of “ToDo’s”. Nothing I was doing was interconnected with making sure my blog got done. The blog serves two purposes: first, it’s an outlet for my opinions and stories, and everyone who knows me well knows I have plenty of both. And fortunately, both are usually considered to be fairly good most days (or so I’ve been told – I’m not going to trust my own judgement on that, I’ve got a fairly good sized ego The second reason is self promotion – I’ve got books and projects that are always in development that I need to be promoting. Just blogging about them isn’t enough promotion, of course, but every little bit helps.

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If you haven’t noticed, my blog moved to it’s own domain!

It’s been a bit since I’ve updated it – mainly because I had the idea of moving it to it’s own place, wanted to change the visual feel of things, and a million other little tweaks to it.  And just to add to that, I’ve had a busy schedule with things like the first book signing for The Story of Gamer Zone, and the first Fountain Street Productions arranged festival.  All things added together, the blog ended up being on hold until I could get the redesign done the way I wanted it.

Now that it’s done I’ll be resuming my regular posting schedule (which is every week to two weeks.) Look for the first new podcast / blog sometime this week!

Davis

We’re living in interesting times when it comes to history.  There’s a huge number of people who study the past.  Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Historians, and all sorts of other folks who piece together what humanity was.  It’s not an easy job – the farther you go back in time, the less information there is to work with.

Looking forward though, those people who’s job it is to re-construct the past is going to hold some interesting new challenges.  There may not be a lack of information – there may be an over abundance of information that makes it more interesting to sift and narrow down information on a single social group.

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Recently I’ve been hit by a big wave of nostalgia.  The source of that nostalgia is Twitter and Tweetups, and in particular the WichiTweeps group.  It reminds me a lot of days I thought were gone – the old BBS era.

I got into BBS’s back in the day when online communication wasn’t pervasive yet.  Internet access to the home wasn’t even a thought yet – there were only 10,000 hosts on the Internet back in 1987, and not a single one of them hosted a website.  Tim Berners Lee hadn’t developed “The World Wide Web” yet.  And being connected to another computer via a modem was a novelty at best for most people.  And yes – at the tender age of 15 I was starting to get connected to BBS’es via my Amiga.  I’ve always been a geek.  Now I’m just an old geek with stories like “back in my day, we connected to ONE other computer at 1200 baud!  And we liked it!  Now you damned kids get off my lawn!”

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