http://www.midnightryder.org Business, Technology, Software Development, and Games - the things that affect our culture. Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:41:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Copyright © Midnight Ryder's Blog 2010 daviss@midnightryder.com (Midnight Ryder's Blog) daviss@midnightryder.com (Midnight Ryder's Blog) posts 1440 Business, Technology, Software Development, and Games - the things that affect our culture. Midnight Ryder's Blog Midnight Ryder's Blog daviss@midnightryder.com No no http://www.midnightryder.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg http://www.midnightryder.org 144 144 http://www.midnightryder.org/2010/06/my-experience-in-game-development/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2010/06/my-experience-in-game-development/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:36:48 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://www.midnightryder.org/?p=1350 http://www.midnightryder.org/2010/06/my-experience-in-game-development/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2010/04/reboot-for-the-blog-and-for-bits-of-my-life/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2010/04/reboot-for-the-blog-and-for-bits-of-my-life/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:22:46 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://www.midnightryder.org/?p=1330 http://www.midnightryder.org/2010/04/reboot-for-the-blog-and-for-bits-of-my-life/feed/ 0 00:01:01 Well, finally. When I moved the blog, the goal was to start using it quite frequently. That was last year's plan, anyway. ... 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. Now, however, the blog (and similar self-promotion techniques) have become important again. nbsp;For a while, most of my money (well, what little of it I made) was made from web development. nbsp;However, times and industries change, and having grown tired of customers that slow pay, customers that promise a project then suddenly back out, and all of the drama, I'm going back to a path from past. nbsp;I'm going back into entertainment. I've done two things in the past that are entertainment based - the first was video game development. nbsp;I developed and released seven full games for the PC, plus did contract work for other game development companies, back before getting involved with the whole LAN gaming center hell known as Gamer Zone. nbsp;That distraction ended up killing most of the headway I had made in game development - things like speaking at conferences, connections, that sort of stuff. During Gamer Zone, I somehow pulled off creating a television show - the World Of Gamer Zone. nbsp;It was reviews and game news - but as we went along, the show slowly morphed to contain information on how to develop games, and at one point we began the process of a game in development. nbsp;Instead of being talking heads just doing reviews it suddenly gained a very serious value as a tool for education or enlightenment in the field of game development. nbsp;As Gamer Zone died, the show continued right up until the TV station it aired on was bought out. After Gamer Zone, it became a slow climb uphill to start paying off my debts from that failure. nbsp;Which is where web development came in play - it required less of an investment in time to get a return back. Now game development and TV both seem to have something in common - there's this weird draw to get back into it. nbsp;I can tell you if I never did another website I wouldn't feel deeply drawn to do it again. nbsp;But TV and games? nbsp;Oh, there's a serious draw there. nbsp;I've been making plans to get back into both fields for quite a while now - they just never quite pan out. nbsp;I'm always lacking the resources (either time or money) to make them happen. But I managed to enter yet another entertainment field - I became a writer. nbsp;My first book, The Story of Gamer Zone has never burned up the charts - but one reason is because I've never marketed it. nbsp;I know about marketing, and it's quite often I spend a lot of (unpaid) hours helping web development customers with marketing both for their website and their business. I was instantly addicted to another entertainment field - I love writing. nbsp;Two more books are written already (one n... Davis,Ray,Sickmon,,Jr daviss@midnightryder.com no No http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/03/blog-move/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/03/blog-move/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:35:33 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://1414178077 http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/03/blog-move/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/the-relevance-of-blogging-in-history/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/the-relevance-of-blogging-in-history/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:28:03 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://1238756933 http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/the-relevance-of-blogging-in-history/feed/ 2 12:20 We're living in interesting times when it comes to history. nbsp;There's a huge number of people who study the past. nbsp;Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Historians, and all ... We're living in interesting times when it comes to history. nbsp;There's a huge number of people who study the past. nbsp;Anthropologists, Archaeologists, Historians, and all sorts of other folks who piece together what humanity was. nbsp;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. nbsp;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. I'm not really that interested in history. nbsp;Sure, who won the Battle of Gettysburg is a culturally important piece of history, but all the minute details surrounding it? nbsp;I really don't care that much. nbsp;On the other hand, how the war impacted day to day life, or how day to day life impacted the war? nbsp;That I find interesting. nbsp;The human element is what shapes history. nbsp;Sure, we see all the big events, but it was the cultures involved that lead to those big events, and the aftermath afterwords tells is how much real impact those events had. And for me it goes a bit deeper than that. nbsp;It's interesting to see how people lived, the problems they faced on a day to day basis, things like that. nbsp;Things that fall less into the arena of historians, and more into the field of anthropology and sociology. nbsp;But piecing things like how day to day life effects government policy, or how policy effects day to day life, used to be a damned hard job, if not impossible. nbsp;Even something as simple was what people ate on a daily basis in Rome 44 BC is damned hard to do. As we move forward in time, there are certain human inventions that have improved that situation. nbsp;The printing press, the library, things like that. nbsp;At first, computers weren't much of a contributor to the situation - how many people in the 80's have bothered to save any of their old data from their Commodore 64, for instance? Now we've got world wide access to the Internet. nbsp;That it's self is interesting, but add one more layer, and how we deal with history is changed for ever: nbsp;The Social Networking Site. MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Facebook, and a ton of other blogging sites will change what we deal with. nbsp;Then add all the little Wordpress, Joomla, and other non-major service blogging services. nbsp;And heck, throw in Twitter and other micro-blogging sites, just to give us even more fined-grain live coverage of events as they happened. nbsp;And for the purposes of this conversation, I'm going to end up using traditional blogs and microblogs in a sort of interchangeable fashion. What you end up with is an amazingly wide view of humanity in general. nbsp;Not just a US-centric view, for instance, but you can get a view of any country. nbsp;Or are you interested in the challenges facing people who moved to the US in the mid-2000's? nbsp;No problem - it's available to dig through. It's gotten to the point that blogging has become ridiculously widespread. nbsp;I'm not just talking about blogging for dollars - I'm talking about people discussing the day to day portions of their lives. nbsp;I started blogging in 1999 (before blogging was the word for it), and since then on the average I've written one blog post every 6.3 days since then, either personal or professional. nbsp;Not everyone is as prolific as me, but there are some that exceed my blogging habit, writing more than one entry per day. But the stuff that people blog goes much deeper than just information on their personal lives. nbsp;The contribution of improved nutrition to human lifespan has always been a subject of study for anthropologists and medical types - in 200 years, looking back to see how we ate becomes simple. nbsp;There's a ton of blogs for just things like recipes (and some services li... Davis,Ray,Sickmon,,Jr daviss@midnightryder.com no No http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/of-twitter-tweets-and-wichitweeps/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/of-twitter-tweets-and-wichitweeps/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:18:24 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://1324464972 http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/of-twitter-tweets-and-wichitweeps/feed/ 10 00:01:01 Recently I've been hit by a big wave of nostalgia. nbsp;The source of that nostalgia is Twitter and Tweetups, and in particular the WichiTweeps group. ... Recently I've been hit by a big wave of nostalgia. nbsp;The source of that nostalgia is Twitter and Tweetups, and in particular the WichiTweeps group. nbsp;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. nbsp;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. nbsp;Tim Berners Lee hadn't developed "The World Wide Web" yet. nbsp;And being connected to another computer via a modem was a novelty at best for most people. nbsp;And yes - at the tender age of 15 I was starting to get connected to BBS'es via my Amiga. nbsp;I've always been a geek. nbsp;Now I'm just an old geek with stories like "back in my day, we connected to ONE other computer at 1200 baud! nbsp;And we liked it! nbsp;Now you damned kids get off my lawn!" In fact, if I tried to explain BBS'es to people back then, you just got odd stares. nbsp;Why talk with people online when you could just pick up the phone and talk in person? nbsp;At first the reason had little to do with social interaction so much as convincing sysops of some local wares BBS to increase my download limits - piracy was a good use for a modem back then. But slowly I started to check out sites with a more social focus, like The Precipice. nbsp;Instead of only one person talking to a sysop, a whopping SIX people could talk at the same time. nbsp;Slowly I began to worry less and less about pirating, and me and a buddy of mine, Rich, would stay up way too late on a school night chatting online. A lot of it was novelty, but the people we found online were similar to us: geeks. nbsp;It wasn't just a male thing either - there were both sexes on there. nbsp;Most of them intelligent people, a little more open minded than the general guy on the street, and almost always valued a good conversation. nbsp;And when people think 1980's geeks, they think the stereotypes from movies like Revenge of the Nerds - taped glasses, sociallynbsp;awkward, and basement dwellers. nbsp;The people on Precipice were rarely like that. nbsp;For that matter - neither was I. nbsp;I had some geekynbsp;tendencies, but I definitely didn't fit any of that stereotype. Eventually The Precipice died - this always happened with BBS'es. nbsp;No matter how good they were, they eventually succumbed to the economic realities of keeping such an expensive hobby or business alive. nbsp;For a while, there was a lull in my online communication - all of the multi-line BBS'es like Precipice had died in Wichita. Probably around 1991, a friend turned me on to something - there were multi-line BBS back in Wichita, Kansas again! nbsp;Elysian Fields became, for me anyway, the hight of the BBS era. nbsp;Games, chat rooms, and all sorts of good stuff. nbsp;I spent a TON of time on there. The important part of Elysian Fields was that, again, it was mostly like minded geeks of all sexes and ages, but this time we didn't restrict ourselves to just chatting online. nbsp;There were parties were people met up and dealt with each other face to face. nbsp;Almost everyone who logged into EF was a local in Wichita or the surrounding area, so there was no long travel for a party - we were all right there. A lot of real world friendships were created there. nbsp;I even dated a couple of the girls that I had met at Elysian Fields inspired parties - one I dated off and on for two years. nbsp;Ok, another one I dated for a whopping two weeks, though we hung out quite a bit after that. Don't get me wrong - not everyone was cool and awesome. nbsp;But with the BBS'es, you could pick and choose - anyone you didn't like to deal with you just typed /ignore and forgot about 'em. nbsp;You social scene on the BBS was just as selective, or maybe even more so, than you social scene in real life. Elysian Fields wasn't alone in Wichita - there we... Davis,Ray,Sickmon,,Jr daviss@midnightryder.com no No http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/new-and-improved-now-with-podcasting-my-blog-returns/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/new-and-improved-now-with-podcasting-my-blog-returns/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:41:41 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://107038952 http://www.midnightryder.org/2009/01/new-and-improved-now-with-podcasting-my-blog-returns/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/10/apple-understands-computers-apple-doesnt-understand-developers/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/10/apple-understands-computers-apple-doesnt-understand-developers/#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:34:01 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://www.midnightryder.com/blogs/?p=74 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/10/apple-understands-computers-apple-doesnt-understand-developers/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/the-story-of-a-failed-business-from-beginning-to-end/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/the-story-of-a-failed-business-from-beginning-to-end/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:26:19 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://www.midnightryder.com/blogs/?p=69 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/the-story-of-a-failed-business-from-beginning-to-end/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/jack-thompson-is-so-disbarred-oh-come-on-its-funny-damnit/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/jack-thompson-is-so-disbarred-oh-come-on-its-funny-damnit/#comments Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:24:35 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://953224460 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/jack-thompson-is-so-disbarred-oh-come-on-its-funny-damnit/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/developers-a-word-or-1000-on-licenses-get-them-right/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/developers-a-word-or-1000-on-licenses-get-them-right/#comments Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:40:02 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://www.midnightryder.com/blogs/?p=56 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/developers-a-word-or-1000-on-licenses-get-them-right/feed/ 0 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/the-new-blog/ http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/the-new-blog/#comments Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:42:08 +0000 Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr http://www.midnightryder.com/blogs/?p=25 http://www.midnightryder.org/2008/09/the-new-blog/feed/ 0