Spanakopita, games, etc.

I made spanakopita today. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture, so you'll just have to believe my claim that it looked nice. It didn't really look like the photo on that Wikipedia entry; ours was a lighter gold color, and had a bit higher pastry-to-filling ratio. It tasted great; we splurged on some really nice quality feta cheese, and it was definitely worth it. I've had a roll of phyllo dough wasting space in the freezer for months, and this was both a great way to use it up and a fun experiment with a dish I've never made before.

I mentioned some ideas for games I'm working on in my last post. Brian offered to help out with a web game, but I'm not sure how to get hold of him anymore. So Brian, if you're still reading: Send me an email and I'll run my idea by you.

I tried out Minecraft today, although that poor guy probably doesn't need any more links. Penny Arcade did a couple of comics about what a great game it is, and since they're one of the most popular gaming comics on the web (they're #1 or #2), the Minecraft web-site immediately crashed under the load of interested gamers going to try it out. The basic idea seems to be that you wonder around, punching trees, which gives you wood, which you use to make tools, which you use to dig a hole, where you can find diamond and ore, which you use to build a castle and weapons to defend yourself from the zombies. Also: You can build roller coasters, just because. It is, in fact, fun.

Minecraft is also yet another example of publisher-less publishing, and the value of getting attention--the guy managed to get a few thousand registrations over the past 6 months, but in the past few weeks I believe he's made somewhat more than a million dollars. His Paypal account was frozen because they were worried something fishy was going on (600,000 euros in a week!), but as soon as he can get that taken care of, he'll be independently wealthy. Good luck to him.

A New Post

At the encouragement of my wife, who is a good person, I'm posting another blog post. I don't know that I really have anything especially interesting to say. I suppose I will just sort of blather and hope that it works out.

I've been thinking quite a bit about hobbies lately. There's quite a lot of things I'm interested in doing. I enjoy writing music, writing video games, and writing stories. I suppose all of these things have "writing" in common. However, at the moment, I'm kind of between projects -- I have some old, half done things that I could pick up again, or I could try and start something new. I've though of trying to do some software work to help make next year's GEEX conference better, for example. I've also thought of trying to start my own online web game (a major obstacle there being that I would need to learn quite a lot, so it would have to be something really simple). I've also got a bunch of half-finished video games lying around, waiting for a little more attention to make them playable. The same goes for songs -- I've got a whole bunch of rhythm tracks, bass tracks, and interesting chord patterns sitting on my computer, waiting for a little more attention.

Arguably, the trick is to focus on just one thing, so that I can make a lot of satisfying progress with it. Right now, the most likely candidate for getting more attention is an old scripting language/game that I was working on a while back, and which has some really interesting stuff that I could expand on. I don't know. I guess I also feel like, even if I were to push this stuff through to completion, would anyone ever actually play with it, listen to it, or read it? Self-motivated projects are fragile things.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about today.