Category — Uncategorized

What was my resolution last year? To become a professional game-maker in 2015.

I know, not the most realistic goal since when I made it last December, I had no experience coding games. I mean, I could code a game, as in, I had the skills. But apparently people do not want to hire you and pay you real money if you have zero hours of professional work experience.

So I decided to tackle this goal a different way.

I pitched a book about teaching other people how to code a game, specifically people who have no coding experience.  It’s a game-making language that is central to leveling the programming playing field, making sure that people who have not traditionally had an open door into the computer world have a space to walk through into game-making.  Kids can grasp it.  Old ladies like me can grasp it.

And amazingly, a publisher bought the book and helped me shape it and gave it an awesome cover.  While it’s not out until spring, it’s up for presale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble et al.  So… introducing the newest member of my book family… Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine.

If you’ve played 80 Days or Lifeline or Device 6, you’ve played interactive fiction, which is an updated, computer-based version of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories from childhood.

To give you a taste of what you can do with it, I made a simple, kid-friendly game that you can play*: A Very Empty Basket.  So click that and play a round, and then come back here because I still have more to say about how this book relates to you.

Oh good, you’re back.

I guess I present this book to you not just because it has been a big part of my life for the last year but because I hope more people in the infertility community will start making their own games or simulation pieces in Twine.  People have been using Twine to give insight into living with depression or trauma or homelessness.  Why not infertility or adoption or loss?

Twine is a simple language to learn — you can pick up the basic tools for making a game in a matter of minutes.  It may take longer to build a complicated game with variables and datamaps, but a basic game: you could start building yours today.

So… I guess I set that as a 2016 challenge for anyone who wants to pick it up: make a game (and don’t get hung up on the word “game”) giving insight into the world of infertility or adoption or loss.  I want to champion that game and help you make it.

So now to come up with a new goal for 2016…

* There should be a prize for anyone who gets all 15 points.  Take a screenshot if you do and send it to me.

Dear Taylor–

My daughter was so excited to see that you were releasing a concert video on December 20th.  She missed your concert this summer, but she has been getting into your music, and this seemed like the perfect do-over for missing 1989.  We put it on the calendar: Sunday night, mother-daughter time.

And then I read an article about the video: it would be streaming exclusively on Apple Music.  Meaning, if you do not have Apple Music, you cannot see it.

It’s not that we couldn’t get Apple Music; we have the right equipment.  But we don’t want our hand forced in getting Apple Music.

It’s not as if you’re the first artist to offer an exclusive deal on an exclusive service.  There have always been television shows created and aired on a specific station (though, if you wait long enough to watch, you can usually pick up those shows on DVD down the road).  We’ve put our foot down with those shows, too.

There is too much out there vying for our attention, too many good pieces of art that ask for our eyes and ears.  I long ago discovered that there is no television show, no movie, no music offered exclusively that is better than what is offered without hoops to jump through despite what the zeitgeist or magazines or award shows would like to have us believe.  It’s just different.

And as is, I will never be able to consume all the great movies and television shows and music out there that is available on multiple platforms for easy viewing.  Why would I ever forgo the art that the creators clearly want me to see and make it easy for me to consume and head towards a video that makes me purchase additional services and watch on a specific device?

It’s like turning down a playdate with Betty Finn to play croquet with the Heathers.

Because you know what these sorts of deals feel like?  They feel like a clique.  Instead of being inclusive, inviting the fan in to enjoy more time with their favourite artists, they feel like a girl talking about the great party she threw over the weekend.  The one that you weren’t invited to but you’re supposed to feel badly because you missed out on something that was so. damn. cool.  And… that’s really unattractive.  Especially to a 41-year-old.

Artists deserve to be paid, but this is a money grab.  It’s not for your fans, it’s for you.

So we reject that.  And we’re buying a different movie instead.  Oh, we’ll still have mother-daughter night on the 20th.  It will just be with a different musician’s concert video.

And lest you feel that you are being singled out, this message goes for all of the shows offered solely on Amazon or Hulu or Netflix.  I’m sure Transparent and Casual and Jessica Jones are great.  But you know what is even better?  Giving my hour to a show that makes it easy for me to watch.

This post contains spoilers for Doctor Who, so stop reading if you haven’t finished the season but watch the show.

We caught up on most of the season’s end of Doctor Who this weekend.  We still have one episode to go.

We knew what was coming, so the twins kept putting off seeing the last three episodes.  But they finally felt ready-ish to watch it all go down, so we got into our pyjamas and piled into our bed and watched.

It was sad.  It was sickeningly sad because there was enough time for the characters to have regrets (or… not have regrets because one of them unrealistically had zero problem with what had happened…  Really?) and say goodbye and think about what was about to happen.  We all cried.  Well, three of us cried, but I like to think that the fourth member of our family was crying on the inside.  We all liked Clara and change is always hard, even when you know that River Song is coming.

The episode after “Face the Raven” was harder because it began with a concept that is simple and obvious but makes you swallow hard nonetheless when you hear it stated aloud: from the moment you are born, death is written into your story.  We all have death hanging over our head every single second of our life.  We know it is coming and there is no way to stop it.

If that doesn’t make you want to pull the blankets over your head, I don’t know what will.

The kids were sad after the episodes, not as much about Clara but more thinking about death in general.  We cuddled and talked about how hard life was knowing that we have to lose people we love.

I have no regrets that we let them watch Doctor Who.  I don’t like it when they’re sad, and I certainly don’t want them to obsess about death, but I also don’t think it does them any favours to pretend that death isn’t a part of life; that death is a very permanent state.

I think it’s better to let them realize that because it is permanent and irreversible, we should do everything in our power to protect people from death when we can such as ensuring they have food and shelter and health care.  We should work to avoid war and support efforts to reduce violence, both of which are a waste of human life.  That, as humans, we should do our best to help other humans so we can all actively work to put off death as long as possible.  Everyone should get a fair shot of living as long as they can.

I would rather have them sad because they lost a favourite character than have them indifferent playing a video game where they are the aggressor, blowing off a human non-player character’s head.  I would rather they consider the enormity of death and therefore actively work to help others than minimize death and have them dehumanized to the point where they can hear another person is suffering and not have it affect their day.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cry.  It’s what happens when you have a heart.

It’s good to have a touchstone, a relationship you can think about to put other things you might feel dismissive about in perspective.  I can always explain to them, “This person in danger is someone else’s Clara, and we need to help that ‘Clara’ because someone else out there is that ‘Clara’s’ Doctor who will mourn her for 4.5 billion years.”  They saw the look on the Doctor’s face.  They saw his fist hitting the wall 4.5 billion times.  They know what love is.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  So get writing, please.

I was reading a book recently that I’m not going to name because it would ruin the ending (it’s sort of the spoiler to end all spoilers) but it contained this crazy idea*.  The main character is in mourning, and he’s told that this isn’t the first time he has been in mourning.  In fact, he (X) has mourned the same loss of the same person many times because another person (Y) kept resetting the clock, rewinding time, reincarnating the players until X got the task performed to Y’s satisfaction.

Trippy.

X doesn’t remember reliving the same moments.  He has no clue that his life has been on a loop, reliving the same scene over and over again.  Even after he’s told, he can’t remember the times that came before the current one, almost as if his extra timelines all fused into layers, one atop the other.  To that end, he has no way of knowing whether or not he is going to be sent back in time and be asked to relive it yet again, or how far back the resetting went.  Was he just living the last adventure again?  Or the last year again?  Or his whole life, over and over again?

I always thought that I’d want to know about my past lives if I discovered emphatically that I was reincarnated, but reading that passage was a little unnerving.  What if Past Me did something awful?  Is Past Me still Current Me?  Am I responsible for everything I did in past lives, or is it a clean slate each time?

I mean, what if you found out that your neighbour — your lovely teenage neighbour who shovels your walk every time it snows and cat sits for you every time you go out of town — is reincarnated Hitler?  Is teenage Phil responsible for the atrocities he committed back when he was Hitler, or is he now just teenage Phil, separate from his past lives?

And moreover, what if people I knew shifted around.  How could I stay married to Current Josh if I discovered that in one of our past reincarnations, he was my child?  Or my father?  Better to not know and to enjoy everyone’s current incarnation vs. having to hold the baggage of their past lives.

I don’t know — if someone could definitively tell you your last few lives, would you want to know the details?  Or would you rather be in a state of blissful ignorance?

There is a moral to this story:

Sometimes when I am waiting for something to happen, I will latch onto something I want and then tell myself that when X happens, I can have Y treat.  It will be a way of celebrating the occasion or accomplishment.

It is a practice that has NOT served me well.

For instance, I have a book that I was really looking forward to reading, and I told myself that I could read it when I got pregnant again.  I wasn’t silly enough to set the bar at “deliver a live baby” or even “get past the first 8 weeks.”  Just get pregnant.

I still haven’t read the book.

See, doesn’t serve me well.  Doesn’t keep me to task or motivate me.  Because 95% of the time, I’m applying it to something outside my control.  I am putting my future enjoyment into the hands of the universe.  And those hands are often not pushing me toward my goal but rather keeping me from it.

A few months ago, I downloaded a solitaire app on my phone.  I wanted to upgrade to the paid version to get rid of the ads, but I told myself that I should wait until X happened.  Upgrading the app would be my Y reward to mark the occasion.

I kept playing the free, ad-heavy version of the app, and every time I had to sit through an ad, it would remind me that X hadn’t happened.  I asked myself to reconsider.

But I think you all know what happens when you try to reconsider:

I suddenly became superstitious and convinced myself that if I bought myself the app — if I celebrated before the moment — that the moment would never arrive.

So I kept playing the ad-heavy app.  “It’s temporary,” I told myself whenever I got crotchety due to the ads.  “When X happens, you’ll have Y.”

After four months, it became clear that X wasn’t going to happen.  Or if it was, it was going to happen on an unsatisfying timeline.  And one night, in a particularly foul mood, I decided to buy the app.  I bought it angrily, punching in my password with quick jabs to show the universe just how pissed I was that X hadn’t happened yet.

And you know what?  The app makes me happy.  It’s a smaller file and runs much faster than the ad-heavy version.  I like not having to see the ads.  But it also makes me feel like I’ve wasted time by waiting.  I could have been playing this better version months ago if I just hadn’t tied these two unrelated things together.  If I hadn’t been superstitious, or thought that things related to luck should be celebrated rather than just acknowledged for what they are: a game of chance.

So much of life is out of my hands; it’s waiting for another person to accept something or find me or connect with me or for the universe to work its completely random magic and cause something to happen… so why should I ever give it more fuel, more power, to change the way I think about myself or the situation.

I’m not waiting anymore.