I’m trying very hard not to graffiti.

I’m trying very hard not to steal things.

I’m trying very hard not to hurt the people around me.

So yeah, I’m taking some time off to calm down. But one last thing: I’m starting to claim white male privilege.

Example:

“Do it this way.”

“Why?”

“White male privilege — because I said so.”

It’s good fun. I feel like I need a soccer-type card (coloured white) as a punctuating prop.

But yeah: I’m actually seeking professional help. More later. Also I might be dropping a music video soon, and TVO might want something I did a long time ago (I’m guessing that won’t happen — but we’ll see).

Anyway, trying to manage my karma. Out.

To that end, they’re getting me to help them revise their hiring process, towards which I am also ambivalent: I get to pick my own coworkers, but I have to do HR — traditionally the most useless development task of all.

How does one hire coders? Interesting question. More to follow (and much discussion, I imagine). Since I’m building HR policy from the ground-up, here’re my preliminary decrees:

HR policy #1: We will never hire anyone who has had anything to do with iTrade or Canada Post.

HR policy #2: We will never hire anyone on my shitlist.

HR policy #3: all my industry friends now have job offers (let me know if you want one).

Corrupt, I know. Fun, too!

Okay, whatever. No ads for you. I don’t want a truck or fucking Budweiser anyway. I guess that’s why they’re fucking me off. Anyway, Chomsky:

It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism.

System: “For service in English, press 1.”
me: 1
System: “For residential inquiries, press 1.”
me: 1
System: “Welcome to Canada Post Customer Service. Goodbye.”

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THIS AIN’T OVER

The odd title is down to another bit of musing: the more I learn about Music the more I think it’s actually the same art as Film and that Game Design is a more-general version of that super-art. Roughly: games are about making NP-hard decisions. Film/Music could be an immense graph of mathematical/physical relationships with individual works as traversals. Music, then, could be a particular problem space within the set of possible Games, which might be why Rock Band works so well.

“Aleatoric” because I like incorporating nondeterminism into things. “Bit” because everything I do is digital. “Sequencing” because everything involves an ordering in time.

* Buddhism says you might not want to spend time making up more illusions to layer over reality. Or, as Marvin the Paranoid Android put it: “Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

I’m upset. Not in the usual sense, but in the literal. I feel off-kilter. I am required to do something tomorrow. People will care. Okay, yes, also a large amount of anxiety.

Tomorrow I’m going to meditate, get my head right, and be a reasonable human being about the whole thing. Live my truth, and etc.

But if they try to make me work weekends I’m going to claim hardcore Judeo-Xtianity: “Can’t man — Sabbath.”

Anyway, more later. For now: Drive with Jill @ The Fox.

[Update: there is no good small/micro business CRM software. 37 Signals was on it, but I guess that project failed -- or converted to Highrise. I just want a one-user-free solution.]

When the company called and asked for references, I decided I’d had enough. The CEO asked me to track down a reference they were having trouble contacting and something in his tone made me furious.

I called up my other references and had them all agree to two things:

1. That we hadn’t discussed what to say to the guy.
2. That when I work overtime I sometimes, playfully, strangle coworkers.

And that, as they say, was the end of that. He was digging, so I gave him something to find — a strategy from poker. I’m collating reports from my obliging refs, perhaps for another update.

I’ve seen a couple of beneficial side effects already. First, I feel better about my interactions with the douche — like I counted coup. Second, I broke a creative block I’ve had on a story I’ve been working on for a couple of years about the games industry. Third, I feel more confident — I got an anecdote out of an unpleasant encounter. Fourth, I feel more connected to my references. Fifth, I didn’t send someone a crazy fucking letter.

I’m sure the list will grow.

I can’t say too much — this is high tech so obviously everything is tip top secret on pain of enhanced interrogation and rendition to room 101 — but I’ll be at an iOS studio that is expanding to the major consoles, and I’m one of the relatively few people in TO with seventh generation console programming experience. I guess.

From their hiring questions (it turns out they liked that answer!) I will probably be building interface design tools and display systems. I used to think that I was doomed to do interface development forever, but as I matured it turned out to be interesting and useful — even something I do for fun — “become what you are.” I reckon this change of mind is largely due to “interface” stuff sounding sexier to my design brain now.

It’ll be useful for me to update my company’s paperwork and web presence shortly — I’m going to start banking deductions and development incentives because “we” have nontrivial revenues now. It might be time to outsource some economically efficient subset of “our” business to India.

Aside: I wrote this on my slide phone while waiting to see a doctor. An older guy sitting across from me interrupted a girl tapping away, “look, everyone’s on their phones” — and we all were — “I am more oldschool.” She smiled and went back to tapping. He turned back to the television.

McLuhan might say that we were all modifying our environment with electronic technology. Doctors’ waiting rooms have always needed cybernetic enhancement — even with something as low-tech as a book or magazine. The real space of a waiting room is far less interesting than ANY possible virtual environment. But privileging an anonymous broadcast over personal, perhaps social, engagement is oldschool in a strange way: It’s anti-tribal, googie even, as if the future had come and gone in 1986.

Watching reports about stocks I don’t own, weather that isn’t here, and traffic I won’t encounter is a much more passive, disengaged way to spend time than [micro]blogging and playing Marble Cannon. Or killing those goddamn smug pigs in Angry Birds. The old guy was essentially complaining that we were impoverishing his technological-environmental experience without identifying that experience itself as impoverished. We were much more socially engaged, albeit in our own isolated universes: I was talking to people all across Canada and he couldn’t engage someone across an empty chair.

I had McLuhan in my pocket too, to cybernetically modify the streetcar ride home: “The Medium is the Massage”. I should have given it to the old guy, but while I was writing this he got bored of waiting and left.

Aside’s aside: it occurs to me that “small” games should be tribally social: “eclectically” multiplayer, instead of “massively”. They should all have “friends” leaderboards, baseline. Maybe matching the scope of a game to the scope of its social engagement is a good guideline.

Anyway, I know a couple of celiacs and they are skinny as heck — and there’s nothing I’d like to do more than diet based on an implausible corporate-grassplant conspiracy. I think it was Michael Pollan who said you can think of modern agriculture as a war between wheat and corn to control the humans — the resources that enable their propagation. They certainly have lobbies in most governments more powerful than you, I, or our elected representatives, as well as a more complex genome.

Today for breakfast: olive oil cooked omelet with chopped red peppers, fresh ground black pepper, and kosher salt. Coffee (lots of cream, no sugar). Down with wheat!

I would also say “down with Corn!” but, let’s face it, all of the most delicious foods are corn-based: tacos, burritos, enchiladas, tortilla chips… Or maybe I just like South-Central American cuisine?