I had a meeting with an agent tonight.

He asked me, "What do you want to do? What’s your five year plan?"

"I want to write," I said.

This week’s Games of our Lives is Demons to Diamonds. Anyone remember this game? I loved it when I was a kid.

Long before the Atari 2600 unsuccessfully tried to duplicate arcade classics like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, its programmers created wonderful little games that engaged imaginations as much as hand/eye coordination. Demons To Diamonds
took things one step further and put real life into its 8-bit graphics
with a cool little story in the instruction manual, which set the game
at a carnival, and included a churlish demon who told players, "So come
on, reach for your laser, exercise your trigger finger on us. Put us
through our paces and we’ll dazzle you with demonic tricks!" Players
knew right away that they were in for a good time.

[. . .]

Kids today might not like it because: After years of online gaming, playing with a person who is sitting the same room frightens and confuses them.

Kids today might like it because: The manual tells them, "Although DEMONS TO DIAMONDS was
primarily designed for children in the 6 to 12 age range, we find that
people of all ages enjoy this engaging game." Don’t argue, just do what
the manual says and nobody will get hurt.

Check out the full column. I think I snuck some funny into it, and I don’t want to rob the AV Club of your precious clicks.

Eleven days ago, Sean Bonner reported his unfortunate experience with Screamfest at Universal Citywalk, and I wrote a post about it where I said:

I hope that they’ll
make good on their promise to provide full refunds to the people who
couldn’t get them at the theatre . . . if they care at all about
their reputation, I’m sure that they will.

There are a ton of events scheduled for the rest of the weekend —
events that I’d really dig, like a screening of Friday the 13th — but there is no way they’re getting any
of my money until those refunds go out.

So we have another example of the importance of the reputation
economy. If I just read their website, I’d be totally into Screamfest.
But now? Until they give me a good reason to change my mind, Not so
much.

A couple of days later, Sean reported that all was not well with the unfolding saga:

. . . as of this moment I still haven’t received a refund for anything. What
I have received are a few e-mails arguing the situation and so far
claiming that I will NOT be receiving a full refund.

Sean detailed the exchange he had with one of the organizers, which when read objectively gives the appearance of an exhausted person, who is just trying to make sure that she’s not getting scammed by a cranky attendee. This is entirely understandable to me, as I’ve dealt with some unscrupulous fans and promoters over the years, and I can’t even begin to tell you how low some of these people will go to rip you off. Ultimately, they confirmed that Sean wasn’t one of those grifters, and he reports today that the organizers of Screamfest refunded all of his money.

I’d happily like to report that I’ve gotten a full refund for the tickets for both movies.

Good on ya, Screamfest organizers. We who are on the outside will never know what sort of issues you all had as you pulled this event together (unless you choose to share them with us, and that’s entirely at your discretion), but we know now that if something goes wrong with one of your customers, you’ll do the right thing. Whatever you refunded in cash, you’ve earned back tenfold in the Reputation Economy.

Nolan and I carved punkins this evening, on the kitchen floor, the same way we have for the last ten years.

I was particularly impressed with Nolan’s creativity . . . even though put a pretty fine point on the generation gap.

Link to the jack-o-lanterns in the dark, on flickr.

I‘m at a crossroads right now, with regard to my blog: I sort of feel like I’m living in a hotel here in exile, and I’m doing whatever I can
to help the hotel feel more like home while my real house is rebuilt, but the longer I stay here,
and the more I try to make it feel home, the more likely it is that it will
become home. I even tried to import the old WWdN entries to this blog, but (big surprise) the import failed. I wonder if I am doomed to have my archives in a useless textfile on my machine in my office until I eventually just suck it up and pay someone to fix the stupid fucking thing.

If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am.

I spent several hours the other day working on WWdN. With absolutely no progress to show for it when I was done, I was so pissed I slammed some drawers, kicked some things, and realized that I don’t give a flying fuck about the technology any more. I just want to write. Yes, it’s nice to have the "I did it myself" merit badge, but trying to do it all myself is eating up time I would rather spend on other things, and is rapidly sucking the life (and enthusiasm) out of me. When I started with blogger and geocities way back a thousand years ago, I loved that the technology made it easy for me to scrape things out of my brain and moosh them up on The Internets. Then I got into the technology and had a good time scooping my brains out, and manipulating the technology to make the stuff I scooped out look a little better. But now, I just want it to work.  It’s the writing that I care about, and time I spend waste dealing with technical bullshit is time that I can’t spend creating things that matter.

Yes, Virginia, I am starting to hate computers.

So I’m working with a friend of mine to completely rebuild WWdN from the ground up. We’re still puzzling out the final design, but it’s going to be very cool (and very different from the current layout) when it’s done. I’m conflicted about sticking with TypePad (and domain mapping) or banging on MT 3.2 until it has the same functionality as TypePad. Right now, I’m leaning toward domain mapping, even though TypePad is having what appears to be the worst technical difficulties in its history (Six Apart has assured TypePad users that these problems are about to go away. I see no reason to doubt that, but it’s still annoying in the mean time, and is the best argument so far to stay with my own installation at WWdN.)

I don’t know what I’ll ultimately end up doing, but it’s clear that I’ll be in exile for much longer than I originally anticipated.

I’ve changed the feedburner feed to reflect the WWd:iX xml file, rather than the WWdN xml file. If you’re subscribed through feedburner, WWdN:In Exile should start showing up in your RSS reader pretty soon, and we’ll all feel . . . at home.