What i did on my christmas vacation

What I Did On My Christmas Vacation / Как я провел рождество с мамой и сестрой – анонсы

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Тревис всегда защищал и оберегал свою младшую сестру Тери. После аварии в которой умер их отец, а Тери серьезно пострадала, ему не раз приходилось избивать засранцев, которые доставляли ей проблемы. Однако на рождественских каникулах его сестра столкнулась с проблемой, которую нельзя было решить кулаками.

Анонсы перевода

Анонсы — это как бы лента новостей проекта перевода. Анонсы пишут модераторы перевода. Так как этот перевод – открытый, все его анонсы попадают также и в общую ленту анонсов.

Написать анонс в книге можно только в случае, если в ней были переводы за последние 5 дней.

WHAT I DID ON MY CHRISTMAS VACATION

Posted on January 5, 2011

Yes, Uncle Blogsy took some time off, as promised. I went out west: not so far west that I was out of the reach of Midwestern weather, just west of Chicago. We were given more than ten inches of snow one day, but I had little or no part in the clearing of it, so I could just watch and say “Ooh, how purty!”

I made a few sociological observations to bring back. In my part of the country, fewer and fewer people are driving what used to be known as “cars”. I believe two of every three vehicles I saw in the grocery store parking lot was an RV, SUV, or just a van, and if you add to that the families who always have driven pick-ups, I suppose no more than 12% of the array could be called cars.

I also noted by listening to the radio that people are still out there writing Christmas songs, people who ought to be restrained by their friends. I could have written those songs, and you know THAT is not a good thing. They mean well, poor dears, and their basic concept is okay but their poetry skills…well, perhaps at that time of year one shouldn’t be critical.

On the other hand, hey, it’s January now. And way too many songs come out with choruses like

“Oh, I love to be with my family at Christmas

Because Christmas is when I like to be with my family;

Families are wonderful at Christmas

Cuz Christmas time is…..Family Time.”

But to a great degree over the break I looked at books. I hope you didn’t think I was going somewhere book-free. We give books at Christmas. (We once had a high-tech holiday when almost nobody got a book, and it was one of the longest December 25ths on record.) I looked over the book sale racks at the public library, and gave my verdict on the books bought at sales through the summer. (My mother, particularly, is a serious book buyer and is NEVER coming to the Newberry Library Book Fair. There’d be nothing left for YOU.)

No, I’m not going to report to you about what books I saw. A book report over vacation? Don’t be daft.

(NEXT TIME: What YOU did over my Christmas vacation.)

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

Every year the residents of this St. Catharines, Ontario road go all-out with the Christmas decorations. The street’s actual name is Rio Lane but it will always be Griswald Avenue to me.

I know what you must be thinking… “We’re into June and HoaiPhai is just getting around to doing his Christmas post-game show. He must have had one hell of a vacation!” The short answer to that question, which if you were paying attention you would have realized wasn’t even a question in the first place, is “yes and no”.

Gone are the days when I’d go to a New Year’s Eve party and sometime around the middle of February wake up in a ditch penniless and hungover with a new crop of cold sores and my pants on backwards. This Christmas wasn’t one for the record books in that sense but, hey, I only got two extra days off work this year.

While it lacked the excitement and debauchery of Yules of yore, I had a fine Christmas just the same… it was incredibly involved with various layers of sub-themes, cameo appearances, and turkey. I had several hints well in advance that things would turn out that way so I sprung into action in early November and bought myself a lot of presents. My new toys will feature prominently in future posts if I can ever get this getting-bigger-and-bigger-every-time-I-work-on-it post up.

No matter how humble, every Christmas involves extensive planning.

The Traditional HoaiPhai Family Christmas

Usually Christmas at Hoaiphai’s place is fairly low-key with a tiny fake self-lit tree (which is kind of funny considering that in my yard there are three forty-foot pines just twenty feet away from where we keep the fake indoor one), some presents, a turkey, and some old movies on DVD with just me, the wife, and my son in attendance. About every second year my friend The Dane spends a couple of days with us, too.

I usually drag myself over to my brother’s house on Boxing Day to catch up with the family. My siblings tend to gather there because they know where to find his well-stocked liquor cabinet. It is for this very reason that I hide my booze in the basement, in the cabinet above the fridge, and in another secret location I’m not even going to tell you about, leaving only weird imported beers and Hpnotiq in plain sight. The genius behind my three-location caching technique is should one of my relatives ever find one of my hidden reserves, it alone won’t be well-stocked enough for them to want to make my home a regular haunt. The gang wouldn’t even get “saturated” by the contents of just one of my caches and would have to move on to another watering hole.

A week of turkey leftovers typically follows Boxing Day, signalling the end of the Christmas Season and heralding in the three month long I-keep-writing-the-wrong-year-on-cheques-and-other-important-documents season I like to think of as Doofusary.

Yes, I did subject Mrs. HoaiPhai to all these traditional rituals but there was something extra special about this year’s Christmas.

Alice in Wonderland

This is a picture of Alice from last summer. Remember?

I don’t know if you remember my wife’s nine-year-old grandniece Alice from last summer’s staycation series of posts but she spent Christmas with us.

In October my wife got a call from Alice’s mother asking if Alice could come spend some time with us over the Christmas holidays. She had asked Alice if she would like a vacation abroad (they live in Korea) as a Christmas gift from her parents and gave Alice the choice of going to her aunt’s place in Los Angeles or to us here in the wilds of the Canadian Niagara area. She immediately chose to spend time with her grand-aunt (or is that great-aunt?) and yours truly.

At first Mrs. HoaiPhai refused, saying that it was going to be tough to take care of her, what with us being too poor to not both have to work, and that there would be nothing for Alice to do here during the winter. When I caught wind of this, I reminded my wife that we would have plenty of time to watch the kid because that magical time of year would soon be rolling around when my wife gets laid off work until spring. Besides, I reasoned, wouldn’t it be great to have a child, especially a Korean one, in the house for Christmas?

Derailing the Story with a Bit of Back-story

You have to understand why I specified a Korean child at the end of the last paragraph. You see, Christmas is not as huge in Korea as it is over here. The Koreans, however, do (Lunar) New Year in elaborate ways that are head and shoulders over our spending way too much cash on a dinner and bubbly wine just to have one’s vision all blurry while trying to watch a ball drop, and then having a fight with your date about the intensity with which you kissed that strange girl at midnight, and then not being able to find a taxi to take you home to your lonely, empty apartment while your date cashes in your drink coupons with that guy in the shiny suit she met at the party while breaking up with you and calling in all loans.

A Korean Christmas, on the other hand, might amount to little more than a couple of presents and a nice dinner in which the involvement of a turkey and/or cranberries is almost unheard of. Even kids don’t think too much about Santa. I really wanted to give Alice a Christmas to remember.

And besides, Korea is generally pretty tough on kids (from the perspective of a former Canadian kid who grew up with very little supervision). School is very competitive and stuff you do in elementary school, and even which elementary school your parents get you into, affects which university will consider accepting you and, ultimately, the type of job you’ll wind up in. School is held eleven out of fourteen days, meaning you only get every other Saturday off. And you’re not finished learning when school lets out because chances are your parents have signed you up with after-school tutors to get you up-to-speed in your weak subjects and make you shine in subjects you’re already good at. The bright side is that schools give credit for things you do outside of school hours, like spending six weeks overseas in the company of a grand-uncle (or is that great-uncle?) who feels kids should have the opportunity to just be kids.

Back to the Actual Story Involving Alice

So the next morning [we were talking about my wife declining an invitation to host young Alice over the Christmas holidays, remember?], my wife got on the phone with Alice’s mom and asked if it was too late to change “our” mind. Alice’s mom laughed, saying that the night before when she told Alice that Mrs. HoaiPhai said that it wouldn’t be a good idea for her to come for a visit, Alice calmly told her, “Let’s wait a day or two. Uncle will welcome me, I just know it! He’ll make Auntie HoaiPhai change her mind.” She was right. I predict that in a few years Alice is going to be really scary in that cool, mature, intuitive, womanly, psychic know-it-all way.

So ten-year-old Alice voluntarily committed herself to travel half-way around the Earth, all by herself, to spend six weeks with people over four decades her senior. I knew that I was going to have fun but I soon began to think about how deeply scarred she would be at the end of her vacation. Being the sensitive guy I am, I soon forgot about it and ate dinner, I guess. I dunno… I don’t remember.

In the days that followed, I checked with Alice’s mom to see if she (meaning Alice, of course) still believes in Santa Claus and was told “Sort of, but she is beginning to doubt him.” The fact that, as a Korean kid, she never had a real reindeer-on-the-roof, coloured-lights, turkey-and-cranberry Christmas seemed so tragic to me. That coupled with the prospect that this was possibly the last chance that she could ever have one involving Santa elevated my goal from a simple little plan to give Alice a nice Christmas and inspire in her a little Christmas Spirit into a personal mission to whip young Alice into a frenzy of Santicipation.

So the weeks flew by, we picked her up at the airport, and once back home and immediately after Alice helped Mrs. HoaiPhai sock away all the food that was sent over from Korea to supplement my wife’s presumed ramyun-, kim chee-, mince draw garlic-, and chili powder-deficient Canadian diet, I began my plan to cultivate in Alice a little “Christmas Spirit”.

“So, Alice, are you looking forward to Christmas? Did you send Santa your letter?”, I asked, hoping to squeeze some gift ideas out of her that Mrs. HoaiPhai didn’t get out of Alice’s mother. The response I got was something along the lines of, “Yeah, Christmas will be nice. I gave the list of things I want for Christmas to my mother, I think. Can I have some juice, please?”

Now this was less than three weeks from Christmas and a ten year old is more concerned with self-hydration than with what Santa is going to bring her? This kid was going to take some serious work to make her appreciate this most jolly of holidays!

Alice watching The Three Stooges. The first step in dealing with a preteen burnout is to allow Curly, Shemp, Larry, and Moe to scrape off some of the hot carbon from the child’s psyche.

So the first step was to rekidify Alice, and there’s no better way to accomplish this than to sit the subject down in front of a TV (this method also imposes very little wear-and-tear on the adult administering this therapy). Luckily, I didn’t have to endure endless episodes of “My Little Pony” or “Dora the Explorer”… Alice is crazy about classical cinema, like The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, and The Pink Panther movies. Between “Curly Classics” disks I began to talk to her about Christmas.

“I sure hope there’s a lot of snow at Christmas”, I said.

“Why?” She seemed really puzzled.

“Having to land and take off from dry rooftops takes extra time, so Santa can’t make as many trips back to The North Pole to reload his sleigh. More snow, more presents. ”

“Yup. But you probably wouldn’t notice the difference even if there’s not much snow. You see Santa is Canadian so we get more presents here than anyone else in the world.”

I immediately left the living room, headed into the kitchen, and turned to call to her in the living room to ask if she’d like a cup of hot chocolate, something she goes nuts over. The hot chocolate question didn’t even register with her. “Santa’s Canadian? No, I don’t think so.”, she said.

I could see a glimmer of Christmas magic in her eyes — the prospect that she was close to Santa, even if that meant that she was in the same vast country, really got her to thinking. I listed the evidence that Santa is Canadian just to seal the deal…

She was so hooked at that point.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas I was asked all kinds of questions about Santa, The North Pole, elves, reindeer, and every imaginable aspect of Christmasology. Mrs. HoaiPhai was kept busy giving baking lessons to her young charge, constructing gingerbread houses, and shopping. For the first time in years I put up all the lights. It was great!

So Christmas Eve rolled around and Alice was so wound up I thought she was going to bust her mainspring! We had a simple dinner that included tourtière. Alice was as unimpressed with the meat pie from my home province as she was with most Canadian food — Alice taught me that hamburgers were not the universal favourite of the under-twenty crowd I thought they were.

After dinner we watched a couple of Christmas classics on TV with frequent checks at the Canadian Forces’ Santa tracking website. We also had a special iPad app that pinged us developments and showed us, in real-time, Santa zipping around the globe. There were even counters tallying how many houses had already been visited and how many gifts had been placed under trees. So when Santa started delivering gifts to little children two time zones away we sent Alice off to bed with thoughts of buns filled with red bean paste (or whatever treat Korean kids associate with Christmas) dancing in her head.

The shingling of a gingerbread house. [Photo was taken using a lens Santa pre-gifted me during a November Nikon glass sale]

I had a few last-minute gifts to wrap, which took me about four hours to finish (because I was exhausted, had a couple of Kahluas in me, and was watching “Dragnet” on DVD), and then I went to bed.

In about the same amount of time it just took your eyes to skip from the last paragraph to this one, Christmas Morning had arrived and my wife was trying to wake me up so we could open presents. [Only heretics open presents on Christmas Eve… that’s like consummating a marriage at the engagement party] So, Alice opened the contents of the very first stocking she ever got and was very pleased. She loved all her stocking-stuffers and was especially impressed with the chocolate money.

Alice was very impressed with all the crap Santa stuffed into her stocking.

We motioned her over to our pretend tree and sat her down in front of the small heap of gifts Santa had brought her. She couldn’t believe it…

Yes, Alice. There is a Santa Claus and he wants to spoil you this year.

How did Santa know I wanted a Pegasus?

So she delicately unwrapped gift after girly gift of dolls, stuffed animals, leg warmers (whatever they are), sweaters, etc. I orchestrated he handing-of-the-gifts so she would get last that thing she wanted most, the thing that she hadn’t even dared ask Santa for… a Pegasus (in any form). Well Santa had read her mind and brought her a very special silver Pegasus necklace that appealed to both the child and nascent woman in Alice.

Alice wasn’t the only one who got gifts… she bought me my very own raccoon!

Once the gifts were all opened, I slipped upstairs and got into a Santa outfit. I didn’t want to impersonate Santa but to dress like him in homage. When I came back down the stairs I was in eye-shot of Alice who was sitting on the living room chesterfield. When Alice recognized the suit she was awestruck — she just stopped speaking with her aunt mid-sentence. I sat down beside her and put on a bit of a Santa voice. She was beaming but still aphasic. I didn’t want her to catch me trying to convince her that I was Santa so I reverted to my normal voice. She squinted and tried to look past the fake beard when she recognized my voice. I’m really thankful that she didn’t feel duped but appreciated my putting on the Santa suite as part of the whole Christmas theme.

So I made her yet another “kids’ coffee”, i.e. a hot chocolate, and real coffees for me and Mrs. Claus HoaiPhai. We spent the rest of the day doing christmasy things things like cooking a giant turkey (Alice had never tasted turkey before but she wasn’t hugely impressed but did eat it. She’s a pretty picky eater and stuck mostly to a limited number of Korean dishes the whole six weeks she spent with us), fiddling with our gifts, and watching Christmas movies when we weren’t on the phone wishing people a merry Christmas.

Post Christmas Depression? Not!

Alice’s return ticket to Korea was for late January and Alice’s mother, partly out of concern that Alice was getting homesick (and/or bored with us old folks, I guess) and partly (I’m sure of this because Alice is such a sweet girl) because she missed Alice, called to ask if Alice wanted to go home early. Alice said told her that she wanted to stay in Canada forever.

I am happy to report that Alice’s enjoyment of her stay with us wasn’t just Christmas-driven. Alice is seen here in early January goofing around and dancing to Mrs. HoaiPhai’s piano playing.

Alice’s mom asked if she wanted to stay in Canada just to avoid having to return to school. Alice replied, “Nope, I wouldn’t mind going to school here. I just love Canada so much!”

“Wouldn’t you miss me, Dad, and your little brother Marino?”

“No,” Alice responded, “not if we all move here! Let’s do it!”

So the final few weeks flew by and the day came that we had to hand Alice over to Korean Air. Alice really didn’t want to go back but in spite of a few verbal attempts to postpone her return to a later date, i.e. “It looks like there’s going to be a snowstorm… we should stay home.”, “The traffic is terrible – we’re never going to make it. Maybe we should turn around right now before we get really stuck.”, etc., we did, sadly, get her to the airport in spite of a near-fatal snowfall of a centimetre or so and traffic so crippling it added a whole ten minutes to our ninety-minute drive.

Epilogue

Moving right along because I’d really like to get this one posted so I can get down to work on my much-anticipated Father’s Day post (at this rate you’ll probably be anticipating it until sometime around Labour Day), Alice is back home and still trying to wrangle her way back to Canada.

There’s so much more we would have liked to have done with her but, you know, winter weather is pretty shitty so you’re more or less stuck indoors in front of either the TV or stove. I’m pretty sure we could even sway Alice’s indifference to non-Korean food if we could just get her here during BBQ and propane-powered, melt-the-ceiling-if-you-use-it-indoors, flame-can-be-seen-from-space wok burner season.

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

I apologize in advance that this posting is a rambling mess.

The Background

Way back in 2008 when I came upon the core idea of this game, the design was the exciting part. Though I started in games mainly as a technical person who was excited about technical challenges, I have shifted into a mode of thought where, when I program, it’s mainly just to get the design done in the most straightforward way.

Since Braid I have viewed programming as mostly pragmatic: I know what I want to do, and I know what kinds of things I have to type in to make it happen, but for the most part, the interesting mental challenges are in design, and programming is rote execution. Once you have enough programming experience, I think 95% of writing a big program is like this. There have been a few times during The Witness when I spent significant effort solving technical problems where I had no idea what the answer would be in advance, like with the terrain manipulation, but even in these cases I treated the technical development in a very pragmatic way: the goal was to get something that is good enough for current needs, not to design a shining jewel of an amazing technical system (back when I was a younger game programmer, I was trying to make amazing technical systems all the time, and it came at the cost of actually getting games done).

Despite the fact that I am trying to focus on design, in order to make this game a reality, I had to start a company, bring people onto the project to build the game, etc. This means that nowadays I am not just wearing the programmer and designer and business development hats, I also wear the producer hat and the (admittedly small at present) HR hat. Maybe if The Witness does well, we can expand the team a little bit so that I don’t have to do these things, but for now, that’s the reality.

We are very laid back and unstructured in the way we do things, but even so, I feel there’s a heavy subconscious load involving running the company, making sure nobody’s work is blocked, dealing with money all the time, etc. I often find it hard to do deep design thinking when I am in the office, if only because all these issues are just ambiently around. So, in terms of design, my most productive days tend to be work-from-home days (which for me includes most weekends).

All this up til now is just to explain that if I take a vacation seriously, it can be very relaxing, because that subliminal load is gone, or at least mitigated for a while. The activity of the rest of the company is mostly paused, which removes urgency from my own activities.

At first I didn’t know how I would spend vacation; at first I thought maybe I would actually treat it the way most people treat vacation, and not work. Then I thought, hmm, there is a certain sector of the game that I might like to work on, that is definitely very important, and I should get a bunch of that done while everyone is gone, so that when they come back it will be figured out. (I don’t want to go into detail about what that section of the game is, because I am avoiding spoilers).

The Vacation

But, inspiration is a funny thing. I worked a little bit on the issues I had planned to work on, but for the first bit of the vacation, up through the 25th, I found myself most motivated by cleaning up old nagging issues on my to-do list, and shipping this improved version of the game to our very few beta players. This involved stuff like improving the feel of tracing lines on the puzzle panels.

A peek at the export script, used to package the game for end-users.

After shipping that beta, I found my attention most strongly drawn toward an unexpected part of the game: an optional area, one that we could completely cut from the game and nobody would know, yet at the same time, it’s an area that adds to the overall conceptual arc of the game in a strong way, and would be very rewarding for the small percentage of players who get deeply into the game. (Again, I apologize for the vagueness, but let’s avoid spoilers).

At first I thought the task would just be to make the old stuff work again and then do a straightforward job of the extra functionality I needed to complete the area. Thinking about the programming I would have to do to complete the area, I saw it as a necessary bummer («I want to be done with this game, but ugh, there is more programming I have to do that isn’t even on the mainline to all the things that really need to be done.»)

So I started programming this more-exciting version of the functionality. Then I saw how I could make it even more interesting, and I would start doing that. Then I would see how to make it even more interesting, though that would introduce a lot more programming work. If I were feeling the regular pressure of the game schedule, at this time years in when it is time to be finishing the game, I might have said, «naah, we don’t have time add that extra work». But because it was vacation the work was free, so I said screw it.

I worked in a fiercely productive way for a couple of days. New ideas would come. They would raise new issues. I would program some things, and in that way that programming often goes, new problems would come to light that I hadn’t thought of, and those problems introduced even smaller 2nd-order problems when confronted. But by this time I was fully energized and just had dogged determination and was fully enjoying the whole process. In the end I programmed at least 5 times as much functionality as I had planned, but rather than being bummed about it, I enjoyed the whole excursion.

It is hard to tell you why this is so cool without huge spoilers.

It’s so amazing and wonderful because

it’s been a long time since I worked this hard and this effectively. Keeping in mind that memory is sometimes not as reliable as we think, I would tell you that the last time I worked this hard and this well was when starting my first, ultimately doomed, company (with a friend from college and a 3D artist we recruited from that same school and unfortunately put through years of meager-wage toil).

Here are some shots from the first professional game I ever worked on, back before we had a concept of ‘indie development’. Software rendered, subpixel-accurate texture mapping, assembly-language inner loop that commandeers ebp in order to utilize a precious extra register, a la Mike Abrash, and oh yeah, it was multiplayer-only, 32-player, over 9600 baud modems:

We were working on this game from 1996 to 1999 or so. 1996 was the year I got into professional game development, and in hindsight, it appears to have been the hardest possible time in the history of video games. Indies of today, y’all have no idea how much easier it is to make games now than it was in 1996. (I hate to be an old fogey who’s all «back in my day, we had to walk to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways,» but in this case it is absolutely true.)

That game was never very successful. It had design problems, but also, we didn’t really know how to talk about or promote a game; lastly, this was before many people played games over the internet, so the potential audience was pretty small. (Trivia Tidbit: There was another online game being supported by the same publishing service as our game, and this other game was more popular, despite being relatively simple in a technical sense, which annoyed the hell out of us on a subliminal level that we wouldn’t totally admit. The guys making this game were John Vechey and Brian Fiete; our producer at the publisher was Jason Kapalka, who later went off with these guys to start a company called PopCap, which last I heard had done okay.)

Back in those days I worked very hard. When we started the company I knew nothing about building 3D games; we learned very quickly. I would long hours, late into the night, intensively. At some point we all burned ourselves out, I think.

After we closed down that company, I went on to do a number of contractor things, game industry lecture things, magazine article things, and working on various independent projects that I never finished. Through that time, I was still very burned out. If you have never experienced burnout, it’s hard to explain. Burnout is not just «I don’t feel like working right now»; it is about your mind refusing to permit you to work, because it has seen what happens when it lets you work.

Eventually, I swore that I would design a very good game and finish it and release it to people, and the result is a game that was successful and that many people like:

A main part of the reason this game exists was that I instilled a certain discipline in myself: I wasn’t going to do this game because I was excited about a technical thing, or excited about programming; I was going to minimize the amount of programming, firstly so that the game would get finished at all (I had plenty of experience by this point at not-finishing-projects, as did many of my friends; it was an endemic problem), but also so that I could focus appropriately on the design and build something very special.

Despite the fact that I kept the game technically simple, there was still a huge amount of programming to do. But thankfully, the strategy worked and the game was completed. Eventually.

Even though I’d made a successful game, I was still burned out to some degree. In 1996-1997 I was working at full capacity and was very productive, at least inasmuch as one might expect for a programmer of that age who was first starting to get real-world large-project experience. But after being burned out at that time, I never again worked at full capacity.

What I am getting at

I am saying all these things just as a way to get around to explaining that, during this Christmas vacation, I finally recovered fully from burnout. For about 3 days, I was working at 100% capacity, which I have not done in 15 years. It felt wonderful to have that back, to not succumb to the story that maybe game design and programming are like math of physics where you peak at 25. These few days were way better than when I was 25, because now I am substantially better at programming, and I am good at design also, and games are so much easier to make than they used to be; so the design cylinders are firing and then they turn it over to the programming cylinders, etc, and very quickly a lot of high-quality work gets banged out. And it’s not just arbitrary good work, but work that helps to round out the game that I already feel is the best thing I have ever worked on, that helps put grace notes in just the right places, in the manner of exploratory game design that Marc ten Bosch and I spoke about at Indiecade 2011. So this period of intensive work was seasoned and tempered in a way that was not possible when I was 25.

It has been a wonderful time and I look forward to doing more of it. Part of what allowed it to happen this way was that lack of pressure that I have mentioned, due to being on vacation. When a design idea would come to mind, and I would see that it might be cool but would lead to a lot of work, well, this week I was able to let it happen, and I was able to enjoy the challenge of going off on a minor programming rathole in order to do something really good in the design. This is to some degree a reversal of the discipline I instilled to get Braid done; you can think of it as a correction term to the equation. The 0th order term is knowing how to program and design; the 1st order term is having discipline to be able to execute efficiently without being carried away with ideas that will scuttle production; but the 2nd order term is that it is joyful and interesting to have some wiggle room in there, sometimes eroding away a bit of the 1st order term.

There is a kind of open curiosity about programming that I haven’t had in a long time, that I allowed myself to re-discover this week in the freedom of exploring that 2nd-order term.

(Richard Feynman has an anecdote about how he was burned out on physics, and how he started to get over it, which I think bears some similarity).

I am not explaining any of this very well. But I am doing the best work of my life, right now, and it feels great, and for the first time I could see myself working in this same fashion for the rest of my life and feeling happy that I am operating at something like my full potential. So there you have it.

I mentioned earlier that I would talk further about the ability to see ideas, but I guess I was lying, because this is already too long and rambling. I’ll save that for a future post.

It’s worth pointing out that I started Braid while working on what was supposed to be a vacation. And back when I got the impulse to start the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, I was on a plane back from a vacation to Africa. So apparently vacations are good times for me, even if I don’t treat them the way Normal People do.

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

Well, I was away from the blog for a couple weeks. And many things happened.

This happened, more than would have been my personal preference, but I’m not in charge.

But that wasn’t the ONLY thing that happened. And I felt LESS horrible in the mornings, and didn’t get sick then, so we were able to do some fun things as a family. I’ve been documenting some of our shenanigans on Facebook and Instagram, but not ALL of them. And not all of YOU are getting those updates.

So, lets catch you all up, shall we? Seven Quick Takes style? Done.

As with the Grinch, morning sickness did NOT stop Christmas from coming. It came. Even though I felt barfy, it came all the same.

And despite all my high ideals and my blog posts and radio interviews about the virtues of a simple Christmas, it wasn’t a COMPLETE success.

The big kids have neighborhood jobs, and they earn money, and they bought each other gifts, and those gifts were toys. *I* did manage to stick to my guns and the kids’ gifts from Santa, and from mom and dad were activities and one group technology gift. And they were perfectly happy. But they got some toys from each other, and it was okay. I may try to talk them into going in on something together next year, or I may just keep my mouth shut and let them be generous to one another in their own way. Only time will tell.

Christmas Eve was new jammies and a group reading of a kids’ theatrical version of A Christmas Carol. Anita really stole the show as Scrooge.

Christmas Day was Mass in our new duds, and the Nativity play, and my first Yule Log!

2. Also Christmas

The rest of the Twelve Days of Christmas included a boxing tournament for Boxing Day:

Plus Christmas cookie-baking, and Christmas movie-watching (but not until all the Santas are lined up properly).

As is our family habit, we celebrated New Year’s Eve a few hours early.

So we could hit an early Mass for Our Lady, and head for the Rose Parade.

The floats were impressive as usual: dragon, phoenix, trampoline guy, Jesus. The works.

My sister and her family have been in town visiting us. Anita and her cousin Emma are best of friends.

The husband got some time off of work, which was lovely. He took the boys and girls on separate outings, while I lolled about the house. But one of the days I did manage to put my big girl pants on and head out to do some art appreciation’ at The Getty.

And, since there’s only so much art kids can look at at one time, we also let them run around like maniacs outside, and roll down the lovely rolling-down hill.

Epiphany also came, and the Three Wise Men left some treats in our shoes, and Anita found the ring in our King Cake and got to be Queen for the day. She requested pineapple pizza and root beer floats for dinner, and that’s what she got.

While the rest of the country is in the throes of yet another Polar Vortex (or so I hear on Facebook), the weather has been lovely since just after Christmas here in Los Angeles. We’ve been inspired to actually take advantage of it, since my sister and my two little nieces will be heading back to Iowa soon (brrrrr).

The beach. Really, you can’t beat it.

7. And Frankie’s Been Frankie

He didn’t SAY it was a self portrait. But it’s a pretty uncanny likeness. I gotta say, I know how doodle Frankie feels.

And that was that. I really have been feeling much better the last couple of days. I have an OB appointment next week, so we’ll all get to find out about when to expect this little troublemaker.

25 Comments

I am crying. #7 is hilarious and so cute!
I think I commented before to tell you that I am glad you are feeling better, but I will type it again because I mean it. I am glad that you are feeling better. Puking is no fun.

Yay for less barfyness! I’m guessing this one’s another boy.
We performed your fab nativity play for the first time this Christmas. I documented the cuteness here: http://blissfule.me/nativity-play/

When I taught AP US History, I used that propaganda poster in my class. So much imagery to analyze!

I know! It really is somethin.’

That trip to The Getty looked fabulous! Reubens is one of my favorites. I love «The Queen of Epiphany ‘s» dinner choice. It screams childhood.

I feel like you did a lot in your barfiness. I’ve had a sinus infection and have been far more whiny and generally refusing to participate.

I kept looking at that picture of Lulu last night on instagram, and I love the one of Betty with her. What a great sister they each have.

They really are so sweet. Betty and Anita get along really well, but they are pretty opposite. It’s fun to see Betty with her little mini-me.

Hahaha, Frankie had me laughing out loud!

Sorry you’re feeling barfy, but you had a FULL Christmas vacation! So.much.fun.

The Getty is on my Top 10 Museums list — and I’m not a museum person at all.

I just love your family… your enthusiasm… love it all!!

How do you manage with the nausea with your littlest one? My three are 20 months, and 28 months apart. I live in fear of how I will do it the next time I get pregnant! I get intensely sick for months. Any advice would be much appreciated!

My first few pregnancies weren’t as bad for me. I never threw up pregnant until number five. But, I did feel sick. I’m not sure, some how, you just manage, right? It’s miserable for a few months, and everyone suffers a bit, but you survive.

It’s WAY easier with big kids, of course. I can check out and take a nap or a bath whenever I need, really. And the big kids can keep things running. But when it was just me and little kids, I tried to get out of the house, to a park or playgroup. Maybe it isn’t the case for everyone, but I actually feel better if I rally and get out of the house, and the kids are distracted and not making messes that I’ll have to clean up.

Other than that, ask for help. When I really need it, I have family and neighbors and friends I can call on. It sounds like you get it bad. That’s so hard. Hopefully you have a safety net? :0(

This was s super post, as always, and I’ve got to say that the likeness of Frankie’s drawing to his own expression is uncanny! The mouths even slant the exact same way.

Aww, Frankie. I’ve got a grumpy kid too, but he is my first and I was sure I was royally screwing up this mom thing. Kids two and three are much happier… turns out some kids are just sort of grumpy, I guess. Maybe we could start a «parents of cranky kids» support group. 😉

Love #7! Glad you are feeling better too. Anita and Emma look so sweet and so much like sisters!

I just love Frankie boxing on Boxing Day.

Yay! I’m glad you’re feeling a bit better, but it’s nice to know you’re human like the rest of us, you know those pesky rumours… 😉

And I thought it was so cute how you all pretended to be cold so you could wear hats and scarves!

So glad you are back and feeling better.

The Getty looks amazing!

But, the real reason I even commented. FRANKIE. Gosh. I love his crankiness. I think I AM the Frankie of my family. I actually laughed out loud at his doodle. Something about his crankiness is so endearing.

The not so self portrait is the best! Maybe the trip to the museum inspired him?

What a fun Christmas season! You guys box on boxing day, that’s adorable. I love that your kids roll down the rolling hill at the Getty – it truly is perfect for it. I may have to take a weekend and go to the Getty to see that Rubens exhibit, it looks awesome. Hope you continue to feel not so barfy!

Great post as per usual!

I adore Cranky Frankie, I agree with the other commenters, there’s something about his crankiness that is very endearing 🙂 And I have my own Cranky Peter (or Crazy Peter as his siblings call him). He just is so different from the rest of our family, very much his own unique personality and we’re often left shaking our head at the things he says and does. I just adore that crazy 4 year old boy.

I’m glad your morning sickness is waning. I keep thinking mine is in the morning and then by 4pm I’m out for the count again. Oh well, I’m doing better than usual at this point though not nearly as active as you are! I think getting out would do me good but bundling up 4 kids and myself to drive in the now would not. So I’ll just wait for spring and the second trimester I think. My first OB appointment is Monday, fun times 🙂

I hope you are feeling better! These all look like so much fun! I’ve been wanting to take the kids to the Getty and hopefully can make the trip this year (or next.) 🙂

It always amazes me that there are places where people can get their Christmas tree with shorts on! I know they exist, but it’s just so foreign to me, living in Idaho my whole life. Also surprised that cranky Frankie self-portrait was done with a sharpie!? You’re braver than me! Praying that you’re feeling much better soon!

Thanks! It was a dry erase marker, not a sharpie. 🙂

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Hi! I’m Kendra. I’m a Catholic wife and mother of many, from little to teenaged. I also dabble in teaching, reading, writing, cooking, baking, sewing, crafting, party planning, graphic design, home remodeling, and watching Netflix streaming. This blog is a place for me to share how we live.