My library of reference books

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Epic Weekend

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Wow… I am worn out.  My team’s big project at work is live now, and we just released a big patch to fix some terrible difficulty spikes.  The last time we released Super Adventure Box: World 1 it got pretty universal praise.  (Which I put up here back in April)  Since then our founder/president has used it (Along with the Mad King Clock Tower I designed and built back in October 2012) as examples of content we release that raises retention rate, and therefore revenue.  So expectations were high for this World 2 release which came out on Tuesday.  The day after Labor Day and the Penny Arcade Expo.     Saturday (3 days before SAB World 2 launched) my company held a party at a hotel near PAX for fans, and my project, Super Adventure Box was the main feature.  We were running speed run competitions all night where players tried to be the first to get to the end of the new zones.  I ended up MCing the whole night.  I guess there’s a first time for everything.  Seems like people had a re
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Coming of Age Ceremony

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I read this book a couple of years ago about how almost every culture in the history of mankind has had a coming of age ceremony for their boys. The point of these ceremonies was, the author argues, to communicate clearly to the young man that their station in life is different from a certain point onward. To present them with a clear image of what it means to be a man. To imbue values and give them a vision for their future. In a society that lacks these ceremonies you have many young men who mostly lack these things, adrift in a narcissistic quest for finding them in all the wrong places. Well, needless to say, I don't want that for my sons, and being one who over thinks everything I set to work designing a ceremony of my own since my oldest son, Justin, was fast approaching 13, the standard age for this sort of thing. The book included several ideas for ceremonies of this type, and I mulled them over. One issue I have is that I do not fit many of the manly cliché's.
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2023 Recap

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  This has been an unusually notable year for me and mine. I think I’ll break this into sections. Career After 3 years at Mythical Games I was laid off. I survived two previous layoffs they did, but when they cut all production on the game I was working on there was no reason to keep me around. I had mixed feelings about Mythical and so I could sooth myself by remembering the negatives. ;) Honestly, my biggest gripe was that the company is based on cryptocurrency and NFTs. Those things bottomed out in 2022 and Mythical was reeling ever since. We went from being valued at over a billion dollars to struggling to get the next round of funding in the span of a couple of months. I’m still not sure if there’s a future for crypto/NFTs, at least one that is less associated with scams and the crypto-bro scene, but I still don’t think the ideas are intrinsically evil.  They just happened to be used mostly for evil so far.   The great things about Mythical were my team, my freedom to work with th
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