Offensive Squid

Reading Malak, I suppose, had me spend too much brain time on Watts so then it crept in to my dreams. (this once happened with Joshua Schacter where I was trying to explain how to use del.icio.us to help Alzheimer patients. so it's not just fan behavior towards Watts, she says, defensively)

Topic was: writing a game based on Starfish. Somehow I was explaining that we could write a rogue like version of it and once we got the game layer worked out, someone could come along and put cool visuals on it some time in the future.

so then I was saying, no, you don't need objects for the actors, you could do collaborative diffusion, did you read the anti-object paper about pacman?

then I said, see, we have the grid and you have the characters, maybe you are one and the rest of the team is automatic, and your characters have to go get stuff, it's like spice in that one alife thing so let's just call it spice for now.

and that's just the start phase of the game. maybe later they realize there is no point to bringing in the spice because it is all a ruse so then that starts the next phase of the game with a different plot.

oh and the characters can tweak the gantzfield settings so that they get more productive in gathering spice but if they tweak it too much some will turn in to hostiles.

Hljothlegur said:

sheila said:

Reading Malak, I suppose, had me spend too much brain time on Watts so then it crept in to my dreams. (this once happened with Joshua Schacter where I was trying to explain how to use del.icio.us to help Alzheimer patients. so it's not just fan behavior towards Watts, she says, defensively)

Topic was: writing a game based on Starfish. Somehow I was explaining that we could write a rogue like version of it and once we got the game layer worked out, someone could come along and put cool visuals on it some time in the future.

so then I was saying, no, you don't need objects for the actors, you could do collaborative diffusion, did you read the anti-object paper about pacman?

then I said, see, we have the grid and you have the characters, maybe you are one and the rest of the team is automatic, and your characters have to go get stuff, it's like spicein that one alife thing so let's just call it spice for now.

and that's just the start phase of the game. maybe later they realize there is no point to bringing in the spice because it is all a ruse so then that starts the next phase of the game with a different plot.

oh and the characters can tweak the gantzfield settings so that they get more productive in gathering spice but if they tweak it too much some will turn in to hostiles.

---

Were you explaining this to Watts?  What did he say?

Yeah I was trying to explain this to Watts. I may have been arguing for designing and writing a game engine without worrying about whether the technology was there to put rich graphics and movies on top of it. hence roguelike :) and also arguing about the design for some reason because I don't like object oriented programming that much, despite my job (I like functional) so I must have been arguing about design and how it wasn't hard, and we wouldn't need to make a complicated object model representing the players and go read that paper. you'll see.

dream wasn't detailed enough for me to fill in the listener or the conversation. and the dream visuals were about the playing grid.

And don't feel weird – I dream about whatever I was thinking about the previous day, injecting people into scenarios at random. 

 

Plus, a few years ago I was thinking very intensely about some giant argument/discussion about God Watts and I were having, and he started showing up in the dreams to continue the argument. I kid you not.  He had posted very few pictures of himself by then and there was no video of him, so the motion wasn't smooth, but it was definitely him.  He popped up as a bus driver, tour guide, a few other places.  Someone strong and reassuring taking me somewhere, showing me something?

 

Same time, I am listening to Spider Robinson podcasts, and guess whom I had the sex dreams about?  Sex dreams are for free, you know, don't mean a thing, so which man is trying to Do Me in dreamland?  Yep, the Spider.  *facepalm*  I mean, have you seen Spider Robinson?  No offense to him, and he has a marvelous baritone voice, but my subconscious had a choice between a sex movie with Peter freakin Watts and Spider Robinson and it picked ….. I just don't get it.

I've seen Spider Robinson, you don't think he is cute? He was a con with his wife one year at one con in the area, and I thought they were adorable. They had a Beatles cover sing along. Spider plays the guitar? or his wife. It's been a while since the event. Someone played and we sang along. I loved "Here comes the Sun" that was a lovely song.

I cannot remember any wet dreams about authors, but I have had ones with characters. back in college I had a surprisingly vivid one with Morpheus from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, down to the white skin, which was slightly cold. Which reminds me of a weird semi-erotic dream I had set in a scene in a weird fantasy novel where I was a being trapped? in a sword and there was an evil king and king's dude who were in a crowd giving a speech or something, and one of them brushed my hand and there was that cold feeling again, and they needed to find me or the sword in order to ground the evil so they could do a good job, i.e. it had some magical property to soak up the evil so that they could be normal people and do their jobs.

I like when I have weird-ass complicated story dreams.

I also like the ones where I go around telling the people in the dream that they are in my dream, so they should try doing fun stuff since it's just a dream. i.e. fly! or make plants grow. and so on.

Hljothlegur said:

The brains thing, maybe.  Men who can bring me really interesting ideas look more attractive, no matter their actual appearance.  It's a kink of mine.  Or maybe… I'm just a little shallow? 

I do have some physical preferences, though as I've gotten older they are less strict (anecdotal but I notice some males have more strict body type requirements and I feel sorry for guys who have a strict preference for 18 years olds because they are doomed to find their mates less and less attractive as time goes on.) Smart and creative is a big deal. Attraction gets a big ++ when someone is smart. and can get a big — when someone sounds stupid. e.g. I once liked someone but my esteem and feelings of attraction went down when they sent me email with "lol" in it and weak writing.

(I've relaxed over the years realizing that some people are smart verbally more than writerly, etc.)

Did you just give me homework? 

naw. but you might skim the article and enjoy it. maybe? I dunno.