So today I did a thing I haven’t done in a while: exercised in the morning. I’m using a slightly modified version of the Canadian 5bx program; I was originally introduced to it by the Hacker’s Diet and used the simplified version in there to pretty good effect. This morning was the first time in a long while I’d done any real strenuous exercise – the last time was somewhere in the middle of summer, before the burlesque class I was taking stopped. And I’ve got to say, it felt good after I was done running. I was a little winded, sure, but my legs were pulsing with the sensation of being well-used; my body was taking a simple joy in moving.

Hopefully I can re-build the habit and keep it up. It’d be nice to have a flat belly again like I did last year.

Also yesterday I went in for another tattoo session; we ended up doing the white lines and some of the stars on my left arm. It was looking pretty cool before, but having the white there contrasting against the blue/black/purple? Wow.

Plans for today: get paper so I can run off the prints for Kickstarter fulfillment, grab the mail I had held at the post office while I was down in New Orleans, possibly go by Jason’s place for some gaming.

I’m tapping this out on the train home from the airport.

One thing I really noticed on this visit to New Orleans: Portion size. Just about EVERY SINGLE PLACE I went to eat at served me 2-3x what I felt was a sane amount. So then I could waste food, overeat, or take some home for later – and honestly I was like, I wanted to eat this thing ONCE, not for the next two damn days. It is no wonder that people in that city are so fat.

I’m glad to be back in a West Coast city that routinely serves people one person’s worth of food at restaurants.

Fifteen minutes from now, I’ll be on a plane back to Seattle. But right now I’m sitting in the Vegas airport, listening to the endless burbling of slot machines rolling their virtual wheels. I almost dropped a buck in one of them when I was getting a drink – the back of my head really thought that one lonely “Alien” machine among all the “Wheel of Fortune” slots was about to pay out, or something – but didn’t even bother looking to see if I had enough quarters on me.

Not that I didn’t have a windfall anyway; one thing I did during my trip to see my mother was to go out to a bank in Gretna, where I dealt with even MORE investments my grandmother left me. Enough to put off getting a “real job” by a few more years; hopefully I’ll get this “small press creator” thing off the ground before then.

I think the main thing I gave my mother was her library back. Ever since she moved into her current apartment, her books have been a total jumble, just thrown onto the shelves with no order. She’s getting old and just doesn’t have the strength needed for a day or three of re-ordering the books (especially with having to crouch to deal with lower shelves), so it had stayed that way. But earlier this week, I started pulling books off the shelves and putting them in piles based on sections (well, mostly handing them to her, whereupon she made the section call), then putting them all back on the shelves. There’s still ordering to be done within the sections, but it already looks a lot more ordered – there’s lots of sets of multiple related volumes shelved next to each other now. We also got rid of a decent chunk of stuff, so she’ll have room to expand that felt lacking before.

It all had to happen in a day because I was sleeping in the library, on a folded-out bed. The stacks of books on the floor kinda meant I couldn’t fold the bed out until the books were out of the way! The fiction’s not really done; I only loosely alphabetized by first letter, and that only up to about half of the Gs.

It was good to spend time with her, but I’m going to be glad to get back to my own bed, and my studio. Where I think my main task for tomorrow is going to be trying to sign, draw in, and send out some more Rita books.

I should also see if there are any end-of-the-world parties coming up…

I just got two photos in my email of the proofs of the shirts for Further Confusion. This is the one under normal light. You’ll have to find out what it looks like in the dark, or under a UV light, for yourself.

Trust me, it looks pretty damn cool.

If you’re not going to the con and want a shirt (I’ve had a few people say this!), let me know and I can get ahold of one for you. I need to know by the 11th of January. Paypal me $25 if you’re in the continental Americas, $30 for everyone else; I’ll get them at the convention and ship them once I get back home. Sizes are small to 5XL.

Oh man there is like a $250 dollar difference in the flights available between Seattle and San Francisco on the 17th (first day of Further Confusion)/21st (Monday after FC) and those available on the 16th and 22nd. Hmm. Pondering, I think my best plan is to arrive on the 17th and leave on the 22nd, for reasons – I’ll only keep the hotel until Monday, but I figure I have enough acquaintances there that I can find a place to crash for a night and unwind after the con a little. And if I can’t then I’ll extend the hotel for another day and probably still come out better.

Also I need to finalize my roomie plans. I’ve got a two-double room and I am not sure if my usual roomies are going to be doing the con. So I might end up trolling for other people to fill my room, or for some friends who need a fourth and drop mine. I sent out email checking on what my usual roomies are doing, and will work from there…

Something I got in the mail the other day, after ordering a bunch of shipping materials. Rolodex? People still use those? Welcome to the forties, Uline!

Today my computer is busily downloading a bunch of Moebius so I’ll have something to read on the airplane. I would totally buy physical copies of these things if they were easily available in the US, but they ain’t, and most of this stuff goes for multiple hundreds of dollars. So instead of giving money to his estate, I suppose I’ll give some love to his reputation instead by spreading that link – if you’ve been meaning to read his stuff but just haven’t gotten around to it because it’s largely out of print, go there and get some torrents going and maybe go pick up that gorgeous hardback of the Incal while it’s still on the shelves.

Just some random thought fragments that follow on from my previous post on some thoughts that Saints Row 3 engendered in me.

Sandbox games are generally about being dumped into a huge, chaotic place, with an excuse to run around Fucking Shit Up. You’re either a criminal in a city, a survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a person in the middle of a war-torn fantasy land. Or a cowboy in the Wild West. (And I find it interesting to contrast my SR3 experiences with my GTA3/4 experiences: in the 3d GTAs, I’ve tended to begin by trying to not kill anyone outside of the plot, until that fateful moment where I accidentally clip a pedestrian, then just quit caring, whereas in SR3 it pretty much ensures you’ve caused a lot of collateral damage before you ever have a real choice besides what your character looks like, so it’s a lot easier to approach the game as A Silly, Violent Game rather than a MURDER SIMULATOR.)

I’d like to see a sandbox set in the future. Where’s the game where you’re committing a crime just by driving a car with your fallible biological reflexes?

I also feel like one of the unspoken conventions of the Sandbox is that there never seems to be more than about eight cars in the observable world at once. You never get stuck in a traffic jam, you know? Or if it’s not a city game, there’s usually still a pretty tight limit on how many things are being simulated.

And if the game’s not set in a wilderness, you are pretty much guaranteed that there are no kids and no animals…

Woke up early. Can’t get back to sleep. Started pondering my iOS experience so far.

Stuff I’m missing from the N1:

The iPhone is curiously inelegant for an Apple device. It’s just a brick. The N1 has the slimming curves at its edges of an Air; the iPhone is just an extruded rounded-corner rectangle. Awkward to hold.

It’s also stupidly slick. A case almost feels mandatory for this, to give it some friction in my hand. I keep feeling like I might drop it at any moment.

I am really missing home screen widgets. Enough that I’m tempted to jump through hoops to downgrade the OS and jailbreak it, or to return it after my trip and order an N4. Despite all of Android’s fiddlyness. This surprises me. But having my calendar right there filling most of my first home screen was NICE; it gave me an ambient awareness of what I had coming up in my life.

Also the decision to make all the icons cling to the top of the screen is kinda maddening. I’m used to having them arranged down near the bottom, where they’re easier to hit with my thumb without stretching it and making my hold on the device more precarious.

The connector is super-strong, making for a crappy “throw it in the bedside dock, pluck it out when needed” experience. Plus it doesn’t even bring up the clock app when it’s in the dock.

I still vastly prefer the stock Android autocorrect over the iOS experience. Having the list of possible words and the ability to cancel autocorrect quickly, always in the same place right above the keyboard instead of one faint blue word floating around near the cursor, is so nice.

Really there’s just lots of little places where iOS seems less thought through, for all that it’s the oldest and theoretically most mature smartphone OS. Like the way the keyboard is always uppercase. Tiny little aggravations. It was awesome compared to dumbphones but now it kinda feels like the Minimum Viable Product.

I mean, you can’t set a contact to always go to voicemail. That’s not even smartphone functionality. Dumbphones can do that. But not the iPhone.

Plus side: much stronger software and hardware ecosystem! Most stuff on the Android store is awkward and ugly. iOS’ store is full of sleek, polished things. It doesn’t help that Google has revamped the look of Android with every release, either; things are really schizophrenic there.

If I downgrade and jailbreak I can fix a bunch of these. I think I’m probably going to, after some research. Though the length of time it’s taking to find one for iOS6 is worrisome for the long-term viability of that strategy.

Edit the next morning. Oh wow I hate that it limits you to 30 seconds for ringtones and alerts. Luckily this is enforced by iTunes, not the phone, and there is a kludge-around; basically you give iTunes an m4r file (m4a, just rename it to m4r) that it thinks is short enough, sync that, show iTunes’ copy of the sound in the Finder, then drop the real file over it. Then you disable ringtone synching in iTunes, apply, turn it back on, and apply – bingo, long ringtones. What can I say, it is VERY IMPORTANT for me to be able to have my ringtone be the ENTIRE opening theme from the c64 port of R-Type instead of thirty seconds of it.