And yes, Formal Fridays. It is my gift to this world.

- Michael Hogan, him what plays Colonel Tigh on Battlestar Galactica, referring to Edward James Olmos as “Eddie” throughout a sort of good, sort of not so good panel full of horrible fans and an idiot moderator.

- The incredible Venture Bros. panel, which involved a preview of the new season and a mention of the game I designed for the show that was killed when Adult Swim made the jump from show-based games to original ones.

- Regularly running into friends and adding them to our party. To survive Comic Con, you need a posse.

- POCKET NINJA.

- Being introduced to Chaotic, a newish and intriguing new card game from 4Kids that is apparently quietly taking the world by storm. Between this and what I’ve heard about the new World of Warcraft CCG, it looks like card games are having a rush of new blood in much the same style as videogames – the people working on these things are the same kids that grew up playing Magic: The Gathering, and the designs of both Chaos and WoW contain reactions against the less popular aspects of the seminal card game. Chaos is faster, for instance, throwing the player into the the thick of things from the word go, while WoW is highly tuned to stave off the horrors of mana burn and other nagging problems WoTC can’t seem to iron out of their game. It’ll be interesting to see this trend continue.

- Doing the business card swap with a bunch of people behind Chaotic, and getting loads of booster packs for free. A mutual beneficial deal to be sure, as the next day I went back and bought two starter sets. I am doomed.

- POCKET NINJA.

- Picking up a fantastic page of original High Moon art from Steve Ellis (it’s page 33), as well as sketches from Kyle and Lily Baker. Also a couple of truly ace robots from artist
Jason May. Our walls are better than your walls.

- Filling up on enough Comics Are Expensive fodder to last me a few weeks at least.

- Filling my bag with enough miniature wine bottles to last me an hour or two at least.

- Realizing I didn’t really care about and of Marvel or DC’s events or booths, and instead throwing all my money for new books at at Dark Horse, Tokyo Pop, and Comics Bakery. Comics Bakery even gave me a squid pin. Pay attention, Big Two: The way to my heart is tentacled and lurks in the deep.

So a good show all around, and I’m very much looking forward to next year. There’s something that makes me very happy about people being able to freely enjoy the things they love, and while there’s inevitably a fat guy running an X-Wing guy down demanding “A PHOTO WITH A PILOT OF THE REPUBLIC!”, it’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t mind tapping into again. We didn’t make it to any of the videogame panels, including the one with my boss sparking a feeding frenzy by mentioning we’re hiring, but there’s always next time. Oh, how there is always next time.

The four or five of you counting as regular readers of the site may have noticed that posting as whole has dropped significantly lately. It’s an unfortunate side effect of work gobbling up every moment of free time lately, and while it shows no signs of letting up till sometime near the end of summer, I’m going to try to get back to a roughly regular schedule of adding blather to the internet. Probably not till next week, though – this weekend is the New York Comic Con, and I’ve decided to smash my brains against it over the course of Saturday and Sunday. Their failure to specifically say on the official site that bottles and such aren’t allowed can only lead to trouble. Delicious, gin lemonade-y trouble.

Regular service somewhat returning next week, assuming I’m not carried off by a battalion of Hello Kitty Stormtroopers.

And good god, they were. The best of the lot was Ultimate Spider-Man, doing the exact same things with guest stars, teen angst, and riffing off old stories and ideas that bored me off the book five years ago. Ultimate X-Men was an absolute embarrassment, featuring levels of horrible writing that I had no idea the usually good Robert Kirkman was capable of. It’s a masterpiece compared to The Ultimates, though – “Train wreck” doesn’t really cover what Jeph Loeb’s writing has turned in to here, and the less said the better. It was all anybody looking to vent a little vitriol could ask for, really. Three high profile books that once represented the potential for a fresh new approach to comics (or at least, comics about superheroes) and an olive branch to new readers so wrapped up in themselves and unable to grow past new spins on old ideas that they were as impenetrable as the comics they were meant to be an alternative to? It was like shooting really big, slow-moving fish in a barrel.

Which turned out to be the problem. The farther I got into the piece, the less interested I was in finishing it. Just reading the books had made me a little depressed at the sort of dreck being happily shoveled on to the stands (and just as happily eaten up by fans, it must be said), and writing about them, even if just to tear them apart, was only making me feel worse. More and more it began to feel like a waste of the space Val has been so nice to give me – is making easy jokes at the expense of books I don’t care about really what I want to do with Comics Are Expensive? Is pumping more malignancy into the conversation over comics really the best I had to offer?

Thanks to the craziness of the rest of the week and my complete lack of time to work on anything, it was the middle of the night on Thursday when I finally decided that no, it wasn’t, and dropped a line to Val to say I wasn’t going to have this week’s column done in time. It was an interesting moment for me, less of a realization and more of a coming together of the sort of thinking that’s run through the other aspects of my life, including game design: I don’t want to be an asshole for the sake of being an asshole anymore. It’s a small part of personality that comes out from time to time, a vestigial hold out from stupid kid days that I don’t have a use for. The Ultimate line of comics just isn’t important in any real way – the excitement from its initial launch has long since burned out, and its audience has settled down to the sort of readers who are going to buy anything with a spider or X logo on it anyway. At this point, there’s not much in the way of things I could say that would top the joke it’s made of itself. At the risk of sounding all high and mighty, it’s beneath me.

So what next for Comics Are Expensive? More new things, I suppose. I want to spend some more time looking at trades and graphic novels, and maybe play around with my approach to writing reviews. Most importantly, though, I want it to continue being a place where I can be happy about reading comics. I used to worry that the columns done so far were all too positive, and that I’d eventually run out of new ways to say “this is good and you should read it”. After this past week, I’ve decided I don’t care. While it’s highly likely that there will be books I don’t like and use the space to talk about, I’m not going to actively seek out horrible titles for the sake of making fun of them. There are a lot of bad comics, and a lot of people on the internet and elsewhere already spending a lot of time talking about them. Personally, I’d rather spend my time point anybody who’ll listen at the good ones.

I’m usually one to get slightly melancholy on birthdays, taking the path of “I’m getting older and could have done so much more with the last year” and driving it straight into the ground, but am actively trying to avoid such thinking this time around. Because it was a good year. I shipped a DS game, was brought on full time with at a company brimming with potential that I love working for. Bible Fight was nominated for a couple of awards and didn’t get my house burned down. I started blogging on a regular basis, a process which has helped greatly with exploring my approach to games and what I want to do next, and got the chance to turn my half of too many conversations in bars about comics into a regular column people seem to like. And of course, I moved in with my girlfriend, which has continued to be totally awesome in all manner of ways. Let someone else have my yearly allotment of regret – I totally won at being twenty-five.

I’m looking forward to this year, having already blessed it by spending the morning listening to Long Blondes and Los Campesinos! at ear-shattering volume (particularly the latter’s ‘My Year in Lists’). I have plans, see. In addition to the two games I’m serving as producer/lead designer on at work, there’s Opportunities For Play, which I sort of outlined over the weekend and should be gearing up next month. Comics Are Expensive should keep rolling along for a good while at Occasional Superheroine, or at least until Val tires of my drunken rambles dirtying up her front page. I’m going to attempt to learn C++, or at least enough to let me put together my own prototypes. All manner of things are on the horizon, with lots of exciting potential ready and waiting to be realized. In the meantime, however, I’m going to enjoy my birthday and look forward the nice dinner with a pretty girl waiting for me at the end of the day.

1. am not good at gambling.
2. am not good at math.
3. do not completely believe the city exists.

I fully expect the plane to land in something that looks like a town but is more like the fake town from the end of Blazing Saddles – a number of quickly erected backdrops put up for my convenience before some massive trap is sprung. Everything real about the place seems too weird to be true – the gigantic light up cowboy (he’s still there, yeah?), the New York City in miniature – while all the fake movie stuff feels like the actual truth. I fully expect to see Nicholas Cage drinking himself to death while George Clooney and friends steal his shit and his girl. Or Johnny Depp screaming at a hotel bar full of lizard people. Or anything other than the actual city, really.

In addition to my somewhat broken ability to separate reality and fiction, the trip has also brought to the surface all my packing quirks. I over pack, see, but not in the traditional sense – rather than too many clothes, or anything that might actually be useful, I overload my luggage with media. For this trip alone, I’m taking:

- my DS Lite, with all my DS games and seven GBA games
- From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
- Labyrinths, by Borges
- a notebook and all the pens I could possibly ever need
- an iPod with something like 96 GB of songs on it and all of Adult Swim’s Frisky Dingo
- my laptop
- the first two tpbs of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory
- the latest issue of Game Developer
- a report on gamer behaviors in the UK done by the BBC in 2005

And I just figured out how to put all of FLCL on my iPod, so add that to the list. Granted, it’s an eight-hour flight both ways, but is this really necessary for a four-day trip? Is packing the results of every “desert island” question imaginable really a proportionate response?

Oh yes. I get bored phenomenally easy, especially on planes and especially on planes traveling the length of the country. That I’ll most likely doze off around the two hour mark is really not important right now – that I pack some form of entertainment for every aspect of my pencil thin attention span is.

So I’m out. Probably no posting for a few days, but that should hardly be too much of a change from normal. See you when I’m back the Wonka factory.

(And did I mention my hotel is a giant circus tent? NOT OF THIS EARTH.)

July was a monster, an absolute beast of a month rising out of the ocean like a dozen creepy JJ Abrams trailers stacked on top of each other. Looking back, it feels like all I did was work too late too often and move house a couple of times. Somewhere along the way a message appeared on the white board at work that summed it all up – JULY: THE WEAK WILL BE EATEN. By that point I felt halfway down the throat and more than a little past caring. The game started and stuttered it’s way towards completion, limping along as each day seemed to bring one more thing gone wrong that caused everything else to screech to a halt as we frantically searched for a solution. For a while there I dreamed in murder cases and stylus taps, excel sheets and foreign language text files. The antsy feeling of still sitting at my desk after midnight and watching a status bar slowly fill as a new build loaded to a server on the other side of the country became a way of life.

And then, all of a sudden and without any great fanfare, the game was done. The game was whisked off to spend a couple of weeks being poured over by the people Nintendo hires to make sure your game doesn’t make them look bad and I started to get used to the idea of spending my time fixing the odd thing here and there, poking the internet to make it to do something interesting, and going home on time.

Outside of work, Team Cohabitation is fully moved in to the new place. New furniture has arrived and been assembled (very little of it by me, mind you – for the first or so at Ft. Awesome, I’d leave for work each morning and come home to literally rooms full of new furniture and a new pile of broken down boxes discarded like so much snakeskin. There are worse things than living with an OCD with her own set of tools), pictures and art and things are on the wall, and the internet is actually working the way it’s supposed to. The place is actually the entire second floor of a house that’s been turned into individual apartments, and between the massive amounts of space (much of which has already been filled by books, naturally) and our insatiable lust for new and better gadgets, it’s general regarded by friends and local experts as the best thing ever. I’m tying this from my lovely new desk area in the game room(!), sitting just across from the massive entertainment stand that holds one of the Wiis, the PS2, and the Xbox 360.

Oh, that was the other thing that happened: I got a 360, one of the swanky black Elite models. It was nearly a week before I had time to play it, of course, and even longer before it was properly online, but it was completely worth it. It’s an immediately impressive system – upon taking it out of the box and plugging it in, I was greeted by one of the smoothest and most user friendly interfaces I’ve ever seen on a console (or a PC not running OSX, for that matter). Everything you need to start playing, download demos or full-sized games, get in touch with friends and a dozen other options is right there waiting for you to tell it what to do. There was an article recently written by the lovely and talented Tim Schafer where he described a shift in mentality where the 360 was concerned – when he turned the system on, he wasn’t thinking “I’m going to play game X”, but “I’m going to play some Xbox”. And that’s it exactly. When I sit down with the controller, it’s rarely to play just one game – in addition to Crackdown, Gears of War, or Burnout Revenge, I might also check for new demos or Xbox Live Arcade games to try out, play a few hands of Uno online with strangers around the world, or head over to the multimedia section to salivate over the Bioshock trailer for the thousandth time. It’s a genuine home entertainment center, and a genuine accomplishment in the realm of game consoles. How Microsoft got their shit together long enough to produce it is more than a little beyond me.

And what else? With work calming down I’ve got some headspace to devote to game design again (funny how I feel like I’ve said that exact thing in this space before), specifically games built around actual every day moments. The thing I’m currently taking notes for in preparation for writing a proper game design document comes from two slightly different sources: a quote from Hideo Kojima in an old issue of Wired where he talked about looking at the different functions of a building as a study in game design, and my old, old, old habit of making games out of dumb stuff to keep myself entertained. The final product should be short and sweet; a flash game, but probably not deep enough to warrant anything bigger. As it moves from notes into actual, semi-firm plans, I’ll probably talk about it more here.

In the meantime, things continue apace. More coming sooner rather than later about rock shows, fallen trees, games, and the usual stuff.

My last week living in Alphabet City is quickly coming to an end, and so far I’ve managed to stick to the right side of the crowbar seperation between thoughtful and maudlin. Most of last weekend was spent hitting up favorite down-the-street places to eat that won’t so much be down the street any more come this weekend – 7A, Crif Dogs, Two Boots, Sal’s, and a few others, all the places, except for dearly departed Joey’s (Oh, those fries! Oh, that one waitress! Oh, that chicken and waffles!), that kept me alive at first and made the patch of island South of 14th and East of 1st home afterwards. Some people make landmarks out of statuary and favorite shops, all of mine are places with tables, preferably drinks, and late enough hours to keep me mostly standing no matter what time I come crawling in.

The best protection against sappy sentimentalism, though, has easily been work and the mad hours the game I’m producing has demanded over the last week. Weeks. Month. After what feels like a forever of being just off schedule, just behind where we need to be, and always in a precarious enough position where the slightest problem can lay waste to the best laid plans, we’re quickly approaching the all or nothing hour where Gold is delivered and the game code locked down. That Gold delivery happens the Monday after we cart my stuff over to the new place is just one more thing, one more day that if I can just get through, things will be all right. The work stress over the last few weeks has lapped up everything around it for fuel, making me shakey and grouchy and feeling always on the edge of taking somebody’s head off, and my own many and myriad neurosis surely haven’t helped any. Thank god for Girl and her handling of…pretty much everything important to the moving process. While work’s ruled everything around me and I’ve spent the last few weeks gradually rattling away into pieces, she’s found the place, ordered the army of new furniture, and set up the truck we’re travelling to the Bronx on Saturday morning to pick up. I can only assume some sort of amazing past-life karma that led to her sticking with me – you know that monk in all those pictures, the one setting himself on fire in protest? This guy. There’s no other rational answer.

So what have I done with my time recently, when not working or sleeping? Packing. Buying board games. Going to see the Long Blondes, and remembering how great it is to dance at a rock show. Buying up board games with the crazed eyes of a man possessed. Playing through all three Ratchet & Clank games, and being consistently amazed at how Insomniac managed to put out three games so inventive, fun, and balanced in the space of as many years. Thinking about and missing game design, and realizing there’s nothing but poor time management and my own feeling sorry for myself keeping me from getting back into it. Getting caught in the rain on the walk home, and not even caring because the last week has felt like living in a dog’s mouth. Watching Mel Brooks movies over the actual rented movies that have to go back the next day. Listening to the first song off the new Art Brut album over and over again, like I’m afraid I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be gone. Realizing I’ve all but forgotten how to make a mixed tape and relearning a song at a time. Y’know, stuff.

Hopefully, once moving is done and dusted and work settles down a little, posting here will take on some sense of regularity. There are actual thoughts about actual games and more waiting in the wings, all in various states of draft. That’s at least a week and a world of things to do away, though, so we’ll see what happens.

i) have at long last gotten around to beating the original Guitar Hero, making Stevie Ray Vaughn my bitch while barely surviving Ozzy.

ii) am 2/3′s of the way towards drunk, having declared war on a bottled of wine following…

iii) finally, along with the rest of my team at work, posted the bastard goddamn Alpha version of the bastard goddamn game we’re working on. A week late and several nights’ sleep late, it’s in. Tomorrow we start talking seriously about what happens for the next build, and there’s a whole new set of problems to worry about, but for now? For now it’s done, and all that matters is listening to Shy Child* as loud as possible and racing exhaustion to the bottom of a bottle. All in all I’d rather be out dancing, but it’s too early in the week and too late at night for that sort of thing. So deafness via pop music it is, then.

*Special thanks to Gillen for the introduction.

But to the point: Summer, and the happenings what are all up in it.

1. Need to look at neighborhoods to move to. Need to look at apartments to then move in to. And finally, at long last, need to physically move. At this point I’m having trouble visualizing the various actions that needs be accomplished for those three things to happen – in my mind, I am already moved in and waiting for Girl to get home so I can properly explain why it was vitally important I buy a 360 right then and there.

2. Need to steer The Game at work through the various milestones over the next few months: Alpha, Alpha 2, Beta…and whatever comes after that. Need to not freak out.

3. Need to sit down and spend a day with Scratch, the potentially amazing new tool from a bunch of MIT kids. Scratch takes the programming end of creating cartoons, stories, and games on a computer and simplifies them by presenting code as a bunch of colorful blocks to be snapped together however you want. The possiblities, while maybe not endless, are such that it could be the best proof of concept tool ever for trying out little game ideas to see if there’s any real promise to them. The biggest problem, of course, is coming up with the free time to explore it properly. Maybe over Memorial Day weekend, provided work and Ratchet & Clank don’t get in the way.

4. Need to come up with some ideas for Gallaher’s Comics Writing Workshop this Saturday. Writing comics is very different from any sort of fiction I’ve written in years (that is, games), and something I haven’t thought about in a rather long time. That said, this sounds like a fun way to spend a Saturday night and can only lead to good things or nothing at all. Of course, I need some ideas before then, or else I won’t really have anything to say. Or an idea. Half an idea. Anything, please.

Need to see the Long Blondes at Bowery in June. Tickets are secured for me and Girl, so all that remains now is to not vibrate myself to pieces in excitement. I’ll probably write something long and gasping about the band shortly after the show – I tried recently, only to realize that my best line was actually mentally hijacked from Miss Amp’s wonderful breakdown of their lyrics. Go and read, and then find and listen (the album’s not out in the States just yet, but you’re on the internet, for God’s sake. Figure something out). Kate Jackson, lead vocal and wearer of scarves, is having none of your bloodless pining away over somebody who doesn’t know you exist. She’s out there right now, breaking down your signifigant other’s resolve pose by perfectly crafted pose. Don’t try to stop her. Your weapons are useless.

6. Need to start thinking in terms of game design. Yesterday’s work snag left me wistfully thinking back to when I was a Game Designer rather than a Producer, and while what I’m doing is fun and rewarding and totally worthwhile, I don’t think I’ll last very long without a new outlet for making shit up again. If that means scheduling time each week to sit down in front of an empty notebook (or the aforementioned Scratch) and poke at things until they click together, so be it.

7. Keep up with the twenty lines a day, genius or not.

8. Keep running in the mornings. Oh god, keep running.

9. Need to amass gigantic collection of board games to compliment ever-growing collection of video games. Apples to Apples, Labyrinth, and a second-hand copy of Trivial Pursuit do not a collection make. At some point once moving and various other expenditures are taken care of, I will descend upon the board game store like a plague of locusts, seeking copies Powergrid and Ticket to Ride for nourishment rather than Egyptian crops. It will be glorious.

10. Finish video games before starting/buying new ones. I’m halfway through something like ten games while other sit completely untouched. I blame the utter horror that was Spider-Man 3 on the Wii for pushing me back in to the loving embrace of Spider-Man 2 for the PS2. Inching through the awesome Prince of Persia: Sands of Time can wait until I’ve scratch my web-swinging itch.

11. Not die. Really.