And suddenly, it’s beautiful. After a week of rather punishing heat by June’s standards—highs in the upper 90′s—it’s now comfortable and breezy, occasional clouds drifting lazily across the baby blue sky. I’m now extra grateful for the hour I spent in the garden yesterday evening, trimming lawn edges and generally cleaning up. I’m now enjoying it, as I recline on the front window seat and glance out at the lawn.

It’s been a great week at work; I helped track down information for a certification the company seeks, and the head of the effort praised me often, especially to upper management. It was interesting work, too; asking people about how we do things, writing up brief process descriptions (how to explain this with minimal words?), marking up spreadsheets, and so forth. And it helped to know that this entire job would be done today; I could focus intently on such a short-term goal.

Unfortunately, my personal time suffered somewhat. Part of that was caused by exhaustion upon arriving home; I’m not used to that sort of pace at work. But also, I was just a little lazy this week. I spent a lot of time chatting with friends online. This is a fine and good thing in moderation, but this was not moderation. In fact, I just e-mailed them that I’m going to have to switch offline at 9:00 p.m. That’ll give me time to write, draw, and read before going to bed.

I just feel a need to make really good use of my time.

I’ve entered a new phase in my understanding of the Getting Things Done system. For the past few weeks, I’ve been dumping everything into my system. If I notice something I want to buy, I add it to my ”To Buy” list. If I think of something I’d like to do, I add it to one of my lists.

As a result, when I have free time, I can’t scour my brain for something to do. All my projects are out of my head, in my system. My brain literally doesn’t remember them, at least not for immediate recall.

This created a curious sense of limbo; I was so used to being pulled by all the strands of projects in my mind. Now, I have to rely on my system. This is a good thing, really, as I can concentrate on one thing at a time.

Been watching quite a bit of anime lately. I finished Zeta Gundam, which was a brutal but satisfying experience. Almost everyone dies at the end, but in true Gundam tradition, their deaths are all meaningful. Characters sacrifice themselves for their beliefs.

Similarly for the movie Char’s Counterattack, though it also has the benefit of beautiful animation and direction. Finally, we get to see what giant robot combat in space is supposed to look like. I now know exactly how fighting in space ‘s supposed to feel in the Gundam universe.

Also finished Gundam Seed, which I greatly enjoyed partly because of its cheesiness and partly because of its solid storytelling. They managed to take a jumble of elements from early Gundam shows and forge a solid story out of them.

Last month, I spent several hours going through a rather frustrating process: I changed all my passwords on all my computers and websites. I now do this every three months.

This was prompted mainly from my webserver, which has been hacked twice in the past couple of years. I know it’s important to change passwords occasionally, but I never bothered to until I lost data on hacked websites.

There’s an unexpected benefit to this: I’ll occasionally be reminded to return to a website I haven’t visited in a long time, and my current password won’t work. I’ll try previous passwords until I can get in, then write down this new website. I now have a comprehensive list of sites that require a password, and I’ve closed accounts on a few that I no longer need. So, I’ve eliminated a few repositories of my personal information that had been floating around.

I remember my passwords by having different levels of passwords: I have one password for throwaway accounts that don’t keep any personal or financial information (such as forums and games), another for financial websites, and another for e-mail. I only have a few passwords that I use every day; the rest (for things like MySQL databases) are at least written down. All my passwords are currently written on a sheet of paper that I’ve hidden in my house.

Moreover, all my passwords use upper-case letters, lower-case letters, and numbers; Almost all are at least eight characters long, and the very important ones use special characters (e.g., *, #, %) if possible.

Is this a pain? A bit. But I feel a lot more secure. I think it’s worth the trouble.

Note there’s more VR story. I’ve also uploaded all of the VR story so far to the VR story section of my writing website.

The VR story is getting difficult to write. I wanted it to be a story I could just write without worrying about an intricate plot; nevertheless, a plot has evolved. And now I have a lot more that has to happen before I can finish the story, but I almost want to throw in the towel rather than spend time on the complexities of a plot for a story that’s supposed to be an off-the-cuff action/adventure.

I’m cleaning out some old webpage on this site, and instead of deleting them or making them individual pages, I thought I’d post them here for posterity. And here’s one now!

Dramatic Theory and Video Games

Dramatic theory is hard to research. There seems to be very little material readily available. As a result, distilling dramatic theory down to a single reed-thin theorem is difficult. I’m going to try anyway.

Good drama results from a certain pattern in the number of unanswered questions in existence in a work over time. In a very short work, that pattern is a simple peak: the number of unanswered questions rises over time until the climax near the end, and then drops back down to zero. Normally, however, that same pattern is maintained in general, but is supplemented by one level of recursion: small patterns of peaks within the larger pattern.

The funny part of that theorem — which is hardly “reed-thin,” now that I look at it — is the concept of ”unanswered questions.” What exactly does this refer to? It depends partly on the work. For example, a console RPG’s unanswered questions usually center around the survival of the characters. A murder mystery novel’s unanswered questions usually center around the motivation, methods, and identity of the murderer.

Fair enough. Now, let’s apply this theorem to video games, particularly combat-oriented video games.

What makes for a satisfying video game? Ignoring the overall trend towards a larger climax, satisfaction comes from a pattern of peaks and valleys in the player’s experience. The player should be “scared” for awhile, then not-scared for awhile. Both of these phases should be of a reasonable size.

In a simple combat-oriented game, one in which the player is fighting off other monsters, this concept can be implemented fairly easily, by keeping a running tally of the number of monsters that the player is fighting. Once the player has spent a certain amount of time fighting monsters, then no new monsters are generated nearby. Once the player has spent a certain amount of time without fighting, more monsters are generated.

Note, importantly, that this does not imply X minutes fighting monsters, followed by exactly X minutes not fighting monsters, etc. There will be a significant period in which the player will finish up fighting the current set of monsters, and clear out any other monsters nearby. Similarly, just because monsters are being generated nearby, does not necessarily mean that the player is immediately fighting them.

Obviously, this is a brute-force implementation, but it serves well as an example.