Category Archives: miscellaneous

No More GDC Austin

By Rubes | Published: May 29, 2010

Well, not the usual GDC Austin, at least. It seems that GDC has decided to reformulate (and rename) the former GDC Austin as GDC Online, which is now geared towards “connected games including casual, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.” So instead of a smaller version of the more general GDC, it’s now focusing primarily on online games.

I’m disappointed, but I think I can understand the move. I really liked having a smaller, more accessible GDC than the big one in San Francisco. It probably makes more sense to have a meeting that focuses on a particular area of game development, rather than just another “mini” GDC, especially with the rise of other conferences and meetings like PAX and IndieCade, both of which are around the same time in the fall.

I have no particular interest in the topics of GDC Online, so that’s a conference [More...]

Also posted in indie games | 2 Comments

The Brew Turns Two

By Rubes | Published: February 3, 2010

Programming alert: The Monk’s Brew officially turns two tomorrow.

As far as blogs go, that’s hardly enough to impress anyone. My two initial reactions are (1) I’m startled that I’ve stuck to it even this long, and (2) sweet, another way to mark the passing of the years while Vespers still isn’t finished. So, for those of you keeping score at home: four years of development, two years of blogging, zero finished indie games. Closer, but not there yet.

This is not a high volume, high visibility blog by any stretch of the imagination, so I appreciate all (ten) of you who stop by here every once in a while to check up on things and see if the furniture has been moved around at all. It does help.

A year ago, I reflected on the occasion by noting how much admiration [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 2 Comments

In Backups I (Should) Trust

By Rubes | Published: January 22, 2010

I never was much of a backup person until I started on the Vespers project. As things progressed, I realized how much content there was to manage, and how important it was going to be to protect it from loss. So somewhere along the way I became a backup fanatic. By my count, I believe I now have somewhere around six active backups of my data, some full backups, some partial. Let me see if I can remember them all.

My main backup is a clone of my desktop development machine. I use an awesome program called SuperDuper! for this. It basically just makes an exact clone of my computer’s internal drive onto a secondary internal drive. I have that running nightly, so at any point in time I have an exact clone ready to go, losing at most a day’s worth of work.

In addition to that, I [More...]

Also posted in Vespers | 5 Comments

Congratulations, You’ve Been Kickstarted

By Rubes | Published: November 21, 2009

In what will amount to essentially a formality, the Jason Scott Sabbatical is set to be officially Kickstarted in just a few hours.

Scott, the digital historian, archivist, and documentarian (not to mention unusually entertaining writer and speaker) responsible for such intense goodness as Textfiles.com, archiving Geocities, the highly recommended BBS Documentary, and the soon-to-be-almost-certainly-highly-recommended text adventure documentary GET LAMP, is going on paid sabbatical. Scott recently lost his day job, and since he was doing all of this wonderous stuff on the side in his spare time, not having a steady income seriously jeopardized future progress on these projects. So he took matters into his own hands and, thanks to Kickstarter, a whole mess of supporters stepped up to the plate for him. A few hundred, actually.

Kickstarter is a pretty [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 1 Comment

Steve’s Cell Phone Number

By Rubes | Published: September 22, 2009

So one of the cooler things that happened at GDC Austin took place at the Speaker’s Party, a nice rooftop patio party for all of the speakers at the conference with, happily enough, an open bar. I was there in Austin by myself, and I’m not the most extroverted person by nature, so mingling at a social event where most people seem to know each other and I know zero isn’t exactly my comfort zone. But hey, open bar.

So I got my precious free drink, scanned the crowd, and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

I finally saw someone I recognized, but only barely; Tom Abernathy, one of the advisors of the Writers’ Summit. I knew a little of him, but I only recognized him because he introduced me at my talk. I approached him and thanked him for his intro, and [More...]

Also posted in interactive fiction | 5 Comments

The End of Prohibition (Sort Of)

By Rubes | Published: July 2, 2009

On a completely unrelated topic…

Just wanted to take a moment to recognize that July 1st marks a new cultural era in the state of Utah. Those of you familiar with Utah know that this place has long been known (and ridiculed) for its arcane and often bizarre alcohol laws. I should emphasize the word “arcane,” in the sense of, “understood by few.” I have lived in this state for 12 years, and to this day I’m not sure I understand half of the laws regarding the purchase and serving of alcohol in public establishments. Trying to explain these laws to out-of-state visitors was always frustrating, and usually ended with something like, “I’m not sure anyone really knows.”

The most well-known and understood of these was the “private club” law. Establishments whose receipts due to alcohol were greater than a certain percentage compared to food (not sure what it was…maybe [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 5 Comments

Priceless Memories, Now Just 99¢

By Rubes | Published: June 8, 2009


I was a child of the late 70s and early 80s, and personally I think it was a great time to grow up. I was 10 years old when Star Wars was released. Could that have been timed any better? Plus, even though I had to be subjected to disco, I wouldn’t actually start developing a taste for music until the fad had long passed. I didn’t think I watched that much TV back then, but looking back at the top shows of 1978 (Laverne and Shirley, Three’s Company, Mork and Mindy, Happy Days, and What’s Happening!), I guess I did considering I knew them all, and many more, pretty well. (Speaking of which, you mean to tell me “Soap” never got higher than #13?)

As I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere a few times, that was around the same time I started to learn programming, on [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 6 Comments

Deadlines Are Just Rough Guesses, Anyway

By Rubes | Published: May 8, 2009

So a couple of deadlines have been extended, much to my relief. Perhaps.

The deadline for IndieCade, the annual independent games festival/competition, was extended from April 30th to May 15th. This is good because I really had no chance of having something close to submission-worthy by the end of April. It’s still up in the air if I can have the demo ready by the 15th, but at least I’ll have another shot.

Additionally, the submission deadline for the Austin GDC conference (for presentations) was just extended from today to Wednesday, May 13th. I’ve spoken with a couple of people about a presentation already, and I’ve prepared a draft of my abstract, so the extension will allow me/us to edit and refine it a bit more. Although I’ve submitted many abstracts for scientific research conferences in the past, I’ve never prepared an abstract quite like this before, so [More...]

Also posted in interactive fiction | 2 Comments

An Aging Brew

By Rubes | Published: February 4, 2009

So as it turns out, I’m looking through my older blog posts and I realize that today marks one year since beginning The Monk’s Brew.

Although I had written a number of blogs about the development of Vespers over on GarageGames.com prior to starting this blog, I remember feeling apprehensive about doing this given the extra commitment it would require. Time is valuable these days, and I’m not a fast writer. Ideas abound, but I often find I lack the clarity of thought to put them into meaningful words. The last thing I wanted was to start a blog, and then let it die out because I couldn’t keep up.

There have definitely been times when it was hard to keep up, and times when I’ve blogged when I should have been doing other things. But I’ve enjoyed it throughout, and I like having a place to toss out [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 1 Comment

Monks, Manuscripts, and Modern Technology

By Rubes | Published: October 19, 2008

And now for something completely different.

This has nothing to do with the IF Comp. Nor does this have anything to do with adventure games, interactive fiction, or indie game development. It does, however, concern a medieval European abbey and the intersection between monks, manuscripts, and modern technology, and if you haven’t noticed I just can’t help but be drawn to juicy stuff like that.

I caught this story in the NY Times while traveling on a cross-country flight, and thanks to the miracle of the web you, too, can partake. John Tagliabue reports that a vast collection of handwritten medieval books and manuscripts, one of the oldest and most valuable collections in the world, is going online with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (Link may require a login to the NY Times web site.)

The monastery in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is so [More...]

Posted in miscellaneous | 1 Comment