LifeBox

My eyes are tired of looking at computers.

Grah.

I made it out to the improv jam at the Hideout tonight for the first time in… probably a year or so. Tuesday nights are in high demand around here; Bernie usually rows, which means I’m on goblin duty, but the crazy rain has closed the rivers to boating. Tuesday night is also when my game design group meets, usually a little later, so if I’m not at home watching Pai or working, I’m there, playtesting and working on those. Tonight was a rare, rare alignment of events that lead me back to the jam, though, and I’m glad I made it out.

We’ve been cleaning, and the rain has been kicking up all other kinds of mold and pollen and whatnot, and my allergies have been going insane, so much that I actually threw my back out or something from coughing and sneezing so much. So, between the hacking and achoo, sniffly nose and crusty eyes, and feeling like my back is on fire and totally tense, which leads to neck pain, which leads to all kinds of sinus/migrane action - I felt like I got smacked in the face with a brick by the time I got home tonight - I was in pretty bad shape most of the day today, but usually, a good couple of hours of improv can actually make me forget how sick I am long enough for it to go away of its own accord. Well, that didn’t happen, but we did have a whole bunch of fun - there were probably between thirty and forty people there, including many new faces and people who just came to watch. There were too many to manage all at once, so we split up, with Roy leading our group and Jeremy leading the newer folks, doing the usual warm-up and scenework type of things, and then we came together at the end to put on a mock show for an hour or so. I was still feeling pretty rough by that time, so I mostly tried to sit quietly in the dark, but managed to get up for some fun a time or two.

Anyway, yeah, good stuff. It’s exciting to see so many relatively fresh people having such a good time, and it’s really great to get to play with some of the people who show up (Cody, Aden, the whole crop of new imps) that I generally don’t get on stage with, except briefly at Maestro or whatever. It’s also been cool to see how Roy and them have totally grown into teachy-leady-workshoppy mode - Roy’s got this natural charm and enthusiasm that totally draws people in, and his scenework and storytelling skills are right up there, and his love for the craft really shows.

So. I get home around 10:30pm - I’m hurting. Pai hasn’t been sleeping - Bernie’s hurting. We evaluate the situation, I grab some vicodin and acetaminophen and try to lay flat for a little bit while it kicks in, and Bernie goes to try to nurse Paidia down again. Neither one of us meet with success - I’m still all twisted up and in a good deal of pain, only a bit loopy now, and the baby is still hollering and refusing to sleep. So we just hang out and play for a couple hours, and try to make everyone feel better. The sound of quiet breathing is coming from the bedroom, so I’m guessing that the situation is under control in there now. I’m going to wait just a little bit longer, and try some more drugs for the hurting, and see if I can actually get some decent sleep, myself. Then maybe tomorrow, I can concentrate on getting stuff done without my face exploding.

I don’t know why cockroaches are so much more disgusting than pretty much any other insect, but they are. In case you’re not anywhere near Texas at the moment, we’re on day 47 or something ridiculous of rain - lakes are twenty feet above where they’re supposed to be, there’s flooding all over the place, and it’s just like a freaking jungle everywhere. Part of jungle life is bugs. We’ve been getting more than our share of six-legged visitors, most of whom are let be, but those greasy roaches are dealt with harshly. They are enemy combatants, and the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

This evening, Bernie went out to the local 24-hour Mexican bakery to get some (ultimately inedible) pastries for dessert, and I was on baby watch. Of course, a minute after she left, Paidia woke up and started babbling away. I went in and laid on the bed to keep her company until she settled down, but quickly realized that was unnecessary, as I saw that one of the little creepy brown dudes was already hanging out in the dark on the sheet, there. I slowly extracted myself and the monkey from the bed, in hopes of reaching our roach extraction kit before he skittered away, but he made it to the corner of the bed, and then behind, before I could get him. When Bernie got home, she declared an all-out offensive, donning boots and gloves and arming herself with bottles of spray bleach and needle-nosed pliers, and after a rousing chase, the intruder was safely captured and sent to the gulag to await sentencing.

Shortly thereafter, as the girls were drifting off to sleep, and I was settling in for a bit of catch-up work, I heard something skittering, then buzzing, under or next to my desk. I got out my pokin’ stick and tried to rustle whatever it was out, when it JUMPED! Well, it wasn’t a crazy jumping roach, but a cricket trying to get out of its last round of moult, and it wasn’t in any position to be captured back in the cords and wires and whatnot back there, so I just let it be, and I imagine that it eventually just hopped away. I don’t know why that didn’t gross me out as much as a roach on the bed - objectively, crickets are pretty freaky-looking, maybe moreso than your average cockroach - but there you go. I think there’s some cultural understanding that crickets are “cute” or something, and therefore less smash-worthy than other bugs.

In other news, my new favorite word is “leptoglossus“. Those little monsters are pretty rad, and they’re everywhere around here. Gonna have myself a little lepto-party, yee-haw.

As a professional Flash developer, I would be remiss if I did not join the great parade of bloggers doing the Papervision3D is here dance. I’ve had my eye on this for some time now - like everyone else - and it’s pretty exciting to see a project of this magnitude looking so good, and releasing their code under a generous open source license. I’ve done some 3D work in Flash before - it can get hairy, but these guys have put together something pretty solid, with the performance and features that you’d expect from a commercial product. I remember when they added 3D support to Macromedia Director - it was pretty freaking cool, and we did some neat work with it, but at the time (and still, I think), the adoption rate of the Director plugin on the web wasn’t so great, and nobody was going to use a scripted environment to deliver 3D on other media. Flash, even Flash 9, has a totally decent penetration these days - see the video player on MySpace, with its mumble millions of users - and the Actionscript coding APIs for the Papervision3D stuff look straightforward enough that pretty much anyone who’s done any coding in Flash can put together something that looks super sweet. I’m quite eager to see what comes out of this, and just hope that my clients can give me a little bit of breathing room before they expect me to make everything all zoomy and twirly, too. Yay, the future!