The Love of My (Other) Life

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Meg

The Love of My (Other) Life, by Traci L. Slatton, is a cute sci-fi romance. Brian chases Tessa all around Manhattan, telling her she’s his wife in an alternate universe, and making really terrible physics jokes. When Tessa isn’t trying to get away from the crazy man, she’s snarking at Chelsea “art” galleries and the insane cost of NYC rent. Favorite scenes include alternate-Brian and our world-Brian arguing in unison about alternate dimensions, and Tessa and Brian wandering into an empty room at a gallery and ending up accidentally making performance-art p0rn.

Plus, I think it takes serious chutzpah for a romance writer use ejaculate when referring to a loud and emotional exclamation. That’s what the word means, but… (My favorite word like this is the Victorian meaning of “promiscuous” meaning mixed or jumbled, so one can have a promiscuous bookshelf, or drop one’s shopping in a promiscuous heap.)

I received a review copy of this, and I have a second copy to give away! If you’re interested, leave a comment with the email address associated with your Amazon account. (The email field in my comments sections is screened, obviously.) At the end of the virtual book tour, a random commenter will win a Kindle copy. I think seven people read my blog, so your odds are pretty good.

This post is part of The Love of My (Other) Life blog book tour but you do not get any cover art here because it has a butt on the cover, and I don’t want your bookshelf to start getting too promiscuous.

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Recent Posts

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Meg

Two recent pieces on Indie Game Magazine on serious sim games. First, I loved the concept of Auroch Digital’s relevant sim Endgame Syria, even if I ultimately thought the execution was simplistic and somewhat lacking.

Then, I broke my rule against posting about indie Kickstarters for Neocolonialism. (I get way too many pitches for indie game project Kickstarters to cover that realm with any fairness or depth.) Seth Alter’s Neocolonialism is a very playable strategy game that’s simultaneously an interactive lesson in global finances.

I’ve played Sid Meier’s Civ a few times with a non-violent house role, battling friends and the jerk Montezuma to control the globe by dominating trade routes, controlling resources, and spreading culture. Players who enjoy that sort of strategic challenge will enjoy the gameplay involved in Neocolonialism. Alter has aligned gameplay goals with economic exploitation, which uses both the moral thoughtfulness players have making virtual political decisions in Positech’s Democracy or Max Barry’s NationStates, and our desires to succeed in multiplayer games, and he creates a strategy sim that’s serious, moral and still engaging.

Via Neocolonialism: Fill Your Bank Account While Ruining The World on IGM

And a not-so-serious one on Greg’s new cow-tipping Facebook game.

 

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Zenonia Hates Me

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Meg

New post on Zenonia 5 on Hardcore Droid:

Zenonia 5, Gamevil’s latest installment in the Zenonia series, is a fantasy action RPG for Droid.  Players enter an engaging fantasy world, with charming characters, oddly adorable monsters to fight, an epic destiny, and all the other J-RPG standards, but a frequent need to spend premium currency to progress, and storyline events that require familiarity with previous Zenonia make this delightful world very hard to access.

….

The story opens with a confusing argument between a king, a girl in a bikini, someone who seems to have killed a witch, and a dude who is becoming the devil because the wealthy have oppressed the poor. Then they battle! For folks unfamiliar with the previous Zenonia mythos, this is all pretty obscure, but in a moment, it seems that this sequence was all a dream! Your character is just as confused as you are! Phew! Your first action as a player is to have your crazy dream interpreted.

Via Love and Loathing in Las Zenonia on Hardcore Droid (No, I didn’t title it, I just wish I’d come up with that title myself.)

This was a fairly difficult review to write. I really wanted to enjoy a fantasy adventure, but I just felt like Zenonia hated me. There was too much — storyline, controls, etc. — that players were just expected to know going in, and while I usually prefer jumping in over a slow tutorial, the cost of that exploration was premium currency. I enjoy magic circle of exploration and interaction too much to love Z5.

Many thanks, and possibly many apologies, to Matt (of Matt Barth Sucks fame) for listening to my love/hate rantings and helping me refine it.

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Winter Wedding

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Meg

Just before Christmas, Harold and I went to the wedding of a high school friend in my New Jersey hometown. I basically cried from when we sat down,  because I always cry at weddings, and also because I’m over thirty now and I’m engaged now and I just have all these feelings.

A bunch of my high-school girl friends were the bridesmaids, and at the reception, the DJ introduced them all by their married names, because they have husbands now and that’s what people do. It suddenly seemed like it would be romantic and right to be Mrs. Harold Sipe, and that feeling lasted until I thought about how many credits I have as Meg Stivison, and, well, tradition can suck it.

Harold and I were seated with bunch of my old friends and their spouses, catching up, eating way too much amazing food, and dancing a lot. Meredith and Rob had a great DJ with a perfect mix of songs (Did you know that music selection is just one out of the ten thousand decisions you are supposed to make when plan a wedding?), and it was kind of awesome to be dancing around with friends from fifteen or so years ago, doing the same ridiculous hyper dances we did at eighth grade dances in the gym, at parties and proms.  Only, you know, one of my girlfriends gave birth just a few weeks ago and another was still nursing her daughter, and I hurt my stupid back, so the dancing was slightly more restrained than when we were younger. But no less exuberant!

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Because Science!

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Meg

We are not wired to control our emotions. We now know that the amygdala can send signals to the prefrontal region of the brain, where the orbitofrontal cortex is located, but the prefrontal region cannot send signals directly to the amygdala. That is, the emotional part of our brain is wired to send signals to the thinking part of our brain, but not the other way around.

From The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor W. Hwang and Greg Horowitt

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On The Future

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Meg

I’ve started contributing to Geek Magazine recently, and my first piece is about future tech.

It’s exciting to think about a pocket app that learns about what you like and finds it for you, and, on a larger scale, about omnipresent technology learning from our choices, and predicting our needs. Still, there’s plenty of fodder for a dark sci-fi future in which privacy is over and Big Data tricks mindless consumers into buying more and more mass-produced junk. As everyone who’s used the musical taste-discovery Pandora knows, the program learns from upvoting and downvoting songs, but it also has an uncanny ability to whip out one’s guilty pleasure songs at inopportune moment. It’s probably not self-aware and doing it on purpose, bent on phase one of destroying all humans, is it?

Via Niantic Lab’s ‘Field Trip’ and the Future of Ambient Intelligence

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Hidden Object Adventures

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Meg

Harold came in while I was sprawled on the couch, immersed in a new game for a Hardcore Droid review.

“Are you playing a hidden object game?” he asked, with a certain amount of shock in his voice. Harold and I met through working on HO games, but we don’t always see them the same way. Harold, fighting everything that’s ever been written about gamer demographics, really enjoys the genre. I recognize the value of this casual games in the growing acceptance of game-playing as a adult hobby, and especially in helping to redefine ‘gamer’ away from the angry young man playing MMOs in his mom’s basement. But I am, of course, too much of an indie games hipster for hidden object casual games.

Plus, they can be just a little predictable… Are you a kicky girl detective unlocking the mysteries of your first big case? A stylish city slicker who’s inherited a dusty old manor with a secret? Maybe you’re a perky young journalist getting to the bottom of this mysterious story! Do you need to find the oil, wick and lamp before going to the dark room where all the clues are? Is there a circuit panel of wires that needs to be untangled? Most importantly, is there a bit of a quality decrease after Big Fish Games’ first free hour?

“No!” I said, “This is an adventure game, with hidden object elements.”

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ReviewerCard: A Card For (Unethical) Reviewers

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Meg

I’ve written before about times I feel like a real writer and times I wish I could carry all my clips around with me so I don’t feel like a hack and how great it is to get official confirmation in a press pass. But this isn’t quite what I had in mind.

Want a free drink? Want to be seated first? Use ReviewerCard to have a random dude on the internet accredit you as a reviewer, and start demanding perks! 

The business model behind Brad Newman’s ReviewerCard startup is quite simple. For a hundred dollars, shoppers can receive a wallet-size card titling them a reviewer, and can present that card to hint heavily for upgrades, free extra and discounts in exchange for more favorable reviews. It’s a win-win for anyone with a Yelp account who likes dining or travelling  and for Newman, who makes $100 to accredit each carded reviewer. Of course, it’s a lose-lose for local establishments shaken down by the threat of negative press and for folks trusting the information from user-generated reviews.

I hope the strenuous requirements for a ReviewerCard include spellchecking before posting on Yelp.

Via ReviewerCard: A Card For (Unethical) Reviewers on TapScape

 

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Pretend Space and Real Trees

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Meg

New post on IGM that’s half about a new initiative from indie studio RocketOwl, and half my rambling about social games for social change.

…The Ottawa indie game developers RocketOwl will be planting a real live tree for each new player of their environmentally-themed Facebook game Green Space who hits level 5. RocketOwl hopes to plant 250,000 trees — which obviously means 250,000 game installs — through a partnership with the reforestation nonprofit WeForest.

I was intrigued by RocketOwl’s environmental message and goals, and so I reviewed the beta of Green Space in August. Because Facebook sharing has the ability to bring a message to millions, there’s a lot of potential to harness that to use a social game to spread a social message. There’s also great potential for players to actually work together to encourage behavior changes, instead of pretending to share cows, as seen most effectively in Jane McGonagal’s wellness game SuperBetter. SuperBetter uses social powers of encouragement and accountability, and gameification of power-ups and levels, to encourage players to make a series of small behavior changes to meet their health goals. There’s potential for a good social game could use the same motivators to bring about better environmental behavior (a bonus for players who use cloth bags at the supermarket, or who take the bus one day instead of driving, for example) and to share stats to raise environmental awareness.

Via Real Trees From RocketOwl’s Green Space on The Indie Games Magazine

 

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But Brooklynites Do Things Ironically

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Meg

Potential Work Contact: My email is *noun* followed by *number* at Yahoo dot com.

Meg:  Well played, retro hipster! Want my fax number?

Potential Work Contact: What?

Meg: Oh. You weren’t kidding. Uh…

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