Career Advice

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Meg

Roy: you should write for ***publication***
they are really one of the top level outlets for general audience/enthusiast tech reporting and they are looking for columnists ***link***
Meg: Oh, nice!
Roy: i’m sure you have a solid application package on hand to send them
Meg: well… I have some good clips
but I hate writing up cover letters
Roy: haha
Meg: No, seriously, if I could just send my clips with a “click here if interested” button, I’d be so happy
Roy: you should have a couple of standard cover letters on file that you can customize quickly
Meg: I have a skeleton one that I tailor for each application, but I am so uncomfortable telling people why I’m awesome
Roy: haha
well you better practice!
Meg: I really don’t know what to say besides that other people hired me
and they thought I was pretty good
so maybe you should too
you know, if you want to
no pressure
Roy: you might want to reconsider that part

 

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Prepping for Doomsday is Surprisingly Cute

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Meg

When I got the Doomsday Preppers press release, I quickly scanned it for the name of a friend who works in National Geographic’s game department, then dropped it in my GMail folder of press releases that I might get around to covering after I finish my pressing deadlines, and after topics I could turn into a piece that would be a good fit for a particular editor, after really interesting pieces I plan do on spec and after the deadlines when have somehow become pressing while I was doing other things. (This particular folder is different from press releases I glance at and immediately bin, but only academically.)

Then Jess and Owen started talking on Tumblr about how much they love Doomsday Preppers, and I thought something that household considers a guilty pleasure was probably worth checking out. And in my review, Doomsday Preppers, a cute and engaging survivalist builder, gets a 9 out of 10.

g5 preppersIn G5 and National Geographic’s new iOS game Doomsday Preppers, players take on the role of a prepper, ready to build an underground bunker that’s surprisingly adorable. Players can’t directly customize their avatar besides gender, but after randomizing a few times, I got a purple-haired avatar in a demin skirt and surgical mask for contaminated air, probably close enough to what I would have made anyway.

Players then begin building their adorable underground bunker, beginning with housing for five prepper friends. Arriving preppers are then assigned work preparing for the apocalypse in different capacities. My first preppers grew algae in a hydroponic garden and produced duct tape in a workshop, making my doomsday bunker kind of, well, cute. The basic mechanics of Doomsday Preppers are resource management, as your preppers work in assigned stations to make products, prepare for doom, and earn gold, which is then spend on expanding your bunker deeper into the earth, providing more housing and more production for more preppers.

Deliveries of crates containing gold start to arrive as soon as production gets going. (For some reason, I allowed the UPS guy into my underground bunker, and he went cheerily into my homemade elevator. I’m… not entirely sure about that.)

Via Game Review: Doomsday Preppers on TapScape

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“After All This Time?”

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Meg

I’ve written lots of times about reading and watching Harry Potter, sometimes as Harry Potter therapy for different things happening in my life.  In college, my roommate Kristine and I would lie on the couches, watch Harry Potter, and escape to Hogwarts when we were worried about finals. In Yantai, I bought Chinese copies of the movies, and watched them when I was lonely and missed hearing English. I read Harry Potter on a night train to Beijing, and on a flight from Seattle to New York. I stayed up all night reading Harry Potter 2, when I was a college student and should probably have been writing a paper, and stayed up all night reading Harry Potter 7, when I was teaching at the community college and should probably have been marking papers. Last winter, Harold took me to Hogsmeade at Universal in Orlando, which was really nice of him, especially considering that he hasn’t read a single one of the books and has only seen segments of the movies when I happen to be watching it. I tried to watch Harry Potter a few weeks ago when I was in Brooklyn and missing Harold. Whenever I’m stressed or unhappy, I put on Harry Potter, and fall asleep thinking about Hogwarts.

With my stupid hurt back, I’ve been having trouble getting comfortable enough to fall sleep. (Other things I can’t do right now include yoga, drinking, following simple plots, sitting still to play games, focusing long enough to write, and pretty much anything else I like doing.) So I do what I do when under stress, and turn to Harry Potter. I arranged the blankets and pillows into a special shape for me to sleep on (This is a stupid back-injury sleeping position, which is different from my usual awesome sleeping position, curled up in a little tiny ball under a big stack of blankets.) and opened HP7 on my Kindle.

The Kindle allows readers to share passages and notes with others. Of course, a  certain percentage of these notes are the expected This book is sooooo boring  y do we have 2 read this?????? SUX. But the notes for Harry Potter 7 show over a hundred readers have publicly highlighted and shared “After all this time?” “Always,” said Snape, a reassuring reminder that people aren’t always terrible. I’ve shared a couple notes from HP myself but I love it all so much that I’d probably have to highlight and share every single non-Quiddich page of the book. Plus I’d have to restrain myself from putting little hearts and smiley faces in the notes section.

While I was reading Harry Potter, for about the millionth time, and trying not to move because of my stupid back, I realized that someone else was reading HP7 at the same time on their Kindle, because they were sharing passages. Once I noticed this, I kept flipping to the notes and highlights section to see if my invisible friend had liked anything else. I didn’t know that there were any new ways left for me to enjoy Harry Potter.

I’m pretty sure technology’s catching up to magic, and I’m just waiting for my Hogwarts holodeck now.

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Phoenix Wright’s Nemesis

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Meg

New review of Devil’s Attorney for Android is live on Hardcore Droid:

In Senri AB’s Devil’s Attorney, players take on the role of Max McMann, an ethically flexible defense attorney, tasked with keeping his unfortunate and misunderstood clients out of jail. Players aren’t solving the case — Max doesn’t ferret out evidence or pounce on contradictions to prove his clients are innocent. Instead, wily Max uses a collection of lawyerly tricks, like Patronizing witnesses or Tampering with evidence, that players use in a points-based strategy battle against a prosecutor. Each successful case earns money for Max with bonuses for proving the defendant’s innocence quickly.

Max’s clients each have a little story explaining the charges against them and why they are innocent. One explains that he totally wasn’t smuggling rare animals, not at all, in fact he has no idea how those lizards got in his underpants! Another one explains that he wasn’t running an illegal betting operation; instead some friends had gathered to watch sports programs and just happened to be counting their pocket change when police arrived.  And smooth Max defends them all! For a fee of course.

Via Devil’s Attorney Review | Hardcore Droid

Also added a segment on the new patch to my Knights of Pen & Paper review.

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In Which I Am Very Old

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Meg

A few days ago, I slipped on the stairs outside Harold’s apartment, and fell about half a flight, hitting my back on every step on the way down. It was…. not my finest moment. I tried to handle it with some ice and some Advil, but by that evening, it was pretty clear that I was becoming less mobile, so Harold finally made me go to an urgent care. (Also Harold would like you all to know that he demanded I see a doctor, and that left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have gone, and then all hell would have broken loose, and also that he was right and I was wrong.)

Not too much damage, at least. I’ve got some bruising on my lower back, and apparently that means when I sit down, stand up, cross my legs, or, um, BREATHE,  it sends spasms up my whole back. That is a serious design flaw. The doctor gave me an assortment of muscle relaxants and pain meds, took some X-rays, and told me I wouldn’t be going to the gym for a while and that I probably shouldn’t drive, either. (At least something is going my way.)

About the painkillers: I can not believe people take these recreationally… I’ve been slow-witted and dull since I started taking them. Harold and I were watching The Shield, and I spent the whole time asking him what was going on. Who’s that guy? Why’s he stealing money? Is he a cop? What’s in the gym bag? What’s going on now? I imagine I was a delightful companion in every way.

If there is anything that makes one feel as old as having a hurt back, I don’t know what it is. And I don’t really want to know.

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Castaway Paradise

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Meg

Wrote about the upcoming Castaway Paradise on IGM, as I pursue my life goal of playing every single island sim game ever.

Stolen Couch, the indie studio  behind Ichi and Kids Vs. Goblins, plan to release Castaway Paradise, a new free-to-play island sim for iOs, Android, PC and Mac.

Stolen Couch had me at “island sim”, I think the survival genre lends itself very well to crafting, farming and exploration game mechanics, and the island narrative is a perfect escapist fantasy.  We don’t need to discuss how many hours of my life I’ve spent playing Lost in Blue, Stranded Without A Phone, Sims Castaway…  Even titles like Youda Survivor and MyTribe, which are essentially time-management games with island art and basic survival narrative, kept me playing.

Via Stolen Couch’s Upcoming ‘Castaway Paradise’ | Meg Stivison | The Indie Game Magazine

Other island sims games not mentioned in this post: Pixonic’s Robinson, Monkey Island, that other version of MyTribe,

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Incubator

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Meg

A few days ago, I went to see the demos for the Triangle Start-up Factory incubator over at the American Tobacco Campus.  I went for work, but I was excited to go. I thought it would be smart to connect with local startups, meet interesting folks in the tech community, see what’s emerging, etc., etc.,  all kinds of optimistic hopes that I’ll look really hard and stay positive and eventually find good things to make a life here.

The keynotes were a bit depressing, because whenever people talk about how the Triangle is hip and high tech and happening and just as awesome as New York and Silicon Valley, it really highlights that I’m in a place that needs to talk itself up for a while first.

I did get the info for a good piece on PopUp,  over at TapScape:

There’s a lot of potential here for cute, asynchronous social fun with this app. It would be great fun to see that a friend took a goofy Instagram at this landmark, and take my own picture doing the same thing at the same spot.

Of course, cute social photos aren’t how PopUp would monetize. PopUp’s presentation discussed how businesses could use these location-based pop-ups to advertise.

…

The PopUp team suggested that a possible use would be for a business advertising, via PopUp, to shoppers in a competitor’s store. This is delightfully scifi, but easily becomes a disaster of constant push adverts, like the one envisioned in M.T. Anderson’s dark future in the novel Feed. The nightmare use of PopUp is, say, stopping for coffee at Bedford Hill Coffee Shop, and getting an advert from every other coffeeshop in my hipster Brooklyn neighborhood, Franklin Street Coffee, Daily Grounds, and Starbucks for good measure, plus a local gym reminding me that cappuccino froth should be burned on the elliptical, and my bank suggesting I use my credit card to earn cashback on my coffee purchase.

PopUp seemed fun in a scifi way, and I did have some interesting conversations at the event.

Still, the best part of the day was the presentation from a startup called Offline Media. The rant about how awful it is that everyone uses social media instead of really socializing is unpleasant from curmudgeons. It’s hilarious from young hipsters who are seeking investors in the online social app they’ve made to save us from online socialization. Anyway, seems like Offline is Meetup for people who, um, haven’t heard of Meetup, I guess.

Joke’s on me, though. I signed up immediately because maybe there’s something cool happening here but only people who are Offline know about it.

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Exemplary Reportage, Comrades

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Meg

The Onion recently ran a piece calling DPRK leader Kim Jung-un the sexiest man alive. While most of us giggled at it and forwarded it to our Korean expat friends, the Chinese state paper, the People’s Daily, ran with the news, and included a 50-photo gallery of Kim. It’s down now, of course, but the folks at Shanghaiist are no strangers to disappearing People’s Daily headlines and grabbed a photo. Then The Onion  added a line thanking the People’s Daily for their exemplary reportage, comrades.

I wrote a few weeks ago about wild headlines, wild truths, and being unable to tell fact from satire, and started thinking about how the People’s Daily could have done this. There’s more to it than just shrugging and saying that the state-sponsored media is a joke.

When I lived in China, The Onion was blocked by the Great Firewall. I wonder if it recently become unblocked, or the People’s Daily staff were permitted to access portions of it for foreign research, but because of the Great Firewall, they were unfamiliar with it and lacked any context to determine credibility. This would be an appropriate cautionary tale about the difficulties of decent journalism with censored sources.

Unless a hardworking journalist cleverly got around the Great Firewall to get a great international scoop… Then it’s very sad.

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Knights of Pen & Paper

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Meg

New review of Knights of Pen & Paper up on Hardcore Droid:

Knights of Pen & Paper, from indie Behold Studios, simulates a D&D tabletop campaign, in which players encounter campy tabletop monsters and running dramatic rescues. From the beginning, the game tells a hilarious and engaging story. Players first select their players, blending a collection of personalities like Little Brother, pink-haired Flowers, a Hipster, and an Extraterrestrial with individual special powers and the usual character classes.

Players — that’s you, not the eight-bit Hipster Mage and Little Brother Warrior party members — then determine the campaign’s plot and plan battles for the players. Knights of Pen & Paper presents two interlocking and participatory narratives, with a campy fantasy adventure and a nerd gaming session.

via Knights of Pen and Paper Review – Android Game | Android Role-Playing Games Reviews | Hardcore Droid.

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My Internal Monologue, #4

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Meg

What!?!? You’ve heard of us?! REALLY?!?!? But… you’re not my boyfriend or my immediate family member…  Wow.

– Was not my actual response to hearing that someone’s got a subscription to Indie Game Mag, but I am pretty sure the dumbstruck expression might have given my feelings away. I’ve often imagined how it would feel to have strangers tell me they’ve read my work, but in my head there was a lot more quiet pride and lot less open-mouthed shock.

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