There is no reason, in 2018, not to make a video game. The kids and I made their mom a pretty awesome Christmas present that I haven’t taken the time to tell you about until now. It turns out that it’s a story that’s longer in the making than I realized. Some years back I made a bold claim, as I’m known to do from time to time. It was made on this blog, publicly, in an attempt to keep myself honest. 2012 is the year I make a video…
It is about ninety seconds before the children need to be out the door to go to school. I find myself in conversation with my eldest. “Where’s the item that you take to school every single day?” I ask. “In the room that’s a mess because of my sister and I and the animals,” she replies. “Okay. Grab it please, we need to get you out the door.” “No. There’s a reason I won’t,” she says, voice rising. “In fact, I’m upset about it, as you can tell by the…
“You know what the most annoying thing you do is?” I admit, I wasn’t quite prepared for that question from Sprints. “I mean, when you put it that way – no, not really,” I laughed. “But go ahead.” She looked me straight in the eye, laid down her fork, and said, “You tell us you love us, like, all the time.” It’s true, I admit it. I’m pretty relentless with the affection. But she’s my Sprints. The Artist Formerly Known as Little Fish. The one who, for a brief time,…
I’ve told people not to ever throw out unfinished creative work. Completed creative work that you really hate, sure. The experience of creation and evaluation is more valuable than the product, in that case. But unfinished work? The beginning of something? Getting rid of that is like cutting out the warmup before a race. Why not go into a massive undertaking, like, say, to write a novel, already having stretched your muscles? 2016 in general was a massive undertaking, full of significant changes. Many of those changes were achievements of one sort…
The kids and I have been doing videos about working on our Star Wars movie. I think it’s high time to tell that story. In April 2013, NJ and I had been dating for about two years. I had effectively moved in, and I had been interacting with the kids for about 18 months, but still hadn’t fully shifted into “parent” mode. It was very much NJ and the kids, and me. We had just brought Leo to live with us a matter of weeks earlier. Our little fstar waramily…
“Knock knock,” I said. “Who’s there?” Whistler had told knock-knock jokes at me through the bathroom door for five minutes earlier. Clearly, she wasn’t done. Only this time, I was on the outside of the door, butting in on her quiet moment. “Sock delivery,” I said. That wasn’t a joke. I really did have an armful of socks. She was strong enough to carry her own laundry upstairs, but wasn’t quite strong enough yet that she could do so without spilling socks all over the stairs. “Sock delivery who?” “Sock…
A null result doesn’t mean a failed experiment I came into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story already a little bit salty. A child of the ‘90s, I have bitterly complained that I already knew the story of stealing the Death Star plans. In fact, I did it – I played that video game and the several that came after it, embodying the mercenary-cum-Rebel-hero Kyle Katarn, working with his partner Jan Ors to get the schematics to the Rebellion and then disrupt the Dark Trooper project. The game was Dark…
I’ve said before on the site that 2016 has been a year of significant change for us. From the wedding to the move to the girls’ new school to the mess that is world events, 2016 has brought with it not only change, but a new resolve and determination to stop talking about the things that are important and actually do them. (I think that Hamilton: An American Musical has a lot to do with that, too, but that’s going to have to be another post, otherwise we’ll be here…
The change started in January. In short order, the girls’ parents were married, and only six months after I started on a new career path, so did their mom. These weren’t massive changes, functionally, but I could tell the kids felt it. A subtle shakeup to the background noise of their lives. Whistler and the Fish met those developments with excitement and an easy acceptance. Then, less than six months later, we decided to change not just little things, but everything. We decided to move. It would mean a new…
I have to admit, I felt some trepidation when I started seeing advertising about The Starfleet Academy Experience. It was vague and nonspecific. It featured cosplayers standing around posters written in Klingon. It featured Klingon-language versions of the front page on local free papers. And nowhere was there any firm description of what it actually was. In short, it seemed like it was promoting itself the way Star Trek as a whole has been in the past year: poorly. Still, the Star Wars experience that had rolled through the Canada…
I used to suffer pretty obvious perfectionism, through a combination of talent and insecurity. When I was in high school, if I couldn’t do something super well, I’d stop bothering to try. University was hard, and as you might imagine, my time there was less than illustrious. There are elements of perfectionism in my girls, as well. DD8, my Little Fish, is one. She will often bang her head against a problem until she either batters it down through sheer force of will, or melt down in the process. The littlest,…
We love space and science over here at Love Make Share, and we were very excited to get up really early and watch NASA TV’s live-broadcast SpaceX’s Dragon capsule being nabbed by the International Space Station. Without diving into a bottomless pit of discussion about the mission, it was important and cool for a few reasons: The Dragon’s ascent stage, the Falcon-9 rocket, finally managed a controlled landing on a barge in the ocean. Yes, a robot rocket lifted a robot spaceship to space and then landed itself on a robot boat. The Dragon…
