A game I play... sad to admit. It's like Diplomacy or Risk mixed with Farmville or something. "Crazy Tribes". Anywho, I was curious as to the various efficacies of the various troops. I'd been meaning to put this into a spreadsheet for months, and I finally...did. Crazy Tribes Troop Efficacy.

This breakdown ignores the rock/paper/scissors nature of artillery/infantry/cavalry, and also ignores the fact that you can only support so many troops in a base (so once you hit your limit, it's worth buying less cost-efficient troops that are more food-efficient).

In the short game, though, I was a little surprised given the caveats above how stand-out the choices were. If you want to build offense quickly, bikers are the way to go. If you want to build defense quickly, gunners or knockers are equivalent (with gunners being half-again more costly).

If you're strapped for resources, then your best offense is scouts, while your best defense is knockers.

This is a pretty superficial inspection of the data. What would you get out of it? Any thoughts on how to best divide the separate "artillery", "infantry", "cavalry" overlap for both offense and defense?

So...stay-at-home-moms...

How do you do it?! Now that I'm going back to work, Amy Fire doesn't get a break! I mean, even with me doing breakfast, lunch, dinner, assorted snacks and cleaning and bathing, and trying to pitch in around feeding, she doesn't get a breather.

It was insane for the two of us doing it the first two weeks, with me doing all the diaper changes and swaddling and crooning and bouncing, and now she has to pick up my slack.

Is the answer just to "power through" the next few weeks, and then the next couple months?

It doesn't feel like much (I haven't been writing, mostly), and I've not been submitting like I need to, but somehow I managed to succeed with a few pieces this year. :)

poetry publications

The Truth of Television Show Cancellations — Every Day Poets, 2012-09-24
Illuminating the Core Text — Every Day Poets, 2012-05-07
deconstructing the mind's eye — Every Day Poets, 2012-04-24
Age Walks Behind — Every Day Poets, 2012-03-06

fiction publications

Sad Pandas mdash; Eschatology - 2012-12-26
* dotcom geek spy thriller &mdash Skive Magazine June 2012

server failure, server upgrade, round and round it goes...

I think that one lasted almost exactly two years. Maybe two and change...no, wait, because it was migrated a while back, ... no, I don't know if the hardware changed.

Going from FreeBSD (32bit!?) to Ubuntu x64.

The hard drive didn't actually fail, but the power supply did, and then who knows what else...it wouldn't stay up for more than a few minutes.

I've had to jump through some hoops to get things going. Installing kmod-ufs to mount it on a _third_ server, rsyncing things over (and checking out my backup process in the...process...and seeing that it's lacking somewhat, though still miles better than it was!)

Today's biggest hurdle so far has been postgresql.

This Ubuntu comes with Postgresql 9.1. I was on 9.0. Postgresql is practically ANTI-compatible with any semi-major version. So I install 9.0 side-by-side from the source...no go. Oh, hey, I must have been running 32bit FreeBSD. 32bit postgresql! So I cross-compile postgresql 9.0 (win!) (except!) The magic upgrade still doesn't work. So I do a dump and restore...and still failure, because a very misguided youthful me did plpgsql functions in there, and the dump hardcoded the path to the associated .so... so I have to go through the dump and replace all those.

Okay, I think it might be good now. And I could go on. But it's 5am, and I'm feeling pretty good, and that's a danger sign with these things.... ;)

Yeah, it's 5am. And my server is now on eastern time. Okay. It probably was before. Or was supposed to be. Don't care. It can stay there.

Oh, hey, and more magic was necessary. Problems with blob ownership in postgresql. of course.

do $$
declare r record;
begin
for r in select loid from pg_catalog.pg_largeobject loop
execute 'ALTER LARGE OBJECT ' || r.loid || ' OWNER TO owners_username';
end loop;
end$$;

via http://doginpool.blogspot.com/2011/10/today-upgraded-to-new-ubuntu-11.html!

I know this isn't Facebook, so I shouldn't post a link and run. So, umm. The link: Michael Lewis profiles Barack Obama.

It's a day-in-the-life, but many days woven together in a just-so-complex manner. It's interesting to me as a piece of how Obama ostensibly thinks (never can trust what gets written on the internet these days, and can't trust a politician, and so on....). As well as what day-to-day life as President of the United States of America involves. Extra-interesting points for the nods to speech-writers and what they "can" and "can't" do; the profile leaves a lot of detail out, but one can taste a certain...richness of information, implicit.

Also kind of cool: the depiction of the "war room" with regards to Libya (which I'm visualizing somewhat in the context of Thirteen Days.

Life! Life is. My last summary update. Not much has changed? Rah rah rah! But...day to day?

My office has the indefinite loan of a Makerbot replicator, and I've been learning its idiosyncrasies. I've printed out three different iPad stands from thingiverse, and one iPad "sound deflector". I'm doing iPad work at work, so it's reasonable. ;)

I'd like to try some art (I have in my head a rabbit launching itself out of a stone block that I did up in blender many years back); or maybe something more practical (pieces for my next entry in the somewhat-forgotten "annual" second-Christmas sumo-bot competition).

Rejections...always rejections, with writing; though I've been having a lot of success with my poetry at Every Day Poets the last few years (at $1 a pop, but hey). That's the world of semi-pro. Need to go back and admit defeat on a number of stories, probably trunk another 20 (or so). Really need to go back and finish and/or polish a number of them. Have been making good progress on a "biopunk" story with a friend...we've been working on it for two years, but it might be near an end (around 10-15k words). *shudder* Because those are _easy_ to shop around, right?

I think there was something else, but I need to get back to work. teasers for next time: trying to lose weight, signed up for a course via coursera.org, ...

Hmm, so. If I were to travel back to LiveJournal to journal and live and stuff, a bit. Who would I be reading? Seems most folks I followed are gone (the quiet gone of tumbleweeds, not the gone-gone of deletion, though there's some of that as well). Some folks I follow are not. (Hello!) Though in some cases I hardly know you, outside of—you were a writerperson I did writer-ish things with, online, on LiveJournal, in some way; and I've got no clue what's going on with you, have lost the story of your life.

And then there's folks who seem to "re-blog" to LiveJournal, and interact with comments there. And I'm interested in that, too, but I think I'm looking for conversations, both ways (and I know how presumptive that is of me, not having been here for years upon years). I sift through the twit-stream with a handful of accounts, sniping comments and opinions and thoughts; occasionally post longer things to facebook (well, longer than tweets). Rarely something to Google+ to see whether I'll get different responses there than facebook. Facebook and Twitter are where I get my news; Twitter is where I get my interactions with writers, for the most part. One of my favorite publications was sparked there; and some of my favorite writing (including co-writing).

I did post a life update a little bit back. Not much beyond that (maybe I should look into posting a before-and-after-yard-work thing). Down in Los Angeles this week, doing yard work (yard clearance), and a few other work-ish things while "on vacation" with Amy for her birthday-week-of-fun. The ice cream cakes (yes, multiple) have been delightful. =) Might be getting another one tomorrow to round it out. ;)

The Niteblade Blog Train is rolling on through, despite my nearly missing it. I'm trying to think of just the right metaphor...but the closest thing I can think of is that the different realities weren't quite synced. Ah, the (broken?) (mind?) (of?). Yes. I remembered quite well three days ago; and two days ago. But yesterday was a mess of round-I-don't-even-know-any-more setting up a security system on some of my dad's sculptures. Limited success==success-for-now!

If you're coming to this in order, you're coming from the 18th, Digital Inkwell. And the future is Chris Lewis Carter. But don't go there yet. That's the future. Strange things happen if you try to experience time out of order....

Niteblade published my tongue-in-rotting-corpse's-cheek poem, "Brain Cookies", back in June 2009 [Issue 8]. It's due to be reprinted soon in the Zombie Survival Crew anthology.

The life of a poem is a funny thing. I've been writing poetry on and off since about 4th grade (and still have some of those lying around. oh my!). Most people probably have as well, and it's just a comparative weighting of the ons and offs. The morse code of poetry-as-virus trying to speak through life (yours, mine, whoever's). No, not making a point, just reaching. ;) The life of a poem....

As it stands, I have about 28 poems (not counting the majority of haiku I've recorded) sitting around, either waiting for me to submit them somewhere, or sitting somewhere, waiting to be accepted or rejected. I have 31 more poems "trunked", essentially poems I once thought were worth of publication but have since changed my mind on; in part due to the endless grind of rejection, and in part due to moving on, getting a better distance from them (in time, and skill). I've had 37 poems actually published, in a variety of journals/zines/whatnot, many of which no longer exist.

There's an easy thousand poems not included in any of those lists, pre-trunked, stillborn, cut off after two good lines, or after hours of struggling to find the right thought that would bring it to life. The life of a poem....

poems are ourselves
trying to channel something
old-yet-new-yet-

Sometimes the words just flow, even if they're bad ones. And sometimes you force them out to make a point—the above lines are a little of both. The point, in this case, was not in the poem, but to have something to make a point about. ;) A nice 5-7-5 senryu (with only 4 in the last, which, well, there's a school at least that says 5-7-5 is not a fixed thing for 'ku done in languages other than Japanese), but in my world (and poems are so often just in our own personal worlds, our own idealized worlds where everyone gets what we'd like them to, responds the same way, ...) the missing beat is the unknown, that "something else".

Poems come from somewhere. They get jotted down, edited, lost, forgotten, found, submitted, rejected, submitted, rejected, .... Shared, somewhere along the way, or not. They attach to a moment, or a person, or a time and place—and sometimes those things they attach to are perfect for them/then/there and irrelevant to more, or sometimes the them-then-there are something else, or you feel a something else in there, and hope that others will also feel that something-else when they receive the poem (with a laundry list of caveats regarding mental spaces, time-and-places).

Okay, so. The train station was here all day, but there were no signs the train was coming. Passengers were arriving early, who'd been on the train...but the train was not there with them. It's a sad thing, but reality can be like that sometimes. Apologies to all the discombobulated!

Now...don't forget. Support small press! Support great writing! Support! And enjoy your trip through today, and into tomorrow's stop, Chris Lewis Carter. And that's the Niteblade Blog Train. =)

What sort of writer are you? I'm a pantser, by and large. Read about it over on inkpunks, where I've got a guest blogpost =)

So I ported it to flash this weekend...I thought that would be a smart marketing move: maybe make a little cash on the side, and use it to push folks to the iOS app. Survey says...wasted time. Mostly. Maybe.

My games have been doing much better on Newgrounds than on Kongregate lately. Limited data samples, of course, but for instance on Kongregate, TumbleDots has an average of 2.64 with 175 gameplays and one comment. On Newgrounds, 1933 "views" and an average of 3.3 [with 220 votes]. And two pages of generally positive and/or constructive comments. Add in FlashGameDistribution (and Mochi), and that's another 1000 views.

Just one day, but that's one of maybe five days that my flash games tend to get these days, unless I'm cribbing from xkcd (Hell, Heaven, ....).

My plan to turn these views into downloads of TumbleDots on iOS is a fizzle at best, at the moment. 3 downloads yesterday, and I feel safe saying none of those came from my flash blitzkrieg (admittedly, 3000 views is not a blitzkrieg). Le sigh....

So now I'm seeing how hard it is to wrap the flash app up and call it "android". Because you can do that.

1. Download the Android SDK


2. unzip it, and run tools/android (note: you can also run tools/android update sdk --no-ui; install what it suggests, for now. I have no idea where this is going.


3. ignore possible errors like Stopping ADB server failed (code -1). cry a little inside. I have no idea if I'm going to have to download each and every SDK in order to support older Android platforms....


4. Continue with the standard Installing the SDK guide. Though I'm going to see if I can skip "Installing the Eclipse Plugin". Fingers crossed. :)


5. And then followup with "Creating your first AIR application for Android with the Flex SDK"....


6. I'm still back on step 2...waiting.


7. Still waiting....


8. Still waiting. Note this information on optimizing for different devices and displays.


9. Consider using the cocos2d android conversion instead...but you'd have to install all the android SDK stuff anyway. Keep waiting.

Okay, this is silly. Sorry. I thought I'd keep notes here, but things are not progressing quickly enough for that. La la la la la!

But while I'm waiting, I should set up my certificates, and note to myself that I'm cribbing from publishing apk with air captive runtime, even if it does use the flash IDE and I'm using...commandline...fun! Fingers crossed some more.