Category: Uncategorized

Well, it’s another week in Vancouver, which can only mean another video game studio closure in the city. Rockstar Games announced today that they will be shutting down their Vancouver studio. Rockstar Vancouver just recently released Max Payne 3, a highly-anticipated and high profile title. Rather than just shut the studio down, Rockstar is actually consolidating their Canadian operations near Toronto, Ontario. All Rockstar Vancouver employees will be offered employment there or at other Rockstar studios. In fact, Rockstar hopes to hire even more people at their new Ontario location. This is definitely a case where a company just wasn’t willing to continue operations in a province that has absolutely no interest in retaining video game businesses or helping the industry grow. Feelings aside, would you rather put your business in a province that offered 17% tax credits or close to 40%? The provincial government of British Columbia, like so many other things they do, has failed miserably in that respect.

A faint glimmer of hope, however, has appeared on the horizon. A former coworker of mine, Matt Toner, has embarked on a grassroots campaign to become the NDP candidate for Vancouver-False Creek in the 2013 provincial election. Matt, like so many of us, have been increasingly frustrated by the inaction of provincial politicians, who spectacularly fail to understand the digital entertainment industry here in British Columbia. Remember that most of the people running this province are older and have absolutely no idea what video game companies do and how much benefit they bring to the local economy.

It’s almost a given that the B.C. Liberal government will be defeated in the May 2013 election, so Matt has picked the right party to align himself with. It will be, however, a most difficult challenge for him in the months ahead. Matt is no politician by trade, so he’ll have to learn a lot in the next few months. This will require money, time, and effort to get this campaign to where it needs to be. The thought of “one of us” being on the inside and having some power in what this province can do for the industry is an exciting proposition though. I fully support Matt in his endeavour, no matter how foolish it may seem to some.

I whole-hardheartedly encourage you to visit Matt’s web site to learn more about his vision and his plan.

As many of you know, my former employer, Radical Entertainment basically was shut down recently. Many of my ex-coworkers are now out of a job. Because I’m lazy, my LinkedIn profile still lists Radical as the last company that I worked for. I guess some people just assumed I got caught up in the layoffs as well because I’ve received many different pieces of correspondence from recruiters and HR people, all wondering if I was interested in applying to their company. While it’s great to see the industry rallying to help itself, it’s not a good sign that most of the companies trying to help are outside of Vancouver. The industry is doing ok but apparently not here.

I need to go reply to these messages now and thank them for thinking of me but someone else is more deserving of consideration.

I received my new Visa credit card in the mail this week. In the past, I’ve been sent new cards every four or five years. This card, however, arrived in the mail just two years after the last one. In 2010, my bank had a potential security breach in terms of credit card data so they fast-tracked a new card to me. It had one of those new shiny chips on it, which was still quite new in 2010. The letter that came with the card stated it would be only good for two years as it was sort of a stop-gap card.

My new card still has the chip but it also has one new feature. It’s been embedded with magic that allows me to just wave the card at a pay terminal and my purchase will go through. There is no PIN to be entered nor any slips to sign. Visa calls this payWave. All you MasterCard readers must be chuckling because you’ve had similar magic for almost five years, that’s called PayPass. payWave is only valid for purchases $50 and under. This is a security measure as anyone could steal my credit card and pay for things without verifying their identity.

I won’t get a new card until 2016 which is a bit disappointing. The graphical design of my card hasn’t changed much since 2000 and it looks really boring. The background image of a pile of twoonies is very plain and evokes an image of a panhandler’s credit card. That’s right, I essentially have good enough credit to get a card that I could pay off using spare change.

Nearly nine years ago, I wrote a post detailing what I’d do if I were the last person on planet. Usually in these scenarios I’m also dealing with the undead or zombies but in this case, it’s just me, nature, and the rest of what’s left of the world. My previous post mentioned how I thought the lack of electricity would be a huge problem in such a scenario. In the almost nine years since I wrote that, I don’t disagree that having no electricity would be a bummer but I’ve come up with another problem: the issue of expiry dates for almost everything.

The most obvious things that expire are fresh foods. In such a world, all the fruit, vegetables, and meat in a supermarket would go bad in just days. One could argue you could just grow more fruits and vegetables, and also raise new cattle. There are other things that expire, however, which aren’t as easy to replace. Medicines and other remedies all have expiry dates. Even if I were able to survive half a decade, by that time, many items that you’d find in a drug store would be past or approaching their expiry dates. Now the question is, do these dates actually matter? Luckily, most of them don’t to some degree. In some cases they do matter though. I’ve purchased anti-acid soft chews which are good for treating heart burn. They come out of the package soft as taffy and are easy to chew. I didn’t use the whole package and a few of them were still lying around well past their expiry date. The chews had hardened inside their package over time to the point they were hard as bricks. There was no way to even chew them anymore.

While some drugs can be safely and effectively used past their expiry date, that won’t be the case for most foods. I mentioned fruits, vegetables, and meat but what about manufactured foods like cookies, crackers, protein bars, chocolate, and chips? We all know these dates do matter in most cases. I wouldn’t eat a box of cookies that five years past its expiry date. I’ve seen and felt a protein bar that was a year beyond its consume by date. It was also rock hard. While one could grow more fruits and vegetables, you can’t grow more cookies or chocolate. I guess I could try baking my own cookies but what if the flour has expired by then? Will I know how to start up the Oreo factory by myself?

Another important item that has an expiry date are batteries. Everyone knows those dates just aren’t for show. Batteries do indeed lose their change even just sitting in their package. Portable power in such a world would be absolutely necessary. When batteries start dying out, I’d be in a lot of trouble. I know some of you are thinking about re-chargeable batteries but what if electricity has been cut off in the world? How would you charge your batteries then?

The last man on earth scenario sure is an interesting one.

It’s been almost three years since I moved into my current apartment and in that time I have not done a full and thorough clean out of the food cooling appliance in my kitchen. I have, however, cleaned the insides of the freezer and the lower compartment, including all the trays and crispers. What I haven’t done is thrown out all the bottles, containers, and frozen items that need to be discarded. That’s not to say I have items dating back three years in my fridge. I’ve just accumulated stuff over time and most of it needs to go.

I started with the non-frozen items this evening. I managed to identify some items that were no longer safe for human consumption. There was an unopened bottle of thousand island dressing. Though unopened, it was well past its expiry date of 2010. There was a bottle of BBQ sauce. This was opened, perhaps used twice, maybe thrice but also beyond its expiry date. There was a bottle of green salsa. I’d consumed most of this but I left enough in the glass bottle for mold to grow inside. Gross. There was the squeeze bottle of french dijon mustard. I believe I had bought this to eat my Montreal smoked meat sandwiches with. There was a lot of this left but no visible mold. As it was years beyond the expiry date, it had to go. For some reason, I’d purchased a bottle of Italian salad dressing. I’m not even a big fan of that dressing yet here was a bottle of it. The expiry date had long passed so it was tossed.

I didn’t have enough time to properly assess the freezer compartment but I did do a quick scan. Here are some definite candidates: a package of frozen ground beef that probably dates back to 2010 or earlier, some frozen dumplings, frozen vegetables, and frozen edamame beans.

I should probably throw stuff out a bit earlier.

In a previous post, I wrote how I was very tempted to buy a low cost deep fryer when I was at Superstore. That was about eight months ago and this long weekend, I found myself at the same Superstore location. I again looked over the deep fryers but I also looked at slow cookers on the shelf. The had some pretty nice ones that were up to $60-$80 in cost. They had LCD displays, large capacities, and most likely microprocessor controlled cooking. They also had a smaller capacity slow cooker for $12.99. On a whim, I bought the smaller slow cooker. I figured I wanted to expand my culinary horizons and you can’t really go wrong with $12.99. It looks like slow cooker above but smaller as it has only a 2L capacity. There’s no fancy LCD display nor any artificial intelligence on this budget slow cooker. It has three settings for the knob: keep warm, low, and high.

I’ve read a few things about slow cooking and what mostly appeals to me is the relative healthy nature of the food and that you just dump stuff into it and forget it for several hours. I’ve started to investigate slow cooker recipes online. Most of them seem reasonable in terms of ingredients and preparation. This pot roast recipe looks quite simple to follow. I’d like to try this beef stew suggestion as well.

I’m excited to try the slow cooker next weekend. I’m tempted to leave it on and cook while I’m at work but that doesn’t seem like a good idea. I wonder,  can you slow cook french fries or fried chicken?

 

For nearly four years, every single time I write about the local video game industry in Vancouver it seems like I’m reporting bad news. I wish this post were different but unfortunately it is not.

I arrived at work this morning and not long after, I received a text message from a friend, who is a designer at a Microsoft studio. The message simply stated that Radical Entertainment had been shut down. There was no official confirmation at the time but soon social media networks lit up with the news. At the end of the day, we found out that parent company, Activision, had decided to lay off nearly everyone at Radical and prevent them from making their own games ever again. As a creative entity, Radical Entertainment is no more. An unknown but small number of people have been retained to help assist other Activision studios in their efforts. All of this was summed up in an Activision corporate statement. My favourite line from that was:

Approximately 89 employees or less than 1.5% of our global workforce will be impacted.

Activision just couldn’t state the number of people who lost their jobs today. Instead, they had to sneak that one little line in to spin how supposedly insignificant these layoffs were. This is the type of stuff that makes people hate corporations and corporate PR talk. I’m sure that every single one of those 89 people who lost their jobs today will sleep better tonight knowing their layoffs “only” represented less than 1.5% of Activision’s workers worldwide.

I’ve been an unfortunate witness to many studios closing down in Vancouver but Radical Entertainment will always hold a special place in video game history in this city. For one, Radical operated for over twenty years. In the video game business, there are just a handful of studios that are twenty years or more years old. For Vancouver, outside of EA, no one even came to close to Radical’s longevity. Many people have worked for Radical over the course of the two decades. I had the honour of attending their twentieth anniversary party in November of 2011 and I was amazed at the number of people who once toiled for Radical. Even people whom I had worked with before and knew for years surprised me with the revelation that they had at one time been there. Radical developed a long and rich history within the video game world. It’s a sad sign that even a studio like theirs couldn’t make it in the world we live in today.

As many of you, my loyal readers, know I worked for Radical for over eight months in 2011. I have written many good things about my experience there. All you have to do is type in “Radical” in the search box in the upper right hand corner and you’ll see those posts. I feel quite lucky this evening to have been afforded the honour of working there before they were shut down. To all my former co-workers at Radical, it was a pleasure working with you and I hope everyone finds renewed success in the near future.

This evening I downloaded the Android SDK again which will allow me to make Android apps. I downloaded it over a year ago before I got my job at Radical. I started doing the tutorials but didn’t get anywhere with developing my own app. Once I started working again, I put the whole thing aside. I’m gonna start again and hopefully I’ll make something fun and useful this time. The timing is good because Google just announced their very own tablet. Fart apps here I come!

I was riding around on the Internet when I discovered the web site for an auto parts store. They seem to sell your standard car parts but then I stumbled upon this item. They don’t state the cost for the item. I wonder how much it is.

Don’t tell anyone but I think you can make your own as well.

At the end of December of 2011, the last video rental store in my area closed down, leaving me no other convenient place to rent movies. I explored other options like a mail-order rental service or online delivery. Neither of them seemed convenient or cost effective. With the mail-order services you can’t really plan on what day you’ll get the movie. Sure, you can leave it lying around until it’s convenient but that means the service might not sent you additional discs until you’re done with the first one. For online delivery, the convenience is unparalleled but the cost is prohibitive. Some services, like YouTube, will charge you $5 for a standard definition movie. I didn’t buy a nice big HDTV to stream movies at a crappy quality. Yes, you can also get online delivery in high definition but some services charge you about $7 and higher for such a visual privilege.

I recently found an acceptable alternative. The Best Buy movie rental kiosk is a convenient and affordable method of renting movies in a high definition Blu-Ray format. There are kiosks throughout all major cities in Canada. In Vancouver alone, they seem to be in most 7-11 stores. You can use their web site to find a nearby kiosk and check the availability of any movies you are looking for. It’s even possible to reserve the movie at a particular kiosk so that it’s guaranteed to be there. The cost of a one day rental is $2 for a Blu-Ray disc. That’s the cheapest I’ve seen for a high definition rental anywhere. That’s less than half for what I paid when video rental stores were still around. When you take away a store lease, employees, and all other overhead costs of running a brick and mortar store, Best Buy is still making money by charging people $2 a night for a Blu-Ray. If you keep the movie for more than a day, they just bill your credit card an extra $2. To add to the convenience, you can return the movie to any other kiosk location.

For me, this is the best way to rent movies going forward. If you live in Canada, check out the Best Buy web site, they have a free rental code to get you started.