Category: Uncategorized

I’d like to introduce a phenomenon to you, my loyal readers, that you might not know about. It’s something that appeared on the Internet in the last few months and the name for it is “hover hands”. It’s a situation that usually involves a male who is posing for a picture with one or more females. Invariably, it’s readily apparent to everyone that the female is much more physically attractive than the male. Examples of such situations occur frequently at science fiction conventions where geeky males like myself pose for pictures with the female stars of their favourite shows.

Now that might seem innocent enough but the phenomenon manifests itself as the male is posing with the female. The male appears to have enough confidence to put his hand around the shoulder or waist of the female but at the very last second, he ultimately comes up short and does not make actual physical contact with the hand. The resulting awkward pose causes the male’s hand to “hover” just mere inches away from the attractive female but never making full contact with her skin or clothing. The classic example of a “hover hand” occurred when the lovely Summer Glau posed for pictures with fans during a convention in the summer of 2010 (no pun intended). If you click here, you can see examples of this.

I wonder what the thought process is for the male during a “hover hand”. I’m guessing that they understand that it’s a photo opportunity and it’s their chance to have a short, personal moment with someone they’re interested in. So they go in with the arm and the hand. I believe at this point that another part of their brain then kicks in. They realize that this female is more foxy than virtually any other female he’s been around in ages. That alone might prevent him from making full contact. He probably believes he’s not worthy enough to actually touch a girl that hot, even if it’s just a hand on the waist for a few seconds for a picture. I also think that some dudes are trying to not to be creepy. They’re probably trying to keep the young lady in mind and not touching her out of respect for her own personal boundaries. I suppose in that case, their heart is in the right place.

Unfortunately, whatever the reason, they wind up looking like a dork. Here’s my opinion on the whole thing. If you’re gonna do the whole arm around the girl thing, you gotta go all the way. Put your hand on her waist or her shoulder. It’s not like you’re grabbing her boob or anything. It’s also for a picture, which lasts less than ten seconds. If she doesn’t want you to touch her, she’ll tell you and if she does, it will probably be before the picture is taken, not during. If I had the chance to meet Ms. Glau for a picture, you can bet I wouldn’t stop my hand five picometers from her waist or shoulder. Now alternatively, if you don’t think you can comfortably touch the lady with your hand, then don’t go in with the arm at all. Now since it’s a picture, it kinda looks lame if you just keep your hands at your sides, so just doing something with your arms and hands. A good old standby is the old six-shooter hands. There are perfectly good ways to pose for a picture without having “hover” over the hot ladies around you.

Well, I hope you learned something today and if you’re interested in seeing many more “hover hand” pictures, click here.

Today was yet again another bump in the road for video game development in Vancouver. Though it was probably just coincidence and bad luck, it happened on two fronts. First, I heard that out in Burnaby, the EA Sports Active team got hit bad. I’m not sure the about specifics but apparently the plans for Active going forward have been either canceled outright or at the very least, been scaled back severely. I would guess the possibility of having an EA Sports Active 3 is almost non-existent at this point. I do know that the fallout of this was that about half the team was let go. How this breaks down into designers, artists, producers, and engineers is unknown to me. The rest of the team was assigned to various other teams within the Sports label. Two of my friends were on the Active team and they got placements elsewhere on other sports franchises. I suppose they were lucky.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the most extreme news was saved for Propaganda Games, who were outright closed up today by parent company, Disney. The writing was unfortunately on the wall when months earlier, Disney decided to cancel their Pirates of the Caribbean game which had been in development for years and millions of dollars. Oddly, the game was canned when it had received good press during previews and was likely just months from completion. That decision, among others, just added to the impression that Disney did not know how to make video games. The most unfortunate part of the studio closure was that I knew three people that lost their jobs today. I had worked with all three before and I would love to work with them again in the future. I know there was severance involved but I do not know if Disney was generous in that regard. In any case, I hope everyone lands on their feet soon, especially the one who just recently welcomed his first child into the world.

For the better part of two years, news like today’s seems to be all too commonplace. We all hope that each layoff or studio closure is that last for a long time but we haven’t gotten to that point yet. Will we ever get to that point?

Today I found out that another former skate team member has left EA and is returning to work for a games studio in downtown Vancouver. That’s two now in the last two weeks or so. Slowly but surely, we are coming back to where we are most comfortable. Unfortunately, we’re not all in the same place when we return, that’s the sucky part. The good news is, we all seem to be clustered in the same two block radius which makes lunching that much more awesome.

I dream of a day when most of us can assemble once again together and make another super duper game, one that involves bacon.

I think about a year ago, I made some vague promise that I might blog about some of my experiences from my undergrad years. The Internet was just in its infancy when I was in university and we didn’t have blogging back then. It’s interesting to think how much blogging I would do back then if you could blog. In any case, I hope you enjoy an anecdote from my early days at UBC.

So when I was doing my undergrad degree I lived in on-campus housing the entire. From my first year all the way to the last I lived in various university residences. This story is from my second year. I was still living in a junior residence complex but as a proud second-year student, I now had a whole room to myself and I didn’t have to share with anyone. No longer a meek first-year student, I was happy to see that many of my previous housemates on the first floor had returned.

Now there was a group of second-year boys on my floor that got along really well. There four of them: Eric, Colin, Maestro (that wasn’t his real name but everyone called him by his nickname), and, Alain. At least I think it was only four, my memory is turning to crap these days. Anyways, when you live in residence at university, it’s really easy to hang with your buddies. These guys all lived on the same floor. They ate meals together. They hung around together after class and during the evenings. They stayed up late into the night talking about whatever. These boys had a lot of time to just chill and get to know each other.

It wouldn’t be much of a story if all they did was just debate political theory but of course, there was much more to it than that. The boys were always looking to have a bit of fun. They were mischievous and at times their fun wasn’t the clean and wholesome kind. Now I was friendly with everyone in the group but I wasn’t part of the group so that meant that I wasn’t privy to all the things they did or said. Some of the details of this story have been pieced together but the major details are truthful. There ain’t no BS about any of this.

As it was told to me, the gang was gathered in Maestro’s room one night and who knows what the hell there were talking about. Now Maestro had these large glass jugs in his room that I believe contained juice. I’m not sure where he bought them but he had several sitting there on the floor. These jugs were about the size of a moonshine jug, maybe a tad larger. As I later learned the boys noticed that Maestro had an empty jug in his room and he had not thrown it out yet. To this day, I still don’t know the complete rationale behind this but I do know what happened. Someone decided that everyone in the room should urinate into the empty glass jug. Again, I wasn’t in the room when this was happening so I don’t have the specifics of why. What I do know is that several of the boys, possibly all of them, did indeed pee into the jug.

Now there were unconfirmed reports that decided to collect all that pee because they needed it to conduct some nefarious prank of some sort. This may or may not be true but I never did get the full details. My memory is unclear but I don’t remember the boys having too many enemies at the time, at least not to the extreme that pee pranks would be involved. The details of “why” are unimportant because of the incident that occurred shortly after the peeing into the jug.

I am uncertain how much time passed or how many more urinations were placed into the jug. What I do know is that sometime after the jug had been peed into, the jug was placed onto Maestro’s desk. Someone then accidentally caused the jug to fall off the desk and then onto the thinly carpeted dorm room floor. The impact was enough to cause the glass jug to shatter and the pee splashed onto the carpet and I suppose the surrounding items in the vicinity.

I believe I didn’t find out about this until several days after the fact. I am unclear on what measures Maestro went to in order to clean his room and carpet. This was never revealed to me but I can’t imagine what the immediate aftermath was like. In any case, I do remember going into Maestro’s room shortly afterwards and then getting a warning from him that I probably shouldn’t be standing there with my stocking feet. It was only after that visit did I learn about the pee explosion.

Well, I hope you enjoyed what I hope will be the first of many tales from undergrad. Hey, are you using that empty container there?

I’m not sure who else fails at this but no matter how hard I try to go to bed earlier, I never seem to be able to do so. We have a team meeting on Monday mornings and it requires me to be actually punctual and at work relatively early. Relatively early means 10am for me. I know, that is quite different than many of your work schedules. Nonetheless, I had the grand intention all weekend of getting to bed earlier on Sunday night but here I am following pretty much the same time line as I usually do.

Maybe next I should change my clocks to read an hour later or something. That won’t work because I’ll know the clocks are an hour ahead. I think I just need to have a little more self-control.

Here’s an interesting problem. The toilet in my bathroom frequently ejects some of the toilet water when it flushes. The amount of water that gets thrown out of the bowl can vary. Sometimes it can be barely a drop. Last night though, it was enough that had any of it got on my, I would have probably needed to shower afterwards. The scary thing is, that’s the water I can see with my eyes. I wonder if the toilet water is being changed into some aerosol form and floats in the air. Ewwww.

I usually put down the bowl cover before I flush but that’s a pain in the ass and obviously sometimes I forget. Is there anyway to prevent this from happening. Is there some setting I can change? I really don’t want to get a new toilet just to fix this.

Like most people, my mind sometimes wanders about, thinking about anything and everything. A few months ago, there was a night where my mind did some deep thinking. It was about midnight and I was doing my dishes because I couldn’t stand to let them sit any longer. I knew I had a few more things to do before I could go to bed so I realized it would be a fairly late night for me. As the cleansing bubbles surrounded my soiled flatware, I wondered if I would be the last person at work to go to bed that night. At the time I was still working for EA, so that meant I was wondering if out of 1200 employees, would I be the last one to go to sleep for the evening. What a strange thing to wonder about. Then I realized that every evening, without fail, someone had to have that title. Who is the person who consistently goes the bed the latest out of all those employees? Is there usually a big time gap between the dude who goes to bed last and the person who is second to last? What would all this data look like plotted in charts and graphs.

Then my steel trap of a mind figured out that every day, someone is the person who wakes up the earliest out of all those employees. Now I know I would never even come close to taking that title on any given day. Who is the person who consistently wakes up before anyone else? It’s probably a parent if I had to make a guess. Then I wondered if on any given day, does the person who wakes up first, get up before the person who goes to sleep last? Crazy I tell you.

Some people do important medical research, I wonder when people go to bed and when they wake up. That’s what I do.

Wow, I just realized my last post was my 2500th post. What a shame it was a terrible, terrible piece of writing. Well, they all can’t be good ones. If you want to read a good one, go read this one. Anyways, I’m disappointed I didn’t bring any special guests along for just an important milestone. If I had known it was my 2500 post, I woulda gotten Tom Hanks as one of my guests and Neil Young would have played two songs. Let’s see what I can do for post 3000.

Well, if you live in Vancouver you know it snowed tonight. There is, however, a 90% chance that as we all sleep tonight, magical rains will wash all the snow away. Just about every single snow storm in Vancouver happens like that. People are saying everyone should take extra time to commute tomorrow because there will be delays all over, even if you drive or if you take transit. I’m going go against that advice and leave even later in the morning. I wonder how that will work out.

I’m getting old and frail. I spent all of ten minutes outside on Monday morning and my entire top lip got wind chapped. It’s dry as a desert on my upper lip. If you could take a look at it with a microscope, you would see tiny camels and nomadic tribes living there. I still refuse to use lip balm though. Also, the people who share lip balm? Gross. Stop doing that.

I promise post 2502 will be better.

As I mentioned previously, there isn’t a Tim Hortons close to where I work. Nevertheless, in the morning at least, I’ve discovered a convenient way to get my Timmy’s fix on my way to the studio. I change trains at Granville to get to the Canada Line for my one-stop hop over to Yaletown. To do this, I pass by Vancouver Centre Mall which conveniently contains a Timmy location right next to the Canada Line station. It takes only about five minutes extra to stop off for a doughnut or a breakfast sandwich but it is so worth the additional time. Starting off the day properly with a fat-filled breakfast just can’t be beat.

I was at my local Best Buy and saw that they had a bunch of Xbox 360 games on sale for $4.99. I don’t think I’ve seen new and still-in-the-package Xbox 360 games for that price. As you can imagine, all of the games on sale for that price were all bottom of barrel as far as quality was concerned. Despite this, I picked up Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. Now I knew even before I took it to the register that this game was bad and that it received terrible reviews. Yet, I bought the game anyways. Why? First, the game is a first-person shooter and I like that genre. More importantly, every so often, I try to play a less than stellar game. The reason I do that is to remind myself separates a good game from the bad ones.

I once had a former co-worker question me why Xbox 360 game history is sporadically littered with game titles that have a critical rating of below a 7/10. He said he doesn’t bother with games unless it gets higher than a 7/10. That’s a perfectly good way to choose games and he mainly receives great game playing experiences from those good titles. For me, I like exploring some of the more poorly received titles. It gives me a chance to really see what how a bad game is presented to a user. What made the game bad? What don’t I like about it? This gives me a great opportunity to contrast it against the really good games I play. I think if you only play great games all the time, it’s possible to not know why a game is so good. The contrast and perspective I get helps me better identify the things that go into making a great game.

Though this is less common with bad games, I also try to see if there is some hidden element in some of these bad games that is surprisingly good. It’s quite possible that a team nailed it with some small part of the game. It doesn’t save the game as a whole but it’s enough to make me notice that it wasn’t a complete failure. Of course, there are some games that don’t have any redeeming qualities and it’s just bad through and through.

As you might expect, I won’t spend 60 hours on a bad game. I try to get through the entire single player portion of the game. I might go through it quicker than usual, so that I don’t waste all my time. I do attempt though, to get the full experience that the developers intended to give me. I won’t skip any cut scenes and once in a while, I’ll just stop to look at the game world. I rarely do any multiplayer on a bad game, for several reasons. First, with bad games, there are basically no players online playing the game anyways. Second, listening to 13 year olds whine on Xbox Live while playing a terrible game is not a pleasant experience.

Lastly, this may sound strange, but once I’m done with a bad game, I usually bring up the credits for the game. I know how tough it is to make a game and a lot of developers could have done a great job on the game and the title still could have turned out like crap. Reading the names of the developers is just something I do because I somewhat understand what they went through.

Next up, Catwoman!