New Gantt Chart

Here's my new Gantt chart: source file
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The Living Library

An organization called the Sacred Science Institute is in the process of compiling an archive that will function as the basis of the Glass Bead Game's Archives, as faithful to the book as possible.

linkipoo

The shockingly poor design is not testament to the amount of insight the site provides.

proposal inspiration

I failed to blog this while it was important, but this essay was a big influence on my rational behind my first proposal for the project: linkipoo

This essay argues that the glass bead game could become a genre of games, a game designers "Holy Grail," rather than a single, unwavering game. I've deviated from this as the main focus of my project, but the thought has remained.

On Project not being New Media

Conceptually, the game is the opposite of New Media. It values reflection and order, or one might say stagnation and hierarchies. The glass bead game players in the book are of an all-male elite class, taken from the outside world to be brought up in pure isolation. The elite class is also forbidden to produce anything of their own--to be creative, in any way, is taboo.

These aspects, which define their elite society and hold it together, are just the opposite of what we talk about in the New Media major. Here we talk about disseminating hierarchies and making everyone a producer, encouraging everyone to be as self-assertive and creative as they possibly can. I think both ideals are important and valuable, I think it is important not to become too bent on any one way of thinking.

For my project to be successful, I need to be able to bring this idea across.

marketing this project

I think that this project is a very personal one, and that its commercial value, or value to anyone outside of me, will remain elusive unless I market it falsely: here's that strategy:

Think Hello Kitty, or any of that cutesy anime style stuff. In-your-face cute. Completely the opposite of the mood of the real project, which will probably just put people off.

I'm thinking of making posters in this style and putting them in the UMaine arcade room. I'll also make a website, of course, which will front the game in the same way, but go into greater depth, revealing the joke slowly.

meditation progress

I've done terribly. I stopped keeping up with the meditation regimen for a few months in the middle there somewhere, but I've been getting back into it. Yesterday I had an interesting session, I came to several realizations; That I live blindly and it's my own refusal to see that causes this, that I just put too much starch in the sauce and that was why it was not thickening properly, and that I'm developing a neurosis over this very project.

The neurosis is an inability to talk for extended periods of time, and it's becoming easier and easier to set me off. What happens is I get very shaky, as if I'm freezing, or like I'm incredibly nervous, and it becomes impossible to continue talking. It started with these project presentations, as I was very nervous for them, which was only compounded by the difficulty of the topic, and has progressed to anything where I need to simply talk. For example, I experienced the same sensation while on the phone with my mother talking about absolutely nothing.

Oh, in reference to my last blog, I guess the term would be "vertex" or "where the vertices meet"

game variation: what number am I on now?

yeah so I've been working on da glass bead game and yo, like I've been workin' on a like board game version an' shit, check it out.

Ehm, this version actually incorporates the actual glass beads, which is nice. What's not so nice is I've only figured the beads in, the pattern manipulation bit is yet to be incorporated into this version.

Anyway, what I have so far is this:
You move your bead around a pattern, rolling a dice to see how many spaces you can move. I say "spaces," but that is incorrect, you only move onto where the tiles intersect. But that's the wrong word too...I guess the English language doesn't have a word for it, but it's the point at which all of the tiles touch, their combined angles, in degrees, reaching 360. Is there a word for that, I'm sure there is in geometry. Maybe my next blog will be about that word. I got 13 more of these babies to pop out so nothing's too insignificant at this point.

The good thing about this version, especially if I can find a good way to incorporate pattern associations in a meaningful way, is that it has the idea of a game "form" incorporated from the get-go. The first version of this game was also boring. BOORRRINNGGG. Speaking of which, did I mention I need to write 13 more of these, and since my attitude is so off the mark I'll probably get little or no credit for them.

I bet no one even reads this. You there, you aren't reading this at all are you?