Kludge powers activate

I am not particularly technically savvy. I think when I was a kid I was a bit ahead of the technology curve for my age, as I had my own computer way before the vast majority of my peers and therefore picked up a lot more earlier than most of them did. But by now, with so very many friends who are accomplished techies, often professionally, I am something of the Luddite in my social group.

Still, if I have one particular ability related to computers and technology, it’s that I have a knack for getting around a problem by finding a kludgey solution. If there is an awkward, inelegant, improper way to make something achieve the desired end result, I will probably find it and use it to laboriously and at length end up with the final product for which the process was begun. I almost certainly will not have succeeded at fixing the problem, or even at making the process in question something more educated people would consider truly operational, but I will probably have gotten the thing for which I engaged the process in the first place. My recent experience with a video subtitling program called Inqscribe comes to mind, in which I figured out a rhythm of activating the various functions that managed to get around its profound propensity toward freezing. Today I set up the computers in my office to connect wirelessly to the new printer by plugging them into the printer, getting the computers to recognize the printer's existence, and then taking out the wire and requesting that it attempt to reach said acknowledged printer over the network. Wonder of wonders, it worked!

Things like this may end up wasting a lot of time which might have been saved if I just found somebody more knowledgeable, but I am proud of my ignorant self for figuring out how to get it done anyway. And none of the people in my office (business and sales guys, mostly) could figure it out, so I feel particularly good about it now.

Larpercalia is at hand

At long last, Larpercalia is here and it is time to see everything we've worked on over the last year come to pass. I am very pleased with myself, and with the hard work everyone on the con com has done. We have a full, balanced schedule of almost all brand-new games that by this point have nearly every slot filled! Hooray! Congrats to everyone who contributed to making that happen.

I am really looking forward to all this, not only because Festival is one of my favorite weekends a year, but because it will be extremely validating if the things we planned and the ideas we used go off without a hitch. Some things were done a little differently this year (the idea of pinch-hitters, for example) so I would be pleased to see them work the way I hope they will.

Got Prince Comes of Age tonight. I'm so glad for Bernie, Matt, and especially Kindness that they put this together. After briefly being held by Ryan, the title of Newest Game Writer to Come Out of Brandeis now goes to Jonathan. I think I will enjoy my character and the chance to wear my pretty costumes. I would like to have pictures of me in it that I don't hate, if someone would be kind enough to take them, and patient enouh to put up with my whining.