I'm not here!

I started this blog for a course I was taking a couple semesters ago, but I really don't have any intention of maintaining multiple blogs. Sooo, if you've somehow stumbled across this (it seems Google has noticed it, as it's right up there among pages they've indexed containing the term "Jolyon Gray") - which is probably pretty unlikely actually, unless you were specifically trying to find me - you can find my actually-fairly-faithfully-updated blog over at Xanga, at http://www.xanga.com/jolyon. Be seeing you!

Hi ho, hi ho

Okay, I'm approaching a point where I can start to think about this paper again.

Yesterday I had an exam in the other class I'm taking this session, and I also had six tons of retaining wall block delivered to our back yard - 270 blocks at maybe 50 lbs. a block. This morning we had a tandem load of 3/4 inch gravel dropped off - another five tons or so of materials - and an excavator with a two-foot and three-foot bucket to move around said gravel. This is all just preparatory stuff for a fun little project, that being the construction of about 100 feet of retaining wall over the next little while. The dumptrucks full of topsoil should start arriving here in a few days after the footers are dug and first couple courses of the wall are up. We're essentially taking a hillside and making a couple of terraces in the back yard. Waiting until school was over, in August, in hindsight probably would have been a reallllly good idea.

Oh, and I've been working evenings to make up for the time I've been taking in the day to handle contractors and equipment and materials. Okay, thus endeth my pity party. After class and work I'll be getting back into this paper in earnest. Sorry it's not here in any real tangible form yet. For now there's the post before this one, which admittedly isn't a lot to go on.

Radical departure

I know, let's decide in the middle of the night before Friday to really change where you're going with this article!

I think I may be taking off in a somewhat different direction than I thought I would originally with my PC Gamer article. The personal experience story I wrote talked about the time I spent playing an online game called Everquest, and suggested that the makers of this game and other online games might benefit from packaging their products together in largely the same fashion that cable television providers package large numbers of channels together.

I have one interview lined up already with an employee at Sony Online Entertainment, the company that runs Everquest. I’ve been noticing in the research that I’ve been doing for this article, though, that the story that’s emerging that’s the most compelling to me isn’t just focused on bundling together competing video games to drive up subscriber rates.

I’ve found article after article discussing what basically amounts to convergences between online games and things that might surprise you. For example, Sony’s sequel game, Everquest 2, offers a command you actually type in the game – /pizza – that opens up a browser window allowing you to order pizza online from Pizza Hut. A Korean telecom company has opted to bundle online game subscriptions with their broadband Internet access accounts to spur sales. A company called Massive has entered into partnerships with game developers UbiSoft, Atari, Vivendi Universal and Konami to bring advertisements into video games. Sony has recently begun facilitating the sale of virtual property in its video games for real money, tapping into what Sony estimates has become a $200 million market for virtual goods. Makers of upcoming games anticipate the ability to buy and sell virtual goods from your cellphone. It goes on and on.

Though they’ve been around at this point for several years, online games are still evolving. Subscription packages are just one thing that companies are experimenting with. Over the course of Friday and this weekend, I’ll be hashing out a far more detailed outline and focusing more solidly on one or two examples.

Unfortunately, I’m also leaning a little more in this direction because there was a bit of a dearth of information to be had focused solely on software bundles. There were plenty of press releases, but I’m still trying to find some good objective analyses to work with. If I can find a little more to substantiate where I’m coming from, I’ll run with that a little more, but otherwise I’m going to have to broaden a bit.

Anyway, need to sleep... badly.

Edit - 11:20 a.m. Friday morning: Okay after reading the comments I should probably go ahead and add that the article is definitely going to be targetted at publication in PC Gamer. For the most part, articles there are written in first person perspective -- four out of five articles picked out at random from a few issues were "I did this" sorts of things -- and they use the now moment to describe experiences with games ("I played this, and this happened"... all past tense). They switch to present tense to discuss issues and offer commentary, "the graphics are stellar" or "the problems with this version are legion". In a nutshell, PC Gamer articles are offering a personal experience with a game, combined with a professional assessment of a game's quality (or lack of quality). They do take the occasional foray into particular genres as a whole, or other broader themes, and that's what I'll be writing.

PE story, revisited

Initially I wasn't real sure what I was going to change in my personal experience story. As far as grades go, what I got was decent. If you get an A in the first place, do you need to change things around just for the sake of changing them? Fortunately, though, it had been a few days since I messed around with this story at all, so when I looked over it again I did see a few places where it needed some improvement. Hopefully I'm not so vain as to think that I don't need to revisit my stuff once it's written; I do. When I looked it over, some parts of it really needed some help.

I didn't really mess around with the overall shape of the story, but there were a number of sentences that were just too wordy, or too awkward, or ones that just tried to pack too much into one sentence. So hopefully I've addressed those, and come up with something that flows a little more naturally for thought processes other than my own convoluted one. Also, I'd used an example in the first draft of a game called Matrix Online, and how it was a good example of a game that would make a lot of sense to incorporate into a bundled package of games. Well, in the interim between the first draft and the rewrite, Sony Online Entertainment swooped in and bought the game, which really forced a change in the way I presented it. Sony actually seems to be at or near the forefront in software bundling anyway, though, which meant that I could look at a whole new angle in this story. I'd thought about bundling different pieces of software that a company had developed itself, but big companies going after other companies' titles, and buying them to add to their own offerings, is just something that hasn't really happened much yet.

Anyway, I basically was editing for clarity, so the overall article hasn't changed all that much. I did add a title, but that part was actually pretty easy. I don't really get around to where I'm going - to presenting something like a thesis statement - until about halfway through the article, so the title really needed to spell out where the article is headed so the reader isn't tagging along for a page or so wondering, "So?" Knowing what it needed to say before I ever got around to saying it made writing the title easy; when what you're going to convey is a given, all that's left really is to come up with a, well I don't really want to say catchy, but a decent way of saying it.

More than anything else, I had to avoid the urge to start going off in completely new directions. Barring something unforeseen, I'll be taking the general idea behind this PE story and incorporating it into my bigger article, so once I started looking over the PE story to see what needed to be brushed up a little bit, I had to resist the compulsion to start tooling around with some of the ideas I've been wanting to pursue. I mean, they're compelling and pertinent and everything, but they're really not so much a part of what I have to say for this piece. I guess that's about it!

Belated post

This ought to have been posted by Sunday at the latest, but I rebelled and put it off 'til Monday morning. Class wound up being cancelled (hope everything's okay), so I'll use this time to work on it. I actually had this all written out late Saturday night, but then I left it to think on 'til Sunday morning, and by then I had no idea what I'd been on about, so I deleted it and told myself to start over later.

More so than anything else, what I took from the second half of Zammett's book was how she took her sister's cancer. We already talked about this a fair bit in class, but that's definitely what was most compelling about it for me. Coping with something that happens to you is just a totally different creature than coping with something that happens to someone else.

This hits pretty close to home for me, so I've had a pretty difficult time coming up with something nice and tidy to say about it. My little brother died in November, 2002, and even though it's been two and a half years now, I'm still pretty much at a loss for profound epiphanies I can draw from the experience. I guess as far as Zammett's book goes, I'll just say that I think it's probably harder to cope with bad things happening to people close to you than it is to cope with things happening to you. I haven't done a lot of analytical thinking about this or anything, but on the spur of the moment I'd say it probably has to do, at least for me, with an increased likelihood to second-guess myself when it's someone else. Even though I know this sort of thinking isn't going to do me or anyone else a bit of good, I still wonder what I could have done that might have made a difference. I remember reading that Zammett's dad was pretty bad about that, too; he was wondering what they might have done wrong.

Actually, I think I identify more with Zammett's dad than with anyone else in that book. When the going gets tough, you'll find me rushing to the Bob Villa therapy method, too. Maybe not with the same sorts of projects, but I'll definitely take being preoccupied to giving myself too much time to think, every time. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from when it comes to Zammett talking about her sister. I tried taking on the subject matter independent of of my own related experiences, but it just wasn't happening. The big difference is that I'm really not like Zammett at all. While she writes freely and openly about the most personal facets of her life, the words you'd be most likely to apply to me when it comes to that sort of expression are words like reticent, or maybe taciturn. Maybe not the most desirable trait in someone whose degree is so dependent on writing, but it just takes me longer to come around.

Then again, maybe that's the biggest thing I can draw from this: It's fine to come right out and say I don't have answers, or I don't have the slightest idea what to tell you is the great beneficial thing you can draw from an experience. I'm just wired to be uncomfortable with not knowing, so I tend to hold out 'til I'm on solid ground. Anyway, I'm rambling. Back to work with me.

Books are the devil, m'kay?

I'm remembering right now just why I declare a moratorium on recreational reading while school's in. Once I start reading something, I don't stop. I started reading Erin Zammett's book, plowed right through the first six chapters of it, and nearly went ahead and started in on the rest of it before I realized it was nearly one in the morning and I'd be getting up again in a few hours. So, I decided to finish it tomorrow and go ahead and blog about it before bed tonight.

Saying "what a great book" just really doesn't do this book justice. I'm really impressed by Zammett's honesty and frankness, her willingness to share so much of such a personal and life-changing experience. I keep finding myself fixated on her ability to take something good from the experience, and I can't help but wonder how much resolve to find that sort of understanding I would have had. I guess it gets progressively easier to be philosophical about it as time goes on and you get acclimated to something like that, but that she approached what she was dealt the way she did really strikes a chord with me.

I guess I could say I'm a little familiar with the territory. Around twenty years ago, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She's fine today, well, fine in the context of being a cancer survivor. She had a radical masectomy to get rid of the mass, and they pretty much took out every lymph node on her left side to get rid of places that the cancer had spread to. Today that means she gets sick more often than she would otherwise; I guess that beats the heck out of cancer, though.

Parts of Zammett's story really resonated with me. On good days my family could laugh about it - I think Reader's Digest has run a piece called "Laughter - the Best Medicine" for ages for a good reason. The bad days were completely emotionally draining. That Zammett was keeping notes about it all as this was unfolding in her life is just really remarkable, but then my natural inclination is to try not to think about things at all, instead of processing everything and having some kind of a cathartic release. Moreover, from a family member's point of view, 20 years on down the road, I remember events from my mom's cancer in something like an undifferentiated mass - thoughts like wondering if my mom was going to die exist right alongside recollections of playing cards in the hospital with her day after day. I couldn't write an account now like the one Zammett wrote to save my life, and that's assuming I had half her talent to start with. The details are just too fragmented, and far too susceptible to being shaped by the decades I've had to think about it.

On the other hand, life's thrown other curveballs to my family that I haven't had the benefit of years to come to terms with. I could really stand to take a long look at the ability to identify the good in what it'd be easy to take as a categorically negative experience. Talking about things to help you internalize them, sharing them because someone else might very well stand to gain something for having heard your experience... these are things I could stand to put some serious thought into. I don't know that I'd commit to giving it a whirl - that's a pretty tall order - but it's definitely food for thought.

(In)auspicious beginnings

Well here goes my first foray into a blog on Blogger; I've had a blog on Xanga for some time now which I post to with varying degrees of regularity. From the sound of it, it looks like we're going to set up a blogring out of all the folks in this class, and it will be the first time I've fooled around with any of that. My wife's big on blogrings, but I'm still a comparative Luddite when it comes to that. I think you can't really mix and match different "flavors" of blogs in rings - that is to say that if we're all on Blogger, we couldn't go and add someone using a different suite. That's a little limiting, considering how much is out there.

My practicum this past semester involved a little work on blogs, too. the University Libraries Outreach department uses something much like a blog called Moveable Type. All the software I've seen is pretty sophisticated, but Moveable Type has some options I haven't unearthed yet in Xanga. That's getting a little esoteric for a first post, though, I guess. On to posting, so I can work out how to modify the template I settled on, and how to change around some defaults.