Did the run by pushing out to 31st before the turn. Felt about the same as yesterday in that the first part on Balboa is tough, the downhill is easy, and I can cruise down Cabrillo.

I also pushed myself as I was making the final leg down 23rd to the house, hitting a full sprint for the last ~50 meters or so. It winded me, but felt good. However, I think I may have pushed a bit too hard, since I then got a headache and had to wait about an hour before I felt like doing the rest of the workout.

20 inclines, 20 squats, 80 crunches (I think. Might have been 90), and 2 sets of 20 calf-presses per leg. The presses are down from yesterday, but I was trying to get a longer motion, letting my heel down further and then pushing to a full tip-toe. After about 15, my legs really started to burn, which is why I broke it up into two sets.

Anyway, while I was reaching 31st, I realized the big reason why running Balboa is so tough. While 23rd-24th is a steep hill, it's still at an incline beyond that. The crest is actually at 31st. Hence, the first part of the run is entirely uphill. I'm kinda liking that, though, because it probably helps me from pushing too hard and wearing myself out early on.

Once I start extending beyond 31st, I don't think it'll get too much more difficult, because that's the extent of the incline. At least until I hit the next hill. My goal with this route is to run to the coast and back, which is a little over 3 miles. If there's two hills on Balboa to contend with, that should be good to give me something to contend with. It'll probably take me some time to work up to that, though.

My legs are mostly past the point of remaining sore all the time, now, which is really nice. Stairs are no longer hard. But the thought of painful legs does bring to mind one more funny GDC story.

Actually, it's more a story about GDC '07, but I didn't hear about it until this year.

At the amazing Three Rings party last year, at one point me and a bunch of others were dancing and, I'm not entirely sure why, but I thought it'd be a good idea to do a Russian squat dance. (Oddly, I think I only had two drinks the entire night, so I can't blame alcohol.)

My considerably more inebriated friends thought this was a good idea and went to it. Ray dropped down and completely nailed the dance for about a minute, kicking the shit out of everyone else (if we were competing.)

Apparently the next day, he woke up and his legs were absolutely killing him, leading him to wonder what the hell had happened.

Every since my first time at GDC last year, I've been somewhat fascinated by the Conference Associate volunteer program. I mostly mean this because, by and large, it works very very well. In comparison, Sakura-Con (and other conventions I've attended or helped out with) often do not.

Sakura-Con isn't bad, and in a lot of ways it stands above other anime cons, but it really doesn't hold a candle to GDC. Part of that can be chalked up to the difference in style (one is a fan-oriented convention over a weekend, the other is an industry oriented conference over a week), but there's a lot of success that the people in charge have done to make the success of GDC's volunteers more pronounced.

Since I'm attempting to break this down, a few details. the GDC is a conference run by a small staff that's likely no more than 30 (including all the head CA staff). The CA volunteers number about 350. There are, in addition, professional A/V techs who work all the rooms and convention center staff of various sorts.

Since I'm mostly concerned about the 350 CAs, I'm looking at what makes that part so successful. These are people who are given comparitively little training: there's an online training thing you have to do ahead of time, and an evening of training on the day before the conference. Also, there's an extremely short timeframe for signing up: applications are accepted starting sometime in the fall, and you find out if you're in less than two months before it starts.

A short training regimen for a very large group of people. And everyone receives the same training (well, a smaller group receive an additional bit of training). True, many CAs are returnees, so there's the added experience, but even so, there's a lot to be said about getting such a large group in on the same wavelength in the short period of time.

Reasons I can see for why it works:

1. Specific responsibility. None of the CA jobs are especially technical. Many jobs are little more than checking badges. Even the more difficult jobs can be taught in a short period of time.

2. Very strong incentive to do well. The passes we get for volunteering run about $2k. Even if all you wanted was to be able to get onto the Expo floor (useful for job hunting), it'd run $200. Either way, there's enough good reason to stay on the ball.

3. Nebulous consequences for messing up. As we're reminded, if you mess up, the brute squad will deal with you. Keeping this somewhat unqualified helps, I think, for keeping people in check.

4. Very strong moral and emotional support. No matter what, the people in charge have our backs. Even if we make an incorrect decision, they'll back us up... might need to fix our mistake, but they'll back us up on it, regardless. Any intervention would be private.

5. Schedules are made in advance, with preference allowed for what the volunteers want to see and do otherwise.

6. The volunteers must apply ahead of time and are often the result of direct referral by others.

There's probably more to it, but I wonder if such a system could be applied to conventions. Not verbatim, but it could do a lot to make things better, perhaps.

The biggest problem I see is providing the proper incentive. Many of the CAs are either hopefuls looking for a job or people already in the industry. For a number of reasons, neither group would want things to go wrong. For a convention, the ticket price is drastically less, so there likely isn't such a sense of gain by helping out or loss if it's taken away.

Still, the points that could work: strict delineation of responsibility, a very good form of scheduling, and mostly the positive moral support could do a lot of good.

If I was a) back in Seattle and b) cared enough to try and push myself into some higher position at the con, I'd consider trying to get something started.

But as it stands, it's a pretty interesting thought to consider. Granted, it's likely it can't succeed as well elsewhere, becuase the people involved with GDC are part of what makes it tick so well.

During one of the lull points last week, I was in the CA lounge browsing around and reading webcomics. I got down to XKCD and busted out laughing at this one:


Josie was working on her physics homework, so I poked her and pointed at the comic. She blinked a moment and said "But that's wrong."

Her head was totally in the math, completely missing the gender point to focus in on the equation.

At the casual games social on Monday, as Josie and I were making our way back from the bar to our group and 'Are You Gonna Be My Girl' started over the music system. Immediately both of us bust out and start air-playing the bass line for Rock Band. Which lasted all of one stanza or so before we collapsed with laughter about how geeky we were.

Amazing what ten hours of sleep will do for me. On the whole, the week was a lot of fun, but Thursday night partying and whatnot pushed me to an emotion overload. Since I got very little sleep, Friday became a day where I just sort of emotionally crashed.

This became compounded last night, since I had to work. I struggled through it and slept rather soundly until past four. I'm starting to feel more human again.

There was quite a contrast with last year's conference. A year ago, I seriously had a lot of doubts about attending at all, and was debating just calling the whole thing off within a week of it starting. Thankfully, I found a cool group of friends and it was a lot of fun.

This time, while I did have some pre-con jitters, I was much cooler about it. It probably helped that I was able to meet up with josienutter a couple times between the conferences, which helped a lot to keep the thread of stuff going and I didn't feel like it was going to be me, Rob, Aya and a bunch of people who I'd had a bit of fun with the previous year.

On Sunday, after working and sleeping, I headed downtown to check in and do a shift I'd volunteered for. I ran into Josie and Ray, which was cool, and then got to work as they headed off to chill until the meeting. I'm kinda bummed about that, since it would have been considerably more fun to go out for beers with them than to stuff bags, but it was all cool. The bag stuffing did help me remember and meet a whole host of other people, which was good.

On the downside, we didn't get the stuffing complete, so we had to do it later, after the meeting, which kept us up and out until well after midnight.

So I went into Monday with not a lot of sleep. Also, when I woke up, the shower was taken, so I didn't get in there until quarter to seven, which made everything very, rushed.

This was compounded by the fact that Monday was a holiday, so the busses were not running on the weekday schedule. Rob and I attempted to catch the L downtown, only to find that the L didn't exist, so we'd have to make do with the much slower normal bus, which would have made us very late.

We went to check another bus to see if it'd get us there sooner, and ran into Aya who was parking her car. We opted to just drive downtown instead, which worked out pretty well.

On the upside, the only shift I had was first thing doing some badge checking at the Intel Interactive Lounge. Over the 2.5 hours I was there, it never got really busy, so I never felt overwhelmed.

For the rest of the day, I mostly just socialized around, until the evening when I tagged along with a group going to the casual games group social thing, which was fun but got rather crowded after an hour. Eventually, Josie and I left, so I could head home and she could go meet some of her other friends. I got home a bit before nine, sat around for an hour, and was in bed by ten (and probably asleep).

Unfortunately, I woke up at 5 am, and lay in bed for a bit.

Still, Tuesday was my light day. I didn't have anything to strictly do, so I chatted with people and went to a panel that Daniel James was sitting on.

I'm not actually sure what happened the rest of the night, except that dinner must have taken place, and then Aya and I headed home pretty early. Again, I was in bed by ten...

But I woke up at five again. I started rolling fairly early, and made it onto a very empty L bus. I was saved from having to get up extra early since I'd traded a breakfast shift with Aya so she could make a morning meeting.

The shift I ended up working was very, very boring, however. I chose to do the hallway thing, which was fine. In the afternoon, I sort of worked two panels, one was on the Mercenaries 2 networked physics engine, which seemed quite fascinating and brilliant in a way, the other was on WiiFit, which was massively overloaded.

As I headed down there, I passed Ray, who had a headset on. "Are you my floater?" I asked.

"Which room are you working?"

"132/33."

"I need you to go over to 135 and help them because this massive line is trying to get in there."

Because the panel was in Japanese, it was being translated live for anyone who spoke English only. I did some line control and told people to make sure they had headsets. After the end of the panel I helped again taking the headsets back, which turned into a bit of a mob.

I made plans with Ray to go grab dinner and then go out for drinks, but he got sidetracked by some other people on his way to meeting up with me. Eventually, I went with Aya and a bunch of others to eat, and randomly ran into Ray, which mostly put our drinking on track.

Unfortunately, drinking somewhat failed, as the beer was pretty bad, and I sent it back after just a few sips. Aya and I walked Nikki back to her hotel and then got home around eleven.

I woke up at 5 again... Around then I started to wonder about my sleep habits, because lately, I've had little trouble sleeping eight or nine hours each day... until GDC week, when I couldn't stay asleep more than seven.

Thursday was pretty fun, as I got to work a roundtable discussion about virtual items in games. It's an incredibly popular roundtable and we had 80 people in a room designed for under 50. I probably had to turn away another 10-20 people, as well.

Thursday night is the big party night at GDC. I had my plans to go to the Three Rings party, which had become a rather restricted invite-only affair. It wasn't starting until 10, though, so I had an evening to kill.

I ended up going out to dinner with Ray and Nikki. We set out in search of, "a fast food Mexican place that served margaritas". They'd gone there last year and started their tradition of margarita racing.

A bit unsure on the specific destination, we attempted to find it again. We knew it was close to the Three Rings office, so first we tried Chevy's (no, not fast food enough), then Taco Del Mar (no). Eventually, we figured out it was Chipotle, which we descended upon. They had to make fresh margaritas for us, which was fine.

After eating a bit we raced to finish them, straws and no hands. For some reason I still cannot fathom, I won the race.

After dinner, it was pushing past eight, and Nikki had an extra invite to the CCP/White Wolf party, so we wandered down there.

The experience was somewhat interesting. There were very scantily clad dancers, an open bar, and...

Well, at one point I heard "Hey, midget!" and turned to find a couple little people serving out drinks from backpack cannisters.

I had a test tube of red and then of blue. The others in my group were doing double shots, but I had mine one at a time. This was the third time I'd matched drinks and done them quickly. (The second was a vodka shot with a cranberry shooter that we got as we came into the party.)

And then Ray, Nikki and I had matching vodka & Red Bulls. I didn't want to drink any more, and it was getting close to 10 by then, so I started trying to round people up to go to Three Rings. Given how some things changed, I figured I could get some in who weren't on the list.

However, some people wanted to stay, and Ray decided to stick around to keep watch, so I ended up going alone. I stopped by the CA lounge, grabbed CA Chris who speaks Japanese to stand in as Ray, and we went to the party.

At Three Rings, I had one drink and started on a beer before I realized I was done with alcohol for the night. Aya pushed a water into my hand, which sufficed.

A comparison between the two parties. CCP was fun if you like loud music, gothy decor, dancing, dancing girls who were wearing leather lingerie, and, um, whipping.

Three Rings was fun if you liked conversation, Rock Band, a significantly higher quality list of free booze, and a higher percentage of cute girls who had not been paid to be there.

The latter is a bit more my thing, but CCP's wasn't unfun.

I probably said a bit to embarass me at Three Rings, but I spent a good amount of it convincing Chris to try to become a J-guest Liaison for Sakura-Con. He said he'd try, but his girlfriend might be in town that weekend, which could cause scheduling problems.

Sometime between 1 and 2, we took our leave to head home, dropped Chris at his hotel, met up with a couple other CAs who were taking the same bus as us, and got home around 3.

I didn't fall asleep immediately, as I just sorta had an emotional upwelling while lying in bed, which had me crying for a bit.

I woke up at 6:15. Which wasn't anywhere near enough, but was a damn sight better than I'd done last year going into Friday.

Unfortunately, Friday was my heavy day for shifts. I had two panels to do, and wasn't really able to nap between them. Neither one interested me, so I did the hall watching duty for both.

And then things started to wind down over the course of the afternoon. By the time we started the post-conference meeting, I was feeling pretty dead, and I'm pretty sure I missed saying goodbye to some people on my way out.

Work afterwards was difficult, since I was barely awake. I snatched couple naps during it, then slept soundly for ten hours, which helped a lot for making me feel a bit more human.

After waking up, I played Guitar Hero III until Aya came home. We went out to pick up Rob from a Smash Bros. Brawl tourney and eat dinner at a Japanese resturaunt in the Sunset district. By the time we got there, we were a bit annoyed because it'd taken forever to find a parking space. On the upside, the food was quite good and very affordable.

Two funny stories about GDC. For some reason, at the end of last year, I'd gotten the impression that Ray did not like me. I'm not really sure why, but I kinda worried about meeting him again this time.

Not the case at all. He wondered how I could think that after the Three Rings party last year. I'm quite glad, since it was a blast to hang out with him this week. Hopefully, we'll be able to hang out more often, since he's fairly local.

Second funny story happened on Thursday night. As I was leaving CCP, Ray asked me to take Alexei to Three Rings. Alexei didn't want to leave, and somewhere in there the message got garbled, and thus everyone he was with for the rest of the night thought that Ray wanted him to stop drinking.

By the end of the night, Alexei was sober. And angry about it. Ray felt bad, even though it wasn't his fault (might have been mine, but I don't think I ever indicated Alexei should be cut off), though we both agreed it's hilarious in retrospect.

Alexei doesn't seem to hold it against either of us.

30 doesn't feel any different from 29. For me 28 is more important. So despite turning 30, it's just another birthday. Apparently last year my birthday itself was so lacking of note that I didn't even post about it. I should take a moment to reflect on the past year, though. It's been a big one.

I've moved. Cast away that safety net of being close to my family and gone to another state. I'm forcing myself to try new things by doing this. Granted, I'm doing it in my typically hermitous manner, but new things have been sought and tried. I've made new friends, and built up stronger friendships with aquaintances. I'd never have found out how much I like cooking if I hadn't moved. I've tried out video games. I'd probably never have figured out how much I like playing Guitar Hero if I were still in Washington. Which means I'd never have bought a bass. That experiment in progress is still very early, but I'm liking it so far.

So, a good year, on the whole. It addressed some of the class deficiencies I've had which should serve me well as I now level up, again.

Last week, I took another plunge by volunteering for the Game Developer's Conference. Well, I suppose I really volunteered back in January, but it materialized last week. Outside of the MT booth and Sakura staffing, I've not worked at a con or anything in almost a decade. A cold volunteering position was quite a shock. Truth be told, I wasn't altogether sure it was a good idea. I figured I could skip on it, do a normal work-week instead, and just catch a party or two besides.

However, I'm glad I went through with it. Suffice to say it was one of the most invigorating weeks I've had in quite some time.

Didn't quite start that way. I caught a Saturday shift so I ended up having to switch my schedule around in rather short order. When I arrived at the convention center and saw everyone, I swear my first thought was, "Oh, this wasn't such a good idea." Large crowds of people I don't know tend to remain as such for quite a while. I foresaw a week where I'd mostly stick in Aya's and Rob's shadows, which isn't bad, per se, but I can do that at home and not miss a week of work to do it.

Things warmed up a bit as we got working stuffing the bags. I made a bit of conversation with the people around me, which was cool, and got into a bit of a rhythm working the line. By the end, my feet hurt tremendously, though. I'm not used to standing up for hours and hours on end. Of course, that wasn't the end of the night by a long shot. After that we had to go through volunteer orientation, which was quite impressive. We also got dinner, for which I'm grateful, but since we were commuting from our apartment, which is a good hour by bus and walking from the convention center, we got home quite late. Sunday was the first short night of sleep.

But I fell asleep rather easily.

Monday turned out to be my busy day. I had four shifts scheduled, but I traded one to Aya to make things a bit more balanced. First, I got to work a lecture that was in the GDC Mobile track. I thought this would be interesting, but I'm afraid it was frightfully boring. For one thing, I was expecting something along the lines of mobile gaming in Japan, which is an awesome concept. Instead it turned out to be related to the incredibly dull (and frankly an economic and development dead end) that is mobile gaming in the US.

During lunch I got my first little indication that this might be a bit different from just about anything I'd done before. While sitting around the volunteer lounge I ended up taking part in a conversation about the relative merits of the various game systems. Afterwards, I wandered down to listen to Daniel James (Captain Cleaver) give a brief lecture on making independent games. He was quite fiery, stating in no uncertain terms how difficult it is for a company to make it.

My afternoon was, work-wise, not significantly better than the first. [Edited due to request.] It could have been better, but was a learning experience.

Aya and I spent the evening attempting to go climbing, but failing. The bus we were to take didn't come and we ended up hanging with various other volunteers for a bit until we decided to head home. Monday was the second short night of sleep.

But I fell asleep rather easily.

Tuesday was a light day, work-wise, since I only had to work a single lunch shift, so I got the chance to check out some more bits of the conference and to meet more people. I think the most significant conversation happened after lunch. Aya and I were talking and trying out Jellie Bellies and another volunteer, who'd been telling a story, paused and said something to the effect of "Oh, I'm sorry. I have this urge to tell the most disgusting stories whenever someone starts eating."

I confess that I missed the entire story (and never got it repeated) but this opened up the conversation and I started to get to know more people. Woo-ha. It was fun a long and covered such topics as working at EA (educational), writing limericks for code commits, and other such stuff with working in the games industry. Where on Monday I'd had some good conversation, on Tuesday it seemed like the start of some friendships. (To be fair, the entire program at the GDC seems designed to encourage this. Our whole lime-green shirted brigade was referred to as a family on more than one occasion.)

In the afternoon, I caught another session that Cleaver was on, this a bit of a panel on casual games. Yet again he had a bit of a fire to light, and disagreed rather heavily with some other casual game heavy-hitters from the likes of RealArcade. Despite the strong disagreements, they seemed mostly amicable. But I think that there's a bit of fear in the industry about Three Rings. The company seems to have a very happy middle ground between not being beholden to anyone while they make their design decisions, but having the financial standing to do whatever the hell they want. Newbies to the industry need to get by on innovation. When innovation has money, the establishment gets concerned.

The biggest point he had to make was that in a few years, the downloadable, single-player game will be dead (or very nearly so.) The general public (ideal target for casual games) just doesn't care for them.

In the evening, we considered going for climbing again but instead decided to take up an invitation to eat at a French resturaunt. The food was excellent, the conversation fun (I'm afraid I dominated it, though), and so it ended up capping off a satisfying day that proved to be the least busy of the week. Even so, Tuesday was the third short night of sleep.

But I fell asleep rather easily.

Wednesday saw the conference kick into high gear, as the two day tutorials ended and the regular sessions and such started in earnest. While I only had one thing to work, I found myself engaged in conversations with my newfound friends, treks to the Three Rings HQ, and some wandering around the conference itself.

The big bit of work was covering a panel on "MMOs, Past, Present, and Future". Although it might have been best to call it "MMOs, Past, WoW, and how things may change due to WoW." Despite the rather focused part of half the talk, it was really interesting. Unfortunately, it was also packed, which meant I didn't get to see it all while I dealt with the problems of an overflow crowd.

In the evening, Rob, Aya, and I watched the IGF awards show (and the Game Developer's Choice Awards). OOO took home the technical excellence award for the second year running, but lost out in the grand prize to a game that hasn't even been released, yet. This is a bit annoying, and it's a bit moreso when the winning title didn't take home the prize in any other category. Still, it was a pretty good show and I'd like to check out a few of the other games that were showcased.

The Choice Awards were less impressive. While there were a few standout bits, the fact that Gears of War took home three prizes, despite being heavily derivative compared to the competition, strikes me as disappointing. It may be a great game, but the other options seemed like they should have topped it in some fashion. Afterwards we went out to dinner with a few of the OOO engineers to celebrate the win.

In retrospect there's one thing I'd wish I'd done Wednesday night. Apparently Freezepop was doing a show and that would have been awesome to see, even if it would have made the night short. So I actually had a relatively early night.

But I fell asleep rather easily.

Thursday was the big day. It's like Saturday of a convention. Everything is going strong. My schedule got shifted around a bit, and I ended up working Shigeru Miyamoto's keynote address. For the most part, this had me standing outside as a human barricade to direct the massive line (it more than wrapped completely around a block and then doubled back on itself). I shouted a lot to direct people to the right area. They keynote itself was great. Miyamoto has a wonderfully accessible sense of humor and had some great anecdotes to get across his and Nintendo's goals for design. While there wasn't anything huge announced (unlike the Sony address the previous day), it capped off with an extended series of clips from Super Mario Galaxy, which looks amazing.

I worked the shift that I had gotten in the trade from Aya during the afternoon break. Then it was time for the big reason I wanted to come to the conference: the Three Rings panel where they announced their latest game. For anyone who's interested, there's enough information on the YPP forums and Cleaver's blog. I can only say that the potential is awesome.

The rest of the day had me helping prep for the party. The same as a con Saturday, Thursday is the big party day for the GDC. Given Cleaver's tendencies, this looked to be a big one. We spent part of the time handing out invitations, part of the time putting together Meta-Science costumes, and part of the time doing little getting-prepared-things.

Oh, wow, the party. It rocked extremely hard, with somewhere around 400 people in there at one point. I'm told there was a line extending around the block of people who were waiting to get in. I'm not sure, since I was in there almost the entire time, chatting, dancing, and whatnot. The only downside is that they ran out of beer in ridiculously short order, which is what I really wanted, so I only had one drink all night.

At one point, I turned around and realized that my roommates had disappeared, so I went with my plan of not going home. Unfortunately, that turned into a plan of not sleeping. I chatted in through the wee hours once things had died down with Nemo and some other OOO peeps. Fun conversation, but it made the prospect of the coming day look less and less inviting.

Somewhere in here my brain mostly stopped working. I muscled through my morning shift and my lunch shift and I believe I had a nap somewhere in there, which helped a bit and allowed me to be somewhat responsive during the afternoon and on to dinner, which wasn't the most ideal, but a good and boisterous way to cap off the week. It dawned on me that I'd gone through a week and actually been engaging and responsive enough to make new friends. Not just casual "hey, how are you?" friends, but there was some nice connection there.

To finish off the conference, we had a round-up with all the volunteers and bunches of free goodies were handed out. I got a Mii t-shirt and a one-month trial to Toon Town Online which I'll need to check out at some point.

At this point I'm practically dead on my feet, so we said our goodbyes with promises to contact our new (and renewed) friends soon and made our way home.

Unfortunately I had to work. Except for a few fits and starts of dozing and napping, I ended up staying awake for 48 hours. I slept for nine, but that didn't do enough. On Sunday I slept for at least another seven, but still felt dead. On monday, I finally got myself caught up.

Great week, and a wonderful way to spend my last as a 20-something. I'm really glad I got to do it, because the sessions were interesting, the party was rocking (hell, I actually danced), and the people were awesome. I only wish I'd had the chance to meet them some years ago. If'n any more besides josienutter have LJs, I'll see about adding them.

In comparison, my birthday was a low-key affair. My roommates took me out to dinner and we played tennis on Wii sports. That's cool, though. I'll be having an actual party in a couple weeks when my homies from Washington come down for a visit.