Media today

For some reason, the god/goddess of media decided that a number of things would arrive today. I got three books in addition to a History Channel 360 game (which is probably not great, but I want to try when I’m not playing Bully: Scholarship Edition or Burnout Paradise) and an old Bauhaus album I finally replaced (…one I owned originally on cassette).

The books:

1) A collection of short plays by Samuel Beckett: I never read Krapp’s Last Tape and recently–during a conversation about the Graveyard–someone mentioned that it was moving.

2) Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton, comes highly recommend. I’m working on two projects with Arkane: One with a very short development cycle, and one that’ll be much longer term. For the short-term project, I just hit a milestone that will make the Fullerton book very useful in terms of iterating. (Being at an independent, passion-driven company again is fantastic…Arkane is very agile, social and fun.)

3) Universal Principles of Design, also highly recommended, is a great book that the title describes perfectly.

A couple of years back, as part of my minimalist trend, I got rid of (I’d say) 4/5ths of my books. I like having some on the shelf, but I’d be happier if I could get them all in digi format, on a multi-use device that wasn’t just for reading (like the iTouch).

Last Night in Austin

Saw the Hold Steady last night with Leah, David K., Nathan Black and Aaron, a friend of David’s. It was chilly by our standards, but I had some coffee at Jo’s on 2nd before the show and the band rocked hard enough to keep us warm. After the show, I went home and listened to Thunder Road as a kind of tribute to the Hold Steady.

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