In this episode of of the podcast, I talk a little bit about coming back from Los Angeles, the state of my various projects, and go into some details about the fiun had at Origins 2009 this year. Also, a bonus rant/ramble about why people like me are the Game Vendors’ Worst Nightmare:

Links for this show:

• Pinax
• Origins 2009
• War, Season 5 of Heaven
• Fluxx and Family Fluxx
• Are You The Traitor?
• Necessary Evil
• The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

Names dropped: Kris Johnson, Jim Van Verth, Mur Lafferty, Ken Newquist, David Moore, Erin Moore, Natalie Metzger, Andy Steigle, John Cmar, Laura Burns

Download the show here.

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I’m not sure about you guys, but the world is wearying me more easily these days.

It might be the last two years of absurdly hard work on my part, it might be the move back home. It might be starting a new job.  it might be all of these things, but I feel like it goes deeper than that.

Sleep can recharge the body, but how does one recharge the soul?

That’s where the weariness lies, I think. Life fatigue — the spirit is weak.  The speed at which things happen, the constant barrage of media, of the tasks you MUST do, the sense of false urgency that surrounds us today.

I was out in L.A. when I realized that I spent so much time “reasoning” things out (read: whistling in the dark), trying to control situations around me, that in the end, I felt like it was all slipping through my fingers because you cannot hold on to so much. My wife calls it living in my head. Critical thinking is good, but sometimes it’s better to feel; to drink in life instead of breaking it down so you can digest it.

The soul doesn’t exist to consume the world. It’s meant to experience, revel in, and produce beauty.

I know that all of you reading this are busy people, so I ask you, how do you take care of your soul?

Phil Plait’s latest article flew past me on Twitter today, and I was speedy enough to catch it and give it a read.

Read this before continuing: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/24/from-distant-planets-to-the-deep-blue-sea/.

I happen to agree with him that even in times like these we need to fund scientific research, in fact, I’d point out that especially in times like these. When the economy is uncertain, it’s all too easy to gaze into the complexity of the problems that face us and want to run screaming into the arms of a comfortable superstition to make us feel better.¹

Good science brings hope. It’s good for the country’s morale. When we make progress, when we understand more about the world around us, we are made a better people. We have a goal, beyond trying to figure out just how to undo what the greed of a few has wrought.

I want to cry when I see how NASA has fared in the last 20 years, perhaps longer, because the boneheads in Congress lack the foresight to embrace science as a priority. My father worked for NASA, and I was lucky to be one of those kids exposed to the Wonder of space and science at an early age. I want my children to have the same, but these days, NASA gets more press when things go wrong than when things go right. That’s an injustice of the highest kind.  We take the Space Shuttle and other advances for granted, forgetting what marvels they are.

I could not agree more with Dr. Plait’s final statements:

It is not only possible, but I believe mandated, that all of us who love science and want to further the knowledge of humanity support each other’s endeavors. The public does in fact have a great interest in many fields of science, including space exploration, ocean exploration, biological exploration…

The key word there is exploration, and there’s enough Universe out there for everybody.

1. No, I’m not talking about Atheism or Religion here. I’m talking about the unreasonable ticks that arise in every one of us when faced with something out of our control.[back]

photo credit: Jonathan D. Blundell

Working as a team lead in any company is especially challenging. A lead developer straddles the gap between the coders and management, forced to take communication from one side and relay it in a manner the other can understand. It’s tricky business, and it’s not something you learn in school.

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up in the last few years, some of them learned the hard way. I hope they’ll serve you well.

1. Provide Solutions: Management is looking for your expertise, even when they think they know better. Temper your speech. It’s easy to get into the habit of saying “No, that won’t work because…” Don’t throw up barriers. You’ve gotten this far in your career because you’re good at what you do, so use your experience to find the creative solution.
2. Accept Input: Listen to your developers. There are days that they’ll know more about the current state of the codebase than you well. If you are lucky, you are leading people who are talented in disciplines that you are not. Listen to these people, accept their input.
3. Make The Call: Eventually, the discussion has to end. Take the data and make the best decision you can. That’s your job.
4. Play It Straight: Be honest. When you screw up, take the blame. When it’s your team, deal with it.  Trying to hide errors just compounds the problem. Without honesty there can be no trust.
5. Share Knowledge: The most fun I have with my team at Mahalo is when we are talking about tech, sharing ideas, new code, and new methods of getting the job done. This is real team-building. As developer, we prize knowledge above most other things. Share it with your team. Learn from them as well. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to teach you a skill you’ve wanted to learn.
6. Keep It Short: Management doesn’t really care how an HTTP Request Handler works.  Keep your explanations short and to the point. Ask if they want more detail. Understand that speaking techie will alienate non-techies, and will cause a slight distrust of what you’re saying. If you cannot avoid giving a technical answer, keep it short and sweet.  It’s not their job to know how it works, they just want to know it works.
7. Choose Your Battles: Your development team will inevitably want things that management cannot provide, and management will always mandate things that are not easy to do. It’s your job to find the middle ground. That will usually mean compromise, and while it’s not pretty, it’s how the sausage is made.  Save the digging in of heels for when you really need it.  An extra button or a different way of processing a form is not worth the trouble, in general, but a new form that causes the entire database to change is worth the fight. You’re not just there to take orders…you’re the caretaker of the project. Give feedback, and if you are overruled, determine how far you’re willing to take it. Be realistic in your assessment: is it a true battle to be fought or merely an inconvenience?
8. Keep A Journal: Keep a journal of the projects you run. Take notes, so you can remember why decisions were made. There will be times that you’ll look at some piece of code and you’ll have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing. Your journal will save you from the ever-embarrassing “I dunno.”

As I said in a previous essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. Along with that, I’ve been considering the way we see other people’s stories. How we watch then, listen to them, and if they have something we feel we need, how we try to adapt their stories to fit into our own.

This is a useful exercise. When we see a person’s life through the lens of history, such as a personal hero from the past, we do not see all their failings, all their personal struggles. We see an idealized version of them, and we take the qualities of their life that we seek to emulate and attempt to graft them on to our own psyches.  We learn and grow this way, trying on stories as we would garments, and when they do not suit us, casting them off.

These days, we live in an information-rich climate. The stories surrounding us, bombarding us at times, all seem to carry something that we’d like to make part of ourselves.  I’ve found this to be especially true with the people I’ve met through my work in the podcasting community, where tales of individual drive, perseverance, and passion have turned normally shy people into the writers, musicians, and broadcasters we know and love.  There’s much that’s worthy of being emulated there.

There are times that we select beliefs or qualities that make sense to us, only to have them cause dissonance with other, more deeply-rooted attitudes. In my life, that’s been Skepticism vs. Spirituality.

To explain: I know a number of atheists and skeptics. I’ve had a number of discussions with them, and to a great degree, their arguments make a great deal of logical sense to me. My own belief in a God (capital G) has been wavering for years now, and as I make my professional life in a world of logic, the arguments put forward by my skpetic friends are appealing to me. Facts make sense, and believing in things you cannot prove makes none.

However, on a deeper level, my inner life has always been one of mysticism, symbol, and faith.  I was raised Catholic, and when I hit the point in my life when I wanted to break out of the Church, I gravitated toward other mystical beliefs: neopaganism and the occult being a major part of that. In retrospect, I can see that I moving from one ritual-based practice to another because it was the motion and poetry of the rituals that I fell in love with, not the actual theology.

In the past three years, these two systems have been causing me some serious internal dissonance. In trying to find a way to make these things work together, I’ve worked myself into a cycle of doubt that has been crippling.  One side, the logical side, tells me that all my beliefs that I cannot prove with facts are bollocks, and the other side reminds me that humans work on a deeper level than mere logic, and that Significance is not fact-based, but instinctual and symbolic. It’s a battle that is deeply troubling.

The effect of all of this is that, when I take the skeptical path, I tend to be bitter and angry, and when I take the spiritual, I’m insecure and full of doubt.  I do not like the way my life tastes when I am purely skeptical, but I worry that I will float away into a never-neverland if the spiritual should take over.

I do not know where the balance point in my own life lies, but I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only person fighting this internal fight.  If you are one of those people with this same inner turmoil, how do you balance it? What beliefs have influenced you, shown you where your strength lies, and how did you come to your decision?