The other day I had one of those irritating experiences where some other entity is credited it with an idea of my own or that of my friends. Public credit for one's ideas isn't a terribly big deal I suppose, but the more mis-crediting that goes on in print and on the web sort of makes me look like a liar on my increasingly feeble-looking CV. 

Some ideas I've had are very silly and therefore don't require me to claim them because they wouldn't in the the least help me to find work. But for edification and historical accuracy I will start documenting them here.

The Seduction of the Saucy Scrabble Player

My friend - let us call him Mr X - and I went away to the country for New Years' weekend with a group of friends and friends of friends. In a rented house we drank, ate and played a good deal of the Scrabble (for people under 25, Scrabble is the board game that Facebook's “Scrabulous” is based on). 

One young woman was particularly successful at the Scrabble board, having been brought up in a keen Scrabble-playing family where two-letter words had been memorised as readily as hot dinners consumed.
On the last night of the holiday Mr X accidentally found himself having sex with this woman after downing a bottle of New Year's champagne. The next day we all went back to our homes in Melbourne but my friend was smitten by this new female acquaintance and he decided that he'd have to contrive some cunning way to get to see her again. Of course, loyal friend that I am, I was only too happy to apply myself to the task. 

In these situations I take my inspiration from Jeeves, the large-brained gentleman's gentleman and logistical genius, the creation for which the comic writer P. G. Wodehouse was best known. Jeeves could invariably be relied upon to devise clever strategies by which his master might negotiate delicate personal matters.

Jeeves' strategies were based on a study of what he called “the psychology of the individual”. In my case the individual in question – let us call her “Angelica” - was an intelligent young woman with an undeniable penchant for Scrabble.

Based on this scant knowledge I decided upon the following plan of action, which my friend, Mr X, enacted:

Through a mutual friend, my friend obtained Angelica's postal address. Then every day for a period of eight days he sent her an anonymous postcard. Each postcard was cream-coloured and square-shaped with rounded corners. On the reverse side a stamp was affixed and nothing was written there except the young lady's name and address. The front of each card bore a large upper-case letter in the centre, and a smaller numeral in the bottom right-hand corner.

They were posted in this order in these alpha-numeric combinations:

L2, A3, I2, C6, N4, E1, A9, G8

The eighth postcard to arrive on the eighth day was the exception to the rest, bearing a short message on the reverse side where one is normally supposed to write nonsense such as “wish you were here” and the like. Mr X. simply wrote “call me”.

And on the ninth day she worked it out and called him.

We never let on that it wasn't Mr X's idea.

I am back in Melbourne on Wednesday, a city in which I will be embarking on a grand experiment. The experiment is motivated by my sudden need for money - money that I need to buy my way into French residency.

So what is this experiment? It is this: I am finally going to do the unthinkable, and attempt to find work outside of the game industry.

I've never entertained the the notion before, because I have never needed to. But lack of funds is standing in between me and French residency and I'm damned if I'm going to be shut out of France for much longer.

My decision recalls to mind all those things friends and colleagues have tried to impress upon me over the years. Quite inadvertantly I am now taking their advice:

"If you want to be designing the kind of games you want to make, you have to leave the industry. Yeah, you could stick around to get more experience, but is that going to bring you any closer to your goals? No, it's not."

"The Australian game industry is no place for a woman. The only women who have gotten ahead are the ones who have left the industry or left the country. What makes you think you're any different? Leave!"

"I love my new job. The work is kind of interesting, but not too hard. I work 9 to 5. And the pay is good. Very good, actually."

"People think you're weird - a bit of a curiosity - and they don't take you seriously. In management meetings they brand you a trouble-maker. You have an image problem, and it's not doing you any favours."

"You get paid *how much*? Are you kidding me? So you've been doing this for ten years, right? And when do you expect to earn a decent wage - after another ten years?"

"Do you want me to see if I can get you a job on our IT help desk?"

I am in Bangkok and now have internet access that occasionally works.

So I have just now created a Facebook group called "I consume internet porn and I have the balls to admit it". Please consider joining it here:

Here is the group's declaration:

 NEWS FLASH: People have sex. And not just to make babies. If parents want to try to shield their children from that fact of life for as long as humanly possible that's their business. But it's not mine.
Yep, there are many reasons why the Australian government's plan to filter the internet is patently stupid:

* It will make internet speeds in Australia slower than they currently are. (Is that even possible? Apparently so.)

* It will make Australia -- a country that already boasts arguably the most censorious media classification regime of any country in the Western world -- an object of derision within the international community.

* Like most filtering systems before it designed to "protect children from inappropriate content" it will likely block culturally and socially worthy "appropriate" content by mistake, including the work of media artists, important information about sexual health, and so on.

* We could go on...

Luckily, plenty of people will be ready to come out and champion any of this "appropriate" content caught in the crossfire. 

Safely vague statements will be made in defense of the principle of free speech. 

Cultural pundits will say lofty, clever things about the right of artists and other creators of high culture to unfettered creative expression (being careful to implicitly distinguish their "Art" from that nasty low-brow commercial porn). 

And many of these people, operating within an political atmosphere charged with fear and hysteria around this issue, will qualify their arguments by stating that "of course children should be better protected from pornography, but this system isn't the solution".

Well OK, whatever.

But let's hear from the millions of Australian residents who views or has ever viewed "inappropiate" content (not child porn, but sexually explicit material) and think that's fine. 

Some of us are under 18 years of age (shock! horror!) and that's also fine, because the right of young people to explore the world around them should be respected too. 

The Australian state, acting through the Office of Film and Literature Classification who's decisions are enforced by the Australian Federal Police, has done its best to quietly remove sex from magazines, cinemas, videogames, bookstores... ostensibly in an effort to protect Australian children - not from poverty, not from disease, not from violence - but from media.

Enough with the children already. Now, won't somebody *please* think of the porn?

I have invited some friends to the group and will be interested to see who's willing to lay their balls on the table, as it were.

The Thai government has been dissolved.  That's a good thing for me personally because it means that things have calmed down to the extent that the airports here are operational again, and I'll be able to leave Thailand before Christmas.

So on that positive note I thought I'd post a few photos I've taken recently that feature unfortunate signage.

First up, here is the charity box I encountered at Hanoi airport. It was soliciting money to help pay for the care of "especially difficult children", and I had to wonder what they'd spend my money on. I'm guessing things like handcuffs, Ritalin and flogging posts.

In Hoi An I was encouraged to spend my hard-earned on a hat that identified me as a tourist. 

In restaurants in the south of Thailand customers often pay according to the size or weight of the fish they choose. At Bernie's, however, it's the customers that get sized up:

An enterprisng crab did this.

This dog is obviously german, sent out by his master to reserve the best spot.

The view from my primitive "office".

So there are some photos.
 
And here's what I have to say about game sequels:
 
I often get my hands on a sequel to a beloved game thinking "I have mastered the core mechanic of game X. I'm in the mood for curling up with a warm X-like experience - something familiar, something I don't have to strain my brain over because I know and understand the paradigm that is X." So I buy X.2, start playing, and what do you know - I'm stuck in the first level. I try that first level for an hour or so, wondering what the hell has turned me from an X master into a developmentally disabled X n00b.
 
Notable examples that come to mind are Knights of the Old Republic 2 (stuck in the tutorial!) Thief 3 (hammered by the AI in the first level!) and a few days ago Lost in Blue 2 (my characters starve to death on the first day because I can't work out where the stove is!). Like I said, in previous incarnations of these franchises it was fairly smooth sailing - right from the beginning.
 
I assume this is because sequels are frequently outsourced to another team or rushed out quickly to cash in on the popularity of the first game(s). Less time was spent polishing the difficulty curve. 
 
Alternatively, I'm just disastrously worse at everything. 

Speaking of getting disastrously worse: the Australian dollar. Its continuing fall in value means that unless I earn bucketloads of money while I'm back in Australia my ability to convince the French embassy to give me a long stay visa is fatally diminished. So how am I to earn bucketloads of money? Ideas are most welcome.

I am on an island in the south of Thailand called Koh Pipe. The internet is expensive. The food is expensive. The fish are colourful. And tasty.

Being on a deserted(ish) tropical island I thought it appropriate that I get out my DS and play Lost in Blue 2 (Lost in Blue was set on an island just like this). But I gave up when I got stuck near the start.

This experience confirms my theory about game sequels. (I'll explain my theory when the internet is cheaper.)

So mostly I'm just working. I wish there were some kind of desk in my bamboo hut.

We're all kind of wondering if civil war will break out here. Apparently the government has fled Bangkok to the northern city of Chiang Mai. Most of the airports in Thailand have been blockaded by the PAD (the pro-Monarchist People's Alliance for Democracy) and people are having trouble getting out. Getting a bus or a train is nigh on impossible. Damn. Not sure if I want to be stuck on this island forever. That'd be too much like my experience getting stuck in Lost in Blue 2.

Today I had to wade through (pleasantly lukewarm but suspiciously opaque) water to get to my usual café. The bank of the river have overflowed and half the town is flooded.

In these trying circumstances the locals remain enterprising. Instead of being hassled by people wanting to sell me a ride on the back of their cyclos or motorbikes ("you want motorbike ride?") I was sidled up to by people in row boats ("you want boat ride?").




Hoi An is a very small town. One can walk (or wade) anywhere in less than fifteen minutes. And yet hurtling around everywhere are those blasted motorbikes - the Vespass of Death that I mentioned when I was in Hanoi.
This is because, as I was surprised to learn when I had dinner with some people from an NGO that runs an orphanage here, walking is seen as a low class thing to do.
"Think about it: have you ever seen a local walking on the street? They'll take a motorbike, even if it's only a few metres away. It's a status things. Only poor people walk, because they have to."

No wonder people think us Westerners are strange for wanting to walk intead of riding a motorbike for 100m back to our hotels, seeing as we can afford to ride.



When I was in Thailand several years ago my friend and I hitched a ride with some locals to a national park. We spent half a day talking with them in their car. When they asked us what we did for a living they were taken aback by our answers (me: a post-grad music student; my friend: a medical student).

"We don't mean to cause you any offence, it's just that we are very surprised because you are not dressed well enough to look like people with a university education."

Even on holiday, casual clothes like shorts, t-shirts and sandals - though comfortable and convenient - are only for "low class" people. Heaven forbid that "high class" people like us be mistaken for "low class" people! Our local friends, of course, were dressed in semi-formal western style suit jackets, despite being on holiday in the scorching heat like us. We found their outfits as strange as they found ours.

It's interesting how these ideas about what signals status is almost completely opposed to way the signs of privilege and affluence for my generation are defined in my own culture:

Cycling and walking walking... (you can afford to live close by to where you work and play)

Wearing casual clothes... (you're not just any old wage slave who's forced to dress formally, or perhaps because you don't need to work at all).

Eating brown rice... (you're educated about nutrition and you have the extra time to cook it)