Let's solve some puzzles!

Edit: Google Doc invites have been sent out. Give me a shout if you want to join!

Anyone want to try to solve some of the Google Interview Puzzles?

I think this could be a fun collaborative thing if a bunch of us got together and used some sort of collaboration service (Google Docs? Office Online? Wave?) to take these on. I'm particularly intrigued by:

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

I tortured Syed with this one:

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

You're the captain of a pirate ship, and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?

 Sound fun? Give me a shout if you want to play with some questions. I'll set up a collab doc and invite in some people.

Allow me to re-introduce myself

For a little while there, I was thinking about dropping out.

It was a symptom, and now I've finally figured out the root cause.

It came on suddenly. Namely, when I woke up last week and realized that I had a ton of friends going into the social games business.

And I think it's a sign that we really will have an economic recovery (at least a small one, for now) when everybody who is employed yells "My company is hiring!" on Facebook.

That scared me. I have 8 months to go until graduation. I discovered at GDC Austin that the companies I'm interested in aren't themselves interested in talking to someone that far in advance. The games business moves fast, and the social games business moves even faster. "Five months is forever," said an industry veteran who just made the transition from core to social gaming. Another one (from a major publisher) said to my face, "We need product managers right now, and we're starting them at $75,000. You'd be a great match." That *awesome* job that's open now? Won't be next June, nor may any of the jobs like it.

I took this concern to several of my professors. Without missing a beat, they pushed right back. "Take leave," they said.

I'm not dumb: this is tantamount to dropping out. Who abandons their dream job to overpay for the privilege to walk the stage? I could walk away from the extra $15,000 in debt right now and start working my way through the gaming world I so clearly belong in. And this whole get a job / get your foot in the door thing is why you enter a professional grad school. So why do the last third of school if the Prime Directive has already been satisfied?

There are plenty of reasons not to go this route. Mainly, job security in the games business is nonexistent, so I could easily end up unemployed, degree-less and in debt in a matter of months. What's more, life in San Diego is really rather good. Why the rush to run away from here?

The symptom manifested itself as the temptation to drop out and get going. What actually happened is that I figured out what I want to do.

I didn't have the answer to that basic question after high school, or college, or my time in Japan. Now I have that answer, and for a while, finishing grad school became just an expensive obstacle on the way to that objective. I didn't give grad school its due credit for helping me get the skills and internship time I needed to figure that out. 

I also forgot the biggest lesson my mom taught me: why be excited about work? We'll all be doing a hell of a lot of it in the future. 

So in the end, I've calmed back down, stayed enrolled for the winter quarter, and made sure to attend my last surfing class this weekend. In the meantime, it's nice to know who I am, and it won't be long before I'm always introducing myself like this:

"Hi. I'm Blake, and I make video games."

They told me it was something else

My mother has never entirely understood roleplaying. I don't intend to belabor the point, but when I was a young man it was the position of our church that Dungeons & Dragons held within it the clustered seeds of apostasy. She was so bewildered by what she had seen during Of Dice and Men [a stage play about D&D] that she made it a point to attend our D&D Live panel, where her son and his friends played this mysterious game on stage. The devil did show up, true, and we did go to hell, just as the clergy had suggested we might. Except in the actual version of events, as has happened so many times, we stood against the King of Lies at the very gates of his damned realm and emerged triumphant.

My mother came up to me after the panel was over, saying, "I'm sorry, Jerry. I'm sorry."  She wiped the corner of her left eye with her thumb.  "They told me it was something else."

-Jerry Holkins, Penny Arcade

If there were a way to dedicate a significant chunk of my life to clearing up such misunderstandings on such a deeply personal level, I'd certainly do it.

Go read this website

Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits

It's true. I worked as one. It's a crappy job.

Also, it's very convenient to simply read their aggregation of actual journalism done, the not shit journalism tag. Interesting articles are highlighted and idiots are called out. This is what games blogging is supposed to be.

No wonder everyone's making Facebook games. You can rely on viral effects to spread games instead of insidious marketing types and the hordes of barely-educated, blog-publishing automatons they command.

An old(er) man's taste in music

I noticed recently that my current listening habits are barely recognizable given what I listened to in high school.

Granted, that shouldn't be that much of a shock, but what surprised me is how little moved I am now by songs - some objectively good ones, even - that seemed to define big parts of my life at the time.

Take Incubus, for example. I had Morning View on repeat for at least an entire year of high school - and now it's been several years since I last heard it. The last album or two haven't been worth more than one listen. 

Jimmy Eat World is a similar case. They were the soundtrack to my college life. Aside from a brief love affair with Chase This Light during the rock-bottom of my time in Japan, I haven't heard much out of them lately either (though that will likely change with a new album around the corner).

The same thing could be said for John Mayer, I suppose. I was a huge, huge fan in late high school and early college. Now, his live DVD following his third album appeared from Netflix, and after staring at the envelope for a week I sent it back without watching. Just not interested anymore. I don't think he's capable of moving me anymore. I couldn't watch that DVD, dated one or two years ago, and get past the subsequent crappy album or his impending collapse as a tabloid fodder kind of celebrity.

Looking back, I think those correlated much better with more topsy-turvy times. High school exists only to stress you out, and college just comes with identity crises and other such inconsistencies out of the box. The raw edge of the first two bands and Mayer's self-aware, moment-in-time mellowness were a good fit for those days.

Can I be moved anymore? Life is about as comfortable as it could be lately. I've spent the last couple of years enjoying pretty much everything. There's no danger, no topsy-turvi-ness, and stress is short-lived. 

I went to concerts for all three of those artists when I was younger. Would I still go to another concert of theirs tomorrow? Hard to say.

In fairness, there are some things I've listened to ever since high school. Basement Jaxx seem to get better and better, for one. Daft Punk are established makers of classics by now. BT's latest rekindled something that had been neglected for years. And the hip-hop habit I was introduced to in mid-college is still going strong. 

It makes me wonder how long I'll listen to what's on heavy rotation now. It's been a great four years of Nujabes, but since he's passed away he won't have any new works coming.   iTunes tells me I'm really into Specifics and The Sushi Club - been listening for 1 and 4 years, respectively, and I have no idea when either of those guys will crank out anything new either.

Is it a sign that I need a new adventure? Another stress test in a foreign land? I can't kick my feet up forever, you know. Maybe Jimmy Eat World needs me back - or, more accurately, maybe I need them back and I don't even know it.