Category: General

I am working on my business plan, and part of it entails figuring out which payment processors I would like to use. I know that the question crops up on the Indie Gamer forums a lot, and so I searched through the archives.

You know how people look back at high school photos and laugh at everyone’s hair? “Man, I can’t believe we thought we looked cool back then.” That sort of thing?

Well, going back over your year-old posts on old forums is kind of like that. Or at least it is for me.

Check out this thread about creating a sacrificial title. David York asked if it made sense to create a simple, easy to make game to gain the experience of making a game and selling one. Since hindsight is 20/20, why not make use of it before you make your serious game?

Now check out my response. It was posted July of last year, and I have definitely learned a lot since then.

I agree, though. Start small and work your way up. Gain experience, and then you can start to tackle the bigger projects.

Wow. Sage advice. Where the heck did I get off giving it back then, though? I am certainly no guru today, and a year ago I didn’t even really have any experience to speak of. Maybe it seems like obvious advice, but there are other examples where I was talking about theory as if it was practice.

I am sure Indie Gamer and GameDev.net and the Association of Shareware Professionals Members newsgroup abound with similar advice by yours truly.

At one point I realized that I really shouldn’t talk like I knew what I was saying when I didn’t really know about the topic, but I soon discovered that prefacing everything I said with “Keep in mind that I’m not speaking from experience, but …” wasn’t any better. And at one point I started to wonder if the “Man, these forums are starting to get a high noise-to-information ratio” wasn’t directed at me. So I stopped posting as much as I did.

Which was good because I didn’t spend so much time on the forums and was able to direct my energies to more productive matters. I can’t get paid for being one of the top five posters on the board, and I definitely don’t have as much advice on the business-end of things as other people might to justify that many posts.

It was like finding an old email I had sent to root at the email server used by my college in my freshman year. I had asked how to setup a website on the server, and he wrote back explaining how to create the public_html directory and changing the permissions to allow everyone to view it. At the time I had no Unix or Gnu/Linux experience, and so I actually wrote back, “Thanks, but I think it needs a better user interface.” Reading that email four years later, after I’ve been using Gnu/Linux as my main OS and have a much better understanding of permissions and Unix in general, made me laugh.

Man, was my smiley funny-looking a year ago…

Now that I’m back, I find that I have a lot of reading to do! Lots of blog updates, lots of email, lots of regular mail, lots of magazine articles, and lots of game playing. Ok, so the last one isn’t strictly reading, but still, it must be done!

Oh, and Christmas shopping.

So, I’ve gotten spam on poker, nudity, mortgages, poker, medicine, poker, and poker. I’ve even gotten trojan spam, where the message looks perfectly legitimate and even points to a legitimate site, but also includes spam links. I guess it is designed to throw off blacklisting or spam filtering. I find it usually has to do with poker.

Today I find spam for…flowers.

Flowers? As if I am really going to see one of the tens of spam comments and think to myself, “Oh, yeah! Flowers! I should pick up a bunch of them on the way home from work!” Of course, someone out there is clicking and buying.

I really need to add anti-bot capabilities to my comments section again.

Over a year ago, I had asked on the Dexterity forums, now the Indie Gamer forums, about health insurance. I was planning on researching the topic, but getting feedback from people who actually deal with the issue would be valuable. What coverage should I expect to need? How much should I expect to pay? What type should I get? I got a number of responses, and someone suggested I go to eHealth Insurance. It’s a great site, and I found my current insurance through it.

Some of the comments were about not getting insurance at all. The thinking was that if I was young, fairly healthy, and almost never go to the doctor’s office, the cost of health insurance would be too much. Others argued that emergencies can cost a lot more, and having to pay a few thousand dollars is preferrable to paying $10,000.

I haven’t had to worry about medical expenses before, but shortly after I was approved for my current insurance plan, I started getting a pain under my jaw. I didn’t know if it was a lymph node or salivary gland, but I did what I always did: drink plenty of water and try to get a good night’s sleep. It didn’t get better, and by the third day the pain was on my right side as well.

I made an appointment with my doctor, went through some hassle to get my insurance ID number as I had not received my insurance cards yet, and discovered I had an infection of some sort involving my tonsils. The doctor prescribed some medicine, and I only had to pay $30 for the visit.

The drug store didn’t take so kindly to the lack of insurance cards and so I had to pay full price. A small bottle of generic brand medicine cost me almost $90. Ouch! It’s a one-time purchase, and so I don’t have to worry about it much afterwards, but I can’t begin to comprehend the costs for people who need regular refills on their prescriptions and don’t have insurance.

If you are contemplating the benefits of health insurance or think that it costs too much with little benefit, I would strongly urge you to reconsider. I’m paying about $65 per month. $780 per year might sound like a lot of money, and people with families can expect to pay a bit less than that amount per month, but it is definitely worth it. Best case scenario is I pay almost $800. Worst-case: $5,000. Still a lot of money, but it is definitely a lot better than having to pay the full cost of emergency rooms, surgery, or doctor visits. Even the healthy people can get into car accidents.

In January I started to keep track of the books that I read. I have been keeping a simple text file with the books I am currently reading and a list of books that I have finished reading. I even started to track the number of weeks that have gone by and also how many books I would have to read to keep on track for reading a book per week.

I am placing a few new links at the top of my blog. One will be the general explanation of my book tracking, and the other will be the current year’s list of books. Eventually the former will also act as my list of archives as it will link to former years.

I started reading more often last year, but it was only this year that I started to keep track of it. Previously I would read only if something very interesting came along, such as the Harry Potter books or The Lord of the Rings. The last time I read on my own regularly was probably grade school. In just one short year I know that I am much better for reading as often as I now do.