there is an incipient weight, almost a suffocation which accompanies his condition. tender as he may bludgeon it, there still is a rain of soft abhorrent little lives falling under his last hope of a sober re-acclimation into the society that once spurned him. without himself lay chicago, the old familiar refrain of two sawblades across his venerable brows.

like a summer moon as seen by gypsies without any chance. durgin. overthrow communism, would you? not without talking. and the b3 organ enters unapologetically. into a tie i tithe, boy. ball liberal golf is not auto increment.

i will average at least one comment on art or poetry every day for the next month.

habits must be labored at first, but then they sometimes grow. we'll see how this one does.

-PL-

by duke and louis is playing now. such a beautiful song.

i'm tired of coming back to this page every week or two and seeing the same negativity.

what have i been doing? a year ago, i shaved my head. i graduated from the etc. i started a company. kdka recently was kind enough to do a segment on us. i love building things and i'm trying to use my powers for good. in a week or two i'll post a link to the latest version of an art toy i'm working on.

work consumes much of life and doesn't pay real well. but sink or swim, i'm doing it on my own terms and learning a lot.

i'd like to post some things soon, mostly older pieces that were never shared. more than that, i'd like to be back in the habit of creating. i got dem ol' kozmic blues again mama.

as i break my silence, you might expect some more measured tones. i used to share a fair amount of detail, but now i find i prefer to distance my public self from my private self.

-PL-

everything must go!!!

Actually, I'm just stuck. (Don't know why I can't get an XMLSocket to connect to a server I wrote.) For the last 2 months or so, I've been teaching myself more Flash, and now, actionscript. Here's what I'm working on. It's going to be one of a pair of toys my team and I are building for ArtThread. The idea is to create toys online to help make cancer treatment suck less for the people who are touched by it. We're building a comic maker because it will hopefully be a way for kids who don't consider themselves artistic to make awesome little stories or compositions, as well as a chance for family members and other loved ones to send little greeting-card-type messages to kids undergoing treatment.

(If you click the link above, realize that you're looking at a prototype. The idea is "build it, make it work, then make it pretty.") Actually, if anyone's interested in seeing how I develop games, I could do a little writeup and link to a number of prototypes and tech tests i built along the way.

FLASH IS THE WORST PIECE OF SOFTWARE I HAVE EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF WORKING WITH. Want to see an engineer get mad? Lie to him in the documentation he relies on to do his job. Build a framework which fails in completely unpredictable ways, then make him sift through the rubble. Build an entirely new language to do things that dozens of previously established languages have been doing for decades.

The designers of Flash are to programming what Dick Cheney is to politics.

I've been on this topic before, so I'll shut up.

I'm pretty excited to be back on "team hobo," though. Our last project (a kiosk to entertain kids stuck in the ER waiting room at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh) has been running like a champ, handling about 1.5 million touches to the screen since we installed in late June. We're spending this semester trying to become incorporated, and hopefully to make more of these kiosks.

Artwise, I'm not idle. Last semester, I was going to figure drawing on campus on Sunday nights pretty regularly. Someday, I'll scan in the backlog of various drawings I have from that and other things, and post. I'm also back to actively recording music I've written. The goal is 1 song/month. I missed it for January, but might squeak it in for this month.

Oh, and I'm still playing (and helping develop) Skyrates, a sporadic game made by some of my friends here at school. Check it out, it's designed for busy people to play for a few minutes at a time. If you do, say hi on the radio. I'm "phil."

-PL-

so yeah, for the last few months I'd occasionally check some messages here, look at a deviation or two... when caught peering through the blinds, i'd pull my fingers back--clink!--and let them snap closed.

It's hard to say what I'm still doing on DA. Although I love my small cadre of friends, part of me knows that with my schedule I can't possibly dream of keeping up contact as I should, so i lurk and dream of winning the lottery or something. Reveling in the warmth and happiness of neglected projects.

It's ironic. This site was absolutely instrumental in awakening and legitimizing the artistic side of myself that i'd been supressing all my life. It made me seek out, work towards, and finally enroll in the ETC so that I could give that other half some training, some oxygen as it were.

It's been fantastic.

So much more (and less) than I ever expected has come out of it. I've nestled into a crowd of brilliant, determined creators and pinged, then ponged, ideas with them. I've worked at least as hard as I ever have in my life, and been master of my own ship. I've made things that were awful and things that are joyful and good.

But my faults still haunt me. One of the prime, A-1 reasons I'm back in school at all is that I must love what I do or I am doomed to fail at it. That's true to an extent for most people, but I feel like for me the problem is magnified--drastically--by my insta-distractability. And it saddens me deeply to learn that daggone it, that's just who I am. I'm working right now doing sound design and programming at Schell Games which by all accounts is about 98% of my perfect job. And I go home most nights at 2am not because of some noble desire to overachieve but my spaceout time, which cuts like a yawning chasm through my day. If i could close that gap, i could be climbing now, or watching the Steelers, ideally with some pretty young woman.

But enough pessimism.

This spring, one of my small-but-not-small-enough jobs was to make a website (to get hired now.) Here it is. There are photos on there that aren't uploaded here, but that's about it. I like the design though. Oh, and there are samples of the things I built this fall. Actually, when I get a chance I need to redo that site. Poetry doesn't help much in job applications for my field, and the "bio" really doesn't say anything about me.

The site which needs attention much more desperately is the spring's. It's for one of the best things I've ever helped make: a kiosk of simple games that sits in the ER waiting room at Children's Hospital here in Pittsburgh. From January-June I slaved over that thing, the lone programmer on the team, orchestrating the little details which take a project from "passable" to "proud." At least once a week, on average, I crashed in the lounge after working--really, truly, working--until the sun came up. It installed on June 22, and has logged over a half-million touches and more than 90% uptime, which I'm pleased with since there's basically no one watching over it. We're presenting at a conference at the end of this month, and thinking about starting a company. It's a good product.

One more year of school and I'll have this master's. I'm staying with Schell Games through December, and then I don't know: possibly another student project, possibly another "co-op" where I basically work on taking the kiosk to market. I could also conceivably work on something else.

life is luscious but at times exhausting and overwhelming. So i'm not on DA much, nor do i expect to be. but i still know that this is (in some ways) where it all started. i remember.

-PL-

Oh, and i played in pittsburgh's summer ultimate league on an awesome team. it was so much fun. i lost weight and we won the whole shebang, only losing once all season.

and i chipped a tooth in May by taking a faceful of SUV during my bike ride home one night. I'm finally getting it fixed tuesday. so i've been slightly uglified all summer... whatever.