Also, I’ve updated my Professional Work page with links to my work on Saw II:  Flesh and Blood!  Head on over and check it out.

1.  Normal people think you’re crazy for doing either.

With video games, people think you’re crazy for wasting your time doing something meant for kids.  With knitting, people think you’re crazy for making something you could buy in a store.  Either way, you’re the crazy one for doing something you enjoy, instead of whatever other people are doing.

2.  They both sound like complete gibberish to people who don’t understand them.

This is a quote from one of my posts about Mass Effect:

The pathing is nice as well, which is something that is usually the bane of my existence in games with companion AI characters.  They stay out of my way and rarely trap me in a corner, and when they do I can order them to move.  The only problem is that my giant tank teammate has a tendency to bogart the cover when we’re all behind a big crate.

This is a completely different language from what most people use.  Do you think my mom would understand what that meant?  Would your mom?  (Maybe.  I don’t know your mom.)

This is a quote from the description of the sock pattern I wrote and published:

Knee high, with a flap heel and calf gussets that flow naturally out of the lace pattern, these socks were worked from the toe-up two at a time on a circular needle using Magic Loop. This pattern assumes knowledge of Magic Loop, short rows, the KFB increase and m1 increases, and basic lace.

Do you understand what that meant?

3.  They both sometimes require grinding.

You know what grinding is in a video game: doing the same thing over and over again to gain equipment or experience in order to progress.  You know what I had to do to knit this sweater?

One.  Single.  Stitch.  Over and over and over and over, to gain length on the sweater pieces so I could progress toward having a finished sweater.  If that’s not grinding, I’m not sure what is.

4.  They both have annoying fanboys.

If you think that the arguments between xBox fanboys and Sony fanboys are bad, trust me.  They’ve got nothing on the manmade fibers vs natural fibers debate.

5.  Despite the fanboys, it’s pretty awesome when a big group of them get together.

PAX is a video game and geek culture convention.  It’s a big celebration of what makes all of us dorks, and that brings us together.

In 2009, a couple of very awesome knitters named Tina Newton and Stephanie Pearl-McPhee created Sock Summit.  It was a three-day convention just about knitting socks.  There were 1800 registered attendees, which doesn’t sound like a lot…  But 30,000 people tried to register for it.  They crashed the registration servers.  I wasn’t able to attend, sadly, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and they’re back for 2011.

When people who have a shared interest are able to share it in person, it’s almost always a magical occasion.  I am psyched for PAX this year.

Hopefully this time I won’t catch Swine Flu.

Speaking of other forms of internet communication, let’s talk about email.  Specifically, about emails you send to try and get a job.  There are a few things we’ve seen at the office recently that seem like they should be obvious, but apparently need to be repeated.

1.  When sending an email, spell your name correctly in the subject line.  I felt bad for this guy–he did everything else pretty right, but obviously was at the point where he’d typed the same thing so many times it didn’t look like a real word anymore.  He had spelled his name one way in his resume and the body of the email, but it was spelled wrong in the subject.  Typing fatigue for sure.

2.  When sending an email, try to spell things correctly. People in the industry do often have notoriously bad spelling, but when you’re applying you should make it as easy as possible for the person reading your email to understand it.  When we have to puzzle out spellings of words it doesn’t endear you to us.

3.  Don’t send out mass-emails. Yes, you’re applying to a lot of places.  We understand that.  But for the love of corndogs, don’t leave fifty emails in the “to” line on your application.  We can see those. When the “to” field of the email is longer than the email itself, it’s unprofessional.  It also makes us laugh a lot.  Do yourself a favor.  Email all those companies separately, and try to tailor your cover letter to each company.  It will make you look much more professional and appealing.

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In completely different news, I wrote my very first knitting pattern and published it online!  It’s for socks.  For all four of you people who read this and like knitting, here is the pattern.

TwinkleTwinkleLittleSocks

If you do knit it, please let me know!  I’d be excited to see it.

Also, here is some eye candy of yarn I dyed myself.

Purple hand-dyed yarn.

It was a lot of fun to do!

Giant sweater for Chris.

Giant tall socks for my dad:

Fingerless gloves for me (remember that last post about it being cold in our apartment?  Yeah, still the case.):

A bag for my almost-mother-in-law:

And a hat and bolero set for me!

Also, I feel obligated to warn all of you.  I got this:

And this:

For Christmas.  I have to admit, this doesn’t exactly bode well for my free time…

Happy New Year, one and all!

On that note, here is some yarn I made!

YanYan approves this message.

One I am done with my somewhat massive amounts of holiday yarncrafting, I will be back to playing video games and posting about those.  Until then, you can probably expect more yarn.

At least it’s pretty yarn, eh?

Now that that is out of the way…

On a previous post, Robert asked:

So, I have a question pertaining to 3-D modeling.  For the purposes of my portfolio, I’m wondering how high-res my pieces should be?  I frequently find myself creating models that are shaped very well, but they have a rather large poly count. So, I guess the underlying question here is whether it is more impressive in a portfolio to see very high poly count models with good texture or to see lower poly count models with textures that just give the appearance of higher resolution?  (Keeping in mind that my painting/drawing skills are rather poor at present so the textures are a definite weakness for me right now)

This is a good question, and the answer is almost always, “It depends.”  As a general guideline, you should never put more geometry into a model than is absolutely necessary to create the shape you want.  If you’re making a cube, that cube only needs to be 6 polygons.  A cube that is 600 polygons is ridiculous, because you really only need 6 in order to make the cube look like a cube.  The more complex the object you’re creating, the more polygons you’ll probably need to make it look right.  If you have a set budget for polygons, use them where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.  People won’t care if a door is made up of six polygons, but they’ll notice if the doorknob is blocky and unrealistic.  Have a look at the wireframe on one of my meshes:

This is a fairly high-poly mesh, but I spent those polys where it would show.  If those curves were choppy and blocky, the mesh would just look bad.  Since I spent the polygons on those important parts, the blocky headboard and footboard can be very simple.

Generally, it’s more impressive to see a lower-poly model that looks good than a ridiculously high-poly model.  Anyone can throw extra polygons at a mesh to make it look smoother, but it’s much harder to serve modeling steak on a hamburger budget and it shows more skill.  Texturing is also really important–if you model really well but you can’t texture for poo, you’ll probably have a very hard time getting hired.  There really aren’t separate modeling and texturing positions in most companies–3-D artists do both, so good skills in both areas are pretty necessary for the job.

Thanks for the question!  I hope this was helpful.

Into this:

It’s about 22 yards of my very first handspun yarn, and I’m quite proud of my lumpy messed-up wool baby.  I’m finding spinning to be very relaxing, in a similar way to yoga.  You do some of the same movements over and over again, slowly and carefully, and just pay attention to what happens.  In yoga, what happens is you get some nice exercise and are hopefully a little closer to being able to touch your toes when you bend over.  In spinning, you end up with yarn!  I found it so enjoyable I felt the need to repeat the process with another pile of roving:

Mmm…   The colors.

PS:  If anyone has any questions they’d like to me answer about video games or whatever, please ask ‘em in the comments!  I’d like to make the Q&A a more regular part of the blog.

I honestly don’t really know what to post about today.  Other than the virus, I had a pretty great weekend.  I’m not annoyed about a particular facet of gaming at the moment, so there’s no motivation to complain there.  I could talk about the games I’m currently playing, but I feel like most of what I have to say about them is old news.  I could talk about my knitting, but most of what I currently have on the needles is gifts for the holidays and I don’t want to post pictures of gifts before they’re seen by the recipient.  I could talk about my cats.  I like talking about my cats.  A lot.  It’s kinda sad how much, honestly.

I put it to you, my readers.  (All three of you.)  What would you like me to expound upon on Wednesday?  Is there some aspect of game creation you’re interested in?  Should I talk about how awesome knitting is, and post pictures of some of the things I’m knitting that aren’t a secret?  Or shall I fill this blog with pictures of my cats?

Seriously, ask me a question and I’ll do my best to answer it in Wednesday’s post.

When this happens, hobbies are what will save your sanity.  I really recommend having a couple of hobbies outside of work that are as far removed from video games as possible.  If you make video games all day, and then come home and play video games all night, that’s a lot of time with a console or computer.  There’s nothing wrong with that if you enjoy it, but for me personally, sometimes the last thing I want to do after a day of playtesting is play another game, even one that isn’t broken.  There are also some serious health problems that can result from a sedentary lifestyle, as well as the repetitive stress injuries that come hand-in-hand with a lot of computer use.  (Ask me how I know.  Tennis elbow.  FROM MOUSING.)

Personally, the two hobbies outside of work that keep me sane are knitting and yoga.  Knitting because it’s a creative endeavor that at the same time requires none of the tools I use at work, and yoga because it is about as far from sitting in front of a screen as it is possible to be.

The things that I like about knitting are somewhat telling.  It’s creative and lets me use my art skills when it comes to designing a garment or settling on a color scheme.  It’s also something that I can control completely from start to finish.  Nothing randomly glitches and crashes when you’re knitting.  It’s impossible to have a corrupted save file with knitting.  It’s portable, so I can do it on the bus, at home, or at a tea shop.  I don’t have to play super-close attention to it, so I can do it while I’m watching TV or holding a conversation.  I don’t have to make a special time for knitting the way I have to for drawing.  I can pick up knitting and start right where I left off without wandering all over the map trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.  (Final Fantasy III on the DS, I’m looking at you.)  And when I’m done knitting something, I have a finished product that doesn’t need to be submitted to any companies or be approved by any publishers.  It’s mine, and I made it the way I wanted.

Yoga, on the other hand, requires me to actually pay attention to my body and nothing else for an hour.  It makes me move in hundreds of ways that I don’t at work.  There are poses and exercises that stretch the Perpetual Mouse Muscle Knot that lives in my right shoulder blade.  I do yoga because I know that what I do for a living can be extremely damaging to my body in a lot of ways, and yoga is a way to counteract that.  Also, it has brought me a lot closer to being able to touch my toes when I bend over, and that’s a serious accomplishment for someone with hamstrings like mine!

Whatever you do in the industry, remember to have a life outside of it.  It’s much healthier for everyone.