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For Precarious.

A friend of mine died today.

Her name was Saoirse Farley, but to me, she will always be Precarious. I met her by that name online, many years ago, when I was running the BioShock 2 ARG. From the beginning, when I only knew her as text on a message board, I could feel her fire – her burning desire to not just live life to the fullest but to devour the world and savor every single moment of it. She was passionate about what she did: in this case, it was the BioShock community. I actually truly believe she is the number one fan of the game in the entire world.

Bad days in the gaming industry

I run the community department in the gaming industry and I am having a Bad Day.

But not in the way that you think.

This blog entry is not about tirades, mental break downs, or lapses in judgment. There’s a lot of that in our industry, and people who work in my field are particularly notable examples, but that’s not the kind of Bad Day I’m talking about.

I’m personally having a difficult time in life right now and it’s making me realize how much more difficult that makes the outward facing component of my job.

The Johari Personality Experiment

The other day a good friend of mine posted her Johari Window on Facebook. This model, created in the 1950s, was designed to map personality awareness. The subject set up the experiment by selecting 6 words out of a preset grouping of 55 total words. From there, the subject saved those traits and sent the same set of words out to friends and colleagues to help complete the Window.

The results of the experiment break down into 4 categories: Arena (the traits the subject believes of herself and her friends agree about), Façade (traits the subject believes about herself yet are not known to her friends), Blind Spot (traits others believe about the subject, yet the subject does not see), and Unknown (traits no one associates with the subject.)

Run For Your Lives: A Tale of Escaping Zombies (and then becoming one)

If you were to ask me, “Elizabeth, do you like zombies?” my answer would be firmly and solidly “fuck, no.” I’m phobic of blood. I am prone to panic. I hate horror films. I still hide behind my hands during parts of 28 Days Later. Don’t even get me started with Dawn of the Dead: never finished it.

Knowing this, you might follow up by asking, “then why in hell do you spend so much time doing stuff that has to do with zombies?”

Know thy enemy, my friend. (Also, it’s helpful training. You see, my closest circle of friends apparently have a location where they will go if there ever is a zombie apocalypse. They also all have given each other helpful zombie killing weapons. I do not yet have a weapon nor do I know the location of said safehouse. I hope, with these efforts, I shall someday earn my place in their apocalypse plan.)



This brings me to today’s zombie topic: Run For Your Lives, a 5K obstacle course (complete with zombies.) About two years ago, I found out about RFYL online. It was a pretty obscure event back then with very few locations, but I was immediately excited about the challenge. I’d just gotten into running (I was going to write “hardcore running” but since I max out at 5 miles, I know I’m not hardcore. I mean “hardcore” as in “I was running 5ish times a week and that made me feel like a badass.”) I vowed to participate in RFYL as soon as it came to an area near me.

Social media: A grammarian's personal circle of hell

If you are a writer, a reader, or someone who cares at all about the English language, social media probably annoys the shit out of you on a daily basis. The internet is rife with it's/its, they're/their/there, and other grammatical errors that people really should know better than to make.

While my personal pet peeve revolves around the proper use of "less" and "fewer", today we're going to talk about punctuation (and the importance of it.)

Enter our champion: the Badger Football twitter feed.

How to Win at the Game of Twitter or: Making Your Numbers Bigger and How That Shouldn't Be What We're Focused On

Today, I want to talk about humans’ fascination with making their numbers bigger. As a gamer, I think I run with a crowd who are more obsessed with this notion than the general population but the psychological root of the issue is the same for everyone: we like getting more. We want to be bigger and better. We see and seek out competition in the most inane places and that single-minded focus quite often is detrimental to achieving a much more worthwhile and valuable goal.

For today’s blog post, I’m specifically talking about Twitter and how so many accounts lose sight of creating quality content for their Followers because all they are about is getting more.

Note on my new Nike Free 5s.

First off: I got those shoes on November 28th. I'm writing that so when I want to know when the hell to replace them, I have this record.

Second: Don't get a dumbass like me and think "the more minimalistic the shoe, the more badass I am!" I have been running in Nike Free 3s for the last 300 or so miles and it has actively impeded my progress. Things got so bad my calves were seizing up and I could barely run so I bought some 5s and... well. I ran 4 miles yesterday without any real issue. That is more than I've ever been able to run without any break whatsoever in my life.

So, yeah. Cushioning. It helps sometimes.

An entreaty to those who work in social media

Hey, people who work in social media? I have a bone to pick with you.

We all know that Twitter and Facebook are Important Marketing Tools. Like it or not, social media and interactive marketing (and advertising) is effective and on the rise. For this, I’m grateful: my job security is all but a foregone conclusion. Hell, when the Israeli Defense Force has its own verified Twitter account you kind of know that as a person who makes a living in community and social media you have a pretty flexible future work-wise.

A happy follow up

Last night I fired up XCOM: Enemy Unknown and lost myself in it for over an hour and a half (streaming - alas, I killed two of my viewers. SORRY GUYS.) After I ended, I got a friendly message from an XCOMer who had... yes, you are guessing correctly... watched the credits.

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: I'm in them as the title that I had during the time I worked on the game.

Boot camp commences

Ever since switching jobs (and losing my amazing personal trainer up in Novato) I have been slacking on the "fully body workout" front, so as of yesterday, Mike and I are enrolled in boot camp in Golden Gate Park.