You’ve heard the Scott McNealy story; this is the rest of my time at Sun Microsystems. I started working at Sun in 1995, directly after I left Netcom. For the first chunk of my Sun employment, I was a contractor through Taos Mountain Software. Taos Mountain was a significant consulting company in Silicon Valley at the time; when I found out how badly Netcom was underpaying me, they were the easy outlet to make a reasonable salary. There was an insane appetite for competent engineers at the time. Those were the days, huh? ...

This is not going to be a surprising revelation. I am writing it down because otherwise I will keep forgetting and being surprised when I remember it and so on and so forth. Sometimes I’m slow. The other day I was noodling on a Frontier Scum one-shot I want to run at Con of the North, because I want to start running more games at conventions and Frontier Scum looks really easy to run and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Westerns in the last year. (I will playtest it before I run it in public, no worries.) And I had a great concept about a bunch of scum who get caught between the law and a bunch of people who are even scummier than them, but it wasn’t solidifying. It was a few frames of film in my mind and a couple of NPCs and then… what? ...

The term of art at Amazon for events like Black Friday and Prime Day is “high velocity event.” My entire time at Amazon was a high intensity event. I learned a lot, I appreciate what I learned, I liked the people, I’m grateful to the company, and I never really wanted to go back. Here are some Amazon stories, which I can’t tell without talking about Disney a bit. Bear with me. ...

We can forgive the Criterion Channel for failing yet again to provide the much desired Boston Crime collection, since it’s Halloween season and that simply wouldn’t make sense. No, today I’m going to complain about their failure to provide a New England Horror collection. The Dunwich Horror, Jaws, The Witch, The Haunting, and I suppose one could make room for some adaptations of that Maine guy’s novels. I get it. Criterion is a New York company and New Yorkers are allergic to Boston. I won’t dwell on this further; let’s get to the October lineup. It’s scary. ...

Eh, I had to get to the jobs I didn’t really enjoy eventually. I wound up at Oracle because I badly wanted to leave Amazon. Never the best reason for taking a role, but we’ve all been there. Also, true story, Oracle rejected me back in 2002 because I didn’t have a college degree, so I felt a little bit like I was getting some of my own back. Not really rational but we’re all human. ...

The first time I saw Sugar live was at the University of Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City, on April 27th, 1993. That’s still one of the two most intense concerts I’ve ever seen, although I’m not a frequent concert-goer. I remember the music much more than I remember the band: huge sheets of guitar snarling out of the speakers and permeating my body. I’d never heard anything so loud. ...

S. and I took a little excursion to Lake Como this morning for Ingress purposes and wound up doing the mile and a half loop around the lake, just because it was pretty. Along the way we realized that this was a chunk of the St. Paul Grand Round (not to be confused with Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway, although they run parallel for a while). So because I am an OCD completist, I took this as an opportunity to start marking our progress along the full route. See the little tiny bit we’ve done around Lake Como? ...

I am pretty sure this is the specific story that’s gotten me hired more than once. It’s a good story about a project I’m really proud of and I’ve gotten pretty skilled at telling it. It’s also a great example of how rapidly careers could move in those days. I’m good at what I do but I also got lucky here and there and this story is about me being both competent and lucky. ...

I saw Buddy and Coyote vs. Acme within a couple of days of each other and I was struck by how much they occupy the same territory while still being wildly different movies. One is horror, and one’s a heartwarming comedy. Both are about the border between reality and children’s television; both are surrealist exercises. Will Forte and Cristin Milioti are the pivot points, the humans with a foot in both worlds. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of this, but I suppose the circumstances of Coyote vs. Acme’s release were the elephant in the discourse room. ...

I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on. My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense. ...