I’ve been thinking about income, and what I’m willing to charge for. I’m not willing to charge for consulting, for example, and have been thinking about why.
Continue reading “Contemplating what to ask money for”Indequus*
* just toying with words, indie equus, indiebio + equus … this post is about horsey games.
I’m doing this serious game thing, but I also have to confess my love of match 3, especially PlayRix‘s games. And merge games (Merge Dragons!) and 2048 games that are pretty, like NLabSoft’s Age of 2048. And clicker games, like Abyssrium Tap Tap Fish. I particularly like the low poly designs. I also love horses, and have played many of the horsey games but they get a bit annoying. I would like a horsey game that’s like an aquarium game, or a kitten game. You don’t expect fishes or kittens to do stuff, you can just watch and enjoy them. So I want to make my own horsey games, starting with a reimagining of PlayRix’s Wildscapes game, with horses.
This post is supposed to track my progress, and throw it out to the interwebs in case people can help. Things I think I need to master to get there:
- Graphics – background and moveable items
- Short animations on home screen
- Match 3 dynamics
- How to get an app into the Android store (I’m only interested in mobile, on Android.)
- Payment options? (I’m not bothered about payment, but if the effort to get the payment options in there is low, then why not)
- Is it possible to hack / reverse engineer a game like Wildscapes and then put one’s own graphics in? Would that be a bad thing?
- …
Water and the Metaverse
Or maybe, ‘the Metaverse and all that shit.’ Anyways, this post is about my plans for 2019:
- Augmented reality game, think Fortnite (actually more ‘Metaverse’) meets water research (Actually, waste management). Or, visualising big data for everyday people.
- Faecal fungi
- Dream Zandvlei
Winning the Argument or Solving the Problem
As a highly competitive industry in rapidly changing times and increasing ecological pressures, the engineering profession seem trapped in a pattern of conflict we can’t seem to break.
Continue reading “Winning the Argument or Solving the Problem”
Building a better engineering profession – step by step
This is a working post. Add your thoughts.
Continue reading “Building a better engineering profession – step by step”
When I said we need to talk … this was not what I meant.
Dear Manglin
You seem to share a consternation that seem also to be an increasing trend in society. Let’s call it populism.
Continue reading “When I said we need to talk … this was not what I meant.”
On stories, and being different
Nanette – by Hannah Gadsby. Selected bits from the transcript.
Mediation – Complicating the Water / Engineering Narratives
Some notes from the piece “Complicating the Narratives” by Amanda Ripley / Solutions Journalism Network about the current US divide.
Paraphrased: Conflict is important. The power of stories is to help people find a way through that conflict.
Continue reading “Mediation – Complicating the Water / Engineering Narratives”
Engineers: we need to talk.
Something happened today which made me think about how we deal with ‘respect’, and the ‘old guard’ and ‘engineers’. I’m still processing what happened and many of the people I am discussing this with requests confidentiality, so maybe I’ll update this later once we agree on it all and have their permission. It did remind me of a few things, most notably a workshop on complexity we had in March 2018.
Sometimes when people ask me why Future Water exists, before I go into the transdisciplinary blah blah company line, I say that we’re trying to teach engineers to talk to other people. It started as a joke, because it was launched by a team who consisted mostly of engineers, and is currently hosted in the Engineering Faculty, but I am more and more convinced that is what our true purpose is.
Peopling rather than experting
I’ve just given another paid workshop, to an audience I at first felt like I have no rapport with – they’re public administrators. My slides were technical, an attempt from my side to show that this is serious, that I did my homework – a common academic / engineer fault, I suppose. But I spoke personally. I’ve slowly decided personal and authentic is my brand, and to hell with it. Shit’s my thing, deal with it. And they loved it. I don’t know if they’re convinced, and frankly, I don’t care. They listened and that is the first step. More on this a bit later. Continue reading “Peopling rather than experting”