It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: money (Page 5 of 5)

Day 89: the jug is up

May 11, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The past few days, I’ve been juggling more.  At work, I’ll have to build our game periodically throughout the day and it takes a good 5-10 minutes to do so.  With the abundance of jugglers in the design pit, it’s a good place to practice, trade some tips, and wait for our builds.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we started passing soon.

It’s like returning to an old friend that you’ve missed.  Realizing, once again, that a solid Mills Mess pattern is so satisfying and comfortable that you never want to stop.

I noticed today that two of my juggling balls were starting to show serious wear and tear.  The outside of one side of the two beanbags had started to crack and I’m sure that continued use would eventually result in an unpleasant explosion of whatever magical bean is inside.

Thus, for the first time in a long while, I looked up juggling supplies.  I looked at getting three more beanbags, to replace and supplement my current collection.  Each individual beanbag costs a little under $10, which is arguably a lot for a small beanbag, but about average for a decent juggling beanbag.  Slightly smaller ones are slightly cheaper and there’s a large variation on ball styles and materials.  I like beanbags because they don’t bounce or roll, and I like the solid feeling they have when they land in your hand.

Regardless, I had a sudden moment of adultness, when I realized that spending $30 on replacement beanbags was nothing nowadays.  Sure, it’s still a bit of a luxury to spend any money on juggling supplies, but it wasn’t extravagant.

Compare that to when I first bought (or rather, was bought) the original 5 juggling beanbags that currently sit near my computer at work.  I was still just a kid – well, maybe a teenager – but those five beanbags felt like a kingly present.  It’s a sense of financial and gift-giving wonder that’s harder to realize once you start managing your own finances.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point.  Maybe I wish I was still naive and felt wonder and awe at spending $10 on a fancy beanbag to throw in the air.  Maybe I’m happy that I know that I can spend $30 on juggling supplies without worrying about becoming insolvent.  Maybe more people should juggle.

I’ll be in New York later this month for a friend’s wedding and it just so happens that the Dube Juggling shop is located in downtown New York.  I just may pay them a visit.  I just may.

Day 80: this is bad news for pay realms

May 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

281 I first learned about Free Realms from this Penny Arcade webcomic, which kind of describes my first giddy reaction to it as well.  I opened an account as a bit of a joke, though – a chance to quickly look at a free-to-play kid-targeted MMO and see how they generate interest and revenue in such a model.

Then, this morning, I played Free Realms for over two hours.  Why?  How did it engage me for so long?  Why do I still have a desire to get online and take my Level 4 Chef traipsing through Sanctuary, looking for new recipes?

First off, Free Realms is not a quickly thrown together product.  The production values are quite high, the graphics are good, and the art direction is clear.  The game is supposed to look safe and kid-friendly, but the environments are fleshed out and the characters look about as good as most MMOs.

Additionally, there’s a lot of content before you even have to hand over a cent.  The world of Free Realms is large enough, and if the team supports the game as time goes on, there’s no reason that the world can’t get bigger in the upcoming year.

Free Realms feels like a rather odd cross between World of Warcraft and Cooking Mama, a weird combination of the core mechanics of a hardcore MMO with the casual components of minigame collections.

Is it something that I would ever pay for?  Unlikely.  I can’t imagine parting with actual money in order to get access to more jobs, or in order to purchase a virtual cat for my character.  But I can certainly see myself playing Free Realms more over the next few weeks.

And just like Puzzle Pirates, I can certainly imagine players finding a community, fostering friendships, and being weaker in their inhibitions.  After all, $5 a month is a small price to pay (considering what other MMOs charge) in order to fully experience the game that the developers designed.

In the meantime, if you jump onto Server 1 on Free Realms, keep your eye out for Zoe Frigidbandit.

Day 30: financial crisis

March 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I just watched last night’s Daily Show episode, where Jon Stewart takes it pretty badly to Jim Cramer (who was to me, until very recently, just that crazy guy on that one CNBC show).  But the entire episode felt like relief – like Jon Stewart was venting for all of us who don’t understand why we as taxpayers are being stuck with these huge bills for a crisis that we didn’t create.

Or did we?  We recently took out what I consider to be a very reasonable mortgage and Wells Fargo (our bank and mortgage lender) did a pretty exhaustive check of our financial standing.

But, if several years ago, a bank had come to us and told us we could get into a house we really liked with a bad loan, would we have known it was a bad loan?  I’m sure there are people who game the system, but I’d suspect that the majority of average Americans wouldn’t understand that a particular mortgage is unrealistic until it’s too late.

Regardless, the damage is done, and something has to happen.  The American banking system is too important to fail so either the government has to pump a lot of money into the system to keep them afloat or house prices will have to make a dramatic and sudden rebound.  Or the government will keep stuffing smaller amounts of money into the system until housing prices rebound.  Assuming they ever reach the levels before the crisis within a reasonable amount of time, which is not a small assumption.

I’ll stop here, because I don’t want to seem like an expert on what’s going on, but I’d urge anybody who has a few hours and wants to understand what’s going on to check out these three This American Life episodes, which do a great job of spelling out the causes and consequences of the crisis in a way that didn’t require any economics classes:

You can listen to all of them for free online and I felt a lot better afterwards, knowing that I at least can understand the basics of one of the largest and scariest things to ever happen to our world in my lifetime.  This financial crisis is a bit like diabetes; it’s not something that affects my day-to-day life yet, but I know that any day I could wake up and find that things are no longer fine.

If I got diabetes and lost my house and job?  That’d be the worst.

Day 13: money

February 24, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I took a corporate class last year about being an effective manager.  During it, we had an exercise where we had to choose our top five values.  As I whittled down my list to get my top value, I let loyalty and honesty drop by the wayside.  What I ended up with was financial security.  It’s not be something that everyone might even label a value, but it was on our list, and quite honestly it is the most important thing to me.

The recession and credit/housing crisis hasn’t affected us too much.  We think we managed to get our house at a relatively good price, but that’ll depend on how much further housing prices fall.  We manage to save a bit of money each month, even with our mortgage payments.  We’re doing OK.

And that really matters to me.  More so than having good friends (sorry good frineds of mine!), more so than making great games, and more so than teaching my cats to pee in the toilet – I need to know that we can go to a restaurant or a movie or the grocery store without having to check our balances first.

It’s odd, because when I was young, I was an idealist who thought that money was an unnecessary part of life.  I might even go as far as to say that I considered it an evil.  Who needed money in this world when there are such powerful forces as love and truth?

Somewhere after adolescence, I realized that maybe my parents weren’t wrong about everything.  I became a bit more practical and lowered my head from the clouds just a bit.  I’m still a bit like Christian in Moulin Rouge: above all things, I believe in love.  But, money’s pretty important, too.

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I don’t sit at home counting all my pennies every night before bed, but I do use Quicken (Deluxe, specifically) regularly and Mint.com as well to be able to track an overview of our funds on my phone.  It irks me a bit that Quicken online doesn’t hook up to my software copy of Quicken.

I would encourage everyone to at least keep broad track of their finances.  Spending 10-15 minutes every few days makes it easier to save money and see where the money you do spend is going.

I just got an email telling me to celebrate Mardi Gras with a sale at PetCo.  That is often the location that I first think of when contemplating where to celebrate Mardi Gras.

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