Six months into the unofficial new era of my life, I’ve graduated from cautiously optimistic to straight up optimistic. There are several welcome contributing factors to this change.

As planned, I have focused on becoming a healthier person. That progresses. I’ve also been settling into the new job, and it’s starting to feel like a good fit. Most importantly, as I’ve come to know my new colleagues, my positive first impressions have borne out. As to game design, that has become a modest but rewarding part of my daytime job, and I hope to do more in the future.

What does that all mean for Mindful Mammoth? I still don’t know. Mostly.

I do know that I will be retiring from Patreon. Patrons have been key to my survival, and I will remain forever grateful. At the same time, Patreon was never a good fit for my projects, nor for my limited social media skills. Given that there is no way to put a Patreon campaign on hiatus or sabbatical, the only real option is to exit. Therefore, sometime in the next week, after giving this post a bit of time to respectfully percolate, I’ll delete the Patreon account. Most of the posts will still be accessible on the Mindful Mammoth website, which will persist for the foreseeable future.

What else? It may be that personal well-being and indie game development are incompatible goals, at least for me. Games take time. So do friends, community, and physical health. It’s hard to do all those things all at the same time.

I continue to dream. I can’t not. Lately, I’ve taken some modest steps towards learning Godot, as a non-evil alternative to the increasingly evil engine that is Unity. My aim is to work on that, and other projects, as interest permits. Given that I enjoy creating games more than posting blogs (sorry), I won’t be posting updates, but only punchlines. If anything ever does get to publishing (or near-publishing), I’ll say so. Otherwise, probably not.

My biggest takeaway from this decade of idealistic (quixotic?) curriculum development is that the world is a far less fair place than I’d thought. My success is due at least as much to luck and privilege as to skill and effort. It teaches me that we all need to be active in fighting for equity – to the extent that we can do so safely, given health and money and such. To be silent when one has the ability to speak and act is to be complicit in destruction. I have been ignorantly and naively complicit in the past. And I’ll surely continue to make mistakes into the future, but I can and do aspire to be a net good.

Polemic begins.

A nation without a social safety net is not truly a nation of opportunity. To be able to take risks, you need to know that there is a bottom, a place beyond which you cannot fall. I had that. Many (most?) do not.  Moreover, a leader who heroizes risk-taking without similarly supporting a safety net is merely an entitled asshole. There seem to be a lot of those around lately.

End of polemic.

And so, I step away from Patreon with gratitude. After ten years of going my own way, I’ve finally landed in a place where I believe I can use my skills for good, while also being a healthy human. I was able to take this risk because I had family and friends who offered both moral and material support. Not all are so fortunate.

If I go forward with indie games, it will be for healthier reasons. Rather than stressing and fighting and hoping to get a thing done before financial implosion, I can make things because I want to make them. Because I think they need to be made. Or not. Perhaps the work I do at work will as much as I can do. We shall see.

Thank you. Till next time,

    Tim

This past year of experiment, with a full-time teaching job at a traditionalist school, has come to a curious conclusion. Results are mixed, and rather emotional. I wrote quite a few paragraphs of details, then decided to stick closer to the facts. I think the facts will be better for everyone.

Financially, the experiment was a success. Not only have I paid off all my debts, but yesterday I transferred money from my checking account to my savings account for the first time in at least ten years.

Personally, this experiment was a failure. I had hoped to find a healthy work-life balance and a long-term sustainable lifestyle. In fact, I worked more hours than ever, at what turned out to be the most stressful job I’ve ever had. I didn’t crack, but it was very close.

Pedagogically and culturally, it was a win, for which I credit my many mentors at One Spark Academy. My ’22 – ’23 school, The Buckley School, has a complex community. There is great joy and terrible sadness and everything in between – and an average mood somewhat less than okay. Transplanting some of One Spark’s community practices to my Buckley physics classroom, I think I was able to build some real warmth, and turn things around for at least some people, for at least some of the time. I am truly proud of this, and deeply grateful to both Buckley students and to the One Spark Community for their kindness.

Back in December, in my winter break, it was already clear that this new lifestyle wasn’t sustainable, and I began looking for a new job.

In March, I was faced with a startling dilemma: two job offers from two very different institutions, both much more closely aligned with my values. I accepted the offer from Art of Problem Solving (a.k.a. AoPS).

On Thursday June 1, I finished my last day of in-person time with students at Buckley. It was bittersweet. The following Tuesday, I began my new job as Life Sciences Curriculum Developer at AoPS.

Most importantly, this latest change means hope. Even in this first month, rather than gradually falling apart, I am slowly coming back together. Baby steps, but now in a forward direction.

The new job is overall positive. In material benefits, it offers a sustainable middle-class salary and a forty-hour work week. Such job features should be standard for everyone, but have sadly become a modern-day unicorn. Equally important, this job is good people – smart, kind, and with a shared mission to do education better. Many goals are commercial, but commercial with positive purpose. So far, I feel pretty good about it.  

What then for Mindful Mammoth? I don’t know. My first priority is me. I aim to use evenings and weekends to cook and sleep and read and play games and play with Legos and go to Meetups and do physical therapy and recover mental and physical health. I will look to my own house first, and hope that when it is re-ordered, I can then be a more effective agent of positive change.

With the focus on rest and recovery, it no longer feels fair to keep the Patreon going as a subscription service. I won’t be using that money for the purposes for which it was originally intended, at least not for a while. And if I do resume design work, it may be more honest to keep it self-funded. Therefore, I’m pausing the subscriptions.

I will continue to post here, intermittently, at least for a while. Because I do still have big dreams of beautiful, science-y games. But the world is complicated, the future is a mystery, and so we shall have to wait and see what we can see.

Again, I am grateful. This was the hardest year I’ve ever had, and I wouldn’t have made it without regular H&H time with friends (hugs and happy hour), without folks who fielded multiple panicked midnight phone calls, without you.

Thank you,

     Tim

It’s been a year! The career-and-lifestyle experiment, the shift from multi-hatted idealistic artist to half-pragmatic full-time teacher is well underway. Results are somewhat mixed, though mostly as expected.

As of today, the material aspects of my life are solid: dishes are washed, bathroom is clean, floor is swept, car is paid off, credit card is paid off, and I am confident of having sufficient income to cover rent and living for the next nine months – and still have enough extra that I can begin stocking an emergency fund.

This is the first time I’ve been capitalistically debt-free in sixteen years. Though I’m not fully debt-free, as I remain indebted to the family, friends, patrons, colleagues, mentors, and strangers who have supported me in my idealistic quest to promote the understanding and appreciation of science, nature, and life through play.

Thank you.

That debt will never be fully discharged. I plan to honor it by continuing to pay it forward: talking talks, teaching classes, doing occasional volunteer work, and making games. Broadly speaking, the goal is to give more than I take. Yes! The quest continues, even if the details have changed.

While I am grateful that my material needs are met, the other aspects of life remain tough. This new teaching job has been far more work than I expected. In fact, I’ve been working even more than last year, which is problematic.

Because of the time I’ve put into learning the systems of a new institution, building lesson plans, building relationships with students, and teaching physics – I’ve been a respectably good teacher with real positive impact. I’ve also struggled to find time to exercise, sleep, maintain friendships, and otherwise care for myself. To continue this teaching work, I still need to find balance. I will give more than I take, but I need to dial it back, so it’s not *too* much more. To be a good teacher, I also need to be a healthy human, and health requires balance.

Some teachering highlights:

• Rollercoaster labs: I’ve written a pair of physics labs based on marble rollercoasters (with a third lab forthcoming). In these labs, students explore the physics of motion by building marble rollercoaster tracks in various shapes, and then collecting observations on ramps, loopdeloops, and so on. The labs are not without flaw, and I can already see how to make them significantly better for next year, but even these first edition labs worked pretty well. People learned stuff, and (mostly) (seemed) to feel good about the process.
• Learning beyond memorization and computation and physics: During the first week of class, we talked about values (kindness, self-reliance, etc.), expectations (assertive communication, good-faith actions), and the philosophy of science – including epistemology. As reinforcement, I regularly use key words from those early lessons during formal instructional time, and in smaller conversations with individual students. In the last few weeks, as we reviewed in preparation for finals, I’ve heard students use those same key words on their own, in side-conversations. Often, the conversations are in fun, rather than being serious – but I think that makes me even happier. Folks aren’t slavishly memorizing, nor are they obediently walking within the bounded lines. Rather, they’re making the ideas work for them, which is pretty cool.
• Progress towards positive vibes: I try to do a lot of hands-on demos and activities, asking volunteers to help out with whatnot and sundry. One day, during last period, I knew a student was having a bad day. When I asked for volunteers to help with a demo and this person raised their hand, I intentionally invited them to help. At the end of the period, as folks walked out, that student came up to me and said, “Thank you. I was having a bad day, but after this class, I feel a little better.” Not everybody loves the class. A few folks hate it, which breaks my heart. But it’s doing net good for most – which is a big deal. Most of my students came into this class carrying some degree of scholastic trauma. The average student will leave my class with at least a little less fear and a little more curiosity than they started with.

What else? Desert and friends and rain. The past two weeks of winter break have been good. Coming up for air after a semester of alternating crunching and crashing. I’ve done some work, maybe not enough, but some. More importantly, I’ve spent time with friends and family, climbed a hill in the desert, played a chunk of games with friends, had time to read several books in the company of rain, and I’m looking forward to more.

What’s next? Spring semester. Which is several weeks longer than fall semester. The good news is that it has a two week break (Spring Break) rather than a one week break (Thanksgiving). Still, it’ll be a lot. Likely even harder than fall, which is again a scary amount of work. I’ve done this before, so I can do it again. And if I get to do it yet again next year, things will be easier. I just have to make it to that point.

Again, I am grateful. For all the challenges of life and school and world, I’m still glad to be doing what I’m doing, and the only way I can do this is as part of a community – family, friends, patrons, colleagues, mentors, and kind strangers. Thank you.

     Tim

My course change is all official, and it proceeds apace. With some sadness, I formally resigned from One Spark Academy and from ArtCenter. Last Monday, I walked onto the campus of The Buckley School to begin my tenure as a full-time physics teacher. Most of the past two weeks were devoted to training and orientation. That time was remarkably useful, and I was very pleasantly surprised that the pattern of quality people continued. A full one hundred percent of the humans that I have met at Buckley have been capable and good-hearted people.

In the coming months, my focus will be on physics, with a side of imagination. Some of the imagination will go towards physics curriculum. Some of the imagination will go here, with games and education and Mindful Mammoth projects. Exactly how much imagination will be around for Mindful Mammoth works, I don’t yet know. Probably just a bit, as health remains a priority. We shall see.

On Physics

Long ago, in my grad school days at UCSB, I worked as a TA, running lab sections of introductory physics. I remember bringing a National Geographic to my first lab meeting, thinking that the undergrads in my sections would independently work through the lab manual, and I could get some recreational reading done. Nope. My students had a constant stream of totally appropriate questions and concerns, and I was kept busy with talking and troubleshooting. This was my first lesson in teaching – that good teaching takes quite a lot of time and effort.

My new 9^th grade physics class has a textbook, two paperback books of potential questions and exercises, and a lab manual. On the surface, it is a situation not unlike those olden grad school days. We have lots of printed resources, ready to go! The difference is that I know better. All these paper things are good and useful – and we’ll use them – but they’re a little bland, lacking both whimsy and human interaction. Therefore, I’m making plans to go beyond the books and hopefully do a little better than the average physics classroom.

As a first step, the fall lab assignments will be centered around marble rollercoasters. There will be a few non-rollercoaster activities, but rollercoasters will be the central thread. Hopefully, it will be a way to mix creativity, theory, experiment, and the physics of motion. Build a rollercoaster! Can you make a loopdeloop? How fast does the marble go! How does the speed change on different parts of the track? With this, we get explorations into speed, acceleration, mass, force, and energy. But wait, there’s more! Create a jump-ramp and launch the marble! And we get projectile motion.

The rollercoaster theme is a break with the textbook, but I think a good one. I pitched it to my chairperson, got a green light, and we have rollercoaster kits on the way! Cool beans.

On Go Extinct!

While I have the technical skills to build this thing, and arguably have the time (summer + evenings + weekends), I don’t currently have the heart. It’s a curious contrast. With burnout and new job and a need for better balance in my life, I’ve sadly concluded that the Go Extinct! app is beyond my ability at this time. Therefore, it is on indefinite hold. Likely permanent.

This is a sadness in many ways, as Go Extinct! is a great game, and digital edition could have had positive impact. It is also a sadness because this change means I’m backing out of a commitment to a friend.

Unfortunately, it felt like a necessary change.

Be more mindfully realistic. That is the lesson to take away from this. Funny how I can say that very thing to my game design students, year after year, and still struggle to actually do the thing myself.

On Papert

For years, my reading pile has been growing. And on the top of that pile, for years, has been Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms. I’ve read the first quarter several times, was always distracted by work or family or shiny things, and never finished. Recently, I’ve picked it up again. For the first time ever, I’ve passed the half-way point.

Mindstorms is a remarkable book. It’s an eloquent monograph on my design and teaching philosophy, written back when I was two, and had no idea of teaching or philosophy, or even of fingers and toes. In the book, Papert shares words and pictures and code and ideas and experimental evidence far beyond my own knowledge and ability. It’s extraordinary.

Back in the 70’s, Papert was doing real work on transformative ideas in math and computer science education, and that work is outlined in Mindstorms. Today, a full fifty years later, we have tech bros slinging buckets of money, and marketing moogles blaring wondrous words, all painting vivid pictures of the value of coding for everyone – but not really doing much good. It’s just the same superficial stuff that’s been done for years, at larger scale. Funny how, fifty years later, in the heart of the information age, we still haven’t learned the lessons of a good education, lessons Papert tried to teach us back in the 70’s. The guy is an honest-to-goodness visionary and genius.

I admit there may be some confirmation bias involved in my review.

Yes, onwards

In the next few months, my focus will be physics, then health, then friends. If there is extra time, I’ll catch up on my reading. And if there is extra extra time, I may noodle at a new edition of Fire and Flora. We shall see. I’ll keep the updates coming!

In this time, I’ll also work to remember gratitude. It has been a hard decade, made hard by thoughtless leaders and thoughtless followers in a time of growing contempt. Yet I’ve lived this time, and that living was made possible only by the kindness of friends, mentors, family, and y’all. Thank you. I am grateful.

I’ll do my best to keep fighting the good fight,

    Tim

Hello

This will be a differently flavored set of stories, coming from a very challenging year, and a place of personal exhaustion. Work happened. Triumph happened. Sadness and burnout happened too. I’m going to be a little more open about that than usual.

Truth and Sadness and Health

Just over a month ago, I went out to Santa Cruz Island with my One Spark Students for the final hurrah of the academic year. I love those people more than I can say, and it was a joy to share this time with them. On the way out, we were soggified by sea spray. When we reached Scorpion Harbor, we had a friendly island intro circle. I talked a bit about ecology, tasked everyone with finding a story to share with me, then sent folks out for a hike. Myself, I hung around the beach with a small crew – the fellowship of folks too injured to hike (more on that later). When the hikers returned, everyone had a story – white cliffs, a valiant crow struggling to land on a branch in high winds, a conversation that left them unable to stop laughing … and more. We traveled back to Ventura by boat, shared a lot of hugs, and parted ways. I love these people.

This last year was over-full. I’d been holding on with my fingertips, squeaking out every bit of effort I could. The end result, the day after this trip, was a me that was physically and mentally unwell.

Physically, I’ve been dealing with a string of joint issues going back roughly four years. In chronological order: one thumb, two elbows, two shoulders, one ankle, several non-thumb fingers, and tendons in both feet. I’ve had blood tests (no rheumatological problems found), x-rays, one MRI, and several rounds of physical therapy with three different providers. Some of those issues were RSI, some were obvious injury, and some had no reasonably explanation. As of this time, some joints have improved, and some remain unhappy. This limits my ability to do everyday work, as well as many activities that I enjoy.

What’s up with mental health? Teaching and making have always been hard. This last year was made extra challenging by covid, cultural conflict, environmental grief, and an increasingly dire economy. In the past nine months, I’ve rarely slept the whole night through. I often go to school tired, and come home even more tired. Some days, despite the obvious good of physical therapy, I’ve cancelled appointments and skipped exercises, because I’m so tired that I can’t even. In the spring semester, I’ve had regular (though minor) panic attacks about everything from lesson planning to the cost of buying new tires to the inefficiency caused by my panic attacks. Exercise always helps – except joint issues have made it difficult to impossible to do most of the active things that I enjoy. It’s been tough.

When school finished, I crashed. In this past month, I spent a lot of time with friends, diligently followed my physical therapy regimen, and did a lot of vegging. That vegging includes naps (sometimes twice a day), videogames (e.g. Going Medieval, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion), and television (Stranger Things 4, Star Trek: SNW, and The Boys).

In the middle of this, there was a day where I took a short walk around my neighborhood. The experience of wind – the feel of the wind on my hands and face, and the sound of the wind through the trees – was almost transcendent. It’s not that I didn’t take short walking breaks during the school year – I did. And it’s not that there hasn’t been wind or trees – because those have always been around. Rather, it’s that I’ve been so caught up in my head that when I did take breaks, I couldn’t feel see or hear the world through the mental noise of my own busy-ness. I’m grateful to have the world back in my life.

When I reflect, I can imagine a different me. Someone more balanced and grounded. Someone who affirmatively takes on big challenges with equanimity. Someone like the folks you see in the movies, working in their workshop while the montage music plays, and producing steady streams of triumph. Sometimes, I can do that. I’m a pretty capable human being. Sometimes, I can’t. Sometimes, there is more than I can handle. This year, I pushed past my safe limits, and I’ve spent the last month dealing with the aftermath.

This summer, my goal was to dive into game development, and get something published by fall. That’s not happening. My new goal is health, and health does involve some so-called “productive” work. Making things is a skill, and I need to keep those skills exercised. It’s also pretty satisfying to bring something new into the world. But the most important thing I can do this summer is to recover my strength.

Today. Finally. After a month of friends and quiet and vegging, I’m feeling mostly a person again.

Accomplishments

So enough of the navel gazing. What’s actually been going on? Indeed, things have happened.

One Spark was a big win. In this most challenging year, all of our students came out stronger than they went in. I orchestrated a Pi Day pie fight (photo), taught classes in Island Ecology and Interactive Fiction, cheered a production of Hamlet, and helped kids understand technology by taking things apart (photo). Outside of classes, we’ve talked about philosophy, argued over whether a pizza is a sandwich, walked the trails around our new campus, and played multiple games of Throw Throw Burrito. I’m incredibly grateful to have shared so much time with these wonderful people.

ArtCenter was also a win. My game development classes were challenging, but mostly successful. The big triumph was the first ever in-person end-of-year Entertainment Showcase. On the final day of classes, game design students gathered on campus to eat snacks and share their work. Given that this is still a new program (just four years old), and that covid has been mucking things up for fully half of the lifetime of the program (two of the four years), community and humanity have been hard. Somehow, our students not only got to know each other, but actually built friendships, and this all came out in the showcase. Yes, the presentation was a little disorganized, but games were played, fun was had, and company was had.

LEG4 is a fizzle. Last fall, I submitted a proposal for the fourth volume in the Learning, Education, and Games series. This volume is subtitled, “50 games for inclusion.” I had proposed a short chapter on The Vale, an audio-only RPG specifically designed for visually impaired players. Unfortunately, writing that chapter would have required more energy than I had. That chapter also required more humility than I had. A hurried weekend of research taught me that there is a pretty active community of visually impaired folks who play audio games. I should have made it a priority to recruit a co-author from that community. Writing this chapter on my own would have been ableist arrogance. The end result is that I withdrew my proposal for LEG 4. Slightly unprofessional, but necessary.

Lastly, reviewing happened. In April, I reviewed 14 entries for the 2022 Games for Change student challenge. This month, I’m reprising my job as a volunteer juror for IndieCade, and I’ve reviewed nine games so far. Some were poor, but some were quite amazing.  I appreciate this review work, as these semi-random assortments of games always expand my thinking around what games can be and do.

Change, and The Future

Back in March, I came to the realization that my stress level was unsustainable, as were my finances. I reached out to a recruiter, who agreed to help me look for possible full-time work. Last week, I accepted a full-time job teaching high school physics at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, beginning in August. This is a complicated win.

With this full-time job, I’ll have to leave One Spark and ArtCenter. At One Spark, I have spent years cultivating relationships with students, families, and fellow teachers. I love those people. Distancing myself from them is an enormous sadness. I cried. At ArtCenter, I’ve enjoyed working with creative students, and leaving them behind will be another sadness.

The good news is that I’ll have a more sustainable lifestyle. I will be able to do physical therapy and (hopefully) make a full recovery. I’ll have modest freedom on evenings and weekends, to play and climb and relax with friends. I’ll have financial resources to deal with whatever this year may bring. And I’ll have new people at Buckley. Those people are still mostly unknown to me, but my experience so far has been uniformly positive.

tl;dr: This necessary change brings much needed hope.

Next

In the final month of summer, I’m ready to get back to work. I expect to split my time into thirds: one third preparing for the upcoming school year, one third working on game projects, and one third goofing off. The Buckley physics class is wholly new, never having been taught there before. It will need a syllabus, careful planning around labs and options, and detailed lessons for at least the first two weeks. On the games, I’d also like to make some real progress on the Go Extinct! app project. Most importantly, I need to keep up on the self-care with physical therapy, friend time, and veg time. That’s the plan. I’ll keep you updated on how that goes 🙂

Thank you

It’s been a year. More than ever, I’m grateful for friends and family.

    – Tim

As expected, fall was intense. It’s a little hard to judge teaching loads, as classes with the same number of units can have wildly different time requirements. I’d guess that my teaching fall load was something like 130%. At least, that’s what it felt like.

This rather large teaching load meant that there was no time for game development. While I’m a bit sad about the lack of progress on Go Extinct! and DROMP, the focus on teaching was clearly the right choice. Students deserve respect and focus. And I confess that even with all of my attention on the teaching, there were days when I faltered, and simply couldn’t do all the things that needed doing. Fortunately, all the mistakes were recoverable, and the semester ended on a positive note.

What, then is the news? I’m glad you asked. You can find it below, prefaced by some bigger picture musings.

The Purpose of Patreon

Patreon is intended for creators that produce episodic media for their patrons – cartoons, podcasts, very small games, etc. That’s never been who I am or what I do. For the most part, I’ve chosen larger projects. Things that take months to years to get to a playable state. Those larger projects are where I see the most potential for satisfying creative work. They are also where I think we can find the greatest opportunity for impact.

These larger-scale projects serve deserving communities, but only indirectly serve patrons on Patreon. For the most part, with Patreon, I’m asking folks to contribute money in the confidence that it will help others. Not us, but others.

Helping others happens.

• Sprout: Is free on Steam, though the process of development and publishing took nearly 200 hours of my time. As of today, it has been played by 68,729 people. All of those people now know a little more botany than when they started. Patreon helps make this possible.
• Teaching: Is rewarding and important, but never fully funded. I regularly spend small bits of money, out-of-pocket, on classroom materials. I also regularly spend moderate bits of time, out-of-pocket, on planning and on support. Sometimes, when I get home, I’m so tired I can’t handle cooking. So I order a pizza. Patreon helps fund classroom materials and pizza, both of which are necessary for teaching.
• Academic things: I wrote a chapter for Learning, Education & Games, Volume 3: 100 Games to Use in the Classroom (free digital download). That book has now been downloaded 100K times. The next volume is just now getting underway, and one of my chapter proposals has been accepted. This means I’ll be writing another short chapter in the next few months. Patreon helps make this work too.

Go us!

What hasn’t happened is much direct appreciation of Patrons. The original plan of regular updates and physical rewards has stalled. This isn’t in keeping with the spirit of Patreon, but it is a practical necessity. I’ve updated the tiers on Patreon to reflect this new reality.

My hope is that, this summer, I’ll be able to re-engage with game development and the broader world. Perhaps begin mailing physical rewards again, and maybe doing some online Q&A sessions on Patreon. In this way, Patreon will become a little more episodically rewarding. Some months, the focus will be on serving the world – teaching, writing, developing. Some months, there will be time to build community. We shall see. That will be the goal.

Game is Software

The ArtCenter Game Design program has a sequence of five Unity classes. Their purpose is to give students a foundation in computer science and Unity. At the end of the sequence, students should be able to build rough digital prototypes of their ideas, and be able to capably interact with more technical teammates.

The first class in the sequence is called Game is Software. Last summer, the teacher for GiS stepped down, and I volunteered to step in. This is a good thing. He was a good programmer, but not a good curriculum designer, and you need a good curriculum if you want to teach computer science to art students.

Last fall, I redesigned the class from bottom to top and start to finish. I rewrote the official course learning objectives and the formal weekly plan. I created slideshows and lecture notes and demo projects and weekly assignments and exams. I reviewed student work in detail, wrote feedback, and made myself available for tech support via email and Zoom. It was a lot. And I think it turned out reasonably well. I’ll call it GiS vT.1. The “T” stands for Tim. Hopefully, I’m not tempting fate with that arrogance.

The new curriculum takes a Unity-first approach. In the first third of the class, we used the Unity Playground toolkit to create 2D games based on physics, collisions, and simple collision-based interactions. This allowed students to get a feel for the Unity editor, and for foundational Unity concepts (GameObjects, Components, Transforms, Colliders, etc.). Because how can you write code for a system if you don’t understand what the system is? You can’t. So we started by learning the basics of the system, the basics of the Unity game engine.

In the middle third of the class, I helped students through a whirlwind introduction to C# and the Unity API, with a hard focus on variables. When teaching later classes in the sequence, I had found that lots of people struggled with the abstraction required by variables. How fast is that car? It’s not going 10mph or 20 mph, it’s going v mph. The velocity of that car is stored in a digital box named v, and the number in that box is constantly changing. Somehow, your code needs to be able to handle that uncertainty. Your code needs to have rules for how to handle all of the different numbers that could potentially be in the box, whatever they may be. Which can be hard.

The final third of the class was an open-ended 2D game project. Overall, I was impressed with this crew. Their concepts were hugely varied, and most people pulled off solid wins with their development work.

The class was not without flaw, for this was only the first iteration of the new curriculum. The programming section was a little rushed. And the second exam was a little bland. On the positive side of things, the class was usefully informed by my experiences with later classes in the sequence. I know what sophomore students struggled with, and so I made sure that this freshman class spent a lot of time on those issues. In the end, people learned stuff, on Zoom, during covid. This is a win, and a credit to the students. Therefore, I count this time as well-spent.

Death Valley

Teaching Sparks

At my lovely little middle school, I taught classes in environmental science, chain mail, and Popsicle Engineering. All were challenging; all required significant prep and planning; and all were worthwhile.

I’m most proud of the Popsicle Engineering class. In the first two weeks, student teams created their own construction sets by drilling holes in popsicle sticks. I then tasked them with a sequence of physical challenges, each of which had some sort of “secret ingredient.” It was like Iron Chef, but with popsicle sticks and stuffed animals and an apocalyptic doom that only we could prevent.

As motivation for the challenges, I constructed a ridiculously unbelievable narrative arc based on Slothapotamous Rex – the ancient jungle god of napping. Having been woken one too many times by humans, he had decided to wipe us from the face of the planet. Horrors! Only we could stop him.

For many of our class meetings, I created a short deck of Powerpoint slides. The images both advanced the plot and offered photos of real-world structures that students could learn from. In the final meeting, the slide deck consisted of a single badly animated slide, on loop. One of my students walked in, laughed at the loop, and said, “That’s some quality CG animation.” Apparently, I succeeded in making something so bad it was good. I’ve rarely felt so proud.

The Near Future

The spring semester will again be more-than-full with teaching responsibilities: class prep, instructional time, tech support, moving furniture, playing games, troubleshooting code, office hours, and generally trying to help people grow forwards during these divisive covid times.

In March, I’ll take a short sidetrip into writing. Spring break should be just long enough for me to write my chapter for LEG 4: 50 Games for Inclusion, Equity, and Justice.

Come June, I plan to take a week or two to recover, then return to work on Go Extinct, the App. I think that one more summer of solid work should get us to a late beta. With some luck, we may even be able to publish 1.0 before summer’s end. But I want to be careful not to count our apps before they hatch. Either way, progress will be made.

Thank you

The world keeps getting harder. Some days, I think fondly of the year I worked at JPL. My job required only forty hours per week, and yet it paid enough that I could not only do everything I wanted, but also stash a third of my paycheck into savings and retirement funds. These days, I just barely squeak by. But I also feel like I matter more. It’s a strange and swirly mix of feelings.

Sometimes, it’s hard to be positive. Yet the evidence is positive. Squeak happens. Not every day brings forward progress, but on average, forward happens – with the help of friends, family, students, mentors, strangers, and you.

Thank you,

    Tim

Well and goodness. It’s been six months since I wrote one of these things. The months have been complicated and tough. Teaching, yes. Also, the isolation and sadness that comes from covid, some ongoing climate grief, and the heartbreak living in a world that seems to be tearing itself apart. Many days, I found it hard to do anything beyond what was absolutely and imminently necessary.

Summer helped. There was time to work, but also time to relax. I read some books, played some games, met up with friends (vaccinated and humbly) and caught up on some lagging life chores. Finally, I feel recovered enough to work on the merely important stuff, like keeping y’all up to date on happenings.

So here we go.

Spring and Summer Teaching

At my lovely little middle school, I successfully hosted classes in Interactive Fiction (via Ren’py), Algebra, Board Game Design, Astroneer, and Starbound. The real highlight of that bunch was the game design class. In the first half of Game Design, we focused on theory and analysis. We did some design exercises, talked about game design concepts, and played some of the casual tabletop games available on Board Game Arena. In the second half of Game Design, we built a thing.

Of the games we played, the kids were most excited about Hoarders. So. We took that game as a starting point, designed a small expansion, had it printed by The Game Crafter, then met up at a park to play it in person!

The base game of Hoarders is fully symmetric – with each player having exactly the same abilities, and operating from the same ruleset. For the expansion, we created a small deck of ability cards. At the beginning of the game, each player draws one card from this deck, and that card gives the player a special ability unique to them. These unique abilities break the symmetry of the game, and improve replayability. I feel really good about this. The successful production of this humble expansion would be a win at any time, but it’s an extra notable win for taking place during remote / covid times, with folks collaborating over Zoom and Google Docs.

In other teaching news, I continued teaching classes in programming and game design at ArtCenter. In spring, I successfully ran the second edition of Game Development 1. Then in summer, I taught Computer Science for Designers and Artists. Programming is a challenging subject, and Zoom is a challenging medium. Still, folks persisted, and ultimately succeeded. So that was time well spent.

The Serious Play Conference

Indeed, it happened. It was small, wholly online, but worthwhile. As part of the classroom-oriented Saturday programming, I ran a small lecture/discussion session on using Eco in the middle school classroom. Planning that session took an inordinate amount of time, but I think it went over well. So that was again time well spent.

Games 4 Change Student Challenge

For the second year in a row, I volunteered as a juror on the Games 4 Change Student Challenge (info). That involved playing a dozen-ish games from middle school and high school students. Most of the games were small in scope, but almost all of them had some sort of sparkle. Some thing that showed that the authors cared about what they were building. And those sparkles made me happy.

IndieCade Judging

Every year, I look forward to IndieCade. It just feels like my people. In past years, I’ve supported the festival in various ways: showing games, sharing stories in their scheduled sessions, and even helping to organize parts of the event. While I don’t have time to be a big help in this year, I can still support the festival as a judge. Because judging happens in summer. So I did that, and reviewed a grand total of 15 randomly interesting games.

As always, the entries were wonderfully varied. Some were disturbing. Some were funny. Some were well-intentioned, but not real polished. A couple were outstanding (and are now on my Steam wishlist).

Jury ethics prevents me from saying more 🙂

DROMP

At the start of summer, my intention was to focus on DROMP. I’d set myself a goal of bringing the game to the level of a solidly playable pre-alpha tech demo by the end of summer. That would allow me to start showing it around to possible collaborators, funding sources, etc.

Things didn’t work out that way. I was just too burned out.

Working on a complex project, something that is speculative, technically challenging, and artistically challenging … well that was a little much for me. It required creative energy that I mostly didn’t have. I would work for a couple hours, feel like I was all squeezed out, and step back. With baby steps, I successfully added a new mechanic, but struggled to make real progress when I was just so emotionally exhausted.

So I put that down, and looked for a buddy. Things are better when you’ve got a buddy. At least, they are for me.

Go Extinct!

My longtime friend and colleague Ariel Marcy has a series of smart and accessible science-oriented tabletop games. Her first game, Go Extinct! is fully published (the second edition just shipped). The other games are variously in process, and I expect at least a few to see the light of day in the next couple years.

One of the obvious virtues of Go Extinct! is that it’s almost infinitely expandable to different ecosystems. If it had a digital implementation, an app of some sort, it would have the ability to reach more folks. Such a digital implementation might also provide a nice little income stream. And extensions to that app might be an easy way to modestly widen that stream.

So. Ariel and I talked. And we’ve agreed to work on this together. Where DROMP is a reach, the Go Extinct! app is a very-well defined problem. Most of the design work is done, excepting some modest UI issues (having to do with the translation from tabletop to tablet), and I totally know how to build the vast majority of the app. The unknown bits can be filled in with straightforward work, and simple playtesting. Which is all very comforting to me.

Working on the app, I was able to be productive and advance the cause of playful science – both of which contribute to me feeling better about me. I could also have the company of a trusted friend and colleague, someone who offered accountability, practical support, and moral support.

This, then, is the next project: Go Extinct!, the app. It’s a pivot, yes. And partly a sad one, for it means DROMP will move to the backburner, yet again. But it’s a happy thing too. It’s a worthwhile project that is within reach of our collective resources, and likely to see the light of day by the end of 2022.

Sprout for Android, again

A screwdriver fell into the Android works back around April. Our web host made a change to their server setup, which broke the Mindful Mammoth website, which made Sprout’s privacy policy inaccessible, which made Google’s automated system flag Sprout for the offence of *not* having a privacy policy, which caused Google to remove Sprout from the Android Play Store.

This was easily fixed with a little bit of effort. Mostly, administrative-type effort. Which is the type of effort I least enjoy. So the issue languished. For months. Sigh.

Yesterday, I finished the last bit of administrata, and again submitted Sprout for Google’s approval. I expect to receive that approval within 1-2 weeks.

tl;dr: Sprout was unavailable on Android for several months. It should return to Android within 1-2 weeks.

The Future

Fall approaches. Once again, I will be teaching at both One Spark Academy and ArtCenter. The former starts tomorrow, the latter starts in three weeks. The teaching load is significant – especially as the ArtCenter teaching assignments have been rejiggered. I’ll be teaching a new Unity class, and building that curriculum from scratch.

Because of the teaching load, there will be little time for Patreon updates or for work on the Go Extinct app. I’ll try to be a little more regular about updates, but no promises. The physical rewards will continue to be on-hold (sorry). While things should be better than last fall, it’ll still be squidgy. Anything could change at any time.

Thank you

Because nothing happens in a vacuum. Having y’all’s company on this road is what makes movement possible. Thank you. Go us!

Tim

Yes, hello.

The altered pattern continues. Over the last few months, I have focused on teaching and self. I have written plans for several new classes, adapted existing plans for in-person classes to work with in online settings, spent some time doing physical therapy, made more time for sleep, and taken myself for some walks out in the desert.

I expect crises in politics and covid and education to continue through June, and so I plan to continue this same pattern through June. Patreon and game development will be mostly on hold. Instead, I will be supporting schools and students through teaching and advising, and caring for myself so that I can be a sustainably effective agent of positive change.

While there has been less game development than otherwise would have happened, all this teaching stuff means that life has been full. Some highlights:

Eco @ One Spark Academy:

Eco is a true standout among learning games (trailer here). It is a multiplayer virtual world that tasks players with building a society from the ground up. That means everything from laws to economy to social norms. In the first semester of the school year, I hosted a game of Eco for my OSA students. It was hard and rewarding in all the ways I had hoped for.

Eco @ NASAGA:

Together with my colleague Juni Yeung, we ran a pair of workshops on Eco at the 2020 meeting of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA). Being our first appearance at the conference, we misjudged the audience a bit. Still, I think we succeeded in helping our session attendees to broaden their thinking around games and education.

Serious Games @ IndieCade:

IndieCade is always my favorite event of the year. This year, it was *very* different. Very. Still, I had some good conversations with folks, met some innovative games, and had the opportunity to host a discussion on serious games.

Staff Advising @ Sci Tech

Not quite three years ago, I worked at Six Points Sci Tech, a camp for nerdy kids, as their video game design instructor. It was one of the most exhausting and rewarding things I’ve ever done. As they move forward, they’re looking to strengthen their staff recruiting process. To this end, they’ve recruited a Staff Advisory Board, and invited me to join. I agreed. While I don’t have much networking clout, they’re great people, so I’m always happy to support them in whatever way I can.

Unity Miscellany

It turns out that Unity has a volunteer Advisory Panel as well. It’s big and broad, and it sounds like something of a pool from which they draw people when they need focus groups. Anyways, I submitted myself. I think I have useful feedback. So far, there’s no action on their end, and there may never be. Bit that’s there. For whatever it’s worth.

Out of odd curiosity, I decided to take Unity’s Professional Programmer exam. Over the course of two weeks, I put some time into studying for the exam, and passed quite handily. I feel validated. And more informed on both Unity and on their certification program. And a little guilty for supporting the educational-industrial complex. It’s a big mixed bag. But that’s there too. For whatever it’s worth.

The Diamond Challenge

Is a worldwide entrepreneurial challenge for high school students. Think Shark Tank, but a little gentler. I volunteered for DC as a judge in each of the last two years. This year, they invited me to volunteer again for their all-online competition. I agreed. Then backed out at the last minute. They’re good people, but my plate is very full, and this one more thing was feeling like too much. I regret the switcheroo, but I’m glad to not have to do that. They were nice about it.

Girls Make Games

Are exactly what they sound like. Every summer, hundreds of girls go to GMG camps to make games. At the end of the summer, there is a competition, and the best prototype of the summer is rewarded with placement on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter then funds full development of the game, for eventual publishing on Itch and Steam.

They’re good people too, and I’ve supported every one of their Kickstarters. You should too. If you can.

I bring them up because they’ve hit several milestones in the last month. They have finished work on two of those Kickstarted games and published them to Steam. You should check them out: Shredded Secrets, and Find Me.

DROMP

My long burbling back-burner project. That tactical cloud brawler I keep mentioning, if only briefly. During the winter holiday, I had some modest hours to work on the prototype. The first draft of the new re/buildable surface feature system is finished. I’m now working on asymmetric team play. Got three players? Cool. Set up a 2v1 game, but with a handicap/bonus to favor the 1. With more flexible team options, the game should be more amenable to playtesting, and I can start to circulate it among friends.

That likely won’t happen till June. Again, most of those things are on pause in favor of teaching and balance. But there may be small progress. For the curious, and the fancy, I’ve created a rough development roadmap in Lucidchart. I’ll share the link with the $2 tier on Patreon.

Fingers Crossed

The world continues to be uncertain. And as the information wars continue, I feel more and more strongly that teaching is one of the most important things we can do. Therefore, I will continue to focus on that, and do the best I can.

It’s tough. And I appreciate your support. Friends, family, colleagues, patrons, kind words from strangers … everything matters, and everything helps. Thank you. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for good luck for all of us.

– Tim

You may have noticed that it’s been five months since the last official post here. That is not that things haven’t been happening, but that work and life and world have been intense. So I want to catch up a bit, and share some changes. Because I expect that work and life and world will continue to be intense for some time to come. And because some interesting happenings have happened.

Changes

This summer I had hoped to make big progress on my long-back-burnered concept for a game of tactical cloud combat (tentatively titled DROMP). That didn’t happen much. Teaching happened. I taught courses in Python (at ArtCenter) and Minecraft (at OSA). This was actually a big deal, as it required retooling my curriculum ideas to fit with the new normal of remote, Zoom-based education. Life also happened – covid and politics and a startling variety of minor physical injuries. Among all this, I kept thinking about game development, but found that there were some tough tradeoffs. There just wasn’t time to do it all.

I decided that teaching was important. In this past year, there are growing numbers of metaphorical fires. There are more and more problems that need and deserve immediate attention and immediate action. Problems related to kindness, equity, and truth. Creating thoughtful games will help in the long run – but game design is slow, and people need help now. Being a good teacher feels like the most impactful way I can help address the growing number of immediate needs. I can’t do everything, but I can do that.

I also decided that I was important. I’ve been flirting with burnout, and descending into full burnout status would only leave us all worse off. So I chose to focus on those two things – teaching and self – and put down the game projects for a bit.

You should expect this to continue, roughly through June. Come June, I expect my teaching load to lighten. If nothing else, I’ll have done everything remotely once, so those plans will be roughed out. Also, come June, I hope (fingers crossed) covid vaccines will be widely available.

What does this mean for Mindful Mammoth and Patreon? Mindful Mammoth has always had an element of in-class practical teaching. This element will move front-and-center. Game development will happen on rare occasions, but will mostly sit on hold until the metaphorical flood recedes. Until such time as it is possible to shift attention away from the critical moment and more towards the future.  

Posts here will be scarce. The whole Patreon rewards deal will more-or-less pause. If you choose to put your patronage on pause, I understand. If you choose to continue, I thank you. Be assured that your support will continue to help bring about the same goals – promoting the understanding and appreciation of science, nature, and life through play. Just through different means. Through the local vectors of individual classrooms and individual students.

Recent Happenings

All that said, there have yet been oodles of doings and happenings. None of these are momentous on their own. But all contribute to the change we want to create – a more fair, equitable, truthful, and playful world.

Chat with HomeTeam GameDev: Back in May, Chris DeLeon of HomeTeam GameDev, invited me to join their weekly meeting as both a pair of ears and as guest speaker. Listing to their progress reports, I was impressed by the creativity and effectiveness of the HTGD teams. After the formal things were squared away, we had a half hour to talk about games and education and the things I do at Mindful Mammoth. If you’re curious, you can listen to the recorded chat here.

Games for Change Student Challenge: Yes, Games for Change is a thing. An organization. They’re solid people. Through my role as adjunct professor at ArtCenter, I was invited to be a volunteer judge for the 2020 Games for Change Student Challenge. All the games were created by middle school and high school students. Some were very simple, some were surprising and complex. If curious, you can play the finalists here.

Learners and Labyrinths: My good friend Jon Cassie of Game, Level, Learn is co-writing a set of books to aid teachers in the practice of gamification. Inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, but aimed at classrooms, the Learners and Labyrinths books discuss everything from pedagogy to level design to character creation. Want to be a half-elf algebrist? Me too. At least sometimes. Anyways, Jon asked me to be an early reader. I was flattered, and agreed. It was fun. Edifying. Interesting. You go Jon Cassie!

Unity Certification: I will confess that I hate standardized tests. There is a small piece of this world in which they are appropriate. Unfortunately, they have become pernicious and pervasive. And pestilential? And generally poorly written. It happens that Unity is expanding their menu of certification exams, in the hopes of … I don’t know, helping capable people to get the respect they deserve? Maybe. Anyways, thinking that these tests could be helpful for some of my students, I worked through the official curriculum for the Unity Certified Associate: Game Designer certification, and took the test. I passed. The experience … met my expectations. I now have a better understanding of Unity certifications. And knowing is half the battle, right?

Sprout Re-compiled: Technology changes, and games need to change in parallel, if they are to continue being playable. Over the summer, I updated Sprout to use Unity 2019 LTR, which required rejiggering some of the animations. This should make Sprout more reliably compatible with upcoming editions of modern operating systems, and keep Sprout relevant for another few years.

Sprout De-futzed: Early last summer, Google pulled Sprout from the Google Play Store. They said it violated their games for family policy by collecting personally identifiable information from children. My first thought was WTF. Really, Google? However, it turns out that Google was right. When you first create a Unity project, Unity includes a number of libraries by default. It is then supposed to strip unused code from your project when you build an executable. Two of those libraries track users – for ads and for gameplay feedback purposes. I hadn’t used any of those features, but Sprout was still collecting data, and maybe even reporting it somewhere. That code hadn’t been stripped out, but was instead compiled and present and lurking and creepy. I don’t know where the info was going, but it certainly wasn’t going to me. I have not, and never will covertly collect personal information from anyone. And certainly not from children. It’s antithetical to my purpose. So, as part of this summer’s codebase refresh, I explicitly stripped those libraries from the project. This seems to have solved the problem, and Google has now kindly reinstated Sprout as a denizen of the App Store.

DROMP: Having used the extra moments in the first ten weeks of summer to gently relax, I finally felt refreshed and ready to take on some development work in the final few weeks. In that time, I rebuilt the innards of DROMP, with two major changes. The game now supports local multiplayer via gamepads. The game also has a major new mechanic: landscape engineering. In the original version, interactions between land and air were important, but players only had control over things in the air. In the new version, players can reshape the landscape of their town, giving them an additional way to influence the flow of the game. Hopefully, this will add the good kind of complexity, the kind that makes games interesting. The full details aren’t filled out enough for playtesting, but the framework is in place.

Game Design Advising: Arlington High School, in Riverside, has a really remarkable game development pathway. The path chiefs hold regular (annual?) meetings with an advisory board to try and keep the program fun, effective, and relevant. You know, just to have people to bounce ideas off of. The invited me to join this year’s end-of-summer conference call, and I put in my three cents. They’re good people. Amazing people really. The kind of people that give me hope.

Upcoming Happenings

Eco @ NASAGA: Eco is a ridiculously ambitious educational game. I won’t try to describe it here. You can check out the trailer for an introduction, or peruse this blog for startlingly thoughtful stories. Given the shift to online learning, this fall seemed like the perfect time to bring Eco to One Spark Academy. So we did that. In planning for this ‘class’, I found very few helpful resources. Some few folks were able to help me get a handle on the depths of the game, but nobody could say much about the specifics of Eco in schools. This seemed like gap that was just asking to be filled. By sharing my experience, I could help others to get started faster, and advance the state of play in education. Together with Eco expert Juni Yeung, we pitched two Eco-based session ideas for this year’s meeting of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association (NASAGA). Both ideas were accepted. As part of this year’s conference, we will run a workshop/case study session, and a get-your-feet-wet gameplay session.

IndieCade: The best event of the year is happening again. Details remain mysterious. The shift to an all-online format is a big deal for an event that proudly welcomed all forms of games (including hyper-physical and place-based games). And folks are still hammering out the details of programs and workshops and technology. I do know that I’ll be hosting a short discussion on Serious Games. And playing games. And talking about games. And being inspired. You should come too. Everyone should come. IndieCade Anywhere and Everywhere. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile.

Yup

Five months of happenings, all rolled up into one place. And I haven’t even talked about the teaching or the curriculum design very much at all. It’s been intense. And it’s been valuable. And it’s only been possible together.

Thank you,

    Tim Handley

10.5 Cows

If you need a silly thing to do, try out our new game, 10.5 Cows. It’s casual game about cow suckage, created with friends from Explorasaurus Studios!

Why cows? We all agreed that cows kinda suck. They’re cute, sure. They also contribute to climate change, and drive deforestation. Hence, our tagline, “Cows suck. Why not suck back?” Yes, I will personally take credit for that one.

Odd and Interesting Prototypes

The Climate Jam inspired 49 entries. You can find them all here. I spent yesterday afternoon exploring the entries. They’re … interesting. Every one of the games has severe flaws (including ours). And. And. Every one of these games is care-full. Calling out some of the games that made an impression:

• Night Flyer: A remarkably simple and affecting game about bats.
• Fire Season: A fire-fighting simulation. As a former assistant to the Fire Ecologist at SAMO, I struggle to talk about fire. Most articles, simulations, and so on, are vastly oversimplified to the point of being deceptive via omission. Complexity is critically important. This game, while small and simple and limited in scope, isn’t misleading. It is instead, appropriately challenging.
• Panda Smash: Perhaps inspired by true events.
• E-Missions: The only game to even attempt to address climate change in an authentically complicated manner. Wow.
• Fire Tree: I don’t know what this is. But … it makes me feel something.

Students were Challenged

To make games for change. The 2020 Games for Change Student Challenge happened too. All submissions were due by the end of April, judging happened last week, and I volunteered a bit of time to help out as a judge.

Most of the games followed the same general pattern, but there were several standouts. One lightweight life sim required you to make balanced choices about life and health while living as a smoker. (Hint: Smoking caused problems.)

Mindful Mammoth is now Sparklier

Over the past few months, Subplex has been working behind the scenes to upgrade the Mindful Mammoth website. Originally, it was a thing that I designed by myself. For good and bad, you could tell. It was authentic, but also rough, and probably not as enticing as it could be to potential partners and clients.

As of today, it is enormously improved. Check it out here.

Layouts, fonts, navigation – all are cleaner and stronger and more attractive. There are a few minor bugs to work out, mostly in the form of dangling links that need reconnecting, but those things are straightforward to fix.

The website always looked like it was built by someone with heart, because it was. Now, it looks like it was built by someone with heart and skillz, because it was! Thank you, CC.

Thank you

In this wonky world, I am grateful for friends and family, colleagues and patrons – we’re all in this together. As an extra special thanks to those of you who supported us at the $10/month level and above, I’m sending you a signed page of Cows code.

Yes, three pages of code in three months is a little repetitive. It’s also authentic. Most of our current work is in a digital space. I’ll try to find something a little more offbeat for next month.

Later,

    Tim