Banned from Disneyland

No Disneyland for me this week, since they’re only keeping the park open until 8pm every night. Even I’m not stupid enough to drive at least an hour and a half through Los Angeles rush hour traffic to be able to spend 30 minutes to an hour in the happiest place on earth.

Okay, I am, but not this week. There’s just too much to do. I think we’re making a lot of progress on the project, which means that when I get back to the hotel I’ve got plenty of stuff to write on the design document. That’s good! But I’m so very, very tired. That’s bad. Still, having too many ideas and not enough time and energy to commit them to (virtual) paper is a hell of a lot better than vice-versa.

I did get to tag along on a tour today of the R&D presentation, following a group of Japanese employees of the Oriental Land Company (they run Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea). The demo was really cool; there’s some really neat stuff in development. Plus, as it was all run through a translator, I got the abbreviated version that hit on all the special effects and visual “Wow” stuff. And I’m pretty sure that’s all I’m allowed to say about it.

Even if I didn’t have work, there’d be too much to do for Disneyland. I’m still fighting under the ever-escalating word count deficit. The zen of “it’s okay; I can do this” has gone away since I haven’t really made a dent in my fictional masterwork (fictional in that it’s a work of fiction and it doesn’t exist at this point), and I still have only introduced one character at this point and haven’t even gotten to the main plot.

And of course, yet another distraction. The game The Movies came out this week, and it’s one I’ve been semi-interested in ever since it was announced. It’s getting fair-to-middling reviews, but I’m still intrigued enough to check it out; the only question is finding time to do it. The game sounds like it does a pretty good job of Sims-like emergent behavior, getting results that were completely unexpected. Something as completely unexpected as GameSpy running a genuinely funny article, about one columnist’s attempt to make a western and ending up with Brokeback Mountain.