Palfrey's life

I tend to think of myself as a fairly creative person. Admittedly, a vast quantity of it is crap (spent a good few minutes a few days ago wondering whether we could get rid of the idea of packets for sensor networks *entirely*), but there's generally a few nuggets in there somewhere, even if the process tends to feel like throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. This has specifically started to grate on me a little at work recently, as I'm working towards full time writing of the thesis, which will to a large extent mean stopping doing doing new stuff for a number of months. Heck, otherwise I'd be in Sweden early next week for the Contiki workshop, but I just don't have the time to do all the cool stuff that would be the end result of after something like that.

Now, however, a few non-work items have popped up. I tend to credit my continuing ability to think up new stuff to a continuous diet of miscellaneous ideas from all over (even if this does tend to focus a little bit on things of a scientific nature), but this does crop up a few things that stir the feeling of *want*. On the plus side, I can at least persuade myself that my luck in these fields would be less than for the work things, and so ignoring them is less painful, but they still need sharing.

• The Paranoia blog pointed out that the Game Chef competition is running again, with the keywords of MEMORY, DRUG, PALACE & CURRENCY or SACRED, ROSE, THREAD & INCONSISTENCY. The idea is to create a playable game based on 3 out of the 4 words in one of the sets. Personally, I'd be leaning towards an idea of memories as currency, but working out how to get a sane gameplay mechanic out of that is another matter.


• The Da Vinci Automata blog is running with the idea of 1,000-20,000 word Clockpunk stories, and the idea of publishing them together as a kinda gateway book to the genre. Ok, yes, they're tiny, odds are they wouldn't get noticed by a publisher, but writing something like that (more at the 1,000 word end, partly inspired by much reading of 365tommorrows) is appealing. The mechanical man stories have been done to death, but I think there's still some possibilities left. I suspect there's some low hanging fruit playing on the "series of tubes" idea, but with literal brass tubes. Network Neutrality jokes for water, springs and clockwork? Maybe.

Yeah, it's a pile of crap. Mainly why I'm able to leave those alone, in favour of the new stuff I still have time for.