Newest Chapter in the Making a Video Game Saga:

Our title hasn't been approved by Legal, and the game was supposed to go to press tomorrow.

Bastards. I was all excited about finally telling people, "THIS is what I'm working on."

The name has gone through a bit of an ordeal - the internal name, which we all liked, leaked to Amazon, where they started taking pre-orders before the game was ever announced.

Then we realized that the name collided with a Hitchcock movie and another recent film and some other crap.

So we needed a new name. And in a little production-management-marketing powwow, they came up with one.

And it sucks. It has a fucking apostrophe after the n.

When they announced it to my team, the ENTIRE TEAM groaned.

But the name hadn't passed Legal. Shouldn't be more than a week or two, they said.

We're waiting...

Problem is, we have two big demos this week, and since they're to non-SimCompany people, we kinda need legal approval to use whateverthehell name of the game we decide on.

So we can't demo the game if we don't have a name.

It's bad. And stupid.

I shall refer to it as the-game-which-shall-not-be-named.

But if this keeps up, it'll be the-game-which-shall-not-be-sold.

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This weekend was...mostly crap.

I had a little mini-breakdown on Saturday night. That was cute. Crying and freaking out about everything under the sun is so becoming.

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Friday night was OK. We had two friends over for an epic game of Settlers and Cities and Knights and Seafarers of Catan.

It was fun - when I could pay attention. Unfortunately, I was consumed with horrific cramps - we're talking labor pains - for most of the evening. I couldn't drink like everyone else because I NEEDED Advil and you shouldn't mix that with alcohol.

Meanwhile, Hunter had taken it upon himself to bake some of the Nestle Toll House break-and-bake cookies we had in the fridge.

I came back from one longer-than-usual trip to the restroom to find that the cookies were done, since Hunter was holding the tray.

Unfortunately, the dishtowel he was holding the tray with was ON FIRE.

He didn't seem to notice. Speechless, it took me a moment to come up with the words "It's on fire!"

Hunter looked at the tray of cookies. Smilingly, he responded "No, they're fine!"

"No, the towel! It's on fire!"

He pondered for a brief moment, then looked down at his hand.

Lo, the towel was indeed on fire.

He made a few comical attempts to blow out the fire like a birthday candle before he finally put the cookies down and soaked the rag in water.

"The towel must have touched the heating element when I bent down," he offered.

"Well, why didn't you just use the potholder?" I asked.

"We have a potholder?"

The whole time, the potholder was hanging right next to the oven. I pointed to it and mentioned "It's right in the place you put it when you cleaned up the kitchen last week."

"Well, that's a stupid place for it."

At least he's level-headed when there's fire - if not just a tad laid-back about the matter.

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We went to a company-related party thingie for the 4th of July. It was kind of awkward. The guy who threw the party is this crazy British guy who is a bigshot on the SimSequel team.

Turns out his house is in the middle-of-bumblefuck, c/o The Desert. It was SO HOT and all yellow dried up hills and stuff. But his backyard was lovely - gorgeous rocky pool with a fountain and poolside redwoods.

And he had this cute little girl that they had just adopted from China.

Anyway, I knew a few people there, and we were trying to be social - but I got all depressed any time anyone talked about getting a job or loving their job or money or anything, so that was tricky.

But it was largely a small group of totally random people from the company, plus the editor of a well-known game industry magazine, and some Irish and English people. Very odd.

But we had some fun eventually - it was definitely very surreal listening to the veterans talk about the miscellaneous easter eggs they added to the game to be devious.

Just...weird.

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Yesterday, we tried to go grocery shopping - but they ID'ed Hunter when we attempted to purchase a bottle of wine - and despite the fact that his license has cleared inspection multiple times at that location before, they "couldn't find it" in their stupid ID books, and they wouldn't let us buy the alcohol.

It didn't help that our cashier barely spoke English and thought we were trying to make a big deal of it when we were just saying "take the wine off the bill and let's move on".

It was embarassing, and for no good reason, because we are both completely legitimate and old enough, and the whole situation made us look like we were criminals or something.

I was just so angry. The depression was clearly shouting in the back of my head - "Look, you can't even buy alcohol anymore. The universe HATES you. You should go jump off a bridge."

I hate the voices in my head.

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