“That’s really mean. Quit it.”

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on September 8th, 2016

Books

I read an eclectic mix of books ranging from technical ones covering math and physics to autobiographies like Dmitri Shostakovic’s and even occasionally kid’s books like Rex Lee Trailing Air Bandits. That last one had my uncle, Levern Lord’s, signature inside the front cover along with the date 1935. He was nine years old in 1935. My grandma took a photo of him dressed up just like Rex Lee at their cabin at Huntington Lake. My Moms now owns the cabin and the photo is hanging up on the wall there.

Levern was killed in action at Manila in the battle for Nichols Field during World War II. So when I saw his signature that made it a special book for me. A few years ago my Mom showed me the letter that his best army buddy wrote to my Grandma after he was killed. He wrote that Levern had refused to be medically evacuated until every one else who was injured had been and how they were shocked when he didn’t make it. Growing up I pictured him as an old guy like my other uncles who survived the war. He was 19 years old. Now, having had kids of my own that were that age, I realize he was very young. Too young.

 

Memories

Most recently I finished reading a couple of books: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then after that, The Sociopath Next Door. Here is an excerpt from The Sociopath Next Door:

My daughter’s fifth-grade class had a field trip, and I was one of the chaperones. We went to see a play called Freedom Train, about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. On the noisy bus ride back to school, one of the boys was picking on another boy, poking him and pulling his hair. The quiet boy being poked was developmentally delayed, friendless, I am told, and did not have a clue how to defend himself. Even before one of the adults could intervene, a petite girl seated just behind the two boys tapped the tormentor on the shoulder and said, “That’s really mean. Quit it.”

This brought up some old memories of my own. Back when I was around 7 there was a man that came in sometimes to run PE for our class. All us little kids would line up outside before going out to play kickball or something else. He went down the line having each of us say our name. “Stan” was a couple of guys in front of me in line. I’m pretty sure he was developmentally delayed. “My name is Stan Smith” (Note that “Stan Smith” is not my classmate’s real name). He had problems enunciating words correctly. The man made fun of the way he talked and made him say his name a few more times. Okay, wow, here I am tearing up just a little as I write this.

I can close my eyes and see the exact spot where he and I were standing when that happened. It is one of those moments that we all have in our life, good and bad, that are permanently inscribed on our souls. *** Phone call summer 1985 “Grandpa died” Dynamix office at foot of Skinner’s Butte Eugene. *** My son, Aidan, being born 1999 Clovis Community Hospital doctor not in room “oh no” deliver myself as doctor shows up and says “Your’re doing fine.” *** Twin Towers coming down 9/11 television home office Shaver Lake – what am I seeing as tower falls!? *** I’m sure everyone can close their eyes and list off their own moments. Some moments we all share and some are our own personal family ones.

I don’t know what path through life Stan has taken, but I hope it has been a happy one for him. Whenever I meet someone like Stan I know that, whatever path we taken to that point where our paths have intersected, his path has been harder than mine.

 

Twitter

Lately I’ve been spending some more time on Twitter, both trying to post a little bit about what I’m working on and also general life stuff. I’ve also been checking out some of the different content that is there. It seems to me that it is like a very large information mountain interlaced with an amazing mixture of different stuff from all over the world. It’s the internet so there are trolls and silliness, but here and there with a little digging you can find real veins of gold.

Around the same time that I finished up reading those last two books, I was wandering around on twitter and came upon Andrew Selsky’s twitter feed. He had posted a photo of Stephen Stills from his Manassas days back in 1973 taken by his brother. He and his brother had great seats and got some nice photos. Oh, cool, I would have loved to see Manassas (that was a magic band and album), but they were just a little bit before my time. I finally got to see Crosby, Stills, and Nash at the LA Forum in 1977 when I was 16 ( I can drive!) and a couple of years later Stills with his band in June of 1979 at Fresno State. I took my little brother and we got in line early (it was general admission) and we were right on stage rail. Could’ve reached out and touched Stephen through most of the concert.

 

 

I started scrolling back through his tweets and scattered throughout are photos of hikes in wonderful places, some craft beers, more photos and videos of different musical groups (I discovered Johnny Clegg and got to see him when he played in Eugene soon after!). And there was even an old super 8 movie from his college days. I filmed some super 8 movies in the 1970s with my friends and little brother as actors/extras. I need to get them transferred to digital if only to see my then 7 year old brother in a dress playing a lady in “The Muggers.” Anyway, what I’m seeing in the tweets is lots of overlapping interests. It brought back to me the sense I’ve had for a ling while that the world is full of buddies that I’ve never met and may never meet.

Andrew also posted many tweets related to his job as a foreign editor/correspondent for the Associate Press (AP). There was a link to a story about marijuana – can’t remember any of the details on that one (that’s a joke – read the story). He has been and lived many places around the world throughout his career; so there are photos, videos, and stories about Haiti, Columbia, Afghanistan, and many other places.

And in some of these places if you are trying to make things better for your country and you say the equivalent of “That’s really mean. Quit it.” then those in power may kill you. Sobering thought. And the ones that say “Quit it.” know this and they say it anyway. Very courageous. Andrew’s job tells their stories to us. It is an important job. It can be a dangerous job. And the bad guys really don’t like these stories being told so sometimes they’ll kill the story tellers too.

Video by: Zoe Selsky

A short aside. Andrew is a novelist and has recently published a new novel called Cowboy Jihad which draws on his oversea’s experiences. I’ve just finished reading it and it is really good. Just a week ago I read a story in the New York Times about a Afghanistan veteran who reminded me in some ways of Stu who is a character in Andrew’s novel. Cowboy Jihad is the story of terrorists planning an attack on Facebook’s data in the cowboy town of Prineville, Oregon. It is also a story about the choices that people make, good and bad; and also about redemption. You can get it on Amazon.

 

More Serious Games

I originally had the bold above say “Mature Games,” but mature conjures up an image of things that are anything but mature; so I used “Serious” instead. And serious reminds me of something that G.K. Chesterton wrote a little over 100 years ago:

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. … Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. … The question of whether Swift was funny in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe would not maintain that the more funny “Gulliver” is in its method the less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.

Games can entertaining, they can have humor, they can make you laugh; and that doesn’t take away from them also being serious.

So reading these stories from Andrew’s tweets/links and especially about his job started to get ideas of possible game projects percolating in my mind. Ideas and scenarios would pop up and drift through my mind as I took my morning walk through the forest. My job is creating interactive entertainment (computer games – but “interactive entertainment” sounds so much cooler, so humor me). I suppose the way that inspiration just magically appears is true in any sort of creative field like literature, music, movies, etc. in that it can strike you at any time from any place.

If you’ve been working in your field for a long enough time it seems like it becomes second nature. You can’t turn it off. There is something magical about the whole process. You snatch these ethereal phantoms out of the air, and soon there are words on a piece of paper telling a story, or new music, or in my case neat interactive things happening on a computer screen. It really feels like magic. You just sit down and apply yourself to your craft and you create something out of nothing.

Now unlike literature, music, or movies, interactive entertainment is a very young field that is just starting to mature. It is maturing in the sense of what types of games are now being created. I’ve been in this industry from the very start,  basically from our “silent film” era and it has evolved to the point where now it is a creative medium that has moved way beyond Donkey Kong and Centipede. Not that those games weren’t fun. I spent many quarters in the basement of the Erb Memorial Union at the University of Oregon in the early 1980s playing different video games there.

Okay, one more short aside. Sorry. This time about the Erb Memorial Union. When I was a student you could write checks there for cash. So one time when I was home during school break I had my bank statement and some canceled checks and my Dad saw my checks made out to “EMU”. So he asks, “What’s this emu?” I was tempted to tell him that it is the great bird god that we worship at the University. Oh, and one other thing, you can see the EMU and a whole bunch of the University of Oregon in the movie Animal House.

Alright, back to interactive entertainment and how it starting to come into its own as a true artistic field. That Dragon Cancer is an example of how games are changing. Ryan Green wrote the game while his very young son was battling cancer. It is a game that tells of his family’s journey. It is a very tough journey. I bought it the day it came out to support the author, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to play it.

Another game that I have been playing recently is 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. You play a photojournalist caught up in the Iranian revolution. I’ve been playing a chapter or two every so often when I have free time. I’m currently partway through it. It is harrowing. It should be because it was a harrowing time in a dangerous place.

Moving Hearts

When I was younger computers were much less powerful than they are today. Huge orders of magnitude slower. So it was a big deal and you were a hotshot top-gun if you could get a bunch of things moving around on the screen at a high frame rate. I did that – wrote fast code at the lowest machine code level (6502 hex code – no assembler) that I knew was good. It felt good and was fun. I know I can move pixels fast. But, nowadays moving people’s hearts seems a much more rewarding and challenging task.

“Be the #hero of your own life. Pursue your dreams relentlessly. Help others achieve theirs.”

It is interesting how several different events in your life can collide at roughly the same time, one of them being that simple twitter post, and that can move you to move in a different direction in your own life. Serendipity – “fortunate happenstance” “desirable discoveries by accident.” I guess that is what happened. It is an amazing place that this world is turning into. Where a message can fly from South Africa to the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, from fall to spring, instantly and nudge the trajectory of your own life. And then hopefully it can lead to you to help others to achieve their own dreams and nudge their lives in a positive direction.

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Collaboration and Trust in Work and Life

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on May 6th, 2016

This is going to be a very short post about what I was just thinking about while taking a short 25 minute walk along one of the trails near our home just now. I got a email this morning from my long time friend and off and on work colleague Jeff Tunnell. It had a few suggestions about making my blog better from the titles of the posts and also about the content. Some of what he wrote echoed what my wife had told me the other day. Now I’ll definitely be doing some of his advice, maybe not all of it, but I’ll sure consider all of it.

So as I was walking along through the drizzling rain we are getting here right now, it got me thinking about collaboration. Jeff felt comfortable sending me suggestions along the lines of “hey here’s what you can do a little better” and I was fine receiving them. I think that is the result of long time collaboration that has built up trust. Although I think our personalities are such that it was probably there almost from day one.

I’ve been blessed over the years to work with a whole bunch of talented nice folk. Two of them were Jeff and Damon Slye who were at Dynamix with me as co-owners. They started it up. As I walked along thinking about how people interact in good and bad ways, what popped into my mind was this one scene in a game that Damon and I had planned for David Wolfe: Secret Agent. Somewhere along the line as development progressed, Damon told me that Jeff was really uncomfortable with the scene and preferred it didn’t go in there. Not “Jeff says take it out.” It meant a lot to Jeff, we took it out.

I’m thinking that is one reason Dynamix did so well, because there was mutual respect and trust. Oh, it did help that Jeff and Damon are super talented, basically the best at what they do. But it seems that there needs to be more present than just that; and our willingness to listen, change, and improve – collaborate in a good way – made the sum greater than the whole of its parts. And now here I am collaborating with Jeff and his latest company, Spotkin, on a game (Contraption Maker) over 30 years after we met. And my son is working with Damon at Mad Otter Games on their Villagers and Heroes game.

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Short Rambling Thoughts on the Discus, Tennis, Warren Zevon, and Flatlands

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on April 13th, 2016

I took a hike through the forest this morning (like almost every morning). Right near the end of today’s walk there is a log home which I’ve passed by many times. But today I noticed that they have a basketball hoop up in their driveway. “Oh, that’d be nice to have.” We can’t have one at our home because we don’t have any flat land. Actually, I guess we could put up a hoop and it would make for an interesting game since our driveway has a pretty good slope to it.

We didn’t think about how nice it would be to have some flat areas when we bought our land and built our home up here in the mountains back in the mid 1990s. Our log home is made of hand crafted logs that were shaped and fitted up in Canada before being taken apart and then traveling down to Shaver Lake, California. Amusing to think of the shell of our home on a few big trucks making their way down I-5 through Portland, Salem, Eugene (our former home), Mt. Shasta, and eventually making its way here.

Discus

I was a discus thrower on our track team in high school and I was competing against people that usually outweighed me by at least 50 lbs and also had quite a few inches on me. Most of the discus and shot putters on all the different squads were lineman from the football team. I’m not built like a lineman. Try as I might, and I really tried, I couldn’t get my weight above 150 lbs. Trust me though, that “can’t get your weight up problem” does goes away when you get older.

I was good enough to get invited to some invitationals with some of the best in the state/nation where my relative size compared to them was even more apparent. My best throw was 151′ 11″ which wasn’t too shabby for my weight. The discus doesn’t rely on brute strength as much as the shot put so I was able to use technique to get on a more even keel with my competitors. Plus my math skills let me know that I wanted to release the discus at at 37 degree angle with a -10 degree angle of incidence.

As a quick aside, those two photos were taken at our meet at McLane High School in Fresno. I recently found out that Warren Zevon went to that high school.

Tennis

Track and Field is a spring sport just like tennis, so you choose one or the other. Tennis fits my body type and skills much better than the discus did. Not sure why I choose discus over tennis. When I was younger I wasn’t too bad at tennis used to play quite a bit at the tennis club that my family belonged to. My older brother lettered in tennis at Fresno State and I think I would have had a good chance to do the same (at Oregon) if I had taken up the sport seriously.

Discus vs Tennis

When I was a senior in high school back in 1979, I remember sitting in my 6th period math class when Jeff Anderson started talking about tennis and the discus. He was on the tennis team. He thought tennis was a much better sport than just tossing the discus. He said, “When we get old I can call up a friend and say ‘hey want to play a round of tennis?’ What are you going to do? Call up someone and say ‘hey want to toss the discus around?” I said, “Uhhh. Yeah, I guess.” I think he had a point.

My Dad is 86 and he played tennis until recently when his knees gave out. He was Fresno State’s starting QB back when he was in college and I suspect his knees took a lot of punishment. Growing up I watched lots of tennis matches on tv with my Dad and brothers. Wimbledon and the US Open were the big matches, but the French Open was neat because it was played on clay which gives a whole different pace to the game. I remember watching an epic match between Borg and McEnroe at Wimbledon back in 1980. It was beyond belief wonderful. The sort of thing that the word ‘epic’ was made for.

I wonder if I still have my old Wilson wood tennis racket somewhere. I should call up my little brother (50 year old little brother) and play a couple of sets sometime. Seriously. It used to be a lot of fun and its been a long time since I’ve played. Basketball needs too many people and the discus needs too few. To quote Goldielocks, tennis feels just right.

But right now I really feel like calling up my old high school friend, Jeff, and saying, “Hey wanna toss the discus around!”

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Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Maker – The Backstory

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on March 28th, 2016

Part two is now posted here: Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Maker – Implementation Details

This is Aidan’s story and an explanation of how and why the cooler is one of the parts in Contraption Maker. It is the story of a brave cheerful boy and my friends from work that did something nice for him.

Sometime soon I am going to write another post that describes in some technical detail how I went about implementing Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Make. When I do I’ll add a link to it right here at the top of this post.

 

Aidan

Aidan is my son and he was born in the first half of June 1999. He was underweight and obviously sick so he stayed in our local hospital for a few weeks while they tried to figure out what was wrong. When he was four weeks old his heart stopped for a few minutes before the doctors got it going again. He was then transferred by ambulance to UCSF (University of California, San Francisco – a research hospital) and soon after was diagnosed with Neonatal Hemochromatosis which is a liver disease that is almost always fatal (“The prognosis is extremely poor. Some infants recover with supportive care, but this rarely occurs.”). In addition to that he also had acute respiratory distress syndrome.

The doctors did not expect him to survive, but they worked heroically over many months to save him and get him to the point where he could receive a liver transplant. He had the liver transplant when he was four months old and spent most of his first year in the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) and the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at UCSF with various complications – very bad and scary complications. There were a handful of times where I thought he was dying in front of my wife and me.

 

 

Post Transplant

Post transplant he had numerous problems including collapsed lungs, heart problems, kidney problems, possible fungal infection in the brain, a bleed in the brain that affected his left side, acquired hydrocephalus, deaf in left ear, and more. There were occasional crises.  He wasn’t able to eat by mouth and so he had surgery to have a permanent g-tube placed. He was also on supplemental oxygen because his lungs had been damaged. He spent much of the next five years in and out of the hospital. His last major surgery was in January of 2004 where he had brain surgery (Endoscopic third ventriculostomy) which cured his hydrocephalus and allowed them to remove his shunt which was draining fluid from his brain.

We were very happy that that surgery succeeded because the fluid that was being drained by the shunt was not being absorbed in his abdomen because he had so much scar tissue there from his many surgeries. In a hospital stay previous to the brain surgery they had drained 5 lbs of fluid from his abdomen. His weight dropped from 32 to 27 lbs. This was when he was four years old.

I want to break from Aidan’s story here for a couple of paragraphs to write a short bit about his nurses. I stayed with Aidan for many weeks in the PICU, sleeping in a chair next to his bed and over the course of all those times I saw many very sick kids there. Sometimes they don’t make it. You can tell because they draw all the curtains on the room – all the walls in the PICU rooms are glass – you can see into every room. It is a tough place to be.

There are certain jobs where you are exposed to human misery and there are people that do those jobs – like the PICU nurses that became our friends. Big kudos and love to them for being a balm in such a hard place.

As he stabilized Aidan had less and less extended hospital stays and got to spend more and more time at home. When he was home he needed some supplemental oxygen. We a had big machine that would concentrate oxygen out of the air and Aidan was hooked up to it all the time with a very long tube so he could wander around the house. If we wanted to find Aidan all we had to do was follow the follow the clear plastic tube.

 

The Highway Patrolman

We lived up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at 5,500 feet (and still do) so when we were down at sea level he didn’t need the extra oxygen. One day when he was three we were driving back from San Francisco from a visit with his liver doctors at UCSF when we were pulled over by the highway patrol near Gilroy. We hadn’t yet put on the license plate sticker for the next year – it was in the glove compartment – showed it to patrolman – all fine. Aidan was sitting in his car seat with an oxygen tank next to him – not hooked up because he didn’t need it until we got back up to altitude at Shaver Lake. The conversation with the highway patrolman went like this:

Patrolman:  Is that hooked up?
Me:  No he doesn’t need it.
Patrolman:  It really should be hooked up.
Me:  He doesn’t need it at sea level.
Patrolman:  Uh, you really should hook it up now.
Me:  We just came from the doctors and he doesn’t need it here – only up in the mountains.
Patrolman:  (with a sudden big grin) I’m talking about the car seat.
Me:  Oh! Yeah, that’s hooked up!

I’m sure we made that patrolman’s day.

 

Wilderness Hikes

Aidan is a true innocent. He will be 17 years old this June, but mentally he is probably around 6 or so. He has been through many painful procedures throughout his life. He has to have blood draws every 6 weeks to make sure that he is not rejecting his liver. Sometimes during hospital stays it has taken one and half hours to start an iv with numerous “pokes”. That is because he has been stuck with needles so many times that his veins aren’t in great shape. His body is a battlefield covered everywhere with surgical scars. And yet throughout it all he has remained brave and cheerful. He has an indomitable spirit and courage. He finds joy in simple things. He loves and is loved. He is my hero.

At home I’d carry him on my back so he could go on mountain hikes and do everything that the rest of the family does. Hikes through the wilderness are wondrous. There is magic around every bend if you just look for it. As the years went past he just got too big for me to keep carrying. The older Aidan could walk for a while, but eventually he gets very tired so then I carry him. On the hike in the two bottom photos below, I carried him for a few miles and it was really tiring. He was getting bigger and I was getting older. By the end of the hike, my arms were tired, my legs were tired, my brain was tired, and Aidan was very happy. I wanted a Black Butte Porter.

 

 

 

Walking

He wasn’t able to walk at all in his first couple of years because his left side doesn’t work too well because of the stroke. He could stand, but to move around he’d scoot on his rear. Then one day when he was two he started using a toy as a walker to get around the house. He could really zip around with that thing – I mean run fast! One time he took a corner too fast and went down with the walker on top of himself. Didn’t faze him – he was up and off again right away. It was good he figured out how to get around his “can’t walk” problem because once he became more mobile then he could more easily play with his brothers and sister.

 

 

Pikachu

When he was an infant he became very attracted to Pikachu. I spent many, many, many, many hours and days and weeks and months and eternities watching Pokemon with him at the hospital. One day when he was two or three he was with me at a Goodwill store and there was a big stuffed Pika in the discount bin. He shouted, “Pika!!” My wife heard him from across the store. That Pika goes everywhere with him. It has gone into many surgeries with him. Even today he uses it as a pillow and it travels with us whenever we go anywhere.

 

 

Steve McQueen

We will occasionally stay at the Glen Tavern Inn which is in Santa Paula. It has quite of history of old Hollywood stars staying there – Houdini, John Wayne, Rin Tin Tin, etc. In 1979 Steve McQueen lived in a hanger at the Santa Paula airport just a couple of blocks from the Glen Tavern Inn. So of course, since Steve was a patron, one of the drinks that they have at the bar there now is “The Steve McQueen”. It consists of:

-Coke
-Jack Daniels
-Bacardi 151 Rum
-Jagermeister

Aidan has gotten into the habit of finding ways to help around the house. A few years ago he started taking the trash out to the street for the garbage truck. He does lots of small tasks like this. So a couple of years ago out of the blue he decided to help mix drinks for me. “Want me to make you a Steve McQueen?” So I said sure. Now Aidan likes coke and so I had been letting him have any of the left over coke. So apparently he figured out that if he puts in more alcohol there is more left over coke for himself.

One day I filmed him making me a drink. That drink started to look very dangerous, I wanted to say hold it, but I kept my mouth shut as I watched with an impending sense of doom. I think it is the Bacardi 151 Rum that is the killer. Anyway I tried to finish that drink, sipping slowly, while watching a movie with the kids, but couldn’t. It crept up on me and eventually hit me pretty hard and I had to go lie down on the bathroom floor. The last time I felt like that was my freshman year at the University of Oregon in the Bean East dorm.

Here is the video of Aidan the bartender:

 

My Name is Aidan

Back in 2007 we visited Ireland for a couple of weeks. One night we went to Knappogue Castle for a medieval feast which was lots of fun with food and singing. Aidan really enjoyed it. When we got back to the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis where we were staying my brother gave me a poem he had written.

 

Coolers

Aidan will get interested in many different strange things and for some reason he started to like coolers. I’m not sure exactly why or what triggered it in his head, but he slowly acquired a small group of different size coolers. One day after watching Toy Story 3, I found that he had set up the coolers around a “See ‘n Say” toy, mimicking that scene from the movie. To this day he will still set up the coolers different places around the house having them do different tasks.

 

 

Dynamix to Spotkin

In 1984, a year after graduating from the University of Oregon, I was living in an apartment just off campus when I got a phone call from Damon Slye. He and Jeff Tunnell had just started up Dynamix and they wanted me to do some work for them. Not long after that they asked me to come on board as one of the original four owners of the company. Our first product was with Electronic Arts (Arctic Fox) and over the years our company grew to around 200 people. We went through a lot of ups and downs over the next 16 years. Bought out by Sierra which was good. Merged with CUC International which was very bad. Here is a New York Times article about CUC and the biggest accounting fraud ever: Asleep at the Books: A Fraud That Went On and On and On

During the years when I was spending a large part of my time in the hospital with Aidan, Jeff started up Garage Games with some former Dynamix employees. I published a few games with them before it was bought out by Barry Diller’s company (IAC) in 2007. Then he started up Pushbutton Labs which was bought out by Disney in 2012. I actually worked with Disney for a year or so before I moved on to work with Jeff again on his new venture, Spotkin. That was when I started work on Contraption Maker which is in many ways an updated version of The Incredible Machine.

So over the course of development of Contraption Maker, I implemented a whole boatload of different parts. At one point in the development I was implementing some container type parts in the game like boxes, baskets, and such. Around this time I was on one of my Eugene visits and I tell the Spotkin guys (Jeff, Jon, Keith, Tim) about how Aidan likes coolers. A few days later I get the artwork from them so that I can add cooler part to the game. They even put Aidan’s name on the cooler. It is a good thing to have work colleagues who are also your friends. In Jeff’s case a friend for over 30 years now.

Cool! I implemented it in the game and then brought Aidan into my office to see. You should have seen his face light up with a huge smile the first time he saw it.

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A longer version of Aidan’s early years is here: Aidan Ryan – Liver Transplant Story

It may take me a while because I’ll need to find some free time, but as I wrote above, I’m going to write another blog post that gives a technical description of how I took the artwork above and turned it into a cooler that acts with correct physics.

For now I am going to end this post with a more recent photo of Aidan and a video from his Make-a-Wish trip where he figured out he could make his shoe squeak.

 

 

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