My name is Garrett Taylor and I'm a developer / code rōnin living in the always interesting, Floridian peninsula.
Normally I would say something like 'Greetings' rather than 'Hello', but big words in titles break responsive site design at the narrower screen widths. Unless you explicitly id the element and on a per-case basis force it to a smaller font size, totally obviating the best advantages of a framework. And don't get me started on browser-based hyphenation …
Why? Because I'm a builder, a maker. An idea pops into my head and I need to create it. When the muse strikes - I write in a text editor. When I'm hungry for a new taste - you can find me in the kitchen. For a widget or repair or building a model - I have my workshop. For building tools that I can share - I prefer the web. But in that Woozle world of web, I'm less a Fraggle designer and more a Doozer programmer.
I've been building solutions since 1998. I've hand-coded portals, linked ancient terminal systems to the web, and built batch processes from the ground up for both small and large organizations. The acronyms are many, the technologies legion. Rarely is the alphabet soup in a solution the important part - just that the solution works. Not just now - as a static project - but how well it can adapt to changing environments and user needs.
That takes experience and forethought.
So, what can I build for you? Let me know.
A formal definition of game - /ɡām/ noun: a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
I focus on the play, less of the sport. I enjoy figuring out the rules to nearly any game, learning through iteration of what works and what doesn't. And if I can do that with friends, it makes it that much better. No matter the soul-shattering defeats or the euphoric victories, they are shared and enjoyed and then laid to rest as soon as the game ends. And to start a new game is to start fresh, maybe a little wiser to boot. It's when the stakes are really that small that I find the games to mean that much more.
You won't find me in any intensely competitive "Pro" environment. When millions of dollars, careers, lives, are at stake - it's no longer game to me. The immensity of the stakes removes the fun that I want in any game I play.
So respawn, draw a card, and decide what you're going to do already.
Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count. We are different and do things differently.
You may have heard of the franchises - Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War, Starcraft. They all follow the same basic model: rigid rules, a dependency on fast reaction times, and –most impactfully– anonymous interactions.
The interactions can be either competitive or co-operative, but the necessary limitations of technology and our monkeysphere introduce an anecdotally supported theory. Going without the normal social limiter of consequence for our actions, in a nod to Mr. Huizinga, we expose a less filtered version of ourselves.
Especially to ourselves.
American classics like Risk, Monopoly, or Chutes and Ladders epitomize the element of luck. Chess and Go are the other end of the spectrum where luck holds no sway and strategies rule.
Euro-style games, like The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, blend luck with strategy using a minimalist style of rules and where conflict is not always zero-sum game.
Which leaves cut-throat competition out of a game's social experience, unless that's why you're playing in the first place.
The most abstract form of gaming, at it's core it's just make-believe - a group weaving a story for the sake of enjoyment. Choices, especially those hard to encode in directions or algorithms, define both the game and the players. Choices that have no optimal outcomes? Unknowable consequences? For all the fantasy that roleplaying holds dear it is probably the one game style that depends the most on real-life.
Most systems – TORG, In Nomine, Heavy Gear, Pathfinder – have worlds already created and rule that dictate how the world runs. But others, like Masterbook, Savage Worlds, and GURPS (to name a few), leave the world rules out and form just a framework of resolving conflicts in a group's shared story.
Well, there is the meaning of the word kith - /kiTH/ noun: one's friends, acquaintances, and relations.
Back in the mid-aughts ('00's) I thought it would be nice to keep one place current for all of my friends and the limited number of family I still had. And clearly being a developer that specialized on putting things online - a website would be perfect. It would be the goto place if you needed to keep in touch with me. So a search for that perfect domain name was undertaken. And taylorkith.com was the final result - relatively short, had my last name in there, and a direct link to Old Middle English was great. Then Facebook came along with their general admission policy - leaving me with a fairly useless domain name as any real communication took place there.
So I turned it into the dump-all repository for anything I keep on the web.
Global Domination is not my goal. More like a hobby. I'm too much of a slacker to have a goal like that.
Under Construction is classic mid-nineties cliché filler, but it is the best way to describe a space that has grown organically in response to stimulus. Like pretty much every other human endeavor - even Stonehenge.
During a Nor’Easter that struck New England, I am born. [...]