I recently conducted an interview with Stephen Cakebread, the creator of the completely wonderful and addictive Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved Xbox Live Arcade game on the 360. Here’s a couple of my favorite question and answers:

Me: Is it true that you hate gamers? That’s the only reason I can think of for including the small purple rectangles — AKA Satan’s Own Miniature Deliverers Of Evil And Consternation — in your design .

Steve: I eat kittens for breakfast too.

and

Me: As a corollary, I’m curious how hard your title pushes the 360 to generate those particle effects and physics calculations. Have you done any profiling and what is your feel for how much overhead you’d have left to push the hardware?

Steve: Well, all games will generally use 100% of the hardware, although some games will get more out of that 100% than others! To give an example from Geometry Wars, I just kept increasing the maximum number of particles on-screen till the game framed out, then backed off a little from that. I could have spent another few weeks optimising the particle code and maybe got double the number of particles on-screen, but at some point we had to ship the game! So I can’t really give you an answer to your question till I actually sit down and try to get more performance out of it!

If you want to read the whole interview — and there’s a ton more there — head on over to the Gamers With Jobs Press Pass and catch the goods.

I’ve moved this thing over to the Lightpress front end. Why? I’ve mentioned before that I’ve gotten nastygrams from Dreamhost for taking too many resources. I’ve tried many, many things, from adjusting the content of the sidebar to no longer display “most popular” and other types of things, to no longer using my Image Headlines plugin, to enabling caching, to using the Preformatted plugin and I never got the usage under control. I’m almost positive it’s a Dreamhost ineffeciency, but they won’t do anything about it preferring instead to send me nastygrams and encourage me to upgrade to their dedicated hosting for a hundred bucks a month. Sure.

I average 6,000 hits a day. Does that seem excessive to you? Does that seem like enough traffic to choke a server? Me neither. So I installed Lightpress which is a supposedly more lightweight front-end to WordPress. That forced me to downgrade to WordPress 1.5 but oh well.

So, what does this mean to you, dear reader? A couple of things.

• Some things don’t work right now. Some people can’t find posts, the archives are for poop. Someday I’ll get around to them.
• Commenting has been turned off. I had it on, LightPress supports commenting. Hell, they even provide an “anti-spam” plugin. Doesn’t appear to do much. So, I spend my time receiving emails from my installation with the 40 latest spam comments and I couldn’t be bothered anymore. When the signal to noise ratio drops below the audibility threshhold, the terrorists win. Congrats spammers! You win!

If I sound bitter or uncaring, I am right now. I have a(nother) sinus infection that’s absolutely killing me. My daughter had one of the worst “colds” we’ve experienced with her for the past 8 days including a 2:00 am trip to the ER for a nasty croup. My wife is slowly coming down with something as well. And I have a work deadline hanging over my head like a guillotine so I can’t just go home and sleep all day. So, dealing with the latest phentermine spam? Off the chart of “sick and tired of screwing with.”