mikeurbanski

Shut Up & Sit Down: Board game review show and secret project.

http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down

Shut Up & Sit Down (http://shutupandsitdown.com & http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down)

A board game review show and a few secret projects.

Cool because: Very funny.

Ah! My first submission was for w09, I thought that I re-submitted my apps for each of the next cycles, making this my 10th. I'm at 6? Will update the title.

Should have made it: "From someone who has been applying for 5 years"

I've had a mix of of mcu/mikeurbanski accounts online for years, when I finally decided to pick one I settled on mikeurbanski. A rename would be useful, but the two accounts have diverged in the past year.

Applying to YC actually forces you to think about the things that you need to do to make a project work.

If you keep at it eventually you become more capable, start to find traction on your own, and you find that you've gained most of the skills that you thought you needed something like YC to teach you.

I spent my 20's grasping for something that was just out of reach, and I'm better for it.

If I had to guess why they were rejected I'd say that it's because they're typically:

#1: Consumer focused

#2: Unsexy/unknown markets

Were they wrong to reject them? Probably not. Traditional gaming isn't a market that many take seriously.

I'm still implementing many of the ideas that have been submitted to YC. I'll release the apps and write retrospectives as we push out features in the future.

Yes, they were usually submitted under one-off accounts. I think that one was 'itemshoppe'.

I love their design and I was a huge fan of Core Wars in HS.

I've been trying to get them to give me a peek for the last week, I really want to cover them/give them free ad space at launch.

Nothing. Radio Silence.

Not being able to edit out that "market place" typo is going to bug me forever.

It really didn't.

M:TG and Netrunner were both designed by Richard Garfield and Netrunner's design was directly influenced by his experience with M:TG.

Cards in Netrunner aren't tapped because actions in Netrunner are limited by a player's "clicks", not just their available resources.

It was a design decision.

The API was just a feature. The actual product was a multi-merchant market place w/ a shipping estimator that was a 1-1 implementation of EasyPost (YC S13).

Unfortunately, and I say this from excruciating experience, this isn't a complete/accurate representation of all M:TG cards.

I spent the summer of 2011 scraping Gather to build out a product catalog and API for a start up that didn't start. I really wish that I had taken the time to put the data out as a torrent.

"Magic: The API" doesn't appear to support:

* Multi-faceted cards such as "Fire // Ice"(http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...)

Both return the data for the "Fire" facet, but with different artists: http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch/id/27165 & http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch/id/27166

* Double sided cards such as "Student of Elements" (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...)

Only shows data for "Tobita, Master of Winds": http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch/id/78691

* Double cards such as B.F.M (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...)

Only shows 1/2 of the cards: http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch/id/9844

* Multi-sided cards such as "Cloistered Youth // Unholy Fiend" (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...)

Only shows the "Unholy Fiend" data: http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch/id/221212

M:TG has 20 years of strangeness to take into account when creating a data model... And Gatherer has its own issues. For example, the way symbols are represented in card text is inconsistent. (e.g. The tap symbol can be represented as both "ocT" and "{T}", and the representations for mana symbols have evolved inconsistently as well.)

Wizards of the Coast are the only ones who can build this API legally. They hold the copyright on all of the data related to M:TG and I truly wish that they would open up it up so that we, as a people, wouldn't have to spend hundreds of hours recreating the wheel. Poorly. [0]

Fortunately, I stopped what I was doing and started on a board gaming "thingy" with friends instead: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/

[0]: That isn't to say that the mtgapi.com guys/gals did a shoddy job. It's just a big task that WotC should be forward looking enough to do themselves.

While I have WotC on the line... Why wasn't the D&D 5th Edition SRD hosted on GitHub during development?

Well, how are you working to change that?

We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched.

We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.

There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating.

Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum?

When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".

Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else.

There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

Oh! Of course it's not confirmed. It would just be nice for someone on the inside to give a wink+nod, or tell us that's it's completely off the mark.

Can someone at Pixar confirm or deny this? Pees?

My favorite quote about this comes from Douglas Rushkoff:

"Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff."

Are jobs obsolete?: http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete...

It's up for me.

Thanks!

We're "profitable". We're really happy with how the new site turned out. Having enough to keep the lights on an pay some friends to help out with the writing after only a month is a huge accomplishment.

I'm pretty curious about MoD too! We'll see what happens.

We don't make board games, we're just wildly passionate about them. Paul & Quinns started Shut Up & Sit Down so they could have fun reviewing and writing about board games. They just had a hard time figuring out how to make it sustainable.

I've been playing with technology surrounding gaming for the last three years or so(and gaming since I was little) so it was natural for us all to team up and build something together.

We're doing the same thing. Our team is located in NYC, London, and Aurora, IL.

We launched our little meta-board gaming company at http://susd.pretend-money.com a little over 1.5 months ago. And we're already profitable!

We made a conscious decision to forego taking money from advertisers/investors, and even dodged a pre-launch acquihire offer, in an attempt to create something that's 100% our vision (unless YC wanted to fund us.) Our plan is to grow slowly, keep up the quality, and use the money that we're making from the show/blog/podcast to fund even more ambitious community/tech projects.

AND!

Board Games are Big Business!

Board/card/traditional gaming (whatever you want to call it) has been exploding in America over the last 10 years or so. It taps into that primal need for people to sit around together and ACTUALLY interact with each other.

We're in a bit of a "Golden Age of Board Gaming". Quinns gave a hilarious talk on the subject: http://susd.pretend-money.com/videos/v/board-game-golden-age...

It feels like DRF is trying to do too much. I'm not a fan of Django's generic views for much the same reason.

I really wanted a framework that was as easy to use as plain Django views while still handling the REST heavy lifting.

So I made Delicious Cake: https://github.com/pretend-money/delicious-cake

It's based on Tastypie, but features a complete Resource re-design that moves serialization and validation out of the Resource. The power of a REST framework w\ the flexibility of plain old Django views.

Two companies are using it in production and a few more are evaluating it. If you love-hate TastyPie you might like it.

Sounds like he knows Linux...

This was a strange application cycle for us. I've applied in the past and my analytics (Google/Bit.ly) and logs have always lit up as the app was under reviewed.

This time. Nothing. Not a single click on our links or view of our video...

Which is strange because we have a great team, a live site (with an audience nearing 75k/month), income, and had an acquisition offer just a few months ago.

Maybe I missed something... Our strongest app didn't appear to be reviewed.

Did anyone else not see any hits from YC on their application's analytics?