12/07/09 - Had a writeup of events at Comic-Con 2009 published

12/04/09 - Blogged on Gamasutra about the addictive nature of Farmville

08/24/09 - Had an interview with Terry Brooks published

05/04/09 - Had an article on storytelling and narration in games published

03/09/09 - Had an article on fairness and balance in games published

12/06/08 - Two significant pieces published, an article on video game music, and one talking about puzzles in adventure games
08/05/08  - New photos from Comic-Con and a somewhat less recent trip

08/04/08 - I've gotten a piece on adventure games published, read all about it here.

02/23/08 - New photos, new post on music, I've been reserving this page for more analytical writing and posting more casual stuff on my blog

Bringing you originality in screen names since 1984.

My goals for making this site:

• To express my personality in a way that will not cause prospective employers to flinch when they Google my name
• To tap the vast power of the internet to bring my timeless appeal to the widest audience possible, forming a prospective pool of hapless admirers and romantic prospects
• To make the details of my life accessible to the masses of people with whom I do not have the time to keep up daily correspondance.
• To improve the breadth and depth of the internet by filling it with combinations of letters and words not previously contained in the pre-existing forty terabytes of text on the web
• To provide a lasting contribution to our culture by combining the disparate fields of pseudo-intellectual philosophizing, random internet humor, cow puns, and pineapple juggling
• World peace.

Frequently Asked Questions of Mark Newheiser:

Where are your brothers anyway?

One's back from England, studying at the University of Chicago, working on becoming a stand-up-philosopher. One's studying Jazz Guitar at the University of Southern California, you can check out some of his past musical efforts here, at his new website. And I am working on have achieved a Master's in Computer Science. Someone has to be the practical one.

Hi, what's your name?

Mark Newheiser. The first name is taken from a book of a two thousand year old religious text, and the last name is a bit of an oddity, it was misspelled a few generations ago so I'm one of only 12 people to bear the name.

So, how are you?

Fine. Really. I have a general carefree attitude on life offset by spasms of frantic overwork, with an underlying current of detached cynicism and emotional alienation from the culture of my peers.

What's your sign?

Sorry, I don't believe in astrology. You see, I'm a Gemini.

What do you do for a living?

At the moment? Starving student Exhausted employee / geek-for-hire. Long-term, computer programming and software engineering, with casual forays into journalism and ludological analysis.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Frankly, is it any of your business? Don't you think that poor chicken is tired of being psychoanalyzed by every two-bit comic who thinks he has a new take on poultry humor? Don't you think it's time to stop projecting our own sensibilities onto unwitting livestock? Isn't it enough to just let chickens be chickens, without questioning the how or the why?

And technically speaking, it's equally accurate to say the road passed under the chicken.

Will you marry me?

How should I know? If I knew that I wouldn't be single, now would I?

Can you do your Yoda impression for me?

No, go away.

If you were a plant, what kind of plant would you be?

I see myself as being most like the tomato. It's quirky, round, tasty, and considered to be poisonous by primitive cultures.

How old are you?

When it comes to my biological age, I prefer making people guess. Emotionally I tend to live my life at the age of 14, in an eternal state of awkward adolescence.

Feel free to submit more questions to the list at the e-mail address quite obviously tied to this page through gmail.

Fun(ny) Facts about Mark Newheiser

• I figured out the points of a compass by playing the Myst(tm) series
• I always bet on black
• I can count to 1023 on my fingers. Ask me how sometime
• I was born over Texas soil, and my birthplace was Saudi Arabia
• I have a perfect memory for both faces and names, but no ability whatsoever to correlate the two
• I am the world's greatest lacrosse player, despite never having once attempted the sport
• My only weakness is a particularly offensive shade of the color taupe. Before it, I am powerless.
• Every other Thursday I am replaced by a robotic duplicate who goes through life doing everything exactly the same as I do, only the insides of his socks are colored purple.
• I once did so well in an eighteen hole round of golf that I came back with a negative score. Stanford mathematicians are working around the clock to determine whether this is due to some hypermathematical breach in the fabric of logic itself, or just sloppy counting.
• Al Gore invented the internet. But I made it awesome
• If I ever have children, they will all be named after lesser-known Roman Deities, such as Janus or Vetermnus. My strategy for finding a wife is based almost exclusively around this fact.
• If it is ever required of me, I can produce a frame-by-frame replica of The Princess Bride entirely from memory.
• It has probably been years since I have had the occasion to fall asleep without the rhythmic whir of a computer in the background
• I am allergic to cats, dust, and the later works of Franz Liszt
• More people than I will ever get to know personally have already viewed this site, and people have spent more time reading things I've written here than I ever spent writing them.
• I try to avoid ever saying or thinking the same thing twice. I have a few repeatable routines I pull out, but most of the originality is for my own benefit.
• I don't so much "live my life" as I conduct field research for my autobiography
• I kind of like the Hulk when he's angry
• If a black cat crosses my path, it actually brings the cat bad luck, not the other way around
• I have an FCC license to emit frequencies in the 230 kHz range at any time of my choosing
• I'd rather make a difference than be happy. I'm reasonably certain that lots of people have been happy before
• On two days out of the solar year I cast no shadow,  and on those nights my mind is filled with such things as would kill my spirit for the waking world if ever I remembered them
  
• I believe that information can save the world
  
• I am fundamentally committed to the promotion of truth over discernible error to a degree beyond any possible compromise
• I dream of a world where our present ratio of style to substance is reversed
• I have three cognitive processes which occupy most of my mental uptime. Analysis, creativity, and fantasy. When real life fails to pose sufficient challenge, I'll occupy myself with analysis of a particular problem or work, expanding my creative horizons and mental catalog of ideas, or engaging in pure unhinged self-indulgent imagination.

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