We had a bunch of people over for Matt's birthday and his mom and my sister had just come out with me to give some feed to the boys. Cinnamon mows through his handfuls of feed so quickly that he spills more pellets than he actually eats, and every time now he's taken to cleaning up his mess for several minutes after we're done, hoovering up pellets from the barn floor or the pasture (wherever we've managed to feed them).

Every media outlet has its bias and NPR is no exception, but if the site goes against your political grain and you can get past that you'll be rewarded with a broadcast that said more about the proposed health care legislation than all of the town halls combined, and with none of the distasteful and shameful theatrics that townhall attendees and political talking heads on both sides of the spectrum seem bent on engaging in.

There are three of them -- Cinnamon, Benz, and Silverton -- and they are completely adorable as alpacas are wont to be. Those of you who've been following our progress on Facebook already know their origin story, so you can feel free to skip a bit. But for those that don't, we got them from Don and Jody Stanwyck of Jo's Fleece Fields, who've gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping us prepare to be first-time alpaca owners. I'd read and researched for years but the time had finally come to actually get alpacas, because the only way I was going to learn any more was by actually owning them.

And that brings us to today's Good UI Principle:

Principle 1: It is far easier and cheaper to develop a multi-platform UI for the console version first and use it as the basis for the PC version than it is to develop the UI for the PC version and back-develop it for the console version.

Principle 2: In the era of multi-platform (and thus multi-input-device) games, UI coding language and algorithms need to be changed from language that uses words like "mouseover" and "rollouts" to "on-actions", "on-exits", and "on-selects."

Giving the player all information at all times is not only not advantageous, but actively damaging to the game experience.

It's a subpoint on my list because it dovetails into a larger point, which is that a UI's job is to present only the information you need when you actually need it, and that information shouldn't crowd your screen at any other time.

I've learned a lot over those many years, and about a year ago I decided it would be kind of cool to keep track of the things I've learned about UI design and the user experience in games in some kind of list. The list has since grown to include about twenty items so far and as long as I work in UI I can only assume that the list will continue to grow. I've taken to calling the list "Good UI Principles" and I've decided it would be a great idea to start expanding on each one of the items in my list in a collection of blog essays because discussion about good UI design is surprisingly hard to find. As to whether or not I'll actually contribute anything to a discussion about good UI design remains to be seen, but hey, what's the harm in trying?

For the past few months I've been working on the UI for Demigod (and by the way, we released the first official trailer today) and we reached a point a couple of weeks ago in which the UI needed a complete overhaul. The other leads on the project were worried about how I'd take this because they knew they were essentially telling me, "we're sorry, but you have to completely redo this, it doesn't fit with the game now." After discussing what changes we wanted to make one of the leads asked me worriedly, "are you okay with this? I mean, we're basically redoing everything." And when I said yes, explaining that this always happens in UI because there's a point you reach at which it just sort of...well, happens, he said, "it does? So what are we doing wrong, then?" Speaking in the broad, industry-wide sense of the word we.

It looks like I made that goal -- earlier that I thought, even -- because my belly dance instructor has asked me to join her troupe, Skin Deep. I guess this means I'm a real belly dancer now.

It seemed that as soon as I joined the troupe we started getting a slew of performance dates alongside Skin Deep's student troupe, and since I've got a lot of family and friends local to the area, I thought it would be useful to point out where we're performing.

But all of that has changed, my friend! On a complete whim last year I decided I was going to try belly dancing. I figured if there was any kind of dance I might have a remote chance of being decent at it would be something that utilized my more than ample junk in the trunk. Sure, they call it belly dancing, but that turns out to be a bit of a misnomer.

If you're an atypical gaming female like me, it's easy to let a knee-jerk reaction get the best of you and make you want to call him a misogynist or sexist, but if you have that reaction then you need to remember one thing: Magnus Bergsson isn't talking about you. He's talking about your average woman, and you know what? He's right.

This isn't entirely new to me. Back in high school I was in Marine Corps. Junior ROTC where I was not only a good shot on the air rifle team (I had a sharpshooter medal), but I was able to spend a week in full immersion at Parris Island, Marine Corps. boot camp. Part of the boot camp experience was the M-16 rifle course, and I'm proud to say that I didn't do too badly, but that experience is a distant memory...