Huge Guts

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRtuxdfQHw]
if you are looking to see cliches distilled + broken down + employed effectively, you often do better to look to the veteran wings of a creative industry than to look at the obvious players; smart folks sometimes choose to sit on the sidelines, collect mad bank, and giggle about the silliness of their jobs without the puffery that accompanies being a known face.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh8-ks6FpeE&hl=en&fs=1]

is teenagers with MS Paint a genre yet?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7522952.stm

beyond the obvious WTF! layer of this story, there’s something very disappointing the reporting here: clearly something interesting is happening on the North Island of New Zealand, but the report as given gives zero insight into who or why people are picking such interesting names for their children. Is it spread throughout the island, or occuring in a particular community? Are there ethnic or class similarities, or a famous New Zealander with an exotic name? Was there a rash of children named after Tolkien figures after the LOTR productions?

so much opportunity, but so little data.

this one goes out to Number 16 Bus Shelter, future totally rad person.

“Although now, my favorite subgenre, thanks to Drew Goddard, is the Final Fantasy VIII interstitial videos cut up to music by Evanescence. I think that’s the movie I want to make.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Ok, so i’m just back into town, and i have much, much to say, but this is quick and doesn’t require much of a write-up, but Warren Spector has a blog: http://junctionpoint.wordpress.com/

The name kind of hints at it and the writing proves it that it’s definitely focused on the new studio, although he does have the usual drops into self-deprecation and analysis that are the hallmarks of a new blog getting its feet. Still, he also drops a lot of insight into his working process, and it is *very* awesome to see such a well-respected and championing game designer talking so openly about himself, his work, and his company. the stuff about junction point also functions as excellent PR, btw, to any corp-types who are listening.

Powered by ScribeFire.

hi!

just back from a week of high-momentum information acquisition. i talked to people about things and also stuff.

I will start with some people:

mark ‘danger’ chen, to whom i owe the idea of talking about the people i ran into. i was foisted upon mark as the GLS students went to dinner on a boat to celebrate the end of the conference, and it was a totally fortuitous.  Mark listened to me ramble a bunch, shared a great meal, and shares a special bond with over the roleplaying opportunity afforded to evil jedi on the wookie home planet Kashyyyk  in the original KOTOR. the secret here is that encountering the Prisoner’s Dilemma is more complicated than it looks.  I am really curious about his work;

Se4n Dunc4n: made fun of me a lot. but his work (with constance and it looks like david simkins, beth king and barbara johnson too) is so exciting:looking at  the ‘theorycrafting’ side of wow players as a kind of scientific literacy (first off, the models for scientific literacy are something i’d never heard of and are really interesting; but moreover, min/maxing really is where i got used to math and there are a lot of interesting questions brought up with this). he still made fun of me though.

Lauren Silberman: future classmate! we compared many notes and kind of hung out by default for a while on friday, which ended up being really nice because we both had a lot of the same things on our minds. Her undergraduate work with the GLS group at Madison seems to have prepped her really well for the greater conversations, and the work she wants to take on is a really neat juncture of some things that i don’t know about; that’s one of the really exciting things about the CMS program. like stepping into a party with a wide net of DJs, i’m getting a pleasurable juggling of the novel and familiar, old and new, me and dia..

also, “pleasurable juggling”. sorry.

Powered by ScribeFire.