This is worse than that time Pandora had the nerve to contaminate my Britney Spears/Lady Gaga station with Backstreet Boys.
Open Arms
Allison and I were lying on the living room couches talking. Or maybe we were sitting at the kitchen table talking. Or sprawled on the upstairs couch talking. Whatever. We spent most of this week talking, and that’s what we were doing when her husband, J, shouted in from the other room. “Honey, why’s our Wii blinking blue?”
“If it’s our alien overlords making first contact,” Allison shouted back, “then I for one will greet them with open arms.”
Look Like Rockstar!
look like rockstar, by Simpson’s Paradox
A rock star with a fondness for tea and computer games, but still!
Wanna Come Over And Check Out My Stamp Collection?
From the LiveShare / CoolIris booth at the SxSW trade show. I cannot stop laughing at this!
SxSW
Hey, did you know that South By Southwest isn’t actually the compass direction? If your sister were a sailor, like mine is, you’d know that it should be Southwest By South.
Anyway, I’m in Austin for SxSWi, which is pretty fantastic. The interactive track has had a bunch of great social media speakers and panels, which have led to great chats afterward. I’m lucky enough to have this amazing job in new media and community management, but to most people I meet, I do something or other with the internet. It’s great to talk with folks who are also doing jobs that didn’t exist a few years ago.
The indie section at Screenburn is stunning, with a great bunch of developers. The indiePub pavilion hits my indie checklist for both an indie game that looks and plays like a AAA title and an indie game that’s mind-blowingly weird.
And early-spring Austin is just gorgeous.
Plus I’m staying at Allison’s house! Allison and I became friends my freshman year of college, when our then-boyfriends, Eric and J, were roommates. Allison and J got married a few years ago, and now they’re expecting a baby! (Eric and I didn’t exactly work out romantically, but he’d still be my speed dial one, if phones still had speed dial.) It’s great to be with Allison again, whether she’s taking me on the tour of Austin hotspots or we’re sitting in her kitchen in the middle of the night.
Punchbacks 2.0
I flew into San Antonio yesterday to drive to Allison‘s house in Austin for SxSW. If I were a superhero, my archenemies would be driving and paperwork, so I was already pretty thrilled with myself for defeating them and getting this rental. Then I came out of the Enterprise kiosk, and saw that my car for the next week is a white punchbuggy! I guess the universe reads my blog.
This got slightly less fun when I got on the highway and discovered that every other car in Texas is either a truck or an SUV, but even being as high as the next guy’s wheelwell can’t dim the awesome of driving through cacti and scrub bushes in a punchbuggy.
Save GameTunnel!
GameTunnel was one of the first websites that focused on the indie gaming scene. It was founded in 2002 and had years of great coverage, monthly game roundups, game of the year awards, indie game reviews and more. The founder of the site left a few years ago and the new owners tried to carry on the site’s monthly coverage and legacy, but eventually got overwhelmed and stopped generating new content back in September of 2009.
Indie Game Magazine to the rescue!
Everyone here at the Indie Game Mag had been fans of GameTunnel and checked in on the website monthly and were sad to see the indie coverage drop off. Eventually, we got in contact with the site owners and ended up buying the site…
Like every other exciting indie games project, this one needs funding. Mike Gnade, my editor at IGM and an awesome guy in the indie games community, set up a Kickstarter page for the project.
Via Kickstarter
Posted in New York City, Other Blogs
Tagged games, GameTunnel, IGM, Indie Game Mag, indie games, New York City, other blogs
Leave a comment
Still Life With Japanese Translation
Taken right before I met up with Casey from The Kartel for the Cave Story talk at GDC. Of course, I pretended that the gizmo was actually translating for me instead of just playing the translator’s voice. It’s more scifi that way.
Related: Casey’s writeup of the Cave Story talk.
Posted in Gaming Culture
Tagged game culture, GDC, my cyberpunk life, San Fransisco, san fransisco, still life with, the Kartel
Leave a comment
