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, by Simpson’s Paradox
A rock star with a fondness for tea and computer games, but still!
From the LiveShare / CoolIris booth at the SxSW trade show. I cannot stop laughing at this!
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.
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.
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
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.
DEMO was held at a gorgeous resort, and I was completely impressed. This is, quite literally, the view from my balcony. I woke up every day completely amazed that this is my real life. (Of course, I spent the rest of each day rushing around, vibrating between the excruciating boredom of answering the same three questions* over and over, and the terrifying strangeness of interviews and all the other bizarre new activities that has somehow become my job.) I think I’ll come back to launch my next tech startup here, too!
After DEMO, I flew to San Fransisco for GDC. My Geary Street hotel has the thickly-painted doors and aggressively ugly linens that I’m starting to expect when I pick a hotel based on price, proximity and wifi. More importantly, it was full of students, small-studio devs and journalists in town for the conference. Game chat was constantly breaking out in the halls or over lounge coffee, and it wasn’t a rehearsed exchange of elevator pitches. The game journo dorm is definitely more home than the resort.
* Those three questions are:
1) So, it’s like Second Life, huh?
2) So, it’s like World of WarCraft, huh?
3) Wow, a girl computer gamer. Are all the boys are crazy about you?
