One of our demo laptops bluescreened at the booth, so I rushed back to my room to grab my netbook and hotfix some gameplay videos. I picked up my netbook, and ran back to the pavilion. I was running up a sweeping marble staircase, under the palm trees, worrying about kludging a demo of my MMO, when I realized I was stressing about running through the palm trees in time to kludge a demo of my videogame.
Because I’m not a waitress anymore!
It was at this precise moment when our heroine realized that she usually prefers playing videogames alone.
Registration at Demo Spring 2011, by The DEMO Conference
Setting up the game to present at DEMO.
This is what a potential connection problem looks like. Unfortunately there’s no picture of my happy dance a few minutes later when I got it working.
Figment came to pick me up at LAX to bring me out to the resort where DEMO was being held. He made my few hours in LA even more awesome by taking me on an epic quest for all the West Coast-only drivethrus, actually eating Del Taco in the line for In-and-Out Burgers.
A few minutes in, he turned and gave me a weird look. I followed his eyes to the VW bug pulling out in front of us. There was a pause. With meaningful eye contact. I knew what he was thinking. The only questions was which of us would say the thing that was on both of our minds…
“Oh, are we starting that again?” he said.
It is a two hour drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs. I’m just saying.
The other night, I told my parents my travel plans for California to go to DEMO and then GDC.
“When you’re driving out from LA to Palm Springs,” my dad said, “and you look out the window and see how green everything is, remember that your dad irrigated that desert.”
“You know, Dad,” I said, “when I was growing up, every time you referred to dropping out of an Ivy League college and digging ditches, I thought it was a metaphor.”
Meg: I’m listening to all my bad music before you come work with me!
Harold: Oh, that’s ok, I’m pretty laid back with music.
Meg: You only say that because you haven’t heard my awesome Lady Gaga / ABBA mix tape.
Harold: Yeah… I might not be that laid back.
(I started to post an apology about how this actually came out as a hard copy around Christmas, but posting about it has slipped my mind because I’ve been so busy with the killer monkeys and timetravel at my day job. Then I realized that I’ve been busy with killer monkeys and timetravel at my day job!!! and rather than apologizing about it, I did a little happy dance.)
Anyway! Last spring, I helped out with Passionfruit Games’ first title Tiger Eye. The game was originally released as a downloadable game in May 2010, but it’s now available as a hard copy, with a box and disc and all that. I haven’t seen it in a store yet (see previous re: monkeys), but I’m sure there’s an another in-aisle happy dance in my immediate future.
“…and then I had a really productive telephone meeting about the magazine, and what direction we’re taking it in.” Marcus told me. “Well, actually it wasn’t on the phone, we were talking on Vent, while playing WarCraft.”
I usually make fun of Marcus’ non-digital lifestyle and lack of technical familiarity, so I was pretty pleased to hear this, and I wanted to blog about it. I found a pen in the litter of nail polish and lipgloss next to my bed, but didn’t have paper available, so I wrote a couple notes on the back of my hand.
Marcus. WarCraft. Vent as phone.
Then I hung up and went to sleep.
The following morning did not begin with me adding a clever post to my blog. Instead, it began with me frantically trying to scrub enoph sa tnev tfarcraw sucram off my face.
