Harold and I arrive in Kansas City, where recent heavy rains have closed one of the main roads. Harold mumbles something about the highway being practically the Missouri River, after several days of rain.
“Should we try to ford the river?” I ask Harold, “Or should we caulk the wagon and float it across?”
(Oregon Trail screenshot from Shared Experiences provided for anyone unfamiliar with fording the river, dysentery and carrying 200 lbs of squirrel meat back to the wagon.)
I’ve just started writing for Tapscape’s new startups section, with my first post on relationship app Weesh:
Weesh, an iOs relationship app for long-term couples, is one of the startups completing Dreamit’s summer incubator. Weesh allows users to find and share new date ideas, and creates a photobook of the couple’s good times.
Users can spot an interesting new restaurant or see a trailer for a movie, and then they make a “weesh” sharing that desire with their significant other. Weesh supports adding a location, sharing a link, a photo, or just entering text of something you’d like to do with your sweetheart.This is social sharing at its best — no spamming 500 Facebook friends with mushy messages, just telling your sweetheart you saw something fun and thought of them.
This creates a list of the couple’s potential Weeshes, closing the gap between seeing an awesome new sushi place on Tuesday afternoon, and then ending up going to the same places on the weekend that you always go. Weesh also offer suggestions for dates, based on place and interest, a bit like another dating start-up app Datini.
Eric holds an end-of-summer barbecue called MeatFest, although that’s more and more inaccurately named every year. It’s still festive, I mean, but now that the group is not so much a mob of starving 20-year-old guys, there’s less meat and more summery salads, stuffed mushrooms, and other kinds of delicious. Our college friends still gather, as many as can make it, now with husbands and wives, and this year included the first baby. (Her parents call her the Trap Baby because she’s so cute and so good.)
I brought Harold, after warning him that uncoordinated volleyball featured prominently in the afternoon’s plans and that the Hoffmanns are my second family. He’s met most of my Massachusetts friends on other visits, and I was excited to introduce him to the rest.
Eric pointed me to the sangria, but told me to leave some for his girlfriend, who was on her way. (I was a little pleased about the sangria and a lot pleased about Eric having a girlfriend.)
Does that say "star"? I think it does...
We ended up drinking, eating, and talking games, as we usually do. I was reminded, again, how very much there is for me to learn. Greg teaches game development, so when the conversation turned to player archetypes, he pulled out the text book he just happened to be carrying… Grant mentioned he was starting a gamification class, and my immediate reaction was to ask him if he got an achievement for completing it. Grant’s actually the first person I knew who made his own RPG, years before the app store, Limbo, and Minecraft made “indie games” a widely-recognized genre.
We had the annual volleyball game, with more excitement and enthusiasm than skill or competition. We usually shift to a more cooperative game in which both sides participate in making long strings of volleys, instead of trying to score points. Some of the guys — including Harold! I didn’t see that coming! — also had the annual battle with foam swords.
As it got dark, we bug-sprayed ourselves and sat surrounding the firepit, catching up, telling stories and remembering other times.
Travel startup Tripl, originally a social connector for travelers, has undergone a reinvention as a virtual travel scrapbook. I checked out the newest version at Dreamit demo day.
The original version, if I remember right, allowed users to find friends, and friends-of-friends in the cities they’d be visiting. Seemed like a neat concept, and one I would absolutely have loved when I lived in Yantai, and I really, really wanted English-speaking friends. As an expat, I often met with distant connections of my distant connections to help them adjust to Chinese life or just meet another Westerner (and I was lucky enough be helped by Old China Hands when I needed it!). Now I live in New York, and if I met up with every single friend of a friend who happens to pass through town… well… um…. no.
The new version of Tripl is a social scrapbook, creating and displaying trip memories.
The design is just lovely, and Tripl pulls in additional content about the destination, like travel articles and related images. This part reminded me of OffBeat Guides, a print-on-demand customized travel guide, although of course the goal with Tripl is more a social memory book than travel planning.
By pulling in public info from Facebook and FourSquare, Tripl doesn’t require a user to have friends also using Tripl in order to see their travelogue.. This cleverly avoids the empty-room feeling that social startups often have. It can be really difficult to see if a product would be useful and fun when the only other users are the devs. Of course, it also makes me hyperaware of just how much of my life is geotagged already… Tripl considers 100 miles to be a trip, so you won’t see any gorgeous travelogues of my SCVNGR checkins at my local coffeeshop. (Still waiting for my auto-cool location app.)
Future plans include tying in Instagram, an obvious next step for a travel-photo app, but the staff is wary of taking on too much and working on too many features, preferring instead to focus just on social travel scrapbooking.
Harold: What does it mean when someone pokes you on Facebook?
Meg: That it’s 2005?
When I lived in China, I often ate shou la mien, those noodles that are stretched by the cook’s hands. Shou la mian (手拉面) literally means Hand Pulled Noodles. (I am excellent at Mandarin words for food I like.)
I can’t wait for the ChinesePod lesson on ordering Robot Cut Noodles.
(Video of noodle-cutting robot army is from LaughingSquid)
I’ve been spending more time in Brooklyn since I no longer have to go into Manhattan everyday, and it’s been pretty great. I love Brooklyn, and I’ve been enjoying visiting all the hipster coffeeshops and seeing my neighborhood during daylight hours. At the beginning of the summer, once day when it was unexpectedly windy at Coney Island, I bought a Brooklyn zippered hoodie, and I wear it non-ironically.
The other day, I went to Manhattan for a tech demo at the Time-Life building. I caught the C, at the time of day when the subway cars are bringing skinny jeans and giant headphones (playing cooler music than I’ve ever heard. I’m sure), to their midtown jobs at companies with self-consciously unique compound words for names. I love the subway anyway, even though I’ve been told that August is perhaps not New York’s best month.
And I love Manhattan too. I even love the tourists in Manhattan. Ok, maybe I don’t love the ones that think that the bottom of an escalator, or in front of the subway turnstile is a good place to stand around and look confused, but I love that people come from all over the world to visit and take pictures, and I live here.
I remember driving with Figment once, and being amazed by how much he loves Los Angeles, and thinking how much I would like to live someplace I loved like that. And I guess now I do.
Of course, the player doesn’t actually need to follow that backstory to gathers materials, and create valuable resources from them, and progress through the game’s levels.
Oddly, your first tasks are not so much gathering materials for a bed, building shelter, or improvising a lemon battery, but boiling gulls’ eggs and powdering them in a powdered-egg machine…. Still, collecting island resources like shrimp and coconuts, fighting off crabs, collecting fresh water, and so forth was sufficiently island-y. And the time-management system, as found in G5’s other Youda games, is a perfect level of challenge, satisfying to complete without ever becoming too difficult.
Players will also use island magic, doing rain dances to create freshwater or mixing potions for health and stamina. This is a nice layer on the time management mechanic, especially the potion recipes. I’m not terribly motivated by unlocking achievements or by cosmetic rewards in a single-player game, but I enjoyed crafting potions for my power-ups.
I played the Kindle Fire version, and it’s worth noting that it froze and required a restart several times. (It did not stop me from playing, or from getting it for my dad, who loves island games as much as I do.)
Could I sell you my kidney for this position?
— Things I did not actually say when asked if I had any further questions for the interviewer.
(I’m too polite to ask who I need to sleep with to get the job. Or at least I’m too polite to blog about it.)
