I didn’t make this, I just wish I did. (Thanks for showing me this, Bethie!)
Harold and Star Trek
Harold and I are walking down the street when he spots a Star Trek book on a bottom shelf of a crowded bookshelf, in the window of a closed store. He was talking, but he cuts off midsentence to drop to his knees and peer through the window.
“I can’t make out the full title,” he says. This is probably because the store is closed, and it’s dark, and also the bookshelf in question is halfway behind another piece of furniture.
“Don’t worry, it’s clearly a Chinese knockoff,” I said.
“Really? How can you tell?”
“There’s simply no other explanation for Star Trek paraphenalia you don’t already own.”
Industry
Today I got a LinkedIn request from a professional contact that began “Hi Meg, we played Kinect wearing wigs at E3…”.
This industry is pretty freaking awesome.
Posted in Los Angeles, New York City
Tagged e3, Los Angeles, New York City, not a f*cking waitress anymore
Leave a comment
Chinese Bingo: Using Games for Cross-Cultural Education
So, I was recently invited to speak at the Serious Play Conference out in Redmond, where I totally tricked everyone into thinking I knew stuff about China and gameplay.
It was pretty nerve-wracking, I spoke on the third day on the conference, and I spend the previous two days worrying about it. When I was listening to sessions, I was worried that I wasn’t spending enough time preparing my talk, or when I left and worked on my talk, I worried that I was missing interesting sessions. There really were some fantastic speakers doing great projects at the intersection of gameplay, technology and education, and I was kind of stunned to be included on that list.
I wonder how long it’ll be before I stop thinking that I’m really not a waitress anymore.
Posted in Seattle
Tagged China, gameplay, games, pretending to be an adult, Redmond, Seattle, Serious Play, Serious Play Conference
1 Comment
Some Indecipherable Code
Today I sent my dad a quest flowchart I’ve been working on, because it was a perfect mix of snarky dialogue, programming logic, hours spent playing Monkey Island, and some of my other random interests. My dad wrote back with a text-based adventure about quest design. It begins:
>LOOK
>THERE IS A DIPLOMA HERE
>PICK UP DIPLOMA
>IT APPEARS TO DO NOTHING
>LOOK
>THERE IS AN ENGLISH-MANDARIN DICTIONARY HERE
>PICK UP DICTIONARY
>IT IS WRITTEN IN SOME INDECIPHERABLE CODE
It goes on from there, with the player narrowly avoiding the possible pitfalls of slimey guys and waitressing, and it ends with THERE ARE BIG PILES OF GOLD HERE.
I think in normal families, fathers just tell their daughters they’re proud of them.
ChinesePod, OpenStudy and Education
I’ve got a new piece over on Dialect Magazine, talking about ChinesePod, OpenStudy, education for its own sake, and the most annoying website add-on I’ve seen since autoloading music (No, it’s not ChinesePod or OpenStudy).
Tech-enabled students set their own educational pace, jumping to the lectures that most interest them, without sitting through 100-level prereqs first, and are able to focus on educational content, not passing exams.
With free access, freemium services, or modest pricing, these educational technologies are almost always available on your smartphone, on the way to work, to make self-guided education completely accessible. Learning Chinese, studying physics or just listening to a one-off lecture, is now totally within reach.
Via CyberCulture: OpenStudy | ChinesePod | TwoChop | Dialect Magazine
Posted in My Other Writing, New York City
Tagged chinesepod, my other writing, New York City, OpenStudy
Leave a comment
Overage, Anti-social, And Completely Owning It.
Caitlin, my college age co-worker, asked me about Tweetdeck, so I showed her some of the ways I sort incoming social information, and what I do with it. I stopped just short of admitting that sometimes, at work, I pretend to be Oracle in the clocktower.
“Whoa. I thought I’d be more tech savvy because I’m younger,” Caitlin said, “but you just do so much of this!”
(I am currently adding spends lots of time on the internet to my resume.)
Sonar: Tech-enabled Telepathy
I have a new piece up on Dialect Magazine, chatting about social media, location-based apps and live-action friendspam, and anticipating future interactions of tech and society.
New location-based social app Sonar.me, though, takes that into account and works as an add-on over your existing social profiles. Sonar’s goal is social telepathy, an app showing your Facebook and Twitter connections to people around you. You might walk into a party or a conference, and check your phone to see if you share any mutual friends with the strangers in the room.
Sonar’s online-offline integration also leads to a fascinating social question: What’s the etiquette around this new connection? Is it socially acceptable now to walk up to a Sonar connection, and introduce yourself?
If so, what about all the dead weight we’ve got clogging our social networks? You know, your buddy’s ex-girlfriend or an old classmate, someone you wouldn’t unfriend, but someone whose social recommendation is pretty light. A tenuous social connection could be at least a starting point in conversation, a connection between glancing friendship spheres and a badge marking a stranger at a party as one of our kind. Or is mutually knowing a former college hallmate just bringing friend-request spam offline?
Via Sonar: Tech-enabled Telepathy | Meg Stivison | Dialect Magazine
Ramen Candy
Last weekend was Alistair’s pool party, an annual tradition for a growing circle that includes a lot of my high school friends.
When I moved back north last fall, I felt strange picking up with my friends from ten or fifteen years ago. I still feel awkward answering the first questions you’d ask anyone back in town after a long absence, those basic questions about why I moved back or what I’d been doing, because I came back to New Jersey so completely battered from the intersection of relationship and career failures.
But, hey, if you ever need to reboot your life at almost-thirty, these are some of the guys to do it with!
We were still at the grocery store before Alistair’s party when the shenanigans began.
Apologies to other people in the store. In my defense, though, A RAMEN DESSERT COOKBOOK???
No, I didn’t get the cookbook. Mostly because the temptation to try the recipes would be too great, but also because I wanted to spend that money on beer.
Alistair is a tattoo artist (Yes, all my friends are cooler than me. Thanks for noticing!), so most of his friends at the party were inked and decorated, sporting retro-cute bathing suits, wild haircolors, and piercings. I was impressed (and a tiny bit intimidated) by how awesome all the guests looked, and I said as much to my high-school friend Colron.
“Oh,” Colron said, realization dawning after a moment’s reflection. “This conversation is about fashion. Ok, carry on.”
Posted in New Jersey
Tagged Alistair, As seen in New Jersey, Colron, grocery store adventures, high school friends, New Jersey, ramen, Roy, Willem
2 Comments
