Cristiano made this photo a couple of weeks ago with his new lens, that has a cool depth of field. The effect is very creepy:
I’ve got a wonderful pair of black knee high leather Aerosole boots (see the black pair in the image below), but a couple of weeks ago I tripped when stepping off an escalator and I may have damaged the heel. I’m not sure yet if it’s possible to fix it; it’s like the inside part of the heel broke (just a little bit though), so it’s slightly wobbly.
They haven’t died completely yet, but the past couple of weeks I’ve just been too scared to use them, in case I damage them even more. I know I should get around to bringing them to a shoe repair, but I just haven’t found the time or the right place. So in the mean time I thought I’d look for another pair shoes! (yeah, no time to bring the old shoes to a shoe repair, but I do have time to go shoe shopping)
I didn’t want a replacement to these boots though, more something that would complement them. So while the old ones had high heels, I thought I’d look for a robust flat pair that would stand a bit of rain and a long day of walking around.
Now most of you may know my problems with shoe hunting (see previous posts). One of my feet is larger than the other, so I always have trouble finding the right shoes. I’m already quite fussy when it comes to the type of shoe (it has to meet my requirements exactly), then add to that the trouble of two different sized feet!
I almost had given up on finding something, when Cristiano noticed a small leather shop with shoes for sale. I ended up with these boots:
Here’s another photo:
They’re exactly what I was looking for! Flat, black, they look like leather (they’re actually rubber), robust, rain proof, comfortable, in other words: a nice new addition to my growing shoe family (I don’t have that many pairs, only six, and that’s including my wellies and running shoes).
I’ve been meaning to write about this conference for more than a week now, but things have just kept on popping up. As I said in a previous post, Playful was a different type of games design conference, not only featuring game designers (in fact, I think there were only two that were actually just that), but mainly people who were passionate about games and had a different perspective to game design.
I arrived slightly late (ugh, public transport), so I missed the intro from Toby Barnes and most of the talk from James Wallis. I got to see all the other presentations though and all of them gave a really unique view. In total there were 15 talks, each of them 20 minutes long. I won’t try to describe every single presentation, instead I’ll highlight the ones I found most interesting.
Roo Reynolds had a cool talk about how he used ControllerMate to interpret the Guitarhero/Rockband guitar “buttons” and pass it on to GarageBand. The result was being able to use your GuitarHero guitar as an actual instrument and create and play your own (or other people’s) songs. His slides and audiocast are up on Slideshare. Here’s a short clip of Roo playing Hotel California:
A nice (and completely unintentional) followup to Roo’s talk was Matthew Irvine Brown‘s presentation. He talked about the similarities between how you learn games and music (how you learn how to play a game and how you learn to play music, like reading notes and scales). He had done a couple of experiments to see how people could learn music principles through a more game like structure.
In one experiment Matthew took brass band type of instruments like trumpets, trombone and tuba, and created Guitarhero-like plastic controllers. In another he used a breath controller as the controller for a small remote control car (exhaling/inhaling in different degrees caused the car to go left/right). Finally Matthew had another experiment with a singing sock puppet (see this video to see what I mean), which got these type of reactions from people:
Adrian Hon normally talks about Alternate Reality Games and that type of game design, but for this conference he wanted to do something different and not rehash an old presentation. So he talked about addiction and his own experiences with it. He told us how a couple of months ago he decided to play Team Fortress 2. Now the cool thing of that game is that you can play in clans with people, so Adrian found a fun clan to join and played regularly with the same group. Only problem: the clan was based in the US, and their standard playing hours were 1am-3am.
After a while Adrian had trouble sleeping and chose for a weird solution: drink alcohol. Apparently for him alcohol would make him sleepy, so he’d drink a couple of beer/wine/(I don’t remember what exactly) every time he would play at night. At one point though it came so far that he’d also drink on the nights he didn’t play. It wasn’t a lot, not enough to think “oh, I’m a alcoholic”, but eventually he realised he shouldn’t be drinking like that. So he stopped with the drinking and consequently with Team Fortress 2 too.
Eric Clough is an architect with 212box (based in New York) and he first gave a couple of examples of cool design stuff his company had done. The main one that everyone was interested in though was Mystery on Fifth Avenue (check out the New York Times article). Eric explained a lot about this apartment, highlighting a lot of things not featured in the article.
Kars Alfrink gave a interesting presentation and a different take on design. The documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys is about the beginning/birth of competitive skateboarding. Skateboards at the time (1970s) were seen as a land-bound pastime for surfers, nothing more. A group of kids took these skateboards and combined them with the empty concrete round swimming pools to create a more acrobatic and exhilarating game. They basically took these existing objects and created their own game with it. Kars proposed that games shouldn’t be designed, but instead tools should be designed with which people can create their own games.
In this talk Matt Biddulph showed the results of hardware hacking and playing around with electronics. He first explained how it was possible through products like Arduino and that basically you can hack anything together you want with some basic soldering skills. He showed examples like Johnny Lee’s Wii hack, the Tenori-On, the BBC Dabagotchi and the DSBrut.
There were 9 more presentations, each giving a unique and cool perspective to game design. Check out some other blog posts about Playful: Digital Consultant, Roo Reynolds, James Wallis. I’m hoping most of the talks will be uploaded, cause I did see a camera recording everything. All in all, it was a great day and I look forward to next year’s event.
I was in a bad mood yesterday, so Cristiano decided to cheer me up with cocktails:
We took the recipe for the Miss Geeky Moscow Mules and left out anything we didn’t had. We also didn’t have any crushed ice though and no blender, so I had to resort to smashing big ice cubes wrapped up in a towel with one of my high heels. Not the most elegant solution, but highly effective.
So here’s the recipe:
A couple of weeks ago, Cristiano and I met up with Carlo and Fabiana in Regent’s Park for a photo shoot… where we were the models. Now neither of us are that natural when it comes to posing for photos, but I love love love how some of these photos turned out. Thanks Carlo and Fabiana!
We’ve got a whole collection of photos to choose from and we’re slowly going through them and uploading them. So far we’ve only got four of them online (on mine and Cristiano’s Flickr account), but keep an eye out for more.
We don’t have a lot of photos of the two of us together, mainly cause most of the time we’re the ones taking the photos. So I was pretty happy to have some photos of us, like this one:
This photo was a bit of an experiment, but the effect is nice and quirky:
Besides some photos of the two of us, we also wanted some new profile pics. Here’s one cool one of Cristiano:
And here’s a really cool one of me:
I’m wondering now: should I change my avatar again?
Last week I got a mysterious email inviting me to a VIP event for a new device that wouldn’t be disclosed:
On the 13th November a new device designed to keep you in social sync more than ever before will be unveiled. We thought you’d be interested in coming along and being involved.
As our special guests, you and a friend are invited to this exclusive event to witness how this new product will impact your life and social interactions. Taking place in a premier East End London venue, there’ll be music from Disco Bloodbath, The Unabombers and Hexstatic are on visual duties and there’ll be plenty of free food and drink.
This is VIP only and places are very limited, so please confirm your attendance ASAP by replying to this email and we’ll then send you your official invitation.
The party starts 5:30PM 13th November. More details to follow.
I emailed saying I was interested and got another email in return: an official invite would be mailed (snail mailed) later that week to me and I got a code which I had to fill in on DriedOnPaper.org. Now when I went to that website last week, all you saw were two target like circles with a countdown at the top. After filling my code in and after other people also filled their code in, we got this:
Next to that I got the following message:
Code accepted
The countdown’s begun… You know when, you know where. Why? We’ll tell you when you get there.
More will be revealed once all the codes have been entered.
Come back and check
The underlying image still hasn’t been completely revealed and I’ve been really curious to find out what this is all about. Then this morning I got a package. Upon opening it, I discovered this:
Stamp? Ink? Dried on Paper? The stamp revealed the following message:
Okay, so nothing new in that, but I’m guessing this slip of paper is my official invite.
At the moment we have only a couple of clues: the phrase “Dried on Paper”, dancing people and a DJ (the image on the website) and a stamp plus ink. Oh yeah, and the venue (from what I can make out of the website) is a photo studio. Plus the product is “designed to keep you in social sync more than ever before” and “will impact your life and social interactions”. Anybody care to guess what this is about?
Episode 89: “Evening, Commissioner”
Just a quick post before diving into bed and getting some much needed wonderful sleep. I’m back from my trip to Middlesbrough and both the presentation and workshop (although I say so myself) went pretty well. I’ll blog about it some though later this week.
For now, back to the video: this may be one of the better trailer mash-ups I’ve seen lately:
Just a short post to let you all know what I’ve been doing lately. So Halloween has come and gone, and I didn’t get a chance to do all five of my ‘5 Days of Halloween’ blog posts. Last Monday I got sick and was stuck in bed for the following three days, being completely unproductive. No blog posts, no work, just a lot of sleeping and lying around. Ugh. Plus I missed out on a lot of cool London Games Fringe events and I’m really kicking myself for becoming sick just this week.
Anyhow, even though I wasn’t feeling 100%, I did make it to Playful on Friday. I’ll followup with a real blog post about it soon, but in short: it was a great event with a lot of interesting speakers. There was a cool mix of speakers from different fields and because each talk was only 20 minutes, you got to see and hear a nice variety of perspectives on games.
Then yesterday I went to check out the new Westfield mall in Shepherd’s Bush. Wow, it’s big. And way too busy. It might be fine after it settles down after these few opening days, but if it remains like this, I can’t say it’s a nice atmosphere to shop in. Too many people, too much congestion. In fact, it was so busy, the mobile network kind of died and I couldn’t get through to anyone (much to my annoyance, cause Cristiano and I split up to go to different stores, and weren’t able to find each other again). I’m hoping it will get better once the ‘newness’ of it has worn off, cause there is a cool selection of different types of shops.
Next to that, I’ve been busy preparing for my trip to Middlesbrough on Tuesday. I’ll be be holding two talks while I’m there, both on connecting through social networking. I’m pretty nervous about it all, cause I’ve never done something like this before. It should all go fine though; I know more than my fair share about the topic, and through BarCamps I’ve had enough practice with holding presentations. Still: fingers crossed it all goes according to plan.
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