It’s 9am here and I’m enjoying some nice breakfast at the Moscone center in San Francisco. All ready for the PayPal X Conference!

We woke up yesterday morning at 6am London time, way too early for me, especially cause I’d been going to bed at 4am most of the previous days, staying up to play Batman: Arkham Asylum (which I managed to finish, although I was only playing on easy mode). Anyhow we got to the airport at 8, with time to spare for checking in and some nice English breakfast. At 10 we were finally allowed to board the plane! I managed to move my seat, so that I could sit next to Cristiano on the flight.

The flight went great! I slept for half of it or so, and spent the other half finally playing Myst. I never played it before, and being stuck in a plane without any internet connection to ‘cheat’ is the best way to play it! I think I might have given up on some of the puzzles waaay earlier, but here I actually figured out most of the stuff myself. We arrived 13:30 in San Francisco (21:30 in London), half an hour earlier than expected!

Our hotel is pretty awesome; we’re at the Parc 55 hotel in a 23rd floor room. The view is gorgeous, we can’t see the bridge, but it still looks amazing.

We ended our day with dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. I had gumbo for the first time (nice and spicy!), but ate too much to actually have some cheesecake 🙁 I’ll definitely need to come back this week to try some out!

So that was pretty much my first day. I’ll try to update some more the next few days, although I don’t have a great connection in the hotel. Still can’t really believe it, but I’m in San Francisco!!!!!

This is just awesome:

So much work, but the end result is amazing! There’s also another video from the same artist, but with dice:

Miss Geeky elsewhere:

• Bleeding Cool Goes Head To Head With TRON: Evolution: I got to attend a press event for the upcoming Tron game! It looks awesome and can’t wait till it comes out.
• Five Things About Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, With Oliver Stone: the highlights of the roundtable interview with Olive Stone that I attended 2 weeks ago.

Interesting links for this week:

• Female Flow Chart: flow chart showing the different types of female characters in movies and TV shows.
• Cute Mittens: These mitten designs are adorable. I love the set in yellow with on one hand ‘Taxi’ written on it (perfect for New Yorkers)!
• Alexa Meade: Wow, these body painting are awesome! Meade creates 2D paintings using people as her canvas; it looks so surreal.
• Space Invader Socks: me wantz…

Wow, it’s been 20 days since I last blogged here! I’ve just been so busy lately and still have tons of stuff to write up for you all. I’ve been to the Future of Web Apps, Playful 2010, BoardGameCamp and lots of other events I really need to write about! I’m going to try to get back into my blogging rhythm, but with my trip to San Francisco less than two weeks away, I think it might only be getting busier for me!

Anyhow, let’s get back to the actual topic of this post: books! I’ve just started reading The Black Prism by Brent Weeks and so far it looks awesome. It’s set in a world where magic is formed out of light; most mages can only draft magic out of 1 colour from the colour spectrum (think: rainbows) and which colour they can draft determines the type of magic they can do. It’s an interesting concept and I always love reading about worlds that are built up so differently.

Here’s the description on Amazon:

Gavin Guile is the Prism, the most powerful man in the world. He is high priest and emperor, a man whose power, wit, and charm are all that preserves a tenuous peace. But Prisms never last, and Guile knows exactly how long he has left to live: Five years to achieve five impossible goals. But when Guile discovers he has a son, born in a far kingdom after the war that put him in power, he must decide how much he’s willing to pay to protect a secret that could tear his world apart.

The only problem: it’s only out in hard cover right now and the paperback version only comes out in September next year! It’s only £8 on Amazon which isn’t too bad for a hardcover, but I still prefer reading paperback myself. Plus they take up so much less space!