One of the traditions at BarCamp is to play Werewolf during the overnight. Although there wasn’t any overnight with this Berlin BarCamp (and we were kicked out at 12), we get the chance to play Werewolf. Now this is not going to be a post on how to play it, so if you’re not familiar with it, check out the rules here or here (or just skip this post entirely). What is this post about? The weirdest probability-wise most unlikely game of Werewolf I ever played.

Okay, some facts before I start: there were 13 people with 3 Werewolves, 1 Seer and 1 Healer. We played with 4, maybe 5 experts and the rest were all newbies, which may be reason it went so weird. I was a Villager, so I’ll be describing everything first from my viewpoint.

Night1
randomperson13 dies

Day1
The seer declares himself during the introduction “I’m not A Werewolf” round and says he has important information. Turns out the “important” information is that MrA (who is sitting next to him) is a Villager. Worst newbie mistake ever! There’s a whole discussion that maybe the “Seer” is a Werewolf and he’s just pretending to be the Seer, but probabilistically that’s very, very unlikely. In the end, we lynch randomperson12, who was asking too many questions.

Night2
MrA (person11) dies. Logical right? The Seer told us MrA’s a Villager, so the Werewolves take him out, leaving less information for the rest of the group.

Day2
The Seer identifies MrB as a Werewolf. After some discussion, we lynch MrB (person10).

Night3
The Seer dies (person9). Hmm, interesting. This meant that or a) the Healer didn’t believe him or b) the Healer was dead.

Day3
The Healer reveals himself, saying he didn’t believe the Seer, so kept healing healing himself. I realise that he could just as well be a Werewolf, cause either way he’s not going to die next round. After some discussion I do believe he’s the Healer and we lynch the guy (person8) who to quickly wanted to kill the Healer.

Night4
Nobody dies! The Villagers win! With 7 Villagers over!

Now look back at the structure of the game: 3 Nights and 3 Days. You’d think the Villagers lynched one werewolf during every day round, right? Wrong. Here’s what really happened:

Night1
randomperson13 dies. The Seer picks MrA next to him: MrA IS a Werewolf, but the Seer misinterprets it and thinks he’s a Villager.

Day1
The Seer declares himself and says he has important information. The “important” information is that MrA is a Villager, while he IS in fact a Werewolf. What’s the chance of first finding a Werewolf, reading it wrong and then give it out as important information?! We lynch randomperson12, who was in fact a Villager.

Night2
MrA (person11) dies. Wait a minute…that was a Werewolf, right? He dies, because the Game master misinterprets the finger pointing. They were actually pointing at the Seer!

Day2
The Seer identifies MrB as a Werewolf. After some discussion, we lynch MrB (person10), who really IS a Werewolf.

Night3
The Seer dies (person9), because the Healer didn’t believe him.

Day3
The Healer reveals himself and we lynch the guy (who IS a werewolf) who to quickly wanted to kill the Healer.

Night4
Nobody dies! The Villagers win! With 7 Villagers over!

Phew! Bit of a different perspective, right? There were 2 mistakes that caused this strange (the misinterpreting of the Werewolf signal by the Seer and the misinterpreting of the finger pointing by the game master), but somehow the second mistake did cause to correct the first mistake. I love probabilities and the chance of this happening is mind-boggling small. Freakishly small! Anyhow, it just seemed like a very surreal game to me and I’m still amazed at it all.

So who’s in for more Werewolf this week?

It’s been a bit quiet on my blog the last couple of days, but with a good reason. After a few days travel (it’s not as dramatic as it sounds), I finally spent my very first day in Berlin (Germany). The trip didn’t go as smoothly as we expected though:

Wednesday

All the last times I went to Holland I took the Eurolines bus; it’s a whole lot cheaper than plane, train or any other means of transportation between the UK and the “Continent”. This time though Cristiano wanted to take a RyanAir plane, because it didn’t matter that much in price and (of course) is a whole lot quicker. I find it ridiculous though that you now have to pay an extra fee for every piece of cargo luggage you’re taking with you and that you have to pay extra for being able to check-in online, but that you also have to pay extra if you want to check-in at the airport (either way you have to pay extra!).

Anyhow, we took the Terravision bus from Liverpool Street Station to Stanstead Airport and neatly arrived at the airport 15:35, 1.5 hour before the plane left. We checked in straight-away and after zipping all our 100 ml bottles of liquid in bags we still had 1 hour and 10 minutes left. The boarding time was 16:25, meaning we still had half an hour left. Now comes our stupidity: we didn’t realise that the gates that we saw weren’t the final boarding gates, but the security check. So we first had something to eat, arriving neatly “at time” on 16:25 at the “boarding gates”, only to discover we were in a very long row for the security check. Oops! It took us 30 minutes just to get through there, which left us desperately running for the plane. And of course, it would have to be one of the furthest gates! In the end we did make it, but it was a very, very close call. After landing in Eindhoven, my parents picked us and drove us to Arnhem.

Thursday

This day we didn’t do that much traveling; we spent the day shopping in Arnhem getting the last couple of items we needed for Germany.

Friday

Originally the plan was that Reinier and Alper would pick us up at IKEA Duiven at 13:00. However, Reinier had spent the previous day driving back and forth from London and only arrived back in Holland at 5 in the morning. The 13:00 became 15:00 so that he could get at least some sleep. Now normally it takes only 20-30 minutes to get to Duiven from my parent’s place; we left at 13:30 to keep some time over for lunch. Today almost every possible route was blocked; it took us 1.5 hour to get there! This meant that we were right on time, but that didn’t help that much. Not only was almost every road around Arnhem blocked, every major highway towards our meeting point was congested (apparently some truck driver drove himself off a bridge). Reinier phoned us to tell that they would have an hour delay! Brilliant, now we had time for lunch anyway! Finally at around 16:00 they picked us up and we made our way over the border into Germany.

Once in Germany we found out that the navigation cd for Germany that we had with us had to be unlocked first, making them completely useless. And of course we also didn’t have a “normal” map. Heck, we didn’t even have the address or the telephone number of Eelke, with whom we would be staying in Berlin. Luckily we could phone in the help of several people, who gave sufficient information to lead us safely into Berlin. Next time, I’m definitely going to plan all this stuff ahead and create some contingency plans in case the “digital” maps aren’t available.

So Friday night at 23:00 we finally arrived in Berlin! Phew, not the smoothest journey, right? Anyhow, yesterday was the first day of BarCamp Berlin, so keep an eye on this blog; I’ll (hopefully) post about it soon!

A long, long time ago in a country not so far away I had great dreams of becoming a visual effects artist for some big studio, creating a little bit of movie magic and earning an Oscar in the process. The backup slightly more attainable dream at the time was to work in the games industry, preferably for a game (series) I loved. Since then 6 years passed in which at one point I realized:

1. there aren’t any real cool movie or video games studios in the Netherlands,
2. there is no feasible way I’m moving to some interesting place where you do have those studios, and
3. linear algebra and computer graphics are not my strongest points.

So I let my dreams of visual effects (and that Oscar) fade away to make room for a more probable and attainable future. At that time I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that I would now live in London, with all different opportunities just waiting to be taken. It is worth saying though that without making the choice not to pursue computer graphics, but choosing another direction instead, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am now.

Why all this sentimental talking about my dreams garbage? Last Tuesday and Wednesday was the London Game Career Fair, again an event of the London Games Festival. Even though I knew I’m not what they’re looking for, it couldn’t hurt to take a look, right? So last Tuesday I found myself in the middle of the fair at the Old Truman Brewery, surrounded by booths from EA, SEGA, Lucasarts, and many more.

I stopped by almost every booth (I skipped the university and college booths) and with all of them the conversation went down similar lines: What do you do? What do you want to do? Are you looking for a job? If so, here is a business card/website/email address where you can send your resume. Oh, and here is some free cool/crappy stuff.

I discovered (had forgotten) that a lot of companies aren’t only looking for people specialized in Computer Graphics and that my background in AI and pattern recognition can actually be quite useful in the games industry. You do, however, have to be very strong in C or C++. At the moment there’s a discussion going on about whether or not they should step over to C# (similarly 10-15 years ago there was the discussion if they should jump from Assembly to C or C++). Regardless though whether or not C# is adopted in the future, if you want a job now, you have to know C or C++ now. One tip I got was to have some programs/code ready to show your skills when you’re applying for a job.

There were three times that I talked to a woman at one of the booths and each time they were surprised to find a girl interested in games and with a background of Computer Science. One of them even went so far to hug me! They all remarked on the fact that while there are woman working in games, they are still in the minority and most of the time in a non-programming role (character design, environment design, QA, etc). I was planning to go the Woman in Games mixer that same night, but sadly other plans cropped up (free exclusive tickets to 30 Days of Night, which btw wasn’t that good).

So after a day of walking and talking around, I’ve got a list of websites and email addresses, for if I ever feel ready to try to get into the games industry. If I do, I will definitely have to brush up on my C/C++ skills first and create at least some sort of portfolio. I also ended up with a great bunch of freebies: 3 T-shirts (SEGA, Realtime Worlds and Other Ocean Interactive), a Lucasarts squishy pen, an Xbox 360 bottle of water, SEGA stickers and a whole bunch of other less useful stuff (mousemat, folders, etc). Not bad for a day’s “work”, huh?

If you’re looking to get into the games industry, I really recommend going to a fair like this. The people are genuinely helpful and give a lot of advice on how to get in. I noticed that a lot of people had brought multiple copies of their resumes (plus dvds with their work) with them to give away to companies, so make sure to bring along your resume. I’m not sure yet if I want to get into games myself, but these type of events are definitely interesting.

One of the London Games Festival events is Be Very Afraid, an annual event held at BAFTA displaying how schools and universities integrate new technologies into their curriculum. It’s meant to show policy makers what the possibilities are when children get in touch with new gadgets, ideas and creative resources. I was able to get a guest ticket, so last Monday I found myself being very afraid…

I got to speak to a couple of the kids and I found it really refreshing. A couple of weeks ago at BarCamp Brighton there was a discussion of how difficult it was to get kids more interested into technology. What I discovered was that these kids were so passionate and creative without needing any real motivation. Just the opportunity to let them play/work on/mess around with PDAs, Nintendo DSs and iPod Touchs (!!) is enough to make them realise what they can do with it.

I’ll try to describe what a couple of the schools were doing. One interesting thing I noticed though was that it was mainly the primary schools and the first years of secondary schools that were doing the really cool stuff. It seemed as if the older you got, the less appropriate it was to use gadgets and computers in a fun (but useful) way; everything turns so serious. In my eyes, you learn the best if you’re having fun with the subject, so why not try to motivate the students in a better way? Anyhow, here’s what I found out:

Dhoon School, Isle of Man

I talked to a sweet 9-10 year old girl who showed me on a iPod Touch (!!) the website her class created. It was an online learning game, where you could pick a place on the map, watch a video about the place and answer a question about the place. They also had simulated a part of it in a KeyNote (!!) presentation, putting all my KeyNote skills to shame. All the children in her class had an iBook or a MacBook, which they used on a daily basis.

St Columba’s Primary School

At this school the Brain Training game on the Nintendo DS was used to coach kids in logic and math. For ten weeks every morning every child had to “play” 10 minutes with the game. The teacher tested their grades prior to the 10 weeks and after the 10 weeks and discovered a significant increase. The boy (10 years old) I talked to was jumping up and down the whole time, desperately wanting to show how quick and precise he could solve all the math problems.

Whitmore Junior School, Essex

This school offered an afterschool club for children to create podcasts and comics. It started out with the podcasting, with the kids going through the complete process of creating regular episodes, writing the script, recording it and editing it all together. Eventually they also began making a weekly comic with several recurring characters. One of the girls loved it so much that even though she is now moved to another school (high school, secondary school? not sure what you call it here in the UK) she’s coming back every week for the podcasting club.

Capel-le-Ferne Primary School, Kent

There were several interesting things this school did. For starters, they had a special project week, where all the kids brought their robots and gadgets along with them to school. Based on the items they brought with them, they created a movie with some kids filming it, some acting in it, and others editing it and adding sound effects to it. Next to that, they built and programmed Spike (see image), a robot that could “see” the edge of tables (and not fall off) and would try to grab your hand. Finally, every child had an own PDA with camera and internet access. There was one project where 6 of the children went on an excursion to a mill, with the rest of the class staying behind at the school, but staying in constant contact because of the PDAs. The idea was that they had to write a story about the mill: the stay-behinders had help from a children’s book author, giving tips on what type of information was useful. They played this info through to the mill-kids giving them instructions on what to look for. The mill-kids in turn investigated everything and emailed the data and photos of the place back to them.

Final Note

These weren’t the only schools that were at the event, just the ones that really popped out to me. I loved the enthusiasm and creativity of the all the participating kids and definitely do feel intimidated by what these kids are learning to do. Most of them aren’t even 10 yet and they can do stuff better than I can. Just imagine what they’ll be doing in 10 years time! Be Very Afraid, indeed…

Last Saturday I attended MediaCamp at BCUC in High Wycombe and after the last couple of busy days I’ve only now finally found the time to blog about it. On it’s website, MediaCamp is described as this:

It’s an UnConference with a strong educational flavour for gamers, bloggers, casts, and new media professionals & amateurs for one day to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media. Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, photography, Second Life, Twitter, and all kinds of other new and social media tools.

I’ll highlight the stuff that I liked and also dwell on some of things that in my eyes could have made it better.

The Good Interesting

In total I went to six different sessions, three in the morning and three in the afternoon after lunch. The first was an introduction to Second Life by Chris Hambly. I’ve never used/experienced/tried out Second Life before, so it was great to see what all the fuss is about. To be honest, though, I personally still don’t see the “use” of SL; why would I want to hang around all day in a virtual world with a virtual life? My real (First) life is interesting and busy enough as it is and if I want to escape it, I’ll play a real game (like FF or WoW).

Another great session was Eaon Pritchard‘s talk about Interactive advertising and TV 2.0. (I didn’t take any notes so excuse me if I get my facts wrong, I’m writing this purely on memory) He talked about an tv advertisement his company did for the Xbox 360 using the interactive Red Button. During the ad the word EGG appeared at a certain fragment and three small eggs were visible at the bottom of the screen with one egg coloured green (indicating Level 1). By typing the word ‘egg’ in with the remote control, you unlocked the second level: two sheep saying ‘ofni’ (info backwards). After you filled ‘info’ in, there was a third level, but I don’t remember exactly what that was. Once you finished all three levels, you had conquered the game and could leave your name behind. The interesting thing was that for weeks nobody had discovered the hidden levels, but the instant 1 person figured it out it spread rapidly. Within a couple of hours of that first person, 25 more finished the game; a couple of hours after that, 1000 people. After a couple of days 1.9 million people had completed the hidden levels. This whole story led to a great discussion on viral marketing and what techniques had been used with other advertisements.

For lunch I went to The Noodle Bar with Twain, Improbulus, Sarah Blow and Steve Lamb. I loved the noodles and it was great to talk with the more tech savvy people instead of the media/marketing-oriented people (who were clearly in the majority at MediaCamp).

After lunch there was a talk I was looking forward to called Job Hunting for Grads 2.0. Being almost finished with my studies (3, 4 months) and having no experience whatsoever with finding a job, I really need some help/info/tips on this all. The session, however, was more focused on finding a job within the advertisement world and wasn’t really helpful for me. It was an interesting story though; Sam Ismail told us about the “stunts” he and a friend did to get scholarships at Saatchi & Saatchi.

Once all the sessions were done (and we were kicked out of politely asked to leave the building) there was a fun jam session in the pub. I surprisingly don’t know as many lyrics as I thought :D.

The Bad Not So Good

Although there were interesting moments and a great atmosphere, there were a couple of things that could have made the whole experience better.

A hungry stomach cannot hear.
For starters, the event wasn’t sponsored, so there wasn’t anything to eat or drink. In itself that wouldn’t have been so bad, but the closest coffee place was 10 minutes away. If I had known that, I would have brought some snacks and drinks along (it didn’t help that I skipped breakfast, but that’s my own stupid mistake). I do understand though, how difficult it is to find sponsors for these type of events, especially for the first time around.

Strength lies in numbers.
One problem was about only 30 people showed up and with such a small group the topics that will be discussed are kind of limited. For instance, there wasn’t anything about games (sidenote: I don’t see Second Life as a game; it’s a procrastination technique). While there was the space and opportunity to do something spontaneous on the spot, it was tricky to figure out if there was any interest for it. I think with a larger group of people there is more room for different types of sessions. At BarCamp Brighton we were with “only” 100 people (I say “only”, because so many more signed up, but only 100 were allowed) and the diversity of the topics was excellent.

All in all, it was an interesting event and I met a whole bunch of great people! MediaCamp has the potential to be a very engaging event, even though it’s not quite there yet. With more attendees and sponsors this could be a great get-together to talk about all things media.

I’m writing this post while in the train to High Wycombe (pronounced High Weecam as the tickets sale guy told me. Why do some English names sound completely different then how you write them?) off to MediaCamp. This is just a quick post to let you know what I’ll be doing the next couple of weeks (and a way for me to kill time in the train).

20 October (aka Today): MediaCamp
22 October: Be Very Afraid IV
23 – 24 October: London Game Fair
23 October: Woman in Games mixer
24 October: Computational Brain
25 – 26 October: Mac Live Expo
25 October: Have I Got News For You Recording
29 October: London Geek Dinner
3 – 4 November: BarCamp Berlin
6 – 8 November: Web 2.0 Expo Berlin
6 November: Girl Geek Dinner Berlin
19 – 20 November: BarCamp London

I’ll update this post with links soon; don’t have time for that now.

I just got back home from the Future of Web Apps and I’m tired! (edit: by now it’s one day later; I’m a slow writer) The last 2 days have been so busy, interesting, tiring, fun and at some (rare) moments extremely boring. The event was held at ExCeL London, which I hadn’t visited before (haven’t visited much outside of central London, to be honest). The main annoyance I had with this venue was that planes regularly flew over, disrupting the sessions. For the rest, it was okay. They could have organized the hall a bit better; the two presentation areas were close to each other and the noise from the one was audible in the other. The organizers realized this though and will take it more into account with planning the next event.

I won’t talk about everything I saw and went to, cause 1) that would take ages, 2) some stuff was boring (and no, I’m also not going to complain about them), and 3) I’ve already got trouble remembering what I saw yesterday. I’m only going to touch on some of the interesting issues that were raised and that really stuck with me.

The blind Robin Christophesen had an interesting talk on how to design usable, accessible sites and showed how existing sites were experienced by people with different disabilities/impairments. I never actually stood still on how a blind person would access a website (with a screen reader) and what problems would occur when such a site is not designed that thoroughly. For instance, Amazon’s mainpage doesn’t have any ALT tags to any of the images, including all navigational buttons (like Books, DVD, etc), which results in having the screen reader to say every single very long link. It takes about forever to move beyond the main page!

From the whole talk that Matt Mullenweg from WordPress gave on how to scale every element in your application (techonology, business, etc), one thing kind of surprised me: the way they included ads. Everybody hates ads, but because they do add revenue to your site, you want to include them. What they did was focus the ads only on the people that were one-time users; those people that by accident or through a search engine wound up on the site. They beauty of this is that you don’t annoy your loyal and most probably more experienced, more tech-savvy users, yet still have a source of income.

Another interesting tidbit was raised by Jyri Engestrom from Jaiku. Now Jaiku and Twitter are not real competitors of each other, but on the other side they do some what of the same thing. Jyri likened it to the beginning of the phone networks, when if you had a number with the one provider, you could only phone people with that same provider. Yet now those networks are accessible to each other. Another example is email; even though you have different email service providers, you can still email each other. The next step for Jaiku and Twitter, but also for other types of sites offering the same type of services, is to be able to connect to people in those other networks. I’d never thought about that type of comparison and hope to see that Twitter and Jaiku are compatible one day.

For a long time I’ve wanted to have my parent’s photos printed as a hardcover photo album and surprise them with it. I was going to use iPhoto, but it’s not really that cheap if you only want to do the 1 book. Then yesterday I came across Blurb. They offer a simple app (BookSmart) to create your own book and then publish it for you. If you order more of the same book, you get a discount, but the starting price for just that one book is very reasonable. Next to that, if you want, you can add your book without any additional costs to their bookstore, asking any price for it. Now I won’t want to do that for my personal photo’s, but I can imagine creating cook books or more artistic photo albums. I also loved the possibility to create a blog book; BookSmart can import complete blogs, including the images, layout and comments. How cool is that?

Some other thought-provoking apps were meecard and FireEagle. The idea behind meecard is that you can collect all your web presences into one single website, which you then can easily share with others. Cristiano was working on something similar for his own blogs, so that he only has to put one url on his business cards. FireEagle is an “app” that collects info about your location from various sources (GPS, Plazes, Dopplr, stuff like that) and passes that location through to other applications. This will only become useful once you have enough (real-time) information about you location and once the interesting apps are available.

This blog post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the live filming of Diggnation. I’ve never watched an episode previously and wasn’t expecting that much of it. I definitely wasn’t expecting the rock-star-like adoration of the crowd! It was just a very weird experience; everyone was cheering and screaming and clapping and whooping. The episode was very funny though and I’ll be checking out some more episodes.

To end this very, very long post it was quite an eventful 2 days and I saw a lot of interesting applications. Somehow these events always motivate me to try and implement my own ideas. Who knows, anyone can come up with the next big thing, right?

I just got back from the 16th London Girl Geek Dinner and as the previous times it was great fun. Now this is the 5th time I’ve been to a Girl Geek Dinner, but the first time I’m actually blogging about it. Why? Well, mainly because I’m too lazy or too tired when I get home from such an event. Then by the time I remember I should have blogged about it, we’re a couple of days further and the specifics are quickly fading from my memory. This time, however, I’m forcing myself to take a couple of seconds minutes to sit down and write about it.

At this evening’s event the sponsors and speakers were from Astraware and fancyapint.com. We were told beforehand to bring along any Windows Mobile or Palm OS devices to get lots of lovely free games. So, I dusted off my old Palm Zire 31 (including 6 brilliant scratched areas on the screen from playing too much TextTwist) and brought it merrily with me. Only to discover that (ofcourse) all the games they had were too “new”. In other words, the resolution of my poor old Palm was way too low. We did manage to beam one game over, so I at least got one freebie.

The speakers mostly talked about how many women were working within Astraware and how it was for a woman to work there. One of the female developers told us how she got the job and what she does within the company. They also gave away a cool VIP pass for their website (=lifetime free Astraware games) for the person with the most gadgets, which unfortunately I didn’t win, because I didn’t want to lug around a heavy bag today. FYI, the gadgets I had with me are: laptop, Palm, Nintendo DS and iPod Nano. The ones I didn’t have with me, but I usually do: 2 mobile phones (one with English Sim card, one with Dutch), external harddisk and camera.

Next to that, I met (and re-met) quite a couple of fellow girl geeks and had some great geeky discussions with them, covering social networks and programming languages to the more serious stuff as fanfiction, scifi/fantasy books, films and Doctor Who. One more thing to note: the food. There were 10 large platters of food, for “only” 40 people. Did they really think that all that food would be eaten? I’m not complaining, just observing that the amount was kind of overestimated.

As always it was great a evening and (as always) I’m looking forward to the next one. It’s planned for the 9th of October and will be sponsored by HP. If you’re interested, you can find all the details on Upcoming.

I’ve been a bit lax lately with writing about the events that I’ve been to, but here’s finally a report of one of them. Last Sunday I went to my very first nerd fest geek gathering convention: the London Film and Comic Con.

There was quite a good line-up of guests; however, some weeks eariler the event was moved to one week earlier and some guests, like Zachary Quinto (Sylar in Heroes) and Torri Hogginson (Stargate Atlantis) had to drop out. The big guests that they announced (and showed up) were: Patrick Stewart (do I even have to mention were he’s from? If so: shame on you!), Dominic Monaghan (Charlie in Lost, Merry in LOTR), Hayden Panettiere (Claire Bennett in Heroes) and Jack Coleman (Mr Bennet aka HRG in Heroes). Then 2 days before the event they also added Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli in Heroes) and Adrian Pasdar (Nathan Petrelli in Heroes). Wow!! For a Heroes lover like me, it couldn’t get any better. (BTW: there were a whole lot of other “celebrities”, but are people really interested in the “guy who walked in the hallway” in Star Wars?? Sorry, but I’m not one of them.)

I wasn’t really sure what to expect of the whole day, but I have to admit I was at the same time delighted and disappointed. The venue was just horrible; most of the stalls didn’t get enough light and the most important guests were cramped in one corner. You also could only “meet” the guests, if you payed for a signed autograph. This also sometimes only meant walking up to them, them taking the photo/poster/weird fan item and scribbling quickly on it, without even glacing up. As a poor, poor student living in expensive, expensive London, getting one autotgraphs (let alone 6 of them) was not a possibility. I would have loved just to step up to them, completely make a fool of myself and go cheerfully my own way. Alas, it was not to be.

Cristiano and I did manage to get a couple of good photo’s of the main guests, which was quite tricky. You weren’t allowed to make photo’s up close and the stewards were pushing everybody back and standing in your path blocking your view. I only didn’t get a good shot Hayden (I did see her! just a quick glimpse). To see more photos just go Cristiano’s Flickr page.

I loved the stalls, but most of the cool stuff were way to expensive. One stall was selling a replica of the Hiro sword from Heroes, that would perfectly go with out Kill Bill and Last Samuari swords. Maybe next year (one can only hope 😀 ). I stumbled across 2 second hand Buffy books for only 4 pounds and got 4 small posters (Ratatouille, Transformers, Aeon Flux and Fealess) for 80p! Next to that we also got a Casino Royale pokerset, which of course we’ll be taking with us to BarCamp Brighton tomorrow.

I’m definitely going to next year’s LFACC (and I hope I have a little bit more money to spend). It wasn’t the “best day evah”, but still very enjoyable.

I haven’t posted much lately (being 2 weeks in the Netherlands), but that’s going to change. The next couple of weeks are going to be busy, busy, busy. So what’s on my schedule:

Sunday 26 August and Monday 27 August: Notting Hill Carnival
Saturday 1 September and Sunday 2 September: London Film & Comic Con
Saturday 8 September and Sunday 9 September: BarCamp Brighton

If you want to follow/see more of what I’m doing, check out my Upcoming page.