wired

Morocco and the Geek Elite

Tomorrow, Matti and Emma and I, along with the my colleagues at CCP will leave for Marrakech in Morrocco for four days of festivities. Of course Emma's first trip abroad is to Africa at the age of four months. She's so cosmopolitan.

I've written up a looooong list of things to bring and piled most of them onto the dining table. Traveling with a baby will be interesting...

While Matti watches It's always sunny in Philadelphia, I'm reading Fast Company, specifically an article about the Geek Elite, high powered producers and creators of shows such as Heroes, Lost and Battlestar Galactica. The gist of the article is how these shows are transmedial, since they use a variety of mediums such as graphic novels, novels, computer games and the internet to create sideplots and fill the holes left in the TV shows.

Most of these men tip their hats to George Lucas and the consensus is that Star Wars and Star Trek are the pioneers of transmedial sci fi experiences. Read the article if this seems interesting to you - for me it elaborates on an idea which is central to my job.

Yes - life's so tough...

Egoism

Fuck it - I'll brag. Sometime in the future I'll be cynical and jaded and the fact that I'm interviewed on apple.com will be just another thing. I'm not there yet.

Lína Ingvarsdóttir interviewed at apple.com.

New toys for the gadget freak

I've been quite unhappy with my Sony VAIO for a while so one of the lovely operations guys at work made me a happy camper today. He replaced the year old model with a brand new one.

Not only do I have a brand new laptop with double the ram of the old one as well as a considerably larger hard drive, I have Windows Vista to test drive. So far it looks nice and I'm able to find my way around it just fine. I haven't installed all of the programs I need and it seems to be very protective in an annoying way but so far so good.

This laptop is the fifth I've been using over a four year period and I've learned that I'll get to know and like (or dislike it) in the next few weeks. The previous one was promising for the first few weeks but then got to be annoying. Here's hoping that this one outperforms it and keeps me happy for a bit longer.

I still miss Helga the nazi laptop that only performed for me but crashed when Gauti touched her. She refused to play EVE though...

A dream almost comes true...

Those of you that know me, know that Wired magazine is my guide through the maze of 21st century life and that I secretly* harbor a desire to be included in their pages. I thought the closest I'd get would be when the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, Cipla, was interviewed about Indias pharmaceutical business environment and I'd had dealings with that company in my job at Actavis, but lo, I get closer still:

EVE-Online coming to Mac, Linux

Granted, this is not in the magazine, this is on the website and the article doesn't tell you anything about the super producer, Mz. Ingvarsdóttir, who's leading the team on CCP's side, but still, it's my project and it is in Wired, even though it's just the web edition.

Lalalalalala

*not so secretly anymore since it's on da interwebz

Early Bends the Hook...

... or as we would say in Icelandic: Snemma beygist krókurinn. In Torremolinos, Costa del Sol in Spain at the tender age of four, playing Pac Man.

See the concentration?

Multilayered to do list

The following is a list of things I feel I need to do in order to finally graduate to wiredpixie 2.0. My wired friends and relatives are kindly asked to comment or add to the list.

• Get a flickr or some other photo site - do I want to use the typepad album?
  
  • Organize my pictures
  • Upload a selection of pictures
• Tweak this site for uber coolness
  • Clean out broken links
  • Redo links in English
  • Add links
  • Get this widget thing - do I need it?
  • Color schemes and images...
• Find friends and add to facebook - I never used myspace but facebook is more to my liking
• Create an amazon wish list and add to both sites
• Figure out veoh - hit or miss
• Create a list of must read sites/blogs and stop reading the crappy ones

Post GDC

Spent last week in San Francisco with my colleagues, attending the GDC. All I can really say is wow. According to numbers I heard, between 12.000 and 15.000 game developers attended the conference, which is the biggest of its kind.

Monday and Tuesday were spent in lectures, Monday on Agile Game Development and Tuesday on Dealmaking for Developers, or that is, Tuesday should have been spent on the dealmaking stuff. I just couldn't take legalese in the morning and so snuck off with more of my colleagues.

San Francisco is an inviting city with friendly atmosphere and the warm spring weather was a treat for frostbitten Icelandic faces. I didn't get to do much sightseeing, but what I saw, Height Ashbury, Chinatown and the pier made me want to schedule another, more leisurely trip, in the nearest future.

Wednesday to Friday at the conference are all about schmoozing and lectures and the evenings are about parties and networking. CCP cohosted the Nordic Game party which was a fancy cocktail affair with made up beds and lots of white and the CCP / White Wolf party...

It was a goth themed party at an S&M club in SOMA with cage dancers, dominatrixes (dominatri?) whipping willing subjects and developers dressed in goth gear and in case of your truly, made up as vampires with fangs and all. Probably the best party I've ever been to and a perfect end to the day I got to meet, and have my Nintendo DS lite signed by, the creator of Tetris.

Friday was suitable hung over after such an experience, so less networking and lecturing was done.Somehow our HR manager managed to arrange a trip to Mountain View to see the Googleplex. For a troupe of geeks, you can really do much worse than arranging an office viewing trip. Google has cooooool stuff, including tiny swimming pools, functioning much like treadmills, snack bars every hundred feet, idea boards all over the place and lots more.

Then there was a lot of flying and being jet lagged and falling asleep at weird times. Now it's Tuesday and I'm just recuperating. But man, it was fun.

GDC

Tomorrow I'm heading off to San Francisco with a number of my colleagues to attend the GDC. It's the Game Developers conference and I'm told it's absolutely crazy. Browsing through the lectures available I realized that Alexey Pajitnov will be speaking. Yes, I'm going to attend a lecture from the creator of Tetris.

Yesterday, incidentally, I picked up my copy of Tetris for the DS Lite at the post office along with Phoenix Wright - Ace Attorney, a courtroom game I'm looking forward to digging into.

Much geekyness on the horizon for the next week, along with partying, eating good food, shopping and learning a whole lot about the computer game industry.

Life is really hard sometimes...