This year, due to the fact that there was no way that I could carve a couple of days off from work in August to go to the beach and play some beach volleyball, I took some mental time off by not reading any sort of technical papers or books when away from work and by not reading and writing in any sort of blogs.
I’ve started this blog over a year ago as an experiment to see what blogging was like and how I could use it to improve my writing skills and keep my research notes on games, creativity and digital art.
Now I found myself with the time and opportunity to reevaluate my initial expectations about it and to rethink and plan what comes next.
But meanwhile…
Bruno rebooted his blog
One of the first people around here to be convinced of the power of blogs for personal research and corporate use, Bruno was never sure of what to do with his blog. Now after a reboot and a facelift, he has taken on a new mission to share with the world the valuable lessons we’ve been learning on how to bootstrap a research startup in a country not used to such things.
Bel discovered Massacration
One topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time but which has always fallen to the bottom of the draft stack, is the subject of office memes. I blame Youtube for this, but no week passes without many gatherings behind a computer monitor to “check out this video, guys..”.
During August, Bel started spreading a very sticky meme in the form of everything related to Massacration, a fake brazilian metal band that started it’s career in a comedy show. They seem to capture everything that’s so great and kitsch about 80’s metal bands, and their lyrics are especially funny if you happen to know Portuguese and the fact that it’s very common for Brazilian people to listen to music in English without understanding the words. (Obviously, this also happens outside of Brazil, but this is the main reason behind the band’s fake english lyrics).
Manifesto Games went live
The world of independent gaming will never be the same, as Greg Costykian’s digital distribution company tries to carve out a portion of the global mindspace for the authors of different, quirky and innovative games.
I’ve been actually playing games
Instead of trying to write them or read and think about them. Matthew Sakey wrote a while back about how game developers are not playing games, and how that affects their understanding of the evolution of the language of games.
While I wait to get my hands on a decent console, I’ve been doing things like trying to survive in a zombie infested city, do rocket jumps like it’s 1998 and getting RSI while trying to induce myself an epileptic attack.
And last, but definitely not the least..
The past weekend was spent in Coimbra, walking around as a sleep deprived zombie (thanks to my pet throat infection acting up again) at Barcamp Portugal 2006, an open meeting of like minded geeks focusing on innovation, web 2.0 technologies and product demos.
Fellow P*’s Pedro Custódio and Adriano Afonso have managed much better than I could ever do to convey into words the spirit of openness and sharing that pervaded the event. Like them, I’d also like to thank the people at weBreakStuff for sparking the interest in future open collaboration between all those that attended.
Unfortunately, Bruno and I didn’t manage to finish in time our presentation on how to build web-based games, but this will definitely happen in the next Barcamp, or HackDay or whatever the new name for these gatherings might end up being.