Sunday 30 November 2008

Macy's Rickrolls America for Thanksgiving

Awesome! You may have seen this by now, but if not check it out:

They managed to have Rick Astley, appear and perform the song suddenly in the middle of the Macys Thanksgiving parade, amazing ;o)



I think Rick bowed down to the power of (internet, in this case) memes!

Just like this one!

Monday 24 November 2008

Tropfest short film festival winner

Tropfest is the worlds largest short film festival. It already happened a couple of months ago so you may have heard of this, but this year for the first time the best film award was won by someone who shot their short entirely with a mobile phone camera.

The movie itself is beautiful, so if you have 3 minutes check it out, but it also made me think more about the way we use/consume/create media, not only has it been getting easier and easier for anyone to create and use production tools on their computer (I recently edited a video at work in a couple of hours, and it was the first time I ever opened iMovie) but all the different tools are getting mashed together in smaller and smaller devices. It's a topic that is definitely being talked about a lot these days, but I'll look at putting some of these thoughts together for a post.

I was also at the Mushrooms of the Russian Avant Garde exhibition on Saturday, I'll definitely write a post about it tomorrow once I upload the pics to Flickr - it was pretty weird and fascinating...

Thursday 20 November 2008

Global Beersphere


Thanks to Andy for the logo!

Catching up on on my posting so this is already old news but the Global Beersphere happened last week and it was a great evening! Thanks to Faris for initiating it and to all the people in different locations around the world to take on managing the event. For those not in the know, Beersphere is a casual gathering of all sorts of planner type peeps, generally in a some cool bar or pub and guess what? Having beers/drinks and a good chat.

The lovely Rachel was our official host for the evening, and it was a pleasure to meet her again and as well as a good bunch of other always interesting people.

The event took place last Thursday 13th November, for the first time in about 9 locations around the world: New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Boston, Berlin and Bucharest!

Blogadi Blogada


Image courtesy

It's being a seriously busy November over in Ice Cream land, but going to the London Bloggers meetup always inspires me to make an effort and get back to writing a few posts. Thanks again to Andy for organising the event, and also for the inimitable inspiration for naming the events - which gave me the title for this post as well!

It was nice to see some people met before (Anthony, Jaz, Andy, and others) and meet new always interesting people is as ever a great pleasure (Melanie, Hayley, and several Chris - sorry I need to find your blogs).

Melanie who writes at Fake Plastic Noodles, which for some reason I thought was Fresh plastic noodles - (Sorry I haven't had time to read it yet, but hopefully will soon) talked about some differences in the UK and US blogospheres, her experience of moving over to London and the fun it was getting working visas in order, some good talk about PR / blogger outreach good practices, and it finished with some great informal questions / conversations.

A few more drinks and good conversations and we was on my merry way home. I'll definitely try to make it to the next one. As I said, it's a great way to meet cool people and find out about all the different topics they blog about and it's really a good motivation to post regularly.

Saturday 1 November 2008

Last post before November!



Happy Halloween everyone! I'm very proud to announce this is the 15th post this month, which for those very math astute will realise that's extremely close to a post every other day! But I'm probably the only one that cares that much...

So let's get to what I'd like to write about quickly. I was at Playful today and it was an absolutely amazing conference. Certainly the best one I've been to this year and one of the best ones I've been to full stop. I think what was really brilliant was to bring together a bunch of people passionate about whatever domain and particularly interested in play, games, interaction from different fields and talk about what they are doing. So a wider spectrum than if they had only invited hardcore game designers - more than often probably pitching the latest product they developed (nothing wrong with that by the way, but I guess not what I was looking for today).

Which brings to what I was looking for today. Nothing specific, really. But I came out of it really inspired! I learned a lot of things about hacking things, making them do stuff they weren't meant to. Theories about games, play, meaning, scores, etc. A lot of very smart people either demonstrating experiments, or talking from a slightly more abstract point of view about people, play and games.

I think one special mention for myself was to meet James Wallis from Spaaace. James opened the event with a brilliant talk about play in general, OuLiPo and a lot of other interesting things inclusing board and role playing games which I love. The best was to learn over a drink after the conference that he designed one of my favourite card games ever: Once Upon a Time. The funny thing is that I just did an internal talk about playing games last week (Which I will upload to Slideshare very soon - as soon as I find some time) and we're going to organise some sessions fro Once upon a time and a couple of other games. A lot of other talks were amazing and I will tell you as soon as they are uploaded on Vimeo and Flickr for the pics

Thanks again to Toby, Richard, and everyone else at Pixel-lab for organising the event! Thanks to all the sponsors as well - Poke, Melinda @ Miss Geeky, The people who provided lunch that I can't remember who they are right now, etc...

PS: I think I just realised James Wallis also created Nobilis, an RPG I've been wanting to try for a long time that looks amazing! And I also realised that had I simply read the details on the speakers list, I would have known all of that already, but hey...