March 27, 2006
GDC Conference Wrapup
It's really hard not to sit here, look back on GDC, and not be seriously fucking depressed. Simply put, there's just too much to do in 5 days, and when you're sick (I picked up some sort of con crud on the way in to San Jose, and am still recovering), that makes it even harder. I know I made a lot of great connections, I met lot of really awesome people, I didn't miss too much at the parties (I saw nothing NEAR roomba frogger level at GDC, which obviously means people weren't drinking enough), but still, when you go through your daily blogs and realize "Oh SHIT, that person was there?!", it's kind of a downer. Now, you've gotta realize, there's like, 12,000 people at GDC, and it'd be impossible to ferret out everyone I wanted to meet, but I suppose that'll just drive me for next year. I'm nothing if not oblivious to common sense.
Here's the coverage I've found of the Sex In Games Lecture:
4Gamer Coverage - Japanese Link
YoshiNogi Coverage - Japanese Link
Linden Ops - Phoenix Linden's Observations
While the lecture did go very well, I think the much more important event was the "Murder, Sex, and Censorship" panel, which has been getting a good bit of coverage. Whether you liked their arguments or not, it was good to see some discussion on the issue at a game conference.
In terms of other things bloggable, well, I'll be talking about the AmBX presentation over on Nonpolynomial Labs here in a bit, but I'll just go ahead and say that I was slightly underwhelmed.
Anyways, my takeaways from GDC:
- Don't get sick before conferences.
- Driving sounds nice until you're doing it.
- 15 hours into driving, nothing sounds nice. NOTHING.
- This is a conference about making things that people use to have fun. The bet for the best contacts is to find the people who look/sound like they're having the most fun making things that make other people have fun, and listen to them well.
- Only CEOs can do their hair like that. Don't even try. They go to college for this stuff.
- "Game Design Ninjas" need to learn some social ettiquite
- No one in the game industry wants to hire a robotics engineer. Remember the last robot in gaming? The NES ROB? Yeah. (All of you who know about the Aibo PS2 interaction game Deka Voice get a gold star next to your name.)
- Therefore, be a software engineer. Yes. Software. Recruiters like software.
- It's kinda weird to wave sex toys at a conference and then go hand out your resume. Just make sure to put away that tag that proclaims you "GOD OF TELEDILDONICS" before you hit recruiters row. While it may strike up a fun conversation, it can be a little offputting when you ask "So, what positions do you have open?".
- The talk you go to will probably be good. The other 10 you miss going to that one will be just as good.
- Game design is hard. But really fucking neat.
- Tutorials are way, way better when the presenter is wearing a top hat. (The fact that it's a renowned game designer doesn't hurt either, but the hat, it rules.)
- Come to think of it, hats are an VERY important thing, as long as your hat isn't like anyone else's hat. The Hat People will always find each other. The Hat People are powerful. You will know the Hat People. You will know us by our Hats.
- If you are introduced to someone stupidly famous, STFU and enjoy listening to them talk to someone they actually know. You'll learn way more than just blurting out "HOLY SHIT DID YOU KNOW YOU MADE [insert game here]?!"
- Just because it's a game conference doesn't mean the art wall can't resemble something from a Sci-Fi/Fantasy con. When the Sex in Games lecture features your art wall, maybe you should take a step back and consider your judges (and the "FBI: Female Boob Inspector" pins they're wearing).
- If you are wearing a shirt that lets other people know you are you, make sure that shirt doesn't happen to match the volunteer shirt color.
- Someone will always have a cooler business card than you. Business card envy is a very, very serious matter. If you are at the top of the business card food chain, you wield a position of supreme, ultimate power. Just flash your card and people will "Oh Shinyyyyyyyy" into submission. I'm looking at you, Amaze Entertainment. You know what I'm talking about.
- If you're new and made one decent, lasting connection to someone who's been in the industry a while, consider it a successful conference. However, for every contact you got completely shitfaced with and can't remember their name or what you said, subtract two meaningful contacts.
- And, by far the most important lesson, a lesson I learned from a wise, hat wearing man: everything tastes better in glasses lit up by LEDs, but especially martinis. Having had a lit up LED martini, I must say, motherfuckers need to lay off on the vermouth, but I'll let it slide 'cause damn, it was pretty.
My relatively small flickr set from GDC is behind this link. Mostly driving pictures. And a really shiny dumptruck.
Next up, SIGCHI in Montreal, April 23-24, 2006. Until then, back to Sex Toys.
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SXSW Conference Wrapup
Ok, so I realize SXSW ended like, 2 weeks ago, but I never did get a chance to post about all of the wonderful, wonderful press that came out of our session there.
GuideLive - SXSW: Sex By Southwest
Reciprocal Demand - Austin Chronical
Sex Alive and Well in Video Games - CNet
SXSW: My Blue World: Game Experts Give Red Light Talk
Fleshbot - Sex in Video Games at SXSW
Lots of good press from the panel, but of course, the panel was not the big part of the conference.
Oh, lordy no. If you technorati SXSW and Sex and Video Games, you won't get too many posts.
But just try "roomba frogger", and, well, holy shit.
Yes, I was a picture taking bystander of the rather famous activities happening that night. Thanks you, Daniel, for pointing me out as the "an expert in teledildonics" in the middle of an article already full of dubious activities. It was quite funny to watch all of the forum threads about how many babies we could've killed followed by "Wow, dude, Teledildonics is a fucking awesome term!".
See? Told you Slashdong was about education!
Anyways, my picture set of roomba frogger is up on Flickr now, just in case anyone is still interested in this admittedly aged meme.
Other than that, SXSW was great, I was very glad to be able to party with the Clickable Culture/Make Magazine/Second Life Herald/Electric Sheep Company/The Escapist/whoever else I met up with. I've still got a ton of business cards to go through. Urf.
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March 22, 2006
GDC - Mission Accomplished
I just waved a sex toy at GDC.
My work here is done.
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March 21, 2006
GDC. Wow. Damn. GDC.
So there's a time when you realize you're about to, in however small a part, speak at one of the biggest conferences for one of the fastest growing modern industries, of which you are not currently a part of, and on a topic which is somewhat controversial.
Apparently that time is around 16 hours before it actually happens.
I have many stories to tell, and I'm sure many more to live through before this is all over, and I assure you, if the cold I decided to catch does not kill me (and it's certainly trying. Con crud is NOT supposed to apply to game conferences!), I'll post them here once I get time to write. Which currently looks like sometime in 2007.
But, to sum up the trip so far:
- Made a pilgramage to San Francisco, sex toy capital of the world. Stopped by Good Vibrations, and comtemplated buying a house just so I could take out an extra mortgage at Mr. S. Mr. S is so incredibly full of awesome. Yes it is.
- GDC is overwhelming, and I've just been to the tutorial days. According to just about everyone, tomorrow is going to blow my fucking mind.
I came home early to do final sexbox testing, and pray to whatever diety will still listen to me that the fucking thing doesn't turn into a white smoke generator tomorrow for some reason.
Cross whatever you have that can be crossed for me. I will report back tomorrow.
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March 17, 2006
Off to GDC
Never put salt in your eyes.
Also, never book yourself to get back from one conference, and only have 1 day in between before you leave for the next. Bad things happen, like iPods breaking and bad blocks in the reiserfs system sector of your main storage drive. Basically, anything that will take more than a day to fix will happen on that day.
Anyways, off to San Jose and GDC. I'll be there from Sunday to Friday, and will be speaking as part of the Sex In Games talk on Wednesday at Noon, with Brenda Brathwaite of the Sex In Games Special Interest Group.
I will not be liveblogging this conference, unless someone would like to pay me to liveblog it for their blog. Just email the tips address over there. I need all the cash I can get, people, and you know I'm funny, I know my shit about video games, and I'll be smack dab in the middle of lots of new releases. So come on. Support the dildo fund.
Off to do last minute packing checks. See you in San Jose!
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March 16, 2006
The Goo Gobler
The Goo Gobler - Flash Animation
Looks like our old friend Utopex finally found a buyer!
The people at BoinkCams are currently ramping up their site, which will feature the full line of Utopex toys, including their spanker and "Homage to Cronenburg" internet controlled tongue.
But apparently, the tongue was just a little too fuckin' classy, so they've one-uped themselves again, with the Goo Gobler. If you hate flash like I do, I'll spare you having to look at the animation with the screenshot below:
Internet Enabled Bukkake. No, fucking really. Someone hooked up a god damn super soaker to their computer, put a little special sauce in it, and then network enabled the firing button. Aim it at a model, and you've got yourself a technology enabled fake spooge fest.
Yet again, this is one of those times where I get that nice, warm, "Maybe I'm not so weird after all" feeling. I cherish these moments.
Unfortunatly, I can't seem to find any sort of product pages for this, so all we have is the promise of a flash animation that this actually exists. But the idea alone is enough.
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March 12, 2006
The Boy who Cried Liveblogging
I can't do it. I just can't fucking doing it.
Everyone at this conference is liveblogging. They sit there in the sessions, typing their notes into wordpress or moveable type or blogger or whatever else. They hurry back to their hotels to podcast or vidblog. And I just... can't. I'm either too wrapped up in the session (Speaking of: Everyware by Adam Greenfield, GO FUCKING BUY THIS BOOK. Absolutely fucking amazing session.), or too bored by the session to blog it so I sit on IRC or SL or whatever other medium being bored. Between sessions, I'm too busy networking. Thank god Tony Walsh of Clickable Culture is enough of an ADD blogger social leper studious blogger that he's getting notes for pretty much all of the sessions I'm in.
So, that's it. No more liveblogging for me. I'm never making that promise again. I'll just write when I have time, and am not sufficiently drunk. Or maybe am sufficiently drunk.
Speaking of sufficiently drunk, I did the first public demo of the SeXBox v5 last night at the Second Life Herald Party (Motherfuckers know how to motherfucking party, BTW), and it went... ok! Especially for me having a cup of tequila and a cup of champeign sitting next to each other and accidently forgetting which is which in the middle of the talk. The serial port seems to have somehow shorted in travel, too, so I'll be spending part of the night in my hotel room soldering when I should be partying. Such is the life of a sex toy engineer.
If you're interested in pictures, I'm photoblogging the conference as I get time, though it's mostly weird floor shots and pictures of tiny ketchup bottles. The important stuff, you know.
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March 10, 2006
Liveblogging from SXSW Interative
Dude behind me just totally said "I'm down with RSS."
No, seriously.
WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO.
Anyways, hi, I'm currently in Austin at Screenburn/SXSW Interactive, from today until Tuesday. I'll be living blogging the whole fucking experience because if I have to sit through 5 days of RSS, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 (Hi SLers!), monetizing things, getting eyeballs, etc etc etc, then SO DO YOU.
I'll try to throw some sex toy talk in too, from time to time, so I can stay on track.
So what is your fair sex toy engineer doing here, anyways? Well, other than being an ass and making quite sure I'll never be able to work in blogging, IT, the web, or anything outside of my basement, I'll be speaking on the "Secret Sex Lives of Video Games" Panel on Tuesday.
In Slashdong Relevant news, to those of you that made it this far in the post. The SexBox v5 is done, is sitting in my hotel room, and will be seieng live demos at both SXSW and GDC. Then it's straight from the conferences and to the page, as I'll be posting the tutorial as soon as I get time to write it. The goodness involves: Serial/USB support, expansion slots, and 4 PORTS OF VIBRATEY LUV. Aw yeah. Rockin' it newskewlsextoy in 2006.
My god. See that last sentence? That's what this shit is doing to me. 5 days left, man. 5 days.
If you're here, look for me. I'll be the only guy without a timbuk2 bag.
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March 7, 2006
Pictures from Slashdong 1st Birthday Party in SL
Pictures from Slashdong 1st Birthday Party in SL
Well, the party is over with, I've finally recovered from sitting in front of my computer and drinking heavily, and from the photos, it looks like everyone had fun.
Thanks to Gomi Mfume for DJing throughout the evening, and to everyone that showed up. Photos are now available on my flickr account.
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March 4, 2006
Slashdong Party Tonight on SL!
OMG PARTY TIME
So, to recap, Slashdong Second Life Party tonight. 5PM PST/Second Life World Time, on Saturday, March 4th @ Nonpolynomial Labs, Deneb (222,190)
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March 1, 2006
TranceVibrator - Linux/OSX Drivers and fingerd client.
TranceVibrator - Linux/OSX Drivers and fingerd client
Rejoice, ye of non windows operating systems! For there is now TranceVibrator support for all!
First off, there're now drivers for the TranceVibrator for OS/X and Linux (created from the original FreeBSD drivers). I'm going to figure that if you're going to try this, you know how to compile things. If not, email the tips address, whine a little bit, and I might be persueded to put a tutorial together. You'll need libusb.
Next up, since we seem to be all about interface these days... You can't really get much geekier than a teledildonics interface created using the fingerd internet request system.
Remember fingerd? Then you are officially old. From the program instructions:
This program is a rudimentary teledildonics application built around the finger daemon - hence bringing generations of CS undergrad innuendo full circle.
It has two modes in addition to what you're seeing now - if you finger [any string]@[this host], a series of random pulses will be generated, proportional to the length of the string.
Alternatively, fingering 0x[hex digits]@[this host] will instead send a direct stream of motor speeds to the vibrator, one per second.
This makes me happy in ways far, far too geeky to explain in anything but greek symbols.
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Slashdong Birthday Party in Second Life - Saturday, March 4th, 2006 - 5PM PST Until ???
Yup, we're havin' a party to celebrate the first birthday of Slashdong!
Now, of course, I'm too damn poor to have a REAL party, not to mention I don't think most of my readership lives in, or near, Oklahoma at the moment, so this is going to be a virtual party in Second Life!
Yes, that's right. I'm celebrating the first year of running a blog by sitting in front of my computer monitor, playing silly music, and drinking heavily. If there were every a more stereotypical way to party about a site about virtual sex, I certainly couldn't think of it.
So, party starts at 5PM PST/Second Life World Time.
It'll be at Nonpolynomial Labs, Deneb (222,190). If you can't figure out how to get there or are just too lazy, send a message to qDot Bunnyhug in world and we'll get you set up with a teleport.
If you don't have an account, well, sign up! They're free! Just go to secondlife.com, all you need is a mobile phone number (or a credit card), for age verification. Other than that, FREE! FREE DAMNIT! FREE!
See you Saturday!
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