Posts Tagged Comic Expo
Calm before a (small) storm
Got that nervous, churning feeling in my gut. As a wizened old country yokel staring out at the horizon might say: “Show’s comin’.”
Not a big one, of course, but any show gets me this way. It’s just nerves. And excitement.
Some random stuff before the weekend, from today:
Did a presentation of something we’ve been working on for about… six months*. It went pretty damn well, even though it wasn’t the all-singing, all-dancing, “Hey – was that Sean Connery on the voiceover?” multimedia extravaganza we’d originally envisioned. We’re going to follow up with more concrete details and then hopefully… fingers crossed… it’ll happen.
Confirmed my attendance at the Staffordshire University event – which specifically, is called MMOG Fest ’08. Then expanded it to our attendance. We’re now going to have a little stand there to sell games and give career advice from. So if you’re a student or just interested, check out the schedule. (I’ll admit it’s not too cheap, unless you’re a student!)
After a lot of confusion over whether or not it was going to happen, got officially asked to present an Eagle Award, essentially on behalf of Andrew Wildman. Which is nice. Be nicer if I knew what the award was for.
Spoke to Kat Nicholson and double-confirmed everything for tomorrow. Colouring sketches is going to be very cool… still haven’t decided if I’ll get any of mine done.
Sat with Chris and Mat, and figured out everything for the weekend. Couldn’t ask for a more solid team, got to be said; we’ve done this so many times now we’re pretty damn fluid**. And I won the coin toss to get a hotel room to myself, so result!
We had some network issues here – hardware problems, which had IT looking deathly serious all day – so I was confined to working on whatever I had in my email. Good thing, as I cleared out a bunch of stuff including edits on a big corporate document. So that made people happy.
Oh yeah; and got put in the frame for pulling together a product presentation video at short notice, so that’ll occupy next week, quite possibly.
Anyway; off to the gym and then hooking up with a friend later. If you’re coming to Comic Expo, I’ll see you there!
* By the way, it wasn’t like we worked on the presentation solidly for six months. That’d be silly. The idea, once we had it, was easy enough to verbalise… it was just harder to visualise for others, and that took quite a while to figure out. Also, we had other things to do in the same timeframe.
** Funny thing is how different things were a year ago. I expect I’ll be wittering about that in the inevitable video that’ll come out of this weekend.
The week that was (and is)
Posted by Rockjaw in Day Today, MMO-related, Personal on May 8th, 2008
Busy week especially outside of work, which is why you haven’t seen much here and probably won’t for a little while. May is festival month here in Brighton, with the Brighton Festival and Fringe both descending, and this year unlike previous we’ve decided to really go for it and see a bunch of stuff. So far we’ve seen a couple of plays, with more to come, and a tea dance which I’ve foolishly agreed to as well.
Most of this is purely for entertainment but I have a personal interest too, as I’ve written a couple of plays and want to see a lot more theatre just for reference on staging, direction and so on. It’s illuminating.
When I’m not out being cultured I’m trying to hit the gym and in-between, GTA IV tends to suck me in, so time at the keyboard to do this is sort of limited.
Work-wise, we’ve been preparing for this weekend’s Comic Expo (at which I might even try to ‘live blog’ a bit, when I’m not being bombarded by people!), as well as getting a few other things moving or off the ground.
Had a real start-stop day yesterday – our Christmas party idea was presented and welcomed… only for us to find that the venue we had in mind is now a year behind schedule in its refurbishment. So that sorta throws that idea out of the window. Back to the drawing board.
As well as that I’ve been invited to attend an academic / industry ‘conference’ up at Staffordshire University in early June, which should be fun. I think I’ll be doing a variation on my ‘how to break into games’ presentation for it.
The calendar’s filling up rapidly, which is good but unusual for me. So please feel free to direct suggestions my way so that when I do get time to blog I do so on topics you want to hear about.
Right then, Friday is it?
Posted by Rockjaw in Day Today, MMO-related, Pimpin' on April 25th, 2008
As I mentioned yesterday, starting my week on a Thursday after a West Coast US-South Coast UK transition threw me for a bit of a loop, so much so that I was convinced it was Monday for a while. Today I didn’t think it was Tuesday, but naturally it didn’t feel much like a Friday either.
Again, slowly getting back up to speed today. One thing that’s been making that whole process feel a bit ‘different’ is this:
Yes, it’s an iMac, which I am now (as of yesterday) using completely as my primary work machine, as opposed to the screen I turned to when I needed to do a nice presentation, or perhaps check my receding hairline (it’s very shiny, you see, like a mirror). This has meant that I’ve had to re-learn how to do my email (I’m using the built-in Mail app, not Outlook) and even how to use Word .docs too. So that’s been a bit slow. Thank God the web works the same, wherever.
What did I get up to today, though? Mostly email catch-up, and I also spent quite a bit of time writing this and this.
Yes, we’ve finally announced what we’re doing at the Comic Expo in Bristol this year, and it’s quite exciting. First of all, I officially announced the first ever Draw the World Together Sketchbook. It’s 32 pages with a colour cover (black and white interiors), and I saw the final proof today. This thing is rockin’. We are so happy with how it turned out, and at a measly £5 (all going to charity) I seriously think it’s going to be the steal of the show.
The second thing I announced, which was really the big surprise, is that we’re going to colour sketches – both new and existing ones. No, not with crayons… digitally, by professionals. It’s a pretty cool development and I really hope people like yourself are going to love the results. Heck, I hope I love the results – you don’t think I’m going to miss out on an offer like that, do you? In case you missed it, here’s an example of what a sketch might look like coloured, courtesy of Jason Cardy:
Pretty damn nice, I say. And that all happens in… eep… two weekends. Before then though, lots of stuff. So I better go and get to doing it!
Talk to me people! I crave comments!
Good afternoon, good evening and goodnight
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related, Personal, Too Much Information on April 25th, 2008
As you can tell, the jetlag might still be affecting me somewhat. Up until about 12:30pm yesterday I earnestly believed it was Monday. No really. Just ask my co-workers.
So, back from hols as of Wednesday; elongated, crazy time-stretched return of course, not helped by my passing out at 9:30pm on Wednesday night (“I’m just going to nap for 15 minutesssszzzzzzzz….”) and waking up at 3am ready to go put in a full day’s toil. Yesterday was mostly filled with me staring at a screen, blinking, and stabbing cautiously at the Delete key as I got through the email backlog.
Today, hopefully, we start to get back to normal.
Lots coming up as I put the pedal back down to the metal, with the first up being, probably, Bristol Comic Expo and then Podcast 2.5. Some cool stuff being announced about Bristol today, too – keep an eye out.
You said what?