Such a long time since I skyped with the Grandbabies, but today I managed to catch up with them to find out how their Fourth Birthday Party went yesterday. The conversation consisted of showing me toys, rolling around on the floor, smacking the computer and running away, and then my favourite, kissing the screen when they said goodbye.

XX Game Jam

In October 2012 I took part in my first game jam, where teams of artists, programmers, game designers, musicians etc dash to create a computer game within a set time, often with people they have never worked with before. This particular game jam was special in that it was super fast ~ we only had 24 hours to create our game or concept and also it was the first ever XX Game Jam ~ only women participating, most of them strangers to each other. 

We were quite quiet to start with, and stayed relatively quiet as we split off into our groups to start working hard on our games.

The theme we were all given was Clockwork ~ very now, very steampunk, and very open to interpretation in different ways, as evidenced by the different games that resulted.

Our small team of three had never met before and consisted of  Kimmi Gan, programmer  and Teri Mardel  - a games designer

We also had some input from Fiona French, who teaches Game design, and got us to stop long enough to plan what we were doing and work out how much was feasible to achieve in 24 hours, if we were intending to sleep at all.

So we set to  and developed a game which involved Ada Lovelace jumping up and down to release cogs that bounced onto a crocodile (a ticking crocodile, like the one in Peter Pan that has swallowed a clock).

The resulting game got simpler and simpler from our initial ideas of snapping jaws and teeth flying out, but we were pleased with our effort, which Teri labelled:  ”Tick Tock Terror”.

We didn’t win the game jam, but we did get a special mention for the aesthetics of our game, which pleased me, as the ahem, Artist (aw, shucks). I am assured this was not just because our main character was Ada Lovelace in a crinoline holding a spanner or that we incorporated Babbage’s engine as our background ~ it was because it was already playable, and albeit seemingly simple, Tick Tock Terror is surprisingly tricky.

The games from the jam will be online in early 2013 so you can have a go. There are some links below to the XX game jam supporters and also some of the press coverage. 

Organised by the wonderful Debbie Rawlings at Auroch Digital, the game jam was hosted by Mind Candy , creators of Moshi Monsters, in their outrageously vibrant and overstimulating offices in London.

It was supported by UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, UKIE, Ada Lovelace Day, Connection Point Technology, PlayMob, London Games Festival & Auroch Digital. 

You can find more on the XX Game Jam via these links, some with more irritating titles than others:

http://findingada.com/events/xx-game-jam-2012/

http://xxgamejam.tumblr.com

UK Sees It’s First Female Only Game Jam

I’m at the XX Game Jam

Overcoming the Odds With a Female Only Game Development Jam

Ladies First: Inside the first ever women’s only game jam

XX Game Jam

Laptop saga

It's back, finally. The laptop went off to the insurer's preferred fixer and came back ten days later (with a new screen, shiny!) only to frustrate me for 24 hours of attempting to reload all the things I had taken off it. It said it was attached to my wireless network, but was taking about ten minutes to access a webpage. And I made several attempts to get Migration Manager working to transfer between imac and macair.
I resisted booting equipment around the room. I mean kicking. I rebooted quite a lot.
In the end I phoned the insurer who agreed I could take the laptop to the place I had wanted to take it to in the first place - Western Computer near Temple Meads in Bristol. There, they diagnosed that whoever had fitted the new screen had damaged one of the two aerials, so it needed a new screen. And now I have my laptop back and it's working. Migration Manager took about three hours but everything seems to be there, and I have no excuse for not writing. Apart from the fact that I am meant to be tidying up for Xmas visitors.

updates and backups

I have spent most of this week backing up the contents of my laptop to as many places as I can think of before sending it off to be fixed. It was one of those random laptop-screen-meets-perfume-bottle incidents, where I stupidly didn't react in time to stop them colliding as they slid to the floor one after the other. I wasn't even using the perfume, just hadn't put it away.
So, I have used Time Machine (which comes with the mac) to back the macair laptop up on my iMac, and copied all documents, photos and videos onto a small (in size not capacity) WD hard drive, and just to be sure I am now uploading as much as possible to my Virgin Media account - that is the frustrating one because it is very slow over our wireless network.
I had a conversation on facebook about best back up plans - a couple of people suggested CCC: Carbon Copy Cloner, which apparently is really good as it copies everything to a hard drive and you can just reinstall it to your machine when you need to. I'm not sure what difference there is between CCC and Time Machine, but have decided that the main thing that I care about are files so am not too bothered if Time Machine doesn't reinstall everything. I could see it as a way of clearing out the laptop a little.
I can remember most of my passwords - I took a screen shot of all the web login names and passwords that I will delete. I also need to copy and delete the saved passwords for email accounts etc. And the emails?
Now I have to decide how much other stuff to delete from my laptop before it is collected to be assessed by the insurer-nominated fixers.
I will probably delete all my documents and images and downloads, and passwords, just to be on the safe side. Then curse when all they do is replace the screen and send the laptop back intact.
This is what the screen looked like at first, with the little black hole:

And now it's more of a strange dangling spider of an ink-blot that takes over too much of the screen:

So, heart in mouth, surrendering laptop to the courier on Monday.

Granny's Dancing on the Table

Not 'just' about grannies, but they play a big role, Granny's Dancing on the Table looks like a lovely narrative film project that invites involvement in couple of easy ways: Check out the video on their kick-starter site that explains the story and how they plan to share the film on a Creative Commons licence and create a related game. Then you can donate as little as $1 to get things going. 
You can also get your own granny involved by adding photos and stories to their collection at The Granny Invasion www.granniverse.com
The script for the film has already won a prize at Cannes, and the short snippets look really engaging. Take a look, help make it happen.

How to get a 360 degree panoramic shot

Now this is a very clever invention developed from phd work by Jonas Pfeil, a student in Berlin. He has built a 'Throwable panoramic camera' which has 36 mobile phone cameras embedded in a ball that you throw in the air and it takes a 360 degree picture at its highest point. There's a video on his website that explains it and there's a link to this panoramic shot to show what it can do.

This reminded me of a wedding in Winchester about 16 years ago, when the Brother of the Bride attached a camera to a rocket - a firework style rocket - and sent it up over the wedding party as we stood on the mizmaze at st catherine's hill, an old pagan site. We all dutifully looked up and smiled for the birdie, then watched in amusement as the rocket did not come straight back down but got blown off course into the brambles, with Brother of the Bride in hot pursuit regardless of his bare legs. After a good half hour of searching he did not come back triumphant, just scratched. He probably shouldn't have worn shorts to a wedding. I do wonder if the camera was ever found. This ball camera would have been more reliable, though possibly not as spectacular and harder to hide in a pocket during the ceremony.

The other drawback is that you have to catch the ball before it lands, not my strong point. Though jostling to catch the camera ball at a wedding would have more point to it than trying to catch the bride's bouquet.

little fishes

Oh, and if you're reading this on an iPad then that big blank space at the top of the page is meant to have cute little goldfish swimming around who come to your mouse cursor. But not for iPad users.