Week 166–167

I was away on hol­i­day the pre­vi­ous week, so these notes on the week pri­or to that are a bit late. I’ll keep it short so we can get back into the rhythm of things.

Most of the week my time went into admin­is­tra­tive things, busi­ness devel­op­ment and some legal stuff. Just basi­cal­ly me wear­ing my stu­dio man­ager’s hat a lot. Which is typ­i­cal of a week before clos­ing shop. The fact that Alper would be away on much deserved R&R in Oz for the next three weeks only increased the need for get­ting some things sorted.

On Mon­day, the Uni­ver­si­ty Muse­um pub­lished the press release for Beesten­bende (in Dutch). Since Octo­ber 12 you can head to the muse­um and play the game on one of the iPods avail­able at the recep­tion. I’m real­ly pleased to have this out in the world now.

That same day I spent about an hour on the Neude being pho­tographed for the inter­view in Tra­jec­tum – the Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ence’s mag­a­zine. I don’t usu­al­ly enjoy these affairs but Kees Rut­ten made me stand in the mid­dle of bicy­cle traf­fic in the hopes of an inter­est­ing shot spon­ta­neous­ly emerg­ing. As you can imag­ine, that made it some­what more enjoy­able. The inter­view and accom­pa­ny­ing pho­to have since been pub­lished. It came out rather nice:

On Tues­day I spent some more time on my TEDx­Utrecht talk. I final­ized the slides and start­ed rehears­ing. Less than two weeks to go. I’m look­ing for­ward to it.

On Thurs­day, I head­ed to Ams­ter­dam togeth­er with Simon and Ulla to attend De Gids’s 175th anniver­sary and wit­ness the unveil­ing of Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie – the lit­er­ary game we’re mak­ing with them. Dirk Sr. & Dirk Jr. did a good job of piquing peo­ple’s curios­i­ty. They talked about some of the think­ing behind the project and of course could only go into the work­ing of the game in gen­er­al terms. The mock­ups pre­pared by Simon did a good job of giv­ing a sense of how the game might turn out:

The same night in Berlin, Alper pre­sent­ed his syn­the­sis of two years of Hub­bub think­ing at Ignite. An enjoy­able romp through some big ideas, here’s the video: