Toshio Iwai, a well known media artist and creator of Nintendo DS non-game title Electro Plankton, was in San Francisco a few weeks ago to demo his latest co-creation, the Tenori-On. His presentation not only included a breakdown of the Tenori-On’s development process, but also video from an SNES project that never got released (too [...]

Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gives a passionate first hand account of a stroke that affected the left hemisphere of her brain—and the resulting subjective experience—in this recent TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
This could be, and apparently has been, the spring board for many conversations.

I attended the opening of fellow ACiD member Lord Jazz’s exhibit in San Francisco Saturday night. The small venue was absolutely packed. The ANSI is being displayed on light boxes and LCD’s. You can see the process of creating the exhibit material on Lord Jazz’s webpage. The exhibit runs until February 3rd.

I had an eye exam last week and opted to have ultra-widefield retinal photos of my eyes taken instead of dilating them. I asked them to email the images to me and they did!

I also had wavefront images taken; this kind of analysis was used in the past for Lasik, but it is now being [...]

Ian Bogost wrote an article for Gamasutra about “Zen Games”. I disagree with his interpretation of Zen—and thus the article’s thesis—so I wrote the following letter to the editor. The stuff in quotes is in reference to Ian’s article, so you’ll need to read it to understand my critique fully. The image above is from [...]

I’ve been attending this zendo ever since moving to SF in 2003. We need some new blood. If the idea of sitting in silence—without moving—for 45 minutes at a time is something you might be into, please come check us out.
On weekdays we sit one period at 6:30 AM. On Saturdays we sit two periods, [...]

Stormfront Studios sent out an email to their employees this week asking what games they “respect for their fun, creativity, innovation, and quality”. There will be a vote to determine the top four names which will be used to name the Scrum rooms in the new office. Here were the game titles given by the [...]

I have been keeping my eye on an interesting game engine named Unity. The first Unity users conference, entitled Unite 2007, was held in San Francisco last week; I was asked by Gamasutra to cover the event! This was my first time to officially cover an event and resulted in my first two press credits. [...]

My friend Brandon Sheffield interviewed my friend Christoph Quas about the DS tactics game he designed entitled Panzer Tactics. When I spoke to Christoph about his game at GDC 2007, he told me that there were 150 units with something like 40 tuning variables each—what a balancing task!
The interview can be found here on Gamasutra.com.

I’m leaving for Tokyo in eight hours, still have a bunch of packing to do. This will be my first time attending TGS, pretty exciting. I’m also planning on going to the Ghibli Museum, CoFesta; a contents festival, and Cedec; a Japanese developer conference. I’m also hoping to meet with some friends and fellow developers, [...]