Apocanomics

Greetings, mates! A quick update from the Captain’s Desk:

* Tomorrow Thursday October 2nd I am going to Startonomics which looks really good.

* Penny Arcade were daft enough to ask me to write a piece on DRM, which I titled ‘Put down the pipe.’. As Tycho points out“… the conversation is wholly the domain of psychotics, dead-enders, revolutionaries, and sophists.” Your vote please as to which bucket I fall into. For the record, I am merely a part-owner of Three Rings, which has many shareholders including our employees and investors, I just have a big mouth and my colleagues extend me unusual freedom to exercise it.

* This is a great post on the role of the CTO on Eric Reis’ blog.

* I was in Austin for the Austin GDC and on a funding panel with Saar Gur, Susan Wu and David King of (lil) Green Patch I waffled something about how a strong CTO should be a member of the founding team. I was on another panel regarding open source and at the Worlds in Motion summit Nabeel Hyatt and I had a rocking session on user-generated content with special guests Merci Grace PMOG, Curt Bereton of Playcrafter and Nicole Lazzaro of Xeo Design. These are all awesome rabbit-holey sites of awesome, visit them. It was a fun session and we didn’t even have to serve drinks. Thanks to those bloggers present for not blogging my (too big-mouthed) presentation!

* I spoke at Siggraph (note to conference operators, please make individual links to talks, so we can uh link to them) on Jason Della Rocca’s panel on user-generated content in games. It was weird; a huge hall with maybe a hundred brave souls after the first hour(!) but I think we said a lot of clever things, aided by ‘user created’ sketches and a guest audience-member from Microsoft flight sim. Siggraph felt kind of sad, rattling around in the giant LA convention center.

* I spoke on virtual worlds on the web at the Virtual Worlds Expo. A lot of folks are betting on corporate applications for VW’s and maybe the time is finally right. Certainly if fuel prices continue to rise flying will become unfashionable. I’m not a huge fan of hurtling through the sky in a tin can, but it will be sad to see less of distant friends and family.

* As a teenager in the ‘duck and cover’ early 80’s I was an avid reader of John Wyndham, and I have a weakness for apocalyptic contemplation. This is an excellent analysis of the credit crisis by Douglas Rushkoff and I like his conclusions; move close to your friends and family (or move them to you, nudge nudge). See also other links from Marc Hurst’s awesome newsletter. It remains to be seen what the effect of the economy throwing a wobbly will be on our business and the small group of generous players who make our games possible. Thanks, and may the force be with us.

* In other portents of the end of the world, the Nautilus was attacked by a motley band of hideous pirates known as the Instructables. After some consideration, the appropriate fiendish rites and a short spell underhill to molder, we performed our Corpse-Craftian Zombie attack on Instructables. Be sure to watch the second half. On the way back I led a small deputation of undead to maraud Eunice and co. at Hello Lucky.

* Hot Facebook news this week as Eunice and I updated our profiles to say ‘Engaged’ and received a slew a congratulations. I actually popped the question back on August 10th, at sundown at the top of Buena Vista Park. We’d been throwing a muddy, drooly ball for Indie and Eunice’s hands were mucky, but she gamely popped on the ring. Hurrah!

* Back to Penny Arcade, Tycho writes that Corpse Craft is “… fucking banging, and may even bang off the hook.” Timothy Conkling and Jon Demos did an fantastic job with this game and are working on an expansion.

* Whirled is really picking up. Something good is happening when every time I login there’s new cool stuffs and when I browse ‘the graph’ (groan) I find pockets of new high-level peoples. More on this in due course, not least when Andrew Chen and I talk about ‘Metrics for Virtual Goods’ at the Virtual Goods Summit on Oct 10th. Apparently he is bringing the brains and I am bringing the data. Mmm, brains.

Having not even begun to catch you up on the last few months, I am afraid that that will be all for this evening. I will endeavour to return soon with more linkage on farming, sewing, bee-keeping and the best spots to establish post-apocalyptic enclaves of right-thinking folk, free of DRM and marauding zombies. Fair winds!