From now on, I’m doing two blogs. One in English (about games), one in Dutch (about my novel). I won’t disable the old RSS feed, but I do recommend that you cancel the old one and subscribe to one of the new ones, through Feedburner: there’s the English one, the Dutch one and the combined feed. Also, check out the new design I came up with. ↵
This is going to be a weekly thing: Bright’s Game of the Week (in Dutch, again). Every Thursday on Bright.nl. ↵
My first news item for Webwereld (in Dutch), where – I hope – I’ll write a lot more about internet stuff and such. ↵
I will, again, be at Crossing Border this November. Today, some acts were announced for the festival – and I’m really happy to see that Spinvis and Chuck Palahniuk will be present. Yay! ↵
“The web browser is a blank canvas. A big empty box that can hold almost anything. Fill it with something original, something you can call your own.” This also goes for novels. However, even though you could theoretically write just about anything, it’s extremely hard to break out of the mold that others have created for you. ↵
Love the keyboard, love the URL: apple.com/keyboard. ↵
Rumours about 16 GB flash memory video iPods. Here’s an insight: a touch-screen similar to the iPhone’s is probably the only way to make up for the decrease in storage space compared to the supposedly-to-be-dropped hard-drive based iPods. ↵
Two interviews with ‘Pac-Man’ creator Toru Iwatani: one from 1986, one from 2005. Supposedly, the man has now quit Namco to become a full-time lecturer at Tokyo Polytechnic University, but I haven’t been able to confirm this. ↵
Over at Bashers, we’re looking for a Dutch games journalist to help us out with the site. ↵
Seth Godin about people he calls ‘rifters’, like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney (and his mom). Be sure to read the older article he links to. Among other things, it contains an interesting question: “I often wonder what Walt would have done with the internet. Or with cable TV. Or with home shopping, home video and DVD.” ↵
Pretty neat: Sander Kessels created a small Flash game based on my debut novel Toiletten. The game is a buggy Mario knockoff, but for every bonus you collect, there’s an animation featuring (Dutch) text from the book. The Toiletten game is used to promote reading amongst young people, which is always great. ↵
“Here’s the truth about why I’m writing this article: I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them someday at a reunion. I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey. I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely decline. Or accept if they’re really good. Then get a generous counteroffer from my boss.” ↵
Following up Monday’s post I’ll add that not only my personal expectations management was to blame – so was Apple’s. Generally it’s never smart to say you’ve got some top secret features you’re not showing, because that’s sure to raise people’s expectations too much and disappoint them in the end. ↵
Apparently, there were similar Mac games related announcements towards the end of the nineties. Sure, but back then Macs didn’t run on Intel, so porting games was a lot harder. Plus I think the market share is growing a lot faster now. ↵