Week 689

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week, nrc.next published a great game spread, including my column about The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3, game reviews by Rogier Kahlmann, Harry Hol and Samuel Hubner Casado (which I edited) and my article about Journey, based on my interview with Jenova Chen at the Game Developers Conference. I might publish that online at some point, but not before the full transcript has appeared in the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine (OPM).

Speaking of which, last week I edited the full transcript of my interview with Jenova Chen, for OPM.

I also published an extended version of my nrc.next piece on Dear Esther over at Bashers.nl. After that, I met with SonicPicnic and Monobanda to discuss the audio art game we are thinking up, which could become similar to Dear Esther in certain ways. (Or not at all.)

Otherwise, I met with David Nieborg to talk about our collaboration on the games coverage of nrc.next, among other things, then spent a day working on the consultancy project we’re doing for the Ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie.

I spent a day working on a proposal and first chapters of De verdwijners, a novel. Together with my literary agent, I am actively looking for a publisher now.

Last week I also discovered that one of my clients had not – ever – paid me. When I looked into this, the pretty stable sounding Schiphol Magazine did not, in fact, exist anymore. I placed some phone calls and sent off some e-mails, and quickly found myself forwarding messages between two higher-ups who both said that if anyone could pay me, it was surely the other guy. Hilarious, if you find probably never getting your € 1313 any kind of funny. So yeah, I have to keep better track of my invoices. I’ve been pretty lucky with my clients in recent years, so I guess I had my guard down.

I started reading Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, a book about the popular games franchise, by David Kushner. Kushner’s previous book about videogames, Masters of Doom, was highly entertaining and insightful. So far, this seems to be at least as good.

On Friday, I attended two sessions at the Holland Animation Film Festival, including Matthijs Dierckx and Arjan Terpstra talking about Japanese animation and games, leading up to Ni No Kuni, the first game with art and animation by Studio Ghibli. Arjan was responsible for the excellent weekly games page in De Pers, the free quality newspaper that stopped that Friday. Must have been an odd day for him.

On Saturday, I saw The Hunger Games, which was nice to form an opinion about. (It’s a teenage dancing movie disguised as dystopian drama. Might write a review later on.)

On Sunday, I helped a friend move.