Week 852

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 I finished the Geometry Girl website and put it online, including the project’s research plan and a first blog post (I have a few more lined up). It’s a placeholder, design-wise, using the standard WordPress theme; what counts is that I can collect my thoughts and document my experiments there. To give the whole thing a proper social media launch, I created a Facebook page, Twitter account and email newsletter, that I intend to grow organically.

On Tuesday and Friday I got together with Alper Çugun and Tim Hengeveld to work on Home Rule (working title), a children’s game for war museums that I will handle the copy for. I’m still internalizing the project, but will already be writing a bunch for it this week (last week was the first of a 3-week sprint).

After a short hiatus, I sent some game article proposals to nrc.next. Seems like I’ll be writing and publishing again soon. I also met up with nrc.next editor Anne-Martijn van der Kaaden on Thursday to pitch the hybrid writer concept, and then with Nina Polak of De Correspondent to do the same. They were both quite responsive, in strikingly different ways; let’s see what happens next.

In the evening hours I read Annelies Verbeke’s new novel Dertig dagen, which I liked a lot, after which I interviewed her at the City2Cities festival on Friday. That’ll be my podcast for July (I should edit and publish the one with Auke Hulst soon). I also attended interviews with Michel Houellebecq and Michel Faber at the festival, two of my favorite authors I suppose, although Faber is a lot more interesting live (and speaks a language I’m decent at).

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Attended the DGA Day on Wednesday, a get-together for the Dutch games scene. I did a tiny thing on stage, pitching the DGA platform that I contribute to. But mostly I watched and listened, posting a summary of the day’s discussion panel afterwards: Can we reach the European top 3? This is what the panel at the DGA Day said.
• Did a wee bit of #hobbydev with Hessel, starting the Dijkstra Maps experiment I’d planned, trying to be smart about finding the shortest path on a procedurally generated grid.
• Finished my report for NOS op 3 at long last, closing off a project that started when they reached out to me last summer. I hung around in the newsroom for almost a month last fall, then worked on a bunch of digital ideas for them.
• Got an Ikea rug for my home office, mostly meant to improve acoustics for ad-hoc audio recordings, but it also happens to really tie the room together.

Average step count per day: 8.210
Average staircase count per day: 13
Average sleep per night: 7:00
Average weight: 91,0 kg