A slippery fire escape

With these weeknotes I track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on. They’re public so you can keep me in check.

For the first time in a while, last week was normal. I made progress on the projects that mattered, goofed around with projects that didn’t matter but felt good, and met up with old friends. I probably should’ve sat down to write fiction more, but hey, I already said things were back to normal.

On the Geometry Girl front, I got the first iOS build from Codeglue installed on my phone and tablet. There’s still a lot to do, but it runs, and that’s exciting. With Saskia I worked on the app’s screens, central symbol, background patterns and colors, mainly digging into the app’s various views, which solved a bunch of problems. I also created a pitchdeck for Renew the Book, so they can hopefully weigh the project’s chances somewhat before I commit to applying.

On Wednesday I visited Niels Bakker at the Dutch Reading Foundation, in the same old school building that houses the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Niels was enthusiastic about Geometry Girl and what’s beyond, and helped me frame my activities in a useful way. Seems like we’ll be testing the app together later on. To make things more thrilling, our meeting was cut off by a fire alarm test, after which we had to leave the property via a slippery fire escape.

What else? I…

• Wrote bits and pieces for an essay about Super Mario, and started reading a recent book about Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Let’s see if I can find the time to finish the book as well as the essay.
• Visited Two Tribes and was pretty productive writing dialog for our shooter/platformer game RIVE. This week I should be able to inject a lot of it into the actual game. Make it come to life!
• Was interviewed by Dennis for his excellent audio zine Ondercast. Our conversation lasted for 1.5 hours; I’m curious what he will and won’t cut to make it fit the show’s November edition. Over the weekend I recorded a short story to go with the interview. (I also happened to be interviewed by Bright TV for an item about Wi-Fi security in public spaces. It should air tonight.)
• Met up with Horst and Irmgard at the Dutch Games Association; I’ll pick up my blogging about Dutch games for their platform soon. And I might even record a pilot episode of a Dutch games people podcast for them.
• Had a few drinks with Geert. He told me about his studio’s next game, which sounds intriguing, and urged me to watch the British anthology show Black Mirror. He wasn’t the first, but I finally got down to it and watched four episodes over the weekend. As predicted by just about everyone, I thought it was great, with some significant similarities to De verdwijners and, especially, my plans for Sexy Sadie. (I also watched another two episodes of Mr. Robot with Filip, which is really not as good as we thought it would be. We’re almost done with the season though, so we’ll pull through.)
• Also had a few drinks (and Surinamese/Chinese food) with Arjan and David. I hadn’t seen these gentlemen in ages, and we had fun catching up.
• Got accepted as a member by the Vereniging van Letterkundigen. 12 years after my literary debut I finally had a good reason to get organized with my fellow writers. Finally I also got accepted for something else, that’s actually cool. But I was gently manipulated into not telling you about it yet.

Average step count per day: 8.937
Average staircase count per day: 19
Average sleep per night: 6:53
Average weight: 89,0 kg