Upscaling it

With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week I thought hard about how to take the reading app ideas from my own Geometry Girl app novel / prototype to something bigger. Upscaling it from a personal art project to a potential business, really.

I talked to Alexander Klöpping about this, who was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule. He had some interesting observations that I’ll run with. Embarrassingly, my TestFlight prototype build expired on the exact day I talked to Alexander, which I discovered during our conversation. So I couldn’t actually show the damn thing.

After this I met up with my old podcast buddy Menno Schellekens, which was enlightening. He caught me off-guard with the notion that perhaps I don’t need a full-time partner for this business, at least not straight away, but someone who helps out with specific tasks for a limited amount of time. About halfway through our discussion he started talking about “us”.

For the rest of the week I tried to figure out how this would work precisely, what the actual tasks are, and whether Menno would be the right person to take these on. I think he just might be!

What else? I…

• Recorded and edited a new episode of Radio Laika, my monthly podcast pastiche. This time, additional voices were supplied by Amy van der Weerden, Sofieke de Kater and Sjors Houkes. The episode appeared in literary podcast Ondercast on Saturday night. I’m quite proud of how Laika keeps getting more complex and polished.
• Went to Two Tribes for a day, appending some tweaks to a new PlayStation 4 build of RIVE: small changes to how specific dialog messages are triggered, and a whole bunch of improvements to the Dutch translation.
• Discovered that a short interview I did was published on the Netherlands Film Festival website, mostly about the RIVE talk I’ll be doing there in a month or so, as part of the Control Conference.
• Visited the Dutch Foundation for Literature to discuss a digital literature portfolio and showcase website they’re creating. Later in the week I went there again for a demo of games and VR experiences that are being developed for the Frankfurter Buchmesse this October. I helped select some of these projects as a committee member, and I like how they’re turning out.
• Worked on my storyline for the new Get out of here escape room, changing things around based on some of the discussions we had. Otherwise, it was mostly trying to simplify everything, while adding more detail to those elements that remained.
• After having a goodbye dinner with my dad and sisters on Tuesday, we waved goodbye to my dad on Wednesday at Schiphol Airport, as he’s moving semi-permanently to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’m all for starting new things, so I think this is super cool, but as he’s also my father I’m a little sad and scared too.
• Had drinks and dinner with the old GameSen community on Saturday. GameSen was a Dutch website about games I created long ago, and this group wasn’t really the site’s crew, but kind of circled it, and they became friends during those years. I hadn’t seen some of these people for over a decade, and it was nice to talk to them again.
• Finished the first season of Stranger Things on Netflix, which emulates the eighties aesthetic so well it’s almost uncanny… and maybe a bit boring? Still a good watch. I also saw the first two seasons of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt over the last few weeks, which is a lot more uneven but I totally fell for. There’s so much creativity in its writing, including a lot that just doesn’t work… which somehow feels brave? I’m glad the creators keep trying to seduce me with their weird jokes. Finally, I started in the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I’m finding extremely interesting.

Average step count per day: 8.646
Average staircase count per day: 10
Average sleep per night: 6:53
Average weight: 88,0