October-November projects and ideas

[leila johnston]

Hello,

What a lovely autumn day, you should go outside. 

Thanks for signing up for this. Extra thanks as this is just the first one and I'm not sure how best to do them yet, so it will be a bit shit. There are a few opportunities to contribute and collaborate in the stuff below, and some details of things I'm going to be involved with over the next month. If any of it sounds interesting or relevant to your work and you want to talk further, please let me know! In general I'm really keen to hear about events and cool tech/art projects that are going on, I might be able to write about them for a magazine or whatnot. So please keep me up to date with your stuff too, I'd like that.

*****Writing*****

Well, it's all writing, isn't it. But you know what I mean. 

> I'm going to be writing a regular column for the soon-to-be-relaunched Imperica magazine. I have permission to do this on work time, so it depends on me having some time at work. I've been putting together something about magic.

> Someone's just asked me to write something about time travel for their newspaper, which sounds excellent and very exciting. Can't wait to see it.

> ...and as ever, WIRED UK have at least a couple of pieces they've paid for but haven't yet used ("how to be a professional gambler", and something on side channel attacks).

*****Making Stuff*****

> I posted on the work blog about some concepts myself and my colleague Duncan have been working on together and separately for a few years. We're preoccupied with inventing the opposite of social networks so it's called http://madebymany.com/blog/the-opposite-of-things There's now some pressure to actually launch a couple of these ideas, and we're thinking of starting with MemoryMap, in December. At some point we should really launch F.U.S.I.O.N, a game demo we created about a switchboard operator abusing her position of power to search for eligible male survivors in the aftermath of an apocalypse.

> I'm hoping to create something interesting and maybe slightly robotified for a gig on November 19th... nothing finalised yet either about the gig or my ability to build the thing I have in mind. 

> I feel strongly that more needs to happen with the site I made with my friend Tim (timwarriner.com) earlier this year (website designed and built by Tom (http://experthuman.com/)) extremeactsofkindness.co.uk. There are times when I find it so funny I can't even look at it, which is surely a sign that something more needs to be done to bring it to more people. I wonder what?

*****Events*****

> I've been running interdisciplinary panel conferences in my new office, with my colleague Sara, for the last few months. We're holding them every other month at the moment, and so far are not short of speakers, which is great. Storywarp.com is the site, and there's an audio recording of the second event here http://soundcloud.com/finalbullet/storywarp2. The next one takes place on December 7th probably at our offices in Angel, London -- and the theme is 'Other People's Stories', featuring a panel of people who know what it's like to tell the stories of people different to themselves.

> I guess the big news is that I've decided to do an Edinburgh show next year. I had just started a new full-time job* this summer and missed two opportunities to perform in great-looking geeky cabaret things, and felt incredibly disappointed about it. But next year... well, I haven't worked out the details yet. Hopefully I'll still have this job, and will be able to find a way to fit in a few shows around it. (*I work at a company that makes online products and services as a sort of digital copywriter and content person.) In the meantime I can enjoy performing and speaking at things, as much as possible.

The show will probably be a whistle-stop tour of interesting stuff that comes up a lot in science fiction. One way or another, I've looked into this stuff quite a lot over the years -- as you might know, I wrote a sort of sci fi/fantasy gamebook about a time-traveling nerd, in 2009. This year I've been doing some talks about Star Trek ("An Office In Space") and Star Wars ("Flowers for Alderaan"). The expanded universes I've seen! So yeah, I'm half-way there. 

Actually, I did Alderaan at Spacetacular last week (facebook.com/spacetacular, and here's a picture of me at their previous event, shorts shorter than I remember http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/207934_118540851559641_102568719823521_148510_3649979_n.jpg) ...which was ace fun, and I'm doing it again at the Cambridge Ideas Festival next Saturday http://www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas/whats-on/?uid=97940469-4c62-3b25-86fc-e6b45148f093&date=2011-10-29. Wow, this paragraph is URL hell.

On Tuesday 25th I'm speaking at the mysteriously-named "Mr Mobbles Magical Emporium" in Camden, a conference about mobile phone tech. I'm going to be doing a bit about interfaces and magic, register your interest here: http://lanyrd.com/2011/mmme-october/

> Then on the weekend of the 5th and 6th of Nov I'll be in Blackpool working at Replay, the phenomenal retro-gaming expo, where I will once again be running around with a camera man interviewing everyone... hopefully including Iain Lee, who was a treat last year. replayexpo.com

> The following weekend I'm in France, then there's a possible something on the 19th involving a creation I'm hoping to build on stage with laptops... then nothing (as yet) 

> ...until December 2nd when I'm doing Making Things Fast at Oxwords http://www.oxwords.co.uk/.

> I'd be interested in elaborating on this talk I wrote this month about storytelling v. content and delivering it to some astonished ears, at some point, if you need a skeptical speaker sometime: http://madebymany.com/blog/stop-telling-stories

Does anyone go to the London Hackspace? Any good? I have all this soldering stuff and circuit boards and things but not enough space to play.

Anyway, that's it for the first one. Same time next month!

L x