Click Nothing

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part IV

Savannah.

It's hot here - like 25 degrees and sweltering humid. Didn't expect that as I'd been keeping an eye on the temperature in the weeks before we left, but what can you do.

So far, things have been going very well. After GameX, I did three big schools pretty much back-to-back. First was CMU in Pittsburgh, then MIT in Boston and after that, NYU in Manhattan. Each time I had the pleasure of getting different tours, meeting and talking to lots of students and seeing what they were working on, and each night following the talk, I was lucky enough to get to grab dinner with some faculty or students or local devs or all of the above. So I've gotten to see a lot of cool stuff, and meet a lot of cool people, and eat a lot of great food (dessert at Rouge Tomate - check it out if you're in NY)

The talk seems to go over well, even though it's a pretty hardcore philosophical talk. Anyway, it was really intended for Masters students, so it's not a typical 'general public' audience, and - judging by the questions that I'm getting grilled with - it shows.

Tonight, we've got tickets to the Savannah Film Festival. Sounds like we'll getto see Woody Harrelson premiere his latest film (not the zombie one). After that, another fancy dinner at The Pink House - while we watch the kids wander around trick-or-treating in their ghost town of a village.

Tomorrow I give the talk here at SCAD in Savannah, and then Tuesday I'm off to Atlanta for the last stop.

Thanks to everyone who has showed up so far, and I look forward to meeting more of you in the next few days.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part III

So the 'lecture' part of the 'lecture tour' doesn't start until tomorrow but the 'tour' part started late last night with a phonecall from US Airways (all the way to Montreal from Raleigh, NC) saying that my 9:30am flight would be delayed until 11:10.

That all changed of course with a 6:30 am call saying the 9:30 flight that had been pushed to 11:10 was now jumping forward to 10:40.

Of course, once we got to the airport everything changed again and we didn;t even get off the ground until well after noon and any hope of a pleasant day in wandering Philadelphia was delayed even further by a nasty headwind that made a 90 minute flight last almost a full two hours and - with renting a car and all that shit didn't get us into town until like 3pm.

We wandered the touristy center of town, saw the Liberty Bell and then strolled through intermittent rains down to South Street. The highlight of the day was an awesome dinner at a place called Farmicia, which is an organic, local food restaurant that I actually got to be the founder of on Gowalla. Shame on you Philadephians for not founding it yourselves. Fantastic food, healthy, innovative with fresh, organic local and seasonal ingredients. A real winner. I'd come back to town just to eat there again.

Anyway - unfortunately, GameX is not even really in Philly - it's in some suburb like 30 minutes out of town... which kind of sucks (hopefully they'll remedy that for next year). So now I am back at the hotel doing a final, final (final) FINAL pass on my talk for tomorrow. Anyway, with the messed up sleep I haven;t been getting in the last three weeks - a good long nights rest before my keynote is just what the doctor ordered.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part II

In the beginning, there was nothing

It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009.

It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days.

The talk, as detailed in a previous post, is about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.

The dates and locations, for those who might be intertested in attending, are as follows (though not all are open to the public):

Sunday, October 25th, 9:30 am
GameX Convention, Keynote
(details)

Monday, October 26th, 3:30 pm
ETC Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:00 pm
MIT, GAMBIT Game Lab
(details)

Thursday, October 29th, 6:00 pm
NYU, New York
(details pending)

Monday, November 2nd
SCAD Savannah
(details pending)

Monday, November 3rd
SCAD and IGDA Atlanta
(details)

For a walkthrough of the tour, you can drop this into Google Earth. If you're on Dopplr, friend me and you'll see the specific dates I expect to be around in which towns. If you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, friend or follow me and you'll be able to keep tabs on my frequent updates.

Since I already gave an early version of the talk at Ubi, here in Montreal, the Twitter stream for the tour and its collected talks is live if you want to listen in on #CNTour09.

Hopefully, if you had any interest at all in listening to my demented ramblings, I will be coming to somewhere vaguely near where you live - drop by and see the talk and harrass me with questions that I won't be able to answer and then we have a drink and talk less seriously.

If I'm still not coming anywhere near you or if you have to go to your cousin's wedding on the night I am passing through your city - don't worry. I am currently in the process of building out video for many of my previous talks - including this one - and I hope that over the coming months you'll have access to this material in video format that you can watch in your underwear while eating ice cream, or on your iPhone on the bus - or both.

Hope to see you somewhere between here and 32 degrees North latitude.

(No, I don't have t-shirts, but I promise if I survive this and do it again next year, I will have some made.)