Woah! Long time no blog!

No, this is not a post about how I can’t stand the youth.  I can’t stand *some* youth but that’s not important.  This is a post of envy.  Gushing, oozing, permeating envy.  Envy so green you swear it can turn a rat into a kungfu master.

I am just completely in awe of the younger generation and of all the toys, technology, and media tools at their disposal.  Of course, those same things are available to me too, but I can’t stop imagining how awesome my life would’ve been if I grew up in the age of Wikipedia, Ustream, podcasting, social networking, and high-tech gaming.  Not necessarily because I’m a gadget-phile but I truly think all of these media advancements can help kids and teenagers, who are in one of the most awkward stages in life, find their voice.

(Obviously, I am well aware of the disadvantages and dangers that new media can have on the youth culture, but I feel like those categories of dangers exist regardless of the internet or cell phones.  Bullying will always be a facet of human experience, and peer pressure will always exist.  And the uglier things like eating disorders, abuse, pedophilia, and bigotry are existing social issues and they don’t seem like they’ll go away any time soon.)

I am envious of kids these days.

Take my friend Jeremy for example.  Not even legal to drink, Jeremy has made himself a small media empire centered around games and design.  I’m not talking about Mark Zuckerberg and making millions off of Facebook.  I’m talking about a kid who is fearless about modern programs and services and using them to express himself.  He has a podcast, uses live-stream for shows, designs graphics, makes storyboards and film reels…all of this just for fun and for the sake of experimentation.  Granted, he’s a talented guy but you have to see that having the tools to discover what you like and what you’re good at is phenomenally powerful, especially for young people.

If I knew that I could have become a professional cake decorator like Duff from Ace of Cakes, I wouldn’t have suffered through architecture school in hopes to succeed in a  profession I pretended to be interested in just to please my parents.  How much I could have known more about the world if I grew up with Wikipedia!  Or with YouTube!  I could have found solace during bad times on social networking websites.

So bathe in your bevy of new media tools, children.  Find your voice, and yell it out.  It’s good to be young.

My husband got his first Capcom-unity dating spam today.

He feels very validated.

Read, then guffaw:

Hello Dear
I’m just browsing now in the Internet and found your profile on
www.capcom-unity.com and it captured my interest i decided to drop few words to you.
I’m miss linna by name,please i will like us to hold a good
relationship with a real love,I’m happy to look at your profile today,you
sound so gentle to me that was  why i fell very much interested in writing
you,contact me through my  personal box (linnadokie@yahoo.com) for more
introduction,also i will send my pictures to you so we can know more about each
other,i will be happy to see your response my dear,age or colour even distance
can’t deny any genuine love,so please lets give our self a trial,thanks till
i hear from you
misslinna

The 20×2 event features 20 people from all walks of life who have only 2 minutes to answer an extremely open-ended question. The ninth 20×2 event was held in Austin at SXSW this past Monday at The Parish Room. I still feel so fortunate and honored to be one of 20 presenters!

“What’s it gonna take?”

I gave a little intro before this video. I talked about how I was a very weak kid and got severely sick all the time. And when you’re a bedridden 6 year-old in the 1980’s, there was only one place you can find comfort, companionship, and answers to your life questions: The NES.

This was my first real video project!  I used NEStopia (free!), and Camtasia (free too!) to capture the footage.  I couldn’t get Fraps to work with emulators, so I used a free trial of Camtasia.  Thanks to Vinny Sciabica for his wonderful arrangement of the Mario star theme.

All in all, I had oodles of fun at the event.  Thanks to the good peeps at 20×2 and all the rockin’ people there.  Even Mark Zupan talked to me! Not too shabby, eh?

Why maintain a personal blog when there’s Twitter?

I’m not being snarky or declaring that this blog is useless (ok, maybe a little…but I have good reasons for keeping this blog…where else am I going to post photos of penis-dinosaur cookies?).  But with technology prodding and fueling our latent ADHD, I admit that I’m having problems reading long personal blog entries.  Is it just me?  If the point of reading someone’s personal blog is to learn more about the author, wouldn’t readers get a more realistic view of the author’s life by following tweets instead?

Just curious.

One of the many awesome parts of working at 1UP for me was that I got to develop and brainstorm site features.

They would ask me, “Hey, how the hell do we improve anything and everything on 1UP?” and I would start thinking, brainstorming, outlining, and mocking up any ideas I had (with visionary people like Jeremy and Sam, no less).  I finished several incredible projects from the ground up right before I left 1UP, some of them are insanely huge in scale…and some are minor but necessary improvements (but all secretive, shh!).  But having something go live on 1UP, well, to be honest, it takes a while.

A really long while.

But this is indeed a Christmas Miracle because our first Column Blog is now a live beta!  And it’s a great feeling to see something you worked on actually exist, and to be able to talk about it now!  I feel like freaking Tiny Tim.  Not to be confused with The Actual Mighty Tim, who’s the head engineer on this project.

But I know, “so the fuck what, Karen, it’s just another content news blog.”

At first glance, maybe.

Though I am not physically in the 1UP offices anymore, my grand ideas are still there, eagerly waiting in a queue for their time to come into focus.  Baby steps, my friend.

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

So our issue of Playboy just arrived, and lo and behold, this month’s playmate is Korean-American Grace Kim.  Now, not only is she a cutie poptart with stunning almond eyes, she also works for Activision as a PR contact for Guitar Hero.  What I liked about her bio is that Playboy wasn’t all OMG A GIRL WHO CAN PWN UR ASS.  They didn’t go overboard with the fact that she plays games.  No printing of the word “grrl.”  No Suicide Girls-esque longing gazes.  No forced tough tomboy poses.  No anecdotes containing the etymological abortion, “n00b”.  Nothing that whinkly overstates GRRLS R GAMERZ 2.  Once or twice Playboy sandwiched in a few remarks about how she’s freakishly good at Guitar Hero but that’s it.

But what I did find that was a little annoying is the photo shoot.  Like I said before, Playboy’s photography is still very traditional and dated.  A lot of soft lighting, airbrushing, cheesy backdrops (Some of Grace Kim’s photos looked like a mashup of porn and bad Chinese restaurants).

But artistic differences aside, let me present to you with this:

(Yup, those are Otis head pasties.)

So with all this Guitar Hero and Activision talk…why are there Rockband instruments in this photograph?  Would Activision get angry at this?  Ms. Kim here is probably going to attract a lot of attention for Activision and for their products… but those aren’t even Activision products.  The other ridiculous photo had Guitar Hero on the plasma TV in the background with a set of Rockband instruments in front of it.  Seriously.

1UP user Malik was telling me about how Sudan is absolutely filled with pirated stuff because Sudan is a sanctioned country so legitimate copies are not allowed to be shipped in.  (I’m taking his word for it because I have absolutely no clue on Sudanese law).  While wandering around town, Malik’s brother Mohamed spotted one particular pirated game that just seems awfully familar:

Hey, that’s not the official Bully game cover…but why does it look so goddamn familiar?

…Oh!  Because I made that.

This was the cover I designed for the Bully Cover Story on 1UP a while ago. (Sam compared the two images on his 1UP blog here.) Malik explained, “I see Gamespot and IGN screenshots all the time on pirated games but only 1up has gotten one of their images to be used as a cover!”

Which totally makes sense!  They can’t just slap a screenshot from a website on to a game box– they need something more coverish, more editorial, more composed. I especially like the added bottom tag line:

DO YOU LIKE SCHOOL PLAY IT

But oh wow, this totally made my day.  So awesome and illegal at the same time.

Before today, the last time I truly coded something was back in 10th grade, and I wrote a Sierpinski Carpet program on my high-end Casio calculator.  The kind-of-sad-but-cool thing is, I had a lot of fun.  So much nerdtastic fun.  But today, I totally kicked 10th-grade-me’s fat ass by writing an unstoppable Journey plug-in based on WordPress’ Hello Dolly plug-in. Wordpress users, start your rawk engines.

Any way you want it, that’s the way you need it! The Rock Ballad is a helluva drug, and this plug-in reminds you the overwhelming power of song, mullets, and a particular tiny leopard-print yellow muscle tee. Let Journey’s lyrics drown you with a deluge of 80’s anthem awesomeness and send you awash in a sea of lighter-waving electrolytes.  Let us sing high and mighty, for our diaphragms should be pushed up into our lungs!   Inspired by the Hello Dolly plug-in, when Don’t Stop Believing is activated, you will see a line of lyrics from random Journey’s classic hits in the upper right of your admin screen on every page.

You can download Don’t Stop Believing Wordpress plug-in by clicking this sentence or on Steve below.

(01:09 Hits a little close to home.)

I appreciate the “quieter” and classier approach of this sketch. If it were me, I would’ve gone all out and have developers in clear lucite heals and runny makeup, and stumbling to car windows in dark alleys offering their nether regions in exchange for better bug tracking programs. And in the corner, a few tattered-looking developers freebasing shredded sheets of Road Map print-outs.

Ok, maybe I’m going a little too far with this.

So what’s the lesson?

Never make me a director of anything.

Hip hip hooray for my official domain and blog site!  It’s still a work in progress, obviously, and I’m still toying with PHP changes and wading through all my various blog posts from other sites to import into this one.  Stay tuned!

I’ve been thinking really hard about how to approach this site’s inaugural post. If my head was of a Futurama robot, then I already would have one of those exploding moments where the glass eyeball busts out of its socket and bobbles up and down to the oscillation of a very sad spring.

I figure I should just start this website off with my thought about magazine subscriptions.

Currently, New Media is well on its way to make Print its bitch, so why spend money on a magazine subscription when you can get the same information for free? A one-year subscription is fairly affordable and it sure is a lot more cost-effective than buying 12 issues every month from Walgreen’s where the pages are already covered in other people’s amino acids. I think it boils down to how consumers are apprehensive about commitment. If someone is willing to get through all these decision-making hurdles and willing to commit, then hell, they either are addicted to the intoxicating smell of new ink, or they really enjoy their magazines and what their magazines are about. Hence, my personal theory is that you can tell a whole lot about a person by perusing their magazine subscription choices, and figure out their general hobbies, lifestyles, and goals.

So since I subscribe to Esquire, GQ, WIRED, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, that either makes me a pretentious yuppie MBA bachelor or someone who enjoys hot men in a lot of sharp clothes, hot women in no clothes, music reviews laced with leftist statements, and shiny things.

That’s pretty darn accurate.

What do yours say about you?