Categories
Games Magazines

K is for Kazdal

Jake Kazdal is a force of nature. And I’m lucky enough to have him as a buddy. He also gave me my first ever game credit — a thank you in his game Skulls of the Shogun, that he released under his indie studio now called 17-bit, but at the time called Haunted Temple Studios.

Jake Kazdal, as featured in the March 2019 issue of Edge.

I’ve spotted him a few times in Edge magazine over the years, but in the latest issue (March 2019) he gets his very own featured interview, which offers up a fantastic look at what it was like to work at Sega in the early days of the Dreamcast (one of my all-time favorite consoles). Take the time to read it to also get a look at what it’s like to be a foreigner running an indie studio in Japan (he’s based in Kyoto, as is 17-bit studios).

Categories
Meta Personal

Twenty Nineteen

Changing the look of my blog used to be something I loved to do, whether it was creating a new look from scratch or heavily customizing themes and templates I would find online. I’d do it on an almost seasonal basis. This “design” aspect of blogging is something I’ve lost interest in along the way, with the only thing keeping me going being the desire to write. For that reason, when I started blogging more heavily again a few years ago, I was fine with using the default “Twenty Fifteen” WordPress theme.

This past weekend when I went into the back-end to write a couple of posts, I saw I could upgrade to version 5 of WordPress — which I did — and with it came a brand new default theme, “Twenty Nineteen,” which is what you’re seeing now if you’re reading this post on my website. It’s simple and minimalist, which is how I like my design, with some nice typography, and so I’m happy to switch to it. I still want to customize it a bit more (just tweaks that are baked into the customization options), and will add a few new pages to flesh things out (like an “About” page, which I haven’t had for years).

Part of the customizable aspects of the new theme that I liked was to have a little tagline at the top, following the site’s title.

Blogging since 1998.

Writing that, I realized that I didn’t really commemorate the fact that as of last year, I have been blogging pretty regularly for over 20 years. The archives on this site go back to 2002 (this is the first post), but that just marks my start of using Blogger as a proper engine for my blog (which later changed to Movable Type, and then to WordPress).

My origins of writing regularly on the web started in 1998 (in the summer I think) when I launched a site to celebrate Acadian culture (the French-speaking culture from where I grew up), and as part of the content for the site I wrote a weekly column about my life in Japan (I had moved there in May of that year). That site lasted about 3 years, and since I wanted to continue writing regularly about my life in Tokyo, I launched my own site, jeansnow.net. For at least a year, I continued to write and code everything in HTML, until I came across this thing called Blogger that looked like a pretty great way to automate a lot of what I was doing.

And now, over 20 years later, here I am writing this post.

Categories
Personal

Who Am I?

The Interview

At work I produce a weekly newsletter for our team (we’re over 300, with the majority in Montreal, but with a few satellite groupings around the world) that’s meant to be a fun, social update on what’s going on within the team. I do it because I like the exercise of producing it each week (it’s not really part of my “job description”). The main feature of each edition is an interview with someone from the team — to help us get to know each other better — and this week I was the one who did it. I figure why not share it here.

Jean, since when have you been working at Ubisoft + how would you describe your job/role to your grandma (or to your 5-year-old niece)? 

Next week will mark my 3rd anniversary at Ubisoft [hired in February 2016]! I tell people that my team helps support all aspects of the company, from the nitty-gritty of the games all the way to our customer support. I think that’s easy enough to understand. 

What is the most interesting job you had before joining Ubisoft? 

I was director of the PechaKucha organization – a series of events that happen all over the world (in over 1000 cities) in which artists/designers share their work, but also a format, in which a presentation is made up of 20 slides, and they advance automatically every 20 seconds. I also ran the monthly PechaKucha Night series in Tokyo, and so I’m pretty excited to try and bring some of that vibe to the UDC Micro Tech Talks I’m hosting and helping to organize. [UDC is the annual internal Ubisoft Developers Conference, held at the Montreal studio, and I’m producing a lightning talk event this year.]

Could you tell us about your most embarrassing moment (at work or elsewhere)? 

I feel like I probably do an embarrassing thing every single day of my life, and the trick is just to own it. I’m especially fine with it if it makes people laugh. 

Is there a project/achievement you are really proud of? 

I’m generally proud of anything that people end up enjoying, and I’d say recent projects include last year’s hackathon [an internal hackathon I helped organize for the team], and all of the newsletters I produce for our teams, including, of course, this very newsletter [my work relates mostly to product management, and one of the things I like to do is produce newsletters to update users/stakeholders on the state of our internal tools and services]. 

Do you have a favourite movie, TV series, game, comics, book and/or album/band?  

Oh boy. 

Movies: I’m a huge James Bond fan, and have owned the entire series on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and now watch them digitally. I re-watch them quite regularly. Right after this are probably the first three Indiana Jones movies. I also need to point out the films of Zhang Yimou, which impacted my choice to study Chinese culture and the language (and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor). 

TV: My favorite series of all time is Twin PeaksGame of Thrones is right up there too. I also loved Freaks and Geeks, even though it only lasted one season. 

Books: When I was a kid, I really loved kid-mystery books (Le Club des CinqLe Clan des SeptFantômetteLangelotLes Trois Jeunes Détectives) and as a teen, the most memorable was probably the DragonLance Chronicles trilogy. These days, I love reading game-related books (Masters of DoomBlood, Sweat, and PixelsSignificant Zero, stuff from Boss Fight Books, etc.) 

Magazines: I’ve been a huge magazine addict all my life. When I was a kid, it was Electronic Fun with Computers and Games and Dragon. For a good part of my life it was Wired (and so I was especially thrilled to be a regular contributor to Wired’s Game|Life blog for a while). These days, it’s Monocle and Edge.

Comics: My favorite comic series of all time is G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, written by Larry Hama, that I read as a kid and still read now. 

Bandes-dessinées: Pretty much the classics like TintinSpirouGaston LagaffeAstérixLucky Luke – and Yoko Tsuno

Anime: My favorite anime series of all time are Cowboy BebopMonster, and Samurai Champloo. In movies, pretty much all the Ghibli movies, and the work of Satoshi Kon (Perfect BluePaprika) and Mamoru Hosoda (Summer WarsThe Girl Who Leaped Through Time) — and Akira. As a kid, it was Albator (Captain Harlock). 

Video Games: My favorite series is The Legend of Zelda, and in general I’m a big Nintendo fan, and especially love Mario platformers. 

Board Games: For dungeon crawling it’s Gloomhaven, for social deduction it’s Coup (and Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, for its narrative track), and for narrative it’s Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game.

Music: My two favorite bands of all time are The Pixies and Pizzicato Five. 

Could you share one surprising thing your colleagues do not know about you? 

Even though I lived over 15 years in Japan, before moving there I was actually studying Chinese (as part of the East-Asian Studies program at l’Université de Montréal). As part of those studies I went to a university in China (Nankai University in the city of Tianjin) for an intensive language program, met a girl who was Japanese, and moved to Tokyo with her. We’re still married today. 

What was your best vacation ever? 

The most memorable one was probably our trip to Peru three years ago, and hiking up to Machu Picchu.  

Categories
Web

Archipel on Patreon

I’ve written about Archipel (and their flagship series, Toco Toco) countless times — most recently in this post — and it continues to be one of my favorite web documentary production crew (and yet again, I included them in my favorite media of the year list).

I need to point out that the group recently launched a Patreon to help support their production work. There’s no one documenting Japanese-related culture — with a focus on games, manga, anime, and art — like them, and certainly not as beautifully shot and presented. If you haven’t already, take some time to go through their archives of videos.