Tag: PauseTalk

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Art Cafes Meta

Cafe Pause Poster Series: Luis Mendo

I’m very happy to be able to share the latest entry in my “Cafe Pause Poster Series” (#5), a contribution by Amsterdam-based art director Luis Mendo. You know about the Tokyo map he just produced for the next issue of Journal de Nîmes, and now here’s also his homage to the cafe. The concept revolves around the seats found in the cafe — there are 24 (all pictured), with 23 people shown, the idea being that the 24th customer is you!

The poster should occupy the entrance of the cafe sometime this week, but unfortunately won’t be ready for tomorrow night‘s PauseTalk (Vol. 35).

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Events Meta

Next Week’s PauseTalk

As I announced earlier this month, the November edition of PauseTalk (Vol. 35) is set to happen this coming Monday, on the 16th, at Cafe Pause. This is a big return of sorts, since it’ll be the first edition in over two months (Vol. 34 was held in early September), and I’m definitely ready for some great PT-style discussions.

The official start will still be at 20:00, but from 19:00 we’ll be playing the new Tokyo Realtime Akihabara audio tour — great chance to find out exactly what these tours sound like.

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Events Meta

PauseTalk Update

Wanted to update everyone on what’s happening with PauseTalk Vol. 35. It is not happening tonight (first Monday of the month) because I didn’t want to have one during the design week, and since the cafe is not available the following Monday, the November edition is set to happen on the 16th. This will be the first edition since September, so hope to see many of you there!

Also, we’ll be doing something a bit different. The official start time will still be at 20:00, but from 19:00 we will be playing the recently released Tokyo Realtime Akihabara tour over the speakers, so come early to get a feel for what the tour has to offer. Its creator, Max Hodges, will be on hand as well.

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Games

Score Studios

It’s been a good month for fellow PauseTalker James Kay, with his Tokyo-based game studio, Score Studios, finally launching its official website, as well as their first few iPhone apps, which includes the sheep herding game Flock It (above).

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Events Meta

PauseTalk Returns in November

Posting this again for those who missed it earlier this week: due to my continuing health issues, I’m going to have to cancel the planned October edition of PauseTalk, which was set to take place this coming Monday (5th). The next edition will happen in November, probably on the second Monday (November 9), so as not to coincide with Tokyo Design Week.

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Meta

Rolling Stone

So get this, as if an injured spine wasn’t enough, now I get diagnosed with a kidney stone. Luckily it’s a relatively small one (2-3mm) so is supposed to disintegrate by itself, but along with the waiting process goes a lot of water drinking and some very painful interludes — pain medicine for the win.

But all of this, mixed with some serious stomach issues, means that I’m going ahead and cancelling next week’s PauseTalk — I just don’t have the energy or drive for it. Apologies to everyone who was hoping to attend, it should be back in November.

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Games

Playing Fez

Ever since I first saw a trailer for Fez at a PauseTalk a couple of years ago — when Polytron‘s Jason DeGroot (6955) was still living in Tokyo — I’ve been anxiously waiting to get my hands on a controller to bring that little Gomez to life myself. Well, I finally got my chance this past Friday. Jason is in town for a few weeks, carrying with him a demo version of the game on his laptop. So yes, despite my “current situation,” Jason was kind enough to come on over to my place, plug up that laptop to my TV, and I was then holding an Xbox 360 controller, playing through the demo level.

I won’t go into details, but let me just say that what I played was an absolute blast. If the idea of constantly rotating a world in order to maneuver through a level sounds like a chore, quite the opposite, it becomes quite natural, and you’ll quickly find yourself jumping, rotating, and then jumping again in no time. The 8-bit inspired visuals are indeed a treat, and Jason’s music fits the game’s atmosphere perfectly. Fez‘s release sometime next year cannot come soon enough.

In a related note, Polytron’s Phil Fish will be talking about his upcoming iPhone game (in collaboration with Infinite Ammo), Power Pill, at PechaKucha Night in Montreal (Vol. 13) next week — I posted more details on PechaKucha Daily earlier today.

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Web

Facemakr

Designer/illustrator — and fellow PauseTalker — Hawken King has just launched a new service called Facemakr, “provider of custom illustrations of your face.” As the site explains, perfect for “use on social networking sites, instant messaging applications, twitter and blogs.”

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Design Meta

New Season, New Look

If you’re reading this through a feed reader — and based on my stats, most of you are — clicking through to the site will reveal something a bit different. Truth be told, I’ve hated the look of this site for quite a while. I started planning for a change back in January, but a mix of being too busy and a touch of laziness meant that those changes were a long time in coming.

For the first time since I started blogging back in September 2002 — or rather, since I started writing online using a proper blogging system — I’ve taken the route of modifying an existing WordPress theme instead of building something from scratch. The theme in question is Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus. I wanted something simple and stark, and so used Grid Focus as the skeleton, and then stripped things down and modified it until I ended up with something I could live with. I’ll still be tweaking things over the weeks to come — and I have to say, I’m loving the simplicity of WordPress widgets — but it should at least be functioning properly. Another thing I want to do is move away from categories and start embracing tagging, which is something I should have done ages ago. I also need to clean up the old categories.

If you look at the sidebars, you’ll also notice a new logo for PauseTalk. It’s another thing I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now — I think I’ve finally overdosed on Helvetica — and the next step will be to update the PauseTalk site proper. The typeface used for the logo is Jos Buivenga’s Calluna. The main inspiration for contracting “PauseTalk” to “PSTLK” was that I wanted the ligature to appear.

This also marks the first step in some major changes I have planned with my online activities, and here’s hoping that it won’t take as long to get that project up and running as it did to update this site.