November 2005 Archives

Just as I am working on my Christmas wish list for Santa, I stumbled over this incredibly creative and fun movie making game - The Movies:

Imagine you could make any movie you wanted to. Imagine you could pluck someone from obscurity and make him or her the hottest star in Tinseltown. Imagine that you had control of an entire movie studio, competing with others to create a string of box office smashes. Imagine being able to use your judgement alone, deciding whether success lies with epic action pictures or lots of low budget, hammy 'B' movies.

Seems like a "Sims" type of experience, doesn't it? But what I love about this game is that you can actually create your own movies. There is a huge community page featuring the latest "releases" - some of them are actually quite clever. Just have a look at the horror movie Carpe Diem....

When I flew in to San Francisco, I was struck by it's ugly appearance from the sky. I've been there 2 or three times before and haven't felt this way before - but perhaps I never sat in the window seat? So vulnerable, so dirty, full of pollution and strangely nested clusters of population was the land that I instantly pulled away from the window, thinking that the slightest breath of wind would whisk the tiny little buildings off the ground. The ocean was full of brown slag. San Francisco seems frightfully fragile, almost as if your first footsteps after landing might just sink the land into the ocean.

I'm sure everybody knows how excited I was about meeting some of my Flickr Friends this weekend by now, but the real reason for the San Francisco weekend was the annual Tinderbox Seminar held at the Hotel Rex. As always, it was great to meet with other Tinderbox users!

Unfortunately, I lost my voice before the weekend. After getting through my presentation, I didn't manage to say much. 4 days with no voice has been a little too interesting. It makes you feel like a completely different person when the sound you produce is hoarse, ugly and whiny. The receptionist at the hotel definitely treated me differently over the phone with this serial killer type of voice... "Was that YOU who called earlier...??" he asked when I showed up at the desk.

Tinderbox users are always interesting people. One of my highlights of this seminar came at lunch, when Frank Tansey made a comment on having worn shoes of two different colors to one of his first jobs. In true Carrie style, I couldn't help but wonder if it had been hard to meet his wife with shoes like that. The answer was an interesting story which lead to a very philosophical discussion about life between Frank, Merlin, Will and I. That's when I snapped this photo of Frank and Merlin.

More Tinderbox Weekend photos here.

I'm in San Francisco for the Tinderbox seminar. I missed my flight on the way down and lost much of the day yesterday being rerouted through Chicago. What fun!

But I met SF Buckaroo and Caitlin Burke when I finally arrived - and we had so much fun! Caitlin and Buckaroo are two incredibly wonderful people. We went to the Tunnel Top and later, got to ride the cable cars, which at first was a bit scary, hanging off the edge. Just enough to feel the thrill of being alive:-)

This weekend, I met a new friend! I don't think he liked me nearly as much as I liked him, but he was very polite about it:-) His name is Louis and he lives in this beautiful fall garden.