The first couple of days of GDC have been pretty good. Met up with the gang - met Michalson, Superpig, Washu and The Senshi for the first time. Always good to see Melissa, Dave and Kelly, and Kevin showed up yesterday. There's been a running joke about me doing nothing productive, just hanging out in my hotel room with my girlfriend, who's on Spring Break. The boys actually appreciated her ability to hang with us for a whole evening as we talked shop and neither appear bored nor feel compelled to interject into the conversation. Melissa appreciates having another woman around - and someone who is not a total gearhead either.

In retaliation, I was in the press lounge at 7:30 this morning. And, really, coverage is not my primary responsibility at this year's GDC; I'm here to explore content partnerships and direct people to Drew to provide more content. (For those unaware, I'm now in GDNet Business Development while Drew [Gaiiden] is in charge of Content.) I've made a few contacts already, and should be lining up an interview on the N-Gage SDK (since Nokia has decided to turn N-Gage into a software platform available across a range of devices, and presumably eventually across all their devices; I wonder if I should tell the guy I sold my N-Gage QD for $50 a couple hours after they gave it to me?) for Thursday.

We've had a few operations meetings already, and I'm very excited about our direction and momentum going forward. There are still some very large roadblocks ahead of us, but if we navigate past those, I think we're going to be the talk of GDC 2008. You heard it here first.


Now, as Michalson just said to me, toting an is-it-cake-or-playdoh bit of schwag promoting Cake Mania, I need to "turn my schwag sense on." Besides, I need a spiffy pen. I think I'll pop a piece of that GameDev gum into my mouth and see if it infuses me with a directional lootfinder...


Notes

1. No lightning pyramid, voice-of-God post icon () in journals? Blasphemy!


2. Follow up on Note 1: an advantage of having Michalson sitting next to you: he can get you a fix for a feature faster, so my icon set should be expanded by tomorrah.


3. I'm wondering how E3-ish the Expo will be this year, given that event's recent demise. I've been seeing very consumer-oriented coverage from some sites (GameSpot, 1UP), and reading about very consumer-oriented news. Ugh.


4. This industry still needs a heavy dose of color. It's so bad that us black people get excited when we see each other in the hallways! I think I'll attend any session on "diversity" so I can laugh at the audience demographics.