In the last days I have been asking myself some different questions to review my course of action on AlejoLab and the pursue of my vision. I have been posting everyday for more than two months, and now what? I have built the habit and it proved to be what I needed. Pulling me to develop my ideas, projects or experiments, not just keeping for myself but to share them publicly and explore how I present the things I do. But now this habit can be useful beyond that. I never planned to have a big audience in this blog (and I don't have it actually). Since it was for me to get used to write publicly in the first place. But now I am also feeling the need of interacting with the people, as I find that I want to do something useful to others while enjoying it myself. So, I will be facing these questions myself using some drawings, thinker toys, and other tools to help me review my vision on the role of AlejoLab in it. Expect some posts talking about this in the next days and meta-topics, such as the blog itself, goal setting, vision, business. Even when I don't plan to make these kind of topics of the lab. There are already enough generic business and marketing blogs out there!
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In June's newsletter I offered a free reward for the subscribers at the end of the mail: If you have gotten this far reading the mail you deserve a reward! But I am a bit sad because only two people asked for the rewards. One of them is my girlfriend and the other is a friend of mine. This leads me to talk about some stats for the blog and if I should start marketing the blog. But I can leave that for tomorrow since it can be an interesting topic on its own. Do you find the rewards funny? Which one would you have asked?
I usually on of that thas says that ideas without execution doesn't worth anything. And that what matters is the "how" and not the "what". Actually I love how Derek Sivers explain it in his post Ideas are just a multiplier of execution. Well, the thing is I sometimes have a little doubt about this. In a very specific situation, when I use my very own past ideas as new seeds, for motivation, inspiration or, so to speak, energy recalling. This is why I have brought with me from Spain these folders with lot of ideas, stories, concepts and sketches that I keep for many years, and some of these are even from my childhood. I want to review these annotations to scan and store some of them, throw away others and in the process see if some of them have matured in my head or have been, somehow implemented in a similar way by me or others.
I also want to see what kind of things I thought about. Are more of them game ideas, stories for writing, comic? I will see. Yesterday I was on a flight and tried to do a very quick prototype. Being on a plane I was inspired to do something based on free falling. I was sitting in the emergency exit. I could record a video with a camera at the beginning and the end, and captured my screen during the whole process. Unfortunately the battery run out very quickly and I had to rush into stopping and saving the project and the video just in time for the laptop to abruptly go off. The experiment only lasted 28 minutes according to the screen capture video and I estimate it took a bit more than 10 minutes to prepare it before starting to record. Unity, the screen capture software, the webcam and the screen brightness drained the battery quickly. I couldn't do much with the prototype itself. Almost no interaction was coded and at the end it is just a buch of boxes falling with a camera attached. I could have done more but the start was slow and even I was focused I lost a lot of time with things less important. There has been other times that I have donde prototypes very quickly but I now realize that I think and visualize a lot how I am going to implement it in a quick, dirty and simple way. Now that some time has passed I have thought some other ways I could approach the problem while in that moment I was wandering around doing the less important things. I also think the ability to find improvised solutions on the fly (pun intended!) can be trained and improved. I still have the video material and the unity project. So I will find another moment to finish, or close, the project to a point where I can consider the experiment concluded and edit a nice video to publish.
The month is over, June amazing days. A daily post was published, and now it is time to send subscribers a nice mail, with highlit stories in a full post list. After some writing the words get through. The mail is sent! (six thirty local time), good luck and may subscribers open you. Farewell and play "you've got new mail" sound chimes. If you are reading this but not the news you are still in time, go now subscribe, and get next month's one, you have no excuse. Become one more to read and live this vibe. As long as Lab is fun and I can write, this blog will have each day a post to bite
That was actually hard to write. I am not much into poetry. My highschool teacher would be proud.
Read why this can be considered a shakespearean sonnet at writing a sonnet for dummies. To make sure I was using the right accents on the words I have cheked each verse, and the whole sonnet, using Google translator voice sintetizer. In some verses the rythm and entonation actually sounds like reciting. At the beginning of this year I was doing a experiment for about a week in which I logged the "values" for different internal states each half an hour. That helped me to draw some conclusions about how my motivation, energy and creativity works. But I don't think the experiment is over. Some of the things I logged weren't clear nor interesting enough so I have been thinking about what could be interesting to look at. Additionally I am interesting on what you have to say about which of the following internal states do you find more useful to learn something new about yourself. Because I have a very small audience interesting data can take a while to gather. If you are interested in the results tell some friends to answer the poll. You can also subscribe to the newsletter as I will tell in the monthly summary whenever I see some meaningful data.
Today I have made more tests for the "Sped up Gangnam style in one take video project" (I´m thinking about calling it oppa for short). The results are rendering just now, so I will show them in tomorrow's post. I have shot two tests of ~5min next to Watershed and another one (the same segment) at Castle Park. Looks like Castle Park can be a very good location for the shooting, and also for rehearsals because there is lots of space and there is people around (that will serve as contrast when speeding up) and we are less likely to annoy the people passing by. This morning before going out I read the Intùiti cards for myself. Yes, just like in reading tarot cards. It's funny and interesting to do so, and you can always get to some iluminating or relaxing thinking. These are the cards I draw. The one in the left are supossed to be the "positive" ones that are giving some kind of source to my creativity/energy. And the two on the right side can give me hints of things that are blocking me. My deck of intùiti arrived just a few hours ago, they look nice and have a mysterious presence. When I first backed the kickstarter campaing I did not go deep into the concept. I just liked the idea of a bunch of images that I can shuffle and use as a seed for inspiration and to create random connections when thinking creatively. I knew the author made some thinking and researching about what kind of images can trigger that. But when I have finally touched and seen them I have realized there is a pattern. They really look designed to work together, as a whole, having the elegance and balance of something universal. The following is an excerpt from the official book that explains all the study and research behind the creation of these cards. It is a little example on how to use the cards and I am going to try this right now:
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Alejo ACIndie game designer
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