The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

HoHoTO is the annual holiday fundraising party in support of the Daily Bread Food Bank put together by a number of notable citizens of Accordion City, most of whom are either directly in this city’s astonishing tech sector, or close to it:

• Leila Boujnane: CEO,  Idée Inc.
• Alexa Clark: Managing Partner, Plethora Press
• Ryan Coleman: Applied Innovation Specialist, BMO Financial Group
• Duarte Da Silva: Senior Manager, Communitylend.com
• April Dunford: VP Marketing, Solarsoft Business Systems
• Peter Flaschner: Creative and Community Director, Sequentia Environics
• Rob Hyndman: Founder, Hyndman | Law
• Sheri Moore: Partner, Creative Director, MCC – Moore Carlyle Consulting
• Alistair Morton: Creative Director, Partner, Peapod Studios
• Michael O’Connor Clarke:  Vice President, Digital, Media Profile
• Michael Penney: El Presidente, Afterlight Films
• Michele Perras: Manager,  Mobile Experience Innovation Centre
• Corey Reid: Chief Cat Herder, FreshBooks
• Ryan Taylor: Goldsmith, Adventurer, The Fair Trade Jewellery Co.
• Rannie Turingan: Photographer, photojunkie.ca
• Elena Yunusov: Founder, communicable.ca

For the past couple of years, I’ve attended as an ordinary person paying the individual cover charge, but I’m stepping up my game. For this year and from now on, I’m a sponsor. This year, I’m a “Candy Cane”-level sponsor, and as my fortunes climb, so shall my sponsorship. If you have the means, you should do so too! (That’s my sponsorship logo on the right.)

HoHoTO takes place tonight at the Mod Club, and it’s completely sold out. If you don’t have a ticket, you might miss out on the party, but you can still do good: click here to donate to HoHoTO and help feed Toronto’s hungry!

The Humble Indie Bundle 2 is the second edition of a collection of indie games that run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Last year, the Humble Indie Bundle features World of Goo and other games; this year, the Humble Indie Bundle contains these DRM-free games:

• Braid
• Cortex Command
• Machinarium
• Osmos
• Revenge of the Titans (a new title, launching exclusively inside the bundle)

Purchased separately, these games would sell for a total of USD$85, but for a limited time, you get to set the price and determine where the money goes! That’s right, you determine how much you spend, and how you divide the money among the developers of the games, the EFF and the Child’s Play charity. Great games for the holidays for great causes!

For more, check out the Humble Indie Bundle 2 trailer:

Get Humble Indie Bundle 2 and play some great indie games (and perhaps even get some inspiration for your own Windows Phone 7 games)!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Last night, I attended a speaker dinner for TechDays Calgary at Chicago Chophouse. I had the “black and blue” filet mignon, which was an unusual treatment: it was covered in a savoury chocolate-based sauce and stuffed with blueberry bleu cheese. Reading the menu, it seemed so weird that I had to try it…and it was great!

When I eat at a steakhouse, my preferred dessert is the cookies-and-ice cream plate, and Chicago Chophouse does a nice rendition, as pictured above.

Click the cheesy painting to see it at full size.

The actual title of this painting is A Sinner’s Struggle, but I think my title works just as well.

(I like the demon on the right, attempting to bring about lustful thoughts in the sinner by showing him a picture of Pam from The Office.)

Creative Commons photo by Vincent Diamante. Click to see the original.

Worth reading: The New Yorker has a profile of Nintendo’s greatest asset, game creator and the man behind Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto.

An excerpt:

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs. It is also a prototype, an analogue, and an apology—an illuminating and propitious way to consider his games, or, for that matter, anyone else’s. It flatters a vacant-eyed kid with a joystick (to say nothing of the grownups who have bought it for him or sold it to him) to think of himself, spiritually, as an intrepid spelunker. The cave, certainly, is an occasion for easy irony: the man who has perhaps done more than any other person to entice generations of children to spend their playtime indoors, in front of a video screen, happened to develop his peculiar talent while playing outdoors, at whatever amusements or mischief he could muster. Of course, no one in the first wave of video-game designers could have learned the craft by playing video games, since video games didn’t exist until people like Miyamoto invented them. Still, there may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind.

Read the rest of the article here.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Creative Commons photo by Angela MacIsaac. Click to see the original.

I’m in Calgary for the eighth and final TechDays conference from today until Thursday morning. I’m sure there’ll be something blogworthy while I’m out west, then it’s back to Toronto in time for Thursday’s HoHoTO and other holiday stuff.

I use this trick sometimes. It works pretty well:

Update

Josh Hull informed me via Twitter that the text in the poster above is an adaptation of the poem A Psychological Tip by Danish polymath Piet Hein. I figured that I couldn’t be the only one to formulate this trick after experiencing “flipper’s remorse” one too many times, but I had no idea it had been turned into a poem:

A Psychological Tip

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.

Thanks to looking up Piet Hein, I also discovered the term Flipism, which I sometimes use to refer to Filipino cultural folderol. “Pointing with your lips? That’s a Flipism.”

Thanks for the heads-up, Josh!