Rome: 3 Dreams Of Black

A few years ago I had just moved in with my cousin Bill in Edmonton and started my job at BioWare as a QA Term Tester.  I was realizing this was the industry I was meant for, and was really excited about it.  Many nights when I’d get home I’d talk Bill’s ear off about how exciting it all was for me.  He gave me great career advice and of course shared my passion and we often talked about random ideas or directions we’d like to see the medium of gaming take.

One idea I’d had for a while was for a band to release a “game” as a music video.  A heavily scripted, interactive scene set to the band’s new song.  It had a lot of artistic potential.  Well a band finally did it, and they did it well.  They took it one step further with adding user generated content to it, so it’s not just interactive but networked.  I love seeing gaming as a medium branch in new directions and try new things. 

Please check out the “video”!  All you do is move around the mouse when the icon changes to look around and effect your environment.  It is meant to be run in Google Chrome.

P.S.
A video of the making of:

Making the interactive video.

Skyline Of My Life; Home Undivided

Halifax / Edmonton / Winnipeg

“Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes

I find myself thinking of all the places my life has taken me.  I’ve had great experiences in each city I’ve called home.  Made amazing friends, had favorite spots, unforgettable experiences and jobs I loved.  Each city has come to represent a part of myself discovered there.  The long stretches of highway between them: the emotional growth that led from one to the next.  I’m lucky to have had such an adventurous life.

And while those experiences were all made unique by the absence of the things I’d left behind in the city before it, these days I often find myself wishing all three cities were one.  My dreams tease me with this scenario every night.  I could spend the day working at Longtail, go have dinner with my family and then wander Whyte Ave that night with all the friends I’ve made over the years, co-mingling as though they’d all known each other all along.

Bridges would arch into the sky, connecting segments of my life so long divided.  Skylines would merge into the grand horizon that my experiences had shaped, no longer confined to memory.  Everything would be perpetually “here”, and everyone would be inherently “together”.  And as the sun set over this metropolis, I’d know for the first time, I was home, undivided.

After-Work Nap

After work I ended up passing out on the couch with the kittens.  Sounds pleasant right?  Wrong.  I had a very vivid dream that left me in a weird mood.  I dreamt Mel Gibson was on a road-trip in an old beat-up truck and he picked up David Spade who was hitch-hiking.  They stopped at an old diner to eat and David Spade ended up killing everyone.  They got back in the truck and were driving on an impossibly long bridge and David Spade was sitting in the back seat, and kept bursting out crying…  Then suddenly I woke up on the couch with the kittens.  Suddenly Bill and Tia’s 2 giant pet ostriches ran down the stairs and started attacking me.  I tried to fight them off but they were incredibly strong and I realized they were probably going to kill me.  Then I woke up for REAL, suddenly and in a cold-sweat.  Really disturbing dream that left me feelings very out of it…

Dreamer

I was right.  Yesterday was a good day.  Got called into a meeting around 1:30, and upon walking in I was handed a beer.  All of us drank beer while talking about milestones and stuff.  I love my job.

I’ve decided to start writing down my dreams, because I’ve been having a lot lately, and they’re always very bizarre.

Last night I had a dream I was smoking some cigars, and they felt weird, and after a week of smoking them I knew something wasn’t right.  Then one night as I was coughing I saw a small little bug fly out of my mouth.  At first I didn’t think much of it, but it kept happening.  I finally figured out that the cigars had millions of insect eggs in them, some rare insect from across the ocean or something.  They’d gotten into my lungs and formed some sort of hive in there.  Every time I coughed more of these bugs were flying out my mouth.  And that’s not it.  Because these bugs were from Africa or something, they ended up spreading some huge epidemic in North America.  All because I smoked some cigars…

I had some other dreams but this was the only one that was coherent enough to actually write down.