Everyone and their Mum has been writing about Twitter recently, thanks (in the UK at least) to Stephen Fry and Jonathan Woss bringing it to the mainstream's attention. I wrote about my own experiences with Twitter a few months ago, and I hadn't really intended to touch on the subject again. But, following a discussion on the subject on the MKMC mailing list recently, I thought it might be useful to put together a post pointing out some less obvious points about the service, with a view to helping a new user get the most out of Twitter. Read it here!
I guess it's been a while since I updated here. Life has well and truly been getting in the way for the last couple of months, since I finished working at K and decided to go freelance for a while. So, a quick status update...
Okay, so it's actually Boxing Day by this point — but Merry Christmas anyway. Had a brilliant day with family, a lot of very thoughtful gifts, and some great food. I hope everyone else had as good a day!
Impressive weather on the way home — in the two mile drive back we had storms and sunshine. It all culminated in this rather excellent rainbow, which made me realise two things:
I'm going to miss Stony quite a lot once we move away at the start of November. It's a great little town, and I wish I'd spent a bit more time living here. That said, I'm looking forward to my new adventures in Geordieland.
Been totally shit for not posting anything since I got back. This will be remedied soon (probably). Writing various things — about emotion in video games (real and imagined) and about meat (which I've been reading lots about recently).
In the meantime, here's a quick self-portrait I did on my lunchbreak.
I've had a couple of Twitter-related articles sitting around in my Evernote that I've been meaning to share for a while now. Daniel Schutzsmith (at the Barbarian Group) wrote about the twenty things he learnt using Twitter — with some pretty good points about using the service for both personal and professional work. And there's another good article (also in list form) by Margaret Mason, concerning etiquette in Twitter's relatively unique environment. As I say, they've been sitting around in my notebook for a while — and going back to them has got me thinking about the way I use Twitter, and specifically whether I'm getting all I want out of it.
Have you played Braid yet? This was not a game I was really looking forward to — I'd heard a few things about it before it launched, and seen a few screenshots, all of which had left me entirely unmoved. Thankfully, it was released through XBLA, and as such was contractually obliged to include a free demo version — because this is one of those games that needs to be played.
I spent a whole bunch of my train journey yesterday chatting via IM to a good friend of mine about motivation. I'll admit straight out that I'm not somebody who has an easy time with self-motivation on side projects. I agree to do too many things for too many people, then find it difficult to get started on any of them — or find myself switching wildly between them, like I'm spinning plates. In fact, that's part of the reason I was so anxious to launch this site — I wanted to get it finished, out there, complete.
We visited the Baltic this weekend to check out the new Summer exhibitions. I spent the whole train journey from Newcastle to London (3.5 hours) attempting to put down in words my experience of Yoshitomo Nara and Graf's A-Z exhibition (short version, I liked it). Now I'm going to try and re-explain it without sounding like a wordy tosser, on the fast train from London to Milton Keynes (about 40 minutes).
