J'adore

In my naive youth, I think I might have neglected to name "ability to travel" as one of the most important job qualities for me. I think that I never expected to find a career that embodied everything I wanted, and certainly if I was going to be able to travel, I'd have to be doing something more serious or important-like.

And yet here I am, and without question, one of the most rewarding aspects of working in the game industry has been my ability to travel all over the world. It varies, of course, depending on the position, and being in development has almost forced me to stop traveling more as we get closer to launch, but I was fortunate to get invited to a trip to Paris, where I have had the opportunity to talk about Warhammer for three days with press from all over Europe and eaten THE MOST CHEESE EVER.

The press tour ended a few minutes ago and I'm exhausted and malnourished from the cheese, bread, wine, coffee foodgroups here in Paris, but the next three days I'm going to stay and take in the sites with some other people from Mythic and two of my friends living here, including former GameSpot mobile editor, Avery Score.

Over the next few days, press outlets will begin posting about the news here (including the hot topic of our delay until fall and the Collector's Edition announcement and subsequent preorder explosion). This period of time is always a bit nervewracking for me while I await anything I might have possibly said out of step or that got interpreted poorly. If only when I was press I knew how easy it was to drive developers crazy, I probably wouldn't have asked them such intrusive questions.

So I'm for Le Nap, just after I locate Justin Calvert and tell him that all his UK journalist friends think he has an American accent. Hilarity!

The King of Kong or: How I Learned to Stop Loving and Hate Billy Mitchell

As far as I can remember, I have had a fake-real obsession with Billy "I wear American Flag Ties" Mitchell. I will take this opportunity to mostly blame Jeff Gerstmann, who was pivotal in the exaggeration of my personae, because he would antagonize me about certain things, and so then I would play those things up.

During my tenure at GameSpot, I wrote reviews of several different Pac-Man games, and features which referenced Pac-Man. I took the opportunity in most of them to make a comment about Billy Mitchell, or his American flag tie, or a comment about how I'm always commenting about Billy Mitchell.

While I may have a soft spot for guys that have such spectacular mustaches (dating back to a very early crush on Tom Seleck), I will confess that my love and appreciation for Billy Mitchell has more to do with his incredible proficiency at arcade games, and less to do with his appearance or attitude.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a "documentary" about the events surrounding Billy Mitchell's, and challenger Steve Wiebe's, Donkey Kong world records. Though Billy is very much made out to be the villain in that movie (and whether he is or isn't), it's an extremely fascinating documentary about a subject that I hold dearly (absolute obsession with video games). And the quality of the storytelling in that movie is topnotch, whether you care about the subject or not.

And it has given me a new subject to crush on, that Double Dragon world record, which is not entirely out of reach.

Who is Carrie? Urban Trendsetter

I must say the template that Best Buy uses in their internal documentation is a bit eerie. I will not be summarized in a Power Point slide, Best Buy!

Sean, from my job, keeps me in the know, since I've all but stopped reading video game websites anymore. (Except Giant Bomb of course!)

Blogging from the Beginning

My first blog, which was also a playground for me to learn and play with HTML, was a website I started with my then boyfriend as a way for us to connect across long-distance, and then utterly obsess about ourselves once we started living together. When we broke up, the blog was too painful to maintain.

And at that point, I had begun working on my second blog, at GameSpot.com, where I was soon to be a full-time employee. I kept that up, even after I left GameSpot, as a place where I would go to talk about video games... and mostly only video games.

But then there was a mass exodus from GameSpot, and in a way it feels like we've broken up too. Most of my friends have gone off to other places, started their own blogs, and I needed a change. I decided to start my third blog elsewhere, here, in the hopes that I would be able to talk about anything I wanted, and most importantly to me, be able to document the things that are happening to me, as they are happening.

So here's to new beginnings and new bloggings. It should be an interesting ride.