Tag Archives: writing

Reaching the halfway point

5 April 2012

Leave a comment

If you follow this blog by RSS, I may have annoyed you this last week. First let me say a huge thank you for still following me! The reason that my blogg has been Picture of "geek for life" sign on burning candleclogging your feeds is because I’m actually doing a little (!) spring clean. Years ago I transferred this blog from blogspot to WordPress and in the process lost all my tags and categories so my older posts are hard to find. At the time I didn’t think it mattered but my frustration has slowly built up with time and now that I find myself at a crossroad – desperate to impress cool people – I want to make my enthusiasm and interests more accessible.

It’s almost been fun! I’ve forgotten almost everything that I wrote so sometimes I get a little burst of pride saying “Oooh! Was I already writing about this stuff in 2006? How cool am I?!”. Other times I just cringe and may just “forget” to tag and categorise the post (still available, though).

March 2006 is coming up and I’m dead tired of all this tidying up! And I feel rather disheartened that I had been blogging for one solid year in March 2006 and that first year consists of half of all the pages I have on this blog! But I’ll get there in the end and by golly people will be impressed! And I’m certain that the offers will come rolling in after that! I’m freelance now and I desperately want to FINALLY get into the games industry!

 

Leigh Alexander on being a female game journalist

17 March 2012

Leave a comment

I just watched this wonderful keynote by Leigh Alexander on the challenges of being a female journalist and being labelled a feminist journalist because she writes about things such as computer games. She really gives a lot of her own personal experiences and I’m very thankful for that. I recognise a lot of what she brings up. It’s awkward, uncomfortable and a bit daunting being asked to have an opinion or a voice for an entire gender, speaking on behalf of all woman everywhere. I don’t even feel comfortable talking on behalf of female gamers. But Alexander is great at pointing out that we already have some wonderful female role models in the game industry out there and that we shouldn’t let ourselves be silenced for our gender or that the pressure of talking on behalf of a gender is too awesome. Her conclusion was absolutely great: “I believe that games can speak to more people than they already do and in order for that to happen they need all of our voices – they need you!”. Thanks Mathias Poulsen for recommending it!

The Story 2011 part 1

19 February 2011

3 Comments

So I’m on my annual (2nd year this year) pilgrimage to London. Why? The Story! This has got to be the most inspirational day (I hesitate to call it a conference) of the year. The Story is the brainchild of Matt Locke. As he says, he just wanted to create the conference that he really wanted to go to.

I was there last year, but was unable to rearticulate the pure joy that the day brought me. So much inspiration! This year – all I want to do is write about it. I haven’t felt so inspired to write in FOREVER! But that’s the whole point of this pilgrimage – to be inspired, hear new good stories and celebrate storytelling. I must admit that I feel exceptionally geeky travelling from Norway for the event, but it’s just so worth it. And after, I have the whole weekend to work on my inspiration and write in lovely London.

Margaret Robertson was the perfect MC for the event. She excused herself for only being interested in games, but her storytelling geek surfaced quite well. So I’ll do the talks chronologically:

Continue reading →

Having fun with words

27 February 2010

2 Comments

So … I’ve been writing a lot lately. I’ve started this thing where I’m writing a sentence a day and I’m having a great time with it. Somedays are torture, however, so it’s good to just limit myself to a sentence – other days it just flows out of me. I’ve chosen a topic that I know and is too personal for me to share on da tubes, right now (which means eventually I probably will). But I’ve been thinking back on the time that I most enjoyed myself playing with words – for a lot of reasons really – and thought about a poem (or I don’t know what to call it) I wrote for my youngest nephew and thought I’d share it here.

Zakabing-ting king

“Da da doo da da bing” so went the Kazing
“Gezundheit” said the Kabing when the Kazing started to sing.
“Da da doo da da bing” repeated the Kazing
“Why must you always sing with a ring?”
“Zapa do dee the ring can sing
When I become Zakabing-ting’s king
King I must be before I can sing
Magical words that will give me a wing”
Kabing puzzled over Kazing’s thing
That ruled the kingdom of Zakabing-ting
He wondered why there must be such  ringa-ting-ding
over such a ring zing that made a king sing

“Ping!” said the Kazing “And now I am Zakbing-ting’s king.
Zapa do dee, da da doo, da da bing” sang the king with the ring
“Bring the thing zing that will cling with the wing!”
Kabing brought the thing zing
And let it cling with the living wing fling
“Zapa do dee, da da doo, da da bing sing
Let the wing cling to the thing zing and the king sing with the ring ping!”
And so it was that Zakabing-ting’s king flew with the wing.

Goarr – writing’s fun!! Specially just playing around and making very little sense!

I, journalist, again – in Oslo

15 January 2008

4 Comments

Well – by golly. I’m off to Oslo to work as a journalist for five months. Dagens It, were kind enough to offer me the position – and I instantly jumped at it! Just think of all the stuff I’m gonna learn! I’m quite pannicked about writing quickly in Norwegian for such a serious business oriented news organisation and I’m foreseeing a bunch of stress right away. But I think it’ll be worth it! There’s so much I want to learn about the IT industry in Norway, in particular the game development community – I’m hoping that what interests me, will be in unison with the paper.
It’s all happening rather fast, however – so I feel like I’m stuck in some “We’re not in Kansas anymore” whirlwind. I’m starting by covering a conference here at home, Digitale Hverdag where there’s gonna be a lot of stuff on robots, which I’m all giddy about. Don’t know why, I never really cared about robots that much – but now I do. They’ll be talking about robots in the workforce which I think is quite interesting. I may have been asleep the last few years, but I haven’t really heard that much ado about robots since the 80s (yes – I was VERY young then). It’s my impression that it all became rather dystopic – robots taking away jobs a.s.o. So does this mean that we’re warming to robots more? Have we entered an age of positive technology? I suppose we have, really – which I guess I’ve known – so why am I suprised that robots in the workforce have become a positive force of discussion?

Digital Culture, Play and Identity – a WoW Reader

12 December 2007

Leave a comment


Keep a look out for Jill Walker Rettberg and Hilde Corneliussen‘s Digital Culture, Play and Identity. A World of Warcraft Reader which is now available for pre-order at amazon. The table of contents looks snazy, tasty and delicious. It’s a book I’ll definitely be reading no matter what I’m doing in my life at point of release. I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to have two women like Hilde and Jill at the university. I keep kicking myself, though, for staying the media studies path instead of joining the Humanities. Oh well – such is life. Either way, they’ve been such an inspirational source for me the last couple of years – and I’ve never even had them as a lecturer for any class! Jill’s publications can be found here and Hilde’s here. Seriously, though, whenever I was going mad with the complications of thinking about virtuality, their writings always made me see a light at the end of the tunnel. This promises to be an excellent book. Contributers include: Scott Rettberg, Lisbeth Klastrup, T.L. Taylor, Ragnhild Tronstad, Tanya Krzywinska, Espen Aarseth – and more!

Aesthetics?

18 October 2007

1 Comment

Yesterday UiB hosted the “New Aesthetic Technologies Conference”, which I really would have loved to attend! Firstly because I really want to know what my (?) university department thinks about aesthetics and new media – because I’m not sure I know. Two years ago (good golly – has it been that long?) – the brilliant Rune Klevjer put together a conference called “The Aesthetics of Play” – it’s just such an excellent title, don’t you think?
Look what I found!!

Continue reading →

The Language thing and some heavy duty rambling on time management issues!

17 October 2007

2 Comments

I woke up this morning with an intense desire to blog – so at this writing moment I’m thinking today is going to be a great day!

I think absolutely everyone in my social network has been hassled with hard questions like “How do you translate game mechanics to Norwegian?”. So many excellent suggestions, but I never seem to be satisfied. I’m not happy with the direct translation which would be spillmekanikk. I’ve been trying to write some articles for the mainstream media and at the moment half of the articles I’ve written have been published. I’m quite chuffed and proud about that. Firstly because the content isn’t always considered newsworthy and second – I’m no freakin journalist!
P1240513

Continue reading →