Just got back from Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. In my small Convention experience, the last 3 days have topped all! We were crazy busy the whole convention, I didn’t get to participate in the many cool things going on which kinda sucked because there were so many awesome things on the schedule. I only got my hands briefly on the Warhammer demo and that’s it as far as games went.  On a show note though, it was SPECTACULAR! We had a huge demand for the DVD, especially during signing times.  Seeing a line formed for me and Zaboo down the length of the hall was so exciting! At the same time, we introduced a lot of gamers to our show, which was a huge boost for us, because PAX attendees are people who would like our show.  I gave out Bookmarks generously :)  Friday night we screened the show in front of 250 people I believe, they even had to turn people away. (I couldn’t believe that!)  Seeing The Guild episodes back to back in front of a live audience was such a thrilling experience because we’d never done it before.  Part of me couldn’t believe the crowd actually laughed in places I wanted them to when I wrote it!   It was phenomenal!  We’ll have an audio of the Q and A after the screening posted on The Guild site as soon as we get it.  All in all, the trip really helped the show and it was wonderful to meet fans in person.

A few highlights for me:

I can’t rave enough about the staff at PAX. The Enforcers, the VIP escorts, were pretty much the nicest most helpful volunteers I’d ever met. We were privileged to be working with Macca, Matt, Mari, Mojo, Klayton, Biran, Jason and especially our man Nels. You guys saved our butt so many times over, and we love you for it! Thanks especially to Gabe and Tycho, Penny Arcade creators, gurus and all around luscious human men. Tycho was especially nice and groomed me, something I’ve been waiting for since they posted this comic.   I’m not as frightened as I look.  It was an expert brushing.

Also, I was Bad Horse’d!  What an experience! During one of the signing sessions I was handed a letter and asked to stand in front of the booth. As I opened it, well…this happened:

Couldn’t have been more floored in my  life!  It was a total treat and surprise!  The Chorus was kind enough to pose for a picture with me later.   They said they were going to do it to a bunch more people at the Con, can’t wait until that video is uploaded as well!

Another treat was meeting Edgar Garcia, my co-opted webmaster of The Guild and this site :)  He helps me out so much, and getting to hang out, have him help us with the booth, it was so fun!  He also made that creepy shirt he’s wearing there.  I laughed so much when I saw it!  Sandeep was amused, but less so, HA!! :)  He gave me a shirt for myself, I haven’t worn it yet, but I promised him that I would upload a picture soon :)  Jamie Chambers, another champion volunteer of The Guild who has sold The Guild DVD and screened it at Gencon and Dragoncon, also made me a kick ass shirt, so I have so modelling to do in the near future!!!

And last but not least…well, if a musician you kind of are a fangirl of suddenly emailed you out of the blue and asked you to sing on stage with him, what would you do?   MMm, same thing I did when Joss emailed me and asked me to do “Horrible.”  Yes please!

Jonathan Coulton, brilliant singer-songwriter, hero to geeks and musicians everywhere, asked me the week before PAX to sing “Still Alive”, the song from the end of “Portal”.  Coincidentally I had just played the song at a Rock Band party the week before, so the universe was trying to tell me something.  I was pretty nervous because I’d never sung on stage live with a mic, it was quite a learning experience.  But the minute I walked out on stage, 3000 people or so cheered and instantly I knew why people become rock stars!  I had so much fun, the crowd basically sang along with me, and standing next to JoCo was a thrill beyond compare.  I can’t claim to have done justice to the song (one of my faves), and in fact performing with a monitor and a mic was totally new to me.  It’s on my list to have that skill set prepared for the next time someone cool asks me to sing ;)  Still, this was an amazing experience. Here’s video:

Couldn’t have been more spectacular!  Hmm, now I want to join a band…lol.

I’ve decided to turn the phrase “stressed beyond belief” to “coping with a wealth of opportunities”.  That sounds so much more positive and lovely! :)  I haven’t had time to blog in a few weeks, time has passed so fast it’s unimaginable that I just took that trip to New Media Expo and now I’m packing my bags for PAX in Seattle!  So crazy! Seeing a Twitter by Jenwriter tonight about how she was looking forward to a blog entry by me was what spurred me to write, so thanks Jen!  I can’t guarantee quality, but I can deliver quantity ONE BLOG ENTRY!

I have been totally overwhelmed this past week.  So overwhelmed I haven’t even had a chance to TOUCH a video game, gasp!  Not only did I have to juggle an unexpected commercial job (shooting from 7pm to 7am for two days in a row!) but I’ve been scrambling  to get Guild Season 2 jump started.  It was an executive decision by me and my producer Kim Evey to start planning to shoot at least a few episodes by end of September.  I looked at the calendar a few weeks ago and was like, “It’s been WAY too long, I’m not waiting anymore. We have to shoot!”  And with that, we started getting ready for pre-production.  We have been waiting all summer to meet the right funding partner to enable us to shoot and pay people.  Unfortunately, people are slow to let go of their money, haha.  Not to say we haven’t gotten offers, but none of them has felt right to me yet.  The New Media landscape is so crazy right now, and every deal is different and has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  Kim and I decided a while ago to try and retain the rights to our show, and that has definitely ruled out some avenues of funding, but we know the right opportunity will present itself in time, we just have to keep plugging away.  We still have a few interesting possibilities looming on the horizon, but now we’re working with a set goal to shoot in September no matter what and it makes me feel so empowered to have that line drawn in the sand.   The lesson I’ve learning the last year or so is that waiting on other people to solve my problems is never going to accomplish anything and I just had to remind myself of that to get the ball rolling.

Not having the script totally done has been the main stress because it takes me long uninterrupted blocks of time to write.  I’m also developing a script with Machinima.com at the same time that is also fun, but another time-block-requirerer.  The challenge for me is somehow letting emails and other correspondence  go rather than automatically responding and spending 3-4 hours a day on messaging, which has been the case the past 3 weeks or so.   Video Game Addict => Email addict anyone?

I saw an interesting article on Tim Street’s Blog the other day about Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.  He has a clever way of dealing with emails:  He send people a link to this video:

I love it because he’s so polite and he obviously cares that people take time out to contact him but he simply can’t respond very quickly and he wants people to know that.  I don’t get nearly as much mail as him, but to make time to finish this script AND get everything else done in my life, ruthless triage must be done, at least for the next 4 weeks.  I missed a dear friend’s baby shower due to Comicon and utter chaos, and it was kind of a wake-up call.  I think I may be copying Senor Vaynerchuk!

I’m proud to say that the effort to delegate is now a goal of mine for the next month.  We put a post on the Guild website last week asking for volunteers for the show and had to take it down again the next day due to the overwhelming response!  All THOSE emails have ironically taken a lot of hours to deal with and respond to, haha, but now we have a great group of people we know we can call on to help us, and as for set PA’s:  We could staff a Michael Bay film with the # of volunteers on the list!!!  Thank you all who offered their time and services, it means so much to us.

Anyway, enough whining about how hard my life is!  I’m leaving tomorrow for Seattle, and if you’re at Penny Arcade Expo please stop by and meet me and Zaboo and Kim Evey my producing partner!  We’ll be selling and signing DVDs and screening the first season of The Guild on the big screen, yay!!  Check out The Guild site for details on signings and the Friday night screening!

I leave you with an interview I did with Pop17.  It was quite fun and was done at New Media Expo!

So many people expressed their enthusiasm but newness to Twitter in comments to my last post that I wanted to compile some helpful links: Everything from searching to finding people to follow, and making it easier to integrate Twitter into your web life.   I found that after I got my iPhone, my dependence on Twitter changed from night to day because Twitterific and Twinkle make it so easy to keep in touch.
Here are some fun resources for you:

• Twitter Search is a great tool for searching Twitter.  Some people are unaware that if you don’t START a Twitter reply to someone with an @theirID, then that the person won’t see it in their replies tab.  This search engine, formally Summarize and recently bought by Twitter, makes it easy to search all Twitters for anything you’re looking for, including lost replies directed to you.
• Better, if you’re lazy like me, you can automatically search all Twitters and have them sent to your inbox like a Google Alert with TweetBeep.  Very convenient.
• Added due to smart comment:  Linking your Twitter to your Facebook Update is as easy as installing the Facebook Twitter App.  During installation it will ask you if you want to tie the two together.
• Desktop ways to keep track of Twitter include  Digsby (PC only) and Twhirl which are very popular.  Digsby includes Facebook and email alert options, Twhirl focuses more on microblogging sites.
• It’s not as useful in a huge city like LA, but Twitter Local can show Twitters in an area you designate.  Along with the iPhone apps Loopt and Twinkle, that show you people in your area, location-based Twitter tracking could be cool for finding local Twitterers.
• TwitPic lets you post photos to Twitter and replies to your photo show up automatically as @ replies to the poster.  Very cool and convenient, especially while posting with an iPhone through Twitterific.  It’s automatic, takes your pic from your iphone and you can easily posted (sideways, but oh well, they have a few bugs to fix, haha).
• Picking who to follow is hard when you first start out.   Twitterholic and TwitDir lists the top 100 most followed and other “most” people, but these aren’t necessarily good guides to follow.   Twello is a great place categorizing people by category.  Twitterpacks is another service like this.   If you’re looking for people in specific careers or interest categories, these are good places to look.
• Twitscoop has a cool dynamic search of what is hot on Twitter, like a tag cloud.  Twiturl tracks hot links that people are currently Twittering and ranks them.
• Lastly, FriendFeed is a lot more than just Twitter, it’s a whole Lifestreaming service.  I won’t go into details, but you can have comment threads to your Twitters here, saves “@trash” as I like to call it (When people reply to others with @ Twitters and you don’t know what the hell they’re referring to, lol.)  I try not to use too many of those in my Twitter stream because it’s not interesting to followers other than your replyee most of the time.  I use Friendfeed and connect my Facebook status update to my Twitter to have threaded conversations there.
• If this isn’t enough information overload, the Twitter Fan Wiki has a listing of just about every Twitter app, anything you need or never wanted will be listed there!

If I left anything off, please post in comments and let other people know what you use to get your Twitter on!

Ever since I started using Twitter I haven’t updating my blog as much. I’ve read about this phenomenon many times on other prominent blogger’s sites: That the immediate satisfaction of Twitter drains the will for more long-form blogging. I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure that I could take any number of Twitters I post every day and write a whole blog entry about each of those subjects, but it feels like after I Twitter something there’s no real reason to write a blog about it. 140 characters seems enough. I don’t know if this is encouraging shallow thinking on my part or just enabling me to post more spur-of-the-moment and share more overall. I’m still trying to analyze it. I know that as I travel through the day, my mind is more attuned to communicating in “Twitter-speak”, just as, when I’m writing a scene for a script, my mind is constantly searching for character traits or line inspiration. It’s an awareness that has become second nature for me, especially since I can Twitter on my iPhone now (addicted, lol).

I think Twitter is brilliant because it is a very effective form of one-way, selective communication. We’re all being deluged with information on the internet, and the “megaphone” approach seems like the natural way to move towards when communication reaches overload. However, that’s from my perspective, having over 7,000 Twitter followers and 1,000 Facebook friends. Most people don’t deal with the volume of communication that I do daily. If I were just limited to a few dozen friends, I feel like Facebook and MySpace would be much more attractive to me, because I would have the time to really keep up with what each person is posting and use the tools to coordinate more real-life meetups etc. It would be a deeper level of connecting than is available to me, the way I use these services.

If any of you Twitter, especially if you’re new to it, I’d love to hear your thoughs about it and social networking in general, and how you use it in your lives!