Panelists: Lee Martindale, Jody Lynn Nye, Melanie Fletcher, Lynn Abbey

Raw notes

LA: story about how she got a chance to talk to rowena, the cover artist, jim baen calls, they're getting a new cover don't want anyone to see

In 1978 they were worried about publishing a fantasy novel under a woman's name. Anne mccaffrey was the first feminine name published. Cj cherryh -- h was added, but had to use initials.

LM: such a pretty face -- anthology featuring larger folks -- but cover wasn't a fat person, it was a pregnant woman, had to explain why this was different to the editor

Star wars -- opened up the idea you could make money off of sci fi AND fantasy

There's been a shift in editors - used to be exclusively male; now a lot of female editors.

LA: tries to have two of everything to try to avoid feeling like a character is a stereotype

Posted by Eric Tilton at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Started teaching Japanese literature, was also interested in fantasy. Saw Akira, thought someone should write a book. So she did.

Her first book was one I picked up in 2002 or so when I was starting to get back into anime, and gave me a number of ideas for things to watch.

First part of talk and book goes over how fascination with Japanese culture goes back to 19th century impressionists, Monet, Van Gogh as early cosplayer.

Second part - fandom. She did a ton of interviews with fans to try to distill experience. For her (and me) Akira was an eye opening moment. For other people it was Totoro and other Miyazaki works, and more "child-oriented" works.

It's interesting to me that the works referenced are ones I was familiar with years ago when I last paid attention and was trying to keep up. Surely there are new interesting series?

It's also interesting and perhaps unsurprising that the audience has that kind of blithe self assurance to interrupt constantly with their own impressions and experiences, breaking down the wall between presenter and audience and turning it into more of a conversation. The downside is that that conversation gas that kind of internal fandom logic that isn't always of interest to the outsider.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are at akon this weekend, so I'll post some iPhone-driven notes where I can. Foolishly, I took these notes from yesterday in the Notes app, so I'm doing some transcription.

Carmack started with a demo reel that ranged from Commander Keen to the latest tech5 stuff. It's notable that the biggest cheers were for Cmdr Keen, Doom, Quake, and Quake 3. Doom 3 and Quake 2 not so much. Excitement for tech5 seems high though.

Carmack observed that we are headed to theoretical limits -- we'll maybe get another decade of order of magnitude improvements. When he started, games were driven by tech tricks: let's build a game around side scrolling! Let's do fake 3d! Let's do real 3d!! Now we're into subtle tech tricks. Now the tech can pretty much support whatever, so the content (and big budgets) is the driver.

He told a story from Doom 3: they decided to devote a guy to "doing audio right." They did all this crazy stuff so that you could, as he put it, hear a fly flying around the room. It was all the really edge pushing ultra realistic stuff that goes beyond good enough. It turned out to be the most unstable part of the game. They rewrote it into a much simpler audio engine... and nobody noticed. Good enough is sufficient for most users. The crazy new tech made possible by current technology has substantially less return reward. So again -- content is the driver on mature platforms.

He's fascinated by the iPhone because it's at the start of it's technology curve. To him, it's much more possible for one tech innovator to compete because the multi million dollar budgets aren't justified -- content isn't driving it yet. If the iPhone starts displacing the ds or the psp though, that'll probably change.

He thinks digital distro is the future, even for very large things -- no optical discs in 10 years.

Current technology is also trending towards parallelism because we're hitting the power and size physical limits. But it's hard to soak that up power for things beyond graphics. You'd think it'd be great for simulation, but it's hard to scale simulation up and down. This is especially true if the simulation has gameplay impact, and if multiplay is involved, because now you have to worry about correctness.

Posted by Eric Tilton at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)