Edinburgh ’08 report:

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I regret: 2

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I don’t regret: 19

Number of things I said that would have made the internet really angry if it had been in the room at the time but it wasn’t so phew: 487,943

Number of people I promised I really would get a ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’ T-shirt made: 3

Gosh,  Edinburgh’s lovely. I really ought to know that by now, for all sorts of reasons, but it still takes me by surprise every time. But it was great to get a chance to load up on plain bread, and see a bunch of old friends, and catch up with all the Dare students as they all get one step closer to taking over the world.

The rather ramshackle slides for my rather ramshackle talk are here (sorry, 13 meg pdf or so, somehow). Fair disclosure: the notes represent what I had been planning to say if I’d had rather more sleep rather than what I actually managed to blurt out on the day, so apologies if they don’t mesh very well with what you heard. A lot of people have been asking me for the Patrick Redding talk, which you can get here, and really, if you’re only going to read one of them, read his and not mine, because his is properly brilliant.  Thanks again to EIF and Dare for inviting me up: good games, good people, good beer, bad weather. God, I miss Scotland.

Develop ’08 report

Lost:  my voice, one earring, one suspected-knock-off, only-slightly-insanely-expensive, 60W MagSafe power adapter (now recovered), one phone USB cable, one bag of clothes (left in a taxi, returned 2 hours later by extraordinarily kind taxi driver)

Most coveted thing face-off: giant Space Invaders commemorative 100 yen coin vs Animal Crossing Happy Room Academy catalogue

Brighton restaurant recommendations:  breakfast – Bill’s for scrambled egg with pumpkin seeds on top and juice brilliance (thanks, T!);  lunch – Bankers for fish and chips (thanks, R!); dinner – Pintxo for delicious peppers and amazo-rasperry/coffee freddo things (thanks, me!).

Unforgettable moment face-off: swimming in the sea with Charles Cecil vs four-man The Final Countdown Band Bros.

New personal best: talking so much my tongue got blisters.

Best new skill learned: how to get an elephant into a fridge.

Cheers to everyone who lasted the distance to come to my talk – super quick’n'dirty slides-with-notes are here. Thanks to Owain for inviting me along, and to everyone who fed my brain-hamster with new ideas.

Whenever I get back from conferences I always promise I’ll do a proper transcript of my session, and then never do, so this time I’ve bitten the bullet and just done some quick and dirty notes on the slides themselves. In the unlikely event you want to check them out, you can download them here.

My GDC swag this year consists of: 2 USB memory sticks, 1 bruised spine, 6000 air miles, dozens of business cards, a 3-figure mobile phone bill and hundreds of un-answered emails. So, apologies if you’re waiting for me to get back to you – I’m catching up, I promise. In the meantime, as literally several of you have requested, here’s the powerpoint (10 meg, sorry) for my ‘Treat Me Like A Lover’ session. I’m not sure how much sense the slides will make on their own, so I’m working on a transcript, which I’ll post up here when it’s done. Hopefully GDCRadio will be up soon, so you can download it there, in the highly unlikely event you want to spend $8 on hearing me be smutty about Advance Wars. Cheers to everyone who turned out at the painful hour of 9am Friday to hear me rant, and thanks for all the kind comments after.