Probably more like Orange County looking north toward LA.
2023-12-15
Luxo Jr.
I went to my first Siggraph in 1987. There was a panel on animation and one of the panelists was a young man who had made a CGI short about a lamp that plays ball with his son.
Siblings
Supposedly if you show people a picture of something cute before you give a talk they will like your talk better. I tried this at GDC one year. Sadly it's hard to tell if it improved my scores. These were the siblings from the litter where we got our dog.
Amazing forest fire from 2007
This is a screenshot from Eye of the North - a Guild Wars expansion.
I wish I had a gif to show you. I don't know who did this environment art but it pushed the engine in a really beautiful way.
Grand Piano
Not sure how I took this. I'm going to guess I took it from the Microsoft offices that are (were?) at Lincoln Center North.
Azurik visits Disneyland California Adventure
The Azurik game was made in 2000 / 2001 and reasonable quality 3D models for games were a new thing (Azurik was an Xbox launch title and the Xbox was better than anything in terms of CPU and graphics at the time.)
It occurred to me that we could pose Azurik anyway we wanted and photoshop him into things. Here's one of my favorites by Priscilla P:
Adrenium Logo Music
This was fun. It was performed by the City of Prague Orchestra and used over the Adrenium logo at game startup time. Somewhere I have a recording of me banging on the piano trying different things until I hit on this.
I took this!
I was working with a client in 2005 and I met with their very expensive lawyer. This was the view from the law office. Oh my.
Performance Graph
I don't recall what this graph covers! It's from a Guild Wars 2 stress test before launch. Maybe CPU cores in use? It would have made Jackson Pollock proud.
The Dash is silent
A joke I like to tell as an introduction to a talk is to explain how easy it is to misspell my name, and I point out it is "Clarke DASH Willson" but the dash is silent. A colleague at work made this drawing of my super-hero persona: "The Dash."
Dissertation
The three in the middle are my Ph.D. dissertation in book form. Besides myself, I think three other people have read it, and they were all on my dissertation committee.
Oh wait! My lovely wife proofread it several times. So ... four other people.
Quick iPad Sketch 2013
I handed my iPad (one of the original models - 64 GB!) to my daughter who made this quick sketch of me.
Sleeping with the fishes
There was an education event for kids (maybe there still is!) where a parent and a kid went to the Seattle Aquarium and got a tour and then spent the night inside!
Early days of Twitter - before the fail whale
People used to bitch when Twitter went down. Then they started putting up the fail whale, which was cute, and everyone said, "Ahh, how said, Twitter is done."
Gilligan!
Not sure why this exists where it exists ... but this was on the wall at Microsoft Studios (not to be confused with Microsoft Game Studios - these were video studios). It's a map of Gilligan's Island.
Towers of addiction
I would save coffee sleeves meaning to reuse them, but I never stored them nearby where I would need them, and so they just piled up. Literally.
Skybridge at Washington Convention Center
I used to see this and think, "It should would be cool to go across that!" It turns out I already had done so a number of times, but it was so full of convention-center stuff that I didn't realize I was in it!
I went to a less jam-packed conference and realized where I was.
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