Could I find my way around San Francisco without the use of my phone? To my surprise, it seemed that I could. What I did was this: I looked for real-world objects that I had noticed en route to the Marriott Courtyard earlier. For example, I saw a group of 10 or 15 bored Japanese teenagers hungrily smoking cigarettes in the entryway to a tiny cafe. I saw a health-food store with a weathered cowboy painted on the sign out front. The cowboy was supposed to look intimidating, like he was about to engage in a barroom brawl or a shoot-out. But he didn’t look intimidating…
Losing your phone has a fairly elegant catch-22 built into it: the one thing that would most help you find your lost phone is your lost phone. My brain involuntarily generated “solutions” that got promptly fed into the catch-22’s buzzsaw: Why not phone Thurmond Slackjaw and see if you left your phone back at the last demo! Oh, I’ll bet it’s there. Ha, ha! Problem equals solved. These “solutions” would, at least initially, make my heart soar like a pigeon released moments before the Super Bowl. I was already looking forward to rewarding myself with a visit to the most decadent place in San Francisco: the Walgreens candy aisle….
I traveled to San Francisco in early March, making my first official “work trip” since I got sick last year. I attended the Game Developers Conference, a relentlessly nerdy gathering that I’ve been going to for over 10 years now. The weather in San Francisco in March is usually gray and grim during the GDC. Not this year. This year the days were unseasonably sunny and warm and curiously optimistic. (more…)
