There’s an addictive little facebook application called “Compare people”, which presents you two of your friends at random, and asks you to… well, compare them on some random dimension. You may end up having to say who, between your lead programmer and your ex-beau, you’d rather be on a desert island with, who’s more likely to win in a fight between your former client and your girlfriend, etc. It can lead to some pretty funny thought experiments.

Of course, it also tells you how you’ve rated when compared to others by your friends, and from what I gather, my friends, at least my facebook friends, don’t know me. Sure, I’m organized and bad to go shopping with, but I seem to rate best on my singing voice (?) and my manners, of all things, winning 100% of the time in those dimensions. Similarly, my friends don’t think I study much (25% win rate) and that I’m a pretty bad public speaker (0%).

Certainly one has to be cautious in drawing conclusions based on this, especially since my facebook friends include people I haven’t seen since elementary school, but it’s a very entertaining way to waste time.

A few weeks after Sam Roberts won the Juno award for Artist of the Year, Nika and I bumped into him at Korova on St-Laurent. When introduced, I asked him what he did for a living.

At the gym this summer, I noticed a man standing near and looking at me expectantly. Thinking it was probably someone I knew but didn’t recognize right away, I said hello in my best can-I-help-you? tone. He then said:

“Hi, you’re my trainer. Are you ready to start?”

“Um, no, sorry, I’m not a trainer. I only said hi because I thought maybe we knew each other.”

“Ah. Well, that’s probably because you recognize me from the television.”

(Looks at me intensely, waiting for my acknowledgement that I know him. I stand there with a blank stare, increasingly embarrassed not to know who this “celebrity” is. Awkward seconds pass, and he takes off his glasses to help me better recognize him. I’m still completely clueless and uncomfortably quiet. He says, “I host the TV show Découverte“. I fake mild recognition, not very successfully. We quietly retire to our respective dumbbells).

Three weeks ago, a film crew came to the office to shoot a developer diary (Making Of) for the game. As they were setting up, the main interviewer and I went out for coffee, and I asked him if he did videogame shoots often. When we returned to the office, an animator informed me that these were the guys from Electric Playground, a well-known videogame show, and my coffee buddy had been none other than Victor Lucas, the creator and star of the show.

This may explain why it astonishes me to get recognized from this little page, which is so much smaller in scope, as happened this week at the Montreal Games Summit. Every time, I feel good knowing that there is someone on the other side of the screen, and guilty that I failed to recognize these guys.

 

I’m pleasantly surprised.

When I left for Turkey two weeks ago, there had never been a time in my life when I needed a vacation more. I knew that if I hadn’t gone then, something else would have given, and I just cannot afford to unravel right now. So I planned the type of vacation I needed: the kind with lots of intellectual stimulation, so that I couldn’t possibly think about work, and physical activity, to shake my body out of its ageing rut. Travelling is always an emotional refresher, a bit of a degausser of everyday life. But to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure this was going to happen this time, I doubted that two weeks would be enough to replenish the energy that’s been so recently elusive. I was wrong, and found myself last Friday in Istanbul pleasantly satisfied, looking forward to coming home, and to going back to work.

But crossing a few things off the life to-do list (getting a scrubdown at a 600-year-old Hamam, visiting Troy, scootering through Cappadocia) has that effect. Who knew?