Author Archives: geoffreylong

Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and storyteller exploring transmedia experiences, emerging entertainment platforms and the future of entertainment as the Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios. He is an alum of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, a FoE Fellow with the Futures of Entertainment community, and a co-editor of the Playful Thinking book series from the MIT Press. His personal site can be found at geoffreylong.com.

It’s only Tuesday?

Boy, if every day this week turns out to be like yesterday I’d be finished with my entire to-do list on Friday. That would be good, because I’d also be dead. One of the things they don’t tell you when you go freelance is that, yeah, if you billed for a full 40 hours every […]

More thoughts on Macrodobe.

Yeah, yeah, I know the resulting entity is going to be just ‘Adobe’, but ‘Macrodobe’ is fun to say. Anyway, I’m going to start adding links to who says what about this new development. Check back here as we go along. Update: Added some more initial reactions. So far, ‘shock and awe’ pretty much sums […]

Adobe + Macromedia?

Well, the entire blogosphere is going to be twittering about this for months: Adobe is buying Macromedia for $3.4 billion. This could be cool (think the Adobe Creative Suite with Flash and Dreamweaver instead of GoLive), or it could be the ultimate death knoll for Apple. If Apple continues to piss off Adobe with products […]

Risky behavior, continued part III.

This is the point in our narrative where my friendly competitor has the chance to catch up. Whereas Week One was fantastic, Week Two was a wash – no loss, no gain, which of course on a timetable means serious trouble. Week Two was sabotaged by going out to the Cubs game on Monday (which […]

Pixel fury.

I don’t know if it’s some sick kind of burnout or what, but today I keep trying to get into a couple different client gigs and I just keep getting frustrated. I finished up one little project and then went to go read a magazine for a while as a break, and when I set […]

Done and done!

Today I learned a valuable lesson – don’t do your taxes at four in the morning. When I went back over them this afternoon, I discovered I’d deducted my laptop twice (oops) and not taken the full deduction on my new desktop machine, which made a huge difference on my bottom line. Mercifully, it was […]

Braiiiiiiiins.

Hot diggety dog, do I feel like crap. Last night I got home late, intending to do my taxes, when I discovered that my Quicken register and my Excel spreadsheet and my receipt envelopes weren’t playing nice with each other – so instead of actually doing calculations in TurboTax, I wound up spending another night […]

We can rebuild him…

So after a long hiatus stemming directly from a massive issue with Movable Type (apparently you can’t backup a MT install, delete it and then copy it back up again – d’oh!) I’m rebuilding Ken’s weblog, The Thin Guy Diaries. His blog suffers from all the same “damn, gotta fix that”s as mine, such as […]

Risky behavior, continued part II.

A quick update to this project. I’ve been measuring my weight every day, but there are some wide variations in numbers, which makes me wonder if my scale isn’t hosed. There has to be something bizarre going on here, because there’s a variation of three pounds between this morning and Friday morning, which is impossible. […]

Slow Sunday.

I have a million things to do right now. I have more than enough client work to fill out the week, I need to finish up my taxes, I need to do stuff to get ready for school, I have work to do on the new Inkblots, but right now it’s 77 degrees in Chicago, […]