FlashBrighton: Post-FOTB Round Table Discussion October 7, 2008

Preamble

For those of you interested in functional, usable information: next Tuesday at 7pm FlashBrighton will be meeting at the Cricketers in Brighton's famous South Laine to talk about the recent "Flash on the Beach" conference, discuss the possibility of new collaborative projects and organise new sessions for the remainder of the year.

For those of you interested in funny, stupid shit, please read on...

Another year, another Flash on the Beach and what exactly are we supposed to do after that?! If we understood aright all we heard it should be one of the following:

1. Play. Work. Follow your heart. Abstract your narrative. Abstract your code. Throw away your code. Make it quickly. Make it maintainable. Make it usable. Make it fun. Make it at two in the morning. Read the manual. Throw away the manual. Go outside. Practice Jiu-Jitsu. Sit down. Have a drink. Twitch. Gibber. Cry.

2. Build a Flex-based, Cairngorm-controlled, emergent, generative, multi-user, streaming, usable, playful, 3D, optimised, open-source, particle-driven, video & audio games engine and ship it in an AIR app.

3. Skip all of the above and click the new 'Create Masterpiece' button that ships with CS4

All in all, it was a bit much and 1,050 people walked away tired but inspired and spent most of the next day arguing about Jonathan Harris. Which still doesn't answer the question: what exactly ARE we supposed to do after that?

The answer is... well, the answer is that we don't really know but that's OK cos next Tuesday we're damn well going to find out! Now that John Davey's Flashtastic cavalcade has rolled on until two thousand nine, it's trusty little cousin FlashBrighton is returning to take the reins. And the agenda is WIDE OPEN!

That's right kids: next Tuesday there's no speakers, no sessions and no "The Werks". Instead we're going to take a deep breath, relax, grab a pint at the Cricketers and sit around chatting about what we as a group wanna do next. There's two main things we wanna discuss:

Projects

Next Tuesday is - pinch, punch - the first day of the month and traditionally that means Projects Night. And traditionally that means Joe Chung turning up and telling us what he's done to the Robot Wars app. Now we love Joe for his tirelewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeee444444444445 sorry, cat just stood on keyboard. Whilst we obviously worship Joe for his tireless dedication to pixel-based slam death-matching it would be nice to have a collaboration involving more people, or a coupla them running simultaneously or something like that. Previously we've tried to set the agenda on projects upfront, with varying degrees of success. This time we're encouraging greater participation by asking you guys to rock on up and decide between yourselves what you wanna do. Get thee down to the Cricketers next Tuesday and get your projection in first!

Sessions:

We have projects, we also have sessions. Only at the moment the schedule is a bit thin. No dramas tho, cos we've got a big old list of session ideas, requests and suggestions mined off the FlashBrighton listserv and we need to go through these and work out "whas hapnin" for the next "woteva" months. So take the FlashBrighton by the horns next Tuesday by turning up and emitting sounds from out your mouth.

That's it kids! In short: beer and conversation. A classic combination, how can you refuse? Even if all you wanna do is sit around and bitch how much you hate Jonathan Harris.

Only joking, we love Jon really. Just make sure you sign up here for a real-life post-FOTB chatroom right now.

Official Website: http://www.flashbrighton.org/wordpress/?p=177