« Jeremy P. Bushnell |
Jonathan A. Leistiko »
Editor, webmaster, and game designer’s wife.
I’m a software developer, tinkerer, mad maker, and crafter. I grow vegetables in my yard and cook food like a systems analyst. I keep a blog at GirlWritesCode.com. Neil Gaiman introduced me to comic books, but I didn’t stop there. I could get by with five CDs, provided I get to choose them. I have recently become fixated on pinball. No, I will not friend you Facebook, but that’s because I like you.
The story of how Invisible City came together parallels the story of how my marriage came together.
In 1998, I was living in State College, Pennsylvania, home to Penn State University. I was thinking hard about moving to Austin, Texas. Thinking, but not so much doing. I met a pleasant, intelligent, funny, well mannered boy who had everything in common with me, including plans to move to Austin, Texas. So we made it a plan.
November 17, the day we count as the beginning of our relationship, we lay in a field watching the amazingly bright Leonids meteor shower burning through the eternal State College cloud cover, talking, all night.
Jon taught me the word “meme” that night, a unit of language or culture that sticks and spreads, like “Where’s the Beef?” and the hamster dance website. A few days later, my friend Faith forwarded me an email describing an interesting project: memeflurry. This guy, Jebediah P. Brushwell, would man a bank of payphones at the University of Arizona on a given day, and we, the internet community, should call one of those phones and give him a meme. He would record them all and turn them into a kind of social poetry.
Neat. I printed the email (it was 1998, forgive me) and brought it to my new boyfriend, who’d just taught me what a meme is.
Jon scanned over the email and exclaimed, “Jebediah P. Brushwell? That’s my friend Jeremy P. Bushnell!”
Are you keeping track? Sharon meets Jon in PA. Faith in NY forwards an email she’d received from someone who knew someone in AZ. Jon in PA knows the someone in AZ. The someone in AZ phoned the Jon in PA that evening. Total elapsed time: 3 days.
Jon and Jeremy had been designing games together for years. Jeremy created us a website, hit upon the evocative name from an Italo Calvino book, and the boys started posting games, taking advantage of my mutant copy editing skills.
Since that time, Jeremy moved to Chicago; we succeeded in our plan to move to Austin; Jon and I got married; the site’s been mentioned on About.Com, Steve Jackson Games and Slash Dot; and we continue to build the community of fans and contributors of which we are so proud and so fond.
Aggregated Sharon Links
Invisible City Productions is a collective of game designers, writers, and artists who provide this as a space for the creators of secret media to come together and touch antennae.