« Jeremy P. Bushnell |
Jonathan A. Leistiko »
Editor, webmaster, and game designer’s wife.
I’m listening to “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor on my iPod. It’s the day after the 2004 election. This seems fitting.
When I’m not playtesting Jon’s games or editing rules, I write software for a computer manufacturer; I read and contribute to impassioned arguments about CSS; I read Neil Gaiman comic books and novels; I dance; I practice public speaking with Toastmasters; I research water conservation strategies for my future garden; and I write fiction. I keep a blog at invisible-city.com/sharon/.
I like the story of how Invisible City came together. It 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.
what does it mean
when it says
from to from to
112 333 22 444 — wally Jul 26, 11:14 PM #
Those pertain to traffic around the ring. The first pair covers the last 8 weeks, and the second pair covers the last 2 weeks. By clicking a “next site” link, how many people surfed the ring from your site and how many surfed to your site.
The webring software is maintained by a third party. We’re just users of it, same as you. — Sharon Jul 28, 05:33 AM #