David Hellman

This week I shot the breeze with a few friends for a couple hours, and then we uploaded the results to the internet with the certainty that our words would broaden the minds and fill the hearts of the multitudes.

David Ellis. Scott Sharkey. Ryan O’Donnel. Good men.

We discuss indie games (like Spelunky, Canabalt and Super Meat Boy), the IGF, and childhood fixations that have failed us in adulthood.

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David Hellman Industries proudly announces its long awaited gardening sequel, Hedge Master: Gardener’s Pledge, Volume 5: Edging. All the pledgeful promises and hardening appendages you recall from Gardener’s Den: Gate of Ardin: Co-Ed Dorm Edition returns, refueled and faintly flavored with intelligent restraint.

Indolent upon the lawn, your hardy gardener detects danger and springs into dangerous attire. Follow him through seventeen layers of redolent foliage, enslave the world!

Related:
Fez becomes Fedge
Eliss follow-up Edgeliss
Closure becomes Closure on the Edge of Reality
Ledge Dismount
Edward McEdgington
Critter Crunch becomes Critter Credge
Canabalt becomes Canabedge
Edgeform: On the Edge of Insanity
And Yet it Moves becomes And Edge It Moves
Edgeless
Space Edge: Edge of Space
EeeEEEEeeEeEEEEeeeEdge!
Aztedge
and,

An explanation may be warranted:
Overview by Boing Boing
More background by TIG Source
And more from Chaos Edge

I’m at TIG Jam at the Flashbang Office in Tempe, Arizona, with about 29 other indie developers. Everyone is working on various cool-looking projects. The TIG Jam website is updating live with graphics from the event, including a web cam. I’ll be posting concept art there over the next few days.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I did a painting for the Darkstalkers Tribute book that came out recently. We weren’t supposed to talk about it, and then we were, and I wasn’t sure when it was okay, and I just forgot about it.

But here it is:

For those who don’t know, this is a character from a popular series of fighting games. Pretty sure he’s a vampire. The book has a lot of vampires, as well as mummies. There are also a lot of sexy girls, because undead things are sexy.

Also! When the poster shop opens in the near future, a limited run of these will be available for purchase!

To make this blog post slightly more interesting, I thought I’d share some of the rough drafts. In the original sketch, the guy was more weird looking:

Read the rest of this entry »

This post falls outside the usual categories this blog has covered (video games and Braid stuff). I have my reservations about the personal or even mundane disclosures that comprise so much of the web; my twitter updates have been strictly blog update announcements so far. I am even hesitant to comment on other people’s tweets because at this early stage, a single comment would heavily shift the ratio of professional tweets to chattery public conversation tweets. Though my recalcitrance is probably somewhat un-dude in the twittering world, it’s hard to feel casual on the open stage of the internet. Even the sillier posts in this blog have been video game-related, granting them at least a nominal professional justification.

On the other hand, you never know what might come from sharing miscellanea of one’s life! That tediously ambivalent disclaimer aside, here is a video:

I shot it Monday afternoon in a dead-end staircase surrounded by gardens very near my apartment building. These are the same famous parrots from the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

Their sounds are frequently the first things I hear in the morning.

I’m obsessed with birds right now. It started with pigeons, and their hilarious mating dance. Then I started looking more closely at the gulls, crows and other birds around here. It’s so easy to ignore animals as irrelevant cruft on the city. But many of them thrive here. When I’m looking at a crow, and then it looks at me, and I can tell I’m not just a patch in its view, but the object of its attention, some kind of equalization occurs. That crow is apprehending me; I am apprehending it. Mutually aware, we will now go about our business with more or less consideration for the other. Whether the crow continues to preen in my vicinity with apparent indifference, or from an abundance of caution flies away, I know I exist in its world. The relationship may develop no further, but already my routine obliviousness is interrupted.

That moment of mutual recognition scrambles my sentience-projection module. When I see people, I make broad assumptions about their minds, their perceptions and the worlds they inhabit by projecting my own experience onto them. Despite the variation among people, and despite my assumptions’ assuredly frequent wrongness, the comparison feels sensible. Human, human. (Probably one of the most common errors we make is incorrectly assessing how much other people’s minds resemble ours.)

When I look at an ant, my ability to identify with it is so slight, that the sentience-projection module defaults to OFF. This may be wrong or unenlightened, but ants just seem like little scurrying machines. (In the case of mosquitos, I hate them so much, and “dehumanize” them so fervently, that I want to ascribe negative-sentience, although I’m not sure what that means.)

A bird is right in the middle. Their faces are not as articulate as a human’s, or a dog’s. But you can tell when one is looking at you. And you can tell a lot more, if you start to watch. When I look at a bird, my sentience-projection module, which I use to populate my sensory world with psychology, goes a bit haywire. The switch can’t default to OFF/ANT or ON/HUMAN. It’s somewhere in-between. And, in the way of things that defy compartmentalization, it becomes fascinating.

To learn about the span of amazing avian adaptation, I recommend The Life of Birds, a 10-episode BBC series by David Attenborough. The footage Attenborough’s team compiles is frequently astonishing.

Just a heads up to collectors that the GameStop near the downtown Berkeley BART station has an edition of Jaws Unleashed that is very rare indeed:

These pictures were taken last Friday, but there’s a slim chance it’s still there.

As recently as yesterday, I enjoyed a scoff over the inanity of twitter, the service that enables peoploids across the internet to broadcast the minutia of their lives. It’s a step beyond myspace, beyond youtube, elevating indiscriminate self-aggrandizement to a whole other level of compulsion. This was my crotchety opinion less than 24 hours ago. But as I type this, the monster truck wheels of technological and cultural progression are bearing down on me. For the first time, I am about to tweet.

This is happening because I met the Area 5 guys for ice cream yesterday. I observed how they used twitter not just to keep up socially, but also to follow the work of friends and colleagues. When Ryan O’Donnell declared that he never checks blogs anymore — he just uses twitter to find reading material — I visualized myself in Montana, calcifying in the strata of an exposed cliff.

So: http://twitter.com/davidhellman

My plan is to use it to announce blog stuff, or other things I’m doing. Professional stuff. That’s the plan! We’ll see how long it takes for laundry updates to start. And I’m looking forward to finding out how it changes my reading habits, changes my awareness of what friends are up to, etc. Hey, we are living in the future, and new systems are needed to keep track of all the crazy futuristic things going on.

My uncle, Richard Hellman, is an artist also. Had his childhood been ruined by Nintendo, perhaps he would have taken the same path as I. Instead, he became a master printmaker, and has exhibited and taught for many years.

His new online gallery showcases his work, as well as his bio, and other information.

He also has prints for sale. They’re beautiful, and actually extremely affordable. Go to his site and click Links in the sidebar to find his imagekind storefront.

On his web site, Rick explains, “The creative process for me has always been a dialog between emotions and the intellectual filter that balances our lives. An idea gets modified once the process of “doing” begins. The various forms of printmaking … have allowed for experimentation and balance between planning and spontaneity.”

That bond of powerful feeling — be it dark or vibrant — and a cerebral, organizing impulse, comes through strongly in his images. It’s also a description I can identify with my own work.

Rick’s prints were always in our house when I was a kid, and he always encouraged me artistically. Please visit his online store on the Links page and consider ordering a print for yourself or someone more deserving.

Well, Animex ‘09 has come and gone. Getting back to normal life, I’m invigorated by the memories of the past week. Thanks to the organizers and everyone I met. It was a great time.

For those unaware of Animex, it’s an intimate, well-run conference that brings together truly amazing, accomplished people as well as people like me, and totally dedicated students.

Some have inquired about recordings of my talk. It was filmed, and should be available at some point. I’ll pass on the info when it comes in.