Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Professor Badass: Math, Start-up Life and Ass-whippings

I was at a conference last week to give a talk on "Diversity in the Tech Industry" and received a text message this morning from a former student.

"Everyone loved, loved, loved your crazy hyper-intelligent self. I am so proud to have been a student of Professor Badass."

Interestingly, this was a former doctoral student who took a class from me on Advanced Quantitative Data Analysis.

This lead me to a podcast I have been thinking about. I know that the games my company makes are really good, and yet not as many people know about us as I would like.


 Since we don't have the funds to advertise during half-time at the Super Bowl, I was considering other means of getting information out about our company. The question is, what would the podcast be about, what would we call it and what would be the format.

Ronda called today and when I brought this up, she said right away,

"That's what you should call it ! Professor Badass! It could be on math and ass whippings. You could talk about the math part and at the end we could discuss who most deserved an ass whipping this week! Let's do it!"

I am giving this some serious thought. I'll explain why in a few posts, if I get some free time. In short, I think there are a whole lot of parents out there who love their kids and would do anything to help them out in life, but they are not into the making cupcakes for the PTA meeting. Maybe we could do a podcast aimed at them.

There are also people interested in succeeding in business, maybe starting a company, but they don't summer in the Hamptons next door to Buffy and Biff (or whatever the yuppie names are these days). In fact, they don't even know what the Hamptons are.

The Hamptons are a where, not a what, by the way.

In fact, I think that could be the topic of one of the podcasts: Things pretentious assholes know.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Hamptons are in Long Island, NY. There's North Hampton and South Hampton.

Ventus said...

I have tried a demo of the Spirit Lake and i would have some suggestions and critiques to give that you may find useful.

Where should i send the message to? Do i write at support or is there another address to direct feedback to? Should i use the contact page on the web site but make sure the title is "demo feedback" or something like that? I think i saw an address for feedback somewhere but i cant find it now.

As for getting recognition for the game i would have a few suggestions too. I see you already did a Kickstarter project for the "Spirit lake". Thats certainly one good way to raise awareness. Getting into contact with various "gaming media" sites will surely help too.
I would recommend looking into "Rock Paper Shotgun" site. They are PC centric, but they like all things progressive and educational games is a novelty concept by itself. Huge global audience and support for all sorts of female emancipation stories and experiences too.

There are many US based sites of that kind (IGN, Kotaku,etc), but they are generally more interested in the Hollywood type of blockbuster games and other such cheap schlock content.
Still, if properly presented as an educational games you could wring some PR benefits for Spirit and Fish lakes out of them too.