... you'd pretty much have to expect something like this would happen eventually (read through to the end). That's one of those authentically Gibsonian paleofuturistic things that could only have happened in the perpetual recent past, circa the early 2000s.
I hate being so tired on a flight that I can't even summon the energy to fire up my laptop and do basic text-editing. But as I promised to a small group of shell-shocked GDC attendees, post-screed, here are the zipped-up slides and presentation notes for "Familiarity breeds contempt: Buidling game stories that flow (1.35MB)".
... and I'm back in Montreal. Austin was fan-freaking-tastic. The conference - especially as an inagural journey under the command of the folks from CMP - was really damn good. I ate my body weight in conchinita pabil, BBQ sausage, pecan pie and hush-puppies (I'm not talking about the shoes. If you think hush-puppies are shoes, you are a freak.) The talk, near as I can discern, went well. I'll have more impressions on that shortly.
The real story here, though, is that I have established once and for all that one should never, EVER, allow a travel agent to book one a connecting flight via Dallas-Fort Worth. I don't know what kind of fucking magnetic anomaly they've built their 90 zillion dollar boondoggle of an airport on, but apparently it can snatch 737s whole from the sky in completely different time zones and summarily ground them on parking lot -like stretches of tarmac, arranged in sanity-rending tesselations of stalled aviation, like giant iron filings slammed into visible ranks by invisible lines of force.