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I survived Slush 2014.

It takes a lot of energy, but is worth it. The event itself is quite an experiment. 5 stages full of talented people talking about their ideas and what they did wrong or right to deserve the right to be speaking to all of us. All the parties that are taking place, when the actual event is not will also consume a lot of energy.

Of all the events, speeches and pitches my personal picks are (I intentionally didn't include those, to whom I'm somehow affiliated with):

• Wooga's CEO Jens Begemann describing how they create hit games, aka. the hit-filter. This seems to be a working recipe from Supercell. The fact seems to be, that if there are 100.000 games in the App Store, only top-15 of them are making serious money. So, your game needs to be in top-15, not top-500.
  
• Dragonbox creator Jean-Baptiste Huynh telling how he wants to change the way kids are learning algebra with a completely new approach by playing a game. It seems that schooling everywhere in the world is sticking with 300 year old methods: to sit on your desk and in order to prepare yourself to work successfully by a conveyer belt of a factory, you must sit still and do as your teacher tells you to. Doesn't sound like 2010s to me. Huh!
  
• Kano founder Alex Klein wanting to turn kids into super-kids by freeing their thinking by introducing everybody into computers and programming. The apparent fact remains, that currently there exists over 8 billion computing devices in the world and only 50 million of us know how to program them (amateurs and professionals combined). His idea is to empower non-nerds to create nice things with computers too.
  

My thanks goes to Slush organizers, Tencent Games and Pocket Gamer.

For many many years I haven't waited the christmas that anxiously, that I would have an advent calendar. Not even a chocolate one. This year I chose to make an exception to that. I got a recommendation to get a proper one from Lieferello.de. Here it is:

This calendar contains 24 (as any advent calendar does) cans of beer. Nice! Finally a good reason to count days for the 1st of December.

If you want to order one, here is the direct link to Die Weihnachtsbrauerei Bier.