“What?!! Not six lbs, six oz." SMITH Community Rocks Lukas' New World
It’s fitting that as I tap out this note of deep gratitude that I’m at South by Southwest Interactive right now, preparing to give a talk called “How to Create an Internet Phenom for Peanuts.” I’ll talk about how you should try to make something for love over gold (though passion can ideally lead to profit) and that the most important concept I can convey is the importance of community. Sites like SMITH are both a blast and a beast to run. I’m the only full-time employee, Rachel F. works part-time and has an intense day job, and we have a few under-paid tech people who do their best to ignore our requests. And we love it.
The birth of my son, Lukas, a few weeks ago was a joyful, intense, confounding event. As that baby came into the world, it was no surprise that I neglected my first baby, SMITH Magazine (though I was lucky to have Rachel, and others like Lisa Q. and Vivian C. and Megan M. kindly picking up some of my slack). As a major life change took place, one that was all-consuming, I wanted to find a way to document it. Writing Six-Word Memoirs about my boy, and my rapidly changing life with him, have proved to be the perfect way to quickly get my feelings down, at once an easily updated journal and a form of public therapy. Your good wishes and advice in the comments of many of my Lukas Sixes came unexpectedly and delightfully.
And then a bunch of you snuck behind my back did something so special that I found myself falling in love with my first baby all over again. For starters, you sent a great batch of books, so the little guy can get off to a good start with his words, as well as a thoughtful gift for his mom. That was the easy part. The images you see here are of a framed poster of Six-Word Memoirs some of this community's most fervant contributors wrote about the newest Smith.
The Six-Word Memoir Game: First Look!
You asked for it, you got it: the Six-Word Memoir Game is coming to a store near you this fall. Since we launched the Six-Word Memoir project in 2006, time and again people have suggested we make a game. (My mom, I'm pretty sure, was the first person to mention it—we were a house of bodies constantly sprawled out on the living room or kitchen floor playing Boggle, Monopoly, Scrabble, and, later, my all-time favorite, Taboo.) Our game will be a simple format that will require little more than a pack of cards and a group of friends—and we hope will spur the same passionate, addictive love of the form we see on SMITH.
The game world is a weird one, one I knew nothing about a few years ago. Like the book publishing industry it has its giants (Hasbro, Milton Bradley, etc.) and a few surviving and even thriving independents, like Universal Games. As I researched the prospect of making a Six-Word Memoir game, there was clearly one company that was the perfect fit. And so it was that I found myself in the office of legendary gamemaker, Bob Moog, in his San Francisco-based headquarters. In a weird bit of kismet, we figured out that his daughter, Nina, wrote Six-Word Memoirs as part of a class she took at Dave Eggers' writing center, 826 Valencia, and we had picked it to be included in our first book ("My ancestors were accented cow herders.").
Games are everywhere at Universal's office—from the hundreds that Bob and his team have launched across the world (20 Questions, Blues Clues, Worst-Case Scenario) to classic games that Bob's collected over the years that comprise his "Museum of Games." The place is like the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of games.