The Salazar awards weren’t very impressive. The speaker seemed a bit unprofessional, and the organization seemed a bit lacking for the GDC. First of all, the speaker was a bit drunk. A little bit..how do I say it? Unprofessional. I thought the GDMA speaker series was eighty thousand times better. Just the general layout, the interactivity, the casual hilarity. It was just great. This. Not so much.
Not only was he slightly insulting (he casually threw ‘mothers of children killed by drunk drivers’ and ‘mothers with gay sons’ in the same category, at which point my friend wanted to walk out). The event itself was slightly insulting. I mean the whole point of the Salazar awards is for students. When they announced the winners, they didn’t even show their work! They didn’t show ANY of the work on the screen. They didn’t even mention the ‘honorable mentions’…hello….it’s in the name! Honorable mentions means you get a mention!? Regardless. The work displayed outside didn’t have any sort of ’1st place. 2nd place. honorable mentions’ stuff on it, so really, who knows who the 2nd place/honorable mentions really were?! Besides, none of the winners were even there!!! Brutal. The sponsors got WAY more shout-outs than any of the students did anyways. Let’s just say the whole thing was lack luster, and leave it at that.
I didn’t blog about it before, but let me just say that the Fresh Thinking GDMA speaker series was AMAZING. Inspiring to say the very least. I don’t know what it was about it, but it blew my mind. Like, gah. I felt privileged to be there, I felt like I would have paid easily paid 40 bucks for that level of awesomeness. Got a chance to talk to the hilarious-hockey-metaphor guy afterwards, he was pretty awesome, super casual and really funny. Basically I’m just glad I was there, even if I did have to volunteer, it was well worth the experience.
Here are some pic’s of Fresh Thinking (all of which I jacked from Dale’s flickr):
Last thing to blog about. Balding for dollars! Thanks so much to everyone who supported!!!! I was scared I wouldn’t hit my goal of $500, but I ended up raising $1600 total. Which means Kyle and me raised $2000 together, which was my secondary goal! Hurrah!!!!
