Because SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) conference was right here in town this year, I was able to stop by a few panels. I’ve actually never attended SCMS before, and so it was nice to be able to check out the conference in a low-pressure kind of way.

The Drake Hotel’s elevator monitor looks an awful lot like a retro game, although after some time spent trying to get from point A to point B, it seemed like a game we all lost.

I don’t have much to say about SCMS — I enjoyed it, generally speaking, and I’ll probably go out of my way to attend in the future. There are panels I wish I could have seen that I had to miss, of course. The panels I did make it to gave me a lot to mull over; I found the panel “Debugging the History of Game Terminology: Critical Studies of Key Concepts” particularly provocative.

Raiford Guins speaking as part of the “Debugging” panel.

Past the panels, I enjoyed touching base with a number of friends and colleagues from the University of Texas’s Radio-Television-Film Department. I didn’t graduate from RTF, but I took several classes in the program and worked on both Flow and the UT Austin|Portugal CoLab during my time at UT. I also have a number of conversations to follow up on in the aftermath, which always makes me feel that I made good use of my time.

These lovely looking wedding chairs serving double duty as attendee seating did a number on my back.