What really happened at Flashbelt ’09

First, before we get started, I wanted to say that Flashbelt this past week was a truly fantastic conference. All three years I have attended have been great, and I always leave with fresh ideas and see many awesome new projects and meet many cool people I would not have otherwise met. Thank you, Dave.

Now on to the business at hand:

There’s a big firestorm brewing right now about a “racy” presentation that was given on the last day of the conference. A blog called the Geek Girls Guide posted an email written to them by an offended attendee.

I believe that the description of the presentation in the above post is somewhat inaccurate because it is given without the context of the reset of the presentation and the kind of conference that Flashbelt is. So I wanted to post a response in defense of Flashbelt (and yes, Hoss too).

UPDATE: After writing this, but before posting it, Hoss posted a response (with a short note from Dave from Flashbelt before it) on the Geek Girls blog. It’s a good read, and you should read it.

Full disclosure: I consider Hoss a friend of mine and have known him for a number of years, mainly from attending or speaking at the same conferences that he has, so read this with that in mind. I’ve also been a speaker at the Flashbelt conference for the past three years.

I’d like to start with an overview of the presentation that Hoss gave from my point of view:

UPDATE: Hoss has posted most of the slides from the talk here, along with some descriptions of the content. I’ll leave my account of the talk here for those interested in another opinion.

First, he started off with his “ignite stye” talk that is a few slides about his recent work and the tough economic times, and yes, as Grant pointed out, it does begin and end with a picture of him at a club called “Club 11″ in Amsterdam (a quick Flickr search turned up this image of the club in question. May be NSFW for some, but it’s certainly not R-rated). UPDATE: Erik Natzke has posted a video of the first few minutes of the talk (which funnily enough, I have a small cameo at the start).

After this he then moved on to talk about a project he worked on for Adobe (the project appears to be no longer live), which was a graffiti/drawing tool. He said that any time you create a drawing tool online, the first thing people do is “draw penis swastikas” with it, which indeed, if the creatures that people have created with the game Spore are any indication, that statement is spot on.

He then went on to explain that in order to perhaps one-up the penis makers at their own game, he embedded a penis in the app itself as an Easter egg. (Before showing this he of course asked any Adobe folks in attendance to cover their eyes). He then went through some steps to place some stuff on the stage, and zoomed in on a crudely drawn penis, which you can see here.

I believe next he showed a couple of drawing tools, and since we were on the subject of drawing “cocks”, he decided to try to draw one. (Note that he had injured his hand a couple of days before and had a splint on his wrist, which was hindering his ability to draw anything, so his drawings looked especially crude and he had to start over a couple of times.) He drew a crude face and a penis and a white line coming out of the penis to the face. I considered this to be a little over the top, but it was at least on topic since he was using a drawing tool and as he just said, people draw cocks when you give them a drawing tool.

He then explained that he wasn’t an illustrator and wanted to invite an illustrator from the audience up to draw something better with the tool, so he asked if anyone was an illustrator, and a woman raised her hand, so he invited her up to draw something. Unfortunately she must have been confused about what he wanted, because she just drew a bunch of random lines and abstract doodles. He thanked her after a minute or two and she went back to her seat. As she left, he hit the replay button on the app so it would re-draw what she drew. As he was talking about how great it is to create an app and see what talented people do with it, he noticed that one of the doodles she drew very closely resembled a penis (which it actually did). So of course he laughed and said that she had drawn a cock and had upstaged him (clearly in a joking manner, it was very funny).

He then showed a fridge magnet tool his company created, and talked about how the narrative of the intro helps people figure out how to use the app, and he showed a video of someone using the app, moving the letters around. I believe it spelled out some PG-13 rated words, but nothing too bad. He was also talking about how the interface is super simple, that it’s magnet letters, which everyone knows how to use already, so it doesn’t take much to get people going with it. He also made references to how complicated video games often use the first level as a tutorial to teach you how to play, and that web apps could gain a lot from this type of set up.

He was then nearly out of time, so he opened up his “Orgasmorator.” The app is pictured here on Flickr if you are curious (don’t worry, it’s G-rated). The app is this: It shows a 3d rendered image of a woman’s face, and as you move your mouse up and down, her facial expression changes. This is in tune to some music I believe, and eventually if you move your mouse enough/in the right way, she gets a big smile and some happy music plays. The app is completely G rated. There is no nudity, no suggestive sounds, just some music and a happy woman. I believe he made a comment to tie the simplicity of the Orgasmorator to the simplicity of the fridge magnets app: that everyone knows how to move a mouse and it’s very basic. UPDATE: There’s videos of the tool here.

So this was the end of the talk. Everyone clapped and seemed to like the talk. There was no nudity and no “sexist” things said.

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Now, I’d like to talk a bit about what kind of conference Flashbelt is. First, Flashbelt is not simply a technology conference. It includes many speakers who are not simply programmers, but artists and designers as well. It has a fairly high ratio of designers/artists to programmers, and I think this a big reason as to why the conference is so successful (and indeed, why other “Flash” conferences are so popular). People love going because you don’t just sit in a room all day and listen to programmers like me teach you about the subtle nuances of Flash Player security. You spend part of the day learning new things, part of the day seeing some incredible work from some of the best artists the internet has to offer.

Because of this balance of art and technology, I think attendees should be ready to see things they may not see at other technology conferences. The talks may not be G rated. There may be cussing. There may be crude drawings of things. If you don’t like risqué content, it’s ok to leave the room and check out the next talk. Nobody will mind at all. And of course it’s ok to speak your mind and blog about it, but please keep things in context.

So to sum up, I’d like to say again that Flashbelt is easily one of the best conferences around, and I will absolutely attend it again and again, and so should you. I also think that Hoss shouldn’t change a thing. I think his talk was enlightening and entertaining, even though it was crude at times and some might even say juvenile, but I don’t believe that there was anything sexist about it. I think his best course of action would be to post a warning at the start of his talks to alert people that there will be drawings of “cocks” and strong language, because TV has warnings and they seem to be OK. And lets be honest here, you’ll likely get stronger language and racier content from a night watching prime time television than from Hoss’ Flashbelt talk.