Twice a year, the pedestrian commuters of NYC get a little treat: Manhattanhenge!

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on Thursday, May 29h this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight.

Read the rest of the quoted article at Newyorkology. Also, there’s a neat Flickr pool with more Manhattanhenge images.

The middle of May was something of a berserk time for us here at Powerhead Games. In the space of one week, we had multiple milestones due for multiple different projects, a client visit, and the sort of computer issues that usually only come from having your offices built on an Indian burial ground. It was like the perfect storm, only without George Clooney dying at the end. We think.

So what better week, then, to have the first ever PHG Mixed CD Swap? Armed with a handful of rules to keep things interesting and the names of three other people to make physical copies of their mix with, a bunch of us set about the time-honored tradition of carefully arranging songs and assembling cover art. The results were far better than anybody could have expected, producing a surprisingly eclectic range of songs and styles while proving once and for all that, to truly know the people you work with, you must first walk a mile in their headphones. For some it was their first mix ever (and how any of them have significant others is a mystery for the ages), while for others it was a chance to dust off old skills while trolling through albums and hard drives long forgotten in search of the perfect obscure Beach Boys cover. While some people had themes for their mixes and others just went with a bunch of songs they liked, one thing is abundantly clear now that it’s all said and done: we’re all secretly in love with each other and can only express our feelings through the poetry of Journey and Avril Lavigne.

Everybody seems to have really enjoyed it, and we’re definitely doing it again next month. In the meantime, if you were to take the fruits of our labors and pile them up on the floor in Jason’s office, it might look remarkably like this:

UPDATE: For the curious, some of us have started putting up tracklists in the comments section. Check ‘em out, won’t you?

As mentioned previously, I was on a recent panel discussing the popular topic: “How to get a job in the videogame industry.” The session was well attended and I had fun taking part (thanks to all involved!). Since there’s already a nice write up on the event here, I’m going to focus the rest of this post on the topic itself…

Helping people get game jobs is an important subject at Powerhead, as we’re in a growth “phase” (phase = most of the last three years). We spend a lot of time looking for “fresh meat” and have some advice to offer to offer. (If you read nothing else in this article, the short version is: DIY. Make cool stuff, show it off, and don’t give up.) That said, we certainly haven’t seen it all. So, to prepare for the panel, I recently took a look at what the rest of the internet had to say on the subject:

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