My take on last night's @layertennis match with @joshuadavis
For only the second time, last night I had the honour of taking part in a Layer Tennis match, this time against the wonderful Joshua Davis. Having known Joshua for around ten years, I knew this was going to be fun and very full-on. Layer Tennis is always an intense roller-coaster like experience, but having Joshua as your opponent cranks that pressure up easily past 11. Joshua even had a live video stream running of the whole event. I didn't bother with a live stream - I doubt the site of me drinking Ceylon Orange Pekoe tea, listening to Debussy would have made for good TV.
Anyway, you can see how the match played out here, but for me I felt I didn't play well. Firstly – and I'm not blaming the tools here – but the files Joshua sent over killed my Mac as they were full of hundreds of vectors and layers, so I every time I tried to use those assets in my return volleys I was just sat staring at a spinning beach ball for literally five minutes. But that's my problem and I had to deal with it, so instead I used the colour palette that Joshua was playing with. It wasn't ideal but was the best I could do without destroying my iMac and still try and keep to the time. As for why I didn't send layers back to Joshua, that was simply because there were no layers; everything was done in Flash using a dynamic algorithm, so it spat out a flat file.
But all that aside, like I said I didn't play well in my Opinion. If I was voting I too would vote for Joshua - he was the better player and was totally on it. The better man should win.
Oh and as a side-note, it always amazes me how personal people get. But such is the nature of human nature - we all do it and I advise anyone who gets to play Layer Tennis to bring very thick skin, and don't look at the Twitter stream during the match (I didn't). I will say this though; they guy who said I "used some shitty font", you obviously know jack shit about typography.