e3 is dead, long live gdc

You can read about it here if you're interested. The short version is that a bunch of the top publishers in the game industry decided that E3 - the Game Industry's mega marketing blitz held each May in Los Angeles - was too costly and had become a large, bloated, money-sucking noise-hole.

To which I couldn't agree more.

The new approach is apparently for E3 to be replaced by a number of smaller, "more intimate" events. Adios E3 trinkets, earplugs, and booth babes. Looks like you'll have to find somewhere else to make nerds think you're into them.

and I refuse to meet anyone with the last name of Cockburn

I was driving into work today listening to Howard Stern and they were interviewing Meat Loaf. Apparently, Mr. Loaf is out plugging "Bat Outta Hell III, his new album due out around Halloween (sounded pretty lame to me, but I've never really been a fan).

Anyway, music aside, Loaf told an awesome story. Apparently, he was at an award show a few years back and realized that he was sitting at a table near K.D. Lang. Being a big fan of her music, he asked his people to talk to her people and see if he could come by and introduce himself. His publicist slipped away and returned a moment later saying, "Um ... sorry, man. She said she doesn't want to meet you."

Shocked at the blow-off, Meat Loaf asked why be wasn't allowed to offer her a compliment.

Turns out, K.D. Lang is a very staunch vegetarian. Her reasoning? "She said she doesn't want to meet you because your name is 'Meat.'"

LAME-O!!

the mind is the first thing that goes

Can't remember if I linked to these before or not.

Here's a bunch of Flash-based mini-games to waste some time with.

Orisinal

meeting my neighbors

There's a button in the upper right of blogger blogs that says "Next Blog." It seems to randomly select someone else's blog for you to check out.

I got curious as to who my neighbors were in the blogosphere so I clicked the button. After a boring one, a SPAM-centric one, and one in a language I didn't understand, I finally found Keet.

Keet, short for Keethana, is apparently 8 years old and blogging from what I'm assuming is England. I have to tell you, I find the blog of an 8 year-old strangely compelling.

Take for instance her take on cable cars:

"Cablecar

I like to go in cablecar. I have not been in a cable car. cable car is so high . It is nice to go in cable car."

I find the fact that she likes to go in cable cars but hasn't been in a cable car yet fascinating. Or then there's this about phones:

"Phone

Phone use to take. Every month my faher will pay the fee. My father has the record. thats what I know about [PHONE]"

... Bweh? Strangely, I feel like I know less about [PHONE] than I did before reading her entry about them. And that's the beauty of Keet. I know that I kept journals when I was 8 or so. I also know that those things were incoherent at best. But, they never ended up on the world stage of blogs and so the world never got to benefit from my thoughts about new Transformers, or whatever Ry and I had done that afternoon with our cousins, or the latest exploits of our dog, Thor.

Though, truth be told, if it wasn't for the spellcheck, my blog would look like it was written by an 8 year old. I can't spell for crap.

it's a couple of wavy lines ...

Everyone's heard of the Rorschach Test, the ink blot test that psychiatrists use to figure out just how crazy you are. Apparently the thought is that by showing the subject a meaningless image and asking them to give it meaning, what they deduce is an insight into their personality.

Well ... Analyze this.

While I've never been one for seeing Jesus in a banana chip or the Virgin Mary in a tree stump, I do find it odd that I keep seeing this strange little image that holds some meaning to me. For the last year, I've been walking outside to my parking space in our apartment building. Everyday I walk past an old blob of concrete on the driveway. And everyday it just sits there and stares at me with it's immediately recognizable form. What is it, you ask?

It's the freakin' Millennium Falcon.


Now ... seriously. Tell me that doesn't look like The Falcon.


I mean, I'm not crazy right? Well, I mean about this. Forget everything else. Actually, come to think of it, that Banana Chip Jesus kinda' looks like the old LucasArts logo

eMe

Yahoo! mail has a gimmicky little feature called the Avatar. Basically it gives you the ability to create a little online cartoon version of yourself that will stare at you when you log into your mail.

This is mine.


It's not as fun as South Park me, but then again - what is?

hotter than a bantha's taint

Good gravy, it was hot this weekend. Manda and I don't have air conditioning in our apartment so we toughed it out on Saturday. But you know what? Toughing it out sucks. Especially when there are plenty of other places in the world that aren't toughing it out. So, we decided that on Sunday we were going to go to the movie theater.

Not just a movie, mind you. The theater. We decided to hang out there and see two movies because they had air conditioning and our apartment was 97 degrees inside. When we got to the theater, it was a sweltering 109 degrees outside.

109! That sucks. I know it's no 116 like Phoenix, AZ or 115 like Nowheresburg, SD; but still ... Mark Twain said "The coldest winter I ever had was the summer I spent in San Francisco." Not anymore, buckaroo. Now it's 109 and people are running for shelter in malls and movie theaters.

Every place that had air conditioning, ice cream, or both was packed. And so we saw two movies: Lady In The Water and The Devil Wears Prada.

I enjoyed both. However, besides the air conditioning, the highlight of the entire experience had to be the old couple that sat next to Manda and I during Devil.

The husband was the star of the couple. This guy had a phenomenal super power.

"Mild-mannered Mort Buckwald was just your average retiree until one day when he was struck by a bolt of Nuclear Lightning! From that day forward, Mort Buckwald, in the guise of Captain Pain-In-The-Ass, could forever narrate the obvious!!"

Yep. Everything that happened that was even remotely obvious, this guy decided to say out-loud in his outside voice.

"That's Meryl Streep."
"I think [Meryl Streep's evil boss character] is testing her [new assistant]."
"[The overworked assistant] should quit."
"[Meryl Streep's evil boss character's] own arrogance is her worst problem."

Wow. Thanks, asshole. I really needed to hear "The Devil Wears Prada for Dummies" on-tape while I watched the movie. It was pretty freakin' hysterical. You could literally witness each thought that passed though this guys head because he always announced it to his wife.

Mort's Brain: ..........
Mort's Brain: ..........
Mort's Brain: ..........
Mort's Brain: That assistant should quit.
Mort's Brain: ..........
Mort: "She should quit."

It was pretty awesome. Most entertaining of all is that he didn't even get the point of the whole movie. I won't ruin it for people who want to see it. But suffice it to say, he missed the point of the whole thing and therefore it was all a waste on him.

Mort rules. 109 degree weather doesn't.

nostalgia friday

Found this on youtube today. Ah, the 80s ... The glorious golden age of video games when everyone realized that the graphics were impressionistic crap at best and so they couldn't use in-game footage to try and sell the games on TV.

Here's what the commercial for centipede looked like:


I love it so much.

so wrong ... so good ...

There's a show someone here at work just turned me on to that I'd never heard of before. It's on MTV2 and is called "Wonder Showzen." From what I've seen off of youtube, this show is brilliant.

Consider it the unwanted result of a drunken tryst between PBS and Adult Swim. It's a show done much like Sesame Street, complete with puppets and little kids, that just messes with your head for its entire duration. It's weird because, having grown up on Sesame Street, my brain is conditioned to feel like it's trying to learn something when presented with information in this format. And yet ... I think I got dumber after I watched it.

Here are some clips:

A nice little song for us all to enjoy:


What is your greatest wish?


Kid interviews at a beauty pageant:


And lastly, Wonder Showzen teaches us about Geography:


Good stuff.

all that was missing were the tumbleweeds

Had an interesting morning this morning. David and I went to The Plant in Sausalito for a mastering session of the original tunes we're doing for Thrillville.

For David, it was a return to the recording studio he worked at as a runner early in his career. The Plant is where Metallica set up camp in the 90s. It's also where Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" and (the one that made me happiest) Huey Lewis and The News' "Sports" were recorded.

And I'll tell you hwhat ... that place was dead, dude. Deader than an all zombie version of Joe Millionaire 3. Apparently they once had the place buzzing with projects, engineers, assistant engineers, front desk staff, runners ... Not anymore. We saw three people there today: their secretary/office manager whose name I didn't get, a guy named Drew Youngs, and the engineer that did our mastering for us - John Cuniberti. John did a great job, but while he was mastering the tunes he was telling us about how the studio now goes for weeks at a time without anyone in there using it.

The cause? Why, Protools of course. Protools and the increased ability of desktop PCs. It's something that - as a musician - I've heard about for years, but I haven't seen it in action much. This place was in survival mode and running on as skeletal a crew as they could. Interesting to see.

I'm not going to say "sad to see" because I've always thought that record companies and recording studios were ridiculously bloated to begin with. I'm a big fan of the home studio revolution and it's definitely cool to see the power to create music go into the creators hands, as opposed to a label-fed studio system.

Um. [/soapbox] Anyway, the moral of the story is: mastering was neato.

worms, roxanne, i was afraid of worms!

I spent my day assembling lyrics to all of the songs that we're licensing for a new game so that they can be submitted to the ESRB.

Since we're licensing pop tunes by established acts, you'd think that the lyrics to these things would be online. Well, about 50% of them are. The rest aren't.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the singers enunciate to the point that I can transcribe the lyrics without any problems.

But then there's The Redwalls.

The Redwalls is a band from Illinois that sound like they're from England 30 years ago. When it comes to the lyrics, however, it's straight-up Illinoise. I don't know how this guy does it, but you can barely understand a single syllable of what he's singing.

Remember that Weird Al cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with the lyrics:

It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss
With all these marbles in my mouth

Well, the Redwalls are pioneering new realms of bargle-zouss.

The first verse of one of their tunes sounds like he's saying:

Well, Tobliss takes the 55 dollar PA
He let that chick go down, he get away
And he stay alive, it don't miss a thang
Because the place that he eats is better than a wedding field

In reality, that lyric is:

Well, Dublin take the 55 diamond PA
He let that ship go down he get away
And he's saying now he don't miss a thing
Because the place where he is is better than where he been

So, thankfully I don't have to wonder about what a "wedding field" is. Still, it's nearly impossible to understand this stuff and it's not online. So what do we do for the ESRB? What if the lyrics are just a string of curses strung together by places this guy eats at?

Well, I contacted Capitol Records through our legal department and requested a lyric sheet. Now, you'd think that the record label would be able to furnish us with a complete list of lyrics.

Nope.

The list they sent was incomplete and, quite frankly, pretty half-assed; or as the Redwalls would say, "hay stacked" or someshit. So, I had to sit there today replaying sections over and over and over again until I figured out what the hell this jerk was saying.

Not since I phonetically transcribed the lyrics to Queen's "Mustapha" at the age of 13 have I had more trouble understanding the lyrics to a song.

So, thanks, Redwalls. Or as Freddie Mercury kinda' maybe said: moh hoh maht deh yeh loh eh-shehlee. Whatever that means.

say it with muffins

My schedule (or, as the British say "schedule") recently has been really busy and one of the side-effects of that is a shunning of the grocery store. Manda and I end up not meal planning because we don't know when I'll be home. When we don't meal plan, we find ourselves eating out a lot more. And eating out more brings us into contact with some special people.

Recently, we've been having some interesting experiences with servers and hostesses at local San Mateo restaurants. A couple of weeks ago, we went to our local BJ's Brewhouse for the first time. When we walked in, I met the world's most sarcastic, apathetic, and grumpy hostess ever. This lady was awesome, just plain awesome. She was this 20-something Asian chick who looked like she thought she was chronically hipper-than-thou. Luckily, she went out of her way to prove that I was right about that first impression.

When I walked up to her and asked for a table for two, she smirked at me and handed me one of those restaurant pagers that vibrates to let you know the table's ready. While we waited to be seated, I watched some guy walk up to her hostess podium. She waited until he was right in front of her and making eye contact before she turned around and walked away. When my pager-thing went off a few minutes later, I walked up to her, handed her the pager, and she just looked at it. Then she looked at me and said "Whoopeeee ..." with the most sarcastic tone the word "whoopeeee" has ever received. As she seated Amanda and I, she said "Not that you asked, but I'm at work right now when I shouldn't be. You get to eat dinner and I don't." then handed us menus and walked away. Our jaws dropped and we laughed our asses off to each other. I then watched her seat table after table and tell every customer that she was jealous that they got to eat while she had to work. She was awesome and undoubtedly the worst/best hostess I've ever seen.

Last night, Manda and I went to Mimi's Cafe in Foster City. Our waitress seemed like a recent graduate of the Mimi's University for English As A Second Language, although I doubt she was valedictorian. She did her best with some broken English to take our orders and then wandered off. No problems. Food arrived. No problems. She took my soda glass to refill it. Pretty much the rest of the meal went by with out my soda returning. I didn't care much, but Amanda noticed and flagged the woman down who instantly ran off to refill the soda.

What was odd is that she then returned with two sodas "to make apologies." It might not sound odd, but it's kinda' weird to have someone give you two drinks and then feel like you're obligated to drink them both. I just sat there scratching my head and laughing about it with Amanda for a bit. Strangely, she then returned a minute or two later with a styrofoam food container in her hands. She was talking quietly as she opened it and said "For my apologies," showed us a spice muffin, and then placed it on the table, bowed, and left.

?? I don't know where this lady grew up, but apparently food duplicates is how you say "sorry." Anyway, I'd recommend dining in Foster City. It's apparently always an adventure.

i believe it

from Overheard In New York:

I Didn't Know Cheney Had Kids That Age

Amherst alum: So we're looking over the applications, and there are all these amazing kids. Won the Westinghouse, worked for the UN. And the questions: "Who do you most look up to?" "My parents, because they're immigrants, and they taught me to work hard." And with each of them it's like, "in". And then we get to this one, it's like, "What's a recent intellectually stimulating experience?" The answer is, "I love my dog, walking my dog." Stuff like that. On and on, really ridiculous. And then, "Who do you most look up to?" The answer: "my parents, especially my dad. He's the President of the United States." And we look at each other, and Steve is like, "in."

--Williamsburg

Overheard by: Julia Mandell

via Overheard in New York, Jul 16, 2006

the brick testament

If you haven't seen this, it's worth a gander.

Some industrious (read: bored, unemployed, or both) person is constructing the Bible with LEGOs.

It's pretty clever. Be sure to stop by the Laws page to brush up on all the things you do that you shouldn't be doing.

Such as:

'If you hear that in one of the towns, there are men who are telling people to go and worship other gods, it is your duty to look into the matter and examine it.

If it is proved and confirmed, you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword.'

You must lay the town under the curse of destruction, the town and everything in it.'

Look out New York! Watch out, LA! I apparently have some sort of duty to deliver unto you an ass-whoopin'!

family reunion

After arriving late last night, my sister and my brother are now both in town for a handful of day and staying with Amanda and I. It's really nice. I haven't seen either of them in a while - my sister since Christmas and my brother apparently for about a year or so. We're a very scattered family.

Apparently I'm so excited to see them that I've lost all sense of common decency and I'm now cutting off people mid-sentence whenever they're talking to ask one of them some new random question. Mostly it's Amanda who's been on the receiving end of my lame interruptions. Gotta' stop doing that. It sucks.

I think we might be driving some go-karts tonight. As far as I can tell, that's the plan. In the meantime, I'm writing my first piece of orchestral music in two years today.

Can you say "rusty?" Great! I knew you could.

um ... how about "shut the hell up"?

Time for July's Ridiculous Lawsuit of the Month.

Starring: The Sea Scouts

For those who don't know, the Sea Scouts are apparently some kind of water-based off-shoot of the Boy Scouts and are where young boys can learn how to make campfires on boats and help old ladies cross lakes or some shit. Provided, that is, that you aren't gay or an atheist. In keeping with official Boy Scouts of America nutitude, heathen Sea Scout wannabes aren't allowed to learn about civic pride or knot tying.

The Sea Scouts of Berkeley, CA were apparently using the Berkeley Marina due in part to the fact that the Berkeley Marina doesn't charge birthing fees to non-profit organizations.

Oops. One exception.

In accordance to local Berkeley laws, The Berkeley Marina's "no birthing fees" policy only applies to organizations who don't discriminate and summarily, the Sea Scouts were made to pay up.

Apparently, being discriminated against makes you feel pretty crappy (go figure) and this new-found karmic pang of human feeling pissed off the Sea Scouts when they discovered that they don't like being discriminated against for discriminating against others. And so they're suing Berkeley.

?

What the fuck? Congrats, Sea Scouts, on industriously figuring out how to go for both your "Frivolous Lawsuit" and "Hypocritical Asshole" badges all in one go.

happy birthday, ceymick

Yes, today is the big 30 birthday for everyone's favorite infrequent commenter, Ceymick - better known to Hoil fans across the globe as the one and only Mr. Bitch himself, Jamie Soundz.

So, in honor of Mr. Bitch's birthday, here's a list of 30 things that he is now older than:

1. Pretty much every home video game except for PONG
2. Punk as a recognized genre of Rock
3. The Space Shuttle program
4. The band The Talking Heads
5. The Concorde supersonic jet
6. The Sundance Film Festival
7. EMI Records
8. The Seattle Mariners
9. Jim Henson's Creature Shop
10. Both C-SPAN and ESPN
11. The collective careers of The Beatles, Sam Kinison, and Jaleel White added together
12. The country of Burkina Faso
13. 24 Hour Fitness
14. J. Crew
15. The Disney Channel
16. Legionnaire's Disease (only by a month!)
17. The 30th anniversaries of the deaths of both Mao Zedong and Elvis
18. Microsoft
19. The sitcom Three's Company
20. The 30th anniversary of the last use of the guillotine in France
21. Stealth aircraft
22. The comic strip Garfield
23. The discovery of Pluto's moon, Charon
24. In Vitro Fertilization
25. The Susan B. Anthony dollar
26. The Guardian Angels vigilante justice group
27. The Mir Space Station
28. Alicia Keys, Nick Carter, and Ashton Kutcher
29. Everything Star Wars
30. And lastly, me

Happy birthday, old man.

they do that hindu that they do so well

Yeah, this weekend we went to a Hindu/Jewish wedding, in that order. Friends of ours of different cultural backgrounds got married and wanted to have both a traditional Hindu ceremony and a traditional Jewish ceremony. So they did - one right after another (with a brief cocktail interlude between them) - and it's extremely interesting how many similarities there were between the two seemingly different cultures.

Hindu wedding:
- Starts with a special prayer to all of the gods in the pantheon
- The couple must circle each other 7 times
- There is a lot of blessing with food and fruit
- The couple performs actions together while holding each others hands
- The entire ceremony takes place under a traditional four-posted canopy of fabric

Jewish wedding:
- Starts with a special prayer to God
- The couple must circle each other 7 times
- There is a lot of blessing with wine and discussion of fruit
- The couple performs actions together while holding each others hands
- The entire ceremony takes place under a traditional four-posted canopy of fabric

I thought that was an extremely interesting number of coincidences. I mean, Christian weddings don't have that many similarities with those two sets of practices. And a drive-thru wedding for damn sure doesn't have any similarities with anything else.

Well, accept maybe another place that has a drive-thru wedding package.

TGIW

... in that today is the third day of my week. Nevermind.

I'm totally freakin' busy. You know who seems to have a little too much time on his hands, though? David Collins' friend Sam who has taken the time to create deleted audio scenes from the Star Wars films.

These things are pretty funny. Most are too long and need to be edited down about 30%. But when they're on, they're on.

My favorite revelation from these clips? The apparent difference between Jedi and Sith is that the Sith think balls are funny while the Jedi don't.

Who knew?

I'd recommend the last two listed on the page. Sam is performing all of the impressions, doing all of the sound design, and tackling all of the music edits himself. Well done, Sam. These things have had me saying "Fuck that guy!" for the last two days straight.

TGI(W)*

...in that since today is the middle of my three day week, it's functioning like Wednesday - even though it's Thursday. Whatever. I'm going for consistency here, people.

Today was (is) long. Longer than a Marfan wang. My spreadsheet is coming along nicely (yawn), but it's been a constant battle to fend off distractions today. I had to look at new builds of games, I had meetings in the morning, I had a brief mix session for Thrillville. All the while my spreadsheet sat unfinished, and it needs to be done today. Then this evening, I was in the role of tour guide and Audio Department representative for a potential contractor. "Here's our studio. Here's our live room and built-in Foley pit. Here's my spreadsheet that has me so busy that we're looking to hire contractors." I think he was impressed with the spreadsheet.

Good times.

Now it's 9 PM (9 PM already!!) and I'm still not done the spreadsheet, so I'm staying late to finish it. Blah. All the while my brother and sister are living it up in LA piercing things and blowing things up with Mentos. If I were a Napoleon Dynamite soundboard, this is the point where I would say "Luckyyy."

Either that or "I caught you a delicious bass."

TGI ... W?

What a nice long weekend ...

Manda and I tackled a whole bunch of stuff - things around the house we'd been putting off, looking at more wedding locations, seeing An Inconvenient Truth, etc. It was good.

Now that I'm back, I'm back to music.



Er ... or back to spreadsheets? This is the side of game music that people don't know about. For every piece of music that goes into a game, there's a huge ePaper trail that follows it to track its production status, its implementation status, its bug status, etc. So, today I'm deep into working out implementation notes. It's a tedious process - but good to do after a four day weekend.

And today is Todd Davies last day here at LEC. Todd has been helming the sound design on Star Wars Galaxies for the past 4 years. As of today, he's moving on to other opportunities and I just wanted to take this moment to wish him well.

Not that he really reads this ... but, you know. He's a good guy, a great sound designer, and we'll miss him around here.

$600.00

to replace my oil pan.

That seems like a lot to me. It certainly seems like a lot when I look at two main factors. 1.) I'm planning (and saving for) a wedding. 2.) I want to buy a new car.

I'm not sure what to do, but I need to make a decision on it soon.

Or hit the lottery. Or find a thumb in my chili.

update: my luck continues

::knock on wood::

So, I heard back from the service station where my car's languishing without any oil. Turns out, the oil pan isn't cracked. Turns out driving over the curb didn't do anything at all to it.

Turns out the reason all of the oil vomited out of the car is that whomever did an oil change for me last time screwed up. Apparently the threads on the oil plug are stripped. As a work-around, the last people to do an oil change on the car put a self-tightening bolt in there instead of actually fixing anything. The mechanic who looked at my car today was really ticked off at the oil change people, informing me of how stupid the job they did was and how ridiculously short-sighted it was to put something in that would eventually just come loose and leak oil.

So, he's writing up an estimate to replace the stripped parts and then he'll call me back.

But, at least it doesn't look like I thrashed my car too badly. Good ol' car ... still hanging in there.

that explains it

My car is in the shop and I spent all day sitting around at home waiting to hear if it's going to be fixed or not. Guess I have to wait until tomorrow.

While I was home, I suddenly became aware of just what accident-prone losers daytime TV thinks we all are. Every other commercial is either "Were you hurt getting out of bed? We can help!" or "Want a computer but have bad credit? We can help!" And if it's not those it's infomercials where people can't perform simple actions like opening cabinet doors or cooking eggs without ruining their whole day.

And there really just isn't anything as numbing as the shows that are on. Montel? Reruns of the Cosby show (the crappy ones at the end of its run)? More infomercials?

Christ ... there must be so many people who sit around all day, hurt from having poorly stacked tupperware fall on their heads, who are too bad off to own a computer and so their entire view of the world is Divorce Court, Oprah, and William Berg.

I hope I'm never on disability and lose my computer. I don't know what I'd do with myself.

my car threw up

This morning I went out to get into my car and head off to work only to discover that - over the course of the night - all of the oil had drained out of my car onto my parking space.

You see, yesterday I got to work early. That's where all of this started. I got to work early which meant that I was able to park in a different parking space than a usually do, one that is significantly closer to the elevators and - I thought - the equivalent of Rock Star parking. At the end of the day, I decided to pull forward out of my space and make a little U-Turn.

Bad idea.

The "rock star" space that I had parked in ended up being more like a Rock Star parking space in that it thrashed the crap out of my car, stole its lunch money, and left it for dead. See, I didn't notice when I parked there, but the space happens to be the only one down there with a cement curb in front of it. Why would they only put one of those things in there? Anyway, long story short, I drove over it, gave my car a serious beating, and then drove home.

And then this morning it had puked oil everywhere. So, good times. Amanda was very sweet and gave me a ride to work. Now I just have to figure out how I'm getting home.

totally didn't see this coming

I'm astonished that I didn't see this coming, but today at lunch my colleague David got a very special fortune cookie.

He had just been talking about the crappy fortune cookie he'd received this past weekend, something that said "Saturdays are a good day for errands." Whatever. Not that big of a deal, but he felt it was a lousy fortune and was hoping that he would get something better.

So, he opened up his fortune cookie here at work today and it read:

"ENJOYING MANY FRIENDS ON THE BUS IS BETTER THAN BEING LONELY IN YOUR CAR."

Now, that's a dumb fortune to begin with and completely not true. Everyone know that bus people are weird, freaky, and smell like pee. But, what's really amazing about all of this is what it said on the back of the fortune. The back read:

"Commute Wisely www.presidio.gov/commute"

It was SPAM! He got a SPAM fortune cookie! How did I not see the SPAM potential in fortune cookies before? How far away are we from cracking open a cookie and reading:

"shame of sex? we can change it Cialis.com is the answer"

It's a dark day for desserts.

this is it, bratz

And lastly, the Stone Cruz skin:



This was fun to do. Now I just need to finalize the rest of the layout and start coding and creating the actual content.

Feels good to finally be making this thing after years of delaying and delaying.

by popular demand

And by that I mean a single random request from my brother, here's what I'm thinking of for my self-promotional website.

It's going to be pretty simple. At the moment, I've just started to figure out the layout of the whole thing. There will be a couple of sections: News (where I'll give a few little updates), Music (where people can listen to examples of my stuff), Info (where people can read my bio and resume), Blog (which is just a link to here), Links (which will have links ... duh), and Mail (which just opens up an email to me).



The menu tabs will shoot outwards when you mouse over them, as evidenced by the Music tab in my example pic. Other than that, I'm designing multiple skins that the user can select for the site. The cartoon me with the skull t-shirt is the default and the one that will automatically load when you first get there.

The second skin is an iPod themed skin.



The third skin is a Republic Commando themed skin.



The last one, and one that I don't have here because I just started it, is a Stone Cruz/Vaz Hoil theme. It's not done yet, but I'll post it when it is.

Anyway, like I said, I've just started to figure out this whole thing. The only things on here that are really final are the cartoon images of me and some of the icons. But, like I said, I said I'd share so I am.

makes perfect sense to me

What's the best way to teach a Japanese audience how to speak English?

Hopefully you said "By re-enacting scenes from 90s movies with really bad actors and a half-assed attempt at costuming and sound design." 'cause if you did, you'd be right!

This is a beautiful thing. I particularly love the soundtrack.

because i wasn't busy enough yet

I've decided two things recently.

1. I can't type for shit on an ergonomic keyboard. Here's what it looks like if I don't use the delete key:

thrgo gollowing is what happe2ns to me whe4n I try7 to type om an ergoanomic keyboard. It isn'tw all that pretty though some of it might habe to so with a gerneral crappiness at typing.

And 2. I decided after looking at an inbox full of crappy websites that I was going to teach myself Flash and make my own promotional site. On and off for the last week, I've been messing around with things in Photoshop and Flash trying to come up with the concept for it all.

As of tonight, I have the concept. Now I just have to teach myself how to code a site in Flash and then figure out the hosting stuff.

If the schmucks who mailed me can author sites in Flash, I should be able to figure it out. Now I just have to find time between working on 4 games and planning a wedding to actually sit down and do it. Maybe I can outsource things like the dishes and laundry.

Oh, wait. That's called a maid. I'm dumb.

how bout them transparent dangling carrots?

Had a brief meeting today and as it turns out, I get to start writing my first all original orchestral game score in two years as of July. I can't wait. I get the feeling the first piece I'm writing is a bit more of an audition of sorts to see if the team involved likes my take on the project. I'm definitely hoping to land the gig; sounds like a very cool project. Seems strange to have to audition even as a staff guy, but such is the way of things.

I'm super excited, though. I haven't written anything substantial since Republic Commando. For the most part, it's been two years of Williams editing. Ep3, Battlefront 2, Lego II ... I need a nice long break from Johnny Williams.

a & arrgh

On "Thrillville" I'm doing a number of things including the role of Music Supervisor when it comes to licensed music. Essentially, this means that I've been getting lots of CDs and I've been going through them track by track and selecting the ones I want to use in-game. After I select them, the list goes to Legal where they find out how much it costs to license each track and inevitably some get kicked off of the list. I go back and find replacements, etc.

It's an interesting process. Apparently the way it works is that record labels send out either the album for the artist or a compilation disc of stuff broken down by genre and whether it's "up-tempo" or not. They then have documentation that comes with each disc in the form of a one-sheet artist description and a list of "focus tracks" - tracks that are essentially the singles.

It's been interesting to see, actually. Now, that's been the fun part. The not fun part? I've become the guy to which everyone now says "Hey, my [friend/mother/dog] has a band. You should totally check them out. They'd be PERFECT for the game!!!"

You know what? They never are. Aside from the fact that they're just not the right feel or genre of stuff that I'm looking for for the game, everything I've heard would need to be completely re-engineered to actually be able to use it. Additionally, how do we license the world-wide rights to a song from an unsigned band? Just bad news all around.

I've been getting plenty of practice though with my "Oh, yeah, sounds great. Not sure it's the right thing we're looking for." speech, which is always fun. And by "fun" I mean dream-shatteringly awkward.

it begins

I've started having wedding-related nightmares. I'd imagine these are the first of more than a few that I'll have due to stress over the next couple of months. The first one was a few nights ago. It involved me calling a place about renting their location only to be asked "What kind of car do you drive?" When I described my beat-up camero, they told me that it didn't sound like I had enough money to rent their place and that they didn't think they wanted to do business with me.

Last night was the second nightmare. Last night I dreamt that we actually found a place and they apparently didn't care at all about my car because they were going to just rent everything to us, no problem. Well, turns out there was a small problem. Apparently, the only money I had was a pocket full of horribly counterfeit $11 bills.

They looked exactly like this:



Who or what "Grover Boulevard" is, I have no idea. Needless to say, the fake moolah didn't cut it and we didn't get the place.

The sooner we find a place for real, the sooner I can move on to nightmares about caterers trying to kill me or cakes that mock my choice in tuxedos.

greatest dance moves ever

This weekend was kinda' stressful. The wedding stuff just doesn't seem to be getting much easier. We went out and looked at a number of places only to find that they were either 1.) in terrible neighborhoods with no parking, or 2.) wanted a bamillion dollars to rent the place. So, still no location yet. Although, Amanda did find some promising candidates for locations that we're looking into now. So, who knows. Fingers are crossed.

Stressful as the weekend may have been, there was a great moment of comic relief for me Sunday night. Manda and I went to the grocery store. As we were standing next to the frozen food aisle, I started to hear this little voice start singing. I turned to look and there was this little girl - probably about 2 or 3 years old - singing and dancing and shaking her hair all around in the middle of the aisle. She was pointing like she was doing choreography, clapping her hands together, and doing these spinning jumps that were clunky in only the way a 2 or 3 year old can be.

Now, I thought she kept singing "Mia" and decided that it was her name. When I showed this girl to Amanda, she informed me that the little girl was singing the Spanish word "Mira" over and over again, which means "Look."

So, what was she looking at? She found the ice cream aisle. This little 2 or 3 year old girl bumbles into the ice cream aisle and like any intrepid explorer, bursts out into choreographed dancing while singing "Look what I found!" over and over again. It was awesome.

I couldn't help picturing Columbus, Marco Polo, and any other famous explorer doing the exact same dance upon finding their great discoveries. How awesome would it have been to have seen Vikings like Erik the Red piling out of their ships and jumping around in the surf like showgirls singing "Look! Look what we found!"?

I'm such a slacker

I know I try to blog every day and really dropped the ball this week. I've just been so freakin' busy.

Monday I had a funk horn recording session for Thrillville. Tuesday I was working late for the Registrar of Voters (we had an election here in California). And then the rest of the week I've been cranking away on either cutscenes for Lego II or script stuff for Thrillville.

Script writing is fun. I'm not sure what, if anything, of mine will end up in the game; but so far the response has been pretty positive. Hopefully some of it will end up in there. I'd love to have a writing credit of some kind on a game.

Amanda and I are charging ahead trying to plan our wedding. And you know what?

WEDDINGS ARE FREAKING EXPENSIVE!!!

Honestly, anytime you contact any kind of wedding-related vendors, they basically just say the same thing:

"Thanks for getting in touch with us. We fully appreciate your stacks of cash interest in our event hall/photography services/tart bakery/whatever. Please feel free to come down to our business between the hours of 1:30 and 1:45 any day of the week and begin dropping off gobs of money. Or, if you'd prefer, you can just leave your ATM card with us and we'll go ahead and rape your bank account. Thanks and congrats on your special day!"

Non-wedding events in the same spaces are cheaper. Corporate events are cheaper. Weddings, though, are freakin' ridiculous. Amanda and I decided we were just going to call our wedding a "Tuxedo Meeting" and get it for a cheaper rate. Otherwise, these places are all going to blow our budget.

Anyway, we're trying to look at a number of places this weekend. Hopefully we can lock something down by the end of next week. That's our goal, anyway. We really want to move ahead with planning this thing. So many details left to figure out ... The word "elope" has already come up wishfully a couple of times.

slammed

I'm really busy at work and finding myself without any time to really blog about anything. Plus, it's all boring stuff, anyway. Recording sessions, cutting music for the Lego II cutscenes, etc.

Someone told me a joke the other day that I thought was funny.

"What's that movie about the two gay guys on the mountain?"
Everyone around starts to say "Brokeback Mountain."
"No, no. The other one ... [dramatic pause] Oh, that's right. 'Lord of the Rings.'"

Heh heh heh. "I can't quit you, Mr. Frodo." That might have made those long-ass movies a little more interesting.



I hate those movies. My bladder hates those movies. I don't get why everyone loves them so much.

two great tastes, together at last

To close out the week, I'm going to share one last website and then that ends Colonel Harlin's Cavalcade of Crappy Websites.

There are some animal/food combinations that just scream out "Make me into a themed restaurant!" Weiner dog + Hot dogs = No Brainer Logo. Chocolate + Crocodile = Chocodile. You get the point. Probably pretty far down on that list, though, is the mixture of Penquins and Waffles.

Clearly pioneering their own mix-n-match combos, the fine folks at Penguino have finally uncovered the long-hidden elusive link between Penguins and Belgians. And, as their splash page clearly demonstrates, the people of Penguino take both Penguins and Waffles equally as seriously. This isn't a Penguin place that serves waffles. Nor is this a Waffle place that likes Penguins. No, this is a Penguin Waffle place, fools, and you're going have to stomach both in equal doses at Penguino.

In fact, they seem so incredibly focused on giving you equal doses of Penguins and Waffles that there's startlingly little info on the site about their own bakery. What is immediately apparent on their main page is that this is "the Official Penguino website." That's right. Don't be tricked into thinking this is just a fan site, or some sort of knock-off impostor. This is THE official site for pictures of penguins and waffles - together.

And not just pictures, mind you. Nope, you can read all about both Penguins and Waffles. Learn all about International Waffle Day. Bet you didn't know this:

"In medieval French, the term for this pastry was "oublie" (from Latin "oblata"), sold by "oubloyeurs" in the streets of Paris and other major cities."

Somehow Penguino really feels you need to be familiar with the Latin roots of a Waffle to truly enjoy it.

Stranger still is the section on the Penguin page all about gay penguins. Yep. You read that correctly. The gay penguin section of Penguino's website.

Where else can you read about gay penguins and look at pictures of waffles? Well, other than that lame-ass Penguino fan site.

strike a pose

I thought I'd share another gem of a website someone sent me to check out. VanityDate was definitely more cohesive than this next one. If ever a website seemed to scream out "confusing illegal pyramid scam," it's 50and50.com.

50and50.com is the site that boldly asks the question: "Would change if you choose join 50and50!" At least, I think they're asking. There's no question mark so maybe they're trying to just tell me something about their illegal pyramid scheme. Now, I know what you'll say. "Hey, Jess - don't be ridiculous. The bottom of the site clearly states 'Note: This is not an illegal pyramid or a chain letter scheme, there are no tricks.'" And I'll agree; that broken English statement is usually pretty convincing. But ... I don't know.

Maybe it's the pictures of people that repeatedly say "Cash ... Cash ... Cash ..." or the block of text on the Sign Up page that simply reads "some writeup will come about 50and50.com... " that makes me question this thing's authenticity.

My favorite part of the entire site? It's unquestionably the completely out of left field link at the bottom of the main page that says "About Yoga."



Huh?! I thought I was here for cash, cash, cash? Why Yoga?

Better still is what you get if you click on the Yoga link. You get treated to a nice little treatise on Yoga, just like the main page promised. And, as an added bonus, you get a scrolling visual display at the bottom of the page of different Yoga positions. Most of them are named something inspiring like The Eagle Pose, The Cobra Pose, The Locust Pose. Without a doubt, though, my favorite pose is this one:



Is that pose honestly called the "Wind Relieving Pose?" Why does Yoga need a Fart Pose?

This site rocks.

tell him about the Twinkie

Something's up today. I don't know what it is. There's some crazy in the air or something. Or maybe it's a river of hate-filled slime flowing under the city of San Francisco. Whatever it is, I saw two different incidents of unwarranted rage on my way to work today.

First off, there's a street that I take to get to work where the lights are all timed. If you drive 35 mph, you get all green lights. Some dump in a sports car didn't quite understand this and decided that he'd jam on the gas pedal every time the light turned green. He spent plenty of time racing to the next red light only to sit there over and over and over again all down the road. Now, that's nothing new. People do this on this street all the time. What was new to me was the jerk in a Chevy Suburban who apparently hated the guy in the sports car.

At the last red light on the street, it was Sport Car in lane 3, me in lane 2, and Suburban in lane 1. As we're sitting there, Suburban rolls down his window and starts to scream "Hey! Hey! What's your problem!?" at the sports car to my other side. Then, in a fit of crazy, Suburban A-hole gets out of his car, walks in front of my car, and stands there right in front of me screaming at the sports car. The guy kinda' looked like a gorilla and I was very aware of being strapped into my car via a seatbelt at that moment. Eventually, Suburban A-hole simply marched back to his car, slammed his door and drove off. Not the most fun I've ever had on that street.

The other incident was right before I got to work. Another guy who looked like a gorilla (or maybe more like George "The Animal" Steele) was roughing up some woman on the street. They both looked like they were homeless and ... let's just say ... chemically altered. I don't know what was going on and I only saw them for a second; but still ...

What's with everyone today? I think I'd better do everyone a service and go check out the Vigo painting just to make sure it's not up to any more of its old tricks.

access denied, you fugly mutha-effa

As I mentioned earlier, I'm looking to maybe hire someone to do some web design work for me. As such, people have been sending me resume after resume and link upon link to try and get the gig. Typos and broken links aside, this also means that I've been checking out a whole mess of web sites that I've never seen before.

Largely, they're all boring. Lots of financial institution sites and technology companies with stupid names like Mobifusion and SoftMediaNet (lame). However, there have been a few gems hidden amongst the crap.

And so I thought I'd share my favorite so far. I present to you VanityDate.com. Now, before we dive in here, I just wanted to say that the site's design and coding is fine. That's not what flummoxed me. Instead, it's the sheer concept of this thing that amazes me.

Vanity Date is a site where pretty people, and only pretty people, can search and look for other pretty people. The site sums it up like this:

You
- be of legal copulation age (18)
- imposters will be hunted down
- be good looking or you will be rejected

Awesome. Apparently the pretty people are so worried about someone average or - perish the thought - ugly infecting their gene pool with impostors that they're mobilizing against them. Spelling doesn't seem to be much of an important quality, though, because "impostors" is misspelled on their front page and I doubt anyone who's a member even knows. Essentially, the site should really just be called VapidCoatHangers.com since everyone here is solely focused on looks and just seems to spend all day posing in different clothing.

The funniest thing of all about this site to me are the fields available on the Detailed Search Page. They seem to go from Normal Dating Site levels of shallow interest to pioneering new levels of Los Angeles-Centric Dating Site levels of shallow nuttiness. Age range? Normal. Shoe size? A little crazier. Type of Car? DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! New levels of crazy self-involvement.



Seriously, you can simply search for people who drive Audis. How retarded is that? If ever there was a solid criteria for the basis of a healthy and long lasting relationship, it's the "Type of Car" field on VanityDate.com. Or Shoe Size. That's pretty effing crazy, too.

I was trying to figure out who is more shallow and pathetic and - not surprisingly - it turns out it's guys by a fairly large margin. There are 547 pretty women looking for pretty men, while there are a staggering 756 pretty men looking for pretty women. Unfortunately, I don't have the numbers on gay men or gay women because the site's futuristic browser-based facial recognition software must have detected that I was looking at the site and now I get a network error every time I try to access it.

So, try and check it out if you can, for as long as you can. I guess if you get to see it longer than I did you know where you stand on the VanityDate.com hotness scale. Personally, I'm going to go mull over whether I should go buy an Audi or not in order to make my relationship stronger.

I don't think it'll take that long to figure it out.

"i um job"

Earlier today I put out a listing on Craigslist for a web design job I'm looking to hire someone for. In about 4 hours, I've received about 12 responses so far. These responses follow a typical format:

"I am a designer living in [who cares] and can create for you the greatest website known to man. Please check out some of my clients. I'd love to talk to you further."

Now, more or less, that's what they all say. Here's what I find absolutely staggering: for people doing their best to sell themselves as Web Design Professionals, why are there so many freaking typos in their mails?

And it's not just typos, peeps. There are plenty of these things that I've received that include incorrectly coded hypertext links. Or links that work, but don't actually go to sites that work anymore. Am I crazy to think that you check this stuff before trying to sell yourself by sending someone there?

Ridiculous. It's staggering how difficult some people make things for themselves in terms of freelance work by simply not running things through a spell-checker. Seems like professionalism, much like hand writing, is a dying art.

\m/ RAWK!!!! \m/

Very interesting day. We had a company meeting today and to kick off the whole show, David Collins and I - the two phenoms behind the original pop music for Thrillville - were asked by the president of LucasArts to get our rocks off and play one of our original tunes for everyone.

The winner? "Whiplash," the AC/DC-ish/Vaz Hoil-esque tune we've written. It's odd to hear the final version of it if anyone knows any of our Vaz Hoil material. It sounds like you're listening to a Stone Cruz solo album (which, by the way, was part of the original Hoil mythology. 1. First Album, 2. Second album = personnel problems, 3. Stone leaves and does a solo album). So, I guess this is my solo album.

Anyway, the show went well. And just to go that extra mile, I thought it'd be funny to do the show in full KISS makeup.



So I did. That's me in my office just now. I thought I'd snap a pick to show everyone how it looked.

Problem is, I don't want to try and wash it off because I'll get water all over myself and I don't have another shirt to change into. So, it's quite possible that I'm driving home like this tonight. To further complicate matters, Amanda just invited me to go out with her to a friend's house for Taco Night. If that's the case, I might not have a chance to go home and change before I have to be there. That would be KISS Harlin eating tacos in someone living room.

Good times. If only this makeup didn't itch so much ....

up next: diaper commercials

Alright, everyone. Here's the new fall wardrobe that you'll see everyone sporting around the country this year.

Why? Because we're back-sliding so ridiculously far into some hypocritical moralistic mania that it won't be long before we're all wearing buckle shoes and calling our neighbors "witches."

Want an example? Okeedokee.

Apparently, I must have missed the memo that went out that said "Hey! Coppertone Sun Screen!! First my kids were effed up by seeing Janet Jackson's boob!! Now they're squarely on a path to hell for having seen the Coppertone Girl's bare ass!!!"

Everyone knows this logo:



But, you know what? Apparently that little girl's decades old wardrobe malfunction is messing up the moral fiber of our country. Guess who the latest victim of censorship is?



That's right! It's little Coppertone herself. It's a small pic and might be hard to see. If you're having trouble, gone is the little girl's butt and it's been replaced with a playful tug on the leg of her swimsuit by her dog.

To me, this is Lame with a Capital "screw you, Coppertone." But, in the interest of simply cutting to the chase and not wasting all of our time - Coppertone, please let me be the first to suggest your next logo:

computers blow

Sometimes. As many years as I've been using them, and as much as I understand how they work and what they do, there's still an all too frequent element of what I can only call black magic that seems to exists within them.

Yesterday I got back to work after a week off for vacation. My computer had been shut down all during vacation. I started it up, worked all morning long, then went to lunch. No problems.

When I came back from lunch, I bounced out a few audio tracks for these Thrillville pop tunes and had just finished prepping the files in Peak when .~*WHAMMO!*~. Total hard drive meltdown. Ry was on the phone with me when it happened. Suddenly out of no where, my network connection died. When I tried to restart my computer, it decided to lock up on the Loading screen and run the fan until it was as loud as a freakin' hair dryer. After that, no amount of finesse with the Power button or kind words would result in anything other than the hair dryer noise.

For the next 4 hours, IT had to come into my office and poke around with crap until eventually my hard drive was simply reformatted at the end of the day. So, now I have to head into work and reinstall Logic, Sibelius, and Peak in order to get back to a functional point for a big deadline tomorrow.

Totally sucks. There goes my morning. Like I said, it's black magic. Or gremlins. I don't know which. But both suck.

she said "yes"

Hey. I'm back from Hawaii. Much thanks to Ry for celebrating the one year anniversary of this blog with a treatise on environmental travel issues. : )

Hawaii went well. Very well, in fact. For those who don't know, my main goal with our Hawaii trip was to propose to Amanda, and (as evidenced by the title of this blog post) we're now engaged. : )

It feels great. We went through this weird period of about 24 hours where our entire relationship felt different in the aftermath. It was as if we'd just stepped off of some huge jump together and were freefalling into unfamiliar territory - something we don't usually feel having been dating for 6+ years. But, all of that has settled down and we're now simply trying to acclimate to the new use of the word "fiance."

I'll fill in the details on how and where it happened relatively soon. I also have some of pictures from Hawaii I thought I'd share (don't worry; we're not talking hours worth of vacation slides).

Anyway, I'll update it all soon. Just wanted to share the good news about the engagement and thank Ry for tackling Oogu while I was gone.

At least the plane food will be marvelous, right?

God damn it's getting expensive to fly!!!! Every year Lisa and I go to Sweden. In 1999 it cost us, on average, around 400 bucks per transatlantic ticket. By 2003 it was up to about 650. We just booked our trip for 1000 per ticket and that was after VERY MUCH price hunting.

The plus side is that we're flying with Iceland air so I'll get to touch down in Rekjavik. Never been there and I like seeing a new city. But for a thousand bucks I could think of many other cities I'd like to see first. (italy comes to mind)

I'm still shocked how cheap it was, when I lived in England 6 years ago, to fly back to the states. Sure I was flying on "student fares." But having flown 25+ flights that cost between 250-350 dollars, my brain acclimated to the idea that a transatlantic flight was 300 bucks. Not so anymore. And not even for student tickets. Today the difference I got from the online sites like Orbitz vs. STA Travel (the student travel company) was 5 bucks. 975 for non-students and 970 for students. Oh, but that doesn't count the 22 dollar student card you'd need to purchase in order to save 5 bucks.

Can we stop using all non-essential gas so I can fly to sweden cheaply? Or can we ramp up development of the air compressor plane - much like the car I mentioned in a previous post?

Get your paws off me you dirty ape!

Recent news articles have presented disturbing realities which either settle the debate about creationism vs. evolution or sugggests that the alleged creator is losing favor with humans.

First there was the news of wild gorillas starting to use tools.

Then there was the revelation that early man was "slummin' it" monkey chicks.

And now today we have the revelation that monkey's have begun using sentences to communicate!

It doesn't take a futurist to see where this is going. Monkey's are closing in on us and are on pace to out-evolve us!!!

A Pleasant Apocalypse...

The AP has an article up today on the wires telling us that April was the warmest such month in US history. But the opening of the article kills me:

Last month was the warmest April on record for the United States, offering many Americans a pleasant spring month.

Oh yes, a pleasant spring month. How "pleasant" this warming trend is!!

Of course the article goes on to mention those who didn't have such a pleasant month, stating "Drought persisted across large portions of the southern and southwestern United States..." and "...there was a series of tornado outbreaks during the first half of the month..."

You know what causes droughts? Warmest Aprils. You know what causes tornadoes? Warmest Aprils!

In fact, saying that there was a series of "tornado outbreaks" wouldn't accurately convey what happened so far this year. Unlike the "summer of the shark" in 2001 when the media jumped on a the recent surge in shark attacks - only to later admit that shark attacks were lower that year than previous years, the media has largely ignored the 691 tornadoes so far this year (as of May 13th)!!!! 318 of those were reported in our pleasant April.

Now is not the time to order your new set of Guiness record books because the records are being broken all the time. The record for tornadoes was set in 1998, then broken in 2003, then 2004, then 2005, and 2006 is on pace to outshine them all.

And what contributes to a tornadoes development and strength? Same thing that make a hurricane... warm water in the Gulf of Mexico! And what makes warm water in the Gulf of Mexico? Warm Aprils... and warm Mays... and warm Junes...

So that AP writer should go see "An Inconvenient Truth" when it opens later this month and then reconsider the rose-colored glasses he wears when he writes his articles on record-breaking warming trends.

There's no common thread here...

Oogu has no common thread. No theme. No connective tissue to hold it together. I guess the common thread is "stuff that's going on in jesse's life or just some stuff he's thinking about."

So the idea of a guest blogger becomes all the more weird because now it's just "stuff ry's thinking about or doing until jesse's back here thinking and doing."

Why do I mention this? Because in getting ready to blog today I realized that I steer clear of more topics than I write about. Most are of a political nature and would've been more suited to my old blog, Grassrootsnation.com. It wouldn't be right to guest blog on a "random thoughts" blog and hijack to become a "exposing the lies of the power elites" blog... for a week only...

So that leaves the "other stuff I've been thinking about" topics. Which, are all becoming thematic as well. For example, today's post was going to be about the solar panel system I'm designing to put on my balcony. That made me realize that my posts so far have been about the air-compressor car, the oxygen in a can, and then the solar panels. Am I so one-dimensional? Surely I have interests other than environmental, right?

The answer is yes, but I tend to get excited about stuff and projects in groups. So when I'm reading about the air car I start thinking about environmental impact reductions I could do at home. Before long, I'm learning about utility intertie and sine-wave inverters.

So the point is, I'm excited to put solar panels on my balcony to reduce my on-grid electricity useage and apparently by tomorrow I'll be explaining how to save the rain forest. Hopefully I get excited about another topic before the week is up!

Now if they'd just offer free Gas, Electric, and Cable...

Skype, the very neat VOIP client, has just announced that - at least until the end of the year, they're offering free calling to any telephone number in the US and Canada. That means that I have almost no use for my regular phone. I've been on the verge of getting a skype cordless phone anyway to try it out... this has likely pushed me over the tipping point to doing it. Hooray, Skype!

See you later $130 phone bill. Hello... $0 dollar phone bill. :)

Why didn't anyone tell me my butt was this big?!?

7-11 in Japan will now be selling cans of fresh Oxygen for people to breath in order to feel refreshed.

I know most alarmists talk about how government intrusions harken back to the very appropriate "1984"... but it may scare me even more to know that 7-11 is harkening back to "Space Balls!"

The missing link between cars and Jetson-mobiles

You know on the Jetson cartoons how the flying cars make that little put-put sound from their exhaust pipe? Well I think we've seen the car that will provide that evolutionary step between car and put-put sky-car.



This car runs on compressed air!!! Why does that rule? For one, there's no emissions. The only emissions that occur are during the production of the electricity that charges the compressor tank. So if you have coal powered plants pumpin the electric into your house... it's more than if you get natural gas electricity. But if you've got solar or wind, you now have a 100% zero emission car that doesn't even use lead and nickel-metal nastiness like the batteries in electric cars.

Want more reason it rules? It's got fewer moving parts which means it's easier to maintain and breaks more seldom. AND it means it's cheaper. The first production models in Europe are started at 6800 Euros (8,000 bucks).

Want more reasons why it rules?

It charges the air compressor tank for 6 hours by plugging in, like an electric car... BUT if you're on a road trip or out driving and run out of compressed air, you can use the quarter operated air compressor hose at any gas station to fill up your tank in just 3 minutes. That's right! For less than a buck, you can be topped up and running again.

Once they make them street legal in the US, I'm totally ready to buy one.

Ceymick, I'm looking your direction...

Okay, so Jesse has left me in charge of his blog for the next week. I have to say that I'm as confused as... well I probably am right now. I was going to say "you probably are" but a look back over the comments on this blog reveals that oogu could be renamed "jesse talks with is brother and girlfriend, occasionally punctuated by visits from Ceymic and "Russ." Since Amanda is with Jesse in Hawaii, I'm hoping Ceymic and Russ will step up to the plate. However, it's very possible that this week will be void of any comments.

What's my goal, then? It's to kick it up a notch!!



I'll do my best to find fun/interesting things to talk about! And hopefully, we'll even increase his readership over the next week. It's sorta like the "While You Were Out" home makeover show... only we won't be remodelling, there's no surprise since he asked me to do this, and it has nothing to do with that show whatsoever.

Good times.

That's all for today. I'm off to complete the awesome task of shopping for a new blanket for my bed. I'm sure the experience will make days worth of blog fodder... or maybe not. ;)

aloha!

So, this is it for me for the next week. Manda and I are heading off to the Big Island of Hawai'i for a much deserved vacation. With E3 behind me, I'm looking forward to a really nice and relaxing vacation.

We've got someone looking after our apartment and our mail. We've got someone checking in on our cat. And for the next week, my brother EmoRiot (or Ryan as he's known to the rest of the universe) will be taking over the reigns of The Mighty Oogu for me.

Be gentle with him. He bruises.

Wiidiculous

I kicked around a few different titles for this post (Wiitarded, Wiigretable, etc). They basically are all just a wiiflection of my thoughts about the new Nintendo Wii. Originally titled the considerably cooler "Nintendo Revolution," the Wii is the latest in a long line of decisions by Nintendo that I just simply don't understand.

Before we chat, watch Nintendo's promotional introductory video into the World of Wii:



Okay. Now, notice anything dumb about that thing? Absolutely every game on there has the player Vogueing this pose:



What the eff, Nintendo?

I know that everyone has had that moment in life when you're sitting in front of your TV, you point the remote at it, and nothing happens. What do you do? You extend your arm out in front of you and get annoyed. No one likes to do that for more than a few seconds at most. Somehow, someone at Nintendo has decided that this is a good posture with which to tackle a 100+ hour RPG. In fact, I think I know who that someone is. I'm pretty sure it's the same sadistic fuck who designed the Nintendo Powerglove. I see wiimarkable similarities.

Well, news flash, Nintendo: your Power Glove didn't change the way we play games, and I don't think the Wii will either. I used to be a really big Nintendo fan. The Wii, however, marks my official "not on-board" status with them.



I'm just so not on-board anymore.

finally!

That's right, fools. It's May 10th and I can finally talk about what I've been working on lo these many past months. I made mention of the fact that I've had my hands tied with 5 different projects simultaneously. So, without further ado, here's the run-down on what's been keeping me so run-down lately:

1. Indiana Jones

There is a really great write up about our new Indy title over at IGN.com. Seriously, this thing is looking great. Especially when you consider that it's still so far out from being released. I'm really excited. Read about it and I think you'll see why.

2. Star Wars

I still can't really say anything about this except that in a recent article with the New York Times, our president - Jim Ward - mentioned that we're working on a new SW game. That has been keeping me busy, too, though admittedly less than Indy.

3. LEGO Star Wars II, the Original Trilogy

Pretty straight forward involvement for me. I've been editing cutscenes and some music for use in-game.

4. Thrillville

Ah, Thrillville. This is where most of my time has been spent recently. All that time I spent in the recording studio recently? It's been writing original music for Thrillville. And we're not talking underscore. We're talking pop music, rock music, hip-hop, etc. Take a look at the trailer for Thrillville and you'll even hear me singing part of "Whiplash," a new tune we just wrote for the game.

5. Traxion

Cool stuff. A PSP game in which the user-defined soundtrack directly changes all aspects of the game. Because of the obvious music-centric nature of the game, I've been doing some consulting, some music edits for proof-of-concept videos, and most interestingly - working with some of my Audio department compadres to actually design some games for it.

If you want to check out trailers for everything listed here (except for Traxion), head on over to lucasarts.com where our main page has been replaced with an E3-oriented splash page.

God-damn, it's nice to finally be able to mention these things. : )

EDIT:

Late addition to the newsfest. We've actually started to talk more about Star Wars. Here's a new write up on IGN.

it's official: i have no taste

There's no question anymore. Earlier, I was yacking about how I had stubbornly insisted that I'd watch the "Dukes of Hazzard" movie before I'd see "March of the Penguins." Well, as of this weekend, I finally sat down and watched both.

And you know what? This is how I ended up rating them both on Netflix:



That's right, bitches. 4 stars for both. They're the same in my book and I admit that probably removes me from anyone's movie recommendation list.

But here's the deal ... "Penguins" is good. Don't get me wrong. But to me, it ended really abruptly. The young penguins jump into the water and that's the end. Am I twisted because I wanted to see some of them have to swim for their lives from the jaws of a waiting seal? Probably. But, I knew that it's something that happens. To me, the story of survival for these things just wasn't quite done yet. Some of them don't make it past that first jump. But, that wasn't in the film and it strangely left me feeling like the end of the movie was a bit rushed and a bit glorified. So, because that's how it ended up making me feel, it gets 4 stars instead of the full 5.

And Dukes of Hazzard ... Well, to be honest, it's not that bad. In fact, it's actually one of the most faithful TV-to-movie translations I think I've ever seen. Charlie's Angels and Starsky & Hutch were radically different. The Dukes, however, was pretty dead on. Insane car chases, exploding arrow-shooting, moonshine running, The General Lee, and freeze frame moments where goofy narration kicks in - all of it is actually done really faithfully to the original show.

And I'll admit it, I liked the show a lot when I was a kid. So, to me, it was like watching a pretty decent tribute to a show I remember fondly. Admittedly, the acting in the original show is much better (Jessica Simpson was really god awful). But I expected total crap and was pleasantly surprised. Giving it 3 stars seemed to say "I was neutral on this." And in the end, I wasn't. So, I gave it 4 stars. Believe me, I've seen much worse.

Anyway, feel free to never ask me for a movie recommendation. My feelings won't be hurt.

totally flattered

Like I said, it was an eventful weekend. Besides camping with vampires, one of the other things that happened was that I got an email from Bart Klepka. Bart is an Australian electronic musician, a gamer, and apparently also a fan of Republic Commando.

Whoever said "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" clearly never had his music remixed. Bart emailed me this weekend to let me know that he had completed a remix of some of my original music from Republic Commando into a new psytrance track called "Vode An (Son Kote Mix)."

First off, it sounds awesome. Bart did a great job giving the Clones a more modern edge than I was ever able to do in the game. I really enjoyed how he took some of the individual elements off of the RC PC game disc and reinterpreted them here for this track. Second of all, how totally flattering is it to have someone say "Hey, you're stuff inspired me to make something new." That's awesome. So frequently composers write music, toss it out in the arena of general consumption, and then never hear anything back. It's really nice to get such nice feedback like this. So, thank you, Bart. It's much appreciated.

Anyway, if you're interested in hearing some great Star Wars psytrance, head on over to Bart's video game remixes page and check out the "Vode An (Son Kote Mix)."

into the woods (and no, it's not more sondheim)

Eventful weekend. The biggest event was our big camping trip to Big Basin Saturday morning. Manda and I joined a handful of people from her work on a night out under the redwoods. For Amanda and I, it was a return to something we did within the first few months of having known each other. Early on in our relationship, we went camping in Big Basin for a week and had a really wonderful time. This time, it was only for one night and ... well, it wasn't quite as wonderful as our last visit.

You see, in the mountains, it's really freakin' cold. No, really. It's true. I know; I was shocked too. Actually, I feel pretty stupid for not having realized just how cold it would be. "We didn't sleep well and I'm tired" is pretty much how the whole story ends. It's not too fascinating of a story, to be honest:

Some friends camped in the woods. It was cold. There were vampires. We came home.

THE END

And yes, I just said that there were vampires. Apparently, our country is in more dire need of Vampire Hunters than even teachers these days. You see, when you pull up to the main Ranger Station of Big Basin, there is a public bulletin board where people can post messages for others joining them letting them know where they are. So, it's full of things like "MARNY & MIKE - WE'RE IN HUCKLEBERRY SPOT #101", etc. However, the very first one when we arrived read:

VAMPIRES

WE'RE AT 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70

So, here's what we learned camping this weekend: apparently Vampires these days feel completely comfortable advertising where they're located and Vampires don't seem to be able to use a hyphen to say "61-70" when enumerating things.

the end of craziness

Next week is E3. That means that everything for E3 is almost done. As always, I'm currently just fielding 11th hour requests.

As of tonight, I will finish the last of the work needed from me. I can't wait to have this stuff out of my (admittedly very short) hair. I think LucasArts is going to have a great showing this year and people are going to be in for some very cool stuff from us.

And, of course, as of next week, I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been doing for the last few months. : )

Just need to finish stuff up now.

focus grouping

Anxious for feedback as they are, Techno Squirrels, my new favorite electronic artists, are currently uploading their latest track to an iDisk for me to check out and give feedback on.

As they were hanging up the phone from their call for feedback, I heard Lisa tell Ry "Make sure you tell him that - no matter what - he says something nice about it first."

So, in light of that, I can assure you that the new track is like rainbow kittens and unquestionably smells like summer love. I recommend it highly.

EDIT:

Actually, having now heard the track, I can say with all sincerity that it is like rainbow kittens and summer love. It's a beautiful new track and I'm dying to hear the final mix. Ry and Lisa are really incredibly gifted electronic musicians and if you haven't heard any of their stuff, go check it out right now. You won't be disappointed. So, nice work, guys.

I'm excited and annoyed by the fact that you've teased me with the mention of two other new tracks that aren't ready to be heard yet. Can't wait to have the entire album.

fun diversion

I found an online South Park character generator.

It's amusing. Feel free to post links in the comments to your own characters if you want.

tell that to Montana

Yesterday was the Day Without Immigrants day of protests across the country or, as the retahded anchor man on the news labeled it last night, the Day Without Emigrants(idiot). Word was that protests all around the country were going to be happening, so I figured that I'd see some people lined up here or there, maybe a march or two. Maybe a sign or a flyer or something?

I didn't. According to the news, it's because everyone was massing in the center of the City - which I'm nowhere near. Still, that said, I did see something related to the day of protests. Problem is, it was someone protesting the protesters.

It was a plane trailing a long banner that read:

AMERICA
IS FULL.COM WAKE UP AMERICA CLOSE THE BORDERS

That's right. Apparently the disgusting truth of it all is that the big success of the day yesterday was bigotry through airpower. I was bummed. It's really a shame to see that so many people were working so hard to get out what they saw as an important message and then one jerk with some money to blow turned the skies above San Francisco into his own personal hate speech forum.

And they had the jerk behind americaisfull.com on the news last night and apparently he's from New York. You know what? Maybe New York is full, but I can think of plenty of places that have tons of available land.

AND and, this is all just a bullshit issue anyway. I mean, seriously, why doesn't everyone see this as the big smoke screen issue that it is? Nothing changed with the immigration policies in the US over the last few years to warrant this. Sure, new legislation was proposed, but nothing happened yet. Nothing suddenly was any better or any worse for anyone than it was a year ago. The only thing that changed was a giant quagmire in Iraq that got worse and worse until someone decided that we should stop paying attention to the giant suckhole nation building failure we created and bitch instead about people who pick our fruit for less money than morally makes any sense.

I guess that's just my own sense of things, though. Still, it sucked to see that plane flying around yesterday. It really makes me admire the fact that John Lennon used to just put up billboards with nice messages on them for a change.

I wonder how much a "SHUT UP, YOU BIGOTED JERK" sign would be?

i can cross this off of my life's to-do list

I had quite an adventure this weekend. Manda and I accompanied her mom up to the outskirts of Yosemite where her mom has a small cabin/house/mountain retreat that she's been fixing up for a while.

After the long day Friday, I was looking forward to a lot of sleep and some R & R in the great wide north. Turns out, I got lots of sleep and shoveled gravel. Not that I'm complaining. I really had a nice time. A little hard labor is good for a person. Anyway, that wasn't the adventure, though.

Saturday night, we were going out to celebrate the 71st birthday of Manda's mom's neighbor with a big group of people. Between dinner and dessert, we stopped back at Manda's mom's. That's when I decided to excuse myself upstairs and use the Little Composer's room.

Well, as soon as I closed the door to the bathroom, I noticed some shadows flying around on the far wall. I thought "Oh, a moth must be flying around the lightbulb." and looked quickly at the bulb to see what was going on.

No moth. So, confused, I then looked at the shadows. No shadows. Instead, it was a bat. Now, never having been closed in a small room with a flying rodent before, I'm not ashamed to say that it gave me a pretty serious case of the willies. With a polite "how do you do?" I excused myself from the bathroom and let everyone else know what was going on.

Needless to say, no one was too thrilled. I don't really remember the next sequence of events, but somehow I ended up back in the enclosed bathroom armed with a large dust wand and the screen to the bathroom window as I tried to corral the thing outside.

Actual photo:



We went back and forth all over the place for a while. He hung from the ceiling, the walls, the floor (how do you hang from the floor? he did it), my sweater ... Eventually he ended up hanging from my window screen shield. With him on it, I could finally just reposition the thing back in the window and he flew away.

It was fun. I recommend wrestling with a bat to all my friends.