Life
It happens.
Holy crap, it’s hailing.
Jan 26th
Took this image (clumsily) of a heavy amount of hail we got on the ground here in California. Never have I ever seen it hit the ground this hard. It sounded like the roof was about to just cave in after only a couple of minutes. It’s finally died down, but i got to slide around on my driveway for the first time.
It was fun!
The Used iPod
Jan 19th
I’ve been the only person in my household with any sort of MP3 player, my classic ipod mini still serving me well on my drives out and about. With my mother receiving a gift of an unopened iPod video, the only person left in my household was my sister, who had resorted upon mix CDs of various genres strewn about my mother’s car, and the terrestrial radio stations she deftly navigated for her favorite songs.
After Christmas, my sister looked into getting her own iPod, using the gift cards for Ebay as her means to purchase a used one at a reasonable price. She finally settled upon the fatty iPod mini, to which she received with much glee, having found it at a great deal compared to most. She wanted me to take a look at it, so she waited patiently as i hooked it up to the mac in my room.
She waited as i made the discovery of music already loaded upon the pink iPod- various punk bands and popular music that made her squeal in glee, things I would never have on my own music collection, Britney Spears and the like. It was only about 2 gigs worth of music out of the total 8 gigs available, so it was an added bonus to the cost of the iPod. I went back to the iPod status menu, looking at the bar at the bottom that showed the size of the various things available on the iPod. 2 gigs of music and… video? Thinking it was more free stuff, i quickly moved to the video tab, only to find porn.
Porn on a used iPod, a title over 50 characters in length describing some act of sexual nature in great detail that I know would probably be illegal in Utah. I stopped, staring at my computer with a dropped jaw and incredulous smile as i called my sister over. “Teresa, you gotta see this!” I said with a laugh as i pulled open the title bar more, describing more raunchy things done with a latina (and a goat, but thinking back on it now, I think that may have been a joke). She looked in horror as iTunes generated an album cover, a random frame from the pornographic movie with the right asscheek of said Latina. “DELETE IT!” she yelled out, covering her eyes as I deleted the video.
I wiped the iPod 3 times, to be safe.
Be sure to check those things you buy on Ebay, mmmkay?
schoools out, for the wiintterrrrr
Dec 21st
Thank god, school’s done. Well, until February, that is. I’m currently relaxing at a freind’s house, letting him and his brother sate their addiction to various shooters and fighting games on my PS3, which I had left at their house in order for me to concentrate on my studies and finals . I swear, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is has been played more often on my PS3 than any other game thanks to those two. It’s a game that’s aged (for the year or two since i’s been out) quite well. Their current addiction is to go through each and every one of the levels on Terrorist Hunt, trying to beat them on the hardest difficulty setting. Their conversations and arguements while playing games together have been utterly amusing to me, down to brotherly bickering (mocking falsettos being one of their favorite methods over the use of a certain weapon or tactic to use. I might record their arguments and have it overlaid recordings of their gameplay, once I get the necessary equipment.
There are no plans for classes for winter inter-session for me- i personally don’t like it, but i haven’;t been able to do any major work on my own projects during the semester, but i hope to get this time to get the projects done. I’m writing up proposals and such for the projects, as they’re going to require quite a bit of manpower. I hate talking like this in a vague sense, but I’m waiting until deals are finished and some major work is done and out of the way before i start talking about things.
Some of the projects i’ve been working on have had me searching for the proper CMS engines to build upon. While I don’t want to build an outright blog and have a chronological order to all the data, I’d rather have a hybrid of sorts- to hold the information I wish in a spacial order, but have a front page blog that can keep people updated on the overall information on the site. Well, only heavy testing will help me turn out results of any kind, really.
Oh yeah, I turned 21. Go me.
photobloggin’ it.
Nov 29th
So I’m keeping sort of a photoblog in conjunction with my regular blog. I’m using Posterous for it, which is a pretty bitchin’ blogging site designed to be posted through email. Ch-ch-check it out.
Has anyone seen my tripod?
the new camera rocks
Oct 17th
Artist’s Block
Aug 31st
Writer’s block is common for many artists- i know of plenty of webcomic artists that struggled to get work done only to feel that their art or their current output is less than satisfactory. To simply call it writer’s block is rather unfair- I rather like to refer to it as artist’s block. Any artist can get it, whenether it may be something so simple as not being able to draw a simple sketch or a musician unable to get the concepts in their head played back upon their musical instrument of choice. As of late, I find that my artist block affects me in cycles.
I basically dabble in multiple fields, including writing, filmmaking, minor photography, and website design. When one of the fields feels stifling to me, the other flourishes. As of late, I can’t seem to get any work in my website design field done AT All, but I feel much more inspired in the case of writing- I’m getting scripts done with much more fluidity than before. I’ve gone back and looked at older scripts that I had done on old Word macro templates and pulling out the funny parts that I had written back in middle school/beginning of high school and seeing what I can do with all of it. There’s some small funny bits i found, but most of it was simply sophomoric humor that would barely fit in say, the Disaster or Date Movies. (I wonder if I could ever combine them all and sell it as a bad parody movie. Somehow, those always make money.)
I had been using the popular Final Draft program for my mac for quite a while, and I had found it to be rather buggy and well… antiqudated. C’mon, a decent program on the mac has to at least use the mac’s own native spellcheck program, right? Nope! Final Draft uses it’s own spellcheck program, and that has proved to be inadiquate for my needs (the program doesn’t even bring up its own spellcheck, persistently frustrating me), . I made the recent move to Celtx, an open source pre-production suite, and that has made the difference between night and day. While it doesn’t have the technical complexicty that Final Draft holds, the program does do a good job of tying in the script to other parts of the pre-production process. It’s rather simple to tie a character sheet together with whatever props I may need to use, what parts of the script is being shot on a certain day, and other aspects of the post production. Best thing, it’s fucking free (fucking just adds the fact that a program of this level should have some sort of price attatched to it, and being free just sweetens the deal for me). I can’t complain with that now, can i? There is a download serivce available to make the program availalbe to multiple people, but if it had some sort of syncing system in place (with wikipedia-esque editing service) i would be golden.
But anyways, back to the original topic. I feel that some of the parts of my artistic enviroment feels restrained at times, while in other times, other parts of my artsy fartsy brain seems to flourish with great gusto. My techy part and my writer parts seems to have been much more proactive, while trying to do any sort of graphic design work or anything along those lines (website design) seems to have gone dead. I’ve tried FORCING myself to get work in those fields done, but they end up looking subpar and crappy. Thankfully, I need more scripts done, so i’m not feeling that far behind, I’m just afraid i’m going to have to play catchup to hit my own personal deadlines.
Well, back to work. Maybe.
shit i haven’t written anything in here in a while
Aug 22nd
I will soon. I’m in the midst of coding, writing, and preproduction.
EARTHQUAKE
Jul 31st
The earthquake that hit only yesterday was a strange reminder of what is to come in the southern california area- my geography teacher spent every other class speaking on the “Big One” that is to come. His voice kept nagging me constantly after the earthquake, as did his jokes nobody laughed at.
The earthquake struck as i was playing Army of One on the PS3 (a pretty fun game, not without its flaws). I had just… uh had some flatulence only seconds before, so the start of the earthquake felt as if it was another gaseous outtake. But as soon as it kept going, and parts of the house started to shake, I jumped up, running out of my room (in my bathrobe, no less) to meet my sister, who was rather scared of the earthquake, running over and diving under the table and ordering me under with her. She stayed there after the earthquake ended, prompting me to attempt to coax her out from under the table (her reasoning- “THERE MIGHT BE AFTERSHOCKS!”). My sibling later became even more distressed as the phone lines were jammed, her distressed cries wore on for hours until my mother was able to calm her down over the phone.
Our family has already prepared something of an earthquake kit, but i think in the coming months, we’re going to be working on it a bit more. A rather popular comment going around the southern california was that this was one of the bigger earthquakes in quite some time, so the younger generation that hadn’t been able to go through larger earthquakes got a taste of what is to come. The big one is coming, yes, but it would be a good idea to be prepared for when that time comes.
Personally, I’d take earthquakes over tornadoes. I was freaked out of earthquakes ever since Wizard of Oz, and those terrible homemade footage of the tornadoes has been a mainstay of FOX TV specials has only affirmed my fear of the natural disaster.
Man, all this talk of natural disasters gives me the nagging urge to play SimCity 2000, build a city, and destroy it. With UFOs.
My E3/Joystiq Experience
Jul 22nd
The past week of mine has been rather… adventurous, to say in the least. I probably had some of the strangest things happen to me the past week than the last three months combined. No, Tuesday and Thursday has been some of the greatest fun I’ve had around LA, and just recently have I been able to actually… recuperate my sleeping habits thanks to it.
With the coming of E3 to my home city of LA, there were multiple meetups for Los Angelinos to enjoy- even though E3 was press only, there were many events open for the general gaming public to enjoy. Capcom had a party to allow the public to play Street Fighter 4, for example. I wasn’t very open to most of them- I doubted I would be able to go to Kotaku’s party, for it was held at a bar (I’m only 20). I was simply looking through them all when one caught my eye- the Playstation.Blog meetup, appealing to me as I was a fan of the blog.
The Playstation Blog meetup was on tuesday, held at the King Taco a couple of blocks away from the main LA Convention center, and found half of the whole place taken up by fans of the Playstation community. They were easy to spot, as most of them had PSPs on them and were… well, nerds. Free food was offered there, so much of it that when regular people off the street noticed all the nerds were getting free food, they would pretend they were with us (the King Taco people caught on quickly and began asking people what the party was for).
Here’s a picture of everyone who came, exempt maybe four or five people that left early:
(finding me in this picture isn’t hard AT ALL)
Free shirts celebrating the Playstation blog’s 1st year of existence were given out, and I was able to meet Jeff Rubenstein, the guy in charge of the official playstation blog. He had a kickin belt buckle that had the Triangle, Square, Circle and X of the playstation controller on it. He held a PSP tournament for a limited edition PS3 with Metal Gear Solid 4- unfortunately, I had no PSP, so I couldn’t play in it. I simply just talked to people and watched the tournament, and that was fun enough for me. I find that I am nervous when meeting people, but when finally getting the courage to do so pushes me to say the first words, the nervousness melts away, and it was fun talking to other video gamers that were as knowledgeable as I was in the industry.
Talking to people there, I met with two of the writers for one of the sub-blogs for the Joystiq community, PS3 Fanboy, Andrew Yoon and Jem Alexander, as they walked in late thanks to a previous appointment. They were engaging to talk to as the PSP tournament wore on, and as the party wrapped up, both had a tired look on their faces, a look i recognized after walking around a convention all day. I offered them and some other bloggers rides, which was met with many thanks. After giving them a ride, they mentioned I should go to the Joystiq meetup party, and I would get some good schwag from the party for my kind ride. I hadn’t thought about going, but the idea of free stuff… well really, would you have passed up the free schwag?
The Joystiq Party was held at Mahalo.com headquarters in Santa Monica- and that was FUN. Rock Band 2 was there, as well as multiple people from the Playstation blog meetup that recognized me there. Meeting the joystiq crew was well… fun. Each and every one of them were incredibly fun to talk to and very kind. I’m used to the very uptight and anti-social webcomics crowd, so to talk to these people about video game topics was engaging. I was supposed to play a game of Rock Band 2 with some of the people from the Playstation Blog meetup (Jeff Rubenstein included) to perform System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” only to be replaced at the last minute by someone else. They failed their performance, and I would like to believe it was due to the lack of… well my awesome self.
Once the party ended, I ran into Christopher Grant, one of the head bloggers and the host of the Joystiq podcast. I offered to help clean up the place and to offer a ride to some of the bloggers, which was once again met with incredible enthusiasm. After cleaning up, I stuffed into my car five bloggers, three being Andrew and Jem (again) as well as Ludwig, another of the podcast hosts. (I leave out the names of the other bloggers for a purpose) We set out for the Joystiq crew’s hotel in Beverly Hills. On the way, someone in the car suggested food, and i drove to In-And-Out burger, packed to the brim with customers. Sitting in the car with some exhausted bloggers while lines for The Dark Knight snaked around the back of my car made me realize that I would have been home right now, on IRC and on my PS3 playing games, and to get out like this was… refreshing!
After getting the burgers, we drove down a major intersection, sitting in a second turn lane of a very busy street to hear someone heaving in the backseat.
Someone was throwing up in my car. I stopped the car in the street as to let the person continue to throw up into the street, and finally made the left turn into the turn lane onto a small grassy area. As soon as we stepped out, the sprinklers went off, spraying everyone with a fine mist. I rushed into the back of my car, trying to find something to help out the sick person with, only to find an empty brownie pan and random objects my sister had left in my car. I couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation- it was probably after midnight, sitting in a car of people i didn’t know, getting soaked, and any other person would have been enraged at this point, but I loved it. I loved every second of it. The realization that NO one would believe this story.
After getting all the wet people back into my car, we drove to a swanky little hotel in beverly hills. Imagine this senario- a ’92 LeBaron pulling into this upscale hotel in beverly hills and getting valet parking in the process (again, yet another surreal part of the evening) at about 12:05 am. I went upstairs to the Joystiq HQ- a medium sized conference room with a long conference table, mini-refrigerator, and TV/DVD combo.
I simply sat there and watched as the Joystiq crew got down to work, checking emails and conversing. A second group of the crew walked in fresh from going to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, declaring that food to be heavenly and the chicken to be “actually be unicorn meat”. Their confused faces upon seeing me again after the party there were quickly answered by Ludwig, as they laughed at the story so far, and apologized profusely.
Justin McElroy (one of the regulars on the Joystiq podcast) walked in with a regal step and presented a porno he had bought from a “vampire hunter” outside of Roscoe’s. Everyone on the crew freaked out as he made the move to turn on the TV to present the film (he didn’t thankfully enough, but he did disappear for a bit to return with a new t-shirt on). The film was of… the colored variety and had a name involving time, but the full name escapes me, probably for the better.
Watching the Joystiq crew in action was incredibly interesting. These people all have a love of video games that’s simply indescribable as they spoke about their favorite games at the conference, or the horrible Konami press conference Ludwig had to sit through. At one point, a video circulating the many gaming blogs was shown (involving… um… garlic) and an impromptu mass showing of the video was done on 12 laptops all at the same time. The bloggers laughed like it was the first time they had seen the video, even acting out certain parts and crying out lines from it, which later received complaints from the hotel.
I left the Joystiq hotel about 12:45 am, with a pretty rancid smelling car and a very weary body, still trying to comprehend the night that had happened so far.
Thanks to all of this, I was mentioned in the Joystiq Podcast, referred to as “the Ethan Hawke character from Training Day” (listen starting around 62:00 for the mention). I also made an appearance on Mahalo’s Mahalo Daily show, talking about Tetris (you’ll find me in there, it’s not that hard).
My swag from the party was this:
a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4, a game I had planned on buying with my next paycheck, as well as a guitar that would work with Rock Band and Guitar Hero- a perfect addition to my current Rock Band pack.
Only yesterday, I had recieved this game as a thank you gift:
On the packing slip for Battlefield: Bad Company was a special comment, reading “BLEURGH!! Thank you for saving us twice! Love, Joystiq”
Thank you for a memorable time, Joystiq. I loved every second of it.
My Porcelin God, Among other things.
Jul 9th
Last week, I was sick due to an unknown bug. It hit most of my family, and included vomiting, lack of appetite, and the abuse of our toilets. We think it originated from my grandmother’s impromptu trip to the emergency room, as it affected everyone (well, almost everyone) that visited her, transmitting it on to maybe one other people before it died out.
Even the smallest mention of food would send me in a skittering run towards my toilet to throw it all up. At one point, all I had to eat was a banana and crackers within a four day span- at separate occasions, of course. I was so sick that my boss forced me to go home, only after realizing that I wasn’t making any jokes about my co-workers. Taking Immodium would only have me to throw up even further, so Tums almost became my regimen, as well as extra strength ibuprofen. Later symptoms would include shivers, joint pain, and hallucinations- the latter of which turned into an amusing night after a marathon of Scrubs, in which the characters from the show would walk around my bed and diagnose my symptoms.
I’m better now, thank you.
I’ve had to deal with what you see here on the left- my friend Sampson injured himself skateboarding. Being the hippie that he is, he was riding his skateboard on the Fourth of July, going what he claims to be 35 MPH, without shoes, down a small hill until he hit a curb and flew into a wrought iron fence.
Genius. Simply genius. He’s fine now, save for a broken foot, a messed up knee, and that bandaging you see on his head. Two stitches are on his forehead as well, and he’s surprised the hell out of the doctors by receiving no head trauma whatsoever (to speak of). We don’t know how long he’ll be in this state, but it does hinder our projects somewhat in the process. A small posse of us went to go see Hancock together, and I brought Sampson along in my car, which he had great difficulty getting and out of, but we survived. I kept reminding him to get a handicap placard so I could park in handicap spots, but he forgot, of course.
Hancock was decent movie- had an amazing start, but simply fizzled out at the end of it all- I think the story tried to get an emotional side, but that was packed together all too much in the third and fourth acts, and left nothing of the comedy to keep the audience interested. Charlize Theron, whom wasn’t very well advertised for (I had some sense that she would be in the movie, but how large her part would be was still up in the air for me going in to see the film, as the advertisements only had Will Smith and Jason Bateman in it), pulled off her role quite well.
If anything you learn from this post, wear your helmet (and shoes) during skateboarding.