It's Far a Future on PLANET

day

2009-07-12T08:07:59Z

got up and mailed off a bunch of ebay packages (yay) and then headed down to california extreme, in santa clara, this year, with andrew the vestal, who came up this weekend especial.

it was really really fun, as always, though this year extremely crowded. it made it particularly hard to play pinball. arcade games were easier. i played a lot of both, but not as much pinball as i would have liked. the demolition man and apollo 13 pins were surprisingly fun. i guess it was just that all the pins in the '90s were licensed, more or less. doesn't matter what the license is when it comes to pinball, after all. did not get to play starwars ep1 though sadly.

arcade games: cosmo gang the video (a favorite, and i have more appreciation for galaga now post-retro game challenge), mouse trap (a favorite on coleco back in the day, arcade version is odd but good for a pacman wannabe), mr. do (finally realized it's mister DO as in do re mi, not mr. do as in "do a job". that's why it plays the scale when you collect the cherries. argh) and ... well, i dunno, a lot of stuff. played SF2HDremix versus a guy and it was fun but my inability to reliably do shoryukens with a stick makes me useless. so useless. i do love fighters. it's nice to be reminded how much.

i dunno, it was good, hung out with ppl aplenty, had a monte cristo at bennigans, generally = good.

had dinner with one of vestal's friends, dave, and his wife, which was fun. social mixing. came home and vestal and i played PS1 games. magical drop 3 is seriously in my top 10 ever, i think. and kururin pa! still fucking rules.

toripuru toripuru toripuru

2009-07-08T23:49:32Z

reflecting on the tandy 1000 HX.

realizing that this is the first time in 20 years i have not had a PC with a microsoft OS.

the tandy 1000 HX was a stupid computer with a crappy featureset. but it was pretty cheap for the time. my mom would listen to me about what hardware to buy; problem was, i was a kid and i just wanted what i saw at the store and though i could wheedle out of her.

bigger pics here. a weird system. it was too small to put a monitor on so you had to buy a monitor stand if you wanted it to sit on top (helpfully, radioshack sold those, too.) it was really hard to expand, but the people who published ads in the back of computer magazines sold unofficial upgrades.

i (successfully) got a serial port onto it (RS232C!) and rocked a 2400 baud modem (external.) all tandy sold was an internal 1200.

conversely, i ordered a hard drive kit from a mail order company and couldn't get it to work. fortunately, they let me return it.

the tandy had a suite of software called deskmate that was partially built into the BIOS so you couldn't load it on non tandy systems. heh. i still have some of the pictures i drew, recovered off of those floppies i found over christmas, and i was able to convert them using a PERL script to something you can actually view in 2009. but they're too lame to post.

we replaced the tandy with a 386SX in 1989. we sold the 1000 HX to one of my dad's coworkers; his wife as an elementary school teacher and she wanted to use it to prepare stuff for school. i hope it worked out for her. i remember going to the house to set it up for them.

the 386SX-16, again, was underpowered but available (i bought it from the computer department at boscov's, a local department store chain.) it was called the PC partner and had the best keyboard ever (except maybe the IBM model M) and was a strange purplish grey with purple accents. oh, 1991. what was it with purple (SNES!) i wanted the PC because i liked its industrial design. not a great way to shop for computers. but i guess it works for apple.

games!

2009-07-08T09:26:21Z

apparently, if you turn on your playstation 3, that's what happens. games. i did, and three happened to me... in just one night!

i am just going to cut this post now. this post covers three games in varying levels of detail. of course, there's always hidden omake and fanservice in these posts, so you never know what you're missing if you don't click, for...

GAIASEED! a rare playstation shooter that costs upwards of ¥25000 in akihabara now!
KILLZONE2! a depressingly common playstation 3 shooter that will cost $5 in gamestop in 2014!
BLAZBLUE! a relatively attainable game that will probably be like $20 once asw farts out one or two minor upgrades.

ok. gaiaseed.

gaiaseed is one of three playstation games by the rather obscure technosoleil. of course, of the three, only the boring-looking puzzler came out here. the other (the rapid angel) can go for up to $100 in japan. i bought that one last october. it's weird.

since gaiaseed is a 2D shooter, it's worth even more. dcharlie sold his copy for like $140 and now the fucker costs like $250. dcharlie am cry.

but in fortunate news, the fruits of technosoleil have fallen into the hands of hamster, and hamster likes to whore shit out to the playstation network. i bought gaiaseed for ¥600 tonight. after spending MAD CASHES (ok, a combined total of like $75) on real PS1 copies of little ralph and angel eyes, this made me feel very happy. or as ray would say, "score!"

gaiaseed:

gaiaseed ain't the prettiest game in town, but it does have some genuine charm. the intro is hilariously bad: it's subtitled in japanese and narrated, in english, by a japanese guy whose accent makes kojima sound like ian mckellen.

i am not kidding. "a whoah."

anyway, get beyond that, and you get a competent 2D shooter with decent graphics (some nice big piles of not-that-great-looking sprites thrown around, scaling and rotating objects, etc. etc.) and swell music. i suck like fuck at shooters, and even though this one has a life bar, i still sucked it up, credit feedery little loser that i am.

i haven't really striven to get better at a shooter, gradually, in that way that you're meant to, since, um, gaiares. i don't think RS counts because we played it 2P all the time on saturn mode and eventually just earned as much as learned our way through it.

i think it's better than kyuuin, though, which i also bought, for like 45 bucks. so. though the idea of it costing twice as much as radiant silvergun makes me kinda fucking lol.

the powerup system seems really meh, for one, and it really does send a lot of bullets at you. i mean, it's not a cave game, but it's definitely from that period right before shooters were about to dive over the cliff into crazytown.

if you have a japanese PS1 account, download it and laugh at people who paid $250 for it.

now, a pause.

before i talk about KILLZONE2!, a disclaimer. even though i have long been a professional reviewy person the opinions below are just my off-the-cuff (well, i have some notes scrawled down, actually, but) personal casually-written sarcastic comments on my personal blog and i am sorry if you made the game and you are butthurt by this. console yourself with the fact that nobody really cares what i think, and i am five months late. i have talked to some people who worked on this game and they were very smart and nice people.

let's back this up a second. i started playing gears of war 2, finally, this weekend, co-op, with lucretius77. i really enjoyed the original game, but i kind of thought of that as a fluke. it's not a fluke; i like gears of war. i don't love gears of war, but i for-fucking-real like gears of war. it's got great art direction -- anything with a head excluded -- and it's fucking fun, and, um, the characters... are large. very large. it feels great. you shoot shit and it dies and then you walk for a bit and then you roadie run and you get nauseous and then you walk and then you chainsaw some thing and then like, yeah. fun. bro. dude.

so since i promised i won't play it anymore till we can finish it together, but i still wanted to shoot things, when i went to my shelf to grab blazblue i noticed something else. sony sent me a copy of their biggest game of 2009 (thus far) and it had been sitting around. so i put it in. yes. i put in killzone 2.

i had like no fun with killzone 2.

killzone 2 is an entertainment product made by the dutch to make the dialogue and story in the gears of war series seem really, really good.

the best word to describe my state of mind during my playthrough of KZ2, as it was, is "annoyed". i was almost constantly annoyed by the game.

i was annoyed by the unskippable opening cutscene (until the pretty space bits.) i was annoyed by the dialogue. there is too much ambient immersive shouty man dialogue where men act like dicks to one another in a show of, um, cameraderie? i was annoyed by the one room i was pinned down in from three different angles for like 10 minutes while helghast poured into it like three our four different times (set times) (because it's expensive to build rooms. value for euros.) i was annoyed by the vague jankiness of the game in terms of NPC behavior, disappearing shell casings, weird AI (you're going to hide in FRONT of the barrier? okaaaaaay) and whatever else. it is the jankiness i sort of think of as "PC game jankiness", that i think of as characteristically whitey. it's sort of ineffable. i don't mind it in good games.

i was annoyed when i noticed the animators made a specific really nice animation for shooting a dude in the small of the back (!!) because i know how much money and time that costs and really, i like those kinds of details, but i was really just annoyed by then.

i was annoyed by the shitty fucking weapons that spray to fuck and go all crazy cockamamie. bullets wooooo! i guess people who play COD, which is everyone who bought this game, are used to this sort of thing, but i am not. i probably would have got used to it and modified my tactics, but i will never play it again, so.

i was annoyed that the helghast don't really have red eyes; they're actually just a race of sarcastic brits with alopecia. it's like a race of the actor in the darth vader costume when you really wanted to be killing james earl jones (though, i mean, not literally. i don't want to kill james earl jones.)

the dialogue, again, to remind you, is extremely annoying. cliche-ridden, sexist, puerile (wait, i mean "gritty"!) particularly charming is the ambient conversation your tough pal has with a military superior where she tells him the leader of the enemy forces must be taken alive and he's like I DONT LIKE NOT KILLING PEOPLE HURR. man. so bad. willfully stupid. stupid on purpose.

a lot of people complained about the weird height issue in the game; you feel like you're playing as a midget. it's weird and they're right. you have to jump to look out of a window your AI buddy is kneeling in front of. i am not kidding.

jumping to look out the window annoyed me.

what really annoyed me, though, was not really killzone's fault. it has a similar difficulty setting to other games, like gears: normal is for those who have "some familiarity with FPS games" or whatever. i beat half-life 2. much more recently, i plowed through the first half of gears 2 on normal without really batting an eye (co-op, granted.) so i picked normal and soon wished i had not. there is no way to know these things in advance.

but more than the difficulty adjustment, what i want is sega arcade mode for this game. i don't care about the fucking immersion. i really don't. i know i am playing a game. so make like crazy taxi and give me a BIG GREEN FUCKING ARROW pointing at shit i need to pay attention to. DING DING DING when there's some shit i need to kill. show it to me. ("what the fuck tank is he talking about? what the fuck is shooting me? oh, i'm dead. again.") RED FLOATING ARROWS PLZ. i mean, the game already has all sorts of obviously scripted things. when you kill all the guys in a room, you trigger a dialogue event cos everyone suddenly knows it's magically safe to move. so why not just put a giant pointing finger with the word GO! floating in the air? save us the trouble of finding the damn door.

i am NOT kidding.

rather than making dudes take fewer shots, i want a retard mode that tells me what to do and where to go. if you are going to build big boxy yet somehow convoluted grey rooms full boxes and dirt, just tell me what to do. i don't love your game as much as you do. i know very smart and talented people spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to design levels to lead the eye of the player to walk where the player is supposed to walk, but the player is not good at your game, in this case, and is annoyed, and kind of bored, and just wants to go go go.

i almost quit before i finished the first mission, but i was like, no, i need to finish the first mission. so i did, and then i quit.

i liked resistance 2 a lot more. it kinda makes me wish i'd stuck with resistance 2 a little bit longer, instead of playing this. but mostly, it makes me in awe of what $20m (more?) buys you in production values and reinforces my general disinterest in the shooter genre. i like what i like, and what i like is the dumb console gaminess of gears of war and the smartypantsness of bioshock and HL2. (they're different sorts of smartypants, but they're smartypants.) my next experiment will be call of duty 4, which reputedly does do interesting stuff with story, because kenny bought it and will soon be bored with it.

killzone 2 made me realize that we put up with a lot of bullshit in games. i mean, i know that we all know that. but most people don't really think about it; they just bitch. we don't, that often, step outside of the bullshit that we like. unless we're reviewers handed a game in a genre we don't like, and then we somtimes write, "why didn't this game revolutionize this shitty genre i hate?" but i digress.

i think a lot of people actually, too, do have a high bullshit tolerance. (i am here reflecting on the conversation i had this evening with jarrett about the irritating cop-out amorality of prototype. it don't faze him none.)

people think FF is a lot of bullshit. i love FF. but, get this -- FF is a lot of bullshit. but it's my kinda bullshit. killzone 2 is also a lot of bullshit. and it is so fucking not my kind of bullshit.

bayonetta? that's gonna be a big ol' pile of bullshit. i'm just hoping enough of it's my kinda bullshit. killing angels? YES! vag cam? NO! and, of course, that the highs are high enough. dig?

speaking of my kind of bullshit...

BLAZBLUE

you have no idea what a relief it is to throw in a game and see some fucking pseudoevangelion cutscenes (i hesitate to call them "anime"; hi-tec storyboardland, maybe) after killzone 2. really. nobody farted out a one-liner about fucking anybody else's mother during the whole thing.

man, this game is gorgeous. it's even less comprehensible than guilty gear. story mode is relaxingly dumb animu with decent voice acting (para nihongo of course) and i... don't have much to say. i threw that fucker in and was like sigh.... my bullshit.

i like, fought some (CPU) dudes and read some text and was really not sure what the hell i was doing. at all.

but i'll be back. and i'll try the training mode. i'm already more interested in it than i really was in SFIV, go fig.

i fucking suck at 2D fighters so bad. you really have no idea.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age

2009-07-08T01:09:56Z

new york times photojournal on dead construction projects caught in the economic maelstrom.

i could say something but i think the title, reproduced above, pretty much says it all -- the rest is at the link (click the pic).

haha wow fail nyt! yeek.

moider

2009-07-07T17:35:11Z

murder and games is a subject i hit on when i was thinking about how much of popular media revolves around murder stories, but how few games outside of point'n'click adventures/visual novels/etc actually manage to take it in. so i thought about why. then i wrote this editorial about it.

bop

2009-07-07T06:42:07Z

andrew vestal bought and played and wrote about a brilliant-sounding adventure game in the classic SCUMM mold. it is called "time, gentlemen, please!" which made no sense to me until it was explained that this is what people say instead of "last call" in the UK. so hit that link and find out more if a mix of uncomfortable british humor and clicking on things sounds as though it might please you. it is a prime reason i am considering bootcamping this maccy.

mac life is rubbish

2009-07-07T06:21:45Z

not really, but it's catchy!

a clickable pic of my mac desktop in its 1920x1080 crazy glory for your amusement.

so i spent way too long dealing with getting the data i wanted off of my external NTFS (windows format) drive and onto my mac and then either burned to DVD+R, or, as i am still doing right now, shunted back onto the drive now that it's mac OS formatted.

hooray for shitty shits.

but it's basically all but sorted out right now.

one thing i will say: formatting a drive on a mac is a lot more arcane than on a PC. macs are generally slicker and easier to deal with, but sometimes the Alien Brain People (aka engineers) devise a feature and then it's like, what? i had to download a PDF on how to format a FUCKING DRIVE from the people who made my drive. that has never happened to me in a microsoft OS.

oh well. quirky! all seems to be well. i named my drive 弐号機 which i guess is cute or something. seems odd to be doing eva references but those are the times we live in. the icon is orange so i guess it should be 零号機 but we all know i prefer asuka. and yui creeps me out.

anyway, almost all is well in chateau du maq. i just need to get that keyboard, and the 4GB of RAM i ordered, and then everything should be almost screamingly peachy.

and we can resume normal non-boring blog service at that time. well, it'll be boring, but it'll be less boring and about something else. cha-ching!

jamietoperation

2009-07-07T00:57:26Z

this is absolutely the best song i heard last year that nobody but nobody else i knew ever acknowledged the existence of. it was on a (go figure) Q best of britishy britishface music CD. the album it comes from is pretty 3-starrish, but this track is a major major standout. it just comes up on my iPod shuffle and rocks me rockingly rock and then goes away. a crazy fusion of british indie and rap and reggae (dub? i don't know this shit!) and god knows what. catchy and messy.

now that you're back at work and missing the long weekend

2009-07-06T18:29:00Z

i didn't want to post this over the weekend because it seemed that online activity was really low. it's a feature interview with hiroshi matsuyama, president, cyberconnect 2.

cyberconnect2 developed, among other things, tail concerto, silent bomber, .hack, .hack//G.U., and the naruto ultimate ninja games. wait, i don't think there are "other things" since i just listed them all.

for some reason i am not fully able to explain i became really really interested in tail concerto in the lead up to its launch on the PS1 and played it immediately when it came out in japan. in fact, i bought a dual shock controller to play the game since it was the first game for the PS1 i played which supported it.

it's a really charming but questionably fun 3D platformer.

the company's next game, silent bomber, is really excellent. it's an original action title that i actually don't remember very well besides being totally addicted to it when i finally got around to playing it in 2002, i think, after i got laid off. it's one of those games i'd encourage people to go back and check out, especially if it were on PSN (it is in japan.)

of course, we all know my relationship with .hack. so i'll skip the descriptions here.

i first met matsuyama in 2002 at E3. he was there at the bandai booth to promote .hack. milky had roped me in to helping him out with appointments at that E3 for no pay (which i did anyway, to bolster my chances with EGM.) one of the meetings i ended up taking was the matsuyama/uchiyama (daisuke, bandai producer) interview. milky and i really got along with them. .hack was a month out for release in japan at that point, and when it did come out, matsuyama signed and inscribed and fedexed two copies of the game to milky -- one for me.

over the years i interviewed matsuyama a number of times. i became an obsessive .hack otaku only to become sick to death of the series in the end, despite still loving it at the same time, and totally skipping .hack//G.U. and the .hack//Roots anime series because i was burnt out. (generally as well as specifically, by that point!)

i've probably spoken to matsuyama like six times at this point. memorably rannie set up one meeting as a formal japanese lunch during TGS, on the top floor restaurant of the makuhari prince hotel. the sum total of questioners turned out to be me, milky, and vestal, and since i knew milky wouldn't use the interview, and vestal didn't have a publication, i just threw the whole thing up on gamespy. (at that point i was freelancing TGS for them.)

and look, here's my E303 interview with matsuyama. just, because. and why not: here's another gamasutra Q&A about naruto. and then one from gamesradar. google is wonderful.

anyway, since matsuyama had a talk at GDC this year i was determined to get a really meaty interview out of the guy. it's not obviously always apparent from the transcribed text, but he's really eloquent and clearly determined. he has a funny showy way of speaking and shows a lot of personality.

tgs 2005. matsuyama 2nd from left. 2nd from right, daisuke uchiyama, producer of all of his games, publisher side

anyway, i think the interview (good interpretation!) shows how strong his personality and ideals are, which is pretty cool. at this point CC2 has grown up to the point where it has 3 active teams and is producing CG anime (!!) as well as games.

anyway, that's my deal. i dunno when or where i'll talk to him again (TGS?) i wonder what's in store. .hack next gen? it would be preferable to star ocean.

i think in a weird way

2009-07-06T09:15:50Z

what i will miss is winamp. i still use it. i don't like to add everything to iTunes. if i'm rarely if ever going to listen to something and don't think i need it on the go, or if i'm just testing something out to see if i like it... i use winamp.

i've tried audion and it seems ok. it's free, anyway. dunno. been using winamp for more than 10 years. yikes.

also, i was leaning forward just now to stare at the screen and my neck started to hurt. i'm going to have to figure out my posture and stuff with this new setup. life changes! i am not optimistic i'm going to be able to resist bringing my old desk back, really. it may be the best solution in the end, even if it is gigantic.

thing

2009-07-06T04:50:01Z

so thinking about it, while i could get ntfs working in mac, really what i should do is actually, go through the drive and pare it down to the shit it actually needs to have, clean and organize the files, and then copy it over, wipe the drive, and put it on there all pretty anyway. it's kind of a fucking ad hoc mess anyway.

^__________^

and i better do it soon; i'm going to want to back stuff up off the mac and onto the drive. hence its existence. cheeeezu

augh now the real horror begins

2009-07-06T02:38:05Z

i need to move like everything onto this computer off of my external hard drive, and then reformat the external hard drive (cos mac does not deal with ntfs) and move stuff back.

alternately i could install one of those ntfs-liking apps. hrm.

blarkblarkblark

either way that sounds like notfun. and getting ntfs running sounds like the less worse option.

or i could just say fuck it for tonight and listen to this squarepusher song

hrms

2009-07-06T02:25:21Z

pondering this keyboard

it has good ratings and sounds like it's not plastic mush like most modern keyboards. then i can dump this belkin one in the goodwill pile (original price: $15)

i expect if i go to best buy or fry's or office depot they'll just have windows-marked keyboards. IT IS A MYSTERIOUS

this is all i am going to be thinking about for a little while obviously. blah blah blah blah blah

hrms

2009-07-06T02:07:33Z

ok, so.

first up, it's kinda funny that the macbook is sitting tiny and alone in the bottom of that giant tower case spot in this 2000-era desk.

second, this monitor is really nice, but the people who wrote about it having a shitty stand on newegg weren't kidding. not only can you not adjust height, at least on mine, it seems to lean just perceptibly forward ... so it's almost like tilted toward you. i may have to put a little something under the edge to prop it back. so odd. and chintzy. there's no angle adjustment, see.

third, i really need to get a new keyboard, with the mac keys. but not an apple one, barf. this is a windows one and it's all bass-ackwards with the windows key being alt and alt being command. or something. it's confusing me and is lame. i think the logitech one i have at work has the keys labeled both ways. i'll have to remember to notice that tomorrow.

movin

2009-07-06T01:58:48Z

so now i'm on the macbook, on the old desk, on the new 22" monitor.

i'm pondering how this is going to work for me.

didn't hook up the printer or scanner yet -- not essential -- but have hooked up the crap USB keyboard i bought in 2005 to use with my laptop when my PC was dead, and man, it's not that great. but not super horrible. i may have to investigate a better keyboard option in the near future. same mouse i had on the windows box, of course, so that's fine.

i think this will work fine.

oh, yeah, the macbook defaulted to displaying this as its primary monitor when plugged in to the power supply so i dunno wtf peter was talking about!

formage

2009-07-06T00:24:01Z

i bought the dell PC i am currently fomatting (while i post from what has supplanted it, my macbook) in 2003.

it was a really good slickdeals deal from dell; it's a pentium 4. i don't remember the specs anymore. it's served me well over the years. at some point, it got to the point where you didn't really need to upgrade PCs anymore. for years, i'd upgraded every couple of years -- since i got my first "IBM-compatible" tandy 1000 in 1989.

i'm finally putting it to bed because i've realized the macbook can be everything to me, and actually runs a good deal faster than the PC. it seemed, suddenly, redundant -- in way my last laptop most definitely did not make it. (i actually had to use that laptop as my primary PC for a couple of weeks in 2005 when i came back from japan to find my PC wouldn't boot -- the power supply had died. i was well tired of it by the end, even with keyboard and monitor and mouse plugged in.)

since i bought this PC in 2003, i've added...

1. a bigger hard drive
2. a DVD+R drive
3. a 19" LCD
4. an external 750gb HD
5. a hand-me-down nvidia video card (from zak!)
6. a second monitor (i didn't dig that at all)
7. a scanner and printer (different ones at different times, even)
8. that new power supply

all in all, a lot of stuff has moved in and out of the PC. but it's still been the same thing for years. and the desktop paradigm is one i've been rocking for, well, i guess since i got my commodore 64 in... 1987?

it's funny; given all the time i spend at PCs i don't really develop any connection with the devices themselves. i guess it's because i thought computers were inherently cool when i was a kid that this seems odd anymore. or thinking about those guys who customize and care about their PCs so much. or thinking about people who name their cars. for something i spend so much of my life staring at, it doesn't mean a lot to me. i think my favorite thing about my PC is the industrial design of the LCD monitor i bought in 2005. and the case design is really nice, functionally. i haven't been inside the case in years, of course...

computers.

1987 - C64
1989 - tandy 1000 HX
1991 - PC Partner (yes, really) 386SX-16 (with my favorite keyboard ever, which i sadly broke in 1997)
1996 - pentium 100 -- with windows 95!
1998 - premio (lol @dravenfrost) pentium 100mmx (what a huge upgrade! however, the mmx-ness and some more ram allowed it to play mp3s without making the system chug. wow.)
1999 - my only built-from-scratch PC; a wanna-be iMac style PC case. (here's a slightly more flattering image.)
2003 - the dell

and now, the macbook.

i remember reading that last year was the first year notebook PC sales outpaced desktop PC sales. i can easily believe it, though i'd not thought about it before. even companies are just giving people notebooks now (i was at facebook last week; everybody there gets a laptop.)

i am kinda forgetting what the point of this post is, or if it even has one beyond reminiscence and timekill while my PC's drive formats, so i can install XP on it, so i can give it to goodwill.

dunno. it was definitely time for a change. that desktop is a giant obtrusive powersuck that doesn't really serve a major purpose. certainly nothing the mac can't duplicate... and if i feel like i want a dedicated desktop again, windows 7 is right around the corner (and won't run well on the old dell.) and then there'll be another slickdeals deal from dell...

4g

2009-07-05T08:56:31Z

it's funny how moving a shelf from one corner of the room to the other can really transform it. i'm slowly modifying my room.

i'm now wondering if my plan to switch desks is misguided -- i feel like my room opened up that much from switching the location of that shelf. of course, saying that, i still can't put my CD racks up the way things are right now.

decisions, decisions.

tomorrow is the planned switchover to the mac.

i really would like that space back. but i have some doubts about my ability to fit the mac and a keyboard and the new monitor on that desk. problem is, you can't run a macbook closed as a computer; it has to be open and functioning.

well, i'll figure it out. it's easy enough to test before i move the desk into my room.

boy, this is fucking fascinating, isn't it?

oh, and i started playing gears of war 2 with lucretius77 tonight. fun. really. i like that series. dumb pretty fun. they're such games. not trying to be anything but video games.

laundry and cleaning

2009-07-04T23:30:34Z

how to spend my fourth of july!

it's kind of relaxing or weird. i dunno, that hoarder video sent me into something of a cleaning mania. i'm not exaggerating. i keep diving on things and organizing them.

it's like an episode of daria, now that i think about it.

<daria voice/internal monologue> "am i really just an obsessive compulsive hoarder who will die crushed under piles of unplayed video games?"

perspective

2009-07-04T21:16:43Z

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

21 minute short film on hoarders.

makes me feel both more and less fucked up about the eva game post below. whee!

my mom is a crazy-ass packrat. not up to these standards, of course. but she definitely keeps tons of stuff. watching this video makes me want to get RID OF tons of stuff. just -- anything.

related: i'm pondering getting rid of my dreamcast collection.

eva

2009-07-04T10:10:02Z

so i have this semi-policy that i kinda need to have all of the eva console games that were out at the time. there are tons of them coming out now, but i don't need any of them. what i want to have are the ones that were out when eva was originally around.

i bought two of them this week, one that i had been meaning to buy for ages (yoshiyuki sadamoto illustrations, for saturn -- which was originally released by gainax itself) and one i'd forgotten existed (evangelion digital card library, also for saturn.) not exactly expensive these days, crappy saturn eva games: $9.99 and $5.99, respectively.

comedy: NCS wanted $49 for each of those back in the day. i know i must have hemmed and hawed over that and decided no way. i have some sense. i do remember debating the sadamoto thing in particular. i also remember eyeing a copy of eva digital card that sat under glass at the gamerary in philly. probably was going for upwards for $70.

the one time i saw the sadamoto disc in japan, i'm pretty sure it cost more than that, because i debated it and put it back on the shelf. and i wouldn't have at ¥1000. but saturn prices are still dropping. nobody cares about that system anymore.

anyway, i am pretty sure that the last game i need is the abovepictured one, for wonderswan. that's from an auction for a really beat up copy for $15. no thanks. i'll have to keep my eye out.

oh, and there's the mahjong game for PS1. that's on the edge. there's one with a $9.99 BIN on ebay right now which implies it ain't worth shit, so i'll have to keep my eye out for it in japan for, like, ¥500 or something. you know. just because.

this totally neurotic collector's post brought to you by being up at 3 in the morning.

hrmm

2009-07-04T09:36:29Z

do i feel better because i feel somewhat better
or do i feel better because it's 2:36 am and i just finished watching season 1 of victorian romance emma.

i don't know, but i'll probably know tomorrow afternoon.

5 5 5

2009-07-04T04:24:22Z

5 hour nap

5 5 5

5 hour nap

sigh.

ran

2009-07-03T23:41:38Z

ran some errands today. which is making me feel tired. hooray! they had to be done, and now i have oj and nyquil, but really.

i guess i'll take a bit of a nap again.

fun fun fun fun fun

why did i expect anything more

2009-07-03T22:32:58Z

fuck you

eva 1.01 coming to DVD in the US this fall. blu-ray of 1.11 not coming to the US till NEXT SPRING. and i'm sure that this is japan's plan.

cos all of the kids who downloaded eva 1.01 fansubbed 10 minutes after it came out on DVD in japan LAST YEAR are going to be interested 2 years later in buying it. right.

today

2009-07-03T05:42:34Z

today has been weird. last night i noticed i was getting sick, and felt like it was unlikely i'd make it to work. that's always a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, though, isn't it? well, it came true.

i went to bed at like 11:20, pissed off and depressed. this week has been oddly stressful and warped. editing today's feature took a lot of out of me; more than it should have, mainly because i was fighting myself all the way, for some reason. it's like if there aren't problems, i'll create them for myself.

case in point:

lately, i've been pondering buying a new television. you've seen me complain about my television on my blog. i've been complaining about it since i got it, more or less. first it was a dead pixel. then it was the fact that the HDMI port can't do 1080p despite the TV being 1080p. more lately, the component inputs started to die. and then the DVI port stopped displaying the PS3 (i had to swap the PS3 and the DVD player. that's working... for now.)

so i've been wanting to buy a TV. when ray moved out, the TV in the living room disappeared, you see, and all we have out there now is a standard def unit.

today, dell put up a deal on a 40" bravia for $649. i got really close.

i can't afford a fucking TV. or rather, i can easily afford it, in the sense that we afford anything in america. we muddle through in this credit-and-month-to-month-wage-churn cycle. i can keep my head well above water. but it's just fucking stupid.

i'm not buying a new television. if anything, i'm going to get rid of cable TV to cut down on costs. kenny doesn't care, and jarrett is young enough that he doesn't even seem to consider watching television as a valid pastime. so fuck it. that'll save some money; money i need. i can buy the soup from iTunes. i can buy TNG on DVD. i'll call comcast next week.

instead, i bought Television. what i mean to say is: i bought the album marquee moon by the band television. serendipity. robert ashley linked that video on twitter. i've been meaning to check them out for ages but never got around to it. the song is kind of amazing. after listening to it twice, i spent $7.92 on the amazon mp3 store and got my own copy of it. goddamn. it's not called a post-punk classic for nothing, that much is clear.

so now that i've put my foot down and refused to allow myself to buy a new television until i've mopped up a bunch of debt -- i mean it -- i'm thinking about what i can do to just improve my life with what i've got. i REALLY need to clean and reorganize my room. there's so much cruft. part of that is the switching-to-macbook thing i've discussed and am in the process of. and part more is clearing out and more effecitvely storing other stuff. i want to switch back to my other TV cart, which is more open, and smaller.

yeah. fascinating.

i dunno; i see that it would make me happier, for little to no cost, to make these changes. i just have to do them.

my brain has been weird today.

but this television album is totally fucking excellent. i would not be born for over four months after it was released.