[  Mood: In Love ]
[  Currently: Listening to Morningwood ]
As the official young person of the RevolutionSF community, I feel it is my duty to share with you what us kids are currently listening to. Basically, the Moby Rule of the 90s continues to apply, wherein if its been on a car commercial, we jam on it. Mostly during text message arranged insta-raves on our newfangled iPods at 2 AM, in the inside parking lot at various malls or just at some random Denny’s.

This happens all the time.

Foist of awl, there’s Morningwood. Their single, Nth Degree, is just plain fun to drive to, and their CD’s tag line, "Sexy music for sexy people," rings with mock arrogance that identifies it as belonging to Generation Why more clearly than Quasimodo trapped in a Anita Ward b-side. I am King of the Run-On Sentence Valley. This group accurately depicts everything that we in our early twenties remember as being cool from the eighties, except for the Peewee Herman PSA about crack. While I’m thinking about horrible PSAs, ever wonder how much gay sex the French can fit into three minutes? Click here to find out!

Who would possibly think this man would die from AIDS?

Sexondly, the New Young Pony Club. Fabulous hair, implied lesbianism, monotone vocals, lots of synth – its like the Waitresses were frozen in time until the world needed them again. Much like Captain America, King Arthur, Jesus, and Austin Powers. Wow, that storyline has been played out. Anyway, these folks are also good times, and if you’re not too busy doing verbs or wonderfully describing them with adjectives, I recommend you pirate their album. They don’t need American money, they’re British. They’ll be like, "Oy, I wants to buy some fish’n’chips, me tum’s a bit rumbly," and the fish’n’chips guy will be all, "Awright, guv’nor, that shall require me partaking from you 5 L’s," and then they’ll say, "All I got’s are these funny green papers with some mushroom headed guy on them," and then the fish’n’chips guy will say, "TEHN ALL YOU GET IS GRUEL LIKE IN OLIVER TWIST!" So don’t let Dickens happen to this band, pirate their music. Buy a t-shirt at Hot Topic maybe. Everyone likes ponies.

Obligatory poorly lit picture of a band

Fred Lee, this is why techno music exists. Lots of people like to flop around and do some fruity wavy arm movements or hump the nearest five people when they go to a party. Me? I beat the shit out of the air in front of everyone around me. It all looks the same under a strobe light, so WHY NOT pretend to avenge your father’s murder by invisible ninja death squad? Answer that question, it wasn’t rhetorical. It’s like therapy for people who have to dance by themselves in crowds. Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy humping girls when the opportunity presents itself. Oh, and this is just an example of generic techno – there really aren’t any good techno artists, just a bunch of acne scarred white dudes with the letters "DJ" in front of some word that is vaguely ironic or dumb. DJ Stanowitz, DJ On-E, DJ JD, for example. Those aren’t really DJ’s that I know about, but if you Google them, they probably exist.

This is also pretty good, but kinda getting old already. Ph33r the Baltimore County School Board, Dexter! The Avalanches have excellent music videos, but their albums aren’t very good on second or third play throughs. They’re masters of sampling old movie reels, and by "masters," I mean they do it way too much.

Just fifty more years until you die, thirty-somethings!

No, I kid, I keed. You’re very important. Your job is to point out bizarre crap you remember from the late 70s on YouTube, or tell us about how badly movies you thought were cool have held up. I’ve never seen a Sly Stallone movie in my life, how the crap am I going to come up with funny stuff to say about Rocky Balboa?

We need you.

I need you.

[  Mood: Distorted ]
[ Currently: Looking at the funk. ]
What did James Brown mean when he said that you have to get up to get down? Glitter and glimmer, fashion and fame – was he speaking literally, or philosophically? Its truly outrageous. It could mean that to be considered "cool," to be "down," you had to stand "up" for yourself, and display that you had pride and dignity. No matter where you fall in this issue, you have to admit: the music is contagious. Or it could mean that every position you have is relative to another position you could be in, but currently aren’t. If you’re down, you can be also be seen as "not being up." And if you’re up, you can also be seen as "not being down." Now, these are relatively negative conotations to associate one’s self with, as most people think that being up is good, and making one’s self lower is bad – a sign of sloth and depression.

But it could be bad meaning good, not meaning bad, as was presented in Run DMC’s theses. Introducing this information into the equation flips earlier assumptions on their ears! Everything is reversed and made literally twice as ambiguous, as there are now twice as many possible answers. James Brown, what the Hell, man? What are you talking about? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

There should be more songs with synthesized tubas making up the bass, that’s all that I’ve gotten out of this conversation with myself. That’s it. Freezepop will be heating up my CD drive for quite some time.

[  Mood: Sick ]
[  Currently: Eating turkey. ]
Woe is to be me. I am a child castaway in the middle of the sea, with no detritus to latch on to in hopes of rescue. I am a spring flower in the jungle, doomed to wither into pale and gloomy death in the shade of my taller brothers. I am a poem composed in the darkest hour of night on a subway ride home, doomed to be forgotten before my codas can be put from mind to ink to paper.

I am sick.

Unnnnngh. Is my nose runny? I can’t breathe out of it, but I can’t feel my face enough to tell whether it’s got snot all over it… I just touched it. Yes. Ew.

Where’s some paper? All I can find near me is some… old memo… But its used. And it’s all hard, and pointy. My nose is CHAPPED. My lips, too. Unnnnnnghhhhahahnn… It hurts to open my mouth to cough. My lips are all crusted together and dry.

I’ve got some phlegm in my throat and it won’t come out. Mhhhhh! driving me crazy. I think I’m gonna throw up if I try too hard to get out. Oh crap. Don’t think about throwing up, don’t think about throwing up, don’t think about here comes the mouth condensation. My stommy hurts. Throat trying to swallow itself

[  Mood: Scared ]
[  Currently: Playing Dead or Arive 4 ]
Wow, have I been getting my ass kicked on X-Box Live lately. I got sick of beating up on twelve year old kids in Dead or Alive 4, and now I come back four months later to be defeated ten matches in a row. Friggin no child left behind thingy, making kids smarter…

Meanwhile, here’s a taste of things to come, using the experimental web comic suggestion that Bey made:

I should have something funny, substantial and coherent up by Friday, w00t.

[  Mood: Amused ]
[  Currently: Playing with Inkscape a lil ]
I followed the advice in Michael’s last reply and spent about twenty minutes on this, just to see how it could potentially turn out.

Before:

After:

I <3 filters. While researching for mild authenticity, I also learned that Orcs are dicks.

But yeah, if I make friends with some LARPers, this is definitely a good way to go.

I’m trying to get several comics done before I decide to buy a URL and start things up – or shop them around to already popular hosts like www.snafu-comics.com – but this is looking like more and more of a huge financial investment and blah blah blah I reward your attention span with sex. This is a story I told a friend several months ago via IM, which he logged, and it was going to be a basis for several weeks of comics. I’ll explain why it’s not later. Also: mild censorship to make it for a, I dunno… I guess, thirteen(?) and up audience, instead of just a 18 and up and mildly deranged audience.

THE problem is that lately, I’ve been really unhappy with anything I’ve attempted to do, sketch wise. Time is not an issue, as my current work schedule as a photographer is less than demanding – it’s all a question of skill.

Choosing a style was the hardest part. I spent what feels like weeks just hammering that out – and I thought that I was happy with my initial batch of character sketches. But I found out quickly that the more detail you put into a comic, the more the uncanny valley comes into play, and that can drive readers away.

Likewise, if I make the characters too cartoonish, than they seem like a knockoff of Order of the Stick in tone, much like Dueling Analogues is criticized for being the poor man’s Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and as Ctrl+Alt+Delete is criticized for being the lazy man’s Penny Arcade. But I don’t like Penny-Arcade.

So, I’m thinking about just copping out of the animation thing, and going with some sort of modified Oblivion engine to do a comic a la Concerned. But! That would severely limit what I’m capable of doing with the game, and I’m pretty sure it’s been done before. I don’t know where, but it has to – if Star Trek: Elite Force had a fan following machimina comic, then surely a juggernaut like Oblivion has several. But if I do go with this option, I have to learn an entire toolset, camera system, and animation system, plus do a lot of modifications myself. And the above story is no longer an option, because there are no "getting head while riding a mount" animations, and ragdolling the characters into the right positions would be a bit of an epic pain in the ass.

In other words, I’ve had sex at least once and this is a huge amount of work. And my alcoholism isn’t helping progress as much as its helping me accept defeat in Dead or Alive 4 easier. Get up and break that teenager girl’s neck, Jann Lee!

[  Mood: Confused ]
Not only was I wrong on every single senate and house prediction I made, and have had to do a shot and take off an article of clothing for each poorly educated guess, but I did not see this coming, either. I just kept telling myself, "No, no, no, don’t buy into it. It’s all hype. It’ll die down and die off, just like it did for Prey and Condemned. No need to pre-order. I can buy it used in a week when some retarded kid gets frustrated."

The game is averaging a 95% in print reviews according to industry trades. That is a monumental critical success. Already beat out Final Fantasy XII. Combined with the number of pre-orders already sold, the hype for Gears of War is going to go through the damn roof. This is definitely going to be a console seller, too, and is going to keep the 360 in play for the holiday season, while the PS3 and Wii just start to emerge. This makes things really difficult for Sony, since they’re having a lot of trouble with their launch numbers, whereas Nintendo and Microsoft production of cheaper machines should be able to supply most, if not all, demand. Dare I say, the people predicting that mommas who are going to fail at finding a PS3 on the shelves this Christmas are going to be picking up a Wii60 instead, are probably correct.

I hope I don’t have to do a shot for that this Christmas, I’m barely coherent as it is. Damn it, Michael Steele, you loser!

MiSo and Co. are now still in the race in Europe, Australia and North America. I thought the 360 library is already extremely impressive, but I guess I forgot what a killer app looked like. I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

My punishment: How am I going to get a copy now that everyone and their grandma knows its great?

[  Mood: Scared ]
[  Currently: Watching Fox News. Dennycrane. ]
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[  Mood: Silly ]
[  Currently: Watching you. ]
1up.com is a pretty polarizing online gaming news site. Personally, I hate it. Their news service is slow, says nothing in five hundred words or more, and is pretty much useless. Their reviews are totally inconsistent, with a 6.5 from an editor on the X-Box channel often equating a high 8.whatever on the PS2 side. Its an online platform for a bunch of antiquated *print* gaming magazines, and they leave all of their juiciest content for the pages you have to pay for. And worst of all, the Goddamn 1UP Show.

Where other gaming site reviews and previews have their editors talking directly about the game via voice over from behind gameplay footage, or at the very least looking directly into the camera and giving a synopsis, The 1UP Show is shot from an awkward third person perspective. It makes you feel like your perverted voyeuristic tendencies have descended to peeking in on boring video game nerds who can’t act their way out of a tissue paper bag placed snuggly over their heads. In fact, I’d kinda like to watch them try, because it would be nice to watch so many annoying people die that way.

Two of the only things that I respect about 1up is the candid nature of the staff in their blogs, and their willingness to dive head first into controversies surrounding the game industry. I don’t give a flying dire rat’s ass about how much a Tenneseean tranny whines about misuse of the word "gay" in World of Warcraft, but 1up devoted about twenty paragraphs to the topic. Other topics of their editorials have included the ilk of such gems as "Sexism with regards to stat bonuses in Oblivion," now pardon me while my testacles vomit.

Female or shemale?

Anyway, the guy who did the tranny story above wrote a pretty controversial review of Neverwinter Nights 2. It was so controversial, in fact, that it recently got pulled, and people are having a hard time finding it on the internets. As a result of this decision, 1up has gained a lot of credibility with fans of Neverwinter Nights and other associated D&D games, while losing a lot of credibility with everyone else, everywhere. I’m posting the review here for posterity’s sake, whatever the Hell that means:

"Ever loyal bites
I’m cruising for a bruising (don’t I know it), but NWN2 is a splash of cold water to the face: A revelatory, polarizing experience that — in the wake of newer, better alternatives — makes you question the very notion of "RPG by numbers." It foists Wizards of the Coast’s latest v3.5 D&D system (a molehill that’s become a mountain at this point) onto your hard drive with stunning fidelity, then tacks on dozens of artificial-looking areas vaguely linked by forget-table plot points you check off like grocery to-do’s.

Sure, the interface is sleeker with context-sensitive menus and a smart little bar that lets you more intuitively toggle modes like "power attack" and "stealth," but with all the added rule-shuffling, NWN2 seems like it’s working twice as hard to accomplish half as much. Worse — and blame this on games like Oblivion — NWN2’s levels feel pint-sized: Peewee zones inhabited by pull-string NPCs with no existence to speak of beyond their little playpens. Wander and you’ll wonder why the forests, towns, and dungeons are like movie lots with lay-about monsters waiting patiently for you to trip their arbitrary triggers. As if the pencil and paper "module" approach were a virtue that computers — by now demonstrably capable of simulating entire worlds with considerably more depth — should emulate. It’s like we’re supposed to park half our brain in feature mania and the rest in nostalgic slush, and somehow call bingo.

The dungeons feel especially stale, so linear and inorganic they might as well be graph-paper lifts filled with room after room of pop-up bogeymen (Doom put them in closets; NWN2 just makes the closets bigger). Maybe you’d rather chat with the dumb NPCs that speak and sound like extras in a bad Saturday morning cartoon? Oh, boy — there’s the portrait "plus" sign! Time to shuffle another party member (improved to four simultaneous) through the level-up grinder, which you can click "recommend" to zip past…but then, what’s the point?

Rule-playing game
In all fairness, it’s not entirely developer Obsidian’s fault. D&D certainly puts the "rule" in role-playing, and a madcap base of D&D aficionados is no doubt ready to string me up for suggesting that faithful is here tantamount to folly (to these people, I say: "Go for it, NWN2’s all you’ve ever wanted and more"). Call me crazy — I guess I’m just finally weary of being led around on a pencil-and-paper leash and batting numbers around a glorified three-dimensional spreadsheet in a computer translation that should have synthesized, not forklifted.

That five-of-10 is actually a hedge, by the way. For D&D fans who want to play an amazingly thorough PC translation of the system they’re carting around in book form, it’s proba-bly closer an eight or nine. But if, like me, you want less "rules for rule’s sake" and more depth and beauty to your simulated game worlds, you can certainly find more exciting prospects. Part of the reason we call them "the good old days" and think fondly of games past is that it’s always easier to love what we don’t have to play anymore."

I’ve spent some time with NWN2, and I have to say, I really agree with this guy. A lot of people are complaining that he mentioned Oblivion in his review, saying that he’s comparing apples to oranges. Well, no, the allusion to Oblivion was registering a complaint regarding the game’s graphical capabilities. Theoretically, the personal computer is the most powerful machine to play games on, capable of turning out unlimited potential for graphics, physics engines and miscellaneous drivers, but NWN2 looks no better than Fable, which was published in 2003, for the X-Box, which translates to PCs as kinda being on the lower end these days.

The environments are tiny, the plot is weak, and the rule set is tedious. If you’re a fan of this genre, for reasons that I can’t comprehend, you really are better off playing on a table top with some close friends. Or find a RPG forum and hold an IRC chat to get a game started online. There is absolutely no reason for NWN 2 to exist, and to be honest, I hope the game fails so that I won’t be tempted to blow time on something like it in the future.

The developer, Obsidian, basically rides the wind in Bioware’s sails. Bioware did an excellent job on Knights of the Old Republic, Obsidian followed up with KotOR2: a rushed-for-money campaign that improved the game in ways that modders for the original KotOR already had. BioWare did an excellent job on Neverwinter Nights, Obsidian followed up with Neverwinter Nights 2: a non-rushed-for-money campaign that improved the game in ways that modders for the original NWN already had. They aren’t "game developers," they’re industry professionals. They have yet to take a risk on an original IP, they’ve depended on name recognition. I don’t think they’re all that talented, and I’m going to rigidly oppress any more hype they spin on any future games, KotOR3 be damned.

As for all the shining reviews from GameSpot, IGN, etc. – well, this is a genre that panders to only a certain kind of gamer. Thirty something, nostalgic D&D addicts who just want one more fix.

Choose STR+4.

That’s exactly where most established and respected game reviewers sit in the internet pantheon. They seem completely unaware that a new generation with a completely different set of expectations is sneaking up behind them as they start to push forty. Reading positive reviews of this game was like listening to Abe Simpson wax rhapsodic about Matlock, or Nichele Nichols complain about being left out of a new Star Trek series. I know it hurts, but these people who forged the way through the birth of the internet are slowly becoming less and less relevant. They didn’t move up to management positions or move on to another job like people do in the "real world" job market. They stayed where they were and lost touch with their audience.

Another example of what happened here, where game reviewers forgot who they were recommending a game for, is with Ninja Gaiden. Tomonobu Itagaki is God to me. I love the Dead or Alive franchise, and I think everything Team Ninja touches turns to gold. Ninja Gaiden was a large, beautiful game that had enough diversity in fighting, platforming and boss battling to be a fun experience throughout – except for the difficulty level. It was insanely difficult. I’ve been playing games for eighteen years, and I had trouble getting halfway through the game. Meanwhile, all of the biggest review sites and magazines were hailing it as a game of the year candidate.

What does that say to thirteen and fourteen year old gamers?

The end result was that Ninja Gaiden’s sales soared, but only a few people who didn’t get frustrated with the game and give up actually played to its end – thereby getting their money’s worth. Between the sheer number of times a veteran like me died while playing the game, I’d say that I probably spent more time watching the loading screen and feeling rage building inside me than actually playing the game and getting my ass whooped. I’m sure people who were less skilled had a similarly rough time, and probably regretted the purchase.

The press failed in their duty to inform consumers in that situation, and this retraction of a negative review of NWN2 is equally spineless and despicable. Pulling a story because its inaccurate is justified, pulling a story because some nostalgic fanboys started whining is not. Now I’m off to go watch my original version Star Wars DVDs, wherein Han shoots first.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Getting the Hell to work ]