Wordpress Update

… seems to have broken a pretty good amount of my Japanese posts. I’m too far removed from any Japanese readers to care, honestly. ごめん、な。

You’ve Got Your Reasons, I’ve Got No Reasons Now

I don’t know what they are, but I’m sure you have them. I’d say the most likely is just simple ignorance. You’ve had no exposure to LoveLikeFire[lovelikefire.com], and that’s why you’re not listening to them. Well, now you’ve read this and hopefully my April Post as well, so that excuse is just not going to fly anymore. In that case, here are a few other available reasons:

• You are dead.
• You are deaf.
• You are old, and don’t like any music recorded after the death of Elvis.
• You suck.

Friday night, Andrew[goviolet.com] and I rolled from Orange County out to a venue neither of us had ever heard of[bootlegtheater.com], having been alerted to a LoveLikeFire show via their Facebook page[facebook.com]. The venue was quite small and sort of… homespun, but once the band took the stage with an unreleased song, neither of us cared. We took in their short, 35-minute set happily and then spoke with the members briefly before leaving (it was already past midnight by the time they were off stage). In addition to being wonderfully talented, they were all quite friendly and happy to chat. Unfortunately, part of our conversation centered around the fact that the recording industry is in such a state now that they may end up self-releasing their album in the States instead of trying to release it through a major label. I’m sure you’re wondering why I would care, since I’m clearly not the biggest fan of the music industry’s machinery. The answer is simple: exposure. They need it.

And that’s why I’m trying to give it to them. Click on a couple of those links and listen a few of their tracks. You won’t be disappointed. Spread the word, get this great band heard. And I’ll be served by them continuing to make music for me to enjoy.

The Wire, Tangled

Late last year, I ran across a fantastic sale on The Wire[metacritic.com], which is widely considered to be one of HBO’s finest shows (or the best, if you don’t have Sopranos blinders on). My life being obscenely busy so far this year, I just cracked it open last night for the first time. “Man, they just throw you right in to the middle of everything, don’t they?” I thought. It was an exciting way to start things off, if a bit overwhelming.

While putting the disk away, the reasons behind the show’s initial complexity became clear. I have since penned the following open letter to HBO.

Dear HBO.

I love your truly professional and eye-catching package design on The Wire. I was, however, distressed to find that the disk immediately accessible when opening the first season is, in reality, the fifth and final disk of the season. In addition, the disks are packaged in such a way that the only visible text when you look at this disk is ‘Season One’. This lead to a very confusing viewing of the second-to-last episode as my first exposure to the series. Please bear my experience in mind when designing your next special edition packaging.

Sincerely,
Joseph

Not Yet

I didn’t get the level design position I applied for (although it seems I was one of the better applicants), as someone already on the development team who had industry experience applied as well. There’s always next time.

ナミちゃんお誕生日おめでとう！ / The April Post

もうすぐ誕生日カードを出すよ！おめでとう！

Somehow my endless parade of new hobbies has reduced my posting frequency to approximately once a month. April, here I am. I'll take this opportunity for a quick life update. In no particular order.

• My family vacation where my father and sister visited in March was a blast. We had a whirlwind week: San Francisco, Yosemite, Sequoia National Park, Santa Monica, Universal Studios Hollywood, San Diego Zoo. Dad and I even managed to sneak in a Nashville Predators game.
• Interested in the photos of my vacation? The promised shots from my time in Ireland[muchlessthanthree.com]? Well you’ll be happy to know that they are available on my deviantArt page[deviantart.com], along with a metric ton of other stuff.
• There’s a fantastic band out of San Francisco called LoveLikeFire[lovelikefire.com]. Give them a few listens and chances are you’ll fall in love with them, just as I have. They have a new album called Tear Ourselves Away that is dropping this summer, and the mp3 fairy tells me it’s well worth your money and time. Check out the awesome video for the first single, ‘William’.
  
• An enormous amount of my free time is still being dumped into my Team Fortress 2 map, which now has the working title of CTF-Standoff (official home[levelwon.blogspot.com]). It should be going beta in June, but I have recently drawn up some promotional images (below), because…
  
• I’ve just applied for another level design position. It’s at my current company, on a very prestigious project, so wish me luck! I had my first interview already, and I feel that it went fairly well.

Stay tuned next month for another exciting episode!

The Inevitable March of Technology

I’m a bit of a tech whore. I know, I know – hardly a surprise. I love following the latest developments… I’m an idealist at heart and love it when someone breaks through a barrier and produces something impossible. That said, even I can’t see how OnLive[venturebeat.com] can work well. For those who’ve not heard of it yet, it’s basically a service where the game input from your computer (or a dumb console they will sell) will be transmitted over your internet connection to the OnLive servers, where the game is run. The servers then stream you back an audio/video feed of the game output. Unless they plan on hosting several of these servers on every ISP’s local network (which would hardly be cost effective) I can’t see them overcoming the very real lag issues inherent in that model. I notice if my Playstation 2 games have the tiny amount of lag introduced by being upscaled on my HDTV. Sometimes even that is enough to make me want to quit playing. Maybe if all the games are turn-based strategy or board games?

The ever interesting Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality has a post[dubiousquality.blogspot.com] that mentions another very interesting problem that must be surmounted – how “spike-oriented” such a service would have to be. It seems that most people who play games would most likely play the latest game the day it is released, finish it in a week or so and then never play it again. That’s hardly a fun consumer model to tackle with the proposed service, as Bill notes. Not that any of this will affect my hardware purchasing habits much, I suspect. I’ll always need a beefy machine to do level design. It’s a hella interesting idea nonetheless, and I’m excited to see how it pans out. Word is that we’ll see the service launch sometime this year.

For any tech savants out there, I’m still waiting for the time machine to let me travel 25 years in the past so I can marry 1984 Cyndi Lauper. Make that happen, and you’ll have me for life.

They say I better get a chaperone / Because I can’t stop messing with the danger zone

My Filthy Secret

I’ve been listening to Chris Cornell’s nearly[rollingstone.com] universally[blender.com] panned[spin.com] (and apparently, even embarrassing[twitter.com/trent_reznor]) new Timbaland-produced album Scream[metacritic.com] quite a lot, and I really like it.