i no longer own an xbox 1 or an n64.

i am thinking i will get rid of all of my master system shit next. i just got the boxes back for most of it. many of them are missing manuals and stuff, but why keep it? really. anything i want to play can be accessed by emulator or virtual console or sega ages.

seems sane.

any other systems make the cut? i pondered selling my dreamcast for like a week but then i looked at my dreamcast collection and was like "no, fuck that, i'm keeping it." i like it too much. maybe i should pare down a bit to get rid of some games i don't want, but sell? no.

i would like to get rid of my VCR but unless i can get those max headrooms converted to DVD then there is no way that is happening. and how do i do that? sigh. i also have all of the zillion (!!) tapes, mostly shrinkwrapped, bought from right stuf on clearance in 2002 when they found them in the back of the warehouse. and i still have all of my eva tapes. i really am just hanging onto those for sentimental reasons, but the sentmentality of hanging onto useless plastic oblongs can only last so long. i think they are going to fuck off to goodwill soon.

hrms. hrms. hrms. hrms. hrms.

bye, dell. that's its new temporary home in the giant pallet of donated computer equipment at goodwill.

six years ain't bad for a PC. windows XP really changed everything about upgrades. well, not windows XP alone, but its lifespan made it easy to avoid upgrading, and the fact that the web and word never got more demanding (hell, i never upgraded from word 2000) made life convenient.

anyway. the end.

so the cleaning and decluttering continues. today i hooked up my old TV in the living room on my old TV stand, which was sitting in the kitchen with a bunch of junk on it. we do not need a junk cart. the junk is getting sorted into various places (including, of course, the bin.)

today andrew and i woke up and headed over to rannie and david's to get lunch with them, and zak and lulu. that was fun. everybody's so coupled! except for me and andrew, obviously. i am ready to recouple, but i need to find someone. easier said than done.

i shipped out $500 - 600 worth of ebay crap yesterday, and carted a medium pile of shit to goodwill. now there's big item trash to arrange this week to get rid of broken chairs and electronics. and some stuff to move into my room now that i have space. the world is coming along.

i think as far as retro goes, all i'm going to hook up is my SNES. or maybe my famicom. maybe SNES and famicom, yeah. that sounds good.

so yes. life is becoming clean and organized and good. but unfortunately that's still also easier said than done. i have too much irregularly shaped shit or stuff that has no obvious method or means of storage. still figuring out.

and i've realized i will need to get yet a third desk to be satisfied, i think. old desk = too big. older, current desk = too small. i lose and ikea wins. perpetually. that's how they do.

i can't believe i now only own one computer and it's a macbook. how odd, and yet how pleasing.

At a nearby bus shelter, someone left a sticker on the bench that says, "JESUS: COMING SOON."

Below that, in marker: "I'd rather it was the bus."

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.

I drove down to West Virgina Thursday to hang out with Jess. I had such a good time. It was nice to kind of get away from everything around here for a few days. We did some fun pin up shots that I think turned out really well. I definitely think she's one of the coolest girls to hang out with and I hope I can see her again sometime in the near future. Here's one of my favorites from the shoot.

bri convinced me: i am going to write a book. 3 actually.

fuck

Iiiiiit's Crime-Fightin' Time!

Or Meme Time. Both involve reckless shooting and the tears of grieving mothers.

___

• Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.

• NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.

• They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.

• You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

( Behind the laughter broods a sad clown. )

These might be images that lay naked my thoughts, beliefs and dreams. Or they may just be a bunch of random crap I found in our 4chan folder. You'll never know.

veshy, I'll email you tonight. :D

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.

Hey! Let's do some prints! This'll be a preorder for the watchmen parody gunshow strips I did for a week. If these do well, maybe I should do other strips later on. I thought these would be good to start with.

Gonna print them on 8.5x11 glossy cardstock. Nice and easy for framing!! They will be signed and numbered (by me).
I'll let this go for about a week, then I will get them made and send them off. WOOOSH

First off, please add one of these to your cart

US-SHIPPING

INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING

PLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO ADD THE SHIPPING TO YOUR PURCHASE.
It's just a one time thing you need to add so its like a Flat Rate postage if you buy more than one of the strips.


Click on the image to take you to the strip.

35$

"Who Watches the Watchmen"

_______________________________________________

$25

"Rorschach's Day Out"

_______________________________________________

$25

"Who Washes the Washmen"

_______________________________________________

$35

"You're Locked Up in Here With Me!"

_______________________________________________

$40

"My Masterstroke"

If you have any other gunshow strips you would like to see made into nice prints, please let me know in the comments.

THANK U GOODNIGHT

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.

( HAAAAAAI MAJIDE! )

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.

Buncha celebrities singing "We Are The World" at the end of the Michael Jackson tribute:



A point my brother made on Facebook rings true: something about this video in particular really makes you realise that Jackson is dead, and he's not coming back.

I'm not naive. I don't think Jackson's planned "This Is It" tour would have re-spawned his career, certainly not on a "Thriller" level. He was just too fucked up, too controversial, and too much of a liability (his album production costs were far beyond the profit margin). When Jackson died, one news site made mention of the fact Jackson was so effed, he had no idea how many shows he was putting on for "This Is It." The official count was 50, but Jackson thought he was only doing ten.

But in spite of everything the dude has and hasn't done, I can't help but notice how thoroughly his music has brought the world together. Even in a city like Toronto, where countless races mingle at any given minute, music is a polarising force. But today, there's a Michael Jackson tribute going on in every corner of the world, and it's attended by whites, blacks, Asians, natives, and Martians.

Michael's music vaulted above and beyond racial barriers. Most musicians have a hard time accomplishing that today. In the '80s, despite pioneers like Elvis and The Clash, it was almost unheard of.

I also remember how my grade 5 teacher would make us sing "We Are The World" all the freakin' time, but the dude couldn't carry a tune or play a guitar to save humanity, and he took us all down with him. It was so fucking tragic.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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