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| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 |
ferricide
|
11:08p |
ADD
i would never have been accused of having ADD. or ADHD. or, well, you know. but my attention span really has been shot to shit, as i noticed. today at work was so hard to stay focused and get anything done, and i actually forgot to do a "must do" item. it's not a major emergency (should be able to get it done tomorrow AM) but it's a fucking bother. i sat down to play FF13 for the first time since before vacation today and i could NOT stay interested. nothing wrong with the game; i just found myself wanting to jump away and do something else. check twitter! check the TV! argh! so i just forced myself to play and after about 25 minutes i was into it, and thne played for a good hour + with no issues. o_O what is wrong with me at least i turned this nervous energy into cleaning my room up. i fully unpacked and put everything away, sorted shit out, and put up my 2010 calendar (yotsubato.) hoorayz |
ferricide
|
2:28p |
O_O
i have begun to realize that my attention span is shot to shit, and that's causing a lot of my problems with actually enjoying life and getting shit done at work. i never want to sit down in front of a game anymore because, simply, i know i'm going to be there for a while. the weird thing is that when i'm actually interested in what i'm paying attention to, i don't have major attention span problems. at work, it manifests as an inability to get a single task finished before dicking around with something else. sometimes i catch myself thinking, "wait, did i finish that?" and then realizing, no, i didn't. ughhhhhhhhhhh |
chrisrawkneri
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12:00p |
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| Monday, January 4th, 2010 |
ferricide
|
11:14p |
so
tonight has been fun. i have 1. been tired 2. eaten a lot of cake 3. freaked out for no reason seriously. i am so fucking tired! what happened. second night in a row of playing zero FF13. wish i had, i guess? i ended up sort of like watching tiny bits of dr. katz in between using the computer, since i dunno how to pay attention to two things at once. i can't write a blog post while watching TV! then i won't hear the TV. that's pointless. really what's been bugging me a LOT is the melting pot that is my facebook friends list. this after i put down "stop worrying about irrelevant shit" (more or less) on that giant list i made. and now i'm thinking: i have to spend tons of time organizing everybody on facebook into CRAZY LISTS so i can restrict their access to things. what things? i'm not sure! what lists? i don't know! who are these people? some of them are total strangers! what is facebook for? i'm not sure! neurotic neurotic. |
ferricide
|
12:41p |
FUCK YOU
by "you" i mean just about anybody who sells bagels in california. i had a real bagel in chicago. i had forgotten what they were like. jesus. they're crunchy and beautiful on the outside, and chewy and flavorful on the inside. the worst thing about california is that sometimes the bagels aren't cooked all the way so that when they toast they brown. but you can't always get them toasted -- often you're buying them from a stand in the airport or whatever. so it's like, oh great, a semi-raw bolus of dough. fuck you people! i've long been aware that californians can't do bagels or pizza right -- it's something i've known since i've moved here. sometimes, though, you can find a pretty authentic pizza, or you can find really good pizza that's good despite the fact that it's inauthentic. but bagels? no. the bagels here are so lame. i eat them all the time but it's been so long since i had a real one. and then i remember what i'm missing... and of course, egg rolls. i'm sure that east coast style egg rolls are not authentic chinese cuisine, but they deserve to be. west coast egg rolls use spring roll skins, are small, and filled with mucous. |
freakservo
|
1:58p |
Setting The Bar Low For The High Horse
Nothing greets your day like being reminded that developers can be simple-minded idiots. Exhibit A is Sega moving away from making M-rated games for the Wii. And the game that convinced them to make this move: Dead Space Extraction. A game Sega didn't even make. Oh, but Sega has their own reasons, right? Madworld and House Of The Dead: Overkill didn't sell well. Maybe there isn't a market for M-rated games on the Wii... ...Or maybe these games weren't good to begin with!! Let's face it, Madworld was overhyped and overrated, and impaling some guy in the face with a signpost can only be fun for so long! And Overkill? Sega, repetitive F-bombs do not a good M-rated game make! Maybe when you can get your heads out of your asses and realize what you're doing wrong, you can actually start making better SONIC games! Okay, yeah, MadWorld was a Platinum Games title, I'll admit, but far as I know they haven't said anything about the Wii not being a viable platform for violent games....They're too busy fixing their own gameplay issues and polishing their next IP in the form of Bayonetta! Besides...What the hell was No More Heroes? A stylized tech demo? Guys, refusing a genre to a system because it didn't meet your expectations is giving up, and any excuse you have to stop trying...from failed sales to just plain poor game design...is not our fault! It's yours, because YOU'RE the ones depriving us of the genre in the end! A...am I making any sense here? Maybe I'm not seeing it from a business perspective, but as a business I don't think I'd sit down and tell an interviewer "Yeah, we're not doing X anymore because our fans failed us, not because we didn't put out a good product". Putting the blame on others...FUCK you, Sega! Okay, on to exhibit B...Most of you haven't heard of Tales Of Tales, but they're an indie developer whose best-known work was "The Graveyard" - an artistic 'game' about an old woman who walks through a graveyard, sits on a bench, listens to some bizarre old-country folk music, and then....for the kind donation of five US dollars... DIES. Yeah, that's a nice sentiment: Death is unavoidable, and greed is as certain as death and taxes. Great message. Y'know, I already have enough personal issues to have a GAME remind me just how much life is a fleeting, depressing nonsense! Oh, but it gets better. The person responsible for such macabre games is supposedly leaving videogames, upset that they're latest project didn't become a finalist in this year's Independent Games Festival. He then predicted 2010 to be a boring year for indie games. That's nice. "Indie games are gonna suck because mine wasn't voted. I'm taking my ball and going home!" This is the message I saw, anyway. And to say 2010 is going to be a boring year for indie games....That's already quite a large jump, isn't it? We're not even four days into the new year....and VVVVVV comes out on the 10th. Oh yeah, I'm crying tears of boredom already. It's been my experience that good indie games happen pretty damn randomly, and you're never going to know when the next big thing hits. Nobody even heard of Cave Story or La-Mulana until they were translated. Just in the last two days alone we got ArGeeBee, a tough, but fascinating combination of platforming, puzzle-solving, and RPG! Sounds crazy? Try it out for yourself. Point is, you can't predict something that has been, for as long as I've remembered it, largely unpredictable. Aren't we going to be getting Super Meat Boy and Fez soon? Have they been considered 'boring'? Hold thy tongue lest your bite it off. But what do I know? I'm not an indie developer, I don't follow the network 24/7. Maybe they have special crystal ball programs designed in GameMaker. From a sidelines perspective, however, you really can't make a prediction if you yourself aren't sure what will happen in the days and months to come. Who knows; Maybe pixel may actually climb out of the woodwork and show us his next new game! It's anyone's guess. Bottom line is, good riddance to the most depressing man in indie game development. Your greedy attempts at 'art' will not be missed. Not by me, anyway. Maybe you can try selling your 'art' to the Smithsonian. Jackass. Okay, I feel better now. I really needed to get that stuff off my chest. Some people should just keep their mouths shut and try to make a better product instead of passing the blame off to someone else. If Tim Burton gave up on making movies after the failure that was Planet Of The Apes, we would've never gotten Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd. For all the fawning Shigeru Miyamoto gets, he never once mentioned how Yoshi's Story deterred him from making Super Mario Galaxy. ... Alright, I'll stop now. |
chrisrawkneri
|
12:00p |
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fiercepancake
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10:40a |
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| Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 |
chrisrawkneri
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12:00p |
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| Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 |
echoboom
|
10:00p |
it is incredibly difficult to trim hair off your forearms and make it even and neat. lets just say the left arm hair is longer than the right one. oh LA, what have you done to me... its like my right arm is gay.. shit. Current Music: Citi Soleil -Afghan Whigs |
ferricide
|
1:49p |
chicago and grand rapids photos
 grand rapids and chicago photos are up. i have a couple of chicago photos on my real camera, which i almost never use anymore. i really wish i had it the day i was wandering around downtown chicago taking snapshots, though. i never think about it anymore -- the iPhone is good enough most of the time. but there are definitely times where i regret not having it on hand, and this is one of them. |
ferricide
|
1:26p |
sitting in ohare
security was empty and more or less unconcerned with my existence. checkin was also empty, but despite that, i somehow was the victim of some screw-up with my ticket and had to use e-upgrades to get into business class or i would have been crammed into a middle seat in the back of the plane. um, no. well, it'll be nice, and i guess probably come with dinner. and my headphones, which i bought in april, are the victims of a dying plug. i've suspected this for a while, but the extent of my attempt to fix it will be trying to shore it up with duct tape. i assume it's actually relatively easy to just snip and replace the headphone jack, but i don't know how to do it. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tresch? to back up a bit, randy and i arose a little bit late and after showering and packing, we went with will to get dim sum at a place near will's which he'd never tried before. it was not bad. they had the interesting tactic of swarming anybody who sat down with all of the carts at once. kind of odd. yesterday, we just sat around and recovered from new years eve, in various states of hungover. randy and i got up around 2, i guess, and went out around 6, to meet up with my friend hyacinth who lives in chicago. we got dinner and drinks and had a really long, entertaining conversation. good thing. i didn't get to see a lot of the chicagoans or travelers (my lunch plans with tim rogers disintegrated, i ended up not going out the night before NYE so i didn't get to see patrick klepek, and i had jennanemone's number, but didn't really have a chance to make a connection) but overall it was a nice trip. i do feel like i'm a bit traveled out for awhile, though i do have to go to pennsylvania in about two weeks -- a trip i am pretty much just dreading. now: almost 2 hours to go in ohare. well, that's why i have iPod, books, and a laptop, i suppose. |
chrisrawkneri
|
12:00p |
|
divamanda23
|
10:20a |
Happy new year!
First of all, happy birthday to my best friend, mskitty23. It is a treasure to have her as a friend. Also, the year is not starting on a good note, when I find myself laughing at SpongeBob SquarePants. Apparently this is the year that my brain totally leaves the building. And WOO HOO! I get to see lillbet this month! It will be great to spend some time with her while she is here for Sundance!! Maybe we will even get to dine with the adorable rastaban43! |
| Friday, January 1st, 2010 |
chrisrawkneri
|
12:00p |
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fiercepancake
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9:45a |
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| Thursday, December 31st, 2009 |
ferricide
|
5:42p |
|
freakservo
|
8:07p |
Just Saying, Is All....
Still four hours to go 'round these parts, but I'd still like to send a 'Happy New Year's' to everyone. 2010...To think that Super Mario Bros. 3 happened over 20 years ago... I still remember when I bought my import copy. Y'know...before Squaresoft made importing such a big deal in the 90s... *Eyes copy of Seiken Densetsu 3, shakes head* Man...what we were forced to miss out on back then...Right, Mother 3? Okay, enough of that. Talk to y'all again next year! |
ferricide
|
4:44p |
some weird meme i am making up
i think i did something like this last year but since i don't want to hew to any previously devised formula, i am just going to glance over the blog posts from every month of 2009 and try to synthesize some reflection on whatever the fuck was going on. this is for my own brain more than it's for anybody else, but it might be entertaining. let's see! i am just doing this via subjects, so let's see what catches my eye... january: egm went to its death. i finished crisis core and moved onto FF7. somehow those both seem like two of the most interesting things in 2009. i didn't like many games in 2009 very much, as we are all well aware by now, and i am realizing that is permanent and is actually a major part of my interest on getting into making them. i mean, i think i maybe just have grown beyond playing them. the way i am feeling about the game industry can be (a little bit) summed up by this: i have been thinking about assassin's creed 2 and i can't think of a reason to be interested in it. on one hand it is an amazing achievement on technical levels (and maybe artistic levels!) on the other hand i can't imagine why i wouldn't just put the $60 i could spend on it into a jar as a starter fund on airfare to venice instead. i made a list of my five favorite songs. like, ever. this will never work but those things are fun. february: i got extremely drunk in vegas. 2009 was the year i got bored with getting drunk. i guess it was a good run (2002 to 2009!) i don't have a lot of regrets about drunken behavior (that's probably relatively novel for a human being) but i have sort of mini regrets about what could have easily gone a lot wronger if i weren't so lucky or so surrounded with helpful friends (and strangers!) never forget: the pepsi ratio is aesthetic geometry. retro game challenge was by far my GOTY. nothing even comes close. it was borderline idyllic, and until FF13 came along, the only time i played games in 2009 the way i think of playing games: just pouring myself into it. i can't play games in dribs and drabs; they need to consume me or i'm not satisfied. march: gamasutra became like a fact of life. the last job to do that was gamespy. gamesradar and GMR never got there. the former sucked too much and i always knew i would quit sooner or later. the latter just didn't last long enough. not sure when it did, but the fact that it redesigned while i was there seems factoidy. my 2 year anniversary was in august, making gama the official longest place i've ever worked. i replayed ys I & II and it was awesome. still pretty much my favorite game ever. i took hundreds of screenshots and never did anything with them really. in fact i think my GOTY list for 2009 really reads like: 1. retro game challenge 2. ys I & II 3. FF13? 4 - 10. TBD i bought a mac and it's nice but it has problems and i don't want to be a fucking mac person. i am not into cults of personality and i am going to buy a win 7 desktop in 2010, for work-at-home purposes. GDC was fucking awesome. looking back at my posts about it, i am looking forward to GDC 2010 so much. i need to meet people this year! april. i went to japan again and the trip was this bizarre mixture of awesome and terrible. day to day and even hour to hour ratings went from like 10/10 to 1/10. nuts. i was lonely and bored and together and ecstatic. and i was a mess because my tonsils were the size of beachballs and i couldn't breathe or sleep. may. i had my tonsils out early in the month. this fucking sucked so much. but it was worth it. and my mother came out to CA for the first time in years to nurse me, and i realized i had to come out to her, but i didn't (for more on that we'll come back in like, october?) i had a shitload of fun following idol obsessively with raymond. i wish we still lived together -- but can the show possibly top glambert and iraheta? no way. i played a ton of star ocean 4 thereby ensuring that 2009 was the Year Of Disappointing games. other pieces of shit i wasted varying amounts of time on include killzone 2 and bionic commando. june. this is the month i started to go insane with stress, i think. i had a stressful year. every month brought something new. i made the decision to not go to the london blur reunion show in july, which was sound but sucked sucked sucked. i am still mixed about that. my birthday is in june. 32 in 2009. i got together with randy over my birthday weekend and it was incredible -- the most romantic experience of my life. but we didn't get together officially till august. i got rid of my XP box and so far i haven't liked that decision much. the macbook is totally great as a computer for main use, power wise, but i don't like not having a home base. it's like living out of a suitcase. i need a bedroom. july. i started wearing jeans again after a decade. okay! august. i wrote an editorial on shadow complex which i would easily describe as the most significant thing i've ever written profesionally and may become the defining moment of my career. which seems odd on some level. i got together with randy and came out to my mom pretty much simulatenously. i think if you take all three of these things together this is the point in 2009 where my brains started to liquify and leak out of my ears. september. i flew to michigan to be with randy and it was idyllic -- the early days of relationships are so fucking amazing it's not hard to understand why lots of people throw themselves right back into them whenever they break up. the hard part is continuing to make it work, as i have discovered. it's not easy, and it's not idyllic, and it involves getting to actually know the person you're dating at a level consummate with your intimacy level, which given that the person is essentially a stranger when you get together is not easy. i saw rannie for the last time. i went from GDC austin to tokyo with one day in between. my brains continued to drip out of my ears, and i started to notice. october. rannie died. seriously, nothing can compare to this, even my trip to shanghai. it was the defining moment of 2009, which sounds fucked up given that randy is here and alive. and he's doing his best, and has consistently done his best. life and death, e'er intertwined. the defining theme of 2009 is that i realized that i am an adult. rannie's death isn't the entirety of why. being with randy isn't the entirety of why. coming out to my mom isn't, either. a lot went into it. those were some of my clues, though. hikaru utada hikaru utada hikaru utada. november. i was down at the bottom of a fucking well. i started to realize some of what i needed to do to get out, though. i think getting my rockman 3 box framed is like accidentally symbolic, in retrospect: freezing the way i felt about games at the moment where i was forced to confront that you can't go back home and things need to pivot. i need to become creative, not consumptive, in other words, and i am realizing that more and more. and i am starting to face up to it. that began in november. i mean let's face it. FF13 is kind of an anomaly in that it both continues contemporary design philosophies and is in step with current prodcution values yet interests me in a direct lineage from the old days. watch me struggle with a remake of one of my FAVORITE FUCKING GAMES. watch me not care about modern warfare 2 or not even really do a convincing job of pretending to. &c. mmm, gravy. december. hey that's now! for the first time in ages i gave a shit about christmas, because it was both cold in san francisco and because i had someone to share it with. which i did, just a few days ago, and which was fantastic. more becoming an adult: stepping into your own way of celebrating the important things. i dunno, this is all fresh so i don't have much more to say. my friends who live in japan and europe are already in 2010. so hi guys, i'll be there soon! just ahead of the californians. |
ferricide
|
3:56p |
things i want to do in the 2010
these aren't resolutions, or even goals. they are things i want to do. - travel somewhere that i have never been - learn to make and start to make games - move - continue to build my relationship with randy - read more - internet less, or rather, take back some control over it - eschew tunnel vision, learn to see things in a bigger picture sense - trust my gut more (just to reiterate that) - stop buying shit the way i buy shit, but instead, buy shit only after i've thought about it - pay off my CC debt and - save more money - not be as distractable - stop feeling guilty about not giving a shit about games either (a) the way i used to or (b) the way i feel like i am supposed to as a Serious Journalist, it's another example of trying to live up to nonexistent ideals - deal with my mother and my father and coming out in an effective way that leaves everyone with the least emotional damage - stop dreading everything - not worry about things like airline mileage programs, AT&T, apple, JP Morgan Chase or other corporate irrelevancies - figure out if there is any way to participate in the political process on any level meaningfully - not bow to the zeitgeist. fuck the zeitgeist. but - harness and exploit the zeitgeist when it's on my side - get in on the ground floor of something - figure out more and better ways to use my facility with language, i.e. less glib, more meaningful - realize that putting something to the side for right now is not abandoning it - see the medium and long term and not just Right Now - don't become a curmudgeon, but don't feel pressure to stay with the times either - have more sex - keep moisturizing my hands, they're dried out! - buy the TNG box instead of getting cable, once i've moved - keep working on my ideas, find a process for getting around creative walls instead of running into them - not feel bad about limiting my infovore tendencies, i can't pay attention to everything - realize my limitations are not defeats, they're just my limits - tighten up the graphics on level 3 - stop being so fucking negative, jesus - not worry about whether or not i need to get rid of shit. it's here now and it's easy to get rid of it and it's easy to not - sausage soup - cat? - accept that it's often serendipity, not intent - on the other hand, effort works - remember: symbols aren't the thing they symbolize - get better at getting up and getting to work on time. i mean, jesus- develop my time organizational scheduling skillz, i am predisposed to this, but also extremely moody - maybe go back to therapy? - care less about what people think about me. this also means putting less effort into my image (haha) - that's online (mental) image; put more effort into my physical image because i'm enjoying it - comfortable chair, reading lamp - europe! - make the most of what i've got, not worry about what i don't - eat at home more - take care of stuff instead of ignoring it! that hasn't worked out great - communication communication communication |
ferricide
|
3:03p |
i don't do the resolutions thing.
but i think if i have a goal, it's to listen to my gut, more. i tend to overthink things dramatically and can convince myself into and out of any decision a million times before i make it. but i have to listen to my gut more. so, i'm going to move out of san francisco in the new year. it's what i want. if it doesn't work out, i can always move back. |
chrisrawkneri
|
12:00p |
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| Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 |
ferricide
|
8:09p |
hang on hang on!
my last post obviously came over way more down on lj than i am. i actually love lj and want it to never go away. i love having a place for my thoughts, feelings, insights, and game posts. there's nowhere else for that. like i said, fb and twitter are blips. fb is starting to just full-time annoy me, kind of, because of the weird mix of people i have on there. i am not sure what to do about it and i'm kinda ignoring it for now. the problem, not fb. i use it off and on, but fairly on. anyway, lj is awesome. i just feel like writing The Rundown of My Day is not a place where lj excels, but it is a place where twitter excels, and in fact i think surpasses, because you just get the chosen highlights (complete with at-the-time pictures.) in fact, if you want to know what i am up to, i recommend you just check in on my twitter sometimes. you don't need to sign up, you don't need to respond, but you can find out what is going on -- really quickly! -- by checking there. |
ferricide
|
4:37p |
chic
today was a bit of a chicago adventure. i had caribou coffee for breakfast and chicago pizza for lunch. i bought some CDs and a scarf. it's cold. i can see why people are leaving LJ for things like FB and twitter. updating your step-by-step life isn't as much fun in retrospect as it was at the time. nor are these posts fun to read, are they? i find myself mostly motivated so i can look back at this later and remember what i was doing. the "journal" in livejournal is coming to the fore more than it used to. which is okay; and i still do love to blog. and where else would i post about FF13? or my real thoughts, as twitter and FB don't really cater too much to more than blips? but... - rental car return - caribou coffee - walk through downtown - CDs and scarf buying adventures - tim cancelled our lunch plans after i'd waited 30 minutes -- i.e. 30 mins after he was supposed to be there - pizza - train back i could make a real effort and add all sorts of color and texture to that bullet pointed list. but then you'd be met with a wall of text. who wants that? |
misseianna
|
3:34p |
First the cake...now on to enchiladas :)  |
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