So I guess I have time to update this blog.

It’s kinda sad that the last time I updated this blog was about how my first job was shutting down. And now my current job just shut down. Yikes.

In the meantime, when I’m not sending out resumes and emails, and adding random updates, I’ll get around to finally finishing GTA4. 51.16% complete!

And just because, a video OldManGreen sent me:

Damn, I originally had a draft of this post that had me rambling about the closing of CGW, but that’s officially two weeks old. So, out with old content that never even got a chance to age. D’oh.

All I can offer up as an excuse is that I’ve been fairly busy lately.

This is the start of the E3 season. I hate how E3 has stretched from a week of gaming zaniness into a multi-month affair, with Editor’s Days that give you a preview of E3 shit, then the official Pre-E3 crap that’s going to hit in May (the hell? EA, Konami, Ubi, and Sega in the span of 3 days?!?!), and then the show itself. Blargh.

One nifty thing for recent times is that Dana and I hit up our old Ziff haunts for a “Very Special Episode of GFW Radio.” I pull a Jeff Green and retell that story about his slashed ear for the umpteenth time.

Funtimes were had at Karen and Patrick’s wedding. Caught up with various people, both those I haven’t seen in a while, and those that I saw a mere 36 hours earlier. Alanna was pretty well behaved, just a bit too enthusiastic with the photobooth. It was a bit weird that she totally got scared of the carousel. Also, the wedding was a chance for both Brad and I to finish off the Don’t Stop Believing sing-along that got cruelly cut off back in Vegas.

Though, at the time, to make up for shortened Journey in Vegas, we, along with the esteemed Jeff Gerstmann, ate at Fatburger at 4 in the morning. Man, I’ve always read Jeff’s stuff and did small talk with him at events, but actually sitting down at an ungodly hour while NOMNOMing on greasy-ass food and hearing crazy stories about Tom Byron and some fellow named Glenn was pretty awesome.

Speaking of that, I found a youtube of the best web animation in the universe. This is the animation that always cheers me up, even when stuff like CGW shutting down happened. I’m pretty sure this animation was made as some sort of post-9/11 therapy a week after the fact, I shit you not.

Anyone who asks (in person) or knows/worked with me long enough will know of my, er, interesting experiences with Tetsuya Nomura. With that in mind, that stupid headline is the closest you’ll get from me in terms of April tomfoolery.

I forgot exactly how I arrived at this subject, but I started wondering what exactly my California accent sounds like. Since I’m a native San Franciscan, I don’t have a concept of a Cali accent; I only notice non-CA accents. Unfortunately, I’m not a linguist, and my brain started leaking out of my nose and ears while trying to figure out this Wiki. I’m going to need to hit up my linguistical friends on translating this sorcerer’s brew. Or get my non-Californian friends to imitate my accent, and see how they perceive the words coming out of my mouth.

Work-wise, playing StarCraft II, C&C3, and W40K Dawn of War in a month’s time has completely ensnared me in the worlds of dirt-farming (and lack thereof) followed by random hotkeying and shrieks of little dudes killing other little dudes. I still think it’s funny that I’m actually pretty damn bad at RTS games, but possess enough knowledge to not sound totally ignorant when I write about them. Though, these games are both my stress relief for work issues, a great way to pass the time (like the crafter-of-shoes, I’m now jumping back into COH), and also screwing with the coordination skills needed to play an intensive action game for a story to be posted next week.

Cinema-wise, the only dent in the Netflix queue I’ve made is with Hitman. As you can expect, it’s not that good. Yea,the token love interest that redeems Agent 47 is pretty damn hot, and there’re some nice nods to the games, but otherwise, it was a mehverage assassin thriller that teeters between being actively terrible and merely existing. Timothy Olyphant is still awesome (his Seth Bullock is the definition of quiet, seething fury, and he was pretty great in Go as well), and it’s totally bizarre to see Desmond from Lost and T-Bag from Prison Break, both sporting terrible Russian accents.

I leave you with this awesome piece of celluloid composition from Hitman that made it all worth it:

When I’m not working or making sure Alanna is still alive, I (and Kristy) have been pounding on the new Boston pack. Hot damn, More Than A Feeling is now the Rock Band song of the forever. The other Boston songs rock as well, but nothing is as absolute as MTAF.

Jamming through those songs urges me to adopt my best “letter to the editor” voice and demand that the Rock Band DLC Gurus somehow secure more CCR (Fortunate Son isn’t enough, we need more!) and Journey. C’mon, pluck some stuff from Escape or something. Wouldn’t it be awesome to see play fake plastic instruments to this?

I remember this song growing up, but I didn’t officially love it until I heard it on some random flash video someone made right after September 11th. It did a damn good job of making me love America at the time. I’m not one of those bandwagon jumping fools who suddenly bought Don’t Stop Believing on iTunes after David Chase decided to use it to close out TEH SOPRANOZ.

Oh, and while I’m always wondering when Chairman Kim is going to lose it and start mucking shit up, I ran across a bizarre piece about China. The Chinese government is going to be using military hardware plus some crazy computer shit to make sure it doesn’t rain during the Olympics. Or, in other words, China has decided to, um, declare war on the sky. This will be something that I shall mock my Chinese friends over; I mean, that’s essentially crazier than even North Korea. Vietnam is pretty crazy, but I don’t read stories about how the Ho Chi Minh crew is going to blow the fuck out of the rain with artillery guns. But if you have a crazy story about modern ‘Nam (I already read about Tony Bourdain eating a live snake heart), feel free to pass them on.

Ever since the whole baby thing, my movie-viewing habits have changed drastically. No more hitting up LECINEMAZ once a week, if not more. I think the last movie I saw in the theatre for is Transformers. Yikes. Instead, I find myself continually behind the loop as I wait for the DVD (well, Blu-Ray) version; thankfully, the modern movie industry has turned the 6-9 month turnaround between theatre to home into something like three months instead. Anyhow, I found myself too busy with work shit to watch movies during the week, and on my three-at-a-time plan, I watched one movie each night over the weekend. Some capsule comments below: 

Superbad: Was kind of prepared, but not really, for how raunchy the dialogue was. It was damn funny at times, but at a whole crazier speed than stuff like Knocked Up or 40-Year-Old Virgin. I also thought the whole McLovin deal looked stupid in trailers, but it actually worked for me once I saw it. Also, bonus for the random 2 minutes of Pineapple Express. Seeing Harry Osborn talk about a cross-joint (“the apex of the vortex of joint engineering) designed by the guy who did the Golden Gate Bridge.

Rescue Dawn: I actually realized that I never seen any part of Werner Herzog’s catalog. I’ve heard of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but otherwise, I only know him as “that guy who uses Klaus Kinski a lot and did that movie about that guy with the grizzlies.” Rescue Dawn ends up to be a pretty spiffy prison escape movie, but in TEH NAM. The transfer was pretty nice, as the green leaves and crazy colors of (Thailand) TEH NAM jump out at you. One thing that I haven’t seen many reviews comment on (then again, I didn’t read a lot of reviews): I found some of the dastardly Laotians really funny. I’m not sure if I’m being insensitive, or if they’re supposed to be somewhat absurd humor breaks to relieve the tension, but by golly, I found them funny. Like the guy that looks like a young Itagaki, or the dude who just keeps on backflipping, or the dwarf. Also, Batman is in it. 

Atonement: Yup, pretty typical Miramax/Weinstein/Merchant-Ivory period fodder for Oscar grabs. Keira is still gorgeous, and the only other thing I’ve seen McAvoy in was Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe (no Last King of Scotland for me yet), and he was certainly an improvement over that. Solidly crafted, if a bit unremarkable for most of the running time. There’s a pretty awesome tracking shot in Dunkirk. There’s a specific aspect to the ending that is much better executed in the book (didn’t want to spoil things); if anything, it’s a clear difference of the sorts of narrative devices that a book uses over a movie. This is a pretty clear “adaptation of main stuff” type of deal, which can be good or bad depending on whether you think several pages of a girl spinning around on the field should be condensed into a three minute scene or not.

On a same, but different subject, I used to work with a guy that really liked fonts. At the time, I didn’t really give a shit about them. But I read some comment online about this book, and how it’s important that people who work in the publishing biz appreciate the shape and craft of the text being used to express their ideas. It’s actually a pretty good read, to me, at least.  

In that vein, this website I’ve never heard of recently did a mini-compilation of people using typography and dialogue to illustrate a scene from a movie. Rather than plagiarize the feature, I’ll just show a couple below, and you can look at the rest on your own.

From my favorite Coen bros movie (I haven’t seen No Country For Old Men yet though). I actually kind of like the scene with Jesus better, but I think this scene below is a better use of the whole typography motif:

From Fight Club, just because I like it, and there’s some clever stuff with font choice, positioning, and random icons/art:

Okay, I’m going to hit the sack so that I can wake up and download some pieces of awesome later. 

So I went to, and survived, a trip to Hotlanta. There was a lot of meeting and greeting. The immensity of both the CNN Center and the main Turner Campus was indeed awe-striking. I even had some grits (damn good ones! With scrimps!).

I didn’t take a camera with me, dumbass that I am, so the closest you can get to seeing some of the visual highlights of a tornado-wrecked Atlanta are at Jared’s Flickr. 

Quirky work-related tidbit: I recently reviewed a PSP game. Which is crazy, as I literally have not used my PSP in about a year. To wit, a certain Bradley Shoecrafter told a former co-worker of his that I opened the case to take out a game “for a review that was three jobs ago.” To be precise, the last game in my PSP was Monster Kingdom Jewel Summoner, which might have been my last review as a freelancer before I went to GameSpy. I actually didn’t even find the original charger, so I had to open my MGS Portable Ops PSP (hemp case, no snakeskin for me) to charge my normal one. Yowza.

Anyhow, the point of the story isn’t that I reviewed a good PSP game after a long while. The zany thing is that I don’t have a headphone adapter thingy for the PSP. Well, rewind a bit: I forget whether it’s the DS Lite, or the PSP, that needs a doohickey to plug headphones in. I’m inclined to think it was the PSP. Anyhow, since I didn’t think I could use headphones, I actually ended up plugging a pair (anyways) to the headphone jack on Delta.

If you didn’t know, Delta seats have this weird CD/MP3 jukebox dealio built-in. Then you build a playlist based on the albums that the plane has. My ipod was filled mostly with the new NIN album, and I wasn’t in the mood to listen to that. What I did instead was load up the John Fogerty disc.

So yea, instead of hearing that same FF battle theme, I was smacking fools and leveling up materia to shit like Proud Mary.

Anyhow, this entry is getting all sorts of stupid, so I’ll leave you with one last tidbit, my official Turner employee badge. Where the shadow lines up to make it look like I got some mullet action going on; where Kristy said that I look like a daylaborer thanks to the ’stache and fake mullet; where some computer in the Turner system spelled out my name as follows:

Yay, the main reason I got a PS3 has finally arrived. I cut up my PS3 box, filled out a form, made a shitty copy of a faded receipt, and sent the whole thing off to Texas in the beginning of January. About two months later…

I know the lighting is all sorts of shitty, so I’ll just run down a basic “why” list.

-Prestige: An honest-to-god damn good movie I actually wanted. Especially since I already have the Pirates of the Caribbean (in DVD, but I’d rather have a new blu and another copy)

-Full Metal Jacket: Another great movie. Special bonus is that it’s the recently-released remastered version, not the shitty original BD transfer.

-American Psycho: Kristy likes this movie, and I didn’t care about the other choices in its tier.

-The Patriot: Eh, reviews said it looked pretty, and it had Mel impaling some dude with the MURRKAN FLAG.

-Species: Natasha Henstridge drilling her tongue through some dude’s head in 1080p. Plus, look at the cast! Ghandi! Mr. Blonde! CSI Willows! Idi Amin! “Throw me the idol and I’ll throw you the whip” guy!

Meanwhile, the only games I’ve played are Uncharted, and the PS3 versions of Burnout Paradise and Army of Two that EA sent me. My Blu-Ray movie count is: these five, Sky High, Enemy of the State, Kung Fu Hustle, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Casino Royale, Open Season, Spider-Man 3, Ratatouille, The Rock, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner.

Yea, so I haven’t really been following the development of the Watchmen movie, only because I’m so, so scared of how it’ll turn out. Don’t read that as a lack of confidence, just an irrational fear of seeing what might happen to one of my favorite fictional works ever.

But man alive, look at the newest pictures.

I actually have some faith! Check out Comedian; it’s frightening that Denny from Grey’s Anatomy (quiet you, I watched it up until the current season) looks so spot-on right here:

You know, if Zombie Ralph Nader (don’t you try to dissuade me of his true nature) can rise from whatever plot of earth he’s been napping under and make a run for the presidency, then it’s time for us to use science and sorcery to raise up another candidate:

Zombie Teddy Roosevelt would totally be able to deliver the business to the political space.

Back when I was a dude living alone on the mean streets of University and San Pablo in Berkeley, I had what could lightly be termed a “shitty diet.” That is, a lot of potato chips, fried rice, and whatever the Foster’s Freeze across the street had for cheap.

Let’s talk today, where marriage/family have introduced me to something that my bachelor self would have loved: a slow cooker. I don’t even know how those things work, but by god, it’s magic. Just put your prep into it, turn it on, and it cooks itself over the day, ready to be eaten when you come home. Magic, I tell ya.

As an example, my past self would have loved my current lunch, which is leftover beef roast. All we did was buy like a two-pound hunk of beef, toss in some broth, carrots, potatoes, and seasoning, and let it do its thing over a day. It was super easy, and it resulted in a lunch that was just meat, carrots, and some oh-so-delicious and most likely health-hazardous juices. I should have taken a picture. Oh well.

I need to find some good slow cooker recipes. On a semi-related note, I’ve decided to snag The Perfect Scoop in order to make some QUALITIEICEDCREAMZ. Anyone know of a similar resource for slow cookery of both meat and non-meat items, gimme a holler.

I also just realized that the first two stupid entries were on a rare leap year occurrence. Too bad I didn’t think of anything more interesting to blog about on a tetralogical event.