Rolling Thunder has arrived
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
My old roomie Ethan introduced me to this awesome move called Rolling Thunder. That’s right. Tommy Lee Jones.
Unfortunately it’s not available on DVD, and every attempt I have made to snag a copy has failed for some reason or another. Until now. Look what came in the mail:
Awww jeah.
Halo 3 one-line review
Posting has been light partly because of my shiny brand new Xbox 360. I haven’t had one in my home for about four months now, and the return of next-gen console gaming has been glorious.
Halo 3 is, however, a disappointment to me. It’s basically the same as the previous two games. Here’s my one-line review:
why they changed that button I do not know. That was gloriously stupid of them.
Going back home
I’ve noticed that in the criminal absence of in-flight wi-fi connections, a lot of people are starting to write blog posts while they’re on the plane and then post them later when they get home. I’m doing that now as I sit on my flight between Phoenix (an airport with free wi-fi) and SeaTac (one without—get with it, Seattle!).
I’ve also just finished catching up on a good 3-400 blog entries. While I was stopped over in Phoenix I used Google Gears to pull an (apparently random) sample of blog posts down to my hard drive so that I could cruise through them on the flight.
So between Google Gears and TextEdit, I’m pretty well set up for the flight.
I also finished reading Steve Martin’s “memoir” Born Standing Up. It has an excellent title, and is a very easy read. I’m sure the traveling helps, but I don’t normally go through 200 pages in two days.
Steve Martin has been one of my favorite comedians, if not my favorite comedian, for a very long time. I am, however, a big believer in “passive research.” Passive research involves me sitting around and waiting for interesting fact to find their way into my head of their own accord.
Which explains why most of what I learned about Martin’s career and work in this book was completely new to me.
I won’t claim that I was any good at it, but I had a short-lived stint doing stand-up comedy in two or three coffee shops and comedy clubs. There are some things from his experiences that I find similar to my own, and plenty more that were completely alien to me. I found it fascinating, and if you have any interest in Steve Martin in particular, or stand-up comedy in general, I think you’ll find it a good read.
In any case, I’m rambling, which I assume is something that Just Happens on planes. I’ll be home soon, and it’ll be good to be back.
Quote
From Steve Martin, in Born Standing Up
Merry Christmas
As I write this it’s 12:30 am in Texas, which makes it Christmas morning (technically).
For me, Christmas has always meant my younger brother waking our entire family up at 6am so that we can stare groggily while he unwraps presents at speeds that make Speedy Gonzalez look like Regular Gonzalez.
I’m also not the type to try and figure out what my presents are before I open them; for me the surprise of finding out is almost as important as what it is I’m unwrapping.
But beyond the presents, Christmas here in Texas means spending time with my whole immediate family, my grandmother, and my cousins. It’s going to be a great day.
I hope yours is just as awesome, whether you’re celebrating Christmas or not.
To that end, I leave you this (just audio, really):
Halfway Across the World
A couple of years ago I spent a semester studying abroad in Brighton, England.
It was a very defining experience in my life, but it was that way for a myriad of reasons that are nearly impossible to count up and put together.
While I was there I took some time to write a piece of “creative nonfiction” about my time there. It’s called Halfway Across the World.
And because I’m on a “I’m playing with InDesign” kick (which I’ll explain later), I’ve laid it out in a PDF which you can download. I’m reasonably proud of it.
The writing, not the layout ;)
Cool Disqus feature: “delete”
For a while now I’ve been using a comment system called Disqus. Although there are a few good reasons not to be using it, especially if you’re overly worried who Google thinks your content belongs to, there are still a lot of reasons to use it.
One of those reasons is that when you get a new comment, you can set the system up to e-mail you, which you can then reply to. The body of your message back becomes a comment in response.
A few days ago, I got a different type of e-mail in my inbox. Note the cool “delete” feature.
NOTE: This message has been flagged as spam. You may respond with “Delete” to delete this message or “Approve” to approve this message. You may also respond with your response to automatically approve the post and post your response at the same time.
joeyy (unregistered) wrote:
[ some spammy crap ]
Way cool.
Good movies around Christmas
You gotta admit, they put a lot of good movies on TV during Christmas time.
Staying with Grandmother
My family and I are staying with my Grandmother for Christmas this year. It’s going to be a great vacation because we’ve got most of the family in one place for the first time in a long time.
My sister has been either at Dartmouth or in England since last June, so it’s good to see her again, too.
I’m staying in what I dubbed “the outhouse” on my last visit. I called it the outhouse because a year ago, it had no bathroom. It’s an old “guest room” type setup that’s disconnected from the main house. Apparently it had the plumbing for a bathroom, but nobody had bothered to install it. So I called it the outhouse.
Just about three days ago, they finally finished putting in a bathroom.
The room is furnished with a bed, an old writing desk, and a Sony trinitron that’s seen about as many years as I have. It is, in it’s own way, very charming.
As much as I’m hooked in to technology, movies, and the internet, it’s kind of nice to stay in a room that doesn’t have (and doesn’t really need) a wall-mounted swivel HDTV with a media center extender and some crazy satellite uplink to the pentagon. It’s refreshing.
I suppose it’s sad that this is probably my modern Thoreau-ean experience in the woods. But I look forward to having a house where my bedroom isn’t also my office. Or even just my computer room. I want a bedroom that’s got a bed, a nice reading chair, and maybe a TV. No desk. No computer.
Just a bedroom. I think that’s very cool.
Jason Calacanis says: CIGNA sucks
Have you heard about the 17-year old girl who died recently?
http://www.calacanis.com/2007/12/21/cigna-kills-nataline-sarkisyan/
The thing about health insurance is that they’re in the business of not spending money, but the whole point of insurance is to have someone who will spend money.
It’s an irreconcilable opposition in goals, and this is a problem.
In this case, CIGNA has a problem because it’s a PR disaster. In general, all insurance probably has the same problem.
If the doctors come together and decide that their patient needs a transplant, you give her the effing transplant.
That’s why we have DOCTORS, so they can decide what patients do and don’t need. I don’t want an insurance agent with Excel making that decision when it’s my life on the line.
*Beep* *beep* | Adventure games are back
Thanks to Corvus Elrod’s excellent cool-stuff-spotting skillz (yes, with a z), I ran across The Brainy Gamer’s series of posts about searching for Narrative in old games, by replaying them.
Way cool.
He started out by plunking down with a copy of one of Infocom’s old text adventure masterpieces: A Mind Forever Voyaging (my personal favorite of the bunch? Planetfall.) What really impresses me is that he actually managed to get his hands on one of the old school copies, box, components, and all. That is not easy to do.
Cruising through his gameplay diaries, though, have really made me excited to fire up some adventure games. Or maybe even some text adventure games.
About eight years ago, I programmed my own text adventure game. I should go find what I made, compile it, and throw it up here for everyone to laugh at.
I didn’t realize it until later, but what I actually made was a text adventure game engine. I did it all in Microsoft QBASIC, and I was obsessed with getting it all set up so that basically all I had to do was enter room descriptions and tell it which directions the player could go.
Looking back, it was actually a pretty impressive system. I built a whole dictionary for the game to act on, including standard text adventure commands - inventory, i, north, south, e, w, open [blank], stab [blank], eat [blank], and so on. It was a lot of fun to make, but if I remember correctly, I never figured out how to let the player save their game and resume it later. Kind of a deal killer.
Regardless, I am now totally back in adventure game mode. I think I’m going to log into Steam tonight and pick up a copy of the new Sam & Max games, or at least episode 1. I played it briefly on my friend Spencer’s computer a couple months back, and it looked like good fun (although nothing could be as good as the original).
This is something that Tony touched on a while back with Portal; we’re starting to see thinking games again. Games like Portal, that make you stretch your brain a little bit, and then lets you enjoy the gentle vibration of snapping it back into place afterwards.
As I think back over some of my favorite games, almost all of them have had some element of that. Some puzzleness. Something to make me feel like success was as much a feat of mental strength as it was dexterity and luck. Hugo 3. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. God of War II.
It might be cyclical; the Myst craze happened a long time ago now. Maybe it’s time for another big game-culture swing. We’ve got games like On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness to look forward to.
Adventure games are back. Totally.
——–
* Ten What the hell? 20 points points if you can get the extremely obtuse TV reference in the post title
Getting up early
I went to bed by about 11:30 last night, and by some miracle when my alarm rang at 7am this morning, I only hit the snooze button once. I was cooking breakfast by 7:30.
I don’t think I’ve willingly gotten out of bed before 8:30 in a very long time. Today’s experiment is part of my evil master plan to Get My Head Back In The Game(tm).
Especially post-conference (the conference part of which was awesome), I’ve had too many thoughts, projects, and ideas sloshing around in my head in a disorderly fashion. It’s like trying to run a fire drill at 3am and discovering everyone is in the shower: it makes you wonder “when has the fire alarm ever meant it was a real fire?”
As far as plans go it worked out reasonably well. I had time to make myself bacon and egg (just one). Sat down, ate it, then got some writing done for my Science Fiction short story. For some reason, I thought there was a chance I’d get a blog post in before I had to start working, but that idea was quickly quashed.
Regardless, the point is that I like having some time between when I wake up and when I have to start working. I doubt I’ll continue to get up at 7, but I think I’m going to try to start getting up early enough to do at least one thing on my own time.
Embedding Roswell from Hulu
I’m not exactly sure how this works, but it looks to me like YouTube with licensed, monetized full TV content. Totally the right way to do online video.
Check out the embed if it works:
Quote
From the NYT talking about Facebook.
The video is called: “why cats are stupid”
-
Subscribe
-
Jason's Shared Items
-
Contact Me
j [at] jason-preston.com
AIM/Skype: Jasonp107 -
MyBlogLog
-
Admin