Jamie Antonisse

So I finally finished Bioshock, just in time for the spoiler-filled narrative review in Danny Bilson's class tomorrow. Is this sort of entertainment-cramming exceptional to video games? Are there English majors out there, staying up all night to read the last Harry Potter in advance of some all-revealing J.K. Rowling seminar? Who cares, on with the review.

Because of a certain program that keeps crashing over and over again (I'm looking at you, Torque Game Builder) I didn't think I'd be able to pull off the full long-winded Pretentious Tuesday entry. But after thinking a bit more about Bioshock, and being roundly kicked in the butt by Max and Diana, I found myself with a Tuesdayriffic theory about the place of violence in the medium. Bear with me... or not, in which case I'll talk to you laters.

I'll admit it... all I really want to do is keep the candle burning on the last two posts. A heated discussion between two Chrisses? Harumph? Dancing zombies? Brauer calling me a stoner? A PG-13 stream of consciousness rant about diet pepsi from my old pal Babonis, a rant so bewildering I'm actually NOT publishing it (though of course I'll send it to anyone who asks nicely)?

There's just too much good stuff in my corner of the world right now.

Yet school marches on. More comments on the blog-turned-discussion-board tomorrow... tonight, I need to sketch the rough outlines of a class and an atlas. Organization is not my strong suit, but here's my best shot:

Saturdays are awesome, because they are full of all the things I love: working less, good weather, and Saturday night.

For all the rest of the things I love (guacamole, sour cream, cheese, salsa, crispiness) I must rely on La Taquiza's nachos. These are the best nachos I've ever had, and every once in a while I like to review them, because it's nice to write good reviews and not be such a picky bastard all the time.

Is there an equal? A finer, messier food? I fear the answer.

This was my low point in Kingpin, and I acted as most people do when they're in dire straights: I constructed a dramatic narrative to contain my sorry state. Who was I really? A guy who's been clicking a button a few times a day, run across a rash of bad luck... nothing too original about that. But as I understood it, I was Misty Eyes LaBone, a once-beautiful face whose gang had been decimated by the underhanded alliance of Wilson Fisk, Skeckulous and M, forced into hiding Forced to don a bag and start a new gang on the other side of the tracks... forced to trade in my well-appointed gentlemen for a bunch of Butterfaces.

The old strategies, the polite strategies hadn't worked, not in this game. What HAD worked was conspiracy.

I'm starting to get into the look and feel of The Cache. Aesthetics and design are not, traditionally, what I do... and on past projects, there have been better minds applied to the images, and I've just done what I can on the story. But seeing as my boys are a coast away, working on something damn important, I have to do the best I can.

I started with really broad Flickr searches and slowly whittled away at everything which was NOT what I wanted. Pinning down atmosphere in these terms was interesting, and I soon found myself in need of generalizations... so I started thinking of the work as a film and forcing my opinions into cinematographer speak (too saturated, darker tones, etc). I found that the Visual Expression class I took was actually useful in this process, despite the irreparable damage it did to my Saturdays.

Here's what I came up with for class: a ZIP file with 13 jpegs and a document explaining the pictures by category.

Download file

I just made a terrible discovery: 6:30 is After Sunset today. The dark half of the year is on its way.

There are three days left in the B-Game competition... so if you can find it in your heart to vote for Transperator, vote now! If you aren't a member of TIGForums yet, you won't be able to play or vote... but if you're interested, sign-up is easy. Just throw down your email address and you have access to all the riches of the indie developer community. Really, that's all we've got.

Those of you who've played the game already may have noticed a huge chunk of text scrolling by at intentionally unreadable speed. Like the game's music, the story of Transperator was my jurisdiction.

I've been pretty busy lately, working on PB Winterbottom, building a site for my ICT project, keeping Hush going, writing and revising endless documents for The Cache, and last but not least, appreciating the British weather.

Sometimes in such states all we need is something mildly miraculous to distract us completely and utterly.

I just spent thirty minutes staring at this animation, wondering if I was going crazy.

My phone's keypad has shorted out. My internet is busted, relaying nothing but a series of blinking red and green lights. My laptop is beginning to sputter towards the twilight years, running high fevers, whirring out strange requests and losing its train of thought mid-command.

Basically, if I am in ANY WAY a carpenter, my toolbox is full of dull, splintering hammers and graham cracker nails.

The thing I find most baffling, in times like these, is the 18 months of system stability that preceded this crash. Why do these things not happen discretely, or gradually? All I can imagine is that the technology gods must operate some sort of God of War style combo system. I GUESS I'm glad to provide a multiplier bonus, but I'd rather be, you know, functional again.

At any rate, that's why I haven't been bloggin or emailin or callin as much this week: I'm experiencing errors. Hopefully I'll be fixed soon.

For one sweet sweet day, I was re-connected. Replacement phone, new internet, new computer in the mail, empty wallet.

As near as I can figure, my current laptop (Sloppy), jealous of my incoming desktop and egged on by all the international attention Los Angeles got for setting itself on fire, decided it would be cool to break down. She will now go no farther than the startup screen... she just stays there patiently, the stripes on her little loading-bar swimming eternally to the left.

Luckily I caught the scent of death on Sloppy last week, and had the unprecedented good sense to back almost everything up. So I'm not panicked... only bemused that every day this week I've spent over an hour exchanging pleasantries with Customer Service. I've discovered that by maintaining an unsupportably cheery, hakuna matata tone, tempered with a VERY SLIGHT genteel southern accent, I can actually convince myself that I am having a Voluntary experience with these folks. Like a picnic or a cocktail party. It works out great: they try harder to help me and I don't want to kill them!

My birthday is coming up this weekend (goodbye, 25) but if I do by some miracle have a computer, I'll post something anyway.

L.A. is s l o w l y returning to whatever passes for normal, by some miracle I have resurrected my little laptop, and the calendar's reminding me that I was born; I am going to celebrate by exercising my right to speak about nothing in particular.

So without further ado, three thoughts inspired by an afternoon alone in the rush hour traffic with the radio station KBIG 104 on full blast. These facts will be listed in ascending order of embarrassing-ness.

My last guest left this morning, so I suppose it's now officially over.

I do not remember this picture being taken at all.

I found this hand-scribbled on a notecard beneath my bed. I vaguely remember writing it months ago at 2 AM, imagining it thought and written by a man with a permanent-fixture cancer stick dangling from his lip and a suit that had been on his back so long it no longer smelled of B.O. A real fucked up gentleman with the following on his mind:

"Fear... fear isn't so bad. Fear keeps me going. But as I grow older I fear less and less... it's all familiar, all too comfortable. It's just the one fear in there now, eating its own tail, the fear that's come to dominate me: the fear that I'm not afraid of anything anymore and that I never will be again. It's a stale fear, there's no comfort or rush in it. It eats at me, all the time: "I'm not afraid of ANYTHING anymore." And I hold onto that sentiment, because in the back of my mind I know: fear is LIFE. And when I accept that I've mastered it, when I give up worrying on how easy it all is, when I decide that it's Okay, then my little life will be over."

Happy Tuesday.

This ENTIRE POST is a response to RJ's phenomenal rant on the endless, misinformed comparison between movies and games. I could not in good conscience tack something this long to the tail of his blog.