Jamie Antonisse

June. How the hell did that happen?

So the other night, Sunday night to be exact, I set foot in the Roxy for the first time. It's a nice place, fairly intimate, with black leather couches scattered over half the floor and a great purple curtain concealing the stage. I love stage curtains, they tell me exactly when the waiting is over and the entertainment is beginning.

We were there to see the Oxford Collapse, a band from New York whose music I'd never heard before, but who had the good taste to name their new album after my roommate. The lead singer, who was cultivating a sort of Albert Brooks cum Magnum P.I. look, thrashed his way through a few good songs before stopping for the customary stage talk.

His subject of choice? The Happening. Using his slightly elevated position behind the raised curtain line for evil (an excusable, nervously snarky sort of evil, but evil nonetheless), he pronounced that he had Seen This Movie and that it was Great.

I have a soft spot for slow games. Games that take place over weeks instead of hours. Glacier games, I call them, knowing full well that the phrase will never catch on.

Al Yang and Ed Zobrist turned me on to this gem, a little European MMOG that answers the question: what would happen if you played a game of Warcraft 2 on a geological time scale? Or, if you prefer: what would happen if Civ II WASN'T a compressed experience, a hyperspeed war 'n' progress sim, played out over turns, but was instead... a multiplayer game of civilizations growing slowly alongside each other?

I'm finally watching "The Wire", after listening to five separate friends rave about it as the "best show ever made". I'm three episodes in, and it's growing on me.

This scene is a little convergence of Interactive Media and Baltimore Hustling. We often talk about the "metaphor" of games, and how many different ways there are to make an abstract system meaningful. I can't thing of a better example than this.

Ever since Values At Play, we've been thinking about making a website for Hush. Now that I did the thing (thanks for the push, Peter) and bought jamieantonisse.com, I figured I'd better start by creating a permanent space for the game to live.

Full admission: this is a site only in the most technical sense, the way a deep sea fluke is technically an animal, and Rolling Rock is technically a beer. That's right, I'm calling you out Rolling Rock. I don't even DRINK beer, and I'm calling you out. i will fight you.

But I have to finish this post first.

What else? Ah, yes. It's important to note that this site ain't finished. I wanted to get the link out there asap, but in the future, this page will have some/more information, including full credits for everyone involved in the game, system requirements, links to write-ups and most importantly, links to places where you can learn more about the Rwandan genocide and how you can help assist in current Human Rights efforts. I'll keep you updated here as the page evolves.

And I promise, all future communications between myself and Rolling Rock will take place off-blog. With fists.