Jamie Antonisse

All around, we had a great trip to San Diego yesterday... but after those final two hours rocking home on the 5, I have learned a bit of alchemy. Here is a list of five things. Any four of them together are a mistake. All five, combined in equal measure, create concentrated Bad Business.

1) Sangria.

2) A truckload of tapas.

3) A Jodorowski movie, played on a laptop.

4) 85 mph for 2 hours.

5) The back seat of a minivan.

I am leaving Marientina, our humble pilot, out of this equation, because Lao Tzu himself could have been our pilot, keeping the brake and gas in perfect natural harmony, grass could have been sprouting from the wheels of that damn minivan like it was Okami, and I don't think it would have kept the nausea away. Yes... these five ingredients are a perfect storm.

Our blog
Completely untouched
A white screen, like newfallen snow
Until some guy posted this.

...have finally been answered.

There is a Santa Claus.

I have been waiting for this show to come out on DVD since... well, since DVD was invented. For some fascinating legal reasons beyond the scope of this post (but well within the scope of this site) it has (had!) been widely accepted that the show would never be released.

If you've seen the State, you are probably, like me, dancing around with a lampshade on your head, trying to type a blog post in celebration but unable to see the keys through the lampshade. If you've never seen The Stsyr upi str s fpivjnsh smuesud dp ejp vstrd@

Today I had an idea. I decided to drive my sad little stick shift car down the 405 to visit a friend.... in Long Beach.... at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

If you live or have ever lived in Los Angeles, you now know that I am not a smart man.

This is the long-overdue story of the game that consumed my May, IMD grad Herb Yang's not-so-originally titled but nonetheless unique Kingpin: The Game. While we were working at ICT, I'd keep John Brennan entertained with the saga of my secret life as a crime lord, and he always said that I should write it up... so these posts mainly goes out to him.

This is part two of the better-late-than-never* dash-stravagant saga-cum-review of Herb Yang's Kingpin: The Game. Welcome to the rave.

First off, I want to announce my ulterior motive for this post... to get Herb to run another round of his game. I've told various folks about my experience and many of them are interested to try Kingpin for themselves.

Alright, back to the story. Where was I? Ah, yes... the Butterfaces and the Beauties...

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.

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.

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.

Our Thanksgiving turkey, courtesy of Hutson Hayward. Brined (brined!) for two days prior to eating. Amazing.

We have a nice little Thanksgiving tradition: a gathering of East Coast expatriates that congregates at our house on turkey day, a second family for the family starved. This year the party grew to seventeen; we threw every table and chair in our house into the center of the room, stacked foodstuff on every surface, and ate ourselves to distraction. Forget Christmas, Thanksgiving is the holiday that really showcases people's giving spirit: twenty dishes! Eight desserts! 15 bottles of wine! And I never needed to stray farther afield than my sidewalk. What a holiday.

Yes, it has been awhile. I have not been a well-oiled blogging machine. There are of course several reasons for this, none of them exciting or in any way Guild-related. So no, I am not on Strike.

[Nice segue, Jamie!]

I'm staunchly committed to not saying that my resolution is "to blog more" (and technically I just failed). I've spent this break hanging up with old friends, discovering strange board games, getting annoyed at Metroid Prime: Corruption, and finishing a public build of "Hush". So I've restocked my larder with random gaming shit to write about, and you'll get more of all that later. Today is New Years, so on to the obvious!

Looking back on 2007, there was one game that stood above the rest, allowing us unparallerallelled freedom to move through a world unlike any we have experienced before. This game opened up a new dimension of gameplay possibilities, proving that a simple twist on a tried and true genre, coupled with insistently clever level design, can literally solve all socio-political problems and bring about a Bill-and-Ted era of spangled guitars, gigantic shoulderpads, dry ice and Dancing in the Streets All Night.

We all know this game was not Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Samus is on my mind tonight, and I have a bone to pick with her.

I'm back from the edge.

It turns out fresh baked bread is delicious, November Rain is not as good without the strings, and I can actually work efficiently at my computer if I ignore 3/4 of the options open to me.

I'm going to have to remember that, moving forward.

I've been fully back online since yesterday afternoon, and the difference has been night and day. It started out innocent: after opening up Firefox, I talked to a few friends, checked my usual pages. But within an hour, I had returned to a troublesome pattern, the timesink that inspired my self imposed off-lining in the first place.

As it turns out, my instincts were the same as millions of other online chumps. When given the agency of the network and the choice of any online activity, I spent my time playing the slots.

My friend, associate, and future IMD masters student (!) Sean Bouchard recently pointed out to me that "there is nothing bloggier than a post about why you haven't been blogging." So in lieu of an apology, here's a list of some stuff that has happened since last I wrote.

Tonight, for the nineteenth time, I decided to double-click the executable file for "Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden". This time, it actually ran.

Nothing else has changed on my computer. Apparently, Chef Boyardee programs his games to hibernate until May.

The first line of the game... White pixelated text on a black screen. "Warning- The game you are about to play is canon."

Second line: "The Year is 2053. B-Ball is dead."

This will be a great adventure. Full report coming soon.

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 slight confession to make... I've thought about earthquakes a LOT since coming out here. By my nature I'm not a particularly neurotic person, so this occasional fixation on disaster has been an anomaly. I don't look at my gas oven and wonder when it will explode, I don't hear the rumble of thunder and step ten feet back from my computer monitor. I understand the Odds, and I've pretty much internalized the fact that focusing on the unlikely event is pointless. But earthquakes are different. In my L.A. life, they have been both inevitable and totally unknown.

Let's talk about fake people for a second. Not people who have trouble engaging in meaningful and honest communication with others... we will deal with them later. For now, let's limit the discussion to people whose mamas were motherboards. People whose fingernails are ones and zeroes. People who do not get frequent flyer miles. You know, Computer-Generated people, the Jar-Jars of the world.

What do you make of this?