Jesse Vigil

I have two good ideas for my interactive self portrait waging a war for dominance inside my cranium.

As you all may remember, I'm leading the effort to create and make fully conversational all characters in the ELECT game. 2 down, 2 more in the pipes, and gawd help me after that. It was suggested in a recent ELECT meeting that I ought to create a full dataset for myself as a character to fulfill this assignment, which I'll admit is totally perfect, since I'd also have to create all the prep options and conversation and negotiation options to have a meeting with Jesse within the context of the system.

So while I admit that it's a pretty perfect self portrait to implement content of myself into the game system I helped design and will have spent a year of my life on, the reality is - it kills my soul to write the content and deadlines are tight enough without me adding bonus Easter Egg Jesse content into the mix. Still, I might take a swing at it.

My second idea and the original one I was going with was to build a korsakow experience that told an interesting if interactive version of my life. I have pretty continuous video footage from the time I was about sixteen until now at my disposal, and I think there are neat parallels. Then when thinking about that, I had a brainwave.

I'm involved in so many creative things that I realized I live easily more than half my life in the fantasies I spend all this time creating. So really, a self portrait of me really ought to be a tour of all my figments more than a tour of my physical life. How best to implement this?

A great love I've not shared with anyone in this program is my love of radio dramas. For those other fans out there, I count Jack Benny, Life of Riley, and Burns and Allen as my favorite comedies and the Shadow, Richard Diamond, Inner Sanctum, and X Minus One as my favorite dramas...

I got it into my head I'd like to build an interactive radio broadcast, wherein Jack Benny style I could mess about with my alter egos or Inner Sanctum style give a tiny peek into what's behind various doors in my imagination.

They're both big time committments - it's a question of whether variety and trying something new is a better approach over perfecting something I've been working on for ages witha clever twist is the way to go...

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I find it kind of hilarious that every month Rolling Stone has this tiny little column called "downloads" that's basically their reviews of music that's somehow been leaked to the internet. Given that this process, and not actually the widespread distribution of music that's already been released and available for sale was what sparked the major lawsuits and really tee'd Metallica off so royally that they spearheaded the movement, I just find this generally amusing.

Notable major leaks lately include Fiona Apple and Nellie Mckay - both albums which were shelved due to various record label/artist issues that somehow got out into the world anyway. That and the Chinese Democracy demos, which if you know anything about me, you know that this used to be the carrot dangled in front of me through most of college. Darn you, Axl, and your much-fabled album. At this point, I almost don't care to hunt them down and listen to them.

But how long, I wonder, before "leaking" a release becomes the new anti-establishment way to "release" it?

and please note that the above wondering is made with all possible sarcasm.

Because seriously, there's nothing more annoying than new media people embracing every phenomenon on the internet no matter how ridiculous and then trying to build a paradigm around it.

Posted by Jesse Vigil at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)