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March 18th, 2012
10:20 am - Writing catch-up
I just noticed it's been ages since I linked any of my GameSpite writing, so time to play catch-up. Since our editor Jeremy got promoted to the EIC position over at 1up.com last year, it became a little harder to maintain a strict schedule, so we've gone from "GameSpite Quarterly" to "GameSpite Journal", but there's still a lot of good stuff coming out the pipeline. Here's some stuff I've written lately...
GSQ8: PSX 15 year anniversary mega-tome- Bushido Blade
- Incredible Crisis
- (also, mini write-ups in the print edition of Pocket Fighter, Wild Arms, Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2, Rhapsody, and Legend of Mana)
GSJ9: miscellanyGSJ10: Super NES Turns 20Also now printing is GSJ11: Second Chances, wherein I take a look at the Mac classic game Dark Castle. All these can of course be found in dead-tree edition over at GameSpite's Blurb store. Of note is that the latest volume are now available in gorgeous, if somewhat pricy, full-color editions. Oh, and there's also a new "GameSpite: Year Two" of older writing from the site before the Quarterly/Journal project took off - I probably have some work in there, but I haven't actually got a look at the Table of Contents yet, so I'm not sure what exactly.
Current Mood:  creative
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February 16th, 2012
04:26 pm - Damn good times
Whoa, another LJ post. Amazing. Went out to see JoCo + TMBG at the Lincoln Theater in Raleigh and it was a fantastic show as always. Ran into a few friends, had good times, adrenaline kept my energy up despite still being slightly sick.
Jonathan Coulton had his new bassist and drummer in tow for the bigger sound of his new album, which he did a few songs from as well as a few oldies, including Mandelbrot Set which I love, even with the sad gap in the lyrics that were made inaccurate by his recent passing.
TMBG played a great mix of old and new as usual. Looked up the setlist to jog my memory for comments...
Setlist: (possibly slightly out of order) (courtesy This Might Be A Wiki tmbw.net)
* When Will You Die - one of my faves off the new album "Join Us", yay
* Celebration - and another one! it references Banksy, Anonynous, and Hieronymus Bosch.
* Birdhouse In Your Soul - yeah, they're tired of playing this, but it gets the audience moving, what can you do.
* Judy Is Your Viet Nam - I wonder if Flans has a story behind this one...
* Damn Good Times - one of my favorites off of The Spine, this is going well
* Never Knew Love - new one from Linnell
* The Guitar - always awesome, this time with a great bass solo from Danny
* Battle For The Planet Of The Apes - the requisite audience participation piece
* Old Pine Box - Join Us again
* Cowtown - They decided to throw in extra songs from Lincoln for the Lincoln Theater, a plan to which I did not object at all! Love me some Lincoln.
* Snowball In Hell - The dialogue bit in the middle was done by The Avatars of They and stretched out into complete ridiculousness, it was great
* Mr. Me - still continuing with Lincoln...
* Ana Ng - yesss, another favorite of mine, and they really crank it up live
* S-E-X-X-Y - fun song from Factory Showroom
* Careful What You Pack - this was a song cut from the Coraline movie
* Spoiler Alert - from Join Us, done to great effect by The Avatars
* Cloisonné - fun new Flans song, featuring what I have to say was the greatest blistering bass clarinet solo (from Linnell) I have ever heard (or heard of)
* We Live In A Dump - from the podcast rarities album
* Withered Hope - nice rocking track from The Else
* James K Polk - a classic, though I wonder how many new fans are confused into thinking the standard TMBG cutout head featured on the monitors was Polk. (it's William Allen White)
* The Mesopotamians - another fun live tune from The Else
* Fingertips - always fantastic live
Encore 1:
* How Can I Sing Like A Girl? - They played this oldschool-style, with just two John voices and Linnell's accordion. There's a nostalgic sound I haven't heard in a while.
* Can't Keep Johnny Down - headline single from Join Us, pretty fun
Encore 2:
* Where Your Eyes Don't Go - another Lincoln favorite! (I have a lot of Lincoln favorites)
* Istanbul (Not Constantinople) - rocked it to 11
So yeah. TMBG: always worth seeing.
Current Mood:  satisfied
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February 9th, 2012
04:51 pm - California Weekend
Hey there, poor disused LJ!
So I just took a long weekend off to go to San Francisco to visit ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) anacoluthon and a lot of other friends, and it was pretty great! There were many things, let's see if I can remember them all.
Flew out Thursday at the tail end of having a cold and got in horribly jet-lagged, so Mo and Enne took me out to Pi Bar for pizza, as their preferred "too much airplane" comfort food. It was quite tasty, and I thankfully managed to miss the waitress by six inches when I knocked my beer clean over.
Friday... amazing donuts for breakfast (one with delightfully restrained bacon topping, and another with apricot and cardamom, so good), then off walking to some hills behind the city. Mo took me to one he'd been at before that's a good hike with lots of cool trees and stuff, and I spotted another nearby which he hadn't been to that offered a fantastic panoramic view of the city. That night (I think it was that night?) we went with Enne to this adorable little Japanese restaurant run by a mother/daughter pair where they make sure you eat your vegetables. And then Mo took me to Smuggler's Cove, where many tasty drinks were had by me, including the Pupule (allspice, cinnamon, vanilla, lime, orange, aged Virgin Islands rum), the Dead Reckoning (Private Reserve rum, pineapple, lemon, vanilla liqueur, maple, tawny port, Angostura bitters), and the Port Light (bourbon, lemon, honey, passion fruit, egg white). (Yes, I registered for the SC website to look those up just for my adoring audience, you're welcome.)
Saturday, hmm, I think we walked to a leisurely brunch at a nice diner-type place. (So much walking all weekend, but it was pretty great. I am slowly becoming more and more sold on city living.) In the afternoon we headed down to South SF for Talcon, a birthday party for a member of the GameSpite forums I hang out on that's morphed into this huge meet-up with like 30 or 40 people. Got to meet several dozen friends I've known only online for years, played some Gundam Extreme Vs and an epic Rockband session of Bohemian Rhapsody, got some 3DS tags, and generally hung out, while Mo got sucked into a huge game of Settlers of Catan with extra German expansions.
Sunday was delicious bakery food breakfast and sharing some cajun plates for lunch (except the bit with prawn etouffee, which was all mine, yum), and then over to Oakland to meet up with corpsefairy, madmanatw, leora, darch, V, Starchy, and Lisa, for lots of hanging out and also tasty burgers and ice cream. Haven't had a chance to geek out about this and that with those folks for a long time, so that was fun.
Monday was breakfast at a slightly ridiculous but tasty single-cup-at-a-time coffee brewery, and then Mo had scheduled a tour at Anchor Steam Brewery, which was great. The very enthusiastic guide gave a quite interesting history of the company (it was one of the first local brewers to really rebound after the advent of national brands, and re-introduced several styles that had all but disappeared) before showing off the equipment, and then heading to the bar for samples - you got up to 4oz *each* of the six kinds they had on tap (Steam, Liberty Ale, Brekle's Brown, Bock, Porter, and Old Foghorn Barleywine) - all for free; thumbs up Anchor. Even the styles that aren't my thing were pretty good, and I quite liked all the dark ones. The long-ish walk back plus some nachos took off most of the tipsy after that. In the evening we went with Enne to Thirsty Bear, a tapas type place that also brews there own beer, where I had the delicious Seventh Stave, a seasonal bourbon barrel aged dark ale with figs.
Then I took a red-eye home because I'm dumb, but fortunately managed to get some sleep on the plane. Almost caught up by now...
This post is like 70% food and alcohol by volume, isn't it? Not complaining.
Current Mood: satisfied
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October 24th, 2011
01:35 pm - Broken Posting
Still haven't had time to write up *real* posts I want to make, but hey, as a consolation prize here's a copy-paste of something about anime I wrote on a forum:
akiko and I just finished up the 6-episode (50 minutes each) anime series Break Blade (aka Broken Blade).
It's basically a Gundam show, only transposed to a standard Fantasy setting. The premise is that everyone has this special magic ability to essentially Quartz-bend, so they make all their tech out of specially adapted quartz, including mecha. Except one kid who's born without the ability, but coincidentally can pilot this ancient really powerful non-quartz mecha they dug up. Which sounds like a stupid, contrived premise, and it pretty much is, but the actual show is a very decent war adventure with good production values.
Also, compared to other robot shows, I really liked the way that, since everything is essentially made out of stone, everything *breaks*. They're constantly shattering their shields, weapons, and armor, and having to re-equip whenever they can. Gives the mecha combat a very visceral feel that missing from a lot of shows with slicker designs.
Current Mood: satisfied
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September 10th, 2011
07:57 pm - fandom flashback
Hello LJ! I haven't posted here in ages (partly due to spending too much time keeping up with reading other social networking sites, which could make for a post in and of itself). There are like three or four in-depth posts I've been meaning to make for months, but this is none of those posts. Instead, as I was catching up on over a week's worth of LJ reading after Dragon*Con (which I also need to post about) (and I have generally been reading here even while silent), a friend had up a survey to keep track of her new LJ friends that looked fun so I did it. It has lots of fandom stuff, which is really stuff I haven't thought about much recently aside from the macross tumblr I started curating. So while this really isn't remotely representative of what I've been up to lately, it's fun to exercise a different bit of brain breifly.
( guess I'll cut this since it's all formatty and stuff )
Current Mood:  tired
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June 22nd, 2011
09:33 am - Silly societal norms are silly
Today's LJ poll of the day on the homepage is "Have you ever caught your significant other checking out another person?"
Pfffft. Do they count checking out hot people together? Sure.
Current Mood: flirty
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June 4th, 2011
02:15 pm - Plenty of Nerdery
Hey there, LiveJournal; I haven't posted in a while and I've been doing nerdy things, so here's a recap.
First off, ye olde local anime con, Animazement, was last weekend. Started off with a bang as I drove over Friday afternoon in a torrential downpour. Much cursing as one of Raleigh's newfangled street parking meters took like a minute to validate my credit card in the rain. But after that all was good. Saw plenty of fun cosplay and pulled out my traditional Jigen Daisuke getup for Saturday. Did one shift at the COUp-run video room to make the weekend pass cheap. Saw Phil run a good Hell. Oh, and went to an interesting panel on Gankutsuou with the voice actor for the Count and the character design and animation director, that was fun.
Also, of course, bought things at the dealers room. Toys: tiny Lum (Urusei Yatsura) figure, little scene from Galaxy Express 999, cool Myria (Macross) figure with interchangeable flight-suit and wedding costumes and heads, awesome statue of Lucca fixing Robo in a scene that's familiar to anyone who knows the Chrono Trigger concept art, and this completely insane Jigen Daisuke revoltech figure that came with a wall, a chair, four heads, nine hands, bullet special effects, two guns, bullets, a lighter, and a teeny tiny to-scale single cigarette. Not toys: Macross Frontier art book with some nice posters in, set of three Pochiyama Pharmacy doujinshi *signed* by Yoshitoshi Abe (of Serial Experiments Lain, etc), a surprisingly affordable cel from You're Under Arrest, and a wonderfully ridiculous fanart of Lee from Tekken riding the Cyborg Rainbow Attack Unicorn that I got for akiko.
Some pictures, mostly of cosplay and toys, behind this finely-crafted link.
Meanwhile, for the first time since like January, I actually finished some video games, so I'll talk about them a bit.
( Behind the cut: Okamiden (NDS) and Little Big Planet 2 (PS3) )
Okay, that's it for now - gonna see about getting some biking in since even though it's sunny out there it's supposed to be less oppressively hot today than any other day for a week in either direction.
Current Mood: amused
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May 9th, 2011
09:05 am - Oh My Hero...
So I drove down to Atlanta this past weekend for the Distant Worlds: Final Fantasy symphony concert. Fun! Met up with a bunch of people from the Talking Time forums for dinner and the concert and drinks, good times were had by all. Good to see more of people I've been talking to for years; we'll have to meet up again at Dragon*Con.
We ate at a place called Flip Burger, which really wasn't very good at handling a 15-person party, but had tasty food. I had a shockingly spicy chocolate mole milkshake and a chorizo burger with a poached egg on it, plus some good beer-battered onion rings.
The concert itself was pretty great. Evidently Arnie Roth (who puts it together and conducts) likes FFVIII a little more than most people, but it's still all good music. They also did a new arrangement of JENOVA from FFVII which - well, really isn't a very orchestral sort of piece, but it was a valiant attempt. Let's see, I don't have the program with me, but I know we also got a I-III medley, Dear Friends from V, Terra from VI, the opening from VII, Liberi Fatali, Fisherman's Horizon, and Man with a Machine Gun from VIII, Vamo alla Flamenco from IX, TO Zanarkand from X, and Memoro de la Stono from XI. He also stuck in two pieces from XIII (by Hamauzu) - Fabula Nova Crystallis and Blinded by Light. Also one of Uematsu's new pieces for XIV. And the full version (in English) of the Opera scene from VI, which is always totally amazing in concert. Oh, and a Chocobo medley, which was lots of fun.
Nobuo himself was there for the concert, though I didn't spring for the super-expensive "meet and greet" tickets that you need for signing and so on. But we got to see him on stage, and he came up to actually join the choir for the requisite encore of One-Winged Angel. Which despite being hideously over-exposed is still a pretty sweet concert piece, and Uematsu is adorable.
So yeah, that was pretty fantastic. Now all I need is an east coast Black Mages concert. ;)
Current Mood: satisfied
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April 19th, 2011
12:16 pm - GSQ8: PSX mega-tome in store now!
It's time for your tri-monthly writing shill, as GameSpite Quarterly #8 is now available. This one is a *humongous* tome of all things PSX, and is extra swank-looking. At over 400 pages, it's a tad pricy for what started out being labeled as a "magazine", but coupon code NEWBLURB will get you 20% off right now, and enough bathroom reading to last you until next fall. Pertinent links:
GSQ8 contents page on GameSpite
Direct link to buy the GSQ8 paperback edition
Meanwhile, for people who want to humor me by reading my writing, only not so much as to spend money, I can cater to that too. Here's links to my articles form the previous two issues (one in the completely goofy mold, the other a bit more informative), now all online for free:
GSQ7: Encyclopedia of 8-bit Villains
- The Black Knight (from Dark Castle)
- Invaders (from Space Invaders)
- The Marlboro (Final Fantasy)
- The R.N.G. (everything, but especially NetHack)
- Tatanga (Super Mario Land)
GSQ6: In Praise of Under-appreicated Games
- Okami
- E.V.O.: Search for Eden
Coming next down the pipe is a free-form issue, where I'll be writing about... are we allowed to spoil these yet? Let's say a gorgeous PS3 hybrid tactics game and some old-school Macintosh game development.
Current Mood: accomplished
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February 27th, 2011
08:14 pm - A little over a Quarter...
Okay, so it's been well over three months since I posted a real update here; I better do some sort of recap before moving on to other things, or it'll never happen. So here's a condensed summary - in the last quarter or so...
I started going to Yoga classes. My two biggest fitness weaknesses are flexibility and upper body strength, both of which it addresses, so it should be good for me. The fact that the studio's like two blocks from my house is a huge boon to actually managing to go semi-regularly. In other exercise news, got some good biking in during the unseasonably warm weather recently, and otherwise I'm still unlocking stuff in Dance Dance Revolution.
Speaking of video games, I also finished up Final Fantasy XIII (only about 9 months after I bought it) and played through Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, which was as much fun as its predecessors. Just picked up Little Big Planet 2, but haven't started it yet, and I have Okamiden on pre-order, which looks totally adorable.
In family news, my parents and brother came down for Thanksgiving and we checked out the Natural Science museum in Raleigh and made some delicious food for them. In December we went up and had a holiday dinner with akiko's dad's family, and I introduced him and his brother to the Black Irishman cocktail.
Just yesterday I went to a fun birthday dinner for corbae. Kevin's housewarming party last month was great too. And I'm sure I've done tons of other fun things with friends in the last few months which I'd tell you about if I had a functional memory. Also, it's great having kipple_n_bits back in town to hang out with.
And, I dunno... I drank a bunch of good beer? We've actually been getting more into keeping an eye out for local brewery special releases and other events. And of course, as a dark beer lover, this is my time of year for seasonal brews, so there's been lots of good stuff.
Current Mood: accomplished
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