- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Hm, I've been pretty tied up all day writing a book synopsis for some shadowy fellows who might be interested in me, y'know, writing a book for them. Hopefully they'll like my angles, and won't opposite my hypotenuse. But regardless, I wish it was a slightly lazier Sunday. Oh well.
I guess I didn't mention it when it happened, earlier this week, but the quarterly results announcement for VA Software, the parent company of Slashdot, picked out Slashdot Games as one of the highlights for the quarter - July was the company's biggest month for advertising revenue ever, so it's neat that I helped contribute a coupla bucks to the kitty. Of course, the company's share price was once $300 or something insane, so it rising to $3 isn't such a big deal, but at least this means I can continue my clockwork-like games postings for a bit longer. Yay.
Oh, and finally, because I mentioned it in passing when talking about the Classic Gaming Expo on Slashdot, the author of the gaming-themed poetry book (!), Blue Wizard Is About To Die, sent me a promo copy. The tome is either genius or tragic, and I'm completely unable to tell which. A brief excerpt from the 'Bubble Bobble' illustrates this perfectly:
Bub and Bob
get da banana!
ICE CREAM! Explode
Mr.Enemy; BAD BAD BAD!
Wow. Just wow. And you haven't even read the extended Half-Life poem yet.
I'll try to keep updates rolling a little more regularly around here.. I tend to end up doing a massive update and then wandering off for a week or so.
Firstly, there's actually an RSS feed for Monotonik releases at the Internet Archive now, which is handy if you want to know when we've released something new without checking the site or signing onto the mailing-list. Yay for RSS.
Secondly, in checking my favorite Muppet-related fansite, Tough Pigs, I have discovered that one of the best record labels around, Ninja Tune, are releasing a Sesame Street remix record on vinyl, mainly for 'Pinball Number Count' by, uhh, The Pointer Sisters, as well as old disco remixes of 'C Is For Cookie' by Cookie Monster. Yay for Cookie Monster.
Having realised that I'd probably need a laptop for work reasons, my purchase was hastened when we worked out we're going to San Diego for our anniversary in November and I'd need to keep working from there. Plus, the wonderful gd had an Apple-employee-only deal he wanted to cut us in on. Thus, I'm now the proud owner of an Apple iBook - the newest white 12" model, in a standard but lovable configuration.
I've only had it since yesterday, but boy, it's impressive. Even before the Apple deal, it's seriously well-priced compared to the competition, the size and design is second-to-none, it's beautifully user-friendly, and.. well, all of you have probably seen them, it's like me ranting about how cars are cool because they can move really fast and are shiny. And since I'm not a 'power user' (tools of trade: web browser, IRC client, email program, word processor), the basic iBook fits me perfectly. I also discovered there seem to be some open WiFi networks in my apartment complex, after installing the Airport card :P But I'll be good and secure and go get my own wireless basestation, don't worry.
..would be (found via Google News, since it has the word 'video games' in the story somewhere):
'Michigan City Boy Recovering After Lawn Dart Mishap'.
There is nothing else to say :)
Nearing the end of this mammoth posting catch-up, wanted to point out a couple of recent things related to our net.label Monotonik which I haven't actually talked about here.
First, the new Monotonik release by Bliss, 'It's Not The Sweetness... EP', is honestly one of the most beautiful things we've ever released, and we're really proud of it. Henrik 'Bliss' Jose is a Swedish musician who's an old demo-scener, I believe, and his affecting, vocal-flecked take on idm-ish electronics reminds me of another of our old artists, Australia's Super Science, who's subsequently been picked up by some really good electronica labels as Clue To Kalo. Here's hoping Bliss goes in a similarly stratospheric direction..
Secondly, it's worth pointing out a video of the Assembly '03 performance by the CNCD posse, masterminded by sometime Monotonik releaser Aleksi 'Heatbeat' Eeben, who was an Amiga .MOD-scene music legend in the early '90s when insanely young, and nowadays works on music for Nokia in his native Finland, as well as tinkering with some amazing Commodore 64/VIC 20/Gameboy 'tracking' music software. Anyhow, the action actually starts about 10 minutes into the video, and it's Aleksi with VIC20 and various other machines, plus a trumpet player, clarinet player, bongo player, and joystick player (!) at various times - really odd but innovative chiptune vs. jazz action, actually, and well worth checking.
I haven't been to San Francisco's Japantown for a year or more now, so it was interesting to wander over there and check out some of the cooler stuff, apart from the obvious (one of the stores has just about the best game soundtrack section I've ever seen, including the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles OST - impressive!)
On the weird/wacky end of things, there were some beautiful Japanese metal puzzles called the Hanayama Newtype Puzzle Ring. They all involved objects you needed to prise apart, re-arrange, or otherwise manipulate physically - here's some of the ones they were selling in Japantown, for about 15 bucks each. The workmanship really stands out on them, although they may be 'solve and forget' in terms of playability :)
There was also some cool Japanese-language magazines in the Kinokuniya bookstore, particularly Cosmo magazine, which is a cosplay (dressing up like your favorite anime/videogame character) magazine that really looks to be aimed at girls, complete with make-up and costume tips, as well as lots of glossy fashion shoots. Most of the featured costumes seemed to be from videogames, too, which was definitely intriguing. I knew cosplay was massive in Japan (the amount of cosplayers hanging out when I visited the Tokyo Game Show in '99 was insane), but I hadn't seen any of the really high-end publications devoted to it.
The newly announced BBC Creative Archive, making their programming available digitally and for free, sounds just amazing. Danny O'Brien has some interesting comments about it.
It'd be amazing to see the Creative Archive as easy and free as the Internet Archive Moving Image Collection is, in terms of download formats and options - though, as Danny and others rightly point out, getting the bandwidth sorted out to give away popular material can be very tricky.
But, and I'm rapidly turning into a rabid advocate - BitTorrent, I heart you. We posted a Slashdot story about the Matrix Revolutions trailer last week, and _eviscerated_ the official Matrix website, but the Torrent link was still letting everyone leech at a good rate, even with 1600 clients on-board. Best thing since sliced bread, I tell you...
Finally get round to updating, after a hectic work week, and a fun weekend in which we wandered up to San Francisco's Japantown with friends (more on that later), but for starters, here's how you find people who have the Sobig virus, Sherlock Holmes-style:
simoniker: i just had an interesting idea.
simoniker: if you know you only have one person sending sobig virus mail to you, can you work out who it is from the email addresses it appears to be 'from' by building up a picture of the individual's likes? :)
simoniker: since they have to be harvested from that person's machine.
jellicle_: if you examine the email headers, their IP address is probably listed...
simoniker: i can tell this person is swedish and likes the Amiga .MOD scene, actually. so it does kinda work.
simoniker: i want to do stupid detective work tho, not know for sure 0:)
simoniker: by IP, yes, he's from Telianet in Stockholm, Sweden.
Yes, yes, I know you can work out the originator by IP, but isn't it so much more fun to add up the clues yourself? :) Elementary, Dr.Watson!
Fresh from a truly 'fun' day at the Internet Archive yesterday (which largely consisted of me trying to remove the MSBlaster worm from lots of machines, then taking time out to watch a removable hard drive fry 120gb of our data, mm), I'm trying to chill out at home and recover.
So, very oddly, after praising the Rebus crime books by Ian Rankin in a recent post, and saying I'd heard there was a TV adaptation, it coincidentally premiered on BBC America on Monday. If you have a couple of hours spare and happen to get the channel, go hence to your TiVo - it's smart, gritty stuff, and there's not an Oxford college to be seen.
On a complete different note, got a mail-out from the very talented Rodney Greenblat (New York-based artist/creator of Parappa The Rapper, Um Jammer Lammy, and friends), indicating a new version of his website, Whimsyload.com. There's also a shop with some great stuff, which I bet you could get signed if you begged - a Rammy doll (Lammy's black+white photocopied hell-based alter-ego from the classic Playstation game? Like, dude, whoa.)
Oh, and I don't think I ever mentioned this, plus most of you are savvy, but web browser of choice? Go go Mozilla - infinitely nicer than, ahem, Internet Explorer, thanks to tabbed browsing, popup-blocking, nice plug-ins like Newsmonster, and so on and so forth. I've only made the switch in the past 6 months or so, being a Windows user and having IE shoved in my face a lot, but it makes my day just that bit sunnier.
Was meant to do fun stuff this weekend, like go to a barbecue and help a friend move house, but I started feeling kinda rough Friday, with a cold and sore throat, and I've been in bed instead. Doh. Still, I got through a gigantic stack of newspapers and magazines that I wanted to check out.
Oh, and in sitting and sniffling in front of the TiVo, I also got to check an obscurity related to Patrick McGoohan, who honestly hasn't been in the limelight much since The Prisoner. It was, bizarrely, his 1990 Columbo special Agenda For Murder, which McGoohan also directed and won an Emmy for. It followed the patented Colombo format to a tee, of course (we see the murder and the clever way it's done up-front, Colombo and the murderer are pitted in a battle of wits from the start as Colombo doggedly uncovers evidence), but McGoohan's direction frames some beautifully stark shots, and his acting has all the intensity it did in The Prisoner. I hear the early Colombo-s starring him (there are 4, apparently, due to his friendship with Peter Falk), are better, though, will have to dig them out.
Another recommendation before I go - the Def Jux DVD, with free CD, is pretty interesting if you want to check out dense, stylish independent hiphop from the El-P-headed label. Personally, I'm more into artists like RJD2 than El-P himself, but it's good to see a really nicely-done music DVD for cheap (only 15 bucks at Tower) - there's live stuff, a big documentary, a label documentary, a bunch of music videos, then a megamix and even a fun Mr.Lif trivia game (also on his website, sporting a GREAT ending CG movie from my super-talented ex-co-workers Norm+Mike Badillo, yay!)
Oh, and you're all still reading Slashdot Games, right? For those not in the know, there's an RSS feed at http://games.slashdot.org/games.rss too, good for the last 10 entries. Still trying hard to make it the best alternative games news source out there, concentrating on the big stories mixed up with the more unconventional stuff other people don't carry.. or that's the idea, anyhow.
Firstly, the good news. I went to the INS with Holly and got my green card today, meaning that I'm allowed to hang out in the States without restrictions for, well, pretty much as long as I like. Yay! The interview was surprisingly straight-forward, although I brought enough paperwork to squash the frail of limb, and we're really pleased that everything is now official.
Secondly, you really want interesting random links, not tedious stuff about my life, don't you? I know you, link zombies. So we have:
- I think the Rock N' Roll Bad Boy site is pretty old, but I only just stumbled across it. The diary section is absolutely unforgettable - is this really a 40-year-old rock journalist who writes like the worst tabloid imaginable, or is it all an extremely elaborate hoax? The fact that I have no idea makes me very, very happy.
- if you're a music fan, and especially a UK music fan, you could do with wandering over to DJ Martian's page, which I used to check a couple of years back when I used to read Freaky Trigger, and I've just rediscovered. The great links list sprawled haphazardly over the top few scrolldowns is worth the price of admission on its own.
- the new issue of XLR8R, the excellent music paper-magazine, has a really smart Stone's Throw CD sampler attached to it - I only really knew Peanut Butter Wolf from the Stone's Throw posse (Bay Area independent hiphop/beatheads, with a major jazzy influence), but it's Madlib who's the real star nowadays, putting out sharp, jazzy beats with impeccable stylings, and his Yesterday's New Quintet future-cut-up-jazz collective sound just amazing.
For those who are into the demo-scene, that weird 'let's see what the coolest-looking stuff we can make in realtime graphics on home computers' subculture that I was once fully immersed in (yes, I wrote the newsgroup FAQ for alt.sys.amiga.demos back when it was, uhm, still alive), you might be interested to know that the Assembly '03 demo-party in Finland has just finished, and the results and the full set of releases are now available for download.
Anyhow, you need a decent graphics card and a Windows machine to run a lot of the demos, but if you can possibly get it working try out Melon Design's 'I Feel Like A Computer', where-in the Amiga scene legends make a PC comeback with a crazy flatshaded cartoon 3D world, a weird red dog, Donkey Kong, and.. John Travolta? Unfortunately it got disqualified from competition for using snippets of copyrighted music, but it's, well, absolute genius.
A lot of the other demos seem pretty neat, but I particularly liked the winning demo-competition entry, Doomsday's 'Legomania', which updates their old Lego demos with some style - definitely worth checking out, especially for the scene where a Lego X-Wing gets built around a Lego character in real-time, brick by brick. Oh, and the obligatory Matrix-spoofing part, I'm afraid.
Firstly, the Marc Laidlaw interview I wrote for Gamasutra (the online arm of Game Developer magazine) is now available on their site. I'm actually fairly happy with it, since we tried out a article/interview hybrid, fleshing out the normal (tedious?) Q+A somewhat, and it seems to have turned out decent. I'll keep everyone posted as to who we're interrogating next, we have our next quaking interview subject firmly in our sights.
Oddly, on a completely different and fully un-segue-able front, here's some random crime novel/TV show recommendations:
- when i was in England, I had a chance to read PD James' 'Death In Holy Orders', a beautifully realised version of the classic detective novel. Amazingly, James was over 80 when she wrote this relatively recent piece of work, and it features her serial character, Adam Dalgleish, as he investigates suspicious circumstances in a decaying clerical college in East Anglia. It may seem rather Agatha Christie to the casual observer, but au contraire - it's earthier and more emotional by far, and wonderfully written, with a surprisingly hard-biting edge. Highly recommended.
- now I'm back in the States and catching up with the TiVo, I finally got a chance to see an episode of 'Monk', the intriguing crime show on USA Network starring the mercurial Tony Shalhoub, whose performance in Galaxy Quest I'm still chuckling over. And I really dig it, as do many critics, it seems. The one paragraph pitch: Shalhoub is an obsessive compulsive, borderline idiot savant San Francisco detective, who makes almost Holmes-ian deductions while supported/tolerated by his friends and fellow co-workers. Since I love classic mystery, and the show seems to be about clever motives, methods, and twists, well.. ker-ching?
- I'm currently reading another crime novel sourced from England, Ian Rankin's 'Resurrection Men', featuring his hard-boiled Edinburgh policeman Inspector Rebus. I believe Rankin's books have been filmed as a TV show in England, but the purity of the novel works just perfectly for me, and I may well have to track down more of Rankin's work - Rebus is Morse given a Glasgow kiss, believably maverick, and wonderfully world-weary. Again, perhaps it slots neatly between genre boundaries, but who cares when it's this well-written?
I'll try to keep up with the random links every couple of days, even in times of busy-ness such as, well, now..
Firstly, I note that, over as the Internet Archive messageboards, someone's posted some wonderful Prelinger panorama pictures they've created by cutting up pan shots from the Prelinger archival film collection - unexpectedly beautiful.
Secondly, while I was in England and in the vicinity of Forbidden Planet, I capped off my Alan Moore obsession by buying the excellent Extraordinary Works Of Alan Moore tribute book. It has some beautiful art, incredibly detailed interviews, and I think I know more about Moore than most of his relatives and close friends now, which probably means I should stop.
Finally, I can't work out if my tastes changed, or whether the show just got better, but I no longer think Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the weak link of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. In fact, I rather like it. It piles on the absurdity, has great voice acting, and that Meatwad is such a lovable runt. :P Or something. I particularly liked the recent episode where Master Shake had plastic surgery - lots of plastic surgery. Pretty messed-up.
Seem to have made it back to the US in one piece, and jetlag is slowly dissipating, which is good. Here's some elements of vague interest:
- currently tempting me on the Neo Geo front is last year's tag-team beat-em-up, Rage Of The Dragons, which is available as a cart for the MVS arcade board very cheaply indeed from the Neo Store. Cartridges are so much more fun to collect than discs - they feel big and substantial, they look cool, and.. I'm a geek, aren't I? Anyhow, I think I've persuaded myself not to get it - but only because I remembered I can get Metal Slug 2 second-hand for only a few bucks more. Mmm, Metal Slug.
- I was interviewed briefly for a Salon.com article from Sam M. Williams on archaic software preservation while I was in the UK, and it's just been posted. Now, if we could get over the legal issues and I could actually start doing more substantial stuff with the Catweasel MK3 and good archiving practice. Unfortunately, it's going to be on the backburner whatever, since I'm so busy with all the other projects, but maybe we can kickstart it later in the year.
- finally, I need to sort through all the digital pics I took in England (low-res as always, philistine that I am), but here's three pictures from the wonderfully bizarre Portmeirion of 'The Prisoner' fame, which really _is_ in the middle of nowhere in Wales:
