- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
So I finally got round to uploading the pictures from our trip back to the UK a couple of months back - Hampton Court Palace, Harlech Castle, Portmeirion, Oxford, and various other picturesque places that you never go to if you _live_ in the country, for whatever reason, hah.
Got a chance to wander up to the VA Software (parent company of OSDN/Slashdot) offices earlier in the week and met up with mon ami Nate of Everything2 'fame' (he got the second E2 webhead back online when he was back in CA, so we can now learn about 'The Curse Of Colonel Sanders' with much swiftness!), and got a chance to say hi to Hemos too.
I've been helping add some more net.labels to the Internet Archive free-to-download audio collections, and we now have Enough Records and Kikapu up too, as well as 8 Bit Peoples, Kahvi Collective, and my own, shameless Monotonik. Bandwidth is still the major limiting factor, but we'll be doing lots more shouting about the collections when download speeds are a little better.
On the 'what media I have been consuming' front, I finally caved and got the Sundance Channel, so I'll try to comment on a few of the good indie movies/documentaries on there. In the meantime, I've been perversely digging the _very_ infrequent repeats of That's My Bush, which only ever had 8 episodes, but is as good/crazed as most of the stuff the South Park guys do, watching the Sci Fi Channel re-showing of excellent, gritty UK supernatural police drama, Ultraviolet, goofing on the ever-wacked Saturday morning MST3K repeats (go, 'Invasion Of The Neptune Men'!), plus playing a little Game + Watch Gallery on GBA and, well, actually doing nothing, occasionally. That's the most funnest.
Well, seems like San Jose has decided that late September is the right time to unleash near-100 degree temperatures on us again, so thank the Lord for my new iBook, and its current proximity (with me attached) to the air-conditioning unit.
At the weekend, when it was only uncomfortable, not insanely warm, we went over to the Camera One to check out Sofia Coppola's new movie Lost In Translation, starring Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson, and it's an amazing, understated piece that may well be the best thing that Murray has ever done. It's about world-weariness, and finding beauty in unlikely places, and trying to be happy somehow - oh, and there's some classic Murray adlibs thrown in, too.
On the videogame front, I've had some serious, if frivolous fun with Starsky And Hutch for PS2, which seems reasonable in single-player, but shines in its odd two-player co-op mode (one player controlling the car with a Dual Shock 2, and the other shooting the bad guys with a GunCon 2.) The same frivolity would apply to, of all things, Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure, which uses the Tony Hawk 4 engine to excellent effect, and even has a 'pro mode' which allows identical key mapping. Oh, and I've been going back to Amplitude, which is still an amazing music game - can't quite complete the Insane level, at least, not yet.
Otherwise, books? Just started on An Experiment In Treason from Bruce Alexander, a very intriguing Georgian-era historical mystery featuring the blind London judge Sir John Fielding. Work? Seems to be going good all ways up (Slashdot, Internet Archive, other in-progress things.) Play? A little experiment is going very well. And I've even been working out, though I'm sure I'll grow out of that in, oh, a day or two.
Firstly, to celebrate my growing enthusiasm for the final Lord Of The Rings movie, and, of course, to celebrate goofy linkage, here's the walking directions to Mordor, courtesy a Hobbit's favorite map website.
Secondly, since I accidentally recorded a bunch of music videos instead of The New Tom Green Show the other night, it's worth talking about the new face of stylish and funky mainstream hiphop. If you witness Pharrell Featuring Jay-Z (mm, Neptunes) and both of the new Outkast videos, it feels like.. some serious spark is back in the tunes? People like the Neptunes aren't afraid to branch off and help other, more quirky artists such as Kenna, too, and it's nice to have some mainstream, Top 40 American music that actually feels quality. I put it down to Snoop getting off the weed, personally.
So, at the weekend, I had a dream. The dream was, if we hung out at our friends' house long enough and drank some of the delightful absinthe they had procured from, uhh, Spain or somewhere, then magically, the Japanese magazine Arcadia would become affordable, as opposed to the current $15 per issue at the finest Bay Area Japanese bookstores. Actually, that wasn't really the dream, but my goals became conflated after a couple of glasses of said absinthe, which didn't really make everything look like Alan Moore's Promethea or all attendant females morph all pre-Raphaelite, as I'd hoped, but was extremely strong, with the bonus of being liquorice-flavored (mm, Pernod!), and gave off an attractive, not easily replicated buzz. Mmm, attractive, not easily replicated buzz.
After the absinthe hijinks, I settled in with the Official Playstation Magazine demo-disc for this month, which I was a little excited by (well, piqued enough to buy, that is), not least cos of the True Crime demo. Well, it turns out the demo itself is tiny, but it shows enough to work out that the game is a reasonably/above averagely competent GTA clone, and that's, well... good, 'cos weirdly, nobody's really got round to cloning GTA yet. Elsewhere, Roadkill is a sadly substandard GTA/Twisted Metal clone, Ratchet And Clank 2 does all the right things, looks great, but still lacks a spark of soul in the character design, and SSX3 is more of the same, which is good, I guess. I'm actually buzzin' cos I kinda got seduced by my rental of Downhill Domination, from the 'please let us make a game that somebody will buy' world of War Of The Monsters developers Incog Inc., and which is, basically, SSX with insane courses and mountain bikes, and oddly more exciting than the 'extreeeeme trrrrrrickiness' of the SSX world - stack it up next to Wakeboarding Unleashed as 'great game based on not immediately exciting-sounding sport', willya?
I'm trying to update ffwd often-ish, but apologies if it's not _that_ often. I seem to be doing ever more work and non-work related things simultaneously - but it's all good. I'm happier than I've been for years, now I'm doing my own thing and feel like I'm doing good work.
Oh, and I'm helping set up freely downloadable net.music.labels on the Internet Archive right now - we just launched the Kahvi and 8BitPeoples collections, and there's going to lots more. Sadly, the Archive's bandwidth is getting severely hammered right now, but there's going to be lots more d/l megabits in the next month or two, so I'll start trying to seriously get a community running when that happens. There's also a legal BitTorrent site for net.labels in the works, but that's a personal project, so more news on that when we get stuff more together. It's great to be helping promote good, legal music online, anyhow.
Something I randomly TiVo-ed and enjoyed recently - Spalding Gray's movie Monster In A Box, a rather wonderfully deranged monologue about finding UFO crazies in LA, going to Russia and Nicaragua, being panned on Broadway, and.. all sorts of other odd corners, quirks, and telling comments. If you live in the States, it's been playing on IFC recently - hope they show the monologue that really got him noticed, Swimming To Cambodia, at some point.
Finally, was nosing around Tower Records earlier, and they were clearing out a bunch of old import CDs, so I found the Yellow Magic Orchestra 'Complete Service' live 2xCD Japanese import for all of about 13 bucks. I'd never quite got into YMO before a few months back, but think a more synth-pop Japanese Kraftwerk with videogame influences, and you're partway there - they also had Ryuichi Sakamoto as one of their members, and this 1983-era live set is superpeachy.
Firstly, two neato pieces of game music-related news:
- my friend Jake 'Virt' Kaufman, previously bustin' out all sorts of great GameBoy and GBA soundtracks, has been co-opted to do the full orchestral-styled soundtrack for a neat-looking PlayStation 2 title from Germany, Legend Of Kay. There's even a trailer with his music on it available - smart if you like furry StarFox Adventures style platforming. Or just boffo tunes :P
- just about out in the States is the said-to-be-OK videogame version of, well, '70s Huggy Bear-fest Starsky And Hutch. There's even a PC demo out, which it may be worth downloading (haven't tried yet, if someone does, tell me what music it has in it!) for the first new game soundtrack in at least a couple of years from Tim Follin. Heck, I'm such an aficianado of his work that I, uhm, made him a fansite - he's been criminally underappreciated and underused because he keeps such a low profile, but his recent Ecco soundtrack was sublime, and his early Amiga and NES work is so seminal, it hurts.
Secondly, why can't I get these two pieces of music out of my head?
- David Brent's horrific 'Freelove Freeway' from BBC show The Office, which made it so big in America critically that Matt Groening, hardly the most publicity-friendly chap, is raving about it. Second series is coming to BBC America in the next few weeks, btw, and.. tune, begone from my brain!
- One of the idents from the You Don't Know Jack quiz videogames - 'Ain't no loving like Number 13'. Too catchy.
Thirdly, we wandered off to the kinda cool Bay Area botanical garden/theme park Bonfante Gardens this weekend, after picking up free tickets via a mail-in offer - it's a kinda old people/young kids thing, but there's some fun mini-coasters there, and they have nice fries. And we saw someone throwing up after going on the onion chair swingy-roundy ride. Which was fun.
Where was I? Oh, yeah.. I didn't get a free ticket at first because, well, Holly's/Holly's parents' dachshund, the ever-lovable Petie, sent off and got one instead. So _that's_ where all the free tickets go when these offers turn up - people's pets :P Fortunately me and Petie are homies, so much so that my KOTOR character is called Petie Hutt and my Derby Owner's Club horse is Petie Shazam III, so he gave me the ticket out of the goodness of his heart. Thanks, Petie!
Quick update to point out that the Internet Archive's archival search engine, Recall, has just been launched - it allows you to search for how popularity of items changes over time! Pretty cool - especially as it's searching over 11,094,924,000 pages from as far back as 1996. It's over at recall.archive.org right now. Yay.
The best search result I've found so far? Tomb Raider - this actually works great, in that you can see peaks around the videogame release dates for Tomb Raider 2, Tomb Raider III (also called 'The Last Revelation', see a similar, but bigger peak for that at the same time!), and then Tomb Raider 2 returns in 2003, since the movie sequel (using the same keyword as the earlier game) was in production/near release.
I have a habit of occasionally linking to silly Flash animations, so here's another, very game-specific one. Alex 'Marweas' Rodberg at Sierra, who's meant to be a 'community liason' type, wrote a hilarious post to the HomeWorld 2 forums saying:
"Well, I'll be concluding my participation in this forum with this post. Frankly, the effort put into keeping this miniscule community informed is not worth the aggravation or the time....
I look forward to hearing more complaints about how Sierra ignores the community. I'm sure accusing instead of asking, and bitching instead of learning will accomplish your goals admirably."
Then, naturally, Penny Arcade did a strip about it, pointing out it's _his job_ and all that.
But more genius than that, someone called Musashi over at TribalWar.com, a Tribes:Vengeance (also produced by Sierra) fansite, made a Flash animation all about Marweas. Looks like it was made before this current uproar, and there's definitely some in-jokes in there, but basically.. this is the kind of thing that drove the poor man to the edge. Love the use of random photos and much hand-waving for the facial expressions.