- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Well, Thanksgiving has been correctly disposed of, with much of the eating and the drinking and subsequent dieting, yeugh. Now it's time for the post-Thanksgiving festivities, which consist of listening to Mazzy Star, watching TiVo, and updating FFWD. Go, me!
My interview with Ensemble's Bruce Shelley is up on the Gamasutra site now (free registration required), and I'm reasonably pleased with how it turned out. Bruce has had a very interesting history, what with his connection to Sid Meier, and his role in the immensely popular Age Of Empires series, so it was good to get feedback on the kind of heritage that's begotten such a popular, classy set of games - my gaming tastes run a little more console-y, but I can still appreciate fine craft when I see it.
Also updated just now is my modsoulbrother site, in which we continue collecting some of the best and most neglected freely downloadable .MODs from the Amiga and PC demo-scenes, since, well, that's my heritage. This time, we added the .MODs from label Tokyo Dawn that were sadly removed when they decided to get a little revisionist about history and remove them from scene.org - there's some great stuff in here, too, and they're still labeled as freely distributable, so I'm not sinning by putting them up in my little corner of the Web.
Some gaming has been going on chez moi, too, primarily the cornucopia of goodness presented in Midway Arcade Treasures - I'd forgotten just how fun Marble Madness and Paperboy are - but also the PC demo of TrackMania, which is a super-addictive little track-building PC driving title, quite like a 3D Elastomania, as many have remarked.
Oh, and I don't even like airplanes, and I'm addicted to the Mojave Airport weblog - they sure do have some nice-looking aircraft out there in the middle of the desert.
Well, thank Alf it's almost the weekend - this week, I finally got rid of my cold/flu thing that _everyone_ has, but managed to give it to my lovely spouse. Needless to say, she was delighted, but we're both on the road to recovery now.
Although you may think me crazy, I now have a legal music service to wholeheartedly recommend to you. If you do a lot of work at a PC with a broadband connection, and you want, say, a 400,000 song jukebox readily available to you at all times, you should think about subscribing to Listen Rhapsody. Although the company is, well, tarred with the RealNetworks brush, the fact is, for 10 bucks a month or less, and an amazing choice of stream-on-demand albums (although a bit light on independent/electronic material, but making up for it with amazing jazz and funk archives), it's a pretty darn good deal, as long as you don't start paying extra to burn the releases onto disc. I already have enough CDs and Emusic MP3s to last me a lifetime, so I don't have an issue with the on-demand thing, thus - ker-ching!
One of the things TiVo is best for is forwarding through tedious award shows, and the MTV Europe Music Awards were no exception. It's very much worth checking out, however, for the amazing Chemical Brothers / Flaming Lips live performance of 'The Golden Path', in an outside stadium underneath Edinburgh Castle - man alive, what a beautiful song, in an amazing setting.
Finally, a Babelfish-translated review of Vim's latest mp3 release on our net.label Monotonik has provided much hilarity, and a new word du jour, as ably illustrated by Beak. Just remember, if anything is pukka, outstanding, or delightful, it's... 'absolutely checken'!
So, we had a really nice time in San Diego, wandering around the nice bits of the city, eating copious amounts of Mexican food, driving out to an Indian casino and doubling our money (OK, we only bet 20 bucks), and generally chilling out.
But, back to work, and there's some interesting stuff coming through with regard to technical partners for software archiving at the Internet Archive, which is great - but obviously, still VERY early days. Also, my spare-time Archive dealio, the Net.Labels Collection, is growing quite contentedly - a bunch of new free-to-download electronica labels are in the process of being added, yay.
But now, your media round-up du jour: movies have been watched on Showtime/Sundance (Mean Machine - dumb/fun Vinnie Jones-starring prison soccer remake, If I Should Fall From Grace - heartbreaking Shane McGowan documentary), videogames have been played (Mario Party 5 - best. party. game. evah), music videos have been watched (the recently-mentioned Michel Gondry DVD, the marvellous 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' video from The Darkness, replete with giant space squid attacks being fended off with guitar power.)
Oh, and being a mini-Ripperologist after appreciating the labyrinthine genius of Alan Moore's From Hell, I picked up the paperback of Patricia Cornwell's 'Jack The Ripper:Case Closed', in which the forensic crime novelist spends millions of her own money trying to prove one Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, using DNA and samples of his paintings as 'proof'. Unfortunately, as this masterful debunking, on seminal Ripper site Casebook.org proves, she's way, way off base - so much so, it's painful. I guess there's a remote chance he could have been Saucy Jack himself, but Cornwell makes the claim that Sickert wrote the majority of the Ripper Letters sent to the media around the time, even those sent from abroad, when it's abundantly clear that, as with any major event like this, you're going to get hoax letters in either the majority or entirity. And, of course, Sickert only came to Ripperologists' attention through the fascinating, but borderline insane 'Royal Conspiracy' theory that Moore adapted into the graphic novel, Freemasons and all. What's worst of all is that this is probably the best-publicized Ripper book of the past 20 years. Shame on you, Patricia Cornwell, for claiming a probably innocent man committed tens of murders, when your evidence is horrifically circumstantial at best, and plain fabricated at worst. Forensics, my ass.
So it's getting a bit cold in California, or at least, colder - I'm having marginally more trouble typing because my hands lose a little co-ordination when they get chilly, so time to start upping the heating bill, hurrah. We're off to San Diego this weekend, since it's mine and Holly's first anniversary, so we're going to be hanging out and eating in Mexican restaurants and generally having fun, as far as I can ascertain.
It's actually pretty rare that getting hold of a DVD, game, or CD has me absolutely beatific with joy. But this morning, this moment is upon me, as The Work Of Director Spike Jonze arrived in the mail. I've only scratched the surface, but over 4 hours of some of the best music videos, short films, and documentaries from one of the best music video directors ever? Oh boy.
Music videos have long been under-represented in compilations, too (Palm's earlier
Hype Williams compilation was one of the few director-based DVDs), and these DVDs are fully creator-approved - there's even a great 52-page book with interviews and unseen photos, dammit. I've got the Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry DVDs on the way to me, too - and the discs are $13 each with free shipping from DeepDiscountDVD, so.. buy several copies each, I say.
Otherwise, been hitting up some TV shows (J.Michael Straczynski's 'Jeremiah' - which has had half of its season bumped to 2004, and is generally being messed around by Showtime, but is still flawed but intriguing, especially Sean Astin's mysterious stranger), books ('The Moose That Roared' - a wonderful history of Jay Ward's output, including the way-ahead Rocky And Bullwinkle, whose licensed early-'90s pinball machine I still lust after), and have been getting on with random Slashdottiness and Archivings - more announcements on that front soon, hopefully.
