| A Rayearth Photoshoot |
[28 Jun 2009|04:39pm] |
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 (Crossposted from http://otacracy.com/serious-stuff/93-a-rayearth-photoshoot)
Magic Knight Rayearth is: one of my favorite series ever. When Alice asked if I'd be interested in being part of a Rayearth cosplay photoshoot, I broke into a big grin and said: "Sure!"
(Inside, my mind was thinking: "OMG AWESOME SO COOL RAYEARTH I LOVE RAYEARTH!!!@!@1!@11111!!!!")
Thing is, as the photoshoot date inched closer, I started to feel more and more nervous. Performance anxiety, a relic from my serious pianist past which had started to crop up again in my video game career as well as my teaching career, was now rearing its ugly head with this relatively trivial pursuit of cosplay photography. I suppose it was only natural; I would be the newbie in a group of experienced photographers shooting a trio of experienced cosplayers. It didn't help that fashion photography and modeling was never what I concentrated on (always considered myself a documentarian since I started shooting back in the early 90s), and giving direction was far from my strong suit. I must have imagined a Hollywood movie worth of embarrassment in the weeks prior to the photoshoot.
Thankfully, none of the horrible predicaments I was imagining for myself actually took place.
After picking up Alice and arriving at Shiya's place in Fontana at around 10 AM, I spent most of the morning watching the two finish up their costumes and thinking: Man, I really want to cosplay again...! (That's probably a post for another time!) Then the others slowly trickled in. The other photographers were faces I was somewhat familiar with from years in the California con scene, but I didn't really know them very well. That changed a bit as we hung out and talked about random stuff (Michael Jackson! Crazy camera equipment! Cosplay drama!) for the next 4 (four!) hours. Yeah, best laid plans, etc.
Eventually we got on the road (cosplayers in a well air conditioned minivan, me with three others in a five door without freon) and made our way to Lytle Creek, where we would spend the next four hours shooting, posing, lighting, arranging, fixing, swimming (kind of!), and all those other verbs that one would imagine occur when doing a photoshoot by a creek in a National Forest.
 Something that I wasn't expecting to happen was the slow start. Sure, I was expecting that from myself; being paralyzed by options is one of those things that I do best(?) when performance anxiety strikes. However, it was a bit comforting when we got to the site and there was this random milling around happening on the part of everybody there. Eventually we pushed ourselves into a few shots and everyone had something to do.
I probably should have had a plan of attack laid out for the day, some sort of stylistic point or technique I wanted to use. I doubt I was conscious of it happening, but it eventually emerged that I was using flash for everything. Not much on-camera TTL stuff, but I seemed to use the Oly system I had every other way I could. Most of the time I was using manual flash power plus manual metering, sometimes with flash mounted on my camera, sometimes held in my left hand courtesy of a hot shoe cable, and sometimes lying on the ground triggered by the RC system (similar to Nikon's CLS, a line of sight infrared remote triggering system). Worked out great for the most part. There were a few times where I really wish I could throttle the flash even lower than 1/128 power because of my propensity for shooting subjects close with wide-angle. Best way to throttle in this case was to switch to high speed mode and up the shutter speed to get the effective flash power output down or pop my otherwise useless diffuser on there.
 I brought two strobes and they worked out pretty well. Another photographer, however, brought stands with umbrella diffusers for his Canon strobes remote triggered with Elinchroms. I haven't seen his stuff yet, but I'm guessing he did some great stuff with them, providing lots of soft light for group shots. He was nice enough to allow me use of his system for a bit while he was taking a break. What I learned from this experimentation? Lots of off-camera soft light is indeed: quite awesome. To Mike: Thanks for letting me play around with it, and apologies for scaring you by threatening some of those flashes and receivers with a potential underwater disaster!
After the photoshoot, the cosplayers decided that some dinner combined with some casual cosplay gallivanting would make a nice cap to the day. This time around, I was the only guy willing to bring out the camera while searching for food in the nearby Victoria Gardens outdoor mall. Ended up with a decent group of casual cosplay pictures, and I again decided that my BlackRapid RS-4 camera strap is my favorite camera strap ever. Great for a guy like me who wants his camera availible at a moment's notice in a wide variety of situations and values the candid above all else.
 With a bit of food in our stomachs and twelve hours removed from when I started my cosplay photographer day, all of us gave our thanks and called it a night. Except I didn't call it a night and spent until 5 AM uploading photos to flickr. Smart move me. Here's hoping my sleep schedule will get back to normal before I teach summer school in a week. It will certainly be a struggle, thank you AX.
Final tally: 460 photos taken, 57 pictures uploaded to Flickr (including documentary and casual, with 8 photos added/changed since Sunday), and 7 (seven!) colons.
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| Printing Takes Time, Money |
[18 Jun 2009|08:59am] |
 (Crossposted from http://otacracy.com/randomness/3-personal-hijinks/90-printing-takes-time-money)
So right now I'm printing stuff.
I've got two fairly nice Epson Stylus Photo 1280 printers. When they work, they create wonderful, wonderful output. On really beautiful paper (like my preferred Ilford Premium Pearl Photo) the prints turn out drop-dead gorgeous.
Unfortunately, they don't work 100% of the time. In fact, they don't work even 40% of the time.
On this particular job I'm stressing over, I'm being commissioned to make 20 full bleed art prints. Unfortunately for me, I can't just put 20 sheets of paper into the feed and hit a button. Doesn't work that way.
First off, the feed mechanism on both of these printers sucks. You look at the printer wrong and suddenly it's sucking in two or three sheets of paper at a time. When the media costs $0.50 to $1.00 a sheet, you don't want that to happen, so that means I print one sheet at a time. Every 20+ minute I have to load another sheet of paper. Fun.
Then there's the print heads. These things get clogged every 5 sheets or so. One clogged nozzle means nasty streaking. That means I'm doing nozzle checks before every single print I make.
Then there's the fact that full bleed printing is non-trivial on these printers. You can't simply say you want borderless prints. (Well, you can, but only if you like a couple millimeters being cut off on every border. That means I have to guesstimate the dimensions in my print settings. Right now, I'm telling Photoshop to print the picture as 12.8" x 18.707" in order for the printer driver to properly fill the 13" x 19" page.)
And then there's the stuff that you just can't account for. Just an hour ago, one of the two printers developed a clog that just will not go away, even after an hour worth of cleaning cycles. Earlier today, the Windows print manager decided that every job was done after about 8 inches of the 19 inch long document was printed. Before that, the printer decided it would be a good thing to mar otherwise perfect prints with a smear of black ink on the bottom edge. Yesterday, a fly got into the printer and... well, you can see the results here.
So! All in all: printing sucks.
Lately I've been considering my options. I only use these printers to print jobs for other people, so considering all the time and money I funnel into them, I should probably just get rid of them. Considering my nature, it's far more likely that I'll replace them and continue offering services...
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| More Music From Way Back When... |
[27 May 2009|06:28pm] |
 (Crossposted from http://otacracy.com/serious-stuff/87-more-music-from-way-back-when)
So earlier I had shown off some old music. There were some other ones that I just found that I figured I'd put in a separate post. Well, here's that post:
ray7.it (MP3 file) was a reaction to Working Designs's reveal of their English opening to the Magic Knight Rayearth Saturn game. Besides showing off the actual OP song, Vic Ireland also showed a joke version that had the singer rocking out. Me, I LIKED the joke version, and felt just a little bit of adjusment would push the people on rec.games.video.sega.saturn (any of you guys remember newsgroups?) to understand my position. I did some EQ on the music, sliced it up a bit, placed it into Impulse Tracker, then added some steel guitar and extra drums to punch up the song.
md-1-1.s3m (MP3 file) was another song from 1998 that made me realize how much I enjoyed writing loops more than songs with beginnings and endings. It actually has a pretty good sound and groove, and the flute sounds pretty natural. In the MP3 version, you can hear it with the song looping a bit in standard Japanese game OST style. Like last time, note how I can't come up with a good song name for the life of me.
1_.it and 2_.it (1_.mp3 and 2_.mp3) had me trying to write music for the game that was in my head. Of course that game was an RPG, me being infatuated with things like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 3 (6 for you hardcore folk), and as I've established before, I really enjoy loops. Loops, orchestral, RPG, can't think of names, etc.
Now I personally don't remember ever making tm1.it (MP3 file). Obviously unfinished and pretty rough sounding, but after finding it, laughed out loud (yes, this is different from LOL) because of just how generic it sounds. Yeah, I definitely didn't always write winners. (Not to say that I always write winners now...)
I'll do another music update later on. Maybe you'll think it's better than this stuff, maybe not... but at the very least, I can promise that it's not more than 10 years old...
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| Music from Back Then |
[29 Apr 2009|11:03am] |
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 (Crossposted from http://otacracy.com/serious-stuff/84-music-from-back-then)
I've been having some really horrible problems with my computers lately. As soon as I got my sound card responding properly courtesy of a software upgrade, my video card starts glitching out. Once I've got my hard drive situation squared away, Windows starts borking at me and refusing to search. It's pretty fun stuff, as you can imagine.
So, while my current music output has dropped far more than acceptable, it has been pretty interesting going through my old music output as I make my way through the burgeoning archive of: stuff. Here's a couple of interesting things.
SKL-SATI.IT (MP3 version) is an Impulse Tracker file from 1998. Yeah, I was in that crew of guys trying to make more performed acoustic-sounding music from MOD files. I was decidedly less successful than others, but hey, we all got to start somewhere, right? (And yeah, I'm not going to show you the stuff from before this. That stuff was just sad...)
MD-6.IT (MP3 version) was another mod I did a bit earlier, probably around 1997. I can't find the original file, but as you can hear it's pretty simple. If it says anything about me it's: I learned early on to love extremely short loops and I was definitely big on emulating the Sakimoto orchestra sound back in the day.
From 1999 on to about 2002-2003, I didn't really do any music writing. I was focused more on school work, piano, and basic undergrad survival. I did have some audio equipment around, as I was doing this snail-like transition from MOD music to MIDI music, but quite honestly, I didn't do anything really cool there. (I did write some piano solo pieces around this time, but those have been lost, sadly. Sometimes before writing those pieces, I'd sketch the piece out in Impulse Tracker... yeah, wacky, I know...)
melon.mp3 is a doodle I did sometime around 2003. By this time, I had given up on Cubase 5 and did a competitive upgrade to Sonar 2. It's pretty rough around the edges (for me, the uneven velocities that I never cleaned up really scream at me), but it's not bad.
Some other things I did around this time include: herotheme4.mp3, 20041014_chase_a.mp3, clarinet.mp3, and deliberation.mp3. The first two pieces were standard random crap while the latter two were among the first things I did for short films and TV. Besides the fact that they're still not that great, you can see some hints at what may be my most defining characteristic: horrible song naming.
Let's end this post with some of the first music I did for interactive. In my first year of grad school, I did some stuff for an interactive fiction with The Labyrinth Project and Lynn Hershman. To this day, I have no idea actually what happened with that project (as soon as they stopped asking me for stuff, I immediately focused my attention on RFID-Flash integration and arcade cabinets as interactive sculpture, no joke) but I made a bunch of music and sound effects for it.
lynn1_c.mp3 and lynn2_c.mp3 aren't bad. I'm not sure if they really sound Lynn Hershman, but they're definitely more naturally me than any other stuff I had done to this point. I've toyed around with the idea of returning to lynn1 and giving it a score and not just a sequence rendered courtesy of an Akai CD of Miroslav Mini. (Oh man, did that Miroslav Mini CD influence the way I write. To this day, those old school Miroslav sounds are the center of my virtual orchestra...)
So that's basically my music pre-video games in a nutshell. My computer is still being horrible (installing Windows Vista as we speak) so there might be more coming this way. I'm hopeful the next time I put some music on here, it will be new stuff!
(Edit: Oh crap... I just discovered Schism Tracker and now I'm rediscovering all these old MODs and S3Ms I did... man, some of these really weren't bad! yeah, that's definitely for the next update...)
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| Hey Kotaku: How about some Credit? |
[11 Apr 2009|01:52am] |
 (Crossposted from http://otacracy.com/randomness/3-personal-hijinks/82-hey-kotaku-how-about-some-credit)
Pictured here is Tim Schafer hosting the 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards. Not a brilliant picture, but not bad either, so I decided to pop it onto my flickr. I'm slightly annoyed that Kotaku is currently using it for their most recent post on the awards show. There are two problems I have with this situation. One: the photo is licensed for noncommercial use. Two: there's no attribution.
On the first, that's easily gotten around with a quick e-mail to me. Commercial magazines and websites ask me to use a CC-non-commercial photo, I say something along the lines of "send me a copy of the mag and a-ok," and everyone's happy. Easy as pie. On the second, well, that's just sad. For us artists, having our name there is really important, and it takes minimal effort. It's not just the terms of the license; it's respectful. Come on, Kotaku. Even Fox News was able to manage that.
Edit: Thanks to Michael and Kotaku for adding the link back to the source. Really appreciated.
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| Video Games: You Don't Need Drugs, Dammit |
[03 Apr 2009|09:25pm] |
![blurb_noby_boy_200901211[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3625/3411138182_14023d8a94_m.jpg) (crossposted from: http://otacracy.com/serious-stuff/81-video-games-you-dont-need-drugs-dammit)
Whenever there's discussion of games like Noby Noby Boy, Katamari Damacy, Flower, or even more conventional games like Rez or Space Giraffe, I see people saying things like:
You know someone was high when they made this game...
or
You have to be high to enjoy this game...
That really annoys me. One: I'm not big on the whole chemical alteration thing (I like remaining in control, as much as I understand that to mean) and Two: Games are all about these different relationships. Sometimes those things being related are more absurd than others, but it's all about those relationships. X = Y. What's so special about some relationships that it would have required some mind altering substance to conjure up? Or to enjoy?
In Flower, the player flies through the air by pushing a button on the controller. A pretty simple connection, right? Nearly as simple is Noby Noby Boy: one stick controls the head while another the tail of this snake like creature. These aren't particularly crazy relationships; in fact, they sound rather trite and gamey. However, these relationships require a little bit of chemical augmentation to understand compared to Gears of War, where hitting the overloaded A button (overloaded does not mean I think it's a bad thing, folks) can result in one of many things happening. Right?
Or maybe you need a little bit of Mary Jane to actually enjoy something so simple. Well, if that's the case, how come no one ever brought the stuff up when it comes to dead simple games like Pong, Gorf, and Missile Command?
Or maybe it's just a commentary on the narrative of the piece. In which case: come on guys. Surely gamers can enjoy some surrealist or magical realist game literature on top of our well established base of competitive sports, science fiction, and realistic power fantasy without the addition of recreational drugs.
If you don't enjoy or understand a game, please just say that. That's perfectly okay. No need to bring recreational drugs into the equation.
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| Anime Songs for Busy People |
[11 Mar 2009|11:20am] |
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I've been meaning to post this, but now I've finally gotten around to it: Anime songs for busy people. Thanks to all the nico nico guys who've taken the time to reassemble anime music to fit our hectic lifestyles...
These are pretty smooth ones. The majority of stuff out there is focused on even more extreme recombination of the words even at the expense of the smoothness of the mix. Some of you guys might not like it. Some of you will be in histerics. Check out more over on nicovideo...
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| Nico Nico Douga is Awesome |
[08 Mar 2009|03:30pm] |
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For most people, the first thing they think of when it comes to online video is Youtube. Youtube is great. It's cool. It has ridiculous amounts of stuff. It's not Nico Nico Douga. Most people know about the scrolling comments, which can add greatly to the enjoyment. But did you know about the looping? Pretty damn cool. Here's a pretty innocuous example, while this one is a considerably less innocuous example. Okay, so maybe you did see a couple of these before, but there's more to Nico Video than comments and looping. Have you seen this video? Try pausing it. I laughed way too hard at this. (I actually spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a non-anime MAD example of that pause functionality. No go. Why does that make me sad?)
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| So Flower for PS3... |
[14 Feb 2009|07:30am] |
 ...is now out. Surprisingly, people are really getting into it.I say surprisingly not because we thought it wouldn't be a good game. We (myself, That Game Company, Sony) were certain that we'd put out a solid game that would successfully one-up TGC's earlier offering, Flow. That game metacritic'd at a 71. Me, I thought Flower would probably hit 80. Right now, Flower's metacritic stands at 88, with all but 2 of the 26 reviews above the 80 mark, some well above. To put that in perspective, that puts it in the same company as games like Dead Space and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Just 1 point below the much lauded Orange Box and sneaking ahead of games like Virtua Fighter 5 and (my personal favorite) Valkyria Chronicles. Perhaps more impressive is the insanely positive reception on game forums like Penny Arcade's and NeoGAF. Yeah, yeah. Pat myself on the back, whatever. That's not really the point of this post. I'm really glad that people are enjoying this game. Flower's Lead Designer Jenova Chen and I definitely have our differences when it comes to what makes a good game, but I'm happy that he shares at least one of my sentiments about what the game world needs. Game developers should deliver to game players more than just what they want. Out of the box, blah blah... ...really, seriously. It takes a special kind of developer to be willing to create something that is somehow beyond himself as a game player. I know during the development of Flower, there were times when the designers and programmers and artists just weren't certain about what exactly they were crafting. That they were somehow able to let go themselves as veteran game players of many years who (obviously) know exactly what makes a good game to go pursuing this ambiguous ideal in their heads of this PS3 game that evokes emotions in petal storms and grassy environments... I can't respect those developers enough. If you've got a PS3 and haven't played Flower yet, I strongly urge you to give it a try. I think the music is pretty good, and I'm happy that most of the reviewers think similarly... (I'm horrible at selling myself...)
Edit: Oh, the Japanese Flowery website is pretty neat!
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| Why this photo? Really? |
[28 Jan 2009|10:18am] |
One simple question: Why is this photo so ridiculously popular? Why is it the most visited photo on my flickr photostream?
It seems that every day, this photo gets a couple dozen hits. Despite being less than a year old, it has far more hits than many more interesting photos in the photostream, like this close-up Anonymous photo from a Scientology protest, or various photos that have made their way into articles on Wired's or Gamasutra's websites.
If the stats are to be believed, nearly all the traffic for that photo comes from search engines. Looking specifically at the Google breakdown, the most popular searches are:
- death the kid cosplay
- soul eater cosplay
- soul eater
- maka cosplay
- cosplay soul eater
- etc...
So I go onto Google image search and try these searches... yep. There's my photo, first row of image results.
Ah well.
It's kind of annoying.
I guess Soul Eater is the new something something...
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| Music Inspirations? For Kanno and Myself... |
[24 Jan 2009|04:10pm] |
(I'm going to try to get in the habit of crossposting between my old blog, my old LJ, and otacracy.com... let's see how goes with: http://otacracy.com/randomness/4-elsestuffs/72-music-inspirations-for-kanno-and-myself )
(And if anyone knows I can get some automatic joomla-wordpress or joomla-lj crossposting in here, let me know!)
 Been kind of busy the last few weeks... so here's just a little thing that I've been meaning to post.
Lots of people love Kanno Youko's stuff for various anime and games. Many love the fact that she just hits the mark with such a diverse range of music. I personally loved some of her older stuff; Brain Powerd is such an "honest" soundtrack, and that sort of honesty is something I strive for in my own music. Her new stuff? Eh. Not super awesome stuff, I think.
Regardless, I was really surprised when someone sent me to this website: 【菅野よう子】インスパイア？類似曲比較動画まとめ ([Kanno Youko] Inspired? A Comprehensive Music Soundtrack Comparison)
Basically, check out the various Youtube and Nicovideo links. Come to your own conclusions.
Me... well... it's interesting thinking about it since over here, someone recently accused me of grabbing the Phantasm theme in order to make this first track from Castlevania: Order of Shadows. Eh... I guess it's possible to see it that way. If you really want to compare, the stuff that's similar are pretty different from a functional standpoint. In my track, that beginning motif is there primarily as a backing for the guitar solo, and the phrase length is twice as long as that in Phantasm, which is more a theme than a motif. It's also there for the entirety of the song in Castlevania, while in Phantasm, it drops out as soon as the soloistic part develops. I mean, really, it just feels very different to me as a song. Take it or leave it, but any resemblance is purely coincidental, as I've never heard of Phantasm until a few days ago. I'm just not a horror film kind of guy.
(Also... man, what's up with that music in that Phantasm youtube link? That performance is pretty bad.)
Oh yeah, my thoughts on those Kanno comparisons? I definitely think she or her assistants were a bit more than inspired. Yeah, my little Castlevania song contained a primary element that sounded similar to another primary element in another piece of music, but the pieces themselves were quite different. Many of those Kanno pieces don't just have one or two similar elements, but many elements coming together to create a very similar song structure with similar arc and similar feel.
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| I don't know what... |
[24 Jun 2008|11:56pm] |
 This past weekend I hung out with some cosplayers and photographers and shot a couple of pictures.
Usually when I'm invited to do a gig, whether it be a photo gig or a music gig or a [stand around and explain some friend's friend's art] gig, I jump into it immediately. When the invitation reached me on this occasion, however, I said I wasn't sure if I could or should. And I thought long and hard about whether I should go, and if I went, whether I should bring my camera system at all. This was largely spurred by the fact that I had a camera system that didn't feel like the one that I brought to Fanime just weeks earlier. Really, it didn't feel like me.
The difference was just one lens. The image quality from my 16-50 standard zoom wasn't feeling right on the borders. A real estate photo gig revealed to me that the right border was really quite poor: something that hadn't been a problem in any of my Famine pictures (though examination of that set reveals that the problem was in there since my first days with the lens.) Since it was relatively new, I went to the dealer and switched it out. This newer one had no problems with the optics, but the focus would randomly decouple from the control ring so that I couldn't manually focus the lens, and the autofocus wasn't quite as good either. I went back to the store and it turns out that they didn't have any others in stock. I needed a standard zoom, though, so I grabbed a 16-45 to tide me over and wished my 16-50 a safe flight to Colorado where it would be serviced and repaired...
And while the 16-45 is a decent lens, it never felt like MY lens. Yeah, it's a dumb psychological ownership/extension of self sort of crappy thing, but it really hit me. During the photoshoot at UCLA, it really was a struggle for me to actually wield that thing. Objectively, I could tell there were things about this replacement lens that were better: faster focus speed, smaller, lighter, slightly easier to manual focus... but I could never get it to feel like it was mine. That 16-50, though... from the first shots I took with that lens, I knew that it was mine... and after a few hundred shots, it went beyond simply being mine to being me.
In the music world, there aren't too many instruments that I would call an extension of me. That one Petrof piano, perhaps. In the camera world, however, I had run across a number of pieces of equipment that became me. Probably the first lens was a Quantaray (Sigma) 24mm 2.8 Macro. And then there was that Minolta XG-M that might as well had been grafted to my right hand.
And then there's the Pentax 16-50. It's not a brilliant lens the way some other lenses in Pentax's catalog are brilliant. The purple fringing on this thing is really tough to deal with, and it would be nice if the minimum focus distance was shorter. But man, the je ne sais quoi!
I personally hate using that phrase, but when it comes to matters of self, it's so appropriate. I've always thought it amazing how we can know so much about the little details that make up these complicated things that exist outside of us: electric and electronic sequences, mechanical craziness, chemical surprises, aesthetic decisions. But all these things that we recognize as our own personal processes; the first thing we look at when we enter a room or the firmness of a handshake; how our body somehow makes the subtle switch from voluntary to involuntary breathing; we don't know anything about them... but at least we own them and are proud of them to the point we allow it to become us. And every now and then, it is just so awesome to come across something outside of us that could possibly become part of us.
I just need to wait for that part of me to come back from Colorado.
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| Blast from the Past |
[07 May 2008|09:41am] |
 I don't often check out Wired's Game|Life blog, but recently a few of my photos have been showing up on there. Late last year, Wired's Epicenter blog used a silly picture I had taken of some smartphones in a blog post about smartphone sales growth. This last week, however, two (2!) articles used images taken from my flickr stream: one of Nintendo's Miyamoto and another of (friend/colleague/former classmate) Jenova Chen. The Jenova picture isn't half-bad, I think... but why did they use THAT Miyamoto picture? At least clean it up, do some sharpening on it or something. It's an okay pic, but it's painfully soft thanks to the quality of the lens I was shooting with (a rather cheap Sigma I was shooting long and wide open) and the rather slow shutter speed.
Back in the day, despite identifying myself as primarily a video game music composer/designer, I was recognized more as a video game journalist, and the work I had on the internet at the time bore that out. All the little bits of audio and music I did never showed up, while my insert credit and Gamasutra output just rose to the surface.
I wonder if this photography hobby of mine will work similarly.
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| Yet Another Domain Name Acquired... |
[21 Apr 2008|08:29pm] |
 I've always thought that I'd never get a domain name quite as cool as apocalypsewow.com... but it doesn't stop me from trying. Instinctgratification.com doesn't really do the trick. Forcedfeedback.com isn't bad at all, but you do have to spend a bit of time ensuring recognition of that unexpected extra 'd'. But now I've got something that's nearly as good as apocalypsewow.com. In fact, it might be something that inspires me to go all insertcredit-style on making a new site:
OTACRACY.COM
Nothing there right now, but man, I really want to put something up there that's substantial. Something that has stuff that people would willingly click on. Maybe even something that could get me a bit of extra pocket change thanks to the wonder of ad impressions! Maybe!
(Also, otakracy.com points to otacracy.com. I prefer the 'c' spelling, but enough people have mentioned the 'k' possibility that I had to get it...)
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| Still Alive... |
[05 Apr 2008|01:40am] |
 ...just about. Standard stuff: having fun writing music and teaching classes and other random stuff, mostly related to writing music and teaching classes. The summer is going to be similar stuff and the fall will be only slightly less similar.
Since the last post, I did a bunch of stuff for Gamasutra and GameSetWatch regarding Game Developers Conference, although it really just boils down to two things: writing articles and taking pictures. A bit more interesting are a few photos I've taken that have been used as material in news items. Now I can add NPR to the sites I've had photos on... and that feels pretty nice, I have to admit.
A little part of me tells me: Maybe I should try to do more with this photo thing. Maybe...
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| Broken Again |
[30 Dec 2007|02:23pm] |
 Yes. My computer is broken again.
Running to Fry's to get a mobo, processor, memory, PSU, case, and hard drive.
I am severely annoyed.
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| Fragmentation |
[14 Nov 2007|02:48pm] |
 Web 2.0 is all over the place.
Facebook is really nice, but then there's stuff there that I would like to put on my blog (which is mirrored by my LJ), and that blog is totally separate from my academic blog (that I haven't touched since summer), and all three of them don't quite connect with the people I connect with on AIM, ICQ, MSN, or the various people on the 5 different IRC networks I'm on. So to recap:
- There's this interesting podcast called Into The Score, which is rather good at what it does: listening to and analyzing video game scores. One of their recent podcasts features the score to Cloud, as well as a rather lengthy interview with me. Man it's hard to listen to my own voice...
- I recently went to an Asian pop culture convention and took way too many photos (though not as much as I take during the gigante cons like Anime Expo). Some of them turned out pretty well, I think! It helps when the cosplayers in front are pretty darn cool (I only participated because I was asked by them, actually. And I'll probably go from now on as it's a nicely run con with some cool guys running the thing.)
- Synful Orchestra FINALLY released the latest version of their not-so-popular plugin. I happen to LOVE it... but I now have significant problems. Basically, the new version wants a very specific latency set in the sound card drivers... which is actually only available in a previous driver. But that previous driver had problems because it didn't provide a specific latency to deal with this dodgy MOTU Symphonic Instrument plugin that I barely use... except for its pretty darn good sounding percussion, which isn't provided for in any of my other software libraries. So... ARGH. Very argh.
- And oh yeah. I love my new camera.
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sklathill's journal
