Contributor Blog
JoCo comes to Chi Town
Jonthan Coulton is a staple of the PAX concerts every year, but I have never been able to see him outside of that context. My live-in-sin-in is closer to obsessed with him than I could vouch for, trying to opt for a show in Chicago and Madison. I passed on the Madison, but Chicago is one of my favorite cities for music, so we jumped on the Tollway and headed for the land of Blues and bad baseball.
After making a stop in Arlington Heights to pick up some Asian snacks, we hit Chicago proper. One thing I forgot about Chicago is that it is home to some of the worst drivers in civilization. I’m not even exaggerating, trying to drive anywhere in Chicago is an exercise in self-abuse. Lane markers are blatantly ignored, and shoulders are frequently driven along like they’re an extra lane in case of idiocy.
Before I get my blood pressure back up, I’ll skip ahead to the venue. We arrived late missing Paul and Storm’s entire set. The Park West is a smaller venue, reminiscent of the classic venues with tables rather than rows of theater seats. We ended up in a balcony in a row of seats from improvised barstools. It was less than comfortable, but its my fault for forgetting that time from Point A to Point B in a city where people stop for no apparent reason is not necessarily just a function of distance.
While I was grabbing a few drinks, more on that later. Joco took the stage with Paul and Storm. Weirdly enough they were doing the opening to the They Might be Giants Record, Flood. Which like the album led right into Birdhouse in your Soul. The crowd all started glancing at each other, it dawning on them that TMBG was playing across town. The trio did the entire album in a wordless rush, with the exception of introducing NPR commentator, Peter Segal. It was a treat to be there, and one of those musical moments you don’t really see anymore.
Jonthan Coulton did his own set, which was excellent. I was quite surprised to see that he changed his set list from the PAX shows enough that there was very little overlap beyond his biggest, “hits” - JoCo is a great performer and the addition of Paul and Storm for his live show has made every show a treat. His Thing-a-Week gimmick may have made his songs a meme, and machina may have made him nerd pop culture, but his songwriting ensures him status as something more than a weird Internet phenomenon.
The show was good, we were happy as we drove back to Milwaukee. The next day I go to check my bank balance, and I find that the bar decided that my $23, $26 with tip, bar tab needed to be ran for $100. So I’m broke now, and I can’t do anything about it until they actually post it, so I’m screwed. Needless to say, I’m a little upset. It was a nice companion to the big dent in my car where an old lady hit it on Sunday. Well at least the music was good.
PAX Twenty Aught Nine
I’ve been home from the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo for a few days, digested and decompressed, and am ready to review what was a really different year form normal. Within the next few days, you’ll see more interviews than I have ever done for Dignews go up, beyond that my “live-in-sin-in” came along for the ride this year. That was actually one of the best parts, because PAX is really something you need to experience before you get why it’s so awesome.
I spent a few days around Seattle before PAX, a real first as I haven’t explored the city much beyond the area around the command center, and grabbing some books and sushi from the U-District. Dan led us on a hike that covered a good chunk of the town in two days, and while exhausting, was the most fun I have in awhile. Seattle is a great city, and although I love Milwaukee, I am rather attracted to the surplus of coffee and books that cry out to me.
The show itself was huge, with the exhibition hall now expanded to twice its size. It cannibalized what used to be the LAN area and really allowed you to breath. The second building was closed, but the show managed to grab another floor, which had two more theaters. Getting to PAX always switches my brain into this hyper-serious mode where I want to spend as much time taking everything in. Reading the show floor like tea leaves, seeing which companies have enough to bring something new, and what conspicuous absences there are. I can tell you that the combination of a slower year and the bigger show floor meant a lot more indie games got attention. Arcade style downloads and even smaller publishers got some space. Although I should mention that about a good quarter of the floor now belongs to EA due to their continued Galactus-like appetite for game companies.
I’ll have a bunch of previews going up, but I have to say there wasn’t much I was “wet-your-pants” excited about. The two top titles for me were New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mass Effect 2. I also must sound my dismay that the third episode of Penny Arcade Adventures was not announced, as for the last two years those games have been one of my most anticipated releases. There was some chatter that there was a quip from Gabe and Tycho about something being in the works, hopefully we’ll get something at PAX East.
Oh yeah, that too. There will be a PAX in Boston for you geeks that don’t feel like making the trek across the country.
The end of the first day was a party for Sony’s MAG title which looks pretty neat and a party at the Baltic Room for EA’s Dead Space: Extraction. Previews have been written. I am certain that quite a few of you are interested in MAG, as it promises PC level online matches for a console. I made it to the concerts after the parties with enough time to catch the end of Metroid Metal, and the always-awesome MC Frontalot. The king of nerdcore rap is a perennial favorite of PAX.
Saturday I spent a lot more time wandering around the show floor. I was really excited to see a lot of smaller titles getting some attention. I was quite dismayed when I overheard someone trying to compare PAX to ComicCon. That would be terrible, the fact the show is focused on fans and not attracting the media means that the industry is focused on serving the fans, not themselves. It may sound a bit weird coming from someone who has always had a yellow badge (media) when at PAX, but I think that the reason I have more fun at PAX than at E3 is because of its spirit.
Moving on, after digging through the show floor, (as with previous day, I am not going to bore you with the details of what I saw, as it’s all going in the previews) it was time for an odd event, the launch party for the PC version of Resident Evil 5. Although I was happy for the time away, I wasn’t really all that keen on checking out a game I had already played thoroughly on the PS3 especially when Capcom made a deal with Intel to push the i7 processor using RE5, meaning what I had at home wasn’t going to come close to equaling what the PS3 rendered the title at.
It was back to PAX for Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. This was a great show, although it ran terribly late; mostly due to the fact that Paul and Storm had an encore of their own. That doesn’t even mention the fact that they are JoCo’s back up singers. I learned later that I should have been there right when the concerts started on Saturday, as Wil Wheaton gave an award to JoCo for his numerous geek achievements. This was in keeping with Wheaton’s position as the Secretary of Geek affairs.
That is one thing I really want to impart about this year, PAX is huge. Like, I missed out on things on every single day, and I am sure that as they trickle out I will really regret it. I did find out Johanen Vasquez of JTHM fame did a signing for 2K Games, I was really bummed that I missed that. I really have to say it is a testament to how awesome PAX is that so much great stuff happens every year; I’m cloning myself for 2010.
Speaking of awesome every year, I closed out PAX with Wil Wheaton’s Awesome Panel. Since he gave the keynote in 2007, Wheaton is a huge part of PAX. This was signified by having to wait in line for about two hours just to get stuck in the back. Sadly, the way the crowd was handled stuck us behind people who had gotten there after us. I was pretty bummed, as most of what I saw was the back of people’s heads. However, Wil Wheaton is really the geek Garrison Keillor so you don’t really need to look at him when he tells his stories. During the Q&A he and MC Frontalot reenacted the “Skit about Vocations” from Frontalot’s last record. As a warning to anyone who may want to bad mouth Jonathan Frakes, if this is done within earshot of Wil Wheaton, you will be punched in the face.
So that was the Penny Arcade Expo for 2009. It’s been almost a week now, and I miss it already. Not only is Seattle just a great place to be, PAX is just the best time to be there. Trying to explain what was so awesome about Wil Wheaton threatening the audience equivalent of a troll is just lost on most people. The game industry may be one of excess but this even is not about the industry, it’s about gamers. That isn’t just controller or keyboard jocks either; it is about people who keep dice and odd cards handy. So until next year, I’ll be counting the days.
Write by Numbers
I spend thursday at a bagel shop either getting some typing done or, more likely some homework I should have done earlier in the week. I’m working on my little Dell Hackintosh, which is supposed to prevent the kind of procrastination that resulted from bringing my proper Macbook along to the coffee shop.
This of course has not happened, but two hours later I am finally getting some work done. Although I have an appreciation for math, I can tell you that I am a language person. My problem with math is that it is its own language. Like English, Spanish, etc. Math has its own rules for expressing ideas. I imagine that is the largest problem that learning math is, we spend most of our education learning how to conjugate verbs, and structure sentences, but we never read a novel or a poem.
If you don’t believe that math can make something beautiful, you likely don’t know that your computer, movies, and games are all rendered by complex math. Vectors and a whole host of calculations take place to give us the marvelous communication and entertainment that is integral to our lives.
So I try to remember that I’m learning a new language, and the lack of fluency can be frustrating. I am not sure how much I will be spending time with Calc when I finish my class, but I do know it has already taught me to think about statistics and data in new ways.
Antici….pation
This was a weekend of birthdays, as on Friday I hit 28, and Monday was my Live-in-sin-in’s birthday. There was a little bit of drinking and a little bit of eating and I had a lot of fun. Looking forward to PAX, and not sure what to expect this year. Every time I assume that the conference is going to be predictable, it becomes something else entirely.
I really like the aspect that this is a conference for fans. Right after my first year at the show, I was unable to keep up with everything they had on offer. There is a ton to do, and not enough hours in the day to schedule it all. The new games are the least interesting part, as the community that the Penny Arcade team has managed to build is just astounding.
When you think about the fact that they openly discourage stereotyping, discrimination, from either attendees or exhibitors. I think that Gabe and Tycho really strive to ensure that geeks are respected as consumers. They may allow booth babes, and shameless promotion, but what they do bar is baseless pandering. Their reactions to things like Gillette’s gamer razor, or corn chips named gamer fuel, this is our playground, you can take your ball and go home. It’s admirable, since often commercialization becomes an panacea for struggling companies, but the effect on the culture is never debated. I think PAX helps keep that debate alive.
Crisis of Choice
I spend a lot of time working. Between Dignews, the day job, and school, most of my time is bound up up in deadlines. As Monk can tell you, I sometime watch these deadlines sail by. This is my last year of school, so I am getting antsy to be done with it for awhile. Although I am still likely going to go to grad school, so I am not quite sure what I expect to happen.
In even more mundane news, I spent a good chunk of time migrating all of my E-mail to Entourage on the Mac. It was quite a chore just to read that MS is going to be abandoning it during the next iteration of Office. As much as I like tech, I do get sick every time I break down and make a choice something comes along that invalidates it, or causes me to think twice. Being into computers and video games is always a war against exclusivity. For the longest time I was always irritated that there was 1 game or another that caused me to break down and grab a second system. Then there’s the whole realm of PC’s and Software where the crisis of choice can explode into a supernova.
I recently had a similar experience in deciding on a new cell phone. I’m near the end of my contract, and I really really want an iPhone. However I don’t want AT&T if it means that every time I’m in a crowd of more than 10 people my phone stops working. I decided to eventually just go on cost, cause I’m a cheap bastard, and the iPhone won out. Either way, even after the thing hits my hand, I’m going to worry there is going to be some spiffy program that doesn’t make it’s way to the iPhone etc. Of course I think that’s why you see so much religious zealotry in favor of consumer electronics, people feel that if they don’t defend their choices, their going to be stuck having the made the wrong choice.
Work, and Shelves
After a really long day, I’m still putting off some Calc homework to try and get in another post here at Dignews. Today was rather uneventful, I spend a lot of time writing as of late, a lot of it surprisingly for my day job. Its actually really fulfilling getting to use what I think is one of my best skills in a job that usually doesn’t even bother challenging me. I enjoy language, and I enjoy crafting any sort of prose. I like poetry, and I used to enjoy writing it, but I realized that no one is good at poetry. I kid, I kid.
I am looking forward to my Birthday on Friday, mostly because its an excuse to go see Inglorious Basterds. I ordered myself a present in the form of two Neil Gaiman first edition hardcovers. Unfortunately one of them was canceled today, which makes me a bit upset, and the only other one I could find is way more than I want to spend. Gaiman has long been one of my favorite writers, and I have been working to collect all of his books in hardcover.
Collecting seems like an even weirder hobby now than it was in the past. Hoarding digital media seems to be much easier on the apartment but less tactile. I have Vinyl and CD’s, Books, Comics, and other weird stuff that get stashed around. I do collect a fair amount of digital media, but I maybe a dying breed. Although the retro sheik has caused people to snatch up some of this detritus, it’s still as disposable as last season’s plastic crap from Target. Well I keep an eye on Craiglist when it does go out hoping to catch some cool stuff.
Metafilter can die a slow painful death.
Man it was a long weekend. My live-in-sin-in’s parents were up as both of our birthdays are next weekend. Spent most of the weekend drinking and eating things that were bad for me. The State Fair really leads to that, although I am a bit bitter that I spent a fair amount of time at work this weekend. I need to get around to getting a smart phone one of these days so I can be productive on my other projects while I have downtime at the day job. The Internet Filter here seems to believe that everything and everyone on the internet is a threat.
See this is where most day jobs lose creative people, or at least those of us who are trying to stay ahead of the curve. I do tech support for god sakes, so it isn’t like I’m going to download conficker, or post company secrets on darknet. Hell, I’m underling enough that I don’t even have company secrets… I digress, being able to peruse gaming and tech news will just have to be relegated to a phone of future purchase, likely one with an inexplicably lower case i. This is what I get for selling out I guess, but at least I can still bring the old flash drive and pound out these blog entries in Word.
They can force me to be productive, they just can’t prevent me from being productive for my own projects. There is something to be said for attaining work life balance by screwing around at work. It may just be the prankster in me that feels you should screw around at work. There is this cartoonist, and the name escapes me right now who said the more we slacked the more we were helping prevent over-efficiency and thus saving the American workforce from it’s own productivity, and thus there would be fewer layoffs.
Gimme Back My Internet!
With celebrities migrating to twitter as their new “common people” communication method, can the Internet be called “New Media.” This isn’t Luddite, but may be a bit elitist. The problem I have when Oprah tweets about whatever new age drivel she’s pimping, of Ashton Kutcher tries to have a publicity contest with a network is that it removes what makes the Internet, “new media.” The internet was all about community and participation, and I doubt Oprah is listening to the internet. Twitter has proven to just be another way for PR people to speak for their clients, (EXAMPLE: http://bit.ly/GlSV6) So who gives a crap about what Oprah is pretending to be saying, she has a show where we can see her read that script. The internet has its own culture, and its thriving, and with a few exceptions it’s largely free of the “us and them” approach of traditional media. The two worlds exist simultaneously, no one going to displace the celebrity industrial complex, and TMZ can make a killing brining that to the internet. What I don’t want to see is interaction replaced by broadcasting, and debate and discourse displaced by punditry.
The third rail of modern entertainment is the acknowledgment that people like crap. Michael Bay has several mansions and wheelbarrows full of money that prove it. That’s why I always strive to connect something to its target audience. That philosophy rarely fails me, and has lead to an idea that most people don’t want smart media. Critics do, most teachers do, but they don’t recognize they themselves are another demographic. That’s how modern media works; every single demographic is given a set of entertainment. Nerds are given the discovery cache of networks, G4, SyFy, and a few nights of network television. However the large swath of media is directed at the vast middle, who want to tune in and turn off. Smart media happens when people ask for it, and I do see a large uptick in shows that are smart humor, others with dense multithreaded stories, and even others who put forth topics that spark discussion. So those that have said the boob tube, and the internet are making us dumber I ask, would a show like Lost even came close to airing in the 70’s and 80’s? Our culture is now annotated, difficult references are easily resolved through fan-blogging, Wikipedia, or simply Google. So yes people like crap, explosions, boobs, and dialog that reads like a ten year old’s creative writing assignment, but it’s getting better. If you feel underserved by media, have you seen what they give kids to watch these days, let alone what they have for video games?
And just to completely turn things around…
Math on acid, more aptly Math on Mushrooms, is the best way to describe the work of mathematician Clifford Pickover. He has written some heavy math books that will be left out of this description of his work, and although he can be a bit New Agey, they are fun. The first book I picked up was Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves. This is an exploration of the world of the religious and occult through the eyes of someone who knows better. Altered consciousness is his culprit for much of what we chalk up to paranormal experiences, but he does a great job of joining the two worlds.
That book may be only of interest to philosophy students, but he also makes puzzle books. I have been working through Alien IQ Test. This is akin to one of the lateral thinking books your teacher used to have, but way more weird. He puts forth about 40 different puzzles that all have this alien abduction theme. He even sets up an alien counting system you have to discern for some puzzles. This is for the TI-85 crowd, but it’s great fun. And let’s face it the TI-85 crowd likely needs to unwind more than anybody else.
Musing (Musical And Otherwise)
Despite what the terrible ramblings I call reviews might say about me, I am going to school to be a writer, a technical writer to be precise. To do so I am studying Computer Science and English in equal measures. This has lead to a fun mixture of classes, but now I am in my final year and having to take more math in a row than should be considered legal under the UN declaration. It’s driving me a bit batty, but I have gained an extra few hours to kill a week so serendipity has given me a handicap on this one.
I am looking forward to my trip to Seattle this year. Trying to plan for five days while balancing my love for odd shops and weird tours with my gal’s love for interesting restaurants has been pretty easy since the city is so interesting. After two years of coming just for PAX it is going to be nice to take some time to see the city. I found out about a neat store that specializes in old jazz records so I expect that most of my savings is going to disappear there. I also want to check out the so called Sound Garden, I wonder if I will find the body of the real Chris Cornell, I figure the guy putting out records since the end of Soundgarden has to be an alien.
Much of the time, my sparse free time is spent trying to catch up on games or movies that aren’t on my plate for Dignews. I also collect records, and being a collector I don’t see the death of the physical medium that most tech writers do. The fetish object that collectors are after cannot be found in simple 1’s and 0’s, can’t happen. Even fancy PDF’s can’t recreate the feel of the record. For years the record junkies were trying to keep the Vinyl alive, as CDs chewed up the sales charts, but they are having their day as the rererereleases are happening on 180-gram vinyl. Oddly the small record stores and weird obsessives that the record industry has tried to ignore are now their main target audience. Funny how things change. Not to mention Cheap Trick’s attempt at kitschy humor when they released their newest album on 8-track. Of course then there’s nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
Woo Hoo – Something To Complain About!
So I wanted to offer something into the “could have been a contender” category of TV Shows. Tru TV was looking to garner a little Mythbusters fandom with a show called Man versus Cartoon. However instead of finding a couple of special effects guys with access to teams and equipment they went to a New Mexico college, and some very uncharismatic engineers.
The premise of Man Versus Cartoon is very simple recreate the wacky machines devised by Wile E Coyote to catch the Roadrunner in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. The sad thing is that this sounds like an awesome show that would easily be one of the best “edutainment” shows of the summer. Execution however hobbles it out of the gate.
The use of a New Mexico college brings with it a lower price tag, but opens the door to safety concerns and regulations that would have never been an issue with professional special effects guys. The students and teachers of New Mexico tech are also very low on charisma, their on screen banter is always awkward, and their commentary is even worse.
So sorry Tru TV, you lost me on this one. When the first promotion aired this was an instant Tivo entry. I’m holding out that this will be reworked in an effort to save it, but with the shoestring budget it was given, this show isn’t long for this world.
Watching TV On An iPod
I listen to a lot of Podcasts, but after getting heavily into the various offerings of Leo Laporte over at TWiT.tv, I have taken another look at video podcasting. Not too much has piqued my interest, but I have three shows that I follow. I think all three offer something we wouldn’t get on television.
The first is Cranky Geeks. Run by the curmudgeonly John C Dvorak and the merely irritated Sebastian Rupley, these two are the antidote to the glowing catalog writing that passes for tech journalism. Dvorak and Ripley both have credentials to back their opinions, and they are great at rounding up a panel that manages to have an interesting debate. The show is likely to anger fanboys of all stripes, and that makes it worth checking out in my book.
Next up is the video game podcast Co-op, a nice panel based review show, think of it as X-play minus the need to please the sponsors. One of the highlights of the show for me is the little comedy bits they toss in to pad out the panels. These range from parodies of shows like Cribs, to a longform bit about one of the cameramen calling in to the show and what he fills his day with. It’s juvenile humor, but this is about video games, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
My last video podcast in rotation is Scam School. I tracked this down after the host, Brian Brushwood did a stint on both TWiT and Skepticality, two of my favorite podcasts. Essentially Scam School is a guide to doing magic tricks suitable for bars and parties. They’re always easy to pick up, and Brushwood is a great teacher. If you like Penn and Teller, you’ll dig Brushwood.
Between all of these we’re talking less than an hour a week, but it is a valuable hour. So that’s my round up of Video Podcasts, now back to the reviews. I would have included TWiT and the rest of their offerings, but I listen to those as audio. I will one day do an audio podcast round up, but that’s a much larger prospect.
