Mar 17

I’m a Rock Band Wizard…Or Something

Yep. Mainly due to this:

Basically, it’s a 100% of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” in Rock Band 2 on Expert Vocals. It’s not a particularly long song, but it has some of the more notoriously difficult phrases in the game in the “Sure plays a mean pinball”s. I never had any major trouble with those specific phrases, oddly (Being more vexed by the “That deaf, dumb and blind kid”s myself), but this was the first time I 100%ed it in a solo game (I did it once before while playing with Jess on guitar, surprising even myself at the time).

This is the first full combo that tells me that I may be pretty okay at this whole “Rock Band 2 vocals” thing, despite what my scoresheet would tell you.

Woo!

Mar 07

Activity Equals Page Views!

A few brief notes in lieu of doing anything productive tonight:

1. I’m convinced that what Rock Band needs is some of the early Power Rangers theme songs. C’mon, tell me the full version of the original theme, or the extended ZEO theme wouldn’t make awesome rhythm game songs. You can’t do it. Bonus points in that the guitar parts actually have what I can see as some pretty difficult parts; the hilarity factor in watching people fail a children’s show theme on the higher difficulties would just be great in itself.

Actually, as I go through some more of the various Power Rangers themes, I think they’d all work pretty well.

2. For some reason, almost all would-be spam comments seem to target one particular entry. Maybe because of its length? Fortunately, since the Amsterdam incident mentioned here, nothing of that sort has actually made it through Akismet.

Mar 01

A Quick Update

For those of you who actually live near me, Fables Comics has a deal for the month of March where you get 25% off of collections/trades. I found this out randomly yesterday after buying Batman in the Seventies and the owner was nice enough to give me the deal anyway. Pretty cool.

Oh, and did you think it took four years for the North to win the America Civil War? Silly person, the South won it in 3 months, though the two battles in the war took a combined 20 seconds or so. Check out how history really played out here.

Feb 25

Random Tuesday Thoughts Wises Fwom Its Gwave!

Yaaaaaaay!

  • In webcomicky news, I’m currently really enjoying the current storyline of Evil Inc., wherein would-be supervillains have been laid off from their evil corporation and forced to find alternate means of employment. In particular, today’s (the 24th) strip illustrates something I wished I could do to certain customers during my days working for Stop & Shop. Go check it out!
  • In other webcomicky news, Don’t steal your punchlines from message boards. It won’t end well.
  • For some reason, Project Wonderful reports my site as being up and down repeatedly, though it seems okay since Sunday. This may have been due to my messing about on the upcoming-I-swear webcomic, trying to password protect that specific directory (And apparently causing the whole site to come up as not found in the process (Speaking of stealing stuff, does anyone know where that “I has a bucket” picture came from? I know the story of the elephant seal and such, but I’m wondering who first captioned it). Oops. At least I didn’t wreck the database this time…
  • Speaking of upcoming-I-swear stuff, I did a bit of work on the Fester’s Quest speedrun last night. It’s become very clear to me that the hardest part of the run is going to be the first 5 to 10 minutes, before I acquire items that let me survive. I’m also going to have to plan exactly how many enemies I plan to kill near the beginning to acquire the items I need (Primarily keys), versus just hoping for them later on in the run. Fortunately, because of a glitch you can use to easily kill the bosses of the game except for the last one, if I can get to the first boss, I’m essentially home free as far as survival goes. Going quickly is another matter…

Feb 16

Status Update!

Yeah, haven’t made a post in awhile. I’m certainly not dead, so don’t worry. My little webcomic project is slowly coming into shape. In truth, I’m a bit scared to pull the trigger on it, if only because once I start, I’ll be forcing myself to stick to an update schedule that I have no idea if I can keep or not (I guess this is why various sites tell you to build a buffer). I’m slowly learning stuff, such as “Even if you’re only doing a black and white strip, it’s better to actually fill the blacks in on the computer rather than drawing it out beforehand”. This particular discovery will probably convince me to do at least spot colors in various places in the strips. I’ll make a post here once everything is finally up and running so you all can read it.

I also did some work on a new speedrun project, this one for the Sunsoft game Uncle Fester’s Quest. An interesting little game that can best be summed up as “The dungeon scenes from Blaster Master as played by Uncle Fester from The Addams Family.” Great music too, though the game itself has drawn some divided opinions over the years.

And that’s that.

Feb 10

I Continue to Exist

And sure, I’m still alive too.

I figured out a use for my obnoxious amount of webspace, given that recording music on my current setup is more trouble than it’s worth at the moment. Suffice to say that it involves my starting from scratch in terms of talent. I think I mentioned that I was considering starting up a webcomic recently. Well, I’m going ahead with the idea, as soon as I confirm that I’m actually getting a tax refund this year (Which should happen later this week). With that will come the equipment needed to get the endeavor off the ground, since I learned quickly that I have no clue what I’m doing from a technical perspective when it comes to drawing with a mouse at a high resolution while zoomed in.

Feb 05

The Post-MAGFest VII Wrap-Up

What? Something resembling an actual post? There’s no way that can be right!

So this past weekend, Jess and myself went up to the annual Shizzie gathering that is MAGFest, a four-day music and gaming convention. This time, it started off even less eventfully than the previous year, as we left at about 7:45AM and. having learned from last year, avoid I95 through New York City like the plague. There was one point in the trip where it took us way too long to go a couple miles leading into a toll booth, but other than that, the ride went pretty smoothly, and we got there at about 3PM Thursday.

I had registered Jess and I as Supporters, and the extra cash got us some neat stuff, including some stickers, a T-shirt, a water bottle, and a MAGFest VII poster. The coolest thing was probably the Supporter convention badge, which was made from an actual Atari 2600 cart (Which one, I don’t know. Probably E.T. knowing my luck). Neat!

Unfortunately, at that point, there wasn’t a whole lot to do yet–the Gaming Room, site of the MAGFest NES Challenges that are my main highlight of the convention (Though that’s certainly not all the con offers), was not yet open for one reason or another. So after meeting up with some Shizzies, I head to the Hilton room 1108 (I think it was 1108), where a mini-party is taking place. One can of the soon-to-be-discontinued Sparks later, and I’m in a decidedly good mood. Jess and I decide to wander down to the nearby plaza for some food, after which the gaming room is finally opened. Thursday was a pretty light night as far as the con went on my end, though I did make sure to complete the Ninja Gaiden II Expert challenge to officially earn this con’s Expert prize, an “I CAN has NES?” t-shirt. I also did one challenge each at Normal and Hard difficulty to earn those prizes (A sticker and button, respectively).

Friday was maybe the most interesting day for me; besides lots of time logged at the challenges booth (And some Rock Band playing), I made it a point to occasionally check on the progress of Tim McVey (Not to be confused with Oklahoma City bomer Tim McVeigh) and Dwayne Richard, both of whom were trying to break Tim’s nearly 25-year-old record of slightly over a billion (Yes, with a B) points on Nibbler, best known today as the forerunner to such games as the old MS-DOS Nibbles or Snake that you find on many cell phones today. Also Friday night, I purchased a print from the person who draws the webcomic Paradox Lost; specifically, a print of this picture. The conversation between myself and Dave Lister (The guy who draws it) went something like this:

Me: *Picking up a binder near his table* So this is just random things you drew or what?
Dave: Yeah, they’re comics, commissions, things of that sort.
Me: Okay, cool. *Flipping through* Random question: Did you do this (A drawing of a bunny girl holding a Wiimote) for Connecticon?
Dave: Yeah, that was for their Saturday badge last year.
Me: I think I have that badge, actually. *Looking at the display of various prints* So hey, what’s going on in this picture? (The picture I ultimately bought)
Dave: Well, this is the end of one of the major story arcs. The secret agent got into an unsuccessful battle with some ninjas, and so now she’s handcuffed and kidnapped and in need of rescue.
Me: You know what? I think I’ll take that print.

We also talked a bit about my badge, and how supporting conventions and such is a good thing to do. Friday was also the SDA panel, where I met a bunch of my fellow speedrunners, and a demo video was played briefly showing what speedrunning is all about. Amongst many short clips of runs in various genres (Plus Freddy Andersson’s Contra run in its entirety) was, of all things, the final boss fights of my Willow run. Not only that, but that clip actually got one of the best responses out of the entire compilation! The main reason for this was something that I had totally forgotten about, because it didn’t strike me as anything special when I did the run–I eventually advance so far to the left in the last phase of the fight that I knock Bavmorda into the status part of the screen, and weird stuff like that apparently appeals to the average game video viewer. So that was pretty cool. Also Friday night, I played some Rock Band and hit a pretty nice stretch of vocalizing where I went 100%, 99% (I got a “Strong” on “I looked out this morning and the sun was gone” in “More Than a Feeling”), 100% on 3 consecutive songs.

Saturday brought a large Shizzie crew to McDonald’s and Subway for an early-afternoon lunch. During the walk back to the convention, Sam told me “Sorry to say that Metal Dream (You may remember him from such performances as “Being better than me at Dr. Mario at M6″) has done just about every single one of those” in regards to the challenges. Little did I know how accurate that statement actually was. Also, Saturday brought the official end to the Nibbler competition–long story short, Dwayne’s machine froze up because, in a fit of frustration, he hit it (As I had watched him do once or twice before on Friday) and, because something wasn’t totally secured inside the mean, jarred something loose causing it to freeze up. Tim finally stopped at about 678 million, having lost his rabbit to chase some 200 million points before that (Dwayne’s machine froze at 498 million or so; Tim was roughly neck-and-neck with him by that point). Besides more challenges booth, Saturday was also the encore of the SDA panel, and the Shizz Family Photo that has been taken every year since at least M4 (My first MAGFest) and maybe before it. Always fun.

Eventually, 2AM Saturday rolled around, and I found out some early unofficial results. Metal Dream had done all the challenges except for 2, leaving a mere 6 points on the table. Chip “Breakdown” Vogel from SDA (Who helped out a bit with the planning for my Willow run) was this year’s Metal Dream, being the guy I totally underestimated who wound up kicking my butt at the booth. At this point, I suddenly had a bad feeling about my repeating my Top 3 performance from last year, given that I didn’t know where Mike “Doin’ the Big Sexy” Uyama stood, and it seemed from the Pre-M7 SDA topic that he had completed basically every single challenge in his own right. Also Saturday night, I got a “free” copy of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (Actual cost: Many, many purchases of Bawls Soda, to the point that I got a free pull from the Mystery Box at the booth [Normally $3] for being a regular customer.).

Sunday morning came, and I got marginally more sleep than I did Saturday into Sunday at M6, thanks primarily to the fact that I didn’t play in any tournaments until 4AM this year. At the Challenges Awards Ceremony, I found out officially what I had suspected in talking to Metal Dream the night before–my 86 points were good for 4th place. No top 3 for me this year. Once again, I pretty much served as the dividing line between “semi-serious” and “freaking hardcore” in terms of the rankings. I close-to-complete Top 10 is here and here. Besides Metal Dream’s incredible performance, the most impressive standing on the list is actually Frezy_man’s 5th place and 40 points, because he made the top 5 with exactly zero motivation to play games he didn’t already know (Understandable). He also won an NES and 3 games earlier in the Con for being the quickest to speedrun the first level of Ninja Gaiden. Evidently the SDA guys managed to annoy the people running that competition (Who were apparently unaware of exactly what goes into a speedrun) by repeatedly requesting resets at the first sign of a mistake. Funny stuff.

So overall, despite the fact I didn’t actually do much besides, um, play games, it was once again a great time, and I can’t wait for next year.

Jan 22

So…Now What?

This site went up and running in October 2007, with an agreement for 2 years with my hosting service. I had big plans for it at the time, mostly revolving around my music. This hasn’t quite worked out the way I had hoped, mainly because of one frustration after another foiling my best efforts to actually release music at something resembling a professional level (First my old computer started going on the fritz, then I realized that this one didn’t have the proper slot for my sound card, then found out that apparently adapters don’t work on this computer either). Given these setbacks, one would think that re-upping for a further 3-year commitment to the site would not be the smartest idea.

You don’t know me very well.

So now I have this site, with (In theory, anyway) more disc space and bandwidth than I know what to do with until about September 2012..and nothing to do with it at the moment. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to throw them out. I’ve actually considered doing a webcomic, but I’m not sure if this is such a good idea because A. Whatever talents I was blessed with, artistic talent is definitely not one of them, and B. Knowing me, I’d quickly lose interest in it before it had a chance to get up to speed.

In other news, I’m back in a StarCraft mode again, as happens occasionally. I’m still awful at it, if you’re curious.

Jan 20

Hmm. This Could Be Bad.

You know, for as much as people rag on George W. Bush (Deservedly so at points), I’m pretty sure he didn’t flub the Inauguration Oath either time he took office like I just watched Obama do (If anyone has footage proving me wrong, please provide it, I’d like to see).

Hopefully this was a one-off, caught up in the moment thing, and we didn’t all misoverestimate (As Dubya might say) Obama.

Jan 14

R.I.P. Ricardo Montalban

He was a Japanese guy in Sayonara. He did commercials for the Chrysler Cordoba in the ’70s. More recently, he was the grandfather in the Spy Kids movies, and the voice of Senor Senior Sr. on Kim Possible. He’s probably best known as Mr. Rourke on Fantasy Island.

To me, though, he’ll always be Khan.

Montalban was 88.