This Is Just Survival

Holy crap, it worked. Nice job, NASA, seriously.

You may have been a purported intellectual thief and the godfather of all nerds, but you are disturbingly responsible for how my life has turned out.

I'll pour a 2d20 out for ya.

Today marks the end of the first week of my new smoke-free status, having quit last weekend for my birthday. So far, so good...I'm actually surprised at how relatively easy it's been. A couple of times I've been out at bars and wanted one, but I was one of the only smokers left in my immediate group of friends, so I'm not around it that much otherwise. Dad had me start on Chantix, which I had never heard of, but I'm guessing it's Latin for miracle drug. If you have any intentions of ditching the smoking habit, I recommend it strongly. I've had virtually no cravings or withdrawal symptoms.

The More You Know™

In other news, Gameheads and I make our collective big screen debut this coming weekend at Saint Louis's ShowMeCon, and I apparently have my own IMDB page, a fact I have just this second stumbled upon! Of course, it's pretty blank, but still. IMDB!

Currently listening to: "Obey The Moderator", Optimus Rhyme

So if you haven't been by here in a while, you may notice that not only have I updated five times in the last day, I've also cheated about when I supposedly posted them. I'm trying to keep them sort of chronologically relevant, so get over it. You may want to scoot down to part one and start from there.

If your name is Marsha and you happen to live in San Francisco, you may wish to skip this next part.

Saturday marked my return from San Francisco, where I was gleefully attending the 2007 Game Developers' Conference. I managed to talk Simutronics into sending me to the Audio Boot Camp, so I spent the entire week attending lectures and panels on things like innovative mixing techniques using 5.1 surround and budgeting/planning for a live orchestra session. A few of the seminars I went to were pretty rubbish, basically commercials for the presenters' products/company, but I got a hell of a lot of useful info from the others. Some of the show's highlights for me:

Talking to Dolby's Chief Research Engineer at the CCP/White Wolf party about new outboard gear they're developing

Garry Taylor's (Audio Manager, SCE Cambridge) lecture on foley and recording techniques

Scott Selfon's (Senior Audio Specialist, Microsoft Game Technology Group) lectures on non-linear game scoring

Getting dragged out of the crowd at a SingStar demo by one of the demonstrators, and beating his ass at "Rocket Man"

Seeing all those nice Bioware people again. Thanks for the shot glass.

Getting a hands-on look at the 2007.1 release of Wwise, the plugin audio engine developed by Montreal-based AudioKinetic, which focuses on Interactive Music.

The stuff they're doing with Wwise this spring is going to be awesome by all appearances. People have done a lot of brilliant game soundtracks over the years (my personal favorites being Diablo II, Total Annihilation, and Heroes of Might and Magic III), but there's rarely more interactivity than switching between music based on your current area of the game, or perhaps if you're in combat. Over the next few years, we're going to be seeing more and more games where the soundtrack tailors itself to how to you play. Take the Hitman series as a random example - a player who stalks quietly through the levels, avoiding unnecessary confrontations, might have a more ambient soundtrack, while a player who goes the spray'n'pray route (like I always ended up doing) and just machine guns the hell out of anything that moves is going to have a fast, exciting action soundtrack.

Hero's Journey is going to be a perfect application of this sort of dynamic scoring, mark my words.

Marsha, you can start reading again, and if you slipped up and read all that other stuff, uh, sorry I didn't call while I was in town. I didn't want to set up a time and not be able to make it, and I ended up not having any time at all.

In an attempt to keep on top of all the other projects I have going on while in San Fran, I am the owner of a shiny new Asus laptop. It came with Vista, and my personal jury on that is still out. So far, I like it except for the networking issues, of which there are several.

In other news, I hear Gameheads has made it through the major portion of the editing process. We'll be meeting back up this Saturday for some ADR work, and with any luck, I can get hold of a copy for spotting. I think someone else will be doing the majority of the music, which is no crushing blow to me and my thousand projects, but I'd still like to get an unscored version to do it myself at some point for fun and practice. I guess I should probably also write them a bio for the cast page, since the one they made up for me says I was raised by wolves, and I tried so hard to bury that part of my life.

Currently listening to: "Wish", Nine Inch Nails

Monday night, we went to the Creepy Crawl and saw Against Me! with openers Fake Problems and Riverboat Gamblers. All three bands were pretty stellar. This is the third time in about a year or so that we've seen Against Me! I guess. Hopefully they'll keep coming back, as I think this was the best one yet. I admit to having never heard of either of the other bands until last night, but they did not disappoint in the slightest.

A couple of Wednesdays before that, we caught Flogging Molly with the Street Dogs, twopointeight, and the Architects. Again, every band was better than the previous one. The Street Dogs were especially good, better than I remembered them being from when we saw them open for Social D. Flogging Molly was of course spot on. They brought the fucking house down from the first couple of notes, and never let up. I was even inspired to get in the pit, something I haven't done in years. You'd be hard pressed to find a live act with more honest raw energy.



A couple of weeks before that, we saw the Asylum Street Spankers down at Off Broadway in downtown STL. The Spankers are relatively new to me, having been introduced to them by 1A sometime last summer. If you get the chance to catch them live, I highly recommend this unique musical experience. Most of their songs are extremely funny, and they are very talented and weird musicians - what's not to love?

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we caught the Dempseys as well. That you should keep your eye out for them is a given.

Currently listening to: "Touch of Grey", Grateful Dead

A while back, my dear friend Tre wondered at me via IM whether I had any ideas for a short story. As it turned out, she was working on a project for a multimedia class that involved, well, doing a short story in Flash. I made up some crap off the top of my head and she ran with it, and later on - I forget the actual sequence of events, but someone convinced someone to let me do voiceovers, sound effects, and music for the project.

Eventually, she sent me the raw flash files, and I threw some Looney Tunes-esque orchestra sound effects on there with the help of Kontakt 2.0's Vienna Symphonic Library, ad-libbed a bunch of retarded dialog, and added a couple of scenes just to mess with her head. Since I had just recently bought yet another new guitar (I am a proud owner of a big ol' hollowbody Gretsch, and Sweet Zombie Jesus, it's nice.) I decided to record something to give it a run and dropped a simple little jazz ditty in there as well.

The quality suffered a bit in the translation from Flash to QuickTime to WMV to YouTube, but hey, you're not going to see it at IMAX anyway. Enjoy!


Yes, that is me doing a poor imitation of Sean Connery. She got an A+ on the project, so that'll do, pig. Useless trivia: the elevator sound effect is from the beginning of the Ramones' "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg".

Currently listening to: "Cinnamon Girl", Type O Negative

Part of my Christmas present from Denise was a gift certificate for singing lessons. I don't really know what she was trying to say, but it's something I've been planning to do for a long time, so I ran with it (I keed, cupcake). I'm studying at Mid Rivers Music with Angela Minahan, a graduate student at nearby Lindenwood University. She's very personable and has not kicked me out yet, so I have high hopes for our continued success, although we have nothing in common musically. I chose Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" as my first song, and we've now moved on to "Bring Him Home" from Les Misérables, whereupon she is teaching me to sight-read vocal music. I have to admire her condfidence.

Lessons couldn't have come at a better time, because as it turns out, I'm in a band again, doing lead vocals and guitar. Also involved is the lovely Princess Sara on bass, 1A on guitar, and D on drums. We are currently called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, although that changed briefly to Folsom Prison Bruise. I've actually since appropriated that name for another project - more to come on that later as it begins the downward spiral that is my to-do list. Currently we're working up a few cover songs as we get familiar with each other, and will then move on to writing original stuff, although we really have yet to decide on a genre. The stuff we're doing right now is mostly punk, but there's a little industrial, metal, and plain ol' rock thrown in.

Currently listening to: "Stray Cat Strut", Stray Cats

So the rest of Christmas came and went, as it's wont to do at the end of the year. The D and I went home the first week of January, as we are wont to do at the beginning of the year. After a great deal of hunting, I found a copy of Guitar Hero II for my nephew. Being the good uncle I am, I had to make sure it worked, so I busted it open on New Year's Eve and played around with it. I'd heard a number of people say that it bore pretty much no resemblance whatsoever to actually playing the guitar, and to those people I say, "Good call, yeah." That said, it was fun enough that I searched around for another copy to take to the New Year's Eve party we were bound for that evening. I couldn't find one, and I was glad in retrospect, because the PlayStation 2 never holds my attention very long, but I had a good time with it for a day or so. I think he was actually a little confused by it. I had considered getting him a real guitar, but I wasn't sure if he had any interest in learning it. I took the opportunity to ask him, and he said he'd been saving money, so I bought him an Epiphone Les Paul. One of these days, I'm going to ship it to him, too.

My niece got an MP3 player that I carefully loaded up with awesome and small-human-friendly music, like the Phenomenauts (who she now loves), the Changelings (who I think she found a little disconcerting), and the Misfits (just kidding). She was dancing all about the house and singing, something she apparently does pretty frequently whether there's music or not. Ah, youth.

I had no idea what I was getting - actually, that's not true at all, I was pretty sure what I was getting, and was completely wrong. My parents got me a delicious digital SLR, a Nikon D50. I will close with a few of the resulting pictures for your visual enrichment.









Currently listening to: "Twilight Zone", Golden Earring