Sunday night, Shanon and I finally got to stay out late and see a few bands. We had talked about going to see Rilo Kiley in Denver, but it just seemed like such a hassle to deal with taking the kids to my parents and getting out of the show after midnight, driving back to the Springs, etc. But then Shanon realized that Rilo Kiley was also playing a Colorado Springs show at the Black Sheep, which seemed a little crazy, but was great for us.
The first opening act was OK, but lacked much of a stage presence. The guy standing next to me kept laughing at how the performer waited until near the end of the set to even say who he was. "And you are...?"
The second act was the Spinto Band, which had a lot of kinetic energy and were fun to watch. In another time and place I would have danced to them. They had three guitars and multiple lead singers anddid a song with kazoos and had a guy who had (as Tracy said) "major David Byrne damage from an early age." This video isn't great, but gives a good idea of their stage presence, complete with wacky strumming motion from the David Byrne guy.
Rilo Kiley was great. I was worried that I'd only like the stuff from More Adventurous, as that was the only album I really knew going into the show. Instead, it did what a live show is supposed to do, I guess, and made me want to get their new album (Shanon downloaded it the next day) and look into their older stuff. Here are two songs that struck me in the live show:
Ever since I played Adventure on my family's Apple ][+ as a kid, I have had a soft spot for interactive fiction (or IF). I went through a lot of Infocom games in the 80s, though I don't think I ever finished any of them. I'm anxiously awaiting Jason Scott's Get Lamp.
I don't spend much time playing IF anymore, though I have installed Spatterlight to allow me to play modern IF games on the Mac, and a few months back I downloaded the .zip file for the IF Competition 2007. Then I saw on Waxy that Lost Pig was named the winner a few months back. I read just enough about the game to know that I'd probably like it, and then gave it a try.
This is a fun and funny game. You play a wonderful character, Grunk, who is a good guy but not too..."book smart," let's say. Grunk has allowed the farmer's pig to escape, and now Grunk needs to go find that pig. I don't want to reveal any spoilers, so I'll just say that the writing is entertaining, Grunk is a great guy, and the puzzles are just hard enough. I started the game last night and played for perhaps an hour before getting stuck. I played again this morning and this evening for maybe two more hours, getting unstuck and stuck again, and then winning, and then playing the end again after reading some of the hints to see some other things happen. Great fun.
There are links to many reviews on Lost Pig's IFWiki page. I read Emily Short's, and The Stack's along with the Sidney Merk review that Waxy linked to.
Grunk also has his own LiveJournal, though he hasn't written much lately.
Lastly, a screenshot: things get just a bit spoiler-ish here, but just a tiny bit. I thought this part was necessary to solve the game, but later realized it isn't:
Gary Gygax, the man who created Dungeons and Dragons died today.
D&D was an important part of my childhood. I remember D&D not so much for the times I spent playing the game with friends, but for the time I spent reading the rules and the modules and imagining scenarios. For me, D&D was often less a framework for a game than it was for my own imagination.
What is interesting to me about his passing is the experience of finding out about it on the web. I haven't played D&D for (gulp) decades. If Gygax had died in a pre-internet age, who knows how long it would have taken me to hear about it. Chances are I never would have.
But instead, because of the internet, I heard about Gygax's death from my friend Josh via Twitter, who posted a link to the Troll Lord Games forum where Gygax's death was apparently first announced. After that, the news popped up everywhere I looked on the web from GeekDad to Wil Wheaton's blog, and on the big boards like Slashdot and Metafilter.
Of course this is the occasion for a bunch of lame jokes about hit points and saving throws and all that, but I thought the self-described "Bordering on the semi-tasteful" tribute at Penny Arcade was nicely done, and MeFi member thanotopsis' story is touching, and a nice way to remember Gary Gygax.
I'm such a nerd that I don't just build model rockets. I scan the decals that came with the rocket and print them out on my own decal paper so I can do a special inverse color scheme. I am such a nerd that I'll post photos here when it is done.
Just as we arrived at the nature center, a fox burst out of the bushes at the side of the road. The fox looked around and the fox and I spotted the mouse at about the same time. The fox chased the mouse for a moment before catching it with a paw, picking it up in its mouth, and running back into the bushes.
Shanon, Luke, and I agreed that it was one of the more fascinating things we had ever seen. Nick missed it, my headrest in his way.
One of Luke's favorite things to do right now is to record songs on GarageBand. It used to be that he would just make silly noises into the microphone and spend a lot of time choosing which icons to use to represent the guitars. But now he makes me go into another room so he won't feel shy, and he sings rambling songs that he makes up on the spot. Then we add some music tracks to his vocals. I guess we don't do a very good job with the music: I have no idea what I'm doing and he is five years old. But I find them very fun to listen to. Here are the latest:
Luke thought we should send the songs to Jonathan Coulton and Beck. I told him I had some hope of getting in touch with Jonathan Coulton, but not so much with Beck.
The photo is from months ago, but I was looking at it again today, and the blissed out look on his face just blew me away.
What are your predictions for the World Series?
I am a fair-weather fan, and only started following MLB with a week to go in the season, and watched my first game of the season with the Rockies v. Padres tie-breaker. But I'm very excited to have the Rockies in the Series, and have watched them sweep their way in with joy and astonishment.
I was listening to some after-game commentary on the radio last night, and found myself absurdly pleased to hear them talking about the Series coming to Denver. And mentioning the game times in Mountain Time! Nobody mentions Mountain Time!
As a kid, I was a Boston Red Sox fan, and I think they might be the only team in the American League I could bring myself to root for. And Manny Ramirez is frustrating and compelling.
So I hope the Rockies can keep the momentum after the long layoff, and take this series, too. I don't think there is any way they'll sweep the Sox, so it will be interesting to see how they bounce back from a loss. We know how well Boston comes back from being down 0-3 or 1-3. Who knows what they'll do with Ortiz when they play at Coors.
Rockies in six. *crosses fingers*
I have a little obsession with a game that I have never played, and am unlikely to play: Portal, and "Still Alive," the closing song from Portal.
Now before you go any further, you might want to see what Jason Scott has to say about Portal.Here is the gist:
So I can't, of course, tell you anything about the game in any concrete sense, other than to say it starts out somewhat simplistic and funny and then somewhere down the line my head exploded. And as I was picking up pieces of my exploded head, I got my head super-double-exploded, all while laughing what was left of my head off.
But I believe if I knew ANYTHING about the game beforehand, I'd have not had half this good experience. If I'd traipsed through a bunch of youtube videos or reviews or even backstory, I bet I'd have been enjoying it but not a combination of side-swiped and floored. (And then hammered and then head-explody, as previously referenced.)
Now that's all well and good, and a point of view that I endorse and often practice myself. If there is a film or a book I just know that I want to see, I don't read reviews, and try to avoid even reading the jacket copy. I don't care to know the plot in advance, and I don't want to have some reviewer's opinions clouding my one. If you feel the same about this game, time to bail out of this post.
But in the case of Portal, I was spoiled long ago with a preview video on YouTube. Plus, Portal (and the other games it was released with as "The Orange Box") are available for the PC, Xbox, and later the PS3, and I don't own any of those platforms. So it's unlikely I'll get to actually play this thing, and the spoilers are as close as I'll get.
OK, here is that first preview video I saw:
That was a few months ago. Then last week I read Jason Scott's post. Then I realized that internet troubadour Jonathan Coulton contributed a song, played over the ending credits of the game. The lyrics give away the endgame, apparently, so things get even more seriously spoilerific from here on out. Here is Coulton's main post on the song, "Still Alive." And here is how the song appears in the game:
Listen to that twice and you'll be humming it all week.
My own personal head had a little explosion right about here with this YouTube video:
Part of what seems remarkable about that to me is that the piano fan-version hit YouTube only a week after the game was first released.
But here is where the rest of my head exploded. Apparently this dude created a piano within the game Half Life that he plays by shooting the appropriate keys with his gun. And he plays "Still Alive" on said piano. (See Coulton's blog for a
more in-depth, more confusing explanation.):
That's the point where the rest of my asplody-head got laughed off.
Bonus game geekery!
In the middle of all this Portal stuff, Waxy led me to a link about one of the other Orange Box games: I Played Through Episode Two Holding a Goddamn Gnome (Spoilers). I was going to say that the title said it all, but it doesn't really. It needs pictures:
