a while back i designed my own marquee for my MAME cabinet at home.  i really liked the design, and for my birthday this year, i had it printed up and shipped to me.  it arrived in the mail today, and it looks glorious.  i mean, wow.  i wish you could see it.  i guess i could take a picture.

oh wait, i did.

it’s a picture of the giant, sad crack in the plexiglas all the way across the corner.  i emailed this pathetic picture to the printers and i hope desperately that they’ll be able to help me out.  it’s a sad thing to have happened.  and i waited so patiently!  oh well.

at least we all can rest assured that the effectiveness of “FRAGILE: DO NOT BEND” labels hasn’t changed dramatically in the past 235 years.

edit:  the marquee image.

finished Portal (1st person puzzle shooter by Valve, for those of you non-gamers) this morning, finally. just got the orange box last week (yay black friday deals! only $25) and spend probably the best 2.5 hours of my gaming* life in a long time playing portal. i can’t believe i took this long to get around to it. i haven’t hit the advanced maps or the challenge maps yet, but i’m looking forward to it.

the way things are going at work though, it may be after christmas before i can get to it. working on work, and i need to be done with it like yesterday. yikes, right?

sara and i played a lot of mario party on sunday, which was awesome. some enforcer friends of ours popped in and we had some four player action as well. and pizza. and the day before that, sara and i had a brainwave and put together a projector screen for our new mitsubishi HC1500. we got some really nice fabric at Jo-Ann Fabric that was extremely opaque (intended for windowblinds), some extra thread, etc., and then went to home depot and got an 8′ long 2″x2″ made of some crazy hardwood that wouldn’t bend under its own weight, and a length of PVC pipe for the bottom to pull down the screen good and tight. got some shelf brackets, eye bolts, drywall screw combos, and s-hooks for the hanging mechanism, and while sara sewed up the loops at top and bottom for the 2×2 and the pie to sit in, i measured and hung the brackets. once complete, it looked awesome. we watched annie hall. the projector isn’t in the best place (we had to keystone a little), but it looks really good, and i can’t wait to get some component cables for the Wii so that we can see it all in glorious 480p.

yeah. 480p. i don’t have anything that does 720p or 1080anything yet. one step at a time!

*: sara found this post which did not originally including the adjective ‘gaming’. i am chastened.

I’ve seen other examples where the art in question could fall into the ‘Homage or Ripoff?’ category, but today it hits closer to home than I had suspected it ever would. A good friend of mine works in the cinematics division at Blizzard, and today I got these two images in the mail from him. The first is a print ad from Vancouver Film School, in which they seem to be using some student art, and the bottom image is a still frame from the Burning Crusade cinematic (Burning Crusade being the first expansion pack for the ever-popular World of Warcraft MMO). This print ad is from the SIGGRAPH edition of Animation Magazine, no less. And you can bet your ass these images are already making the rounds at the Blizzard offices down in Irvine.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that student homage is great and studying other people’s work is a great way to learn, but the usage in this instance is just wrong. I graduated from VFS back in 2003, and unless things have changed radically, students still need to show their source material when they’re creating their work, and plagiarism is highly frowned upon. Whether or not this instance qualifies as plagiarism could be debated, but the fact that VFS are using this work in an advertisement strikes me as really stupid and insulting. “Oh, hey Blizzard, thanks for your hard work, we’re going to use this to round up a few more students, is that okay?” except not so much with the asking or the legitimacy.

This is either the student’s fault for not disclosing all sources of inspiration like they were supposed to, or VFS’s fault for not giving a shit about who they make money off of. Let the student put it in his/her demo reel at his own risk, sure, but for christ’s sake don’t use it to make money for your school when it’s so very obviously someone else’s work.

VFS, I hope you’re listening. I really want to be proud of my vfx alma mater, but this puts you in a very poor light.

Edit: I realize that this is a strongly worded post, so I want to add that there are definitely good people working up there at VFS, but stupid things like this overshadow that good work and make the school look it doesn’t have any idea what it’s teaching or producing. Obviously something broke in the chain of events that lead to this advertisement, and whatever it is that broke (or was broken already) needs to be fixed.

so i got my M3 DS Simply the other day, and i’ve been playing with it a lot the past week or so. here’s a summation:

i paid $90 at themodchipstore.com for the M3 and a 2gb microSD card. i bought it as a package so that i could be sure to have a microsd card that would work error-free (see Scorpei’s DS wiki online for details). if i had been more brave, i would have bought the R4 (exact same hardware as the M3) somewhere cheap ($30), and ordered the kingston 2gb card from amazon (even cheaper than the $40 i paid). however, i’d just sold a bunch of stuff i didn’t need, so it was worth it.

setup is a little arcane, since the chinese english is so terribly bad, but once you get understand what files go where, it’s very easy. i even made my own skin, since the default one is pretty stark and ugly. now that i have it all nicely configured, though…

1.) DS Games: i have all the carts that i own (and maybe a few others) on the card, and gameplay is simple and awesome. i can even cheat, thanks to the M3. online gameplay doesn’t work for everything, but for most it’s great.

2.) DS linux: boot linux, ssh to home machine, OR run any of a multitude of precompiled apps. i use dslinux to ssh to my home machine and then connect to my screened terminals. \m/ very easy install, also.

3.) homebrew apps: a very nice irc client, a good organizer app, and even an xm tracker, among other things. running apps is just like putting a game rom on your card.

4.) homebrew games: one word: lemmings. playing lemmings was never so awesome. also, check out the ports of nethack and SCUMMVM for the DS.

5.) moonshell: this is a shell that launches from the m3′s boot screen, and it handles txt, jpg, and a lot of music files (including mp3s), as well as video (if properly converted). the txt viewer is about what you’d expect, and the jpg viewer is so-so (ComicBookDS is better, IMO), but there is very little that beats listening to NES and SNES soundtracks in their original form. i’m listening to final fantasy VI right now, and it’s freaking awesome. also effortless, since the tracks auto-advance (it ignores looping).

all in all, this is one of the best purchases i’ve made in a long damn time.

nuthin’ to see here, folks.  sara didn’t write nuthin’ and i didn’t draw nuthin’.  we did, however, manage to save a young girl’s life, twice.  turns out she was an unwitting victim of the man-made GUILT virus *gasp*!  after scrubbing up in post-op, we sat down and watched spiderman, something we hadn’t seen in at least a couple years.  wheee!
yes, we’re playing Trauma Center: Second Opinion on the Wii.  you should be, too!

i plan on (emphasis on ‘plan’) making a larger, more complex drawing over the weekend.  i hope.  wish me luck!

(wow, this post is a lot longer than i had intended. i hope you enjoy it anyway.)

so kim and i and jared and kemer suffered an abortive attempt to snag a wii on saturday morning. as it turns out:

hot tip about ebgames getting wiis early != actual hot tip.

but sara got to play with the wii at friday’s holiday party (thanks, kurt!), and so around 9pm on saturday, we decided (after much debate about how we were definitely Not Too Old To Do This Kind Of Thing) to go crazy and camp out for a wii on sunday morning. we showed up at Toys’R'Expensive at about 10pm and got chased off by the security guard (long story). we went for coffee and donuts, sat in the car in the parking lot and watched DVDs until midnight, and then set up camp after the security guard left. we came prepared with many many layers of clothes, many many things to do, but we did not come prepared for idiots. we were first in line (a dubious honor), but the guy right behind us could NOT shut up, and the the word ‘confirmed’ must have been on the vocabulary list in his weekly ‘How To Talk Good’ class. 40 consoles were ‘confirmed’. his place in line was ‘confirmed’. his wife was #11 in line at target, that was also confirmed. i wanted to see if he could confirm my sleeping bag stuffed up his ass, but i was pretty cold at the time and needed the extra covering. his underdeveloped sense of humour (don’t ask for examples, as i can’t give them anymore — my ‘cringing’ muscles are now broken) and poor social skills just about sent sara and i over the edge. and his crazy wife, oh my god. this woman’s every other word was a conjugation of the term that denotes intercourse between two individuals. she was waiting in line just up the road at target, called him about every ten minutes to ask if they’d gotten vouchers yet. i shit you not. there’s more to that story, but you really just don’t want to know.

anyway.

so we sat in line, people trickled in to wait in small groups until about 3:30am, and then there were about 20 people. after that, people really started showing up, and the stupid level just continued to rise. jeff foxworthy’s mentally incapacitated and pulchritudinally challenged twin brother showed up, and demonstrated his lack of ability to go 10 minutes without a cigarette. he and confirmation guy became best buds, and they and about 5 other guys had the same conversation for the next five hours:

1. how many Wiis there were
2. the probability of getting a Wii tonight
3. boy, it was too bad they couldn’t go to work tomorrow because they’d be too busy playing with their Wiis, ha ha ha.
4. how many Wiis there were
5. when they would get their vouchers (6am).

lather, rinse, repeat until your ears bleed.

i managed to sleep from about 4-5 (yayy headphones), covered in lots of clothes and a sleeping bag. sara didn’t fare quite as well. we were both suffering from the aforementioned imbecilic auditory proximity, but i was better able to tune it out.

anyway, about 6am we got up and waited for the manager to come out and hand out vouchers. we should have just kept playing cards, because he didn’t come out until 7:30, but whatever. the time spent between 6am and 7:30 we mostly watched Captain Confirmation and his sidekicks race back and forth in front of the store windows, tracking every move the manager made to see if he was Actually Coming To The Door This Time. you know when you walk past someone’s house and they have a fence and a dog or two? and the dog keeps up with you as you go past, or if you turn around and go the other way? it was a lot like that, only with more drool.

we finally got our voucher, there were about 40 Wiis, maybe 60-70 people in line. when we actually got into the store (8am-ish, after some coffee and warming ourselves up at pavilions), everything went very smoothly. we got two more wiimotes and nunchucks for a total of three. behind the counter they had a literal PILE of extra Wiimotes and nunchucks, so if you guys have been looking for one, i would bet that they actually have a few left (you should probably call them first to make sure).

then we went home, hooked it up, and played until our elbows gave out. we went out to go see Agamemnon at 3pm with friends, and that’s when i was able to catch up on my sleep. idiots and their kin notwithstanding, it was fully worth the wait.

so yay! christmas wish fulfilled! i hope you all enjoyed my diatribe.