Just an insane amount of stuff.
It seems like it’s all hitting the fan at once here at Casa Green. In case you managed to miss it somehow (surely not for lack of me blabbering about it everywhere), after months of teasing everyone along, the Classic Gaming Expo 2007 4-DVD set is now up for pre-order, with the first discs shipping at the end of this month. PDF Level 2 now has a drop-dead date in early April, giving me around a month and a half to complete it at its planned 3-hour running time (which includes editing, post, restoration of commercial clips where needed, writing, and composing the music – not necessarily in that order).
As a sidebar to PDF Level 2, though, I’ve fallen in love with a bit of my own work. I hate to admit that, because at some point you have to step away from it and view it with a critical eye. Or ear, in this case, because it’s a piece of music I composed to cover an audio-less stretch of the 1970s segment of Level 2. In the course of prepping a segment and getting it to the point where I’m finally ready to put it to bed, I get to where I have the sound memorized, and the music memorized to the point where I’m sick of it. But, pathetic as it may sound, I could listen to this piece of music all day – I embedded it in this blog post as “RCA Studio LIV” (think Roman numerals to get the joke). I’m probably going to go back and do an extended/embellished version of it to use for the trailer. Why I’m so fond of it, I don’t know – it was intended to resemble a late ’70s Alan Parsons Project instrumental (a sub-sub-genre of music that I dearly love), and I must’ve gotten somewhat close to the mark because I can’t get my ears off of it. It’s all that stuff that jumps around at fifth intervals – that sounds very Parsons. I don’t rate myself as a musician, especially not with a loop-based program as my weapon of choice (the conceit here being that the music for a video game documentary is being composed on a video game console), but this thing is just an earworm. At least for me. Your mileage may very well vary.
I have an actual client edit soon as well, and then once PDF Level 2 is on the floor and out the door…I might actually sleep. Yeah. That sounds good. Was I ever working this much when I was punching someone else’s clock? Probably not, but then I didn’t have a little guy running around “helping” me edit. Having him around (eating us out of house and home) keeps me highly motivated! 😆
One thing I’m going to try very hard to accomplish after Level 2, though, is to get my old VHS taped of the various Northside High School drama department productions transferred to DVD, do any restoration work needed, and get discs authored and duplicated in time for their respective class reunions (there were two productions in the ’88/’89 school year, and two in ’89/’90). Now, considering that these are 20-year-old edits of plays staged 20 years ago, I’m not exactly saying these are up to what I’d consider my current professional standard, but they are what’s there. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I probably won’t be charging an arm and a leg for these, just covering my costs and making sure everyone who was involved in those productions who wants ’em can get a copy.
After that…who knows? Best of CGE 2003 & 2005? Jump Cut City: Remastered, now with CGI Burchuss? Actually writing one of these books I keep promising/threatening to write? Or sleep?
Oops – Evan just woke up. Silly me – daddy stuff is what I’ll be doing with my time. 😛
P.S. I can confirm, for folks attending OEGE, that I’ll have some CGE DVD sets at my table at that show. Anyone who’s only been to OEGE who watches the CGE DVDs may be in for a bit of a culture shock. 😆… Read more
Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2, the follow-up to the successful 
After our mid-morning meal – ravioli, peaches and a few veggie crackers for Evan, and a big ol’ baked potato for me – we guys were sitting around the house, our bellies full and both of us verging on full-blast sleepy, when a random Google search lead me to MisfitMAME. Put simply, MisfitMAME is a modified version of MAME that allows you to run various and sundry… well… unofficial versions of certain games. Some of these are well-known graphical and game play hacks that apparently don’t make the cut for MAME itself (such as Popeye Pac-Man, the game for which I was Googling), and some of them, frankly, are user-made. Some of the user-made hacks are as cheesy as, well, the multifarious useless hacks of Atari 2600 games that are floating around out there. But there’s something neat about the fact that they hacked arcade code. Now, yeah, much like the 2600 hack scene, you wind up with completely pointless modifications such as a version of Pac-Man where the ghosts all wear Elton John glasses (WTF??), interesting mods such as Pac-Man Unleashed and a hack that turns the graphics of Pac-Man into a replica of 2600 Pac-Man, and actual seen-in-the-arcade hacks such as Popeye Pac-Man. Stuff like Pac-Man Unleashed and 2600 Pac-Man at least show some humor and imagination; the two zillion minor graphical or speed hacks of Pac-Man, I could do without.
As part of the fun going on for theLogBook.com’s 20th anniversary, virtually the entire site has gotten a nice little facelift. The code’s a little tighter, and so help me, the look might just be a little cleaner. There are still some minor tweaks to be made, so if you find anything broken, let me know.
(That’s the name of an old Commodore 64 game, by the bye.)
Everyone keeps tagging me with this particularly silly meme, so I figured, what the heck – with my abundance of truly weird music sitting on my hard drive, not to mention Doctor Who audio stories, film & TV scores, various and sundry sound FX albums and whatnot, I’ll be able to elevate this meme to a completely surreal new dimension. Either that or every answer will be an ELO or Split Enz song. … 
Blurgh. Evan’s been barfing again, much more explosively than his last bout of the barfies at the beginning of the year. I’m hoping that maybe this is just a recurrence of the same stomach bug, but it worries me that I haven’t been hit yet (and believe me, I’ve been up to my ankles in it, cleaning it up, and all but field-stripping the crib to clean it all up, so I’ve been in physical contact). Evan and I have spent so much of the past three months being sick with one thing or another that I worry that his immune system just hasn’t quit reeling from the punches. Such are the joys of day care: interesting new social situations for Evan and his immune system! 😛
When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, there was one basic rule in the toy world: Star Wars was king, so if your toy line had to have a chance of success, it had to be in the same basic scale as the Star Wars figures. Things aren’t quite so unified in the modern toy-making or toy-buying world, but it’s neat when it does happen – mixing and matching characters and vehicles and whatnot kinda flexes a kid’s mental storytelling muscles (or at least it did mine). There was some justification for the smaller-scale G.I. Joe guys and the Micronauts and the crew from The Black Hole hanging out on the Death Star. You just had to use your imagination to figure out what that justification was.