Category: Toiling In The Pixel Mines

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Critters Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

The Othello Report

FISH!Othello is home from the vet, and as I type this he’s enthusiastically chowing down on some Fancy Feast – of which I have quite a bit that I never intended to feed anyone after the Great Wet Cat Food Scare of a year or two ago. All these cans o’ Fancy Feast came as little samplers packed in with cat litter. Right now, they seem to be hitting the spot just fine, which is exactly what we need; due to the same aforementioned Cat Food Scare, we switched off to a regionally-produced brand of dry food – i.e. something that didn’t come from the same mills as 90% of the commercial brands – which Othello now shows no interest in. He now happily chows down on canned food while the other two are locked away temporarily, which drives the kitty kids nuts. Especially when I put his food away and he happily struts back into the baby’s room to lay down on my bed, smelling like canned cat food…which the other two can’t find. Good to be king, eh? But it’s even better that he’s eating. Now let’s see you pack on some pounds, skinny boy.

Got an Avid drive cable in yesterday, so I was able to try out the new Avid drives I got from eBay – remember, the ones that came clanking against each other in a priority mail box with absolutely no packing material whatsoever except for one flimsy piece of bubble wrap between the drives? – and to my astonishment, one of them was not DOA. The other one’s media was so damaged that it couldn’t even get one minute into a low level format. Say it again with me: dumbass! I wouldn’t even be going to the ‘bay for these except that I’m dealing with a slightly older generation of Avid gear. I’d have to buy a completely new setup to get the generation of Avid that uses firewire for everything, and I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t be getting that one for under $425 and a trip to Illinois. (To date, despite a motherboard replacement, three new drives, and new drive cables – which are all kinds of not cheap – I still have yet to sink $1,000 into my Avid.)

Neat stuff comes out of though. I’ll be sending out the next round of PDF DVD orders today or tomorrow, including the first international order (!) and orders from folks who I have no idea who in the world they are. As much as I appreciate my circle of friends picking up copies, the whole “total strangers buying my little DVD that I made” thing is kind of exciting.

Speaking of video games, I finally got Daphne working last night, and played my first game of Astron Belt in ages. I wish I’d accomplished that before the PDF DVD went out the door. 🙄 Ah well.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Recovering from OEGE

This code disk means FREEDOM!Sorry I haven’t had a lot to say this weekend – Saturday I was either en route to, in, or returning home from Oklahoma City all day, and Sunday I proceeded to sleep in like a madman and then go feed horses (presumably also like a madman). I took the TVs and DVD player I used in OKC back to self-storage Sunday night, which marks an all-time record for me putting away all of my “expo wares” after getting home from a show. 😆 It was a decent show, pretty quiet, subdued and small though, and I strongly get the impression that while it being an on-school-premises event is a valuable backbone for it to have, that also hamstrung the promotion of it because everything from securing sponsors to putting up a web site (the latter of which never happened) had to be vetted by faculty. Putting it right around the end of the semester might not have helped in that regard either, since it meant that faculty was probably getting ready for, or grading, finals. Still, one lives and learns, and hopefully this show will make it to a second year. I sold about a dozen copies of the PDF DVD, a link to which I’m now contractually obliged to include in nearly every blog post or message board post I write, and not all of them went to Digital Press forum regulars, which was encouraging.

There were quite a few people who asked about it and didn’t buy it, and they were just as valuable as the folks who did fork over money: they gave me a very good idea of what to say on the actual ordering page, including clearing up a very frequent question, i.e. “Is this DVD the thing that’s showing on this TV screen, or is it emulators and ROMs?” I don’t want to denigrate any potential customers, but come on. I’m in a grey enough area with the commercials that are on there, but emulators and ROMs? That’d just be a suicidally stupid thing to sell on the internet. So into the disclaimer it went: yes, this DVD is what you saw on the screen – the timeline documentary thingie. Though three minor issues with it cropped up after I’d made the copies, in general, I’m very pleased with how the PDF DVD turned out. Maybe it’s a bit of an ego trip, but after watching that whole three-hour thing, and then the animated GreenhouseFX logo at the end with the music…that little logo animation just does not get old. Not for me anyway. 😛 … Read more

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Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

PDF: The DVD – coming in one week!

He's all over the place! What an asshole!Well, I bet you weren’t expecting to hear that. Next Saturday at the Oklahoma Electronic Gaming Expo in Oklahoma City, the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD will make its debut. Almost four hours of classic gaming history, footage, commercials, rarities and trivia on DVD for your viewing pleasure – and at a Low Low Price too. (For those who can’t make it to the show, I’ll figure something out afterward…just let me get the show out of the way first!)

I’m sure there are probably some folks wondering where the hell the Classic Gaming Expo DVDs are, and all I can say is: I’m still working on them. A lot of the PDF stuff was pre-produced a little over a year ago, and just needed to be edited into the proper order now. I’ll put it this way: it was much easier for me to finish the entire PDF DVD project within the month of April, in and around and on top of looking after the baby, doing housework, and doing other stuff (not to mention shutting down the whole shebang every time a bad storm rolls through, so the gear doesn’t get fried – which means approximately 2 days a week of downtime, than it has been to try to get the CGE DVDs done. We’re talking about a difference of several hours of material, and material where the sound has to be endlessly tweaked vs. material where the sound mix is already, for the most part, done.

I also wanted to get one project done, and done well, to re-energize myself for the home stretch of working on the CGE project. I’ve run into some epic sound issues (which had everything to do with the Riviera making no provisions for me or anyone else connected to the show to record sound direct from their little microphone mixing board for the keynotes – I know some people are bemoaning the fact that CGE isn’t going back to the Riv, but let me categorically state that I am not one of them). I’ve been working and reworking one segment of the CGE project for nearly a month in and of itself, just trying to get the sound to not suck. We’re talking about chopping up the sound and editing and tweaking it on the order of 30ths of a second. That’s some seriously tedious stuff, but when you’ve got speakers mumbling to begin with, or making no effort to even sit near the microphone, this is the kind of thing you find yourself up against, never mind your everyday sound editing like knocking down the sound level of the guy coughing in the front row right underneath the camera’s microphone. I’ll confess to you here and now that I’ve grown very discouraged with the CGE thing: I thought we’d have access to the sound board, and that would mean that this thing would be in the can by now. Instead, I’m hoping and praying that maybe CGE 2007 on DVD will be ready for you folks around the time that we would’ve been doing CGE 2008 if there was a show this year. 🙄 Seriously, it should be done well before then, simply because having done the work on the PDF project has goosed my enthusiasm a bit.

For those who have seen the earlier incarnation of PDF at the Tulsa OVGE events, this one looks the same in many respects, but it’s vastly, vastly expanded – where the old one took all of about five minutes to blast through the video game achievements of the 1970s, this one takes nearly 40 minutes to get into the 1980s at all. There are twice as many game segments (including stand-alone dedicated consoles), more commercials than the original version, and more trivia bits, including iconic and unusual controllers, notes on vaporware products that were announced and then scrapped, and so on.

Even the PDF DVD has hit some technical snags, including a handful of items that went missing and had to be reconstructed from the original version, a major change in how I handled music for the project, and even new bits that had to be hand-animated from scratch. If you thought the old version was impressive, you better sit down for this one. Mainly because it’s twice as long, and you probably don’t want to be standing for that length of time.

For those feeling betrayed by the fact that this has gotten finished before the CGE DVDs: all I can say is, don’t feel that way. The PDF project has been in progress, at an even slower boil than the CGE project, for years. The announcement of the OKC show just gave me a little kick in the butt to put the other thing on pause for one month and crank this puppy out. Seeing how good the PDF project looks and sounds has renewed my enthusiasm for getting the CGE stuff done. As they say, stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you want to see some bits from the PDF DVD, here they are: … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gaming Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Early spring and lightning

Elizabeth Lister ObservatoryIt’s all around me, yeah yeah yeah. Odd time to be blogging, I’ll admit, being in the middle of a thunderstorm warning with quite a sound and light show going on just outside my window, but I stay awake for these things just in case they wake Evan up.

And speaking of Evan…I’ve got video for you! It’s just not the video I was trying to get. I’ve been a bit self-conscious lately of the fact that I take boatloads of pictures of the kid, and not nearly enough video, which has to be the height of irony since I’m kinda like Mr. Video Equipment. So today, before I put Evan down for his morning nap after we’d had breakfast and read some stories, I set up one of my cameras to look straight down into the crib. Now, one might just argue that the presence of a huge freaking tripod directly above one’s head might just be something that would be unusual enough to merit staying awake. But I waited until he was rubbing-his-eyes tired to put him down for his nap. Did it help? Not even the tiniest bit. I sped up the resulting 10 or so minutes of video to give you a time lapse version of what all he did instead of, oh, actually sleeping. You’d think he would be making a ton of noise while doing all that shuffling around, but no, he just gets good and stuck and then he calls for help. I have no idea where he got that.

While waiting for someone to e-mail me back a JPG or two so I could finish a video project I was working on for them, I farted up a little Doctor Who DVD intro thingie that might also amuse you fellow fans out there. You can watch that here.

I’ve gotten an invite from the Computer Arts and Technology Society at Oklahoma
City Community College to be an exhibitor at the first-ever Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo on April 26, 2008. At this point…I honestly don’t know if I’m up for that or not. There was no OVGE in 2007, which frankly was a bit of a relief (not that I didn’t miss it though), and now that I’ve got a baby that I’d have to make arrangements for, the thought of unplugging a bunch of my crap and hauling it to OKC is just a bit more daunting than it would’ve been this time two years ago. Part of me wants to go, part of me wants to just sleep. At any rate, if you’re in that neighborhood, it’s Saturday, April 26th at the OCCC campus, south of OKC near the Will Rogers World Airport. (“Will Rogers World! Will Rogers World! For all your Will Rogers needs!”) I’ll keep you updated on my decision, whenever I reach it. I might do something, I might not. OVGE folks who remember Kent will be relieved to know that he’s on hot standby for this event – I think he’s been suffering OVGE withdrawals.

Not quite last but most certainly not least, congratulations to Keir and his family on the new baby. I’m glad they got to deliver in an ambulance behind the post office instead of me – you’d think that would’ve happened to us… 😯

Finally, I have to confess an embarrassing truth: I almost pissed my pants laughing so hard at South Park’s Heavy Metal parody last week. If you haven’t already, you really need to catch the rerun of that one, or get it on iTunes or something.… Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Timeline…to DESTRUCTION

If anyone’s wondering why the CGE DVDs are taking so long, fear not…they are still going to happen. Getting ready for, and then having, and then taking care of the baby kinda knocked my feet (and my schedule) out from under me, but I’m pushing pixels as fast as I can to get the whole thing ready. What in the world could be taking so long? Check out this tiny portion of the Avid editing timeline for the “CGE Stories” panel with John, Sean and Joe. … Read more

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Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Windows to the past…and Binky Blast!

I think I may be the only person, at this point, who looks over to the left side of the screen (assuming you’re looking at the actual Scribblings page instead of crossposts on Livejournal or Myspace, or the RSS feed box I’m trying out in a couple of places, etc.) to see what I wrote on this date X years ago. Over the past month, I’ve become almost obsessed with clicking on that for myself, just to see who I was, where I was, and what I was doing this time a year ago, before I assumed my new superhero identity* of Evan’s Dad. Today’s entry from a year ago is especially interesting to me in that regard, in that it illustrates a frustration that is simply no longer a part of my life. Man, how I don’t miss that place. As distressing as I’m sure it is for anyone still working there, it heartens me to some degree that everyone else working for the person in question followed me out the door within the past year. That validates it to some extent – it wasn’t just me.

But enough about that place. For some reason – possibly the combination of lack of sleep and being in the house too much – my creative juices haven’t been so much in overdrive as they’ve just been pouring out of every orifice in a viscous ooze. This is behind the sudden burst of stuff like the Doctor Who DVD covers and, now, presented to you here for the first time…my idea for an Odyssey2 homebrew game. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Should We Talk About The Weather? Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Wind and/or wuthering

Man, the wind blew last night. Right out of the north too, which means “right into the window of Evan’s room, which leaks air like it’s barely there.” I tacked up a blanket across the window, so the cold air didn’t reach him (his crib is by the door, and more importantly, by the central heat/air vent over the door, which was keeping him nice and toasty), but the bed I’ve been sleeping in there during my “overnight baby shift” is right under the window, so…yeah, I got a bit cold. Even my cats didn’t stick around. Draft dodgers!

After reading Flack’s tale of attrition by pizza, I was instantly reminded of my first TV job, and the fact that I had only part of one night’s training. Bearing in mind that I had been working in radio for about 4 years at that point, I think it was probably a big help that I had basic theory of timing out commercial breaks, etc., down…but still, it came as a surprise to me when, about four hours into my shift, she announced that it looked like I had it all figured out, and that she was going to leave and go hang out with her boyfriend. She also made it clear that she wasn’t going to come back to check on my work, or for that matter come back at all. She was quitting on the spot.

I finished out that shift to the best of my ability, without any major issues. Needless to say, the next Saturday night, I was working that shift instead of her.

The funny thing is, several years later at another local gig, I ran into someone who shall remain nameless who was apparently the person with whom she went to hang out after leaving me to my fate. We had a little laugh about that and said that the last time he saw her, she’d said the same thing – which came as a bit of a surprise, since he thought he was her boyfriend. My only reply to that was “Well, I guess she’d finished training you.”

It’s strange how well that joke didn’t go over at the time, but I still think it was funny.… Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Gagging on Cox

(Sorry for the post title, I couldn’t resist.)

So here we go again – the old 40/29 vs. Cox Cable feud is coming to a head. Of course I’m rooting for my 40/29 homies, or ex-homies as the case may be, but at the same time, from the responses already posted on the unusually subdued Arkansas TV News Blog (by five responses, it’s normally a lot nastier and bitchier than that – seriously, these people waste no time, well, relatively speaking, since most of them read and respond to that blog while on the clock, but anyway…), you can already see the logic that you know has to be running through the minds of most viewers who are aware of the problem: “oh well, we’ll just watch KTUL out of Tulsa.” Bit of a double-edged sword there, that Tulsa feed. (From my understanding, the reason the KTUL feed has never been syndexed – i.e. blacked out for syndication exclusivity – is because the feed from the National Weather Service in Tulsa comes in on an audio subchannel from that feed. Whether or not that’s accurate is another matter entirely.) I’ve been known to switch over to KTUL myself on such occasions as Lost being pre-empted by an Arkansas basketball game that I wasn’t particularly interested in. You can bet that others have done the same too. Question is – how much hardball can the station really play when the end result would be everyone just shrugging and changing channels?

Good luck with that, guys. For what it’s worth, it reminds me of one time, back at our rental house, when Cox called repeatedly, insisting that we were behind on payments (we actually weren’t). My wife handed me the portable phone and said “Guess who’s calling again? It’s Cox.”

“No dear,” I replied, “it’s pricks.”… Read more

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Cooking With Code Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Fun and/or games

This week marks the official launch of yet another WordPress-ified section of the site, this time an archive for the literally hundreds of videos accumulated for Phosphor Dot Fossils over the years. It’s not the most elegant solution for handling that material, I’ll admit, but it does help me to get away from coding every PDF article twice over and then doing dumbass things like forgetting to change the template code (which is why every Apple II game looked and sounded uncannily like Ghostbusters for the longest time 😆 ). You can do a search by title and look at video of, say, every port of Zaxxon for which we have video. It’s actually kinda neat – give it a try. In time I’ll also add back in stuff such as the maruqee artwork and other artwork elements that used to be part of the now-defunct Arcade Artwork Archive section. See? Even in the digital world I’m a pack rat who never throws anything away. I decided to go ahead and launch this monster this week because, plain and simple, it cuts down on extraneous coding and goofball Ghostbusters mistakes.

Speaking of old games…guess what? I’m goin’ to CGE! It’s official. But there’s a catch – you probably won’t see me much outside of the keynote speeches, which I’ll be taping for a project that the CGE organizers will let you know about Very Soon. (Well, okay, I’ll spill: I’m producing a DVD, possibly a multi-DVD set, of this year’s show. Keynotes, alumni dinner, auction action, show floor, you name it. The current plan is for the whole shebang to be available around Christmas. So hey, there’s my major post-production project to be working on after Evan gets here. Funny how that works out, eh?) So think of it as a working vacation. Still: it’s a trip to CGE that I literally didn’t have in the budget, so it’s nothing but a huge treat for me. Hanging at the Expo with an all-access pass, doing what I do best (aside from kicking your butts at Galaga), what could be better? And I’m still going to 1984 Arcade in a couple of days with Rob, Brian and the gang, so July really is kinda like my last hurrah before baby time hits me like a loaded diaper.… Read more