Just popping my head in to apologize for not feeling particularly bloggy lately. Some stuff has some up - and admittedly 90% of it is work - that’s left me in a not-even-remotely blogful mood. (I’ve also been trying not to vent about things a whole lot at work either - I’m sure everyone’s as tired of hearing about it as I am of dealing with it. That, and I have to start taking the moral high ground at some point rather than feeding the gossip mill.)

I’ve started conceptualizing another fun little piece, very much along the lines of Olivia vs. Dalek, that I hope to start some shooting on fairly soon. I won’t spill any dirt there, except to say that it, too, involves Daleks. Possibly lots and lots of them by the time I’m done working a bit of Avid magic…

You may have noticed the scads of ads for Amazon.com/.ca/.co.uk/.egbdf gift certificates all over the site. That’s the great thing about the sections that have already been converted into WordPress - I just drop in a smidgeon of code, and wham, it’s on everything. (I’m sure some folks are going “oh, gee, that’s great,” but just remember it helps to keep us “on the air.”) So if you need an Amazon gift certificate, by golly, click one of those handy little buttons. The site can always use the dough.

We have wintry-type weather moving in tonight. I’m actually hoping that it’ll sock us in enough that I can’t make it down the mountain to go to work. (That actually happened last year - when you live out in the boonies, you’re in the absolute last place that anyone’s going to send a snowplow. Instant vacation!) I’d love to stay home with my favorite cats and dog in the world and just relax and not worry one bit about the station. At the same time, I’m hoping this weather doesn’t kill this weekend’s gaming get-together in Bentonville. Maybe it could thaw out on Saturday morning…

Also, congratulations to the spammer whose random name generator came up with the absolute best spammer sender name ever to appear in my inbox: Yomoshiro Guadalupe. I mean, that’s got the staying power of Napoleon Dynamite and then some.

November sweeps ends in one hour. Thank God. The handful of spots I’m not embarrassed about from this latest month of mayhem can be found in my work section, for those interested.

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Okay, so Raquina’s not expecting. She’s just getting fat. Which doesn’t help her next year when we breed her and she is expecting. Looks like it’s time for me and the li’l nibbler (okay, she’s not that little anymore - at the beginning of the second half of this video, she’s the horse who almost runs over me) to do some walking. (Seriously, she follows me around. And tries to nibble anything relatively loose that I’m wearing - jackets, hats, you name it. Hence the nickname.)

Speaking of video, I bet that even if you have a Transmat Dalek, it doesn’t do this. Neat little practical lighting effect - no video trickery whatsoever!

OK, now that my weekend “Christmas by way of eBay” is over, it’s time to reveal the spoils of my mad consumer lust. Continue Reading »

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…a baby horse next year. Here, what’d you think I was gonna say? Raquina’s huge. With a capital H and a capital UGE. She’s either going to have a baby, or she’s eaten one and we just haven’t noticed which one is missing yet. When the ultrasound was done, her breeding seemed not to have “taken,” and we just kinda threw our arms up in the air and said “oh well, there’s always next year.”

I’m really down because my Slightly Extended Weekend is almost over. It’s nigh-on-impossible for me to wind up with a three-day weekend without being deathly ill throughout the whole thing, so I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve slept a lot, because by golly, I’ve needed to catch up on sleep. I’m unashamed to say that, Friday and Saturday, I got 10+ hours of sleep each day. Because I’ve been freakin’ exhausted.

Some awesome eBay finds tonight, including one which is a real doozie, and one which is something I’ve literally wanted for almost 20 years. Some stuff is Avid-related. I’ll do the customary show-and-tell when it all gets here.

I’ve been doing some Avid stuff when I haven’t been asleep or at the farm. Mainly video for the site, catching up on PDF demo videos and starting to crank out the first few Pixel Fiction demo videos. (I think there’s been one already, for Katamari, so maybe that’s a misnomer.) Now, I’ve been asked a couple of times, “Surely, with all of that power in your hands, you’ve not just going to crank out game demo videos for the site, or make Olivia blow Daleks up, or do spaceship animations.” Continue Reading »

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Got a nice shiny new animation for you that I left rendering over part of the holiday. I wish the Flash - as nice as it is - looked like it looks on a real TV screen. I forgot how much I enjoy doing 3-D animation.

Work on the PDF DVD should begin soon - the expanded version of the presentation shown at OVGE the past few years. I did some messing around today with creating animated looping DVD menus with the Avid, and I was well pleased with the results. Every new discovery I make with this thing is a rush, and it’s all I can do not to load you guys down with 2-3 new Flash movies every day.

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It was still a damned good season though.

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So I actually have a day off today. Wow! I was asleep until almost noon (which made for a grand total, with a couple of minor interruptions, of almost 11 hours of sleep, and let me tell you - I needed that), and now I’m getting ready to watch Arkansas knock LSU out of the running for the SEC championship. Good times.

Speaking of championships, the Galaga tournament didn’t happen yesterday as planned - there was a little bit miscommunication as to who was working which shift. Darned if my old PS1 doesn’t look nice on a great big HDTV though.

I can’t think of a better use for the conference room table.

Purty.

The ship is almost as big as my hand. That’s just crazy.

Despite me loading up Super Mario (via IMBNES), Ms. Pac-Man, and much more recent fare, nobody touched this setup at all - kinda like I was tampering in God’s domain by hooking it up in there at all. Who knows, maybe they’re right. I just thought it looked kinda neat.

Been doing some 3-D animation stuff I’ll show off to you soon, though I’ve gotta say it looks better on a real live teevee screen than it does as a Flash-compressed file.

Back after the game. LSU, yer goin’ down.

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Earlier this year, the video portion of my beloved Sony A/V amp apparently decided that showing video was a nasty habit that it wanted nothing more to do with, and I had to pull it out and swap it for another amp that just didn’t quite have the magnificent vast variety of inputs and outputs that I like to have. I was glad to have a replacement for it, but I just didn’t like the replacement enough, and I think that coincided with my PC becoming the center of my entertainment system instead of the A/V setup. Well, my wife located and procured a Sony amp like that one that had gone on the fritz, and this one even had all of its marbles - and a working remote, which the original had lacked. (The remote is unique on this model - it’s like a black egg, and you use it in conjunction with an on-screen point-and-click menu almost like a distant ancestor of the Wii controller.) It’s all hooked back up now, and it’s lovely. Now that I have extra outputs again, I may run audio and video from the amp to a secondary input on the Avid - so, for example, anything PDF related, I could play the games directly into the Avid with no loss of audiovisual quality from putting it on tape. I may also run extra outputs from the Avid back to the amp, so I can show anyone who’s there (never mind that fact that I virtually never have company in that room that doesn’t have four legs and whiskers) what I’m working on, on the BIG SCREEN. (If the 25+ year old 19-inch TV I normally drag to OVGE can still be described in such terms.)

It looks like I’m working Thanksgiving, and that means IT’S ON. Our weekend weather guy, Ted, will be filling in then, and we’ve been talking trash to each other about who among us is the master of Galaga. Get ready, Ted. You’re goin’ down. I’ll be dragging my modded PS1 and all of my retro compilations, and The Joystick, in for this supreme display of retrogaming prowess. Ted, you see those things at the end of your legs? What are those? Oh yeah. DE-FEAT.

In other Ted-related news, Ted Sczypiorski, he who authors insanely great Odyssey2 homebrews, sent me a copy of the manual for his next upcoming masterpiece, Puzzle Piece Panic, to make sure I was okay with the acknowledgement for coming up with the game’s new name (for a while early on, it was called Tedtris). I was kinda flattered to get a name-check - and I like his updated 3-D take on the O2 logo as well (not that you can tell from the standard thumbnail size here - trust me, the full version looks much better). I don’t know anything for sure, but I’d say smart money’s on seeing Packrat Video Games release this baby around Christmas. Want to hear true polyphonic music on an almost NES level coming out of an O2, without using the Voice? This game does that. Ted just keeps rewriting the book on what the O2 is capable of - I keep joking that his next game will be an O2 edition of Dragon’s Lair. I just hope he doesn’t get discouraged by the rather insistent (and very vocal) side of O2 fandom that keeps clamoring for this game, that game and the other game, seemingly blissfully unaware of the time and effort involved. He’s said that he’s working on a sequel to Pick Axe Pete next (!!), and I’m always happy to play whatever he comes up with next, because he has yet to drop a stinker in our laps. He’s got a very good sense of balancing the Really Fun Game side of things with the Cool Technical Achievements That We Didn’t Know That Old Hardware Could Do side of things - and among homebrew authors, to put it charitably, that’s not always the case.

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WARNING WARNING…MY VISION IS IMPAIRED…I CANNOT SEE.

Oliviazilla!

1. This kitten cannot stay out from in front of a camera.
2. Why couldn’t she have done this when I was shooting video?

I promise, this is the last Olivia vs. Daleks post for a while. I’m not sure the Daleks can take much more damage from her.

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