Category: Toiling In The Pixel Mines

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Home and away

Much like Psi Corps, I’m everywhere, for your convenience.

I spent some time over the weekend working up some new music for PDF Level 2, and even found that at some point in the past, I had helpfully left some stuff just this side of unfinished that’s virtually perfect for the next PDF DVD. I also cooked up one new number that I like a lot – for some reason, as sedate as my music writing is when I’m thinking of stuff with lyrics, my instrumentals over the past 10 or so years have tended toward get-up-and-wiggle-all-available-body-parts stuff. I also discovered, along with the various useful unfinished music, the long-lost full 8-minute version of the PDF theme – you better bet you’ll be hearing that excerpted a lot on the next DVD. Hell, even I had forgotten how long it originally was – I wish I had remembered that while scrambling to find enough original music to cover the audio gaps on the first DVD! I may post some previews in the days ahead (like anyone’s that attached to my “white guy doing ’70s funk” routine!). Having had a little burst of musical creativity here, though, I’m probably going to wait until much later in the game to do more – “compose to picture,” as they say.

Speaking of the PDF DVD, you can get it this coming weekend at Sniderman’s table at CCAG in Cleveland; at roughly the same time, relatively speaking, the newly-released Odyssey2/Videopac cartridge Martian Threat will be debuting with cover artwork by yours truly at Eurocon 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany. That’s not a bad reach, geographically speaking, for a guy who stays home with the baby in Arkansas all the time. The weekend after that, you can find the PDF DVD at Too Many Games in Reading, PA. I’m hoping that I’ll have a trailer ready for the CGE stuff by then too, but if that happens, it’s going to be an insanely tight squeeze.

A while back I promised a follow up to Doctor Who In 35 Minutes; I’m coming down the home stretch on that, mainly because I’m going to need it finished and off the Avid so I can continue working on the CGE auction (!!). As soon as I’m done with the CGE DVD content, it looks like I’ll be doing the packaging artwork too. I think we’re still firmly on target for Christmas though. I’ll make sure it doesn’t look too much like another PDF DVD. 😆

Stay tuned.… Read more

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

Birthday boy!

Evan and his daddy on Evan's first birthdayEvan’s birthday is today, and I’m working on a little video piece to celebrate the occasion. I temporarily ceased any other video work I had going so I could load every piece of Evan video I have into the Avid. I won’t tip my hand about the music, other than that it involves the Traveling Wilburys. But going through all that video has kinda made me realize how much he’s grown in the past year, and how much I have too – I kinda had to grow the hell up, a bit more than I’d realized. I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing, really – I don’t have a playbook that I’m operating by. All I do know is that it’s now been a year since I become A Guy With A Baby. Somewhere in that year that’s passed, I’ve become Dad. And I don’t doubt for a moment that it’s an improvement. He’s the best part of being me, and from here on out he always will be.

This also means that it’s been a year since I gave up full-time gainful employment. Despite that, I’ve surprised myself and, I think, everyone else by still pulling in some money while I’m on daddy duty. There were people who predicted dire things for us income-wise, and you know, it hasn’t been easy… but for the most part it hasn’t been a train wreck either.

In other news, it looks like those of you hitting gaming events “up east” will have two chances to pick up the PDF DVD – at CCAG in Cleveland on October 12th, and the following week on October 18th in Reading, PA at TooManyGames. I won’t be there in person, but plenty of DVDs will be. 🙂 The sudden surge of duplicating I’ve done for these two shows has brought the total print run up to 200, so if you’re in those parts of the country and haven’t picked on up yet, hit up Tim Snider at CCAG or Scott Stilphen at TMG those weekends and get caught up…especially before the PDF Level 2 DVD comes out next year!

OK, back to the birthday boy for me. I’ll have his video up for your amusement and amazement this weekend, and I’m hoping that next week I’ll have another treat finished at last for those who enjoyed that little video piece I did about catching you up on the mythology of a certain TV show in 35 minutes. Little hint: you’ll need another 30 minutes free in your schedule somewhere, and then you’ll be caught up on the rest of what’s going on in that universe. 😉… Read more

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Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Wow…real labeling

Makes me kinda embarrassed about the first 50 out there with hand-written “labels”. 😳

PDF DVD - now with labeling!

Sweet, eh? As silly as I feel about the 50 hand-written discs, their success made it possible to go this route. I’m not sure anyone appreciates what a no-budget endeavour the first run was: I blew what I had on blank discs and cases, Flack saved my butt by printing and cutting the covers, and after the OKC show I sweated bullets trying to get the word out to the right outlets. Now the whole project has A Budget. Which is almost scary in and of itself. One thing I did today to cover my own butt – but it’s something I’d been promising myself that I’d get around to doing for some time now – was to grab the domain phosphordotfossils.com (don’t get too excited – it redirects to PDF here at theLogBook). It just seemed like it was better to lock that down now than to have to fight for it later. (Actually, the internet being what it is, I was surprised that it wasn’t already taken by somebody, somewhere.)… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Should We Talk About The Weather? Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Mother’s Day musings

More nasty storms rolled through tonight. No damage on our end, but it wouldn’t have been the first damage of the year if there had been; we finally got the write-up from our insurance company on the work to be done on the house, as well as the check to do it with. It’s not what I’d describe as a small check, and not what I’d describe as small work: new roof, new windows all around, new back door, refinish the deck…I’ll admit that I look forward to having screen windows (the paperwork actually specifies screen windows), as well as a new back door, but I was a little surprised by the new roof thing. That’ll be fun. 🙄

In other news, another round of PDF DVDs goes out the door on Monday, due in no small part to me finally openly promoting it on Digital Press and AtariAge. Both communities have a bit of a history of suddenly getting their backs up when someone starts trying to sell them stuff from within, but ya know, I think both communities also know me well enough to know that I’m not a fly-by-night spammer. (Though considering how little I’ve been on AtariAge for the past few years, they might think I am. 😆 What can I say? I just don’t quite have the hardcore Atari tunnel vision that some of the folks there do, and I feel a little out of place.) I’ll admit that over the past couple of weeks since the OKC show, it’s been kind of fun to see where I got with just word-of-mouth and a banner about the DVD in my message board signatures, but it’s time to get down to business – I need a new office chair stat. Mine’s broken and it’s driving me nuts to sit on it. :-p

Speaking of video work, I’ve been amused lately by a TV promo about a grocery giveaway that looks like something I would’ve done with the on-screen text being “printed” on “receipts” that scroll up the screen. The really funny thing? This promo is not running on a station I used to work for – it’s running on a station that’s, technically speaking, the competition. 😆 Maybe I’m having delusions of grandeur, but permit me a moment to laugh out loud at channel 5 aping some of my old 40/29 promo tricks. (Please don’t mistake this for me pining away for the old job though – one thing I’ve enjoyed about the wild weather this year is being home to take care of my family, rather than getting called in or having to stay hellishly late to wipe someone’s butt and worry my head off about my kid.)

Finally, speaking of my kid, some pictures that only a mother could love: … Read more

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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