Category: Toiling In The Pixel Mines

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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