Category Archives: Distractions

Friday Fun Link O Rama

Distractions 1 Reply

Okay I had to read 4 different articles to grok this but… it seems scientists have punched a hole into time to cloak things. I bet the producers of Terra Nova are busy re-writing their show.

Yes I know it’s way past Xmas but I want one of these.

Via BoingBoing via SuperPunch via… this made me larf without needing to read any caption:

“Too old for this, I am.” – This (plus the coloured burgers from Burger King) is making me really NOT want to see Star Wars Episode I in the theatre. But the one consolation is that they rift on the “I hope you like PAIN” youtube video, and SharkBoy will find it amusing…

Battlestar Galactica on my Gameboy Advance

Sad to see the seen-from-space Hidden Mickey (scroll down…) over at Hollywood Studios destroyed? No worries! There’s one at Animal Kingdom!

View Larger Map

So it looks like SharkBoy will be out on the picket lines in 2-3 weeks AND it might be a long one since both parties are stubborn, immovable forces. If any of you wish to help with our rent, my PayPal account is deadrobot at rocketmail com le dot. The last time this happened (right after a big Disney vacation – owch) I was equally mad at the unions and the city. Now I’m furious with just the city, for obvious reasons.

And in Disney planning news: I’m trying to convince SharkBoy that we should stay at this “gay-as-Liberace” hotel in Celebration.

Year in Review!

Distractions, Personal Bits, You Magnificent Bastard Leave a reply

Everyone is doing it! I will do it! You will read! You will be barely enriched! Read now!

One favorite post from each month:

January
I post my own text version of “It’s Gets Better”, purely because my voice sounds weird to me.

Feburary
Even though I recap our Disney cruise and parks visit, I think my three stories for BigGayCloset.com “coming out stories” were more interesting. Here’s my story of coming out to my Dad

March
Okay so I do talk about our Disney trip. Here I relate a magical gay moment with Josh and Sean at the Liberty Tree Diner.

April
I’m tasked by Nice To See Stevie B to try the Blog 64 Topics challenge. I don’t make it. But I do manage to like #6: A happy picture.

May
Probably the best surprise gift I’ve ever accomplished. SharkBoy gets a trip to Disney World and finds out the day we leave. I’ll probably never have kids and this was the next best thing to it. I will never forget his face that morning. Honourable mention

June
While away, postbear usually watches over our two feline treasures, which we’re eternally grateful for. When we get home, the apartment usually has some… new decorations… that take us a few weeks to find. He tells us we still haven’t found them all.

July
I start my AIDS Walk Stormtrooper fundrasing. In the end I made $2500 and wound up with blisters on my feet. I’d do it again in a second.

August
I mark the one year anniversary of my father’s passing, but I liked this day better.

Honourable mention: I also recount our trip to Disneyland/California with more pictures.

September
Fuzzbelly sends on prints of SharkBoy and I in our troop suits in honour of my AIDS Walk fundraising. I go all verklempt. He really is a great man!

October
Steve Jobs passes. I gush just a bit.

November
I notice that I’m writing less. Maybe 2 times a week. Is blogging dead? Or am I frustrated that this sort of shit can happen without me knowing?

December
I hate this ad. It’s gone, thankfully. But I like how I wrote about it.

There you have it. The last year in 12 links!

I hope the next year brings you happiness and bla and poo flinging monkeys with fezzes.

 

Toutical

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Obsessing on yet another social network. This one, Tout, is like Twitter but with video. Like Twitter, it places limitations on your posts and forces you to only bore your followers for 15 seconds.

Like so:

Is it a win? I’m having fun trying to think up things to show and it may replace Twitter for me. I might reduce my Twitter feed to news only, if more friends and bloated celebrities jump on board with Tout.

Add me (deadrobot) if you’re Touting!

Uncharted 3

Art, Distractions, Gaming 5 Replies

Not Drake. Not Jason Statham either, but rrrarrr!

Drake is back! Drake is back!! GASP DRAKE IS BACK!!

No not some Toronto rapper, foos, Nathan Drake, from Sony’s potboiler game series Uncharted. We’re at #3 if you’re counting. And if you’re not, this post will be like jibberish to you, postbear.

Lets get right to it, WITHOUT ANY SPOILERS…

Uncharted 3 is tops in the “game as movie” genre. From the beginning we’re treated to establishing scenes of how Drake and his faithful manfriend, Sully playfully interact while kicking ass in a London pub. A cut scene of dialogue and some bar-breaking rough housing, more characters show up and bla bla bla – things happen. Suddenly we’re whipped back 20 years to see the origins of Drake (something U1 and U2 never really touched upon, other than Drake telling us he’s a descendant of Sir Francis Drake) and how he teams up with Sully. This turns out to be some of the most clever writing/game production I’ve seen in a long time. Oh and all that I just described? It’s basically the tutorial for the game, hidden cleverly inside the prologue. Brill!

With Drake’s and Sully’s backstory established we jump back to the present day and continue on with the action. Without ruining anything, the game hits all the points you’d expect in an adventure movie: discovering long lost secrets, hidden cabals, pirates (modern day, vaguely Somalian – very topical) and treasures that may not actually be physically obtained. ooo! And while this is all going on we’re treated to themes of trust, revenge, hubris and even defeat – something hard to do when the purpose of a game isn’t to make the player identify with a character’s will to stop, to end. But yet they manage to create feelings of finality in some scenes – and yet you’re still mashing buttons. And wanting more.

One section of note in the game comes right after a spectacular plane crash in the desert. Juxtaposing action to calm, like we’ve seen in countless desert movies, Drake must make a long, hot journey through miles of desert. You’d think this would be extremely boring for a video game, but the designers manage to interweave dramatic cinematic elements into play. The developers succeed in engaging the player in what could have been a really risky element in an action game, which makes me love the game on so many levels.  Since the movie/game genre is still in it’s infancy, the designers are able to use these well-heeled movie cliches to it’s advantage – almost like they were new.

A whole lot of nothing. But it's freaking amazing nothing.

 

Here’s where I go apeshit over the beauty of the game. I… Its… beautiful. Many times I stopped what I was doing  just to spin the camera. I suggest you do that too. The developers Naughty Dog create such stunning environments that you forgive them the 3-4 year wait time  between games. Every time I finish an Uncharted game I wonder how they’re going to outdo themselves in the next game, considering the platform hardware stays the same. I keep wondering if Naughty Dog is pushing their games up into the top levels of processing speed. Yes the environments are that impressive.

Everything is punchy, well lit and on fire.

 

What didn’t I like about U3? The fight mechanics were redundant. Punch punch dodge punch punch – NPC is down! That’s pretty much the extent of close combat dynamics and it gets a bit repetitive at times. The character modeling during the cut scenes felt odd too, in terms of rendering. In some cases the eyes and expressions were spot on but then suddenly you’d get a character who moved their hands like they were wearing mittens, or their mouth looked like Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy. Minor points but I am sure Naughty Dog had to make concessions on some things to cram all that atmospheric goodness into one game.

Speaking of cram… I’d be happy if Naughty Dog/Sony left off the Online Gaming/Multiplayer aspects of this game to swap out more story or an extra scene here or there. I’m not an online gaming kind of guy and this part of the game will never be used by me. Considering the game is established as an adventure game, why not make the Multiplayer part be optional, paid DLC?

Okay so to sum it up… Best game I’ve played in a long time.

 

 

Utter the Truth

Distractions 2 Replies

I stand dramatically in the doorway and turn to SharkBoy. My eyes languidly landing on his equally couch-prone body.

“Do you… love me?” I ask breathlessly.

“Where is this coming from?” He answers (I notice) with a question.

“Well. Say I were to shit on something you own…”

Boobilypoot

Distractions 1 Reply

I went to the doctor n’guess what he told me?
Guess what he told me!
He said
“Banana taco face poopy
dog breath apple boobilypoot!”
But he’s a fool
`Cause nothing compares
Nothing compares to you

Hmm… it was funnier on the way to work this morning…

Slow Down…

Distractions Leave a reply

Like most people,  work in a place where everyone else is under stress to sell and meet deadlines. Thankfully I don’t have any part of that culture but I do have to service these poor souls. It can be stressful but I try not to let it get to me.

I use to get angry when someone would email me, utterly freaked out that they needed a marketing piece that had forever changing prices on it. And said piece would be edited 7 to 8 times before being completed because gas prices in Coober Pedy went up.

Now I just get it – things change fast and a less focused mind may miss things. Example: While “kicking the tires” on a travel site that specializes in Disney vacations I just finished retrieving a price for a week at the most magical place on earth. Then I got busy with something else and when I went back to the screen, there was a yellow box just above my quote, informing me that the price I found had increased by $13 since my last search. I suspect it was a gimmick for me to buy right away, but in this day of instant reporting, I sort of doubt it.

Anyway back to my story… stressed out people…

I got an email from a woman who got one of our ads for a seminar we put on in various cities. It was for an event on the 9th, at 6pm. Her complaint was that the event was on the 6th, at 9pm… She had transposed the numbers in her head. Didn’t we know that it was way too late for her to attend and why would we even bother with such a late hour don’t we know that people have lives after the office and maybe even kids too that need their attention??

I’m fixated on the amount of time it took her to write back to complain and the wasted energy expended. If she had only read it instead of flying off the handle because she got a spam email (that she subscribed to) and not actually “seeing” what was in front of her.

My inbox is littered with emails stuffed to the tits with grammatical and spelling errors from people who type like they only have seconds left to live, by people who have utterly ignored their spell check or have turned it off in anger. Literally things like:

I need the ad by mex week

On the intranet I see can that you have…

I take complaint. Is not department my.

That last one is an exaggeration, but not that far off.

So take a moment. Breathe. Count to ten before hitting enter.