This cat is on Facebook.
The cat in question is one from a popular application on Facebook- Farmville. I suppose players stumble across the cute little kitten while tending to their pixelated fields, and has become a common occurrence. The cat is a collectible in the game, but I'm not certain. Either way, it's driving me nuts- the cat appears at least two or three times a day in my newsfeed on Facebook. I'd like to be making that up, but i'm not kidding.
I want attack that cat so badly. I don't know why I've developed such a hatred for an inanimate object, but it's become a pet peeve of mine. I always develop a weird hatred for odd things, from ways people say words (my friend Primo knows of a certain movie title that if said correctly, makes me shiver and yell at him) to the occasional squirrel on my front lawn. But I've never had such hatred for something on Facebook.
I want to kick a fake cat so hard. Or at least use a thresher. That's on the farm, right?
Hope to see you soon, big girl. The Wii is starting to get old.
Think about it. there are probably thousands (maybe millions) of kids running about with pokemon fighting against one another. Unsupervised. Often bullied by grown men waiting in the low grass, stalking them and waiting for them to pop up before challenging them to a duel.
These same children fight with pokemon that more often than not, battle with flame, electricity, and poison.
Why don't the kids take more pre-emptive measures to protect themselves during the battles instead of standing on the sidelines like nincompoops?
There's no good parenting in the Pokemon world. Or pedophiles, I guess.
I really need to stop letting my mind going off on these random tangents.
Thank you, Joystiq Podcast Appreciation Group. Thank you for your generosity.
A little background: my Playstation 3 died around june/july of this year. From what I can tell, the temperature sensor is conked out. The system is completely and utterly dead. It's a 60 gig console with the backwards compability, so I figured getting it fixed would be an easy thing.
Well sure, I'd be easy. After $150. It was out of warranty. I grumbled a bit, and saved the money needed to fix it. I waited a while to do so, saving small incriments of money from my part time job. In waiting, I was even mentioned as one of those rare cases of a broken PS3 on the Joystiq podcast.
Unfortunately, my car died. I lost all the money I had saved for the PS3 to fix the heating coil (first time I discovered cars HAD heating coils).
Then any money I had at that point disappeared as the car broke down AGAIN-major components, including the oxygen sensor and part of the engine, melted (the temperature sensor failed after I Ieft the mechanics, causing much of the car to overheat.). My car, my precious LaFonda (or Joystiq One, if any Joystiq members were present.), had put me into debt considerably.
A couple of friends offered to help me out with the system repairs, as they had played the console more than once, but they seemingly dropped out over a series of issues. I had resorted to playing games rarely- playing my wii on short bursts and looking at some of the games I bought after the fact (I have a collector's version of Resident Evil 5 that hasn't even been played yet.). I gave up on fixing the system and decided to wait until December- where christmas money would be spent to pay off the black monolithic console that was reduced to a very heavy paperweight.
Today, I went to an Uncharted 2 event. Frazzled and annoyed that I got lost twice, I waited in bumber to bumper traffic with an eve shorter fuse. Waiting completely stopped on the 101 freeway, I received this message on my phone- a Facebook message from a fellow JPAG member, Alex Raymond:
Hey Dan,
After you told me the other day that your PS3 was broken and you didn't have the cash to fix it (and frankly the fee is ridiculous), Randall and I rallied the JPAG and a bunch of us pitched in and raised $175 for you to send in your PS3 and have it fixed. Just send me your email address and I'll be able to hand it over via Paypal!
I lost it. I checked my phone six, seven times over, trying to see if all this was true. I couldn't believe it.
I lost it. I cried right then and there on the freeway. Crying as a police officer drove by, giving me a stange look upon seeing my face. I was overjoyed, shocked at the generosity, the compassion the JPAG (and some Joystiq writers!) had given me with this gift. I'm crying right now as I try and type this all out on my Blackberry.
Thank you again, JPAG. You really do make me proud to call you my friends. I don't know what to do to repay you all.
Christ, I need a tissue.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Take today, for example. A mother and her son walked into the library today, making a beeline for the video section. I took no notice when they first walked in, until i noticed a flowing cape behind the son- he was dressed as Superman.
They took no time to pick out an individual VHS copy of Thomas the Tank Engine. He bounded towards my counter, sliding the VHS onto the counter as best as he could, standing on his tiptoes as his mother shuffled through her cards to find her library card. She found the card moments later, and I quickly checked out the movie. As per policy, I walked past the security gates to hand the VHS to the patron- but i leaned over to the child's level, over the counter.
The joy on his face as he bounded around the corner and to me was one I can describe in a limited scope- he hopped and skipped over to me with cape flowing, he looked like a small, latino version of Superman as he took the VHS from my hands, a big grin crossing his face. He thank me, and scampered down the stairs. The last thing I saw of him was his crew cut hair being hidden away by the cape. The joy and utter pleasure he took at something i grew up with made me smile. It helped that he was dressed as Superman, though.
It's moments like these I love working at a library.
Yesterday, I took apart my second computer to get it scrapped.
It was built by a small computer shop on Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena. It no longer exists.
I remember helping picking out the parts- a 500 mhz Pentium 3 CPU. 20 gigs of storage. Two optical drives in it. The green case, I picked out to "make it look more like an iMac.". I started playing a bunch of games upon it- Starcraft and Diablo being my favorites.
I remember the immense pride I had in installing a second drive, when I was just in middle school.
After this computer died, I built my family's first computer. The first one I named. This computer was never named.
See ya, lime green.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
i wrote a little story about my very first memory of my Dreamcast over at Wing Damage.com:
http://bit.ly/3tjoz
It's thinking, baby.
Sounds completely mundane out of the amounts of praise to which the Playstation 3 exclusive game has been receiving (or lack therof, in certain places), but it's certain levels in the midpart of the story mode of the game that have me flabbergasted, thinking about my childhood in Mexico.
I was born in Mexico, and I grew up there until I was seven years of age. My mother, a white woman born in southern California, fell in love with my father, a man from Mexico city. I grew up in Mexico for a number of years, until about the summer of 1994, when my mother took me to the United States. My memories of that time are very jolted together, and it's hard for me to remember everything in that time I grew up the bustling metropolis.
I've been on a stint as of late to try and remember my time there, but as most of my memories go, they're mostly visual, mis-mashed together in ways I can't begin to decipher.
My friends in Mexico.
My extended family.
The private school my mother had to work at so my sister and i could afford going there and receiving a decent education.
The small pushcart/go-cart I used to drive in the parking lot of my apartment complex, swerving about moving cars.
It's all tucked away in my brain- I just don't remember half of them. There will be times when I see something and it just... clicks. I remembered the first game system I played it was the NES, at a friend's house. I remember the wall surrounding the apartment complex i lived at- the concrete walls with the tops of the walls covered in broken glass as a safety measure. These memories are all locked away in my brain, and it's hard for me to remember everything. My past life in Mexico is slowly unlocked by visual cues- I remembered the glass on the tops of the walls after seeing a similar wall in South Cenrtal LA.
Playing Little Big Planet, however, brought me back to my memories of my childhood roots, unlocking them. It was The Wedding levels that hit me the hardest. The design of the levels have a distinct Mexican style to it, especially that of the Day of the Dead celebrations held every year around November 1st. The distinctive design of the calaberas adorning the entire levels, the flowers given to the graves of the dead as to honor their heritage. I looked at the screen, the bobblehead eyes of the calaberas staring at my ryu-adored sackboy as it remained frozen for a second, as i sat my controller down and began staring at the screen, at the stage before me. It reminded me of the ofrenda my mother made every October, a small shrine of sorts in the home where you leave offerings to relatives and friends who have passed on. I distinctly remember my mother setting down a can of budweiser beer (a rare thing in mexico those days, if my mind serves me correctly) as an offering to my great uncle Joe, who worked for the Budweiser company as a delivery man. I sat back and tried to remember the last time my family even did an ofrenda. It was probably middle school. I felt guilty I haven’t set down that Budweiser can in such a long time at the ofrenda in offerings to my Uncle. The song playing in the background of the level (youtube link) reminded me of the cassete tapes of Mana my mother had. (to this day, she hasn’t bought any of the tapes in digital form, the only mana album she still owns is the unplugged album that has had an insane amount of play in our stereo). The memories just flooded back to me, and I remembered visiting the grave where my grandmother was buried- the amount of vendors parked outside of the graveyard selling flowers, candles, and other sorts of offerings as the hustle and bustle of the graveyard as families tended to their respective graves. I had forgotten about it entirely.
I had to stop playing the game. It reminded me too much of a heritage i had forgotten for some time. I spent some time outside, finding my mother taking care of her plants. I asked her about the ofrenda, and she had to pause to think about it.
“Can we do one next november?” I asked meekly. I didn’t explain why until later, but she smiled and nodded.
Playing a video game made me think of my identity- one of being of two worlds, of being white and being mexican at the same time, and i just felt... completely lost about both. Since playing Little Big Planet, I’ve taken upon myself to go and try to relearn spanish (got an B in spanish 1, going to take spanish 2 in the fall) and I may take a mexican history class I saw in the class listing earlier this week. Who knows.
I would never had been spurred on to do this if it wasn’t that goddamn adorable game.
Kusanagi and Togusa are from Ghost in the Shell, while all of my external hard drives are characters from a recent-ish anime, Black Lagoon. The only thing that bucked this trend was my old iPod mini, which was named Hannibal.
Portfolio for the fall. Applying to art schools bleh.
I will have more sooner, including some fucking fantastic news coming soon.
Releasing the Joystiq podcast soundboard NEXT week (I should totally explain this to the people who don't know about it soon).
But for now, WRITING AND BOTHERING ACTORS.
PS Mos Def's new album? AAAAHHHMMAAAYYZZING.
Zombies.
Yeah, the living undead. I'm fucking SCARED of them. It doesn't help that some of my best friends are absolutely fascinated with the subject. More often than not, regular conversation turns to the survival of the living during an outbreak. An oddly bleak subject, naturally, but it's given me quite an amount of fodder to write with.
Writing these series has proven to be the most stressful, crazy thing i've written in quite some time, and gives me nightmares. Most the nightmares involve the characters I wrote myself (with some scenarios I later incorporated into the series, thank you), but a lot of the times, I would find myself scared of the dark. I've started to stay up late to the wee hours of the morning, something I had never even considered on doing until about a year and a half ago. The relative calm that comes over my neighborhood (and family members sleeping) can be rather soothing, if you can block out the squaking parrots and the ghettobirds patrolling for the latest felon to wander only blocks from where i live. This opportunity has a large caveat- that same lull also brings forth the fear in the imaginary within myself.
I fear sometimes for the imaginary things I had created in my mind- the zombies that once attacked a character in a script now has a slight chance to exist in reality, waiting for me on the other side of my door.
It was a silly fear, but enough to give me certain amounts of stress when writing, and that stress would in turn affect said writing, to the point that it would be... unnerving.
Talking to Primo's brother, Andrew, I relayed to him my fears in such a case. He smiled, and gave me a solution- "come up with an imaginary weapon".I was puzzled, but he explained it rather well- if you fear the imaginary, come with an imaginary weapon to fight it.
As such, I've been carrying around a cheap little BB gun pistol, a PP9 replica that's probably 1/2 (or even less!) scale replica of the actual gun. I know it isn't real- i left the orange tip on there for safety, but it's there to fight off the imaginary, to reinforce my own mind that I am the one in control.
Oddly enough, it works. When I walk around my house, I'll carry the gun in the pocket of my robe or my jeans, or if I have a particularly heavy scare, I'll walk around the house toting the small pistol in my hand.
The zombie nightmares have gone down to a minimum, thanks to this cheap gun i bought off of amazon.com (it was .99 cents, if i recall correctly. It was something I bought off of the site that was a simple joke).
An odd way to explore the power of the mind and imagination, but there you go.
If there was an Android based handheld on Verizon Wireless' plan, I would be getting that phone in a second. All the crazy cool things Android has begun to do really interests me (The newer incarnation of the Android OS is fascinating me), but it's Verizon, after all- the choices are either smartphones or Verizon OS based phones with small keyboards. So I went with the next best thing.
I gotz me a blackberry!
The Blackberry Curve, to be exact. I had heard too many horror stories with the Storm to even have me consider it- a neighbor had switched to it and had more than one problem with it, goiing through two or three Storms before he gave it up for something else. So I just went for the next best thing on the Verizon service plan it doesn't cost too much more than I was paying for already, and thanks to a sale, i only paid about $120 bucks for it. (Deus ex machina says I'll be finding the phone dropping in price after i type this, but I don't mind at this point, I have it, why regret the purchase?)The sister and I went together to get the same phone (she later decided to get a pink one, to separate the two. At one point, the service rep almost activated the pink phone on my account) One of the sales reps at the Verizon store tried to get me to move up to the Storm, but i wouldn't budge, sharing a look of "ooooh heelllll noooo" between myself and my sibling. He later gave me a dirty look when I snorted when he asked me about singing up for the Verizon Hub thing. Who needs it, really?
So yeah, I'm about two/three weeks into using this phone, and I'm fucking loving it. I switched the domain name for teammayhem.net over to be used to Gmail, so I'm able to use a lot of the gmail apps on the phone. IMAP support is incredible on the application, and I'm really liking the OS overall. The syncing program for the Blackberry to sync with my mac is a crashy bitch, so I decided to sync everything to my google account. My address book is on google, and both my mac and my blackberry sync to it, so all is well. Next step is to fix up the calendar to sync properly, but that's going to be a bitch and a half to try and figure out. Maybe for when I have more time, or a lead I could follow.
The apps I use on a regular basis are:
AIM- I talk to a bunch of my friends on AIM still, and having it on the go is great. It's fun to be talking to a friend and having them slowly realize 20 minutes into the conversation that I'm actually at the supermarket shopping for beer (Hi Katja!).
MSN Messanger- Again, it's for conversation, but Levi just spams me with it and sends insults. Lovely times.
TwitterBerry- I love me my Twitter, and this just an extension of that addiction. Works well, have yet to try the TwitPic support.
Opera- The standard browser on the Blackberry is great (and I still use it from time to time) but to view full pages, I switch over to the Opera browser. It's a full fleged browser on the blackberry, rendering pages at a decent clip to make certain sites easy to read.
Pandora- Pandora on this phone is terrific, just plug it in to my stereo and pick a random band to listen to as i drive. SO good.
The only big gripes I've had are the lack of apps on the device. I've got my standard set of apps I use all the time, but naturally, there isn't that variety, that pizazz of titles that can be found on the iPhone, hell, even on the Android system. With the creation of the "Blackberry App World" earlier this month, it's a start for some great opportunities on the handset, but the pickin's are slim so far. I'll probably talk about this thing more once i have more time to send it through stress tests, but it's a step up from the Rzr.
It was fun!
After Christmas, my sister looked into getting her own iPod, using the gift cards for Ebay as her means to purchase a used one at a reasonable price. She finally settled upon the fatty iPod mini, to which she received with much glee, having found it at a great deal compared to most. She wanted me to take a look at it, so she waited patiently as i hooked it up to the mac in my room.
She waited as i made the discovery of music already loaded upon the pink iPod- various punk bands and popular music that made her squeal in glee, things I would never have on my own music collection, Britney Spears and the like. It was only about 2 gigs worth of music out of the total 8 gigs available, so it was an added bonus to the cost of the iPod. I went back to the iPod status menu, looking at the bar at the bottom that showed the size of the various things available on the iPod. 2 gigs of music and... video? Thinking it was more free stuff, i quickly moved to the video tab, only to find porn.
Porn on a used iPod, a title over 50 characters in length describing some act of sexual nature in great detail that I know would probably be illegal in Utah. I stopped, staring at my computer with a dropped jaw and incredulous smile as i called my sister over. "Teresa, you gotta see this!" I said with a laugh as i pulled open the title bar more, describing more raunchy things done with a latina (and a goat, but thinking back on it now, I think that may have been a joke). She looked in horror as iTunes generated an album cover, a random frame from the pornographic movie with the right asscheek of said Latina. "DELETE IT!" she yelled out, covering her eyes as I deleted the video.
I wiped the iPod 3 times, to be safe.
Be sure to check those things you buy on Ebay, mmmkay?
Oh man, i wish there were more commercials like this.
The work has doubled for me as I've moved to HD, or at least not full HD (I'm working at 1080i). My new camera, while being small, is a beast in nature, and now, I'm having some hardships with the format. My computer can barely keep up with the large file sizes, so I have to have lots of patience as files render. I'm also forcing myself away from using Final Cut Pro as my main offline editor, locking down my sound and cuts on FCP, then moving to After Effects for color correction and special effects, lacking down cuts using that program, and it doesn't help that effects is being a two timing whore. But hey, the camera pumps out an image that's been goddamn gorgeous, if my photoblog has anything to say other than looking mighty purdy. I'm really excited about youtube's new widescreen look- for the work I'm thinking about doing, it's probably the best so I don't feel like I'm having to shortchange ideas for short films because "they don't work on youtube" (that whole thing was a rubbish idea in my mind anyways, disregard it entirely. )
Oh hay, here's another screengrab. This is footage FROM the Rose Parade, or at least the pregame stuff. I'll be uploading small clips I won't be using in a short film up on my own personal account on Youtube. Or Vimeo. Haven't decided which one yet.
There's a batch of new scripts I've been able to finally accomplish, and everything seems to fall into place. I'm going to launch my own personal site soon, and get ready to announce the main projects I've been quietly working on for my own since I left Cornstalker. There's whole batches of ideas that I wanted to try beforehand that i can now successfully attempt to accomplish.
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danielmayhem- danielmayhem
- Team Mayhem Productions
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