All for six bucks.
Sah-weeet
I've tried to come up with something witty to say, but at this point, I want to drive out there to see the garlic plants.
Ever since coming here from Mexico City in 1994, I've been to every single Rose Parade.
I drag myself up at 6, 7 in the morning to a (usually) cold morning to see friends and relatives that only come together this day to celebrate a bunch of Volvos with dead flowers pasted upon them (I can't take credit for that one- heard it on a local radio station). To stand the crowds of hung over (and still drunk) people waiting for the onslaught of sights and sounds that would cause any degree of hangover to worsen. (seriously- with the right hangover, after three marching bands, I would have murdered anyone who would have tried to mess with me).
Friends ask me time and time again why I put myself through it, through the security checkpoints and the traffic to spend hours watching the Rose Parade- to wait in between gaps as floats break down. To put up with my mother as she yells out things to the crowd.
It's seeing such an event up close, to be able to have a level of interaction to which you would never be able to see on television is what makes it worthwhile.
One of my favorite memories of the parade had an element of this interaction- back in 2003, beloved children's entertainer Mr. Rogers was one of many of the Grand Marshalls that year. I looked forward to seeing him as anyone else that grew up with his fantastic television show. Upon his approach, his car had come to a halt, waiting for the float before him to start up again. In the time waiting, a small child ran up to his car- or at least attempted to, before she was accosted by his bodyguards. Mr Rogers spoke a few words to the guards, and motioned for her to come closer. The little girl ran up, full of glee, and handed him a rose. He reached down and hugged her. Everyone within eyesight cheered and clapped wildly as the girl hugged him.
You would have never seen that on the telecast of the Parade. It's moments like these that makes the whole experience worth it.
Twitter- Been using this for a while now. Still love it. Been using it for years now. I still love it, from random streams of information from friends to turning about and sending insults to friends across the globe. Fantastic fun, I say!
Tumblr- For my random thoughts of the day. I'll post almost any thought that comes into my mind on Tumblr, and I actually have a Queue going of all of the random thoughts that fly through my head. These are more the mini posts or random musings that I have that I don't feel are worth publishing on my blog proper.
Foursquare- I'll be using this from time to time- think of it as a location based game. A social network game. It's fun from time to time, but I'd like to think that if i had more friends on it (and I went out a bit more) it would prove to be a bit more useful.
Posterous- I'll use this just as a way to quickly post to the blog. Nothing else. It's a pretty simple system though- recommended for those who want to create a quick blog post via email (and to have it autopost to a variety of other services, like flickr or any variety of blog.)
Flickr- Flickr is a great photosharing site, and I've been using it so much now that I might be buying a full pro account for it. Random images I like or things I took from my iPhone. It's sweet.
The blog is hosted in two places at the moment- one, at my Livejournal page, the other, at my own blog, which i will launch next year, with some new stuff upon it.
And naturally, Facebook. But you didn't need to be told that.
I've been thinking about Google Chrome and what it exactly means, at least to my observations. I was one of many dorks who watched the livestream of the conference, who watched with a slightly underwhelming view of the announcements. No installed applications! It's all in the cloud, baby! It was all so very new and such a weird take that I had to wait to think and process the information that flowed forth about the OS and what my take on it would be.
But in all honesty, I agree with so many critics- it's a small step. It's a small step between a full fledged OS and something you'd find on a cell phone (a smartphone, that is). And for the applications that can run on it so far, that would be just fine for certain uses. I could probably see myself running the Google Chrome OS on a netbook someday- something that can boot quickly, to check the plethora of GMail accounts I have running (last time i counted, it's about five so far, but that may grow with passing time), Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The Google Suite has been a major part of my workflow the last six months, so the use of Chrome OS would be a welcome addition to my workflow. The ease of which I could check emails, type out some writing I had in mind into Google Documents, so on and so forth, would be a snap on the Chrome OS. Hell, I've used GDocs to bounce out scripts to later convert and move over to Celtx for formatting. To have the Google OS as a stopgap to between my random ideas and rough drafts to the finalized versions on my computer would be a tremendous help. Hell, this was written in Google Documents before I moved the document over to MarsEdit for editing and posting. I could have foreseeably used the OS in the process of writing this.
As John Gruber stated, "The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating." To have a small netbook running chrome with my usual menagerie of permanent tabs (gmail and twitter, mostly) off on another computer while I save the system resources for Final Cut Pro or some other resource hogging application. It's just a small resource that would complement the entire computer experience.
It is my belief that the strength of the whole project can be seen in the fact that the OS itself is open source. Everything I've seen so far with the OS has been offshoots people have cooked up for the public to play with, and in time, I can see major companies doing the same. Imagine, what if Asus built a motherboard that had a small flash drive onboard just for chrome OS? Sure, you can take your time and boot into Windows, but you can just hold down a key when booting up and Chrome OS kicks in from that onboard flash drive and lets you check email or show that funny cat video you wanted to show to your significant other before you leave for work. A fully customizable instant on OS.
Imagine the offshoots some valiant coder (or company!) could pull off with the operating system. With the code being open sourced, there could be a plethora of flavors of the Chrome OS that could come out for different uses. Perhaps one version could be created to be run on MacBooks and Macbook Pros, for quick bootups. Another version to be run on tablet PCs. What could be seen as a slow tablet could run quite briskly with its own flavor of the Chrome OS. Hell, aging computers could be given a quick update with a 10 dollar ethernet card and given a new lifecycle with this OS- something simple to allow a family member to check their email or annoy the entire household with a terrible youtube clip (if you don't, more power to you).
One offshoot could benefit my current place of work- the library. Imagine a flavor of the Chrome OS that would be designed for library use. Patrons to the library could keep their bookmarks, their settings, hell, even their own background as they come in to use the computers, as they move from terminal to terminal. The OS could be limited to have parental controls and time limits for children and for adults alike. Instead of suffering from the constant upkeep regular windows computers have to face, a simple Chrome OS system that's self updating, and much more secure would lower the frustration and the costs of said upkeep with public use computers, such as the ones at the library. A similar system could be put into place at a cyber cafe, with little to no overhead compared to its windows counterparts.
Of course, like with the actual OS, such an idea would come in the pipeline- nothing that Google makes right away is all that good to begin with. Anyone care to recall how... simplistic Gmail was back in the day? Or how much the Google documents system (remember when it was still Writely?) couldn't do basic exportability to word documents? Everything is a work in progress at google, and I would expect Chrome to be no different. What we see now would probably be remarkably different even months down the line, even six months after the fact.
It will grow, it will evolve, and in what ways, it may turn to be interesting. For what it stands now, a small step, it's quite small. But the magic lies in the potential to where it may grow and flourish. The initial steps may be underwhelming, but where it can go is promising.
Edge Games is a small games company, known for trademark trolling over the word "Edge" in video games. Multiple disputes have come out in which the company, headed by Tim Langdell, have attacked everything from EA to small iPhone developers at even the slightest mention of the word "Edge" in video games. Eurogamer has great coverage of the events that have transpired so far.
One of the more recent events to have transpired was EA petitioning to have the trademark dissolved. I had been following the story with great earnest, and when reading the legal documents that have come out, I realized that the company listing for Edge games was locally, in the Pasadena area. I knew the street it was located on- South Lake Ave, a street with a small shopping area with a couple office buildings littering the street. It was my hope to try and find the offices of Edge Games.
So two months ago, I brought my camera down to the South lake buisness district and tried to find the offices of Edge Games. I didn't know what I was hoping to find, to be honest, but I came across... well, slightly disappointed. If anything, I hoped to find some sort of small cramped office behind the Japanese fast food place I like to frequent. Turns out, I was dead wrong.
Say hello to the Edge games office. It's a shipping/mailbox store. Want to see the office?
That's it. Number 171. Kind of cramped, I think. On a second viewing of the google maps street view, I should have guessed as much. Look at all the businesses Edge Games shares it's building with! It's fantastic.
Well, I'm a dope. But I was vaugely attracted to the idea to doing writing for video games for once. Who knows. I may do a small op ed essay when time permits.
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.
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