Exploring Innocence Podcast #1: An Innocent Introduction
Welcome to the very first episode of “Exploring Innocence,” a podcast where we take a look into the inexperience of my friend Eric. We’ll be talking about relationships, love, sex, and all sorts of other things. In this episode we talk about Mormons. See? Diversity.
Eric was kind enough to agree to do this podcast and chat with me, which is something I’ve wanted to do since forever because I think Eric has an extremely unique perspective on human interaction. That’s a really nice way of saying he’s never kissed a girl. We’ll be doing plenty of episodes on this, considering we used to sit and chat about it night after night, and I plan to delve deep into the inner monologue of Eric’s mind to figure out just what goes on in there. This is a pretty tame introduction as compared to what we have planned.
Check for our podcast on iTunes, we’ll be up there soon once our feed is approved. Every episode will be hosted right here, so you’ll be able to listen right on the site. I’d prefer you subscribe though because then I can see how many people are listening and decide when I should start trying to milk money out of all of you. The feed for this podcast, if you’re one of those manual feed followers, is http://ajrambling.com/category/exploringinnocence/feed/. Thanks for listening, or at least pretending to.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Debt Ceiling is Really Confusing
I wanted to take a moment to tackle the pressing issue in American politics at the moment: the debt ceiling. However after some analysis of my understanding of the issue, combined with the general explanations provided by the 24 hour news networks, I came to the conclusion that no one really has a clue what is going on. So I think it’s best we take a step back and try to simplify this problem as much as possible so everyone knows that America will not implode on August 2nd.
First things first, what in the world is the debt ceiling? It is the legal limit of how much the government can borrow. It’s been in place since World War I and was established to allow for blanket borrowing up to a given point. It’s also been raised around 100 times since it’s inception, so that given point is kind of arbitrary in the sense that we’ve just pretended it doesn’t exist every time we’re about to hit it.
This brings us to another question, just how high is the debt ceiling? It’s $14.6 trillion dollars, up from just over $1 trillion in the 80′s. Now maybe you’re asking how did it get that high? That’s a fair question. Here’s an analogy for you:
You live in a pretty standard ranch style house. You’ve started filling the house with a bunch of cool stuff that you bought. As it turns out one of the things you bought, we’ll say a life size replica of a female giraffe that measures just short of 16 feet tall, will not fit standing up under your 10 foot ceilings. But it is too good to give up, and you don’t want to cut it down or anything, so instead you head over to the bank to borrow some money to raise your ceiling. Yeah, it’s going to cost you quite a bit, but the bank is pretty sure you’re good for it and you keep insisting that you are. So, money is lent, the ceiling is raised, and you now have your awesome giraffe standing in all its long-necked majesty.
Now you know you have this loan from the bank, and it’s not due for awhile. You should probably start paying that back, but there’s this great sale on oversized spiral staircases at Staircase Depot. Unfortunately, your 16 foot ceiling isn’t high enough to justify taking advantage of this sale. Luckily for you, though, you’re the head of your community organization committee. Community fees are due to paid soon, so you decide you’ll just raise the cost a little bit and take some of that money for your remodeling. After all, it’s going to benefit everyone for you to have that money and you’ll pay them back eventually. So you up the fees, keep some cash, and up your ceiling to about 40 feet because why not?
Now, you’re way over your head in debt and you know you cannot pay it off. But here’s the thing: you added a pool to the main floor of your house and it would be totally badass to have a diving board up at the top of the stair case. You just need about 8 more feet so there’s room to jump up without hitting the ceiling. Everyone in your neighborhood is kind of pissed at you so you can’t ask for any money from them, and the bank is still tapping it’s foot waiting for you to come through on that loan. So you hit up your Asian friend. He’s surprisingly not that great at math, so he lends you the money with the idea that you’ll pay him back with interest in the future.
Now you’ve got everything you could possibly want and you didn’t have to sacrifice a single thing to get it. Reality hits hard for you when everyone wants their money back and at the same time. There’s not a whole lot of room for the ceiling to go at this point without risking either cutting down some of your purchases inside the house (you call them “programs”). If you raise the roof any further, it’s going to be held up with twigs, rotted 2×4′s and some duct tape. It won’t hold for long if you take that route, and people that have lent you money are going to just start taking things from you to get back their investment. It’s time to make some changes.
That is where we’re at right now. So that brings us to one last, important question: What happens if we don’t pay back the debt? Well like with any debt, it defaults if it’s not paid off. What happens if we default? We’re not really sure. There’s a few potential outcomes.
- Nothing. We’re safe. Nothing changes, everyone we owe money to just assumes we’ll figure this out, and we keep on going like nothing ever happened. Odds on this are low because, well, that’s kind of how we got here.
- The stock market essentially collapses and costs everyone with investments in the system a nice chunk of change. Wall Street takes the hit, but main street keeps operating.
- When we default, our credit score drops from a AAA to AA, which means higher interest rates on our loans. If that happens, all of our AAA level loans will be sold for next to nothing. We’ll be looking at a bit of an economic meltdown that will lead to a lot of unemployment and inflation.
- Open the floodgates and welcome to Hell on earth, just in time for 2012. Everything tanks for America and China demands their chunk of our debt be repaid. We’re looking at warfare at this point. America’s military is far superior to China in every way but numbers, and don’t expect a desperate American military to play by the standard “polite” rules of war.
Option for is clearly an extreme and about as unlikely as option 1. More than likely, the result will be somewhere between 1 and 3. Where exactly, we have no idea. All we know is it’s time to lower that spiral staircase a few flights and maybe shorten the neck of that giraffe statue. It’s time we start living under a stable, sustainable ceiling.
First Ever Short Film, “Roaming” (48 Hour Film Project Entry)
This is my first ever attempt at writing, directing, editing, and just basically creating a film in any form. (Ok, there was that one summer where we tried to make a movie but that was a bad idea and I would appreciate you not bringing that up.) I think it is fair to say after watching it play on an actual cinema screen in front of a sold out audience, I have had my fill of this movie.
With a significant amount of help, this piece was created and developed from inception to completion by me in forty-eight hours. I wrote the first word and made the last cut. I lived and died for an entire weekend with this film. There was not a step on the emotional spectrum that I skipped through the process, and when all was said and done, I wasn’t sure if I loved or hated it. The audience at Sundance Cinema didn’t do me any favors in making that determination.
I loved the script. The script was funny. There were jokes in the script. The audience, for the most part, disagreed. There were beats that were seamless in my mind, deliveries were right on cue. Part of me believes that maybe the jokes just didn’t translate. Part of me insists the audience just didn’t “get it,” but I don’t want to be that guy. I refuse to be the self-righteous indie filmmaker after my first venture into the art. I’ll save that until I’ve made something abstract that the audience isn’t supposed to get, and everyone is afraid to say they didn’t get it because snobs will say that they’re too stupid for it so they just say “Yeah, that was a great movie.”
I liked the performances. No one could have been the detective aside from Ty. That part was written for him, the lines come off the page in his voice. He nails everything I asked for out of him. His timing is dead on, his delivery is perfection, and his facial expressions deliver more personality than some of the dialogue I wrote. Eric did exactly what we needed him to despite not wanting to. My scene only holds up because of the chemistry Ty and I have. The outtakes from that consist mostly of us laughing at one another and making stupid remarks between takes. I realize that my job when being an actor is to act, but my character was so far from who I am that it’s hard for me to watch the performance with any sort of seriousness. I played a drug dealer. My first appearance on screen is me rolling a joint with a bunch of prescription pills tipped over on a table beside me. I’ve never smoked pot and never popped a pain pill with any more strength than an ibuprofen. My performance was the ultimate inside joke. Jack is a theatrical guy and gave probably the most memorable performance because of his exuberance and passionate presentation of lines. Everyone gave the best performances they could with less than 10 hours to prepare to give them.
I hated the editing. In a way, I didn’t. There were moments when a scene would come together or you’d find just the perfect spot to cut something at and it was amazing. It was piecing together a story in a whole new light. Everything changes in editing. But I hated the editing. I had less than 20 hours to take about 150 takes, pick the best one, splice it, paste it in, and transition from one angle to another without it ever feeling like the interaction came from separate takes. We had a single camera operation, which I think is a set up that I prefer to a multi-camera approach because it allows you to try different things without having to do everything all over each time. It’s freedom through limitation, really. And that’s great…when you aren’t on a deadline that requires you to make judgement calls that require you to cut individual lines to fit under the allotted time limit. Plus it doesn’t help with the SD card from your Zoom H4n audio recorder craps out on you three-fourths of the way through production. I liked the editing process. I did not like editing with a deadline that was hours away.
My feelings on the film changed at every stage, so when the film played on an actual stage, a full theater set up with professional visual and audio projection, it was only right that my mixed emotions be confirmed by mixed reaction. There were laughs, but they were sparse. There was enjoyment, but it was reluctant. There was a lot of silence: from the audience, from the other directors, from me. We weren’t the only college group in the field of films. I think it is safe to say we were one of the only teams competing with a crew that consisted of four people. There were teams that had more crew members than our team of four had fingers. No one didn’t play a role at any given time during our production. Was that beneficial? I’m not sure. It definitely made it feel more intimate, in a way (if I were a rapper, I would say “no homo” right here).
There was little intimacy with the crowd, save for one moment of political pandering. Shameful? Perhaps, but you gotta hook ‘em however you can. Next time we’ll slip something about beer and cheese in there and we’ll be shoo-ins. It stings a little to watch your words being read in front of an audience and have them not receive the reaction you expected. Especially when they’re coming from angles you set up, clips you shot, and in a scene you spliced together from it all. It was discouraging in a way. I definitely have been disappointed in the final product since that night. I don’t think it was bad by any means. I don’t think it was misinterpreted either, though. I think what happened was a group of friends from college made a movie in 48 hours and to expect it to be an amazing end product would be foolish, in away.
Were we the best film there? Not at all. Were we the worst? Not at all. For our first foray into the world of film, a leap that pitted us against actual production companies that traveled across the country to compete, I think I can live with that result.
48 Hour Film Festival, Or: How Not to Relax on Your Weekend Off
I believe I mentioned in my first ever post on this blog that I don’t really consider myself a writer, per say. It’s something that I aspire to be, but I am not. I write, so technically I am a writer. I’ve even been paid to do so (not much, but money is money), but I don’t think that grants me any qualification to say that I am indeed a writer. If someone paid me to have sex with them, I would hate for that to make me a prostitute. I would like to think that it just means I’m good enough at it to be paid for it. (I have a far better chance at the writing thing.)
There is reason I wasted that entire first paragraph to restate something that I’m not sure I ever actually said because, let’s be honest, I’m not going all the way back to the first page of this blog to see what I said. I, along with a few friends, recently participated in the Madison edition of the 48 Hour Film Festival. As a quick synopsis of what that is, since you’re clearly too lazy to click those links, basically you’re given 48 hours to create a four to seven minute film based on three constant parameters and a genre variable. Every team that participates in the challenge has the exact same parameters: a character (Matt Michaels, musician), a prop (calendar) and a line of dialogue (“Where do you want to meet?”). The one thing that no team has alike is the genre of film. There are all sorts of possibilities from comedy, to sci-fi, to silent film, to superhero. There are twenty-two unique genres to choose from, and they are all assigned by the most scientific method of decision making known to man: picking at random out of a hat.
Now, before we go into the genre, I feel it’s only fair that I first introduce my rag-tag team of cast and crew.
Tynan Humphrey became our impromptu production manager, providing everything from set locations to costume accommodations to lunch (the most important thing). He also starred in the entire film which meant acting pretty much continuously from 10am to 7pm. Plus he acted as the wall for my tennis player equivalent of a script writer; he constantly bounced ideas back with a spin I wouldn’t have put on them or let them fly past if they weren’t worth returning. For as much as I spearheaded this project and put my stamp on every part of it as I could, this doesn’t happen without Ty.
Eric Snell was the master of the camera when I had to hop into an acting role. Luckily for me, Eric has probably more vision than I do when it comes to these things, because he was able to grab some shots that I would have completely bypassed. In fact, he wanted to do a few other angles on a scene but we just ran out of time. The only reason any part of the movie that I directed turned out with anywhere near the quality of what Eric did was because I insisted on so many takes. I went with quantity, Eric delivered quality. Plus he graciously accepted an acting role as well, which was something he clearly would have rather not done.
Jack Nee is, for lack of a better term, an enigma. I know he’ll read this blog, but he has no discernable online presence. He’s always in the background, and it’s a little scary for the rest of us that know he’s there. But Jack gave us the only hint of professionalism that this project had. He indulged us with his acting expertise and gave us some clarity and advice when we clearly had no clue what we were doing. Plus he gave a stand out performance, as he always does.
Now, onto the genre. We must have been around the fifteenth or so team to pick our film type, so many of the ones we would have hoped for were gone at this point. Of course, being the over-prepared, knowledgable person that I am, I didn’t even read the list of potential genres beforehand, I just heard people say what they got and immediately thought, “Damn, that would have been a good one.” So when my name was called, I had no clue what to expect. I reached into the hat and grabbed my slip of paper, which when opened offered my selection of “Detective/Cop.” Film noir is a classic genre, it’s been done hundreds of thousands of times over and there are certain traits that define it. We had no clue how to capture any of those. I’ll walk to through the actual film and the idea behind all of it when I can post it here, which won’t be until Thursday evening. Until then, just know we tried to tip our hats as well as we could to the standard while creating a unique take on a topic that has been done every way imaginable. It was very much a “Simpsons did it” type experience when trying to flesh out ideas.
The script was written in about three hours on Friday night, almost immediately after getting our topic. It would have been immediately, but I wanted to go to Caribou Coffee to do the writing, and the closest one was about twenty minutes away. It’s one of my favorite places to write and I enjoy the atmosphere. Also their smoothies are delicious. Listen I don’t have to explain myself to you, I already had to explain myself to Jack and Ty for making them drive 20 minutes out of their way so I could enjoy some familiar ambiance. The point is, we split up our time on the film so we wouldn’t be overwhelmed any given day. We got our topics by 7pm on Friday, so the writing process took place that night. Saturday was an all day film session, and Sunday I would edit. It turned out that this was a brilliant idea, because if we would have crammed any more of anything into Saturday, throats would have been slit.
Filming all day is a draining process. I spent the majority of the first half of the day setting up shots, filming, resetting, filming again, changing angles, filming, and acting. During our lunch break, I set up to record voiceovers and then edited the film. There was no real downtime for me during all of this. Everyone was doing a lot of work, don’t get my wrong. During shots, literally every member of our group was doing something. But when one person was recording their voiceover, everyone else could kind of relax. Lunch was a break period for pretty much everyone at some point of it. I think I ate an entire bag of beef jerky during lunch because I just kept grabbing for a piece as I was piecing together the first scene so we’d have a preview of the finished product before the day was done. By midway through the day as the scenes I was in became longer (mostly because I required a lot of takes, being a fuck up of an actor and all), I was completely drained of any will to do anything. Eric stepped up in the director role for me for much of that period, setting up the angles I wanted while adding some of his own. I even told him on the last take of the day when he wanted to do another angle (that I now regret not getting), that I didn’t care and just wanted to be done. The filming process as a whole is a lot of repetition. Repeating the same lines, re-watching the same scenes, re-cutting the same footage. By the end of the editing process I wasn’t even sure if the film was good at all. I was so indifferent to anything in it. Some shots I probably should be proud of, and some I should be ashamed of, and I really couldn’t differentiate. It was a short film. That’s it. No superlatives. It was just a thing.
The cool part about all this, though, is that “thing” of a short film is going to be screening in a full size theater at the Sundance Cinema here in Madison. Once it shows there, I’ll be able to disclose more details about the movie and actually show it. I’ll probably post it up on here and go through each scene and explain what went wrong, what went right, and what wasn’t supposed to happen at all in them. I’m reluctant to call myself a writer. I’m even more reluctant to say I’m any sort of filmmaker. What I will happily say, though, is that I made a film with some friends. For now, here’s what I have to show for it:
To Whom it Make Concern: Shitty Techno-Pop Artists (Or: Hey Everyone! I Found The Cesspool that Kesha Climbed Out Of)
Just a quick heads up for some of the readers out there, this post contains a lot of extremely vulgar and grotesque language. Also, excessive use of the phrase “bomb-ass pussy.” See? Vulgar. You’ve been warned.
You’ll have to forgive me for just recently finding out about the group that I’m about to go on at excruciating lengths about. Have any of you heard of the Millionaires?
When it comes to music, I usually have my head dipped into the fairly shallow end of the underground scene. I’m able to catch artists right before they blow up (see: Fall Out Boy, Gym Class Heroes, Death Cab for Cutie, Atmosphere, etc.). I get to ride the indie train just long enough to scoff at the new followers that fall in love with a single and call themselves diehard fans. I get to be bitter about it, which is absolutely all I really want out of it. I get good music and I get to be pissed off at others for liking it after I did. Yeah it’s hipster as fuck, but I was totally doing it before it was cool.
This group somehow escaped me. In fact, their entire genre escaped me. I was never exposed to such a thing until Kesha hit the scene with a bottle of Jack in hand just over a couple years ago. I was aware of some similar acts (e.g. Jeffree Starr) thanks to their fringe acceptance and novelty factor catching in some of the circles I did follow, but I never liked the music. But to be fair to Kesha, she was the first mainstream artist I had ever been (unpleasantly) exposed to that advocated girls getting drunk and being slutty and disguising it as feminism. There should be little to no empowerment found in listening to a talentless hack who has all of her music completely overproduced and her voice manipulated to hide the fact that she cannot do the one thing that she is famous for: singing. That should be embarrassing. There’s nothing wrong with self-expression. There is nothing wrong with being slutty. (In fact, I encourage it if you’re around me and moderately attractive.) It is, in itself, a form of expression. A dirty, disease-ridden form of expression. What is wrong is expressing such a sentiment through shitty music that girls are going to crank in their parents car.
Which brings us to the Millionaires. Technically, their career launched after Kesha started attempting to make a name for herself, but musically they are the hominid primates to what would Kesha’s upright, standing descendant if she weren’t passed out drunk in a bathtub. Also, for me to call Kesha the “evolved” version of this type of music should tell you a lot as to what to expect from the Millionaires. If you’re a reality junkie, you’ve heard this groups music. They “sang” on TRL before it’s demise, performed the themes of A Double Shot at Love and Teen Cribs, and appear on My Life as Liz, whatever that is. All those are accomplishments of some sort, I’m sure. But let’s just examine their most recent music video to attempt to figure out why in the world they’ve had this success.
I submit into evidence the “Party Like a Millionaire” music video.
Ok, is everyone completely disgusted at what they just saw? Let’s talk this through, shall we?
First thing you should notice, aside from the opening “Millionaires, bitches” that indicates the class that the rest of this video will display, should be the fairly catchy, danceable, mainstream sounding backdrop. There is a quality beat that is behind this song. It now officially does not matter what is said over it to the majority of listeners because they can move to it. But you’re more than likely watching this from a chair somewhere in your house. You are not a dancer. You hear everything that follows, and what follows is the biggest indication to me that we, as a collective, are fucked.
The opening lyric to this song is “Middle finger in the air if your puss is tight/all the boys are getting hard, down to fuck tonight.” Do you ever find yourself listening to Kesha and think, “I wish she’d drop all the innuendo and suggestiveness and just talk about her tight puss and some hard dicks?” You haven’t? Well too bad because the Millionaires are here to provide you with just that. Here’s a scenario no one wants to go through: You’re a girl at a Millionaires concert and this song comes on. You’re having a conversation with your girlfriends about how you just can’t get your panties on straight after letting some random guy finger you in the bathroom after he bought you a drink that you saw him drug, but you don’t care because you’re already buzzing off worse substances than he could possibly spike you with. While you’re chatting it up, the first line of the song comes up and you have just been asked to reveal the tightness of your vagina via display of middle finger. Unfortunately, because of your conversation you completely forget to wave your middle finger in the air. Now everyone thinks you have a floppy, unsavory puss. How totally embarrassing! Now you’ll never hook up with that bathroom attendent that was kinda cute and watched you wash your hands in the most seductive way you possibly could.
Just as a reminder, we’re one line into the song. Let’s skip a bit or we’ll never get through this.
The brilliant bridge of, “Smashing bottles, doing lines, popping pills and getting high” is followed by the chorus that raves, “I do what I want, middle finger in the air/Gonna party (party, party) like a millionaire/Gonna dance like a slut and I don’t even care/Gonna party (party, party) like a millionaire,” sung with an unwavering reckless abandon for any form of integrity. I don’t want this to come off as me taking issue with people who party, do drugs, or act promiscuous in any way; All these themes can be presented in a far more interesting way. What I am taking issue with here is shitty music and while you have every right to enjoy this music, lets not kid ourselves that it holds any form of substance aside from whatever it is these girls swallow, snort, or inject into their bodies. And as an aside if you actually ARE a slut, you’re not dancing “like a slut.” You are a slut that happens to be dancing.
The only real notable line of the second verse is “Need a fix/Big and thick/Holler if you have one,” which is really only worth recognizing because it’s the most subtle mention of male genitalia that this song will make. I know, you probably didn’t even know that “big and thick” referenced penis in any way until I pointed it out. That’s how hidden these girls keep their innuendo.
After another run through of the chorus to reestablish these girls’ ability to “do what they want” with their “middle finger in the air,” they bring in the lyrical fortitude that is contained within the breakdown. A call and response of sorts that goes, “Who wants/That bomb-ass pussy?/You want/That bomb-ass pussy/Who’s got/That bomb-ass pussy?/I’ve got/That bomb-ass pussy/” followed by the reassuring “White girl with a bomb-ass pussy” in case you were curious if the lone caucasian member of the group had a “bomb-ass pussy,” as it were. It is the continued reinforcement of the idea that these girls have “bomb-ass pussies” that makes me question the bomb-ass-ness of said pussies. This, of course, leads to the next logical question, “What is a bomb-ass pussy?” The girls unfortunately leave this question unanswered, but from what I can gather from the music video, it probably means that AIDs is involved. I don’t mean to be harsh, nor do I aim to wish AIDs onto any of the members of this band. All I am saying is that I would be in no way shocked if one– or all three– of these girls at the very least were fighting with HIV.
It’s difficult to make the distinction that I am not attacking these girls because I find them to be repulsive and their presentation crude and disgusting; I think they make really, really shitty music. Not only that, but I think artists like Kesha see the success of a group like that and go, “I can tone this down slightly, add some glitter to glam it up a bit, and sell the shit out of it to the 13 to 16 year old demographic that have no clue what I’m talking about but think that it looks cool.” It’s not fucking cool. You know what’s fucking cool? Making expressive music with a point, with meaning, and with distinction. Giving people something they can relate to because they understand, not just because the bass kicks and you swear every other word, is cool. Kids think that shit is cool because it’s expresses something that is normally suppressed by the rest of our culture so artists like Kesha exploit that in a way that allows her and others like her to capitalize on it. Adults who think songs like “Party Like a Millionaire” are cool should grow the fuck up.
An Addendum to the Link Dump
I know I just did a shameless excuse of a post in the form of linking to every article I’ve done over at GotGame and The Spoon Feed, but I just had my interview with Mrs. Carrie Preston go live on FilmMonthly and I can’t help but through that up here. So without further adieu, my interview with True Blood‘s Arlene, Carrie Preston:
Film Monthly (FM): What can you tell us about your film A Bag of Hammers?
Carrie Preston (CP): This is a film that was written and directed by Brian Crano, he co-wrote it with Jake Sandvig who is one of the stars of the film. It’s a film that you first think is going to be a buddy-buddy “bromance” kind of a film and then it takes a very sharp turn about a third of the way into it due to my character and a decision my character makes. Then the film turns into something that has a lot more consequence to it and it becomes a real “coming of age” or growing up story for these two main characters. I play a single mother who is feckless and in way over her head with her child. She’s moved to a new town to make a fresh start and she just cannot get on top of things. In this economy, she has a really hard time getting a job and the father of the child is absent and she really is drowning in the situation. Meanwhile, the two main characters are con-artists who have spent their whole like taking and treating the whole world as if it is nothing to take too seriously. When they see what is going on with this woman and her child, they start to look at their lives in a different way.
FM: This isn’t the first time you’ve played a single mother. Is there a particular mindset to playing these types of characters despite similarities or do you approach each uniquely?
CP: Each character is different depending on how it’s written. I am certainly one of those actors who really likes to trust the writer and look at the script that they have presented to me and try to bring that to life. I was trained at Juilliard, which is a classical training program so the text is king. From my training and working with the pieces from great playwrights like Shakespeare, Chekhov and Gibson and whatnot, it really did give me a wonderful foundation to apply to all pieces of material that I have the great privilege of working on. I usually just start with the text and in this situation the text was quite good and compelling. It was up to me to fill up all the negative spaces and figure out why this woman is the way she is. That’s what I love about acting; marrying your imagination and your own emotions and your own history or way of approaching the character. In this case, I really was in good hands with the script…
Link Dump Time
Here’s a giant list of places where you can find things I’ve written recently:
GotGame Articles (I try to keep them pretty approachable even though they’re about a specific thing that may not interest everyone. Half the time I’m not sure what I’m talking about until I get going on the article so don’t feel too left out)
PS3 Price Drop
Hellgate Open Beta
TimeSplitters 4
Journey Closed Beta
Uncharted 3 Demo
XBox Live Arcade Summer Line-Up
Playstation Plus Sale
Angry Birds the Movie
Independent Games Festival Submissions
Shannon’s Law Workaround
(This is by far the most interesting thing I’ve covered over at GotGame. It required a bit of research and I still don’t fully understand it but I tried to lay it out as simply as I possibly could, mostly because if I started explaining details blood would have shot out of my ears.)
Blade Runner Game
Also, I’m getting pretty popular in Japan apparently (some Japanese blog picked up my article about Dungeons and Dragons founder Gary Gygax getting a memorial in Lake Geneva. The original article can be found here)
The Spoon Feed
Comic Book Characters that Deserve A Movie
Last but not least, my latest in the “To Whom it May Concern” series is getting a fair amount of love over on Reddit, which is extremely cool because it’s an awesome but very honest and harsh community.
Ok, shameless link dump complete. Please continue on about your normal activities.
