on music and other stuff

- Almost drove into a table lying in the middle of the freeway the other day. Wound up swerving to the next lane but my front right wheel still hit the table a bit, and afterwards I thought I was smelling the scent of burnt rubber. Took the car to the dealer afterwards for a long awaited service and there didn't seem to be any damage though, except for a scratch on the underside that can't be seen normally.

- When I'm alone and left to my own thoughts, typically when I'm trying to sleep (although it happened today while sitting in a balcony while watching a concert) - I start getting half crazy thoughts about arranging future meet-ups with random people I haven't talked to in a while, or even just sending them letters or something even though I don't usually write letters. Like I'm schedule-planning who I'm going to contact soon. And afterwards, when I'm more awake (or wake up after sleeping), I ask myself what was I thinking? On a normal daily basis I wouldn't be having these thoughts... or at least that's the kind of thoughts that they feel like.

It's more like I have this mood or mindset that only emerges once in a while, and when it takes effect it feels like I'm having a withdrawal from not seeing specific people.... even if we haven't really talked before, which is weird. And I feel really desperate about wanting to talk, even without knowing what to talk about yet. And then afterwards... it's like I don't know what I was thinking.

And then there's those times, once in a while, where the imagined hangout actually ends up taking place, but it doesn't turn out the way I wanted it to because we didn't have the kind of conversation I was hoping to have or it just went by too fast and felt like we barely hung out at all, perhaps because we didn't know each other that well to begin with. Especially for the non one-on-one's, although even with one-on-one's sometimes this happens too. Except what I was hoping for was probably not in the other person's interest, so nothing comes of it.

I don't like using terminology like one-on-one's though, cause it makes it feel like I'm doing some kind of job like I'm a staff worker or something. Sometimes I just want to hang out with people who under regular circumstances, I might not get to hang out with or talk to as much, for whatever the reason. Do I actually have to have a reason for wanting to see people?

- Speaking of concerts, I feel like I've been over-concerting myself this year. (I blame it on Elan.) I think I'd been seeing an average of less than 1 concert per year since college started (a bunch during a freshman year craze and then one GY!BE concert a few years later), and then all of a sudden this year comes around and I feel like a concert-aholic already.

-- Radiohead
-- Godspeed You! Black Emperor (round 2)
-- Beirut
-- Animal Collective
-- Beach House
-- Stars (in a few weeks)

It's like I've been trying to check off all those bands I got into back in high school (sans Beach House), since for the past while I've only been listening to music on and off, which was why I hadn't been keeping up with music news in the first place. If I want to keep this trend up, then the only bands left on my favorites list that I still want to see or could see are:

-- Broken Social Scene with Feist and/or Emily Haines in the lineup.
(I've already seen them live with only the male members)
This likely will never happen unless I try to see them in Canada. I mean, Lisa and Amy are cool too, but apart from All to All, all the other big female-backed songs were originally sung by those two. Just to see Almost Crimes, 7/4 Shoreline, Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, Swimmers, and Sentimental X's live... okay I'm gushing too much.
-- Asobi Seksu.
(when are they going to tour again?)
-- Yo La Tengo
(has a chance of happening next year since they're releasing a new album! still going strong.)
-- Los Campesinos!
(I feel really tempted to buy a ticket to Treasure Island just to see them... but I don't think it'd be worth it as much with less songs than a normal concert. although M83 and The xx and Joanna Newsom are nice bonuses, I guess.)
-- ...My Bloody Valentine?
(on second thought, I don't want to go permanently deaf from a concert.)

- I usually hardly ever talk about the music I listen to on this blog... or in real life in general, cause it feels like most people I talk to have never heard of the stuff I like (except for Elan and Justin to an extent). And there's those of my friends who go "wtf are you listening to" when I do play something. I guess I do feel the same way about most stuff that plays on the radio though.

And then there's the friends that like to rant about the hypocrisy of indie-hipster culture which is another thing altogether. Of course... I don't really subscribe to the whole idea of it not being cool anymore once it becomes mainstream and everyone listens to it - you gotta own up to liking the stuff at some point. Although it does get tiresome hearing the same songs played over and over again sometimes. I actually like Midnight City, but I keep wondering why the radio station doesn't ever play any of M83's other stuff for once. As usual, I guess.

- Slowdive - Blue Skied An' Clear on repeat. If I were depressed or looking at pictures of dead pets right now, I would probably be crying.

(I don't have any dead pets, unless you count some aggressive goldfish and a goldfish-sized shark.)

"Stanford should just change their mascot into a castle. And then Cal should change their mascot to bears with siege weapons."

 - random quote of the weekend...
after discussing a game in which bushes evolve into trees which evolve into castles? O_o

snippet of a year

I worried so much this past year about such little things. Feeling incredibly resistant to meeting new people because I wasn't sure if these people were the kind of people I wanted to hang out with. And even after the fact, feeling left out of the loop even though I hadn't really tried that hard to begin with. Sensing that there were still things I might not like about them, or that there might be things they didn't like about me. Maybe that was the reason I always had to invite myself to events?... until I stopped and grew tired of it.

The best advice I got on it recently - "don't worry about it."

And to realize that all wasn't as it seemed. That even the people I thought I might dislike or never see again were still people I enjoyed interacting with, even if I hadn't said a word to them at all for months. I think some of my favorite interactions are with people who I haven't spoken with for a long time and are perfectly fine with it being that way... although maybe that's more typical of the working life to begin with.

Overall, I think this experience has been mostly the opposite of what I was expecting. I remember at the end of senior year expecting to be a recluse and lose touch with most people, or writing something along those lines on one of the posters at Chapter Camp. and now I'm just the guy who somehow ends up either at Berkeley or out of town every other weekend or is otherwise off being too popular for his other friends except for pity hangouts. (which they aren't!! -__-)

It doesn't make sense because my idea of a perfect day is some combination of a bunch of single-person activities. Reading a book [in bed], watching a show, playing a game, coding, and then sleeping. But somehow I have five different plans in succession this weekend, and it's starting to stress me out a little the way these things suddenly just stack up, even if they are good things.

(random aside, but I think I also suffer from the incessant desire to always befriend friends of friends. It tends to not work out so well. There can only be so much friendliness in the world.)

Kickstarter Game Projects

Obsidian finally made their Kickstarter!!!!

If you don't know what Kickstarter is, it's a platform for announcing and obtaining (all-or-nothing) funding for creative projects. The project creators make a page announcing their project and set a funding goal and a deadline, and then as time passes up until the deadline, people who visit the project page can pledge funds to the project via Amazon Payments, to be collected on the deadline. If the project doesn't meet its funding goal by the deadline, no funds are collected by anyone, and hence it's all-or-nothing volunteer funding.

Technically, it's possible for scams to be set up through this process where a bunch of people end up paying someone to produce nothing or something really stupid, so a lot of the process is dependent on the contributors' faith in the project makers to deliver on their promises. At least for the gaming-related projects (there's a ton of other kinds of projects on the site that I haven't looked at yet), the projects that have come up have been announced by people who have made some great games in the past, so hopefully it'll deliver well.

This year is in particular has been a good year for [hyping about] PC adventure games and western rpgs (the stuff that I obsess over for stories in games nowadays), as a lot of makers of classic games from the 90's/early 00's have been jumping onto Kickstarter.

- Double Fine Adventure
(adventure; from the designer of Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, etc..)
- Wasteland 2
(wrpg; from the founder of Interplay)
- The Banner Saga 
(srpg; ex-Bioware devs)
- Shadowrun Returns
(wrpg)
- Jane Jensen's Moebius and Pinkerton Studio
(adventures; from the creator of Gabriel Knight)
- Tex Murphy - Project Fedora 
(adventure; they've been trying to make this game happen for years)
- Dead State: The Zombie Survival RPG
(wrpg; from the designer of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines)
- Planetary Annihilation
(rts; from the people behind Total Annihilation)
- Broken Sword - The Serpent's Curse Adventure [ongoing]
(adventure; Broken Sword's going back to 2D!)
- Homestuck Adventure Game [ongoing]
(adventure)
- Project Eternity [ongoing]
(wrpg, the new Obsidian project)

A recurring trend behind a lot of these projects showing up on Kickstarter is the limitations of relying on traditional game publishers; the Wasteland 2 video pitch conveys it pretty well (if not a little exaggerated for comedy's sake). A lot of times game designers are prevented from creating the games they actually want to make due to lack of interest or willingness to take the risk by publishers, even if there is fan demand for those games. It gets even more frustrating when legal issues come into play, like losing the rights to make the sequel to a game because of company politics or closures (Wasteland 2; Tex Murphy; Anachronox; and so on)... hence why it's kind of exciting to see all these game developers able to get by publisher issues through crowd funding.

People have actually been waiting for Obsidian to finally do a Kickstarter for a while. Even though they've been pretty active lately (Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, Neverwinter Nights 2, Star Wars: Knights of Old Republic 2...) and have a good reputation when it comes to game writing, their games are known for being ridiculously buggy, sometimes incomplete, and plagued by other development issues due to time restrictions. Not to mention, for whatever the reason, they seem to always get the short end of the stick in negotiating with publishers - like being only given a year by LucasArts to make Knights of the Old Republic 2, or the New Vegas Metacritic story from earlier this year. So naturally, it leads one to wonder what kind of product they could make if they actually had enough time, money and full creative control over their work for once. Especially after the Wasteland 2 project kicked off successfully (which Obsidian is contributing to), it seemed like only a matter of time for them to do their own project for once - what might end up being the next Planescape: Torment, but better?

One thing I like about this process that's coming about is the increase in transparency between the developers and the fans in the making of these games. In part because fans themselves are directly funding the games and kind of merit it, the developers have been using the Kickstarter platform to provide frequent updates on the current development status, along with documentary-style insight into how these games are being made in the first place at the same time through videos, release of the game design documents, adding other making-of material as bonus gifts, and more. I think the whole phenomenon in general has made me a lot more conscious of the individual people that are involved in the development of games - like who the big movers and shakers are - and also the challenges that they face in trying to release a quality product.

There's still some concerns about the process, though - like for instance, if most of the people who would buy these games in the first place are already contributing to these projects in the development stage (and hence are effectively getting "free" copies), then how will these games make a profit when they come out? And of course, it's possible that some of the games from these projects will just end up being not as great as they've been hyped up to become in the future, and Obsidian could still mess up and deliver a buggy product like much of their past work. If that happens, then it's likely that people will lose faith in the process and not contribute to future projects if they come up. But in the meantime, I'm hopeful.

[Also, I think ex-Humongous devs should get together and do a Kickstarter ala Spy Fox or Pajama Sam or Putt Putt or something similar. But that's just wishful thinking for now. At least they're starting to re-release the old games on mobile platforms.]

Blog options

I've been meaning to revamp this blog to a newer format for a while now, but I've been putting it off out of laziness cause it takes a considerable amount of effort to actually set stuff up the way I'm looking for, and my efforts so far haven't been too successful.

wordpress.com: has a bit more options when it comes to customizing, compared to blogspot, but the site's too slow for me and the lack of ability to modify the php files comprising the site is a turnoff.

wordpress.org: requires that I get my own webhost first, and I don't feel like paying for one quite yet...

jekyll: the concept is attractive (especially writing posts with markdown), but I'd literally have to write a layout from scratch, and static blog post generation time increases a lot when you have a lot of blog posts.

octopress: I messed around a bit with the default layout and the css/sass, but the same static generation time issue from jekyll applies. and when it comes down to it, I don't feel like putting that much effort into dealing with the under-the-hood details (or pretty much all those rake steps) when I want to blog.

and I don't feel like looking at other blog/cms systems, although the evernote generating blog idea looks attractive... if not fully developed yet.

and so of course I end up sticking with what I'm familiar with here. I will probably migrate to a web-hosted wordpress blog with the markdown plugin at some point in the future when I feel like it, but for now this will do. Although, if I do, I might try to set things up so that blog posts here update on a sub-blog there or something like that.

Part of my motivation in revamping is setting up another blog about tech/coding/work related stuff concurrently with this one, for posts like this one (and also for those random "aha!" moments I have while working), and markdown is pretty nice for delineating code sections. I suppose it's also the popular thing to do nowadays when you're in the tech industry, but eh.

...now that I think about it more, part of me wants to just start from scratch with jekyll again, just cause. aagh I can't decide. Maybe I'll just implement the work blog in jekyll and tie it to blogspot somehow?

A rather long time ago now, I got a comment from a friend on how naive I was. I don't remember if I said anything in response, but naturally it ticked me off inside. Naive to the world? Please, I'm not that oblivious. I know that people aren't always what they make themselves out to be... how much this life sucks and is a lot more mundane and boring in general than we'd like to admit... and how messed up the world is on a daily basis.

But honestly, though, that friend was right. Despite how much I like to play myself off as a pessimist in general... I tend to put more faith in the unselfishness and the integrity of other people I know, even if I don't actually know them that well at all. I try to downplay the bad qualities of other people if I do mention them, and hearing anyone talk trash about other people or character bashing, so to speak, tends to bother me even when it is merited. I also hate it when I hear talk about rating other people based on looks or whichever... it just feels foreign to me. (which led to Johny asking if I had absolutely no standards about looks - okay, well I'll admit that some things do turn me off. >_>).

Lately I've been reminded or shown a lot more of how much I don't actually know, how unaware I am of what other people actually think or believe or act. Little topics of conversation that bother me because they reveal my naivety, my lack of worldly knowledge, were I to even say anything, although others probably suspect it of me anyway. How wrong and out of touch with reality I was, for hoping or trying to assume the better of others when they gave no reason for me to do so. Even though it feels a lot more poisonous in my head to assume the worst.

Sometimes I just feel out of touch with reality and people in general. Like I'm continuously living life in my own little bubble, refusing to pay attention to what's going on and ignoring the things that other people say that I don't like. But then when I do end up around other people, particularly people I'm not as familiar with, I just feel irrelevant and out of place. and uncomfortable.

Incidentally, the last two months have been a bit... socially exhausting for me, so I'm wondering if I'm just overreacting out of a need for more dedicated alone time. I think it's becoming more apparent to me now that there are just some worlds that I won't fit into in general. And that there are some people I just gravitate towards more easily than others, and other people I probably never would really get along with that well. I wish it weren't so though. 

Game Musings

Warning - another nerdy post.

"A culture's teachings, and most importantly, the nature of its people, achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves... or find themselves lacking."

Came across this quote while reading/watching a Let's Play of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, and it struck me. It's meant to be more of an indicator of the philosophy of the character who speaks it than a standard truth persay, but it does make sense in a way. You can learn a lot about yourself from how you deal with conflict... or how you don't deal with it.

(Why am I going through a Let's Play rather than playing the game itself? Because I'm lazy and the game isn't on Steam. And also cause I mainly got interested in it in the first place cause of the story, considering that it's touted as a regular example of a Chris Avellone game... and after going through Planescape: Torment I suddenly have this desire to play- I mean read every game this guy makes.)

It occurred to me that there's games with stories that make you think about life and other stuff, like this one, and then there's games whose stories that don't necessarily inspire the same level of thought but are fun just for their aesthetic presentation or sense of epicness. I tend to put stuff like the Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts games in the latter category; the plots tend to make you think in the sense of being complicated or convoluted and thus requiring you to try and make sense of what happened, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter so much why stuff happens. Most of the time, it's just the writers putting in events into the story to make it look cool and flashy, or leaving stuff out so that people can wildly make theories for the sake of making theories. I used to be pretty obsessed with the theory making discussions myself.

As far as games go, there's a few stories that that stick out to me in the interesting to think about category. Probably spoilers if you aren't familiar with the games. I'm mainly writing this out for my own amusement.

- Planescape: Torment, the obvious one. The question, "What can change the nature of a man?" is so often quoted from this game online that it feels a bit too common now to see the game get praised all over the internet for its greatness. What I really liked, though, was how each of the party members are linked to The Nameless One in their torment because of their own nature - and how necessary it was for them to eventually embrace that torment rather than escape from it.

- Persona 2: Innocent Sin/Eternal Punishment. The overarching plot of both games is pretty much a cosmic game between two Jungian entities from the collective unconscious that is kinda reminiscent of the debate between God and Satan from the book of Job, only a bit more secular and psycho-Japanese. Philemon comes across as a God-like figure who happens to be on our side but treats us as nothing but pawns in his game at the same time. Which I guess might sound accurate to some people.

- Xenogears/Xenoblade. The two games look drastically different in setting, but they're made in the vision of the same director and share a common theme in the final goal being to defeat "God," or at least the creator of mankind in that sense. Shares an emphasis with Persona 2 on the idea that humans should ultimately determine their own fate - part of me feels like maybe this is just something that the Japanese are obsessed with, cause it seems to come up a lot in other mediums like anime/manga too.

- The Longest Journey/it's sequel, Dreamfall. A subversion of the whole "chosen one" cliche that turns up in a lot of classic fantasy stories - and if you continue on to the sequel, what happens in the long run after the main character loses her sense of purpose as "the hero" after believing in a lie for so long. April Ryan is probably my favorite female character in a game. I didn't really care so much for the other two playable characters in Dreamfall (and Zoe was technically the main character there), but as foils to April's character and her plight, they worked.

- Gemini Rue. Deals with the issue of identity in a world where memories can be destroyed and created at another's discretion. Are we defined by our memories?

- Final Fantasy Tactics. The beginning and ending highlight the contrast in roles between the main character and his best friend - one is forgotten in time, and the other is remembered as a hero. But the disparity in the sacrifice (of integrity) that each makes brings up the question of who experienced the real tragedy. There isn't really that much to debate here, to be honest though, since the game is pretty clear in its presentation who it sees in the wrong.

I kinda wonder if this is meant to convey some kind of general moral lesson, since I get similar vibes from the director's other games (FFXII and Vagrant Story) also. I'm playing Tactics Ogre on the PSP right now - hoping to see if it adds anything else, seeing as how it's a spiritual predecessor.

- Starcraft. Before Starcraft II came out and tried to pull off an out of character redemption plot thread, I always liked how Infested Kerrigan was portrayed in the first game (in her words, "I'm pretty much the Queen ***** of the universe.") Her transformation from a hero into a major villain was fascinating to watch - was it a product of her forced biological transformation, a desire for revenge, or the discovery of the power that she was capable of?

..that's more of a rhetorical question, cause it seems kinda obvious by the end of the game that Kerrigan just loves having control and power over everything. She probably was just forced to keep it to herself when she was still a human and had all those neural inhibitors preventing her from doing anything out of line. It could be said that Brood War was the first time she really had total control over her own faculties, and so in a sense her true character came out when she started backstabbing everyone.

- I know I tell everyone that Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time, but I have trouble thinking of much else to the story [without including Chrono Cross and its deconstruction of the benefits of time travel]. Most of what I can think of has to do with how Lavos is portrayed as a planet-killing parasitic villain, when at the same time it's technically doing what it has to in order to live. Are there species worth killing because of how detrimental their existence is to other life?

... I'm looking at you, damn mosquitoes.

Be back after finishing KOTOR II/Mask of the Betrayer/Tactics Ogre/Portal 2 and maybe some Fallout/New Vegas. But I need to stop obsessing over games so much.