My New Favorite Evening…

June 15th, 2009 § 0

As I tend to do, tonight I randomly got up from reading on my bed at 7 and decided to just bike somewhere with no plan. I made my way out of Winooski, crossing the bridge with the last bits of work traffic and opted to bike up the big hill rather than settle for the easy way on Riverside Ave. I typically dread biking up that hill for tonight it wasn’t a problem at all. I was feeling great and was barely out of breath when I got to the top and flipped my stem back into a higher gear to cruise down Colchester Ave. Got to the Pearl Street intersection and took it all the way down, managing to only hit one light. Riding as fast as traffic with the wind in my face always feels amazing, especially on a night like tonight was: sunny but cool, the sky a mess of orange and pink as the sun is starting to disappear behind New York across the lake.

Pearl Street took me to Battery Street and from there I took the back way down to the waterfront on Depot Street. From there it was smooth riding as I started heading south on the Burlington Bike Path. I rode about 5 miles south of the city until I felt thoroughly like I didn’t know where I was any more and turned back only because it was getting dark. I was pretty excited to take some pictures, but unfortunately when I sat down to do so I realized that 1) my batteries were (still) dead because I’m too cheap to buy more AA’s, and 2) my memory card was still in my computer back in Winooski. Double fail.

I wasn’t too disappointed because even then, not even half way through my ride, I knew that I’d be back there a lot this summer. Tonight I found some of new favorite places in all of Burlington, and that makes me smile.

§ Leave Comment

And I’m Back.

May 19th, 2009 § 0

Three weeks since last post, time flies. Honestly though, the past three weeks have been some of the best respite from school I’ve had in about a year. I’m all moved into my new apartment in Winooski. Finally got a double that I’m sharing with Alex, and it’s the most space I’ve had ever in this apartment complex.

Burlington in the summer is gorgeous, there is no two “but”s about it. What a dumb saying. But seriously, it’s much quieter here, more locals are out and about, and it smells like progressive politics and healthy living :D

Montreal tomorrow for an IGDA meeting: Iterative Level Design in Bioshock 2! Should be an interesting talk, going up with 4 other Champlainers. Should also get a chance to check out Jaime and Alex’s places they’re staying at for the summer. Hoorah!

Leaving Thursday afternoon to head home for the long weekend, which I am REALLLLY excited for. Why? Well, this weekend is most importantly the first FULL crew hangout session in a LONG time. And by that I mean, the old QP crew hanging out, shooting film for Sean’s BFA, playing at the park, stokin some fire at Chris’s and celebrating Cadah’s birthday. It’s going to be one of the better weekends in the forseeable future. It’s pretty rare these days that Sean, Spencer and I are in the same place hanging out, not to mention with everybody else, so a great long weekend it shall be.

Nothing incredible to talk about really. My new job starts next Tuesday, so that should be exciting, especially because it’s a new project we’re going to be working on with the State of Vermont, doing a virtual archeology museum. Exciting, right?! I’m excited. So I’ll have more to say on that after next week.

Anyways, just wanted to check in. Not dead, just busy and getting settled into my new digs. And listening to a LOT of classic rock. Ain’t nothin better.

“But don’t stop
Honey don’t stop
Don’t stop
Baby don’t stop”

§ Leave Comment

‘Chanson du Bon Chose’

April 28th, 2009 § 0

The great thing about The Mountain Goats is that you can have been listening to John Darnielle’s music for well over a year and still come across tracks that you’ve never heard. Actually, it’s pretty common. I’ve got 338 tracks of his on my computer, and that doesn’t include any live bootlegs, which means no duplicates, and I still know my collection isn’t complete.

"Chanson du Bon Chose" - The Mountain Goats

I heard “Chanson du Bon Chose” for the first time this afternoon, and I think it’s one of the most amazing songs about falling in love I’ve ever heard. Honestly. I was kind of half listening while I was doing work, but even so it gave me chills listening to it the first time.

i saw the sycamore underneath the moon
i was waiting for something and you were sleeping out there in the living room
and it was five-sixteen a.m. – the air was sharp and cool
and i wondered where you buried our dark little jewel
and the heat rising, in the room
i am digging graves. i am digging graves
and the water boiling, on the stove
i am digging graves. i am digging graves

so i held you close to me
i saw the shadows start to gather outside beneath the sycamore tree
and something was changing
this was something here entirely new
bursting into blossom inside of us both with the sun coming up and
me holding onto you

and your body breathing on mine
i am digging graves. i am digging graves
and your hands running through my hair
i am digging graves. i am digging graves

§ Leave Comment

‘Imagine Peace’, Parkway Drive, Where’s Rolla?

April 26th, 2009 § 0

Well, my final weekend in Montreal has rolled around. I’m having a hard time comprehending how fast this semester has gone by. Not to say that I’m not excited to make my way back down to Burlington, but on one hand I wish that I had another week to spend here without school and work to worry about. Everything is finally starting to bloom and its been quite warm the past couple days, as anybody in the Northeast/East Coast could probably tell you.

On Saturday I finally got to check out the “Imagine Peace” exhibit that’s going on right now at MMFA. Carolyn and I had been eyeing it since we saw it advertised back at the beginning of the semester. The exhibit takes a close look at the relationship of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, especially as it relates to their “Bed-Ins”, one of which took place in Montreal. Through pictures, art installations, movies,  music and interactive pieces, the exhibit did an incredible job at covering John and Yoko’s relationship together and what they accomplished in such a short time.

That first image in the group is one of Yoko Ono’s Peace Trees. Basically everywhere she does an exhibit, she has trees, and small tags that people can write notes on and tie to the tree. She is collecting all of them, and the result will eventually be a sculpture made out of all the peace notes. Pretty cool.

Saturday night, I was lucky enough to get to go see Stick to Your Gun with Parkway Drive at Underworld. Alex had a ticket, but other plans came up and he didn’t want his ticket to go to waste. Stick to Your Guns was decent, though I can’t say I’ve listened to them a ton. Parkway Drive put on an extremely energetic set, despite the vocalist being sick and coughing his way through a lot of their breaks in between songs. Here, look at this crappy picture I took:

Parkway Drive

A good end to the night was going out and trying to meet up with Carolyn’s … cousins…friends…friend, who is here on vacation from Cali (or maybe he isn’t, if he doesn’t exist…). Short story made shorter… we didn’t know what he looked like, we don’t have cellphones, we couldn’t find him, but still had an awesome time wandering around to the bars he was supposedly going to and seeing if maybe there were any people wearing tshirts that said HI IM FROM SAN JOSE, IS YOUR NAME CAROLYN?

Then, to close the night, we watched Across the Universe to complete our day of Beatles/John Lennon-mania. A solid day if ever I have known one.

§ Leave Comment

Extended Preview for ‘9′ Makes Me Excited!

April 20th, 2009 § 2

Wes alerted me this morning of a new excerpt from Shane Acker’s upcoming movie ‘9′, which is due out for release September 9th (see what they did there? tricky…). If you haven’t seen the trailer for the movie, you may want to watch that first here.

§ Leave Comment

The Eve Hits Beta! And Bella Lagosse Design Work…

April 18th, 2009 § 1

Hooray! It’s been awesome week, one of the best in recent times, and definitely one of the first times in months that I’ve been able to breathe for a while. If you haven’t seen my continual Tweets and away messages about it, The Eve finally hit beta last night. It’s been distributed on some forums for testing and we’re already getting a lot of great feedback. Chris Crowell, creative director over at A2M, was awesome enough to come in last night and hang out with us for nearly three hours playing and giving some great feedback and opinions.

If you’re interested in doing some testing and you don’t have access to the Champlain EGD forums than shoot me a message or leave me a comment and I can arrange for it. That is, assuming you will provide feedback for us. Otherwise you can wait til the game ships =]

So, given that I’ve had some free time this week (a foreign concept in my life this year…)  I was able to work on a design for my good friends in Bella Lagosse. The new layout went live tonight, so check that out.

Bella Lagosse

This is what I truly love about coding Myspace layouts. HTML validation check:

Validation Fail.

C’est la vie. Now that it’s nearly 3 a.m. I’m thinking I should eat some dinner and probably get to sleep. Gotta love life =]

§ Leave Comment

Australia Moves and The Eve Updates

April 13th, 2009 § 1

Bad move in my opinion...

Apparently Australia just up and moved 7 days ago, and I just found out about it. Seems a bit extreme just for high speed internet. But hey, who am I to speak, I’m not in charge of these things. I make art.

So, this weekend was the one. The weekend that The Eve came together like butter. Better than we could have expected. After 2.5 months of creating individual art assets and Auston and Alex doing code separately, Husam and I finally got to see our work in-engine. And BOY is it looking good. I’m not sure I’m going to post anything more just yet, ya’ll can wait til a playable for a couple weeks. But, here’s a teaser.

The Eve

§ Leave Comment

And the Title Was: Preposition

April 12th, 2009 § 2

It’s really been so long since an email like this made it to my inbox. But there it was this evening, in my Gmail inbox like any other reponse from a professor or link with puppies from Kyrsten. It made me laugh.

Haha, “Barrister Yang Lim Fowler”??                 … I think not.

YANG LIM & ASSOCIATES
SOLICITOR AND ADVOCATES
NO. 101, JALAN PUDU RAYA,
TAMAN DESA RAYA
MALAYSIA

I am Barrister Yang Lim , an attorney at law.  I discovered your email and
information through internet search so I decided to contact you. A deceased
client of mine, that shares the same last name as yours died as the result
of a heart-related condition on March 12th 2005. His heart condition was
due to the death of all the members of his family in the tsunami disaster
on the 26th December 2004 in Sumatra Indonesia. And in the record there is
no known successor to this deposit of the deceased who died without a
will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake.

I have contacted you to assist in distributing the money left behind by my
client before it is confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where
this deposit  valued at Eighteen million dollars is (US$18million dollars)
lodged. This bank  has issued me a notice to contact the next of kin, I
can be reached on (yanglim8@gmail.com) for more information.

Best regards,
Yang Lim
Attorney at Law.

If you’re feeling particularly malicious you could start spamming his inbox with links for free puppies.
* I really do apologize…I couldn’t resist the opportunity.

§ Leave Comment

Profound Thoughts With Little to No Importance

April 11th, 2009 § 1

But first, this…

Shirt: Red, Green, Orange

As you can, my fashion sense was amazing, as I’m clearly wearing a t-shirt that has two primary and one tertiary color in it, and there isn’t even a design on it. The shorts, however, have a design on them, and it probably involved something ridiculously rad like Power Rangers or surfboards or sea creatures. But before you look away, be sure to notice those incredible black socks I’m sporting. They were all the rage at the turn of the decade (that’s when im assuming this is from, approximately).

Anyways, here’s those profound thoughts with no relevance or importance.

That grapevine we’ve all been hearing everything through. Yea, well, the internet is the grapevine. Just remember, you heard it through the grapevine… you heard it through the tubes.

If you’re devoutly Christian, isn’t eating an apple original sin? There’s just this really delicious apple and it’s tempting you and then you just give in and eat it? The fall of man follows. I mean, if you want to get technical. Just sayin…

§ Leave Comment

Hindsight Winter Teaser Trailer

April 7th, 2009 § 0

You all should watch the teaser trailer for Sean’s new film, titled Hindsight, a film about growing up in Marlborough, CT. Read more about it on the website and follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/hindsightfilm


HINDSIGHT – Winter Teaser 01 from sean hanley on Vimeo.

Don’t tell Sean, but… it makes me giddy =]

(Also, I installed a captcha plugin because I was getting like 20 spam comments in my spam blocker every day. It’s a nuisance, but hopefully you all can deal with it. If you comment alot then ask me and I can just let you register on the site.)

§ Leave Comment

Page 3 of 7«12345»...Last »