by Matt | Jun 6, 2008 | Culture, Games
I rarely cut and paste. I find it demeaning to the medium of blogs as a whole. In this case however, it couldn’t be helped. I had tried, repeatedly, to sum up my compassion for computer gaming for some time, in hopes that I could convey how much I love the platform even though I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time with the 360 version of Call of Duty lately. Tycho, as always, delivers a far more eloquent description of the situation than I could hope to. I present it, distilled to it’s purest, the reason PC gaming will always be part of my life.
“On a weekly basis, we’ve got apocalyptic news about the PC as a platform interleaved with assertions of a phoenix-like resurgence. The phoenix-like resurgence portion is rarely built on any stable metrics, so it’s impossible to know the vigor of this reconstituted sovereign with any precision. The important takeaway point is that everything is incredible, perpetually so, even while publishers, developers, and many of your own (supposed) friends choose to grip gamepads during their increasingly constrained leisure hours.
I don’t think you can have any perspective on this industry unless you’ve spent time with PCs. You need to know that when Insomniac is talking about how they’re going to have sixty players, and squads, and so forth, that Battlefield 2 had sixty-four players, and squads, and maps for specific playercounts in two-thousand five. In 1999, I played a game of Tribes with a hundred and twenty-eight players over a modem.
…
What I’m talking about is perspective. If you want to look into a Goddamned crystal ball, spend some time with a tooled-up personal computer.
…
I’ll never be able to divest myself of the intense nostalgia I have for this platform. I can’t be without it. But if a person wants to play videogames in their spare time and not perform mechanical surgery on their equipment, that doesn’t make them an idiot. It makes them a pragmatist.”
Epic.
by Matt | Jun 3, 2008 | Work
Alright you Mac fiends, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. I need your help. I’ve got a crazy fast Mac Pro with 8G of memory as my work station and besides Thunderbird and the Adobe Creative Suite, it’s got NOTHING on it. I need suggestions for the best Mac apps out there. There’s a few I know about in passing, like CandyBar and Toast, but what else does the Mac community have to dazzle me with?
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by Matt | May 19, 2008 | Personal
It’s been a week since I started and I’m now settling in at my new job. The first week was a little on the crazy side, but pretty positive. I had a weeks worth of training videos, procedure manuals, documents to sign, all that good stuff. I had to get keys, key cards, IDs, email accounts, phone extensions and start the process on even more stuff that I’ve yet to get (ie: it’s on order or isn’t set up yet).
I was right in my guess that I’ll be on a Mac. I’m working off a MacBook Pro at the moment and my giant Mac Pro (with maxed out specs) will be here next week. The cinema display is just sitting here waiting to be used to it’s full potential.
We’re a separate entity inside of the company, complete with our own budget for things like hardware, so they seem to always get the nicest toys. I’ve even been asked to “make a list” of camera equipment I might want or need for any future shoots. It’s like Christmas shopping came early this year.
The job itself is good. I’m really enjoying it. There’s a great bunch of people I’m working with. There’s a graphic designer, a videographer and designer/jack of all trades guy who’s my direct boss. I think with my photo skills and a healthy dose of Photoshop mastery and web design background I’ll be a good addition to the team.
The best part is, I can take time off whenever I want, take real vacations, and enjoy myself. For the past five years I’ve taken a grand total of two, less than 5 day, vacations. I don’t know if my former employer realizes how easy he got off because we were always too busy for me to be able to take vacations. Looking back, it was incredibly unfair that I had to cut vacations short or not take them at all because of projects at work. Now, with a more corporate structured atmosphere, it’ll make having a normal life much more easy.
I’m really happy at the moment, and very glad I made this change. I think it’ll be a good move for me on all levels. I hope everything is going well with you guys, I feel like I haven’t talked to anyone in forever. It’s been a solid month of craziness down here.
by Matt | May 5, 2008 | Personal
I’ve had a wide variety of cars in my life. I’ve driven my parents cars, an old junky pickup truck, an old Oldsmobile with no AC, a nice little Mazda that was in a huge wreck. All of those cars were either free or under $500. My current car is the first “new car” that I’ve purchased solely on my own dime and that I’ve now successfully paid off. The car is mine, in total, and I’m fairly proud of that.
That’s why it hurt so much to bring it in for brake work today. Since it was a new car, I’ve yet to put any major maintenance into it. Normally it’s just $25 for an oil change, or $8 for a headlight, or something little like that.
Today I had to drop $350 for a complete brake job.
I’ve ridden that car pretty hard and recently had a series of brake-slamming incidents that lead to the brake light being on and a faint scratching/whirring sound every time I slowed down. Drivers here in Texas refuse to use any sort of turn signal and have a habit of turning into places at the last second or even from the wrong lane. I’ve had to avoid dozens of collisions since I’ve been here. I blame the drivers from Mexico. If you think that’s somehow racist, I assure you it’s not. It’s simply an observation that the driving laws, or lack there of, south of the boarder and many of that regions residents coming here to visit/work/live, etc leads to poor driving habits by a large portion of the population. They drive the same on small dirt roads in the country as they do on our freeways. I’m sorry if they can’t handle going faster than 35mph on the correct side of the road.
I can’t be mad at them any more. There’s far too many of them and they simply suck at driving. There’s not really any nice way to say it.
So, I’ve had a few close calls and had to put a bit of extra pressure on my poor brakes.
All four pads and shoes needed replacing, and all four routers got machined. They also bleed and refiled the brakes lines and rotated the cylinders. They were also concerned with one of the rear calipers but it turned out to just be stubborn and not stuck or broken. That cost me $350 and half the day.
I don’t really mind, it’s not like brakes are something you can live without. They’re kind of an integral part of the car. Being able to stop is fairly important and I’d rather be safe than rear end someone because my brakes gave out.
I think after my first paycheck at the new job I’ll put a set of new tires on as well. Other than that, the car has been relatively maintenance free so far. I can definitely deal with oil changes and tire rotations if this baby will go 200,000. We just got 150,000 out of Lauren’s car without any major maintenance. At that point, the cars reliability has more than paid for itself.
by Matt | May 2, 2008 | Web
The upside of being at work crazy early: Being able to browse the new plugin section of WordPress.org, finding interesting plugins and installing them for no reason. Like this one, which is now rocking my NextGen Gallery. Click for the rounded corner goodness.
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