Browsed by
Month: August 2005

PAX – The Penny-Arcade Expo

PAX – The Penny-Arcade Expo

Well, I had the weekend off, so I decided to go visit something I hadn’t been to in a long time – a gamer’s convention. How I do miss the sights and … smells of the oft under-hygiene-oriented gaming world.

PAX is run by the Penny-arcade guys (www.penny-arcade.com) and they have the convention each year in Seattle (www.penny-arcade.com/pax). So I loaded up the car, plunked in the latest Harry Potter audio book (17 cds!) and headed to Seattle. They had 3 big focus points: console games, pc games, and the old traditional board/tabletop/model/card/DnD games rooms. For $20 it was a very worthwhile, affordable, and well-run event.

There were a lot of free-play console and pc stations to just jump down and start playing a lot of the latest games – all networked and ready for fun. I found this to be really cool feature because there were lots of games there that I’d heard about, but never played (Katamari Damacy was one I had been dying to try). In the PC world, there were lots of high-end boxes and laptops donated by local companies trying to drum up exposure -for you to free-play games on (Half-life 2, CS source, BF2, etc).  I have to say I stayed true to my addiction and kept playing Counter-Strike Source most of the time; but I got to do it on some truly outrageous hardware.  Playing CS source on a 17″ ATI x800 laptop (which I had considered buying) was a great experience. CS Source with a sub-10 ping time at 1600×1200, full detail, 4x anti-aliasing at a 80+ frame rate is something you don’t get to do very often.

They had tournaments on all the different games all day long – both console and PC. Mario Kart derivatives, CS source, etc, but what is most amazing is it was not just the newest stuff. I wandered into a Quake 1 tournament at one point. I didn’t even know people still played that. For each tournament you played/won you got points to redeem at their redemption spot. They also had arcade games there – various DDR’s as well as other ‘interactive’ games of this sort.

Fun as that was, it wasn’t all just games. I arrived just in time for the two guys who do Penny-arcade to draw Monday’s strip with the crowd. They answered questions and did the strip from concept, sketches, to final mock-up in front of us. That was cool because they only use Photoshop. They had a merchandise room and folks giving out all kinds of stuff – T-shirts, stickers, etc. I did manage to get an event-shirt which was pretty sharp.

I got a few autographs as well – including one of the penny-arcade guys. I met the guys that did Red-vs-Blue (www.redvsblue.com) series and got the signatures of Griff and Gus who did the famous Mac gamer video. They had a really funny t-shirt (with a famous quote from the series “I would just like to let everyone know that I’m a girl, and I like ribbons in my hair, and I want to kiss all the boys.”) but they were out of my size. The guy from TechTV (Kevin Pereira) was there doing a lot of interviews, and he was everywhere. Every time I looking up I found myself in the line of camera fire – you might check out and see if you see me in the background somewhere. Finally, they had a Karaoke contest at night (which was hilarious), a classical pianist come in and did an arrangement of FF7 music, and then some rap band. I passed on the rap band because I thought they sucked; but that was me.

I didn’t leave till 11pm which meant I didn’t get back into Portland/bed until 3am – but it was worth it. Oh wait, and I didn’t even tell you about the board-gaming folks. Oh my, that was an experience in humanity in all its smelling glory. I guess I’ll have to add that later…

Last Thursday

Last Thursday

Alberta street (NE Portland) has a art festival on the last Thursday of each month – which was last night. It was the first time I was able to attend, and I must say it was quite a spectacle. One guy turned his whole lawn into a mini-circus noir in which performers did fire dances, rode around on bikes, hoola-hoops, a free Joust arcade game which you could play, and just gobs of people in goofy costumes, goofy art displays, etc. Think of a mini-burning man.

There were no less than 10 blocks of people on the streets selling all manner of art stuff (paintings, photos, gobs of jewelry, etc) The galleries were open as well. The most cool part was the people. Wow, this is not your first-Thursday downtown crowd. Lots of hippie people, young folks in funky clothes, street musicians/artists/etc. For the most part, the art was pretty disappointing.  Lots of people seem to just slap things together to make a quick buck; but there was some really good stuff. One photographer did some great photos and then had them done with giclee prints. A potter had the most interesting molded glass sculptures. The highlight for me, however, was the people watching.

If you get a chance, I’d highly recommend it as a fun alternative to the first-Thursday art stuffiness. It was really interesting to watch all the dynamics going on with the people. I’m still processing all the stuff I saw. It really spoke to me of that real human longing that we all have to find meaning and value to what we do. I saw a lot of people looking for that meaning in the faces I saw. But I’ll reflect more on that in another entry…

5 new cels added

5 new cels added

One of my hobbies is collecting Anime cels – specifically from my favorite series: Tenchi Muyo. I had a couple of cels for a long time that I hadn’t put up yet. I don’t have flatbed scanner to use, so I used my digital camera and a little fixup in Photoshop. Check them out in my projects page, or on my Rubberslug account here.

Updated Blogger tool

Updated Blogger tool

I had a very old copy of the blogger tool in my projects section. I’ve made a number of bug fixes in this latest version, please feel free to try it out. I know there are a number of areas I want to improve it and ways to break it still; but it is a free beta tool for you to enjoy!

CPE ends – neglecting my updates (sorry)

CPE ends – neglecting my updates (sorry)

Sorry about the delay in updates and the sorry state I left my RSS feed. Found a bug with the updater code, but it’s fixed now and you should be seeing this just fine.

I just finished my CPE assignment at the hospital and am continuing to decompress and process the whole experience and was given accreditation for 1 unit of CPE (A whole year would have given me 4 units).

I’m still left wondering just what to say about the whole thing. I’ve learned so much about myself, about how we process trauma, counseling techniques, emotional roller-coasters, being with people in joyful occasions like the birth of a child to the whole process of being with someone when a they are about to die. You just can’t fit that into a sound bite.

All I can say is that it has completely changed me as a person – and for the better. One of the most amazing things about the experience is that you learn and grow far more than it seems that you give to other people in those moments.

While I was at a BBQ about 2 weeks ago, someone asked me what it was like. In the course of describing what we did in the program to process events we experienced, I described how much of you gets laid bare. One tool we use is a verbatim. A verbatim is a review of an encounter you had with someone. Everything is anonymous and there is no way to track the original person down. One presents a dialogue (as best they can remember) of exactly what was said by everyone involved – including yourself. You present it to a peer group who then re-enacts the event with you. They then go through and examine what was going on, what you said, and why. It’s amazing what starts coming out – “I see that when they said they were afraid of death, you asked them about how they were getting along with their parents. Why did you ask that? What is/has gone on in your own family to make you ask that question? What do you experience when thinking about your own death?”

Well, you can guess that by the end of these sessions, most people end up in tears at some point. It’s amazing; but it’s amazingly healing too. I guess that’s why so many people see it as the real gateway to growth in relating to others. I for one have seen my relationships open in a whole new way – everything from dear friends to even the casual relationships. The change is so dramatic that I’m still trying to make sense of it all – but it is so much more mature and healthy that I find it very exciting with each new person and encounter I have. It’s like living got ‘re-charged’ somehow and all things seem to have been made new. Looks like I’ll be enjoying this newness for some time; and I’m excited for it.