Okay, how about this: I just spent around a week updating this site and, in order to celebrate(?), I’m going to hold a little contest. I get a little trickle of traffic every day and I am always wondering if anyone actually reads this stuff. So here’s the plan, I will send an original print, The Politics of Against, to the first person to send me an email using my contact form with the subject “Send Me Free Art!” Make sure you leave a valid e-mail address on the form and I will contact you if you are the winner. Check back here and I will post in the comments if the prize has been claimed. This contest ends midnight CST on Sunday, Sept. 15. Ready… set… go!
The Tiny Bang Story is a small puzzle game that I think is designed more for younger players. Most of the game-play is in the vein of I Spy and other hidden object games. You look at a wonderfully illustrated setting and then click around trying to find a given number of similar items like apples, toy boats or gears. Once you have found enough objects a puzzle is unlocked. Complete all the puzzles and then you move on to the next setting.
I didn’t find the puzzles that difficult. Actually, the only parts of the game where I got stuck were a couple of the hidden image sets. Here’s a hint: click everywhere! Despite its simplicity, I did enjoy playing this. I found it to be a nice relaxing change of pace after carpal-tunneling my way through a couple of shooters over the last few weeks.
Well, I’ve finally decided to upgrade this site to the latest verison of Drupal. The actual process of migrating to version 7 wasn’t too bad. The majority of issues came from Views and fields not being named or typed the same way they were in Drupal 6. Changing all the views by hand was not that difficult and it allowed me to do a bit of how cleaning withing views. Views in Drupal 7 is sooooo much better!
The biggest challenge has been recreating the site’s theme. Although the general look and feel is more or less the same as before, I have made some visual tweaks here and there. The biggest change has been the fly-out menu and the switch to a responsive, mobile-friendly layout. I’m still working on getting that finished, but for the most part the site looks good on just about any size viewport.
The only downside to the switch to Drupal 7 is that my host, MediaTemple’s Gridserver, has performance issues with the new system. There are a couple of tweaks that help, mainly changing references within the database file from “Innodb” to “MyISAM.” I have no idea what this does, but it helps keep the database from freezing up and timing out on the Gridserver.
Videodrome always seems to turn up on lists of the best horror films of all time. While it was visually and conceptually interesting, I was not that enthralled by it as much as I thought I would be. Whatever appeal it has lies in its art film style. There’s a dreamy and confusing narrative that has more in common with Mulholland Drive or other puzzle movies than with a straight-up fright film. I may revisit this movie again. I suspect it gets better on multiple viewings.
Another yarn about corrupted youth from Vin Packer. This time it’s four disenfranchised teenage boys who become a vigilante squad looking to clean the bums and and degenerates out of the city. They’re lead by Bardo Raleigh, a smart and charming young man who is obsessed with discipline and order. The rest of the crew is made up of a jazz bebopping nut case, a love struck mope and a mentally unstable herpetologist wannabe. You kind of know where the story is going from the beginning and the end falls a little flat, but overall a good tale of hooliganism.
This was a movie that did not need to be made. That said, it’s reasonably entertaining but not at all scary or funny or anything that made the original Evil Dead trilogy so great.
The original BioShock was a great game with an interesting plot and a wonderfully unique setting. I never really understood the bizarre take on Ayn Rand though. It seemed to say that if objectivism is taken to its logical extreme that would mean people who believe in individualism and self-ownership would immediately start modifying and enslaving people against their will? That makes no sense at all, but it was enough to give you a bad guy to pursue. BioShock 2 takes place in a more deteriorated Rapture several years after the fall of Andrew Ryan. This time, however, the collectivists are in charge and, whad-do-ya-know, they suck too. I guess the theme here is it’s cool to be an indecisive, on-the-fence moderate.
This sequel plays about the same as the original but there have been a few improvements such as the removal of those annoying pipe-dream style puzzles that represented hacking. The combat, while fun, was pretty difficult for me and I often felt like I was dying without warning. I eventually got the hang of it once I had enough power-ups. This game felt like it moved along a little better than the first with less back tracking. The story comes to a decent finale and, in the end, I think I liked this game just as much as I did the first one.
I created this print during the height of the anti-Iraq war protests. It’s about being against everything and for nothing. After I finished editioning this print, I created a two-tone reduction print version of it that looks much cooler, but I only manged to make one copy of that.
The Blues Explosion (at least on these earlier recordings) occupies a nice space between the raw, rootsy rock of bands like the Bassholes and the driving rock of Touch and Go bands like The Jesus Lizard. As much as I like this release, I think the follow-up Orange is much better.
