Deus Ex Machina

feline technology

awww...look at the kitty. click to see a larger version (opens in new window).

voodoo, who do? you do...

ever wonder why i disavowed wcpr for a new orleans station? well, besides having much better playlists and morning shows (not to mention better dj's in general) 106.7 also throws a mean music festival. yep, it's time for voodoo fest again and this year's seems to be the most kickass ever. so, what bands do i want to see? uh... nine inch nails, cake, mindless self indulgence, digable planets, queens of the stone age, billy idol (ha!), the flaming lips, and carl cox. bands i'm not interested in that others may be: my chemical romance, social distortion, ryan adams, the bravery, louis xiv, world leader pretend, and others....check the link. bands/people i didn't think i'd see at a voodoo fest: neville brothers, dr. john, joss stone, kermit ruffins, and other bands local to new orleans. we have to go to this show.

travels and travails

just came back from a weekend up in birmingham, have a week here plus a show saturday, then sunday to san antonio for 4 days. things i want to talk about: games, msi, and books.

we've been waiting for area 51 for a while and it's still on hold at gamefly, but in its stead we have god of war and final fantasy: crystal chronicles. can you guess who plays what? i bet you're wrong. i've been sticking to the more mellow, "less manly" final fantasy while jessica's been killing things left and right with the testosterone-fueled god of war. both are good...god of war especially. a hitch for final fantasy is that, while being labeled as a multiplayer game, every person playing the game must have the proper hardware (i.e. gameboy-gamecube cable) and we don't have that, so i'm going through the single player mode. final fantasy: crystal chronicles is an action-rpg, so it's more like zelda than your typical final fantasy, but it's pretty nice. the graphics and rich and crisp and the gameplay is solid as well. i'm not too sure about the story, though, but it doesn't matter anyway because it's not a full fledged rpg where you'll want to know every tidbit of info. jessica will have to talk more on god of war because she's played it a helluva lot more than me.

i'm not sure if i've mentioned them before, but mindless self indulgence is one of my favorite bands around. they're indescribable, though....i think the closest thing i've said that comes close to classifying them was "atari-punk-rap-metal." that description looks horrible on paper, but they sound kickass on their latest album, you'll rebel to anything. this is probably the first album in a long time that i haven't gotten tired of. something that probably helps is this band is never played on the radio, avoiding overplay death. their first 2 albums (the third being a collection of live songs) were great, but not really musical. instead, the tracks were minute-and-a-half clips of crazy stuff, sometimes relating to the 711 or clarissa explains it all. the latest is different in that the songs are actually music, good sounding at that. this album rocks and there's no other way around it. good guitar, kickass drums, crazy vocals, funny (for the most part) lyrics, it goes on and on... they even released bonus songs on the vinyl version and edited cd.

i've been reading once again. finished up nymphomation by jeff noon and started shadow puppets by orson scott card. both books are related to a series. nymphomation is basically book 4 of the vurt chronicles. vurt was excellent; one of the coolest books i've ever read. pollen (book 2) comes after vurt and was ok, but nothing compared to the first. automated alice is a quirky book styled like lewis carrol, but using noon's crazy ideas. it's almost a stand-alone book, but ties into book 4, nymphomation (which precedes vurt as far as plot chronology is concerned). so, with vurt being excellent and the middle two being adequate, i went into nymphomation with high hopes, but not expecting too much. surprisingly, that book is almost as good as vurt...i'd say they're close. though i just started shadow puppets, i can say that's it's right in line with card's other ender/ender-related books and that's a good thing.

seems like that's all for now. out.

go hide behind the shadow of a sad, sad man

about a week or so ago, penny-arcade posted a comic strip regarding a documentary being made about digital comics...the title, i believe, is "adventures into digital comics" and i'm not going to correctly grammaticize it. brief description: webcomic creators, for the most part, are avid scott mccloud enthusiasts. scott mccloud is this old guy who apparently knows a lot about comics and comic books, though i've never read or wanted to read any of his work. his major works are books titled "understanding comics" and "reinventing comics," but they really don't hold much worth to me. anyway, this documentary sounds like it's basically an ego-boost for all of those "proteges" of mccloud that have webcomics. the crazy thing is, even though the movie is about digital comics and adventures into them, it fails to touch on the truly successful webcomics: penny arcade, pvp, and ctrl-alt-del.

you know, it kinda seems like no one ever appreciates penny-arcade...that they're too opinionated or they aren't funny, but i think the exact opposite: i value their opinions (mainly because they're logical and generally well explained) and i think they're the consistently funniest webcomic around. shit, pvp has never made me laugh, ctrl-alt-del still manages it from time to time, and another i failed to mention, 8 bit theater, used to be funny, but i haven't laughed at it in a few years. that's another thing that gets me. these people think that webcomics are some bold, new art form that pushes the boundaries of serial artwork, etc., but i always saw them as something usually supposed to be funny (it is a comic) and never as a serious art form...more of a hobby that may make people successful.

anyway, mccloud thinks that webcomics are a revolution in the business model area...wait, i thought comics were comics, but apparently not. regardless of that, the point of this whole post was scott mccloud posting a response to penny-arcade's comic strip and news post about the documentary. sure it's pretty critical (penny-arcade's stuff...not mccloud's...his is just asinine), but for scott mccloud to demand that tycho apologize to these people because he was critical and their feelings were hurt is just stupid. and just because a he posted a picture directly from the documentary's site that may not be favorable, don't scathe him or accuse of trying to make fun of someone's appearance.

i guess i got a little worked up over this, but it seems so stupid that these people took it so personally and then tried to accuse penny-arcade of being jealous...like they should even be jealous of that, and tycho will tell you. this just reminds me of all the people who criticized PA for their child's play fundraiser, saying that it was self-serving...it's a charity, how is that self-serving? especially if they raised over 300 grand for 5 separate kids hospitals?

that's it for now...maybe the front page will be redone over the weekend. out.

work in progress

i got a wild hair this afternoon (actually, it started late friday night) and decided to start changing the front page of nodal-point. it updates any time any blog on this site updates, so you now have a gateway to come to in order to see what's new. the other standard links are also there, down at the bottom. take note, though: this design is quite temporary and will most likely change on something like a daily basis until i settle on a nice look. luckily, i have some good ideas swirling around in my head. out.