of course maybe i'm just a vampire. but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones. just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.
Aug 15, 2010
dim lights keep the hulk at bay
it's true. i was reading a study the other day (which i can't link because i forgot to bookmark it and now i can't refind it) that basically showed how any light level that's actually brighter than sunlight (i.e. the interior lighting of pretty much any building in the United States at any given time) is so confusing for the brain that that light level is interpreted similarly to how our brains interpret night-light. the shorter and less shittily-phrased version of that sentence is this: when it's really bright inside, humans' brains think that it's nighttime. this explains a lot about the last 29 years of my life. it also explains why i always fall asleep after turning the lights up real high to keep myself from falling asleep. it ALSO explains why this is my favorite sight to come home to after a long day of work:
i've always liked keeping the lights down rather low, to the point that certain others tend to become exasperated upon entering my office to find that, for the tenth time in a row, it's too dark for them to navigate from one end of the room to the other. in the middle of the afternoon.
of course maybe i'm just a vampire. but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones. just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.
of course maybe i'm just a vampire. but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones. just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.
Jul 16, 2010
fifa 10 sucks.
that's pretty much it.
in the wake of the world cup coming to a totally metal, crane-kick-to-the-heart-style end, i was left missing my quadannual injection of football action, and decided that my best recourse (other than watching tons of euro league action on espn3.com in august) would be to get a soccer pc game. it's just efficient, combining hobbies this way.
anyway, i tried the demos for both Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 and EA Sports' FIFA 10. and they both suck. a lot. for years, this absurd argument over whether PES or FIFA is the more "realistic" soccer game has raged among fans of both series and i have to say after spending a few evenings tinkering with various installments in each series post-2005, that most realistic video game soccer can still be found in the FIFA incarnations of 2002-2003.
sure, the control schemes for each of the games nowadays is way more in-depth, and the ball has its own physics system, and as a result, much of what happens on the field looks more like real soccer. but it certainly doesn't play like it. why not? because for some reason even the international versions of each game bow to the hit-hard-hit-fast aesthetics that characterize american sports (and american video games).
first of all, the most glaring, and telling, issue: in neither game can you set the half length to FIFA-standard 45 minutes. the most minutes you can play per half? 10. that's it. and once you start playing the game you'll see why. all the players sprint, all the time. the CPU defense plays in a constant press, to the point that when i clear an attempt on my own goal, every time the only player on the half of the field on which the ball lands is my own goalie. every single possession is a fast-break attempt for a goal. there is no time to set up a real, complicated attack, and no need. the defense plays the midfield not at all, so there's no concern over being challenged until you get almost to the goalie box. your CPU-controlled offensive players all take off downfield as soon as you take possession, as well, so even if you try to force the issue by holding the ball at midfield, pretty much the only options you'll have are tricky through balls above and below the goalie box. the result of this is that the entire game is a trading of dramatic shots on goal and desperate sprints downfield, and more often than not, when goals are scored it's simply because the defense-cum-offense recovered from a change in possession faster than the offense-cum-defense did. it's not unusual, even against a skilled CPU opponent, to have a 10 minute half end with a score like 4-4 or 5-5. once, i altered the game's .ini file in order to force the game to last 45 minutes per half; i shouldn't have bothered. this didn't change the CPU's approach at all. by halftime, my entire team was literally completely exhausted, but that didn't stop the final score from being in the 50s.
this is ridiculous, and what's worse: the purportedly "more realistic" PES suffers from many of the same issues. if you don't believe me, check out this youtube video and see if you could have told the difference between the two games had you not been told which was which:
sure, both teams have awesome graphics, 5 million different teams with real players, and all that jazz...but neither game feels like real football. at all. sure, it feels really cool when you're given exacting control over each shot, pass, through ball, header, corner kick, penalty kick, etc...the controls are incredible, and the ball physics sure beat the hell out of the ol' 2003-era "the ball's magically stuck to your foot!" system. but when you get 25 corner kicks in a half and can cross the entire field in four seconds at a sprint over and over again, and your team expects you to do this as your default play, something's screwy. when you get 50 shots on goal and 25 goals in a half of soccer, something's screwy. and you can't even slow the game down if you want to.
i remember playing FIFA 2003 obsessively after the 2002 world cup. it was when i was first enchanted by soccer, by the rhythm of it, by the fact that it was an interesting alternative to the sports i was used to. it had the speed of basketball, but without the often-boring first 3/4ths of a basketball game, which often features 40 or so scores by each team that largely just function to set up the final 10 or so minutes of action. it had the strategy and interesting minutiae of a football or baseball game, but without the 1 minute of action for every 10 minutes of commentating, huddling, winding up, and commercial-showing. i wouldn't say it instantly became my favorite sport, but i was intrigued.
when i bought FIFA 2003, then, i got these same experiences through the game as i saw on TV. it was a game that took thinking. it wasn't just two teams taking turns shooting broadsides as each other's goal. if you played on anything but the simplest skill level, you spent most of the game (with 45-minute halves) at midfield, fighting for possession. if you got a free kick, or a corner, it was potentially a key to your (likely) 1-0 victory, just like a real game. if there was a breakaway goal, it was due to excellent offensive forethought and/or defensive failure, and not something that happened 30 times in a 10 minute half. for all the game's "ball on rails" handling dynamic, you couldn't just give the ball to a big strong dude and have him run through the entire defense like a freight train, something you can do at will in 2010-era games. if you tried that shit, you'd lose the ball faster than i go through a bottle of tapatio. i remember many an epic game that ended 1-0 or 1-1 after 90 minutes of careful planning, substitutions, formation switches, and the like. many players nowadays (according to the forum threads i read as research) seem revolted by the idea of sitting down for 90 minutes and having to dredge their way through an entire game of video game soccer...but isn't that the point? aren't these games supposed to replicate reality?
i stopped playing madden in 2003 because i started feeling like it was creating an arcade-shooting aesthetic and building it around the rules of football rather than trying to faithfully reproduce the game that, you know, real people actually play. i stopped playing nba live in 2006 for a similar reason. i mean, i understand that part of the point of video games is to put you into situations where you have importance and agency beyond what you feel you have in real life (i.e. games are awesome because you can blow shit up and save the world, which you're unlikely to do in real life unless you're wesley gibson. but i always played sports video games because they allow you a different kind of agency: the agency to be a running back, or a striker, or a home-run king on your favorite real-life team. i thought that was the point...and now when i play sports games i feel like i'm not being allowed that experience anymore. instead, i'm being guided towards a thinly-veiled reimagining of the experience of blasting the demonlord and his hundred henchmen with a rocket launcher when i'm forced to shoot off ten or twenty strategy-less goals per half to keep up with my enemy...i mean, the other team. god forbid you actually have to know a little about how to play a sport to play a sports video game. i mean, you all know that i have nothing against mindless shoot-'em-ups (after all, three of my "Best PC Video Games of All-Time", if you remember, were Unreal Tournament, Doom 2, and Serious Sam), but if i want to play Doom 2, i'll just play Doom 2. i want a soccer game that plays like real soccer and was made after 2003. but apparently that's too much to ask.
in the wake of the world cup coming to a totally metal, crane-kick-to-the-heart-style end, i was left missing my quadannual injection of football action, and decided that my best recourse (other than watching tons of euro league action on espn3.com in august) would be to get a soccer pc game. it's just efficient, combining hobbies this way.
anyway, i tried the demos for both Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 and EA Sports' FIFA 10. and they both suck. a lot. for years, this absurd argument over whether PES or FIFA is the more "realistic" soccer game has raged among fans of both series and i have to say after spending a few evenings tinkering with various installments in each series post-2005, that most realistic video game soccer can still be found in the FIFA incarnations of 2002-2003.
sure, the control schemes for each of the games nowadays is way more in-depth, and the ball has its own physics system, and as a result, much of what happens on the field looks more like real soccer. but it certainly doesn't play like it. why not? because for some reason even the international versions of each game bow to the hit-hard-hit-fast aesthetics that characterize american sports (and american video games).
first of all, the most glaring, and telling, issue: in neither game can you set the half length to FIFA-standard 45 minutes. the most minutes you can play per half? 10. that's it. and once you start playing the game you'll see why. all the players sprint, all the time. the CPU defense plays in a constant press, to the point that when i clear an attempt on my own goal, every time the only player on the half of the field on which the ball lands is my own goalie. every single possession is a fast-break attempt for a goal. there is no time to set up a real, complicated attack, and no need. the defense plays the midfield not at all, so there's no concern over being challenged until you get almost to the goalie box. your CPU-controlled offensive players all take off downfield as soon as you take possession, as well, so even if you try to force the issue by holding the ball at midfield, pretty much the only options you'll have are tricky through balls above and below the goalie box. the result of this is that the entire game is a trading of dramatic shots on goal and desperate sprints downfield, and more often than not, when goals are scored it's simply because the defense-cum-offense recovered from a change in possession faster than the offense-cum-defense did. it's not unusual, even against a skilled CPU opponent, to have a 10 minute half end with a score like 4-4 or 5-5. once, i altered the game's .ini file in order to force the game to last 45 minutes per half; i shouldn't have bothered. this didn't change the CPU's approach at all. by halftime, my entire team was literally completely exhausted, but that didn't stop the final score from being in the 50s.
this is ridiculous, and what's worse: the purportedly "more realistic" PES suffers from many of the same issues. if you don't believe me, check out this youtube video and see if you could have told the difference between the two games had you not been told which was which:
sure, both teams have awesome graphics, 5 million different teams with real players, and all that jazz...but neither game feels like real football. at all. sure, it feels really cool when you're given exacting control over each shot, pass, through ball, header, corner kick, penalty kick, etc...the controls are incredible, and the ball physics sure beat the hell out of the ol' 2003-era "the ball's magically stuck to your foot!" system. but when you get 25 corner kicks in a half and can cross the entire field in four seconds at a sprint over and over again, and your team expects you to do this as your default play, something's screwy. when you get 50 shots on goal and 25 goals in a half of soccer, something's screwy. and you can't even slow the game down if you want to.
i remember playing FIFA 2003 obsessively after the 2002 world cup. it was when i was first enchanted by soccer, by the rhythm of it, by the fact that it was an interesting alternative to the sports i was used to. it had the speed of basketball, but without the often-boring first 3/4ths of a basketball game, which often features 40 or so scores by each team that largely just function to set up the final 10 or so minutes of action. it had the strategy and interesting minutiae of a football or baseball game, but without the 1 minute of action for every 10 minutes of commentating, huddling, winding up, and commercial-showing. i wouldn't say it instantly became my favorite sport, but i was intrigued.
when i bought FIFA 2003, then, i got these same experiences through the game as i saw on TV. it was a game that took thinking. it wasn't just two teams taking turns shooting broadsides as each other's goal. if you played on anything but the simplest skill level, you spent most of the game (with 45-minute halves) at midfield, fighting for possession. if you got a free kick, or a corner, it was potentially a key to your (likely) 1-0 victory, just like a real game. if there was a breakaway goal, it was due to excellent offensive forethought and/or defensive failure, and not something that happened 30 times in a 10 minute half. for all the game's "ball on rails" handling dynamic, you couldn't just give the ball to a big strong dude and have him run through the entire defense like a freight train, something you can do at will in 2010-era games. if you tried that shit, you'd lose the ball faster than i go through a bottle of tapatio. i remember many an epic game that ended 1-0 or 1-1 after 90 minutes of careful planning, substitutions, formation switches, and the like. many players nowadays (according to the forum threads i read as research) seem revolted by the idea of sitting down for 90 minutes and having to dredge their way through an entire game of video game soccer...but isn't that the point? aren't these games supposed to replicate reality?
i stopped playing madden in 2003 because i started feeling like it was creating an arcade-shooting aesthetic and building it around the rules of football rather than trying to faithfully reproduce the game that, you know, real people actually play. i stopped playing nba live in 2006 for a similar reason. i mean, i understand that part of the point of video games is to put you into situations where you have importance and agency beyond what you feel you have in real life (i.e. games are awesome because you can blow shit up and save the world, which you're unlikely to do in real life unless you're wesley gibson. but i always played sports video games because they allow you a different kind of agency: the agency to be a running back, or a striker, or a home-run king on your favorite real-life team. i thought that was the point...and now when i play sports games i feel like i'm not being allowed that experience anymore. instead, i'm being guided towards a thinly-veiled reimagining of the experience of blasting the demonlord and his hundred henchmen with a rocket launcher when i'm forced to shoot off ten or twenty strategy-less goals per half to keep up with my enemy...i mean, the other team. god forbid you actually have to know a little about how to play a sport to play a sports video game. i mean, you all know that i have nothing against mindless shoot-'em-ups (after all, three of my "Best PC Video Games of All-Time", if you remember, were Unreal Tournament, Doom 2, and Serious Sam), but if i want to play Doom 2, i'll just play Doom 2. i want a soccer game that plays like real soccer and was made after 2003. but apparently that's too much to ask.
Jul 9, 2010
new music news! (no, seriously)
so, you know how this usually goes: i get on the blog once every four or five months and blather on endlessly about all manner of fancy-ass music shit that i have planned. sometimes it's a new album, sometimes, it's being able to afford lots of new equipment, sometimes it's new gigs, sometimes it's a new website. often, it's a combination of these with an extra helping of a vague promise of someday selling albums on iTunes and playing a sold-out Cedar Point concert while riding a rollercoaster.
then, reality sets in and i realize i'm working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (at least during fall and winter, more like 30-40 in the summer) and making 9,000 dollars a year, and nothing ever happens. which is a bummer, because i love making music and i'd love even more to be able to approach it more seriously than i am now. but, to do so would most likely be to fail out of grad school, or at least do less than my best, which would be sort of silly at this point...i mean, i've gone to school for 24 of my 29 years on earth. i might as well finish the last two years with a bang.
anyway, i'm getting off-topic. i really liked my idea of starting a real website last year, and even better i liked my idea of consolidating my photos, essays, poems, songs, and other such fun stuff into one site. so i spent many of my off-hours for a few weeks tooling around with microsoft web expressions, trying to come up with something that represented all those different forms of media effectively. i came up with a few interesting ideas, visually and structurally, but in the end it really just came down to the fact that Facebook is a better media hosting site than what i could build myself. it's easier to upload things to, and it hosts videos and photos directly...much more of both than i would be willing to pay to host for my own site. i can link it to my blog so that every time i post a piece of writing on here, it shows up there, too, and i already have a facebook page for lazy blazers, which gets more visits and listens than my reverbnation page, or my old home page ever did. plus, all of those hosting features are wrapped up with the social networking aspect: any time i change any of the site's content, it immediately informs the 125 people i'm friends with on Facebook. i don't think ceding defeat to Facebook is all that bad; my lazy blazers page is pretty awesome, and besides, a lot of the time i would have spent designing and maintaining a website over the last few months has instead been dedicated to working on collaboration with lindsey, practicing old songs to get them back up to snuff, and playing monday nights at rico's, which is what's more important in the larger picture of music-making anyway.
so yeah...i suck and am lazy and what's the news here again?
thing 1: i'm ditching reverbnation. it's a great site, but it's for people who actually want to super-publicize and make money off of their band. i'd like to do those things, but to have to navigate that intense-as-all-hell menu system with band ratings and street team notifications and all that crazy mumbo-jumbo is not what i ever wanted in a site that i was hosting my music on. it's just intense and crazy. so i switched everything last night over to soundcloud.com. it pretty much just posts your tracks and nothing else, and allows you to post a widget into Facebook and that's it. if people want to come to my page and listen to my music, huzzah. no crazy cross-linkages or multiple clicks or any such bullshit. in case you're interested, the soundcloud page is here. you can access it directly through the lazy blazers page on Facebook (become a fan if you're not already...it won't give you cancer, i promise) or just through my normal Facebook profile as well. i also took down all the links to my youtube videos and am in the process of uploading any and all music-related videos directly to Facebook. basically i figure if i'm ditching plans for a personal music website (at least for now) in favor of Facebook, i might as well host everything there.
thing 2: lindsey's been doing excellent designs for the band recently. in case you haven't seen them yet, they're here, here, and here so far. i really want to cover all my guitars and guitar cases with stickers made from these designs, as well as the possible bumper sticker-size design i'm trying to talk lindsey into drawing.
thing 3: speaking of lindsey, she wants to make an album in the next few months, and i'll be recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz. i might even be playing some guitars and maybe a banjo or mandolin and singing some harmony. i might even have my cake, and also eat it. anyway, her songs are great and i'm really excited to have a copy of them to listen to WHENEVER THE FUCK I FEEL LIKE IT. besides, this fills the gap nicely when you're a guy who wants to write and play and sing new songs, but you suck too much to actually write your own.
thing 4 (the ultimate thing): actually, i have written a song. just yesterday, in fact. it's a little different than the usual guitar-and-singing thing, in that it's a chiptune. that may not be an exactly fair characterization, because i'm not using an actual amiga or commodore or NES to get the sounds...but i am using a bunch of soundfonts and VSTs to get sounds very freaking similar to the original NES sounds (i'm working, at least for now, with NES exclusively, since i grew up on its funky 5-channel music). so yeah. i spent the last few nights reading and downloading software and screwing around with samples, having no idea how to use a DAW or a tracker or anything (seriously, if you clicked on any of those wiki articles, i was reading them for the first time ever about 48 hours ago). i ended up settling on downloading a windows port of linux software called LMMS, which seems to have a lot of the same features and functionality of high-end programs like FL Studio, but for the price of free dollars. then i went here and downloaded tons of NES related sounds and junk. and it turns out, it's really freaking fun composing this stuff. what i REALLY need is a midi-compatible keyboard so i don't have to click each note in by hand with a mouse. but otherwise, it's really great. like a really need something else to halfheartedly screw around doing in my spare time, right? i mean, final fantasy 10 isn't going to beat itself. but. i wrote an original NES song, and if you want to check it out, make with the trip to clicktown:
Ascendancy (Chiptune) by lazyblazers
then, reality sets in and i realize i'm working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (at least during fall and winter, more like 30-40 in the summer) and making 9,000 dollars a year, and nothing ever happens. which is a bummer, because i love making music and i'd love even more to be able to approach it more seriously than i am now. but, to do so would most likely be to fail out of grad school, or at least do less than my best, which would be sort of silly at this point...i mean, i've gone to school for 24 of my 29 years on earth. i might as well finish the last two years with a bang.
anyway, i'm getting off-topic. i really liked my idea of starting a real website last year, and even better i liked my idea of consolidating my photos, essays, poems, songs, and other such fun stuff into one site. so i spent many of my off-hours for a few weeks tooling around with microsoft web expressions, trying to come up with something that represented all those different forms of media effectively. i came up with a few interesting ideas, visually and structurally, but in the end it really just came down to the fact that Facebook is a better media hosting site than what i could build myself. it's easier to upload things to, and it hosts videos and photos directly...much more of both than i would be willing to pay to host for my own site. i can link it to my blog so that every time i post a piece of writing on here, it shows up there, too, and i already have a facebook page for lazy blazers, which gets more visits and listens than my reverbnation page, or my old home page ever did. plus, all of those hosting features are wrapped up with the social networking aspect: any time i change any of the site's content, it immediately informs the 125 people i'm friends with on Facebook. i don't think ceding defeat to Facebook is all that bad; my lazy blazers page is pretty awesome, and besides, a lot of the time i would have spent designing and maintaining a website over the last few months has instead been dedicated to working on collaboration with lindsey, practicing old songs to get them back up to snuff, and playing monday nights at rico's, which is what's more important in the larger picture of music-making anyway.
so yeah...i suck and am lazy and what's the news here again?
thing 1: i'm ditching reverbnation. it's a great site, but it's for people who actually want to super-publicize and make money off of their band. i'd like to do those things, but to have to navigate that intense-as-all-hell menu system with band ratings and street team notifications and all that crazy mumbo-jumbo is not what i ever wanted in a site that i was hosting my music on. it's just intense and crazy. so i switched everything last night over to soundcloud.com. it pretty much just posts your tracks and nothing else, and allows you to post a widget into Facebook and that's it. if people want to come to my page and listen to my music, huzzah. no crazy cross-linkages or multiple clicks or any such bullshit. in case you're interested, the soundcloud page is here. you can access it directly through the lazy blazers page on Facebook (become a fan if you're not already...it won't give you cancer, i promise) or just through my normal Facebook profile as well. i also took down all the links to my youtube videos and am in the process of uploading any and all music-related videos directly to Facebook. basically i figure if i'm ditching plans for a personal music website (at least for now) in favor of Facebook, i might as well host everything there.
thing 2: lindsey's been doing excellent designs for the band recently. in case you haven't seen them yet, they're here, here, and here so far. i really want to cover all my guitars and guitar cases with stickers made from these designs, as well as the possible bumper sticker-size design i'm trying to talk lindsey into drawing.
thing 3: speaking of lindsey, she wants to make an album in the next few months, and i'll be recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz. i might even be playing some guitars and maybe a banjo or mandolin and singing some harmony. i might even have my cake, and also eat it. anyway, her songs are great and i'm really excited to have a copy of them to listen to WHENEVER THE FUCK I FEEL LIKE IT. besides, this fills the gap nicely when you're a guy who wants to write and play and sing new songs, but you suck too much to actually write your own.
thing 4 (the ultimate thing): actually, i have written a song. just yesterday, in fact. it's a little different than the usual guitar-and-singing thing, in that it's a chiptune. that may not be an exactly fair characterization, because i'm not using an actual amiga or commodore or NES to get the sounds...but i am using a bunch of soundfonts and VSTs to get sounds very freaking similar to the original NES sounds (i'm working, at least for now, with NES exclusively, since i grew up on its funky 5-channel music). so yeah. i spent the last few nights reading and downloading software and screwing around with samples, having no idea how to use a DAW or a tracker or anything (seriously, if you clicked on any of those wiki articles, i was reading them for the first time ever about 48 hours ago). i ended up settling on downloading a windows port of linux software called LMMS, which seems to have a lot of the same features and functionality of high-end programs like FL Studio, but for the price of free dollars. then i went here and downloaded tons of NES related sounds and junk. and it turns out, it's really freaking fun composing this stuff. what i REALLY need is a midi-compatible keyboard so i don't have to click each note in by hand with a mouse. but otherwise, it's really great. like a really need something else to halfheartedly screw around doing in my spare time, right? i mean, final fantasy 10 isn't going to beat itself. but. i wrote an original NES song, and if you want to check it out, make with the trip to clicktown:
Ascendancy (Chiptune) by lazyblazers
Jul 8, 2010
that is one indolent sport coat!
so i was kicking around the idea of building a website for my professional, English-y stuff today (as it occurred to me that I probably wouldn't want to send potential future employers to lazyblazers.com to find my CV), and while checking the availability of benbunting.com, i decided to check the availability of lazyblazers.com as well, just to make sure that it would come up as unavailable. it did, but i also got a list from google of similar domain names, in case i wanted to buy one. here are some of the best they gave me:
slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers
some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!
slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers
some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!
Jun 24, 2010
my smartphone's menus are hilariously intense.
it always makes me oddly sad when my mom calls when i'm in the middle of a meeting or class or something, because to reject the call, i have to hit this comically huge, bright red "REJECT" button right underneath this picture:
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