It’s 3:26 am, I got up an hour ago, I’m flying into the mouth of Ike, I will be rained on and learn about how people play video games.  Also, cats.  If you’re going to AGDC, or live within adventuring distance to it, email me: evilzug@evilzug.com :3

Life truly is a journey.

So is Journey.

I will be in Austin, TX, from late Friday night September 12th, until nighttime Wednesday, the 17th for the Austin Game Developers Conference. I’m going for a few reasons:

• I’m sorta a game developer now!
• I’m going to need a vacation for after PAX.
• I’m giving myself a late birthday present. =P

If any of you internet friends are either going to it, or are close enough for a drink or dinner or whatever, let me know. Reply here or email me evilzug@evilzug.com.

Heya, I’m back.

• Vegas was a blast. Met lots of cool people, ate, drank, and went to bed when the sun came up.
• Certainly an identity re-centering. Matt said it best in that it was an amazing character study.
• Mentally fried. Combination of 110+ degree heat and zero percent humidity saps the strength from body, mind and soul. This is a textbook case of leaving your vacation exhausted and needing a vacation from your vacation.
• Zohan was kinda funny, kinda cool for the subject matter, and it made me lol a few times. They hackysack a mau. Another interesting fact was that they played Israeli pop music during the movie, which wasn’t really a big deal until Infected Mushroom came on during a scene… Not sure how I feel about that, but at least Adam Sandler is cool?
• Still waiting to see Incredible Hulk, which I heard was Incredible.
• I sucked out at Blackjack.
• Every time I go to Vegas I get a few lines of code closer to writing some sort of card game and/or a Blackjack game. This time was no exception.
• I’ve only got four minutes to save the world.
• Work is insane. I may be getting a bit of a title modification. Cool stuff very, very soon… stay tuned for that.

I got one of these, and one of these.

If you need me, I’ll be here.

bbiab.

“Jay Maynard shot to internet fame by dressing like a character from the movie Tron. In this pod vc2 producer, Jean Nagy, joins Jay as he dons his Tron outfit and heads to the inaugural ROFLCon for internet memes on the MIT Campus.”

We saw this camera following Tron Guy when we were there.  They actually did a really good job.

Tron Guy // Current

“Geoffrey Golden of Meteor Games says, “If we had the answer, we would be gazillionaires. It’s what marketers, what everyone is trying to figure out.”"

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/01/roflcon/index.html

You may know Geoffrey from such awesomeness as Hella Koala.

I went to Boston this past weekend.

I finally got to meet Neil and Emmy Cicierega
I went to Nan Ling.
The RoflConcert was awesome, videos coming soon.

Everyone’s ‘internet fame’ was a fluke, barring MillionDollarHomepage guy. Very, very much a fluke, in lots of different ways. Lots of flukes. Related to this: If you want to be famous on the internet, you really can’t try, because people will smell your effort and not care.

One reoccurring and very annoying theme was the need for girls to ask the white twenty-something-aged guys on the panels “Why is it that you’re all white twentysomething guys? Where are all the girls?” I can’t blame college kids for being feminists but this really got on my nerves towards the end. Why are you asking them? Ask yourself why you aren’t making stupid, impulsive shit for yourself and sharing it with the world? My friends and I had some really good convos afterwards, about things like the content itself has no gender, how traditionally online, girls tend to be the presenters of the content and not necessarily the creators/producers… Lots more, too.

I saw the Second Skin documentary.

Here’s some pics, I’ll update this post with more as I find them.
Flickr: The ROFLCon 2008 Pool

I came down with some sorta sinusy-flu so I don’t really feel like spilling guts about the con at the moment, and I know this will sit here for days if I don’t just share it with the world.

I’m also realizing that I dread the ‘recap’ aspects of adventures, sadly. I’m jealous of people who do good jobs of it but I’ve always got the internal struggle between experiencing an event and documenting an event.

:3

ROFLCON HOOOOOOOO!

I’ll be in Boston tomorrow morning (Friday) till Sunday. Email me evilzug@evilzug.com with a ’sup’

So, I posted about what I thought of this mystery commenter here: » Grand Theft Auto IV Viral Bloggery? - ScatteredGenius.com

Well turns out they were listening and have not only replied to me in my comments, saying:

Hi, I just responded to your post on my site… not sure if the trackback worked or not though.

Anyway, thanks for the plug and subscription… I am real, and will update my blog. If I find something else of interest (GTA4 maybe) on your blog, I’ll be sure to come back and comment :)

…but they’ve also posted on their site:

Very interesting way to look at things. I don’t know what to think of this at first… maybe I’m a genius and didn’t know it because I laid a link on a blog post that I found interesting? Or maybe I’m just a GTA4 fan that found someone bored enough to write about me? Either way its kind of entertaining.

Well, mister pretend internet marketing liar man, I don’t believe you! You say you are real, then I challenge you to update your blog in such a way that there’s no posts about GTA on the front page. You say you’re not a marketing company or hired to blog, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t a clever employee or spouse or whatever of someone at Rockstar or any of their related companies. WHAT SAY YOU, INTERNET STRANGER!?

I wanna go here, it’s in San Jose.

Computer History Museum

I wish I felt like this, but really I feel like this, from melting this weekend.

It was just brought to my attention that we may have played Rock Band for 6 hours straight last night. \m/_

This concert was amazing. They alternated old songs and then new songs from their new album, which are growing on me. Their energy is always super amazing. They played Kitty second, and right before the “kitty rear up and scratch me through my jeans” lyric, they cut IMMEDIATELY into playing “superstition” by Stevie Wonder. It was seamless and made for an amazingly mashup. I screamed my face off cuz I love that song too. Then, just as quickly as they cut, they cut right back into Kitty. I can honestly say that screaming “MEYOW” along with a venue full of people is nothing short of religious pilgrimage for me. (Just last Saturday I believe I was in a venue full of people screaming “PENIS”, which, in it’s own ways, was quite religious in itself.)

If you’re familiar with the song “Old Man on the Back Porch,” they busted that mofo out pretty crazy. During the ‘rant’ part where the ‘old man’ tells a story, in the story, the old man says he hears a knock on his door, and was visited in the story by Wayne Kramer of the band MC5. Then he hears another knock on his door and was visited by Weird Al Yankovick. The tangent was met with a lot of confused cheers but needless to say my ears perked up.

The show wrapped up, they had played all of my favorite songs, and you could feel the obligatory encore coming up. After an amusingly short cheer session, they came back out for an encore.

Then, for an encore, another guy came out. Turns out it was indeed the lead guitarist, Wayne Kramer, from MC5, to play the PUSA song “Kick out the Jams,” which I’ve now learned is a half-cover of the MC5 song. (Half-cover in that the melody and the chorus are covers but the rest of the lyrics aren’t covers.) Which looking back was pretty awesome. The exciting part of this, however, was the simple math I had done in my head regarding the previous foreshadowing.

They then played another song I think, and when that ended, and people could catch their breath, mister Wierd Al Yankovick walks the fuck onto the stage with a god damned accordion. I totally knew it, it was completely obvious, but I was hung up on what the hell they could possibly sing… I was going through the PUSA catalog in my head and the only things that were left were some of my favorite songs off obscure singles they released. Sure enough, they didn’t play a PUSA song, but busted out More Then a Feeling by Boston. Weird Al is amazing singer, totally got into the song, and fucking … rocked? on his accordion. There was a fan up on the stage, which I didn’t notice of course because Chris doesn’t have hair, but Weird Al times all of his rocking solos by standing in front of the fan and letting his curly hair waft in the breeze, honestly, it was amazing…. hahaha. We were all literally saying WHAT THE FUCK. IT’S WEIRD AL. HOLY SHIT. OH GOD. The song choice was hilarious, too, because it’s such a Guitar Hero song. Easily one of the most memorable concerts I’ll have ever gone to for this moment alone.

As an aside, Weird Al I think produced their latest music video, so I’m sure he was helping them out or wanting to or whatever. I don’t know, however, if they are on tour with them.

This is the shit I go to concerts for. So awesome.

I gave them 80 of my dollars for two t-shirts, and two CDs.

Ok let’s see if I can get up to speed. It’s time for BULLET POINTS! Epic post is epic, come adventure after the cut!

So I kept a surprise but I’m having a last minute smash bros part at my place! I went out and got a huge TV and finally got my Wii hooked up. Come play! Details after the link!

I was walking around the IGF games, looking and playing a few. I peek my head one of the monitors, and watch someone play Flipside for a bit. It’s a silly game, and it was making some loud noises. People were interviewing the creators of Iron Dukes, and asked us to turn it down. I botched my roll in intelligence and dexterity and pressed the contrast lower button on the monitor to try to turn down the volume, which brought up a menu dialog on the screen. When really I should have just turned the knob down on the speakers. I got all embarrassed and looked at the person playing and was like ‘oops, sorry..’ when my heart stopped. Who was playing the game?

GABE NEWELL.

He was giving the game a shot, because it’s a HL2 mod. I just froze and choked.

He stopped playing and turned to the creator of the game, shook the guys hand and said “Hi, I’m Gabe Newell.”

…the person had no idea who that was, and just replied with a bored “Hi.” Perhaps he didn’t know who he was, because he was Danish? Delicious.

“Everyone at Valve has been talking about it,” says Gabe. Still, crickets.

“Cool.” Wow. No idea. How funny is that…

So after Gabe walked away, I had to say something so I chased him down. Aaron walked up right at that moment. I stopped Gabe and introduced myself, and explained about EndgameRadio. I told him about the incident where Urban was in HL2. (THE PIX ARE DOWN, URB, MAKE IT WORK AHURR HURRRRRR :_:) and then also where we all deemed him the sexiest man alive. He was a good sport and said we should talk to Lombardi and get some interviews with Valve employees. I made sure to thank him for being radical and doing radical things. I didn’t want to take up too much of his time, so we let him go check out more games. For as big a deal as we’ve made him, and as much as I thought I’d be star struck upon ever actually getting to meet him, I was somewhat surprised I grew balls and talked to him.

It was kind of one of the most awesome things that happened to me ever. In all seriousness, it was really awesome to be able to tell him how rad I think he is, despite the teasing we gave him in the past.