Emptyeye

I’ve been holding off on posting anything about this until it was 100% official that I would be doing it, and I got word yesterday that I’m good to go on that front, so here it is:

At Gobble-con, I’ll be giving a panel titled “So You Want to be a Speedrunner: A Leisurely Guide to Playing Video Games in a Frantic Manner”. Those of you who know me are no doubt laughing hysterically at your computers, knowing how confident and outgoing I am.

But in truth, as I mentioned previously, this is something I’ve actually thought about doing for awhile, in part because it’s so contrary to the image of me that most people have of me. That said, the fact that I’ve never lost the Best Vocalist Award at Connecticon‘s Rock Band tournaments, in which performance is a factor, does show that I can fake the confident, outgoing persona for short periods of time when it’s required…and I figure I’ll be fine as long as I keep telling myself “I don’t have to actually be outgoing and confident, I just have to fake it for an hour or so.”

More seriously, the fact that Gobble-con is a small (Don, the guy running it, told me he’s expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 people. In contrast, Connecticon had roughly 8000 people this year.), first-year convention was what convinced me to take the plunge and try to do the panel there. For one, I figured that, being a first-year convention, they’d be looking for panels (And more willing to grant a panel to someone who has never actually given a panel before), as opposed to something like Connecticon which more or less has its pick of panel submissions. For another, the smaller audience means that if I do badly for whatever reason, not a whole lot of people, relatively speaking, will see my spectacular failure.

Truth be told, I’m excited about this. I’m hoping to use some of the stuff I learned in the How to Run a Panel panel, and I’ve been scouring the Internet for public speaking advice as well, using my judgment whenever I come across any contradictory advice. I also plan to use this site (Yeah, the one I’ve been neglecting for the past six months) a bit more to post my progress in this endeavor. I should really change that “Newest Song” at the top to more or a “Latest Progress” kind of thing, what with not having done any recorded music stuff in about two years.

Until next time..
-EE

Yaaaaaaay!

• In webcomicky news, I’m currently really enjoying the current storyline of Evil Inc., wherein would-be supervillains have been laid off from their evil corporation and forced to find alternate means of employment. In particular, today’s (the 24th) strip illustrates something I wished I could do to certain customers during my days working for Stop & Shop. Go check it out!
• In other webcomicky news, Don’t steal your punchlines from message boards. It won’t end well.
• For some reason, Project Wonderful reports my site as being up and down repeatedly, though it seems okay since Sunday. This may have been due to my messing about on the upcoming-I-swear webcomic, trying to password protect that specific directory (And apparently causing the whole site to come up as not found in the process (Speaking of stealing stuff, does anyone know where that “I has a bucket” picture came from? I know the story of the elephant seal and such, but I’m wondering who first captioned it). Oops. At least I didn’t wreck the database this time…
• Speaking of upcoming-I-swear stuff, I did a bit of work on the Fester’s Quest speedrun last night. It’s become very clear to me that the hardest part of the run is going to be the first 5 to 10 minutes, before I acquire items that let me survive. I’m also going to have to plan exactly how many enemies I plan to kill near the beginning to acquire the items I need (Primarily keys), versus just hoping for them later on in the run. Fortunately, because of a glitch you can use to easily kill the bosses of the game except for the last one, if I can get to the first boss, I’m essentially home free as far as survival goes. Going quickly is another matter…

Yes, after quite awhile, my speedrun on that platforming classic (By which I mean “Game that goes rapidly downhill once you press Start to get beyond the title screen and actually start playing the game”) Chuck Rock has been posted to SDA. Go check it out! And for those of you who found the site via the link in the run’s comments, welcome! Feel free to browse through the blog archive, or check out some of my music. If you’ve got your own site to advertise, consider putting in a bid for the ad-space to your right at Project Wonderful. Thanks, and hopefully you’ll keep checking back!

Oh, and a special shoutout to the people/bots/whatever from Amsterdam who keep trying to spam my Comments. I mention this only because they were the first people since I activated Akismet to actually succeed in getting through it–for about 6 hours, when I blocked any comments coming from their IP block. Hi Amsterdam!

Yeah. I’ve been a bit lazy with the Weekly Updates because, frankly, not much is happening here site-wise.

Last night, I beat the thoroughly mediocre Chuck Rock for the first time. Prior to then, I could never figure out how to harm the last boss, and as the game is really pretty average (Except for its awesome title screen music, which you can hear part of here), I never really thought to pick it up again until very recently. Not only that, but upon completing the thing, I came to the conclusion that it would be a good game to speedrun. It’s short, it’s obscure (So far, of the three-as-of-this-post comments at SDA, two are of the “I’ve never heard of this but more runs are always cool” variety, and the third calls the game…well, not very good.), it’s perfect for me. Now I just need to work out some strategies for it.

Yeah, I’m insane.

This past week, I actually posted some stuff. Amazing, huh?

I’m still trying to figure out precisely what to do with my stimulus check plus birthday money. Essentially, in one corner is waiting a bit and buying an XBOX 360 and Rock Band 2 when it comes out. In the other is actually addressing my recording obstacles full-on, getting either a new soundcard or adapter for the current one plus an honest-to-goodness updated copy of Cakewalk SONAR (The latter actually being the more expensive of the two); I know which one I should get (The second one), but knowing me, I’ll demonstrate a total lack of responsibility and commitment and cave and get the first next month.

Jess and I went down to New Haven today to eat at a place called Amato’s, which was pretty good. I had a huge lasagna, which I only managed to finish half of, and Jess had some chicken parm which she also failed to finish. More leftovers are always good, I suppose.

In Guitar Hero III news, I’m through 3 of 8 tiers on Expert, with all but 3 songs 5-starred. My most recent 4-star, “Paint it Black”, was probably also the most amusing in that I hit 96% of the notes. The problem was that six of the song’s 9 star power phrases were in the 4% of notes I missed. Oops…

Until next week..

-EE

Yes, I’m still alive.

Yesterday, I turned 25. This makes me ancient and decrepit in most of the social circles I hang out in (Except for work, where I radically skew the average age of the department downwards). So yesterday Jess and I went to her parents’ house for brunch, which was tasty. Then my friend Brian came down from Massachusetts, and we went to dinner before settling down to watch the Summer Olympics. On tap last night was diving, specifically 3-meter springboard synchronized diving. And the team tapped to lead off the broadcast performed….a forward dive.

Yep, that’s it.

Now, I realize that diving is hard. But seriously, this is something your average aquatic 8-year-old learns how to do. And you lead off an Olympic broadcast with this? Really, it makes it very difficult for me to not make fun of diving as a sport when this happens.

Adding to our confusion was that the next tandem performed an inward 1 1/2 somersault–which is apparently no more difficult than a forward dive. Huh? Excuse me?

The Olympics are weird.

In other news, I’m trying with all my power to resist buying an XBOX 360 and Rock Band after my Connecticon experience. This is made all the more difficult by my realization last week that I actually still have most of my stimulus check, which was presumably designed for such irresponsible purchases as ~$450 worth of limited-use video gaming equipment (Wasn’t it this irresponsible spending that got the US as a country these checks in the first place?). Oh well.

(This post is huge; most of it is hidden behind a tag to prevent you from having to read it all each time the page loads)

This past weekend was spent at Connecticon. Quite honestly, I had hoped to have the CD/business cards/etc. out at this point, but various circumstances that I have documented before have prevented that thus far. In any event, I first became aware of this convention sometime last year, and went on the Saturday of last year to play in a DDR tournament. I didn’t do very well, but that’s beside the point–I had fun, and decided to go to the entire convention this year, and actually booked a room at the hotel despite living fairly close. This made more sense when I lived in Waterbury (My thinking was I’d go right to the hotel from work on Thursday, because I didn’t want to go from Waterbury to Cheshire, back to Waterbury, and drive back through Cheshire again on my way to Hartford), but as I’ve since moved out to Milldale, I did go back to my apartment after work to pack and then headed off to the Convention Center at about 7:30 Thursday night.

(Continue reading…)

The title of this post pretty much explains my past week–I’m watching a StarCraft-related video as I write this update, in fact. I continue to be terrible at the game, though I seem to be learning, if nothing else, the patterns of the computer opponents (Or, put another way, “How to Hold Off the Computer Until I Can Mass Carriers”).

Other than that, I haven’t been up to a whole heck of a lot. This upcoming weekend, I’ll be heading to Connecticon, and Tuesday night, Jess and I are going to the Poison show at Mohegan Sun. She likes Poison a lot, and I figure I’ll at least enjoy Sebastian Bach, so…

Until next week…

-EE

This past week as far as the site goes mainly consisted of me finding out why my soundcard doesn’t fit my new computer. Apparently I have the next step up in card technology in the computer…which renders the soundcard obsolete, at least temporarily. My options now are either getting an adapter for the port, which is expensive in and of itself, or trying to find another sound solution–the current hardware is not going to cut it, if my brief experiences with trying to record Astyanax speedrun commentary are any indication.

Other than that, the main thing that’s been happening with me is work. Without going too into the details, we have a big project we’re trying to roll out, and a rather severe lack of resources to add some of the features that are basically needed. Not a lot of fun.

And I continue to be awful at StarCraft, if you’re curious.

-EE

Yep. I had planned this post to coincide with (At least within a day or two) the opening of the site…then checked my archives and realized I made the first official post on the site on October 7th, 2007. So I was late by nearly a week. Whoops.

Anyway, the most interesting thing is that my prediction as to the usefulness of a review of the Dream Theater book was apparently completely off–it’s the most popular post on the site in terms of views, and even the author himself (Hi Rich, if you happen to read this) stopped by to share his thoughts, which was pretty cool. Filewise, the most popular thing appears to be the commentary for my speedrun of Rygar, which makes some amount of sense.

And that’s about it as far as that goes, for now anyway.