Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

So after work last night, some fairly spontaneous decisions got made and I went into San Francisco to kick it with one Matthew Rorie and his posse. The dude has got no mercy, for sure, and yes, his crew runs DEEP. The night quickly became a blur of autographed sandwiches, a giant flying stone head that pukes guns, and a karaoke bar employee that, for all intents and purposes, was Sam Elliott.

I’m all for karaoke, but I think that people need to totally give themselves over to the experience, realize that they’re essentially making a fool of themselves in front of a crowd, and have fun with it. It always surprises me when I see people up there, singing, looking completely embarrassed. What, exactly, did you think was going to happen when you handed in your stupid little slip of paper?

We ended up bailing out of that place before most of us got a chance to sing, mostly because it was taking forever. I guess that’s one point in favor of the “rent a small room” style of karaoke, but acting like an ass in front of your friends isn’t anything special.

Last night left me a little tapped out, so I’m relaxing a bit and finally straightening up my bedroom, which has become a mess of cables, sweatshirts, networking hardware, and empty Amazon shipping boxes since I started working again. I got sort of obsessive about keeping stuff clean when I wasn’t working, since I was spending plenty of waking hours in this bedroom. Now, it’s effectively gone back to “the place where I go watch TV for a few hours and then go to sleep.” So it’s easy for stuff to pile up.

I’ve also been watching a lot less TV these past few weeks. The Law & Order reruns are history, and I haven’t really been up to keeping tabs on the two or three shows that I usually record, either. Even still, I think I’m going to upgrade to the DirecTV HDTV package. Now that baseball season’s here, I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time watching random baseball games on the weekends, and I might as well be watching them in ridiculously-high resolution. Unfortunately, this means I’d have to give up my TiVo and replace it with the crappy DirecTV equivalent. I have an SD version of the DTV DVR in my living room now and it’s an underpowered piece of crap with awful remote response times. Hmm… this is starting to sound like a white whine, so maybe I should stop here.

While writing this, news came out that Charlton Heston has died.

Man, just when you thought your probably-unhealthy love of Michelle Collins couldn’t get any deeper and unhealthier, she goes and unearths some recently-unearthed clips of Stairway to Stardom, the most-bestest cable access talent show in the world.

Some of these clips have turned up in the TV Carnage series, and I’m totally going nuts over here, seeing them on their own, separated from the madness of Carnage.

Go watch these and, to pass along the warning that TV Carnage handed out at the time, do your best to not learn the words to Hairdresser.

What is the proper length of time for a sober person to allow a drunk friend (actually, let’s say acquaintance) throw playful-but-still-too-hard punches at your shoulder and arm area before you snap and nail him in the gut a bit harder than you should?

My answer was probably around 45 seconds, but only because he caught my elbow.

The problem with Wrestlemania (apart from the whole “wrestling is pretty dumb, actually” thing) is that it’s like a four hour show. Now, I still sort of like wrestling and still follow it out of habit. But dude, four hours?

That’s why you need to have people over, so you can all share in the overwhelming feeling of needing to take a nap about 2.5 hours in, which is right around the spot where all the matches start to get really predictable.

Now that I think about it, the heavy night of drinking on Saturday probably didn’t do me any favors, either. When Chris text messages you and says “dude, we’re dropping shots of apple Pucker into half-pints of Sparks,” that doesn’t mean you should immediately order the same thing, 40 miles away, just to see how horrible it is. It’s horrible. End of story.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, which probably won’t make any noticeable difference to you, but it changes the back end of this blog pretty dramatically. It’s got a cleaner look that’ll probably be easier to use in the long run, though at the moment it’s a bit confusing because it’s so different.

Back to work tomorrow. We’ll probably shoot a new video early in the week and aim to have it up by Wednesday or so. Since that’s also the camera that films Points!, no new movement on that front until our real camera arrives… which should be any day now.

Word up, blog!

Just wanted to answer a question or two. Yes, the Points! videos will continue. I’m not 100% sure where they’ll live, though. Maybe I’ll post them here and link to them from giantbomb.com, or maybe I’ll post them there and link to them from here. I’m not sure.

Noticed yesterday that my new Xbox 360 account name, GiantBombing, has risen to #1 on the 360voice.com charts, which is pretty cool. And here I was, worried that once I changed my name I would completely vanish off of lists like that…

Totally loving the town I’m working in now, even though it’s ultra-Marin-y in spots. That works out well and keeps me from losing my edge by giving me enough organic food stores to get angry at. On top of that, the town’s 7-11 has a wine section. Christ. Growing up around “wine country” has given me a very strong dislike for wine and wine culture. That probably also has something to do with my preference for cheap beer and fine malt liquors.

Starting work right as the weather got nice is working out perfect, as it’s a bit of a walk from where I park my car to the office. It’s been great.

Looks like my recently-purchased 750GB SATA drive is actually having issues, and that’s what’s been causing all my blue screens in Vista. I had been thinking it was an iTunes-related problem, because iTunes still doesn’t behave properly in Vista, but I’m attempting to copy my D drive (150GB of MP3s, to be specific) off to a USB drive and it’s died on me a couple of times now. Guess I’ll have to copy the files off in smaller chunks. It’s not marking any sectors as bad on a surface scan, so I’m not really sure what to do. Guess I’ll get everything off of it and try to RMA it.

Totally digging the AirPort Extreme I picked up. You can bypass its router functionality and let your ISP assign IPs to all of your devices. I have a range of static IPs from my ISP, so this is absolutely perfect for me. No more routing, no more hassles with forwarding port 133 to my desktop machine, none of that. Smooth sailing, at least until I get one or two more devices on my network and completely run out of IPs, anyway.

I’m installing Vista SP1 right now, and it’s about to reboot to finish up, so I should probably stop here. Keep reading giantbomb.com, we’re just getting started.

Not to bore you all with more talk about things I do to my computer, but I ditched that D-Link hunk of junk today and put an AirPort Extreme in its place. That raises the number of Apple products in my home up by one and it’s starting to really freak me out. Am I becoming one of those people? Am I going to suddenly start wearing turtlenecks and hanging out at Starbucks? Will I be the ass telling people about my screenplay every chance I get?

Hell, I even work in an all-Apple office now. Madness!

Jason Ocampo, you were right all along. There, I said it. If I didn’t use this PC for playing games, and if it wasn’t the only computer I own that is fully equipped with music-making stuff that I enjoy using (most of which could probably be replaced with Mac equivalents, if I really wanted to learn some new software), I wouldn’t need a PC at all.

It’s starting to feel like the summer I spent transitioning from using an Amiga to using a 486.

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It’s sad to watch, but my poor lonely blog here has seen better days. Traffic is dwindling, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not posting here very often or because people have stopped checking it in favor of checking giantbomb.com instead. It’s probably a bit of both. Once my life stabilizes a bit and I’m not spending every waking hour thinking about the new site, I expect things around here will pick up a bit.

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In music news, the new Goldie Lookin’ Chain album is out in UK stores next week. I’m pretty excited about that, already have a copy pre-ordered.

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One more nice thing about switching network devices… the AirPort only has one fairly dim light on it. The D-Link was full of those PlayStation-style super-bright blue lights. If you’re throwing that in a closet, that’s no biggie. Mine sat right in the middle of my sightline from bed, making the room too bright, even when my eyes were closed. I felt like some kind of old man/crazy person, putting black tape over lights at 3AM while muttering curses under my breath. Now if I could just get those TiVo hard drive fans to quiet down… that’s my fault, though, the thing was plenty quiet until I threw a second hard drive in it. How else could I keep the entire run of Cheap Seats a couple of button presses away?

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Oh, and it’s about two guys driving cross-country who catch wind of a plot by evil Germans to kidnap UK super-girl-group, Shampoo, and how they decide to take matters into their own hands to save the girls and stop the terrorists.

So, now that Giant Bomb has launched in blog form, I’m not 100% sure what to do with this blog. I’ll keep it going as best I can, but that sort of depends on how many non-gaming things that happen to me. Anything gaming-related probably belongs on the other site. With a site to launch and a game blog to keep up, I’m not sure what sort of non-gaming things will actually happen to me, but I’ll drum something up.

- I’m currently in the process of making my way through the Human Giant Season 1 DVD, which was released last week. I missed most of the episodes when they were on originally, and I’m pretty surprised by it. It’s better than “sketch show on MTV that isn’t The State” sounds. And, unlike The State, they were thinking ahead when they made this stuff and properly licensed the music for the DVD release. I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Xbox Live Marketplace or iTunes versions of The State because they went in and replaced all the music with generic-sounding stuff for licensing reasons. The music was a significant part of The State’s comedy, so… I don’t know, maybe it’s just nostalgia, but it isn’t the same without it. I guess I’ll have to stick with my 80th generation VHS tapes.

- It’s daylight savings time now, which has me way excited, because I’m due to start commuting to an office again as of, well, later today. Driving home in the dark always sort of leaves me depressed.

- I dislike the wireless router I picked up. While it’s easy to configure and everything, it’s still a router. My ISP provides me with 8 static IP addresses, so I don’t have to put up with port forwarding and internal IP addresses and all that crap, but I am now. So far, it’s been mostly smooth, but it pops up and gets totally irritating just enough to make me remember/regret my decision. Like when an AIM file transfer seems to not work. Or when, for whatever reason, I can only upload files to the Giant Bomb media server from my Mac when it’s got a wired connection. That makes blogging from the bathroom (the American dream, maybe you’ve heard of it) totally impossible. Not cool.

- The long-awaited album from Crystal Castles is only a little over a week away. If you haven’t heard of them, it often sounds like a girl singing/shrieking over an NES, an Atari 2600, a Game Boy, and/or a Commodore 64, all of which are running through distortion pedals, including (especially) the girl. That’s a bit of an over-simplification, but whatevs. I like their sound, and the songwriting is good, too. Take a listen on their myspace page if you haven’t heard of them already. It fits my criteria in that it occasionally sounds like they’re playing dancey music on a device that is about to break or catch on fire.

- Speaking of music, I haven’t had a whole lot of time lately to work on new Midnight Brown material, but I’m hoping to find some time for more of that in the near future. With a Mac available to make recording vocals easy and portable (before I had another desktop set up in a spare bedroom), it’s all a little easier to deal with now. Now I just need to find a decent host/sequencing application for OSX and see if I can find anything I like more than FL Studio. I doubt I will, but I should at least give it a shot.

- OK, fine, one little gaming thing before I remember to post about it in greater detail. You should check out Nexuiz if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a free, open-source update of the Quake 1 engine that makes for a decent online first-person shooter. You’re not going to confuse it for Crysis or anything, but it’s very playable, and the price is definitely right.

A friendly warning. Do NOT go to this page. When you are busy not going to that page, make extra sure that you don’t just let it loop for an hour, because it will auto-loop. And it will make you lose your grip on reality.

As an added bonus, make extra EXTRA sure that you don’t load the video up on every web browser in your house and leave with it running so that your roommate gets home to discover it looping on two laptops, a desktop PC, and your console-based web browser.

It’s my extreme pleasure to invite you to check out giantbomb.com. It’s the “new thing” that you’ve been hearing me and Ryan drop hints about for the past week or so. I am jumping-out-of-my-seat excited about what we’ve done so far, and the best is ahead of us. Seriously, I can’t stop smiling and it’s sort of freaking me out. Be sure to watch G4’s X-Play today, where I’m pretty sure I sort of just start excitedly speaking nonsense near the end of the interview. It was hard to maintain my composure, for sure.

And none of this would be possible without the support of the people who’ve read and commented on this blog. Watching you react over the past few months has already shaped the site we’re building, and as we work to convert the temporary blog that’s available there into a full-fledged site about games, we’ll have your thoughts and desires in mind. Together, we’ll all be able to shape Giant Bomb. It’s already my new home. It’s my hope that it will become yours, as well.

Be sure to catch X-Play on G4 tomorrow (Thursday). Barring some sort of horrific car accident or other catastrophic happening, I’ll be appearing on the show!

If you don’t get G4, I believe they plan to post it on the show’s website sometime tomorrow, as well, just like last time. Either way, don’t miss it.