Anyhow, we’re at the end of my birthday here, going into the day after, and now on my last year before 30. While the day started out honestly feeling like it would be plain and dull like any other, doing things like responsibly cleaning up and doing laundry, it became much better as the day went on.

First up is something I’m starting, mostly as an exercise in attempted self-discipline, and a bit of vanity. I’m starting one of those 365 photo projects, taking pictures of myself each day for the upcoming year. To give it some purpose/excuse, I’m going to attempt to do it as a chronicle of my last year before I turn 30. I’m sure most any of you actually reading this will find it rather dull, and I may save some sanity by mostly keeping it over on flicker with, say, weekly roundups of the shots here. Day One(nevermind the post-midnight posting, its been a long evening and was online way earlier):

That was as I headed out in today’s gorgeous weather to have a 3-in-the-afternoon birthday brunch, nice and low key at the nearest Denny’s, and on the trip back, picking up some delicious Izzy’s Ice Cream (Creme Coffee Crunch with a Guiness Izzy, and a pint of Strawberry) and some cupcakes from the shop a couple doors down from there. Come home to find Pokemon: Heart Gold (as much as I’m enjoying it, poor Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey finds itself immediately sidelined) waiting for me along with lots of time on the phone with friends and family wishing me a happy birthday.

Then it was off to the main event of the evening (and new Pokewalker in tow), Video Games Live, an orchestral concert featuring music from a range of beloved video game series, and their first time in Minnesota. While I figured it was going to be a pretty fun thing, I wasn’t at all prepared for how awesome it turned out to be. Doubly so considering it was to be hosted by Tommy Tallarico, one of my least favorite G4TV hosts from when I still had the channel available to me.

But no, they had to go and get things going on the right foot, playing some pretty funny videos and bringing up the finalists from a pre-show costume contest (naturally Link won, like he always does in any popularity contest). Then it was time to get the show proper underway. They started things off with a giant medly paying homage to the arcade/Atari era with everything from Pong to Defender to Battle Tank to Donkey Kong and Tetris.

Then it was on to modern times, with a great Metal Gear Solid medly (and video intro from Hideo Kojima himself) that also saw a certain cardboard box wandering across the stage while a guard looked about all !-like. A pre-recorded David Jaffe takes us into God of War, where we get bits of several of the better pieces (sadly no Pot of Tea) that brings about a mental fist pump from me, as I’ve been playing through the trilogy (again) for the better part of the week getting the remaining trophies, and will be back to it after getting this written up.

Springing from the box, Tommy pops out of the cardboard box and calls out for an audience member to come to the stage to play a game. The girl he picks out comes up, gets handed a t-shirt to put on, and we’re all informed that she’s going to be playing Space Invaders, winning a fancy MAME box if she can beat the first stage in 2 minutes or less. The catch? Her ship’s to be controlled by the shirt she put on via the magic of motion tracking. How’d she do? Well, I’ll leave the video to speak for itself:

Following this, Tommy dug out from somewhere an old, old, old video of Ralph Baer, one of the orignal video game creators, giving a demonstration of Table Tennis, something that I’d never run across before. And not only did we get this little bit of video game history, but he then connected us to Mr. Baer live through the magic of Skype, where we all duly, and rather loudly, made our thanks known for helping to birth one of our favorite entertainment mediums.

Medleys from Zelda (intro’d by Koji Kondo) and Warcraft, along with a fantastic eyes-closed piano solo by one Martin Yeung playing a mash of Final Fantasy pieces, rounded out the front half of the evening and getting us to intermission, For those of us that stayed in our seats, a loading bar alternated with various short clips from a TON of old NES/SNES/Genesis games, each bringing cheers and hollers from various parts of the audience.

Post-intermission, Tommy (with a Tri-Force emblazoned guitar) and conductor Jack Wall (with a plain old acoustic) get in on the act as Chrono Trigger/Cross has its turn in the evening’s spotlight before they moved into the other interactive event of the night, a Guitar Hero (Van Halen) performance from a pre-show contest winner. Challenging him to earn 200,000 points playing Jump on Hard, the audience member scoffed and said he’d do it on Expert. And with Tommy and the orchestra playing alongside him, he readily proved to be up to the challenge, going to far as to actually jump in all the right places without missing a beat, and coming out of it with a score of 231,000+, then hopping off the stage with a nice pile of swag. Somewhere around here, we’re treated to another Koji Kondo introduced medly, this time for Super Mario and his hundreds of games.

After Tommy grabbed another guitar, they launched into an absolutely outstanding Halo performance (and this from someone who’s not a huge fan of the series) that got an absolutely huge round of applause from the audience as he and the conductor ran off stage and the lights dimmed. With the applause not stopping, they came back out and asked if we’d like an encore. Of Course We Would You Silly Billy.

But before that, Tommy decides he needs to embarrass one of tonight’s audience members, he’s friends with so and so, a longtime supporter of Video Games Live… a longtime resident of the area… the renowned writer of such works as Sandman and Coraline… Neil Gaiman! Holy. Fucking. Awesome.

After Neil gets a monster round of applause just for showing up, we get down to business and as close as I would get to having my Metroid wish fulfilled, we got a pretty good Castlevania medley, followed a jaw-dropping live demonstration of the thing that made the aforementioned Marting Yeung Youtube-famous, a blindfolded Super Mario Bros solo. But two extra pieces weren’t enough, Tommy offered to give us one more and we gladly accepted.

“The company is Square.”

Wild Cheers.

“The game is Final Fantasy.”

Shouts from everyone giving number to their favorite entry.

“Seven.”

Crazed Cheers, myself included.

“One. Winged. Angel.”

The Audience Explodes.

By the time they were done, everyone was on their feet cheering or in a puddle of blissful ooze on the floor. I don’t care how overhyped/played it is at this point, and how sick of it anyone else might be, but Oh My God, that was the best possible way to end the show. I’ve a newfound respect for Tommy, and would have loved to stick around for the meet-and-greet afterwards, but one look at the monstrous line told me I was going to have difficulty getting home if I stuck around, ah well, there’s always next time(and given that they sold out, there likely will be a next time).

Being downtown and on Nicollet, I took the opportunity to do a little bit of photography, but only the following shot came out (really fucking) well:

Wells Fargo tower, downtown Minneapolis

A short trip home with some more inital Pokemon-ing and enjoying my cupcakes sees me to the end of the day proper, but now before I go to bed, I’m off to finish up Titan Mode on God of War III, possibly doing the challenges as well.

The year is 1999, the month, May. We are, one and all, in line for the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode I (worth noting that this was a very rare, perhaps previously non-existent occurrence in the northern wilds of Minnesota at the time). Some started lining up early that morning, skipping school and work, making the local news in the process. However, my small circle (rightly) figured that 8pm would be the ideal time to join the slowly swelling ranks, optimizing our chances of getting in while minimizing our wait. We arrived, meeting up with one other that had arrived slightly ahead of us, and got ready to get our ZOMG NEW STAR WARS!!1!!!!!!!11!! on (a certain abominable moment in the Special Edition released a couple years prior all but forgotten for the moment).

Plopping down on the ground, we started playing the still-enjoyable-at-the-time Star Wars:CCG amongst ourselves. After all, we had two hours to kill in a blinding, and unusually warm, evening sun. As we waited, we watched the line grow around, and eventually out of, the edge of the rather large parking lot*, peppered here and there with a Vader, Stormtroopers, and some Jedi- the anticipation was palpable already.

Eventually, 10pm rolled around and they started letting us in, excitement builds! While we waited our turn, I took the opportunity to sabotage one of my companions by telling the group to make sure they didn’t request a ticket to a different movie. Sure enough, we get to the counter and, the seed planted in his head, he completely screws it up, asking for a ticket to the wrong movie (The Mummy, I think). Realizing what he’s just done, he freezes for a moment before correcting his mistake, and we revel in his embarrassment. In we go! We wind up almost as close as can be- 2nd row, a little off center (I wind up second seat from the end, seated next to some out-of-town stoner, who proved to be rather entertaining)- and hunker down for the remaining hour and a half wait until showtime.

Shortly after, with every single seat filled, someone very drunk starts getting very loud, chanting for them to start the movie. We all kind of laugh and applaud, but restrain from joining in. The ushers have words with him, and he quiets down, but then starts up again, repeating the cycle 2-3 times before they pull him off to the side. And then.

And then. All of a sudden, the lights dim and the projector fires up! What is going on!?

I quickly check my watch, we’re barely past 11! Are they secretly showing something else in front of it? Confusion! Then the Lucasfilm logo springs forth from the blackness, and the theater explodes in raucous, ecstatic, deafening cheering/nerdgasming. Our drunken comrade (kicked out or not, I’ll never know) has somehow gotten them to give us our long-awaited movie an hour earlier than the millions of others awaiting their respective screenings. We were blessed, being first-ier than the millions of other nerds in seeing the grand new Star Wars adventure had given us an additional feather to wear in our nerd hats.

And then, one and all, we watched the thing we had loved and cherished and grown up with become ruined forever.

An hour ahead of everyone else.

Lucky us.

There were still some enjoyable moments in it, particularly the podrace sequence and the duel at the end, but after that, Star Wars was never the same. The second and third parts were seen with ever-lessening hope that things would be salvaged, but still seen out of an obsessive need to know regardless. Interest in the parallel properties- the games and novels- diminished at an accelerating pace, until I was all but done with following the franchise early in the new decade.

A couple of bright spots have occurred since then though- Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars series, the union of LEGO and Star Wars, and the recentish Force Unleashed in particular- so I cannot help but keep a casual eye in its direction for glimmers of the old magic to appear, but by and large, the starship has sailed.

*I would hear afterwards that all of the restaurants that were still open were absolutely swarmed by people that couldn’t get into the show, seems to me they got the better deal in the end.

A few more things caught my eye, and turned out decently, as well today, but that’s the standout for me in the batch. You can find the rest of them over here. Oh, okay, one more:

Christ almighty, do you want my firstborn with that too?

Sexy Spring VI
WHEN: June 5-7, 2009
WHERE: Ford Hall – University of Minnesota’s East Bank, 224 Church St SE Minneapolis MN 55455
WHAT: Workshops/skillshares focused on exploring the ways our gender, bodies, health, sexuality, choices, communication, relationships, and sex affect our lives and communities. A variety of exploration methods are used, including workshops/skillshares, discussions, networking, demonstrations, art, storytelling, performance, play, etc.. Sexy Spring is a product of the people who assist plan, coordinate, and host as much as the people who attend and participate. Therefore, Sexy Spring seeks to attract a very diverse collection of perspectives to attend, as well as assist plan, coordinate, and host.
WEBSITE: http:/sexyspring.org

Not something that I’d particularly be looking to attend, but exactly the sort of thing I was looking for with the Local Things category- randomly found, with a URL, and amuses (or at least bemuses) me.

Just a little night photography, I had a pile of time to kill tonight waiting for the bus, so I thought I’d finally get some proper shots of the stop that I get to wait at every night. Past attempts have failed miserably, but I’m quite pleased with how this one came out. As you can see, its a pretty nice spot, just outside the Securian Center in downtown St. Paul. There’s a few more shots to be had here, and I can’t say that I’m displeased with any of them.

On the bridge, looking down the river, completely zoomed out:

And zoomed in on a lone highrise on the horizon and the Ford Parkway Bridge, which reflects off the river in spectacular fashion:

Then a little experimentation, a 15s exposure with the camera sitting over Mississppi River Blvd on the near end of the bridge, this is the jpg the camera created alongside the RAW:

And this is what I ended up with after a little bit of processing:

It also captures some flecks of a dying firework, but hardly enough to count. Sigh.

Fired in March from Cingular, via my own stupidity in handling a situation, by choosing not to do anything for three days instead of doing something I thought we had no business doing.
That plus my lackluster interviewing skills made it nigh-impossible to find work for 2 months, but I’ve managed to get a temp position for the moment(for another month or so).
Right when I get the temp spot, Cingular’s contested my unemployment app and now I have to somehow pay back the $1600 I’d gotten in benefits, along with denial of future benefits for a while.
Last weekend my dad walked out on my mom, and I’m still wrapping my head around that.
Yesterday my roommate informed me that once the lease is up at the end of September he’ll be moving out(unless he somehow finds a job), which he didn’t bring up last weekend due to the thing with my dad.

So between now and the end of the month I need to line up another job(or somehow finagle permanent status at my current one) and find a resolution to the housing situation(either by lining up a new roommate or a new apartment), or else I’ll be out of income and shelter, with the possible, but highly undesirable resolution of ending up back up north into the middle of the parental situation. Awesome.