The Welcoming Committee of One

After days and days of packing up our possessions and lives, and some days to move all of them out of the city and into a quiet -- more accurately, a small island -- setting, I had finally put my feet up on the recently assembled coffee table and let out a bone-weary sigh.

It was quiet outside.

No sirens. No cars. No commercial jets.

Birds, a slight rustle of some leaves in the late afternoon breeze... just the hint of ocean air but filtered through cedar, fir, and arbutus trees.

I let out another bone-weary sigh.

"Dad, Dad!" my oldest daughter yelled from the front yard. "You've gotta see this!"

Wax On! Wax Off! WAX WAX!

I really did think I would be blogging up a storm about games lately, especially with E3 in the rear-view mirror and the very recent flip-flop from Microsoft regarding their DRM/always on plan and the battle against used game sales, but I'm struggling with actually caring very much about games at the moment.

I'm not sure I want to turn this into a "Dear Diary..." exposition of my personal life but I feel comfortable enough to say that there are a lot of changes happening in my life and a particularly big change in a few weeks: moving.

I'll be honest, I hate moving.

It has a lot to do with the last time we packed up the house and moved everything.

We'd just returned from three weeks away in Florida and after a long drive back home from Seattle -- riding the bleeding edge of a snow/ice storm that turned the highways into bobsled runs -- and thought we were relatively prepared to move prior to leaving on vacation. How wrong we were! During the night, while we tried to shake jet lag, it snowed. Not a ton, but just enough to make manoeuvring a large moving truck extremely tricky. And, well, the list of things that went wrong extended from there -- more snow, taking way too long to pack our truck, etc. -- and at 1:00AM I was single-handedly trying to extricate the moving truck from the alley behind our new home with a shovel, handfuls of salt, and tubs of hot water. It was nasty! That was the first time I've ever been able to honestly say I was "bone tired" because I was barely functioning at the end of it and every step felt like an effort.

Brutal Legend Companion Video

A video companion piece to my recent Brutal Legend review on The Armchair Empire - Infinite. Here's a link to the full review in case you missed it.

Killing Data

The other day I cancelled the data plan for my phone.

For some, this might be the equivalent of suddenly deciding to live under a rock.

But it was a move that I needed to take after I realized how much time I frittered away scanning Twitter, Facebook, news sites, etc. looking for something to fill the time while I commuted, waited for the lights to change, went to the bathroom... It allowed me to avoid thinking for any length of time because I could always jump to something else in a bid to be entertained or somehow educated and kept up-to-date on what was happening in the world.

Christy Clark and Me

The audio in the YouTube clip above came from an appearance on the Christy Clarke Show (on CKNW AM980 in Vancouver, BC) when I was guest just before Christmas 2007. I was there as a video game expert to talk about games, what was hot/not, what kids should and shouldn’t be playing, etc. Unfortunately for me – and I’ve done nothing to rectify this particular issue – I have zero media training so it’s kind of difficult to listen to five years after the fact.

Christy’s first question, “So, what are the hot games this Christmas?”

What do I do? I completely sidestep the question and start monologuing about ESRB ratings.

Couple Hours of BioShock Infinite

Hidden message in the title?

Besides getting a feeling of déjà vu a number of times during the opening hour or so of BioShock Infinite, I was struck by the repetition of character models.

Really, Irrational? This is the best you could come up with? Most games will hide the repetition of character models or mask it somehow, but BioShock Infinite does zero to hide the fact they’re all the same. The kid selling papers is the exact same kid sitting on the garbage can a couple dozen feet away! After having “rescued” Elizabeth from the tower and splash landed on a beach, the same issue appeared. Of the couple dozen NPCs going through the motions on the sand, there were maybe three different characters to see.

Take It to the Grave

One thing about this blog that I constantly struggle with is how much of myself I should reveal, especially because there’s some anxiety – fear? – that my kids or parents will find the blog and suddenly know things they shouldn't. (And just typing that sentence might be enough to get both groups to wondering.)

I’ve always viewed personal blogs as online diaries. But I think a lot of people don’t know how the Internet works.

People pour out their souls and innermost thoughts with little thought on how it might impact their job prospects, dating chances, and so on. Do you really want a potential employer or that cutie responding to your OKCupid profile to have the option of running your name through Google and finding that blog post you wrote about how you like to lick parrots? Or that travelogue of semi-legal houses of prostitution in Nevada? That half-remembered trip to Amsterdam? What about that post where you described in vivid detail the horrible rash developing on your inner thigh? Your marital problems? Your confessional post where you list all the people you ever stole money from?