Fri
Apr
23
One of my favorite online pastimes is hunting for free soundtracks to video games. The variety of styles of video game music is wonderful, diverse and the quality always surprises me. I’ve noted several worthwhile soundtracks on this blog before and recently made another discovery which just adds to my amazement that collections like this one are free.
Game Arts has made available the soundtrack from the WiiWare title “The Magic Obelisk” (Shadow Walker in Japan) on its website as a free download. The page is in Japanese so you will need to click on the link beneath this piece of artwork (pretty obvious, really).
(xkcd)
I think red laser toys are for cats as Christmas and Santa Claus are for children. They are bright red, shiny, exciting but when the cat realizes who is responsible for the fun everything changes. Sure its still fun, but the magic is gone. I busted out the laser toy for Lord Byron last night, but instead of madly chasing it around the room, he simply sauntered past the bright spot, hopped up on the bed beside me and started purring as if to say “I appreciate the attempt to entertain, but I’m a little too old for this.” Honestly, I was a little sad.
It’s been a while since I created an original single panel cartoon. I drew this several years ago, but since my inking is still pretty rough, I dug the sketch out and inked it for practice. It turned out okay. Obviously, I have a lot of work ahead of me. I used to draw a lot more.
Tue
Apr
20
Sleep is Death is a remarkable “game”. Sure, its not graphically sophisticated (or is it?) but what it provides in terms of collaborative storytelling is unlike anything you have ever tried. The creator, Jason Rohrer, explains Sleep is Death using the tool itself, but to understand it better you might want to check out the articles at Boing Boing, Kotaku or Joystiq. In looking for a good description, I couldn’t do better than Michael Thomsen at IGN.com…
Jason Rohrer’s newest game Sleep is Death (Geisterfahrer), originally commissioned for the Art History of Games Conference in Atlanta, tackles this problem by making a game about the actual process of telling a story. It’s a 2 player networked experience that you can play online or through a local connection. One player acts as a storyteller and has access to a full set of editing tools, character models, environmental objects, and a music generator. The second player is the actor in a story that the first player prepares.
My cat, the big guy, Lord Byron is sitting in our kitchen window hollering at a murder of crows. They are clustered in a pine tree nearby pestering our resident nesting owl’s mate. The male owl hangs out on the house side of our yard to keep the crows focused on him while the female owl is busy with the hatchlings in the nest on the far side of the yard. One of the crows dropped down low and started squawking back at Lord Byron. It’s quite funny to listen to the back and forth.
It should be understood that the crow’s beef with the owls goes far deeper than their historic species rivalry. The tree in which the owls are now nesting used to hold a giant crow’s nest at the very top. Crows had been nesting in that pine for years, but an ice storm two years ago snapped off the top of that tree, tearing down several large branches and the huge nest. The crows did not try to rebuild.
But this year a pair of owls built a nest about ten feet from the top (still 30 - 40 feet off the ground, these are some tall pines) and the crows are tireless in their harassment. I don’t think they’re happy to lose their familial nesting site to a pair of owls.
Lord Byron is annoyed by the whole lot of them, owl and crow alike.
Update: We learned from a neighbor that the likely cause of Friday’s ruckus was the baby owl. It left the nest earlier this week and has been seen flying through the trees behind our home with both its parents. I’ve yet to see the fledgeling, but I’ll keep an eye open for it this week.
