GRABBINGSAND

sand. literally.

and microscopically.

You are my friend, you are special.
You are my friend, you’re special to me.
You are the only one like you.
Like you, my friend, I like you.
You Are Special, Fred Rogers, 1928-2003

thank you, mr. rogers.

thank you for teaching little me that people are good, i can stop when i want, i can do it if i try, and i can never go down the drain. thank you for the trolley, the speedy delivery message service, for king friday xiii, daniel striped tiger and bob dog. thank you for taking off your tie and putting on a cardigan, taking off your shiny shoes with a toss from one hand to the other and putting on a pair of simple sneakers, because that let me know you could come down to my level, that you weren’t going to be talking down from high adulthood.

and thank you most of all for being such a remarkably positive influence in my small life that your lessons still resonate in my adult life so many years later. i thank you for being my neighbor. (and i am not the only one.)

the new york times takes a look at the career trajectory of great white: “a hard-rock adventure that became just a job“

i’m sitting here, waiting to see the eye doctor, and i find myself slightly bothered that waiting rooms have replaced their stacks of random magazines with cable television. so here we wait. me and Regis.

ubi soft’s splinter cell, now available on the pc, opens with an action-kicking cinematic scored with crystal method’s name of the game. mmm, tasty.

the internet will eventually become a home for every single obsession known to man. and each will be important to someone. for instance, let’s say you were wanting to hear your favorite 60s or 70s era television production jingle again. now you can. (beware the pop-ups, bask in the nostalgia.)

a couple of weekends ago, the lads and i continued a tradition of very strange quarterly behavior. for over two years, jason, zip and i have garnered confused looks from friends and family by packing up unwieldy computer equipment and hauling said assets to a location somewhere south of atlanta for the better part of a saturday afternoon. why do we do this? a lanparty,my friends. the epitome of geekdom in action. what is a lanparty? break it down. lan, or local area network. party, as in a bevy of like-minded folks intent on amusement. and believe it or not, it’s almost always worth the effort.

i might never be able to explain just why. i know that most folks would never dream of hooking up 30 or more machines just to compete in any number of faux violent video games. so rather than analyse why, i’ll just share a handful of photos from february 8’s gamenight:

- the three of us, setting up camp in an unfinished basement wired pseudo-professionally with network cable.

- jason, taking his quaking very seriously.

- the mighty zip, radiating an air of confidence and elan.

- and then there’s me, bearing an unfortunate facial expression and employing a pointless finger wag.

this effort might not inspire a since of understanding, but at least it shows that the people that attend such gatherings are perfectly normal. right?

after a very subtle opening to a usually garish spectacle, the grammy awards proceeded to hand out awards in a refreshingly atypical manner. dustin hoffman introduced simon & garfunkel (who resembles a bald eagle with a light downy pate these days), and with the exception of an out-of-key gwen stefani, that set the mood for the whole show.

but the winner of all winners, the destroyer of pre-packaged punk-pop (instilling “frust-er-at-ion” in scores of pre-teen girls in polo shirts and skinny ties), was the truly talented norah jones. nominated personally for five awards, she walked away under the happy burden of four. or maybe five, if you count the song of the year award (though that award will live on the shelf of it’s songwriter).

okay. here comes a review. unreal 2 is a gorgeous game, a new benchmark for how detailed a graphics-intensive application can be, but the aesthetics seem to come at the expense of other key elements. the plot is simple and predictable, another one of those “find the pieces to assemble The Device” stories. the fire-power is inventive, yet so straining to even the stoutest graphics card that your frame rate drops to nil and everything slurs into slow motion. and the “Loading” screen appears so much that it needs to be creditted as a co-star.

after playing through most of unreal 2 this week and finding it somewhat wanting, i’ve been thinking about those games, those computer games that would take up residence in my hard drive and become a minor obsession for weeks. so with a little thought and a little reminiscing, here’s my list of … um …

The Games That Devoured Time.
(more…)

a couple of changes have been made to the site. or rather, i’ve updated one thing and added another.

- i’ve updated my theatre resume. yeah, i know i need real headshots, but i just can’t justify the expense right now.

- i’ve signed up with blogads to lend out a few inches of my site to prospective advertisers. i pick the per-week price and i get the option to accept or reject potential ads. i set up a test ad for theatre noble just to see what it looks like. i’m not expecting to make any money from this, but it might at least pay for my web hosting.

hey, i might even make enough to get some headshots.